Lost Girls (4 page)

Removing her own glove was tedious, but at last it was off, and she gently exercised her stiff fingers. Once more she thought about how the climber’s end must have come. He would have tried to upright himself several times before the effort became too much. Then he would have relaxed into his fate, remembering, thinking, ruminating about loved ones. Perhaps, if Metcalf was right, he would also have been thinking about the people he set out to save. She hoped he would have considered them one last time before he drifted into eternal sleep, hoped that bringing her here was not time wasted. Still, she could not imagine what the dead man might have been thinking that would lead the climbers to a cave buried under a literal mountain of snow.

Metcalf rested on his lines, feet against the mountain wall, and wrapped his arms around her as she reached for the dead man’s hand. She felt Metcalf’s cheek brush against hers. His arms encircled her waist and pulled her body tight into his. She could feel him taking the weight off her line. Then he reached for the dead man’s hand and pulled it toward them, guiding it to her hand.

There was a full moment when she was thinking about nothing but Metcalf’s arms around her, his warm breath on her neck as he took the weight off her harness. She had to make herself concentrate as she worked the cold fingers with her own until the hand was pliable and soft, and at last she felt the familiar transformation taking place.

…a woman’s face, her lips were bleeding beneath patches of darkening skin. She was lying on red cloth, candlelight flickering on a brass zipper and all the white snow that surrounded her. A small electronic device was propped by her head, it looked cold and useless; now he looked up at the chin of a man and a tightly knotted necktie, olive skin and starched white shirt, gold cