Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) (14 page)

“You ready to go?” he asked me.

I nodded, and he grabbed a leather satchel that was identical to the thousands of others toted by the metrosexual businessmen of San Francisco.

“Do you think your Japanese friends will be gone?”

“No.” His face set. “But it's a big city and they're poorly organized. Finding us will be difficult.”

They found us before, I wanted to say, but that would only remind him that it was my fault they found us in the first place when I suggested we go to China Town.

“I hope you're right,” was all I said. Showing great restraint, I thought, but his mouth tightened.

“Well see.”

Michael didn't touch me on the walk back, and he didn't say much. I glanced at his profile from time to time, but I didn't say anything, either. It was better not to, when he was like this. Silent and deadly, like the perfect predator. Even though we were on the same side now, I knew the potential for violence existed inside of him — to forget that would be naive.

And I was no longer naive.

Chapter Ten

Entrapment

Christina

I opened the door to the office suite and held it open for Michael, who grunted his thanks. The first he had spoken since we had left his privately owned building. I could smell percolating coffee, so at least one member of AMI was up and around.

“Do you think — ?”

But when I looked around, Michael was gone. A flash of movement in the corner of my eye had me turning instinctively to my left, where I saw a male form heading in the direction of Angelica's office.

I sighed, and shook my head. As I turned towards my own, I almost collided with a broad chest. Cliff. I looked up, and my frustration disappeared as soon as I saw his face. He looked more concerned than usual, and it was tinged with an urgency that made my pulse quicken in nervous anticipation.

“Is something wrong?” Only with great effort did I manage to keep my voice calm. Secretly, all I wanted to do was scream, “Really? This bullshit again?”

“Yes.” His jaw worked. “There was a break-in.”

“What?” Michael was behind me, with Angelica in tow. His humor hadn't improved at all, and beneath that icy facade I could see his temper rising like a boiling sea. “How the fuck did that happen?”

“It happened while you were gone.” A note of accusation. “Five men, dressed in black. They came in. Disabled the security camera over the door somehow. Just that one, though. I checked the others — they seemed to work fine.”

“Seemed to?” I ignored the look of impatience Michael shot in my direction. I had a job to do, and I was going to see it done. “Have you tested them?”

We — ” he nodded at Angelica “ — headed into the panic room with Jatinder until they were gone, and watched them on the monitors.”

Which would be a 'no.'
I thought of our files, the information I had spent hours decoding. All that information just lying around like cyber gold. The thought was infuriating. “Did they
take
anything?”

“Not that I could see.”

Michael swore. “We ran into some trouble yesterday, as well. I doubt it was a coincidence.”

Cliff looked uneasy. “Is that where you were?”

“Where did you think we were? Tahiti?”

Cliff shook his head slowly, pinching the bridge of his nose. He closed his eyes. “Wait…. You think — you think this was a planned attack?”

“It was obviously orchestrated,” I said. “Five men decide to hit us —
us —
when there's a bank across the street and a diamond jewelry store a block away?”

Michael nodded his agreement. “We must have probed too deep. The bastard must suspect where we are — if he doesn't already know,” he added darkly, “he will soon. I'm sure he's been having this city watched, and this will light up on his radar like it's the fucking Fourth of July.” To Angelica, he said, “Destroy the files. Have the girl help.”

For a moment I thought he meant me. For a while, he always referred to me as “the girl.” A method of depersonalization, to put emotional distance between him and me. I opened my mouth in protest. Then I realized he meant Jatinder. I hadn't even stopped to think about the toll this must be taking on her. But Cliff's subsequent question drove me from this chain of thought.

“Do you think that's necessary?”

What a stupid question. Of course it was necessary. Adrian had hackers, just like we did. Probably a lot more. He wouldn't want to face the same embarrassment the IMA had suffered before when my father had accidentally hacked into their mainframe. Not when he had so much to lose.

“Better safe than sorry,” I said. “Especially when it's his brand of sorry.”

