Within two minutes of leaving the building, a murmur arose from ahead. Gloria craned her neck and saw the turn to Building 17 closed off.

  “Keep moving,” one of the guards who patrolled the top of the cages called down. More words followed in languages other than Spanish, for the prisoners who didn’t speak it.

  The procession moved down a route Gloria had never taken before. Another two turns, and they came to a stop.

  Again, she craned her neck to look ahead. A closed gate was keeping them from continuing. On the other side of the gate, people dressed similarly to her and her fellow workers were moving down a path perpendicular to her group’s.

  After the last person walked by, a minute passed before the gate opened.

  “Keep moving,” the guard above ordered again.

  Gloria’s group resumed walking.

  It felt like they went an entire kilometer before they reached another closed gate. For the next several minutes, gates rose in front of them and closed behind them, guiding them through small sections of the moveable maze until they found themselves in a pen just large enough for all of them to fit. Once the final person had entered, the gate behind them closed, locking them in.

  The pen was only one of dozens filled with flocks of hopeless workers, separated from one another by empty chain-link corridors. Gloria knew she had been living in hell, but until this moment she hadn’t realized its extent. There were hundreds of other prisoners, maybe even a thousand.

  The pens all sat on a slight upward slope. At the bottom of the slope was a platform, like a stage. Standing at the front edge of the platform, facing the pens, were two dozen armed guards. More guards were spread on top of the cages, looking down into the pens.

  Gloria leaned toward a woman next to her, who had been a prisoner longer, and whispered, “Have they brought you here before?”

  The woman glanced at her, a blend of fear and sadness in her eyes, then looked back at the platform without saying anything.

  Off to the right, one of the last still-empty pens began to fill.

  What the hell is going on?

  Gloria didn’t have long to wait for her answer. A voice blared from a speaker, “Do the work. Do not cause problems. These are our rules. They are not difficult. If you stick to them, you will always have food and a place to sleep. You all know this. You also know if you do not stick to the rules, there are consequences.”

  While translations played over the sound system, four men moved onto the stage. Three wore black masks. The fourth was completely naked and hung limply between two of the masked men.

  Gloria stopped breathing.

  No. It can’t be.

  After the naked man was brought to the center of the stage, the one who hadn’t been holding him up grabbed the man’s hair and tilted his face up.

  “Oh, God,” Gloria whispered.

  It was Ricardo.

  “This is a worker from Building 17.”

  Gasps rose from the people around Gloria.

  “Last night, he tried to leave us without asking. No one leaves without our permission. And those that try will be caught.”

  The words were repeated in several languages.

  “What have we taught you?” the voice asked.

  All those who spoke Spanish said in near unison, “Disobedience will not be tolerated.” Even Gloria, as shocked as she was, couldn’t help but mouth the words that had been drummed into her.

  After the non-Spanish speakers had repeated the exercise, the man holding Ricardo’s hair let go, pulled out a gun, and placed it against the back of Ricardo’s head.

  “No,” Gloria said, loudly enough to get a few glances from those nearest her.

  “Disobedience will not be tolerated,” the voice said.

  The man pulled the trigger.

  Gloria fell to her knees.

  The lady she’d spoken to earlier grabbed her around her back. “Get up. You don’t want them to see you like this. Get up.”

  Another woman helped pull Gloria to her feet.

  “Unless you want that to happen to you, too, you can’t let them know how much it affected you,” the first woman whispered. “They may think you helped him.”

  I did help him, Gloria thought, but said, “Thank you.”

  The woman’s expression softened. “Did…did you know him from before?”

  “No. Just from here.”

  “Well, that’s something, then. Best now to forget him.”

  Gloria had no idea how she could do that.

  “The time you have missed at your workstations will be added to the end of the day,” the voice on the speaker said. “The workers of Building 17 will be on half rations for one week. Follow instructions and return to your stations. Disobedience will not be tolerated.”

  The pens were released one by one, the pathways converted to lead each group to its assigned building.

  Gloria had no memory of walking to Building 17. No memory of sitting at her machine. No memory of making her quota, though she must have. After Ricardo was killed, the only thing she remembered was lying in her bed that night, staring at his empty bunk, and knowing there was no way she would ever get away from here.

  No way any of them would.

  Chapter Two

  Present Day

  Aboard the Karas Evonus

  Oakland, California

  The eight ball rolled toward the side pocket, its momentum slowing.

  “Too soft,” Dylan Brody said. “Sorry, boy-o, looks like Ireland gets this one.”

  “Patience,” Ricky Orbits said.

  The ball inched closer to the hole, then stopped right on the lip.

  Dylan stepped toward the table to take his shot, but Ricky held out a hand, stopping him.

  The ball teetered on the brink for another second before gravity pulled it into the pocket.

  “Ha!” Ricky yelled. “I believe this one is mine.” He picked up the cue ball. “Rematch?”

  Dylan glared at him. “You’re a cheat.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’ve had more time on this table.”

