The Hunted. Rachel Lee
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myself imagine, I can almost believe they’re fit for human consumption.”
She laughed with him, trying to cling to the humor of the moment, knowing it couldn’t last. It didn’t.
“I’m going to keep to the back roads for a while,” Jerrod said. “I’ll make sure we don’t have a tail.”
Erin’s neck prickled. “What if we do?”
“I’ll drive off that bridge when we get to it.”
It was an odd kind of confidence, she thought. They had only the barest notion of a plan and no real idea what might happen, yet he seemed comfortable with that, as if the uncertainty itself were a security blanket. Then again, given what he’d told her—and what he hadn’t—he likely had a lot of skills that she didn’t necessarily want to think about.
Some of the prettiest countryside in Texas slid by, invisible in the predawn darkness. There were no headlights to be seen, and rarely a streetlight. They could have been driving through grass-scented ink, with only the thrum of the tires and the occasional chuckhole to pull them back to reality.
They rode silently, sipping coffee. Just as trees were beginning to emerge from the darkness, Jerrod spoke.
“I’ll have to stop by my office and do some things, but I’m going to leave you somewhere while I do.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s in the Houston police reports that I found you. And someone may also have reported that I took you away from the apartment. Point is, it’s no secret we met. So I don’t want anyone to know you’re still with me.”
“You think they’d be watching that closely?”
He glanced over at her before returning his attention to the road. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m not used to being paranoid.”
“Like I said, you’re the only link they have to your source. They want to know who you’re talking to. Then they want you both dead.”
“Thanks for the message of cheer,” she said. “So they think I’m going to lead them to this guy?”
“That’s what they’re hoping. They’re hoping we’ll do exactly what we’re going to do. Find the source. So we have to do that without them knowing we’ve done it.”
“And if we can’t?”
He looked at her. “Then we’ll be taken out of the equation, and a whole lot more girls will go into it.”
“The equation?”
He nodded. “Ever ask yourself what it means when a corporation changes the name of its ‘personnel’ department to ‘human resources’? We’re not people to Mercator. We’re variables on a balance sheet. Until you tumbled onto this story, the paper had you in the assets column. But once you got onto this…”
“I became a liability.”
He sipped his coffee. “It’s as easy as that, when your personnel are just human resources. Move them from column A to column B. Eliminate as necessary.”
She shivered. “I don’t like the world you’ve lived in, Jerrod Westlake.”
“Neither do I.”
“Are you going to tell your office about this?”
“No.” Unequivocal and flat.
“I guess the FBI has human resources, too.” She settled back and sipped her coffee again. “So we can’t trust anyone. Hell, for all I know, you were sent here to gain my trust so I’d lead you right to my source. For all I know, you’re on cleanup detail.”
He laughed quietly. “Now you’re thinking like me.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.”
“Actually, it is. You’ll live longer.”
No clouds marred the sky of Austin when they arrived. The heavens shone a breathtaking blue, and the air invigorated her with just a touch of winter’s chill. Erin could have wallowed in the lack of humidity.
Jerrod surprised her. She’d half expected him to put her into another hotel, but instead he left her on the St. Edward’s University campus in South Austin.
“It’s busy, and it’s public. Nobody will bother you here. And their library will have Internet access.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be back in two hours. Will you be okay?”
“Sure.”
When he glanced into his rearview mirror, he saw her disappear into the library. Then he sped north to the Federal Building, already planning his story.
Inside the library, Erin found quite a few students working busily. Near the elevators, she found a pair of public computers that required no log-in, linked into the library database and the world beyond. While she couldn’t connect to her anonymous account, she could look up “white slavery” on Google and see what was out in the public domain.
While some dismissed it as myth and others as women knowingly entering the sex trade for its economic opportunities, the statistics were staggering. Whether abducted, enticed, purchased from their parents or simply drawn by the lure of leaving home and gaining some measure of social and psychological independence, women and teens entered the international sex market on a horrific scale. Most knew they—or the daughters they were selling—would soon be working as “bar girls,” “comfort women,” “escorts” or “house girls.” What they too often did not know was the degrading, violent and often deadly conditions under which that work was done.
Although the U.N. and many countries had funded countless studies and passed legislation to eliminate white slavery, the trade went on. In some societies it was accepted as a matter of course. Girls were imported, often as young as eleven or twelve years of age, and then schooled in the skills of their new profession. By their midteens they were ready for resale, often convinced that they were graduating into the adult world, a world where their bodies were fungible assets.
Waves of revulsion rolled through Erin as she read. Most repulsive of all was a question that slowly grew and began to gnaw at the back of her consciousness: what if these girls were not brainwashed, not victims, but self-motivated entrepreneurs who had chosen what they saw as their most accessible path to economic independence?
Some of the girls interviewed in the studies almost seemed to have been put forward as poster girls for prostitution, with gilded stories of having paid for college and opened doors that would otherwise have been forever barred by using their earnings. If she let herself see their perspective, it was almost as if prostitution was the female equivalent of military service: trading one’s youthful body for the rights and opportunities of adult citizenship.
But for every one of those stories, there was a story of another kind, of beatings, of rape, of feeling one’s heart and soul hollowed out, twenty minutes and as many dollars at a time, trying to pay off the “loan” that had brought the girl from Russia or Thailand, Burma or Brazil, until she realized that she could work the rest of her life and never be free of the debt…or the memories.
The more Erin read, the more convinced she became that the human species could rationalize away the most abhorrent evils imaginable. If this was the best humanity could do, she thought, perhaps a radical global climate change would not be a disaster at all.
Perhaps it would simply be Mother Earth washing herself in disgust.
Alton Castle was probably the least important accountant at Mercator Arms, and that was fine with him. He handled shipping invoices on classified projects. Like everything at Mercator, his job was compartmentalized, so that none of the junior employees would have a full picture of what they were doing on any contract. It was standard security doctrine, and Alton liked it that way.
In fact, he would