Cliff nodded grimly. “I'll wipe the hard drives of the computers.”

“Use the rare earth magnets,” I called after him.

Cliff left the room without responding.

Ugh. I'd have to go over them all a second time myself, later, before I destroyed the hardware.

“Good call,” said Michael, staring intently at the door Cliff had vacated. “With the magnets.”

Praise from him was as rare as a solar eclipse. I didn't feel like basking in it, though. His behavior from this morning had left me feeling cold.

“Kind of sucks that we have to destroy several months' worth of work, though. I can't tell you how many all-nighters I pulled, getting some of that stuff to paper.” I looked at him. “You really think it was Adrian's doing? That he found us already?”

“Pack your things,” he said. “We're leaving—and we're not coming back.”

Which wasn't exactly an answer. And yet, it told me everything I needed to know.

Suraya

On the other side of the windowless room, the days continued to pass unrelentingly. There was no transition period — I was catapulted into their disgusting business without prelude. They had me working at all hours, sometimes rousing me from sleep to get on my back. I was permitted no forms of technology. I wasn't even allowed to handle the money.

Time seemed to no longer exist. When I slept and woke, I wasn't sure how much time had passed. It gave my life a surreal, nightmarish quality that was extremely disquieting. It was as though I were in limbo, hell's waiting room, and had just been told to take a ticket.

The man who had been fucking me left. He had paid up front, ordering his woman of choice the way one would a pizza. Exotic woman, eighteen-years or older, hold the anal. I often didn't find out what a client had requested until one of the Albanians brought him to my door.

“Give him what he wants,” they would say, with threats of punishment if I didn't comply.

Prostitution and sex work is highly romanticized in American media, often turned into a modern-day Cinderella story. Women are forced into sex-work out of desperation, to save their families, or else as someone's savage act of revenge.

Working for the Albanians merely cemented what I already suspected was true: the men who frequented brothels were forced to pay for their sex for a reason. Many were unattractive. Fat. Ugly. Excessive body hair. Odor. I hated it when the ones who smelled bad kissed me; it seemed like I couldn't get the taste of them out of my mouth for hours afterwards.

Some of the men had perversions that made BDSM look like hand-holding in the park. I had men who brought their own costumes or sex toys. Men who wanted to be shouted at, men who wanted to shout. Men who wanted someone to play with their prostate until they got off.

Still others were hiding from someone or something—the law, a suspicious wife, their closeted homosexuality, the knowledge that they were terrible people. One man felt the need to tell me that he had never fucked a “nigger” before, had never felt the need to. I told him, in the halting accent I'd perfected for myself, that I was not an African American, that I came from India — not that it mattered. He nodded sagely and said that, “sand niggers were worse because of that 9/11 bullshit.” I said nothing else after that. I didn't trust myself to.

I was the very flower of restraint.

I did all my “work” from my cell. That was upsetting. Not just because of the obvious reasons — the filth and the squalor — but also because I had been hoping to have the run of the brothel. Better chance of overhearing something vital that way.

But no, my captors had imprisoned me, and the only thing I heard in my dark cell was the incessant, often xenophobic prattle of my so-called clients.

There was a button by the door I could press if the men wanted food or alcohol. Eating the food here seemed like a mistake, and the alcohol had a 500% markup. A $20 bottle of decent champagne cost $100. For the price of a bottle of Cristal, you could pay the deposit fee for an apartment in a good area of New York. No wonder they kept this business running, I thought. The alcohol alone would fuel it.

Michael had given me a transmitter, which I had been forced to conceal in my anus, and I'd managed to drop the transmitter in the room where the Albanian boss had debriefed me. I wasn't sure if that was the room where he conducted the bulk of his business, though. The smart thing would be to move from room to room, but I doubted whether they planned ahead that far. They looked — and acted — like thugs, more swagger than any real sense of business.

Although if they were able to get this far, I reasoned, they're probably more intelligent than I gave them credit for, or they're working for someone who is.