  Ricky set the rack on the blue felt top. “Sounds like you’re just making excuses. You play one table, you play them all.”

  “That there is a load of shite and you know it.” Dylan looked over to where Liesel Kessler sat at a nearby table, thumbing through a magazine. “Back me up. He’s got the home-court advantage, right?”

  Without glancing at him, she said, “Ricky is right. You are making excuses.”

  Dylan stared at her, slack-jawed. “Tell me I’m hearing things, because you couldn’t have just sided with Ricky.”

  “Hey, loser racks ’em,” Ricky said. “Let’s go.”

  The Administrator touched the control pad and the image in the main monitor switched from the Karas Evonus’s game room to the midship deck, where Rosario Blanca and Ananke were stretched out on lounges, soaking up the last bit of the setting sun. Ananke wore a pair of wireless earbuds, her head rocking slightly to whatever she was listening to. Rosario was reading the Spanish translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which she’d requested when the team returned after the job in Bradbury, Washington.

  Instead of having the team disperse to their homes, the Administrator had suggested they come back to the ship, where they could enjoy a little downtime together. “You’ve only been together on missions so far,” he had told Ananke. “I think it would be beneficial for you all to hang out in a less stressful situation.”

  The Karas Evonus, a converted cargo ship, had been designed as the team’s mobile headquarters, and except for the first few days after they were all recruited, they had spent very little time on board.

  Ananke had floated the idea to the others, and when no one objected, the Administrator had flown them back to the Bay Area. They had been on board for three days, and he was pleased to see the cohesiveness they’d been building in the field grow even stronger during their time off.

  The days of sunbathing and playing pool couldn’t last forever, however.

  Sitting on the Administrator’s desk were files containing information on several potential new missions. In a few minutes, he would be presiding over a meeting with the Committee to decide which mission would be chosen. Until that morning, he had intended to push the Toronto project. It wasn’t particularly sexy, but the damage done by the scammer organization known as MIRA needed to be stopped. To do so permanently would mean infiltrating the organization to identify all the players before the whole enterprise could be brought down.

  But another file had altered his intentions.

  The only question was whether he could convince the committee to see it the same way.

  A soft bong signaled it was almost time for the meeting. The Administrator activated the screens on the wall in front of him. Because the Committee still had two empty slots, only five of the monitors glowed with the countdown to connection. When it reached its end, the images of Committee members Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday appeared.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome,” the Administrator said.

  They talked first of the slots that needed to be filled. The Administrator said he would have a list of vetted candidates within a few days. He did not, however, mention that the list would be preapproved by Committee member Monday, the man who was secretly behind the formation of the Committee and the Project, and was the real power when push came to shove. There were a few other small business matters before the conversation turned to the real reason they had convened this evening.

  “Has everyone had time to read the brief I sent?” the Administrator asked.

  There were nods and a few yeses.

  “This seems fairly straightforward,” Committee member Sunday said. She was a Korean entertainment mogul who managed, among others, several of the top K-pop music groups. As a preteen, she and her father had attempted to escape their former home in North Korea. The only reason she’d made it was because her father had sacrificed his life by diverting the attention of the soldiers who’d been closing in on them as they were about to cross the border. Experiencing the unjust death of a loved one was a prerequisite to being on the Committee. “This business with MIRA in Toronto seems the smart choice.”

  “I agree,” Friday said. His qualification was a sister who had been on Pan Am Flight 103 when a terrorist bomb took it down over Lockerbie, Scotland.

  “What about this problem in Naples, Italy?” Wednesday said. He was the only member of his family to survive China’s Cultural Revolution.

  The Naples mission was the least attractive to the Administrator, but he remained silent. He was not an actual member of the Committee and did not have a vote. His job was the day-to-day running of the Project.

  He was not surprised when Monday repeated something the Administrator had told him during their pre-meeting briefing. “I think Naples can be handled without deploying the team. But I defer to the Administrator on that.”

  The Administrator acted as if he was giving it some thought before saying, “It will take a little work, but I think we could find a solution that does not involve Ananke’s team. Would you like me to look into that?”

  The matter was put to a vote, the results unanimous in favor.

  “What about this Julio Gutiérrez matter?” Monday said, as if he hadn’t given it any thought until now.

  Sunday frowned. “There’s not much here.”

  “Perhaps not,” the Administrator said, “but if you do decide the team should pursue this item, we have enough on Gutiérrez to get started.”

  “This is developed from the information learned on the Bradbury mission?” Monday asked.

  Monday was referring to the mission Ananke and her team had just finished. A wild one, involving a trio of white supremacist cousins, human trafficking, human hunting, and a missing woman—Tasha Patterson—who’d uncovered what was going on. Ananke had made a copy of the information Tasha had gathered for the Administrator before giving the original disk to the FBI. Gutiérrez was the black marketeer the cousins used to sell their human product.

  “It is,” the Administrator said.

  “I thought the government would be handling this.”