Regardless, I shouldn't underestimate them under any circumstances. And I didn't. I worked as if they were watching my every move, because they probably were. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.

That was what kept me going even at my lowest points, when my body was sore and I was filled with self-disgust. I was doing this because Adrian Callaghan was a monster who needed to be stopped—if not for my sake, then for my sister's sake, and other men and women like her, who were the casualties in his tactical chess game for power, wealth, and suffering.

By owning my subjugation, I could rationalize it, dissociate from it; I turned it into a lie that I was willing to believe.

The men were always provided with condoms — I suppose they believed I might use them as a weapon or to harm myself if they were left in my possession — although whether they used it or not wasn't really up to my discretion. Management enforced it loosely, on the pretense that this was a “clean” establishment, but the clientele had different ideals. Some men were willing to pay more money, a lot more, to go without, but I always insisted. The type of man who would have sex without protection in a brothel is the type of man for whom they were made in mind.

Usually, I only had three to four men a day. On a few days, however, I might have as many as fifteen. I wondered about the other girls, who were undoubtedly trapped here alongside me. I wondered how young they were, how many men they were forced to sleep with, and whether they were in good health or sickly. Were they as desperate as I was? Had they tried to fight back?

These were dangerous questions.

I never asked questions, at least not aloud. Not if I could help it. In fact, I avoided saying anything at all. The less these men heard my voice, and my accent, the less they thought about me at all, the better. I wanted to be just another face to them, a single flower in a wilted garden.

One day, the Albanians came to my cell. This was a deviation in routine, and I had been trained to view all deviations as circumspect. Fear squeezed my gut as I carefully lowered my eyes, wondering if I had been found out. If they men were displeased with my conduct, and were going to punish me as they always threatened. If they were going to rape me as the guards did.

Oh, yes, the guards raped the women here. They saw it as their due, one of the fringe benefits of working for an illicit brothel that shouldn't exist. What could we do? Go to the cops?

“You have been making good money,” one of the men said. I waited for the 'but.'

The other man, the boss, nodded, his dark eyes like flakes of ice on a tar-black road. “Some of the girls work the streets. There is better money this way, but not all girls can be trusted.”

No. The opportunity for freedom would probably prove too tempting for a young girl who had been taken against her will, and raped into half-submission. Only the truly brainwashed, or the truly stupid, could be trusted with such an endeavor. And then it occurred to me that with my halting English and lack of questions, they must believe I belonged to the latter category.

I kept my face blank and nodded in a way that I hoped was understanding. Men are so quick to dismiss women as helpless, powerless fools; this is why female agents are so successful: maintaining the disguise requires almost no effort; the implicit assumptions propagated by a patriarchal society do 90% of the work—and nobody wants to believe they've been bested by a girl. This was the chance I had been waiting for. Both men studied me the way a scientist studies a lab result, noting every reaction and pondering the significance. “Can we trust you?”

I stared back at him, wide-eyed, blank-faced.

“Yes,” he said, after a moment, “I think we can.”

That night, when I was finally allowed to be alone, I sent Mr. Boutilier another transmission.

I'm in
.

Christina

When I was younger, I used to think that I'd like to travel, maybe study abroad in a faraway country in a sunlit cafe overlooking a stone courtyard (there was always a courtyard) while a model-gorgeous young foreigner, who had fallen in love with my brain and not my looks, attempted to help me learn the language. I know—I know, me and every other foolish girl without an ounce of knowledge about the way the world really works.

But with the exception of trips to the Dominican Republic to visit relatives I barely knew, and the odd (and uncomfortable) trip with my mother to some of her fashion shows, I had stayed in the same place. I hadn't been happy, and I had assumed that if only I could change the scenery all of my problems would fade along with the discarded backdrop. I had been wrong, of course; if you're unhappy in Oregon, you'll be unhappy in Paris, too, or Luxembourg, or Prague. How ironic that since being kidnapped I'd found myself traveling to a number of places I'd never thought to go. Target Island. Seattle. Arizona.