  “They haven’t discovered this piece of information yet. But even if they had, they’re overwhelmed by the leads they’ve already uncovered on Patterson’s disk and would likely not get to this for some time.”

  That piece of information concerned a large group of individuals kidnapped and then sold via Gutiérrez over the last two and a half years.

  “I don’t like that we only have the one name to go on,” Wednesday said. “It could very easily be a dead end.”

  “It could,” the Administrator said. “But—”

  “I wasn’t finished,” Wednesday said.

  “My apologies.”

  “But while I may not like it, and it could be a dead end, it seems like this is something we should follow up on. We’re talking about one hundred and twenty-seven people. If we can help them, we should.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, the Committee debated the merits of the remaining mission choices. When it came time for the vote, the tally was two for Toronto and three for Julio Gutiérrez. Committee rules dictated that missions must be approved by four members—a majority with seven voting members. Even with only the five, rules were rules, and four were still needed for passage.

  It was agreed they would reconvene in twenty-four hours to vote again.

  “Thank you for your time,” the Administrator said, swallowing his frustration. “Until tomorrow.”

  One by one the Committee members disconnected, until only Monday was left.

  “That did not go as planned,” the Administrator said.

  “It’s the nature of what we’ve started here,” Monday told him.

  “I understand that, but…”

  “But time waiting is time wasted?”

  “Exactly,” the Administrator said, no longer able to hold back his anger. “If something happens to any of the hundred and twenty-seven because we have delayed, then that will be on us.”

  “If that were the case, then anything that happens to anyone on every job we reject is on us. We did not kidnap those people, nor did we sell them.”

  “You’re right. I apologize.”

  “Don’t. I appreciate your passion. And while I might disagree about blame, I agree with you that this is the job we need to do.” He paused. “Let me work on the others. If I can’t turn one vote then I should quit right now.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’ll contact you when I have news.”

  The Administrator spent the next several hours making sure everything was ready to go whether they went after Julio Gutiérrez or took on the Toronto scammers. At 11:15 p.m., Monday called back.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of moving tomorrow’s meeting up to eight a.m., your time.”

  “Will we have the votes?”

  “We will.”

  The Administrator took a deep, relieved breath. “Thank you. Do you think it would be out of order for me to start things moving now?”

  “I think it would be out of order if you didn’t.”

  Ananke and the others spent a relaxing evening aboard the Karas Evonus, starting with an excellent dinner of grilled salmon, roasted asparagus, and fresh French bread, followed by an impromptu eight-ball tournament.

  Ricky, cocky from his continuous bludgeoning of Dylan on the table that afternoon, had suggested it. But much to his and the others’ surprise, Liesel turned out to be a bit of a pool shark. Ricky didn’t even get a shot off the first time he played her. When he demanded a rematch, she had let him break, and after he missed a shot, she ran the table again.

  “It’s okay,” Dylan said to Ricky. “I’m sure with a little more practice, you might even sink a ball next time.”

  Ricky sneered. “Ha. Ha. Well, the least you ingrates could do is to take me out to a bar and buy me a drink.”

  Unlike the other team members, Ricky was restricted between missions to the alcohol-free Karas Evonus. If he hadn’t agreed to that, he would have been promptly dropped back into the prison from where the Administrator’s people had pulled him out. But he could go ashore as long as he was in the company of other team members.

  “Not me,” Liesel said. “I am going to bed.”

  Rosario uncurled from her chair. “Me, too.”

  “I’m with them,” Dylan said. “Let’s do it tomorrow.” He followed the two women toward the stairs down to the living quarters.

  “Ah, come on. It’s still early!” Ricky turned to Ananke, who had started to rise. “Sweetie, please. One drink.”

  She frowned at him.

  “What?” His eyes moved around as he reviewed the last several seconds. “‘Sweetie?’ I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s a term of endearment. For friends, you know. Like a sister.”

  Rolling her eyes, she said, “Good night, Ricky.”

  Years ago, there had been a short and regrettable few months when they were a couple. “Back when I’d been dumb,” Ananke would tell people. She’d smartened up soon enough.

  It had not been her idea to have him on the team, not that she’d had a say about that, but if she’d been asked, she would have told the Administrator, “No way.” Ricky was a pretty damn good tracker—probably one of the best—but his interpersonal skills, particularly when it came to his dealings with women, left a ton to be desired.

  She had to admit, though, in the less than a month that the team had been working together, he’d improved. Especially after the last job in Bradbury. At times he seemed contemplative, and there were moments of what she could only call unprompted kindness that she’d never seen in him before. She wasn’t about to offer him a spare key to her room—that would never happen—but sometimes she wasn’t completely repulsed by his presence. That was progress.

  She heard the pool balls crashing together in the rec room as she headed down the stairs, and knew Ricky was getting in some practice in hopes that his next encounter with Liesel would go differently. Ananke doubted it would. Liesel had not even come close to missing one of her shots, and hadn’t looked like she was even trying that hard.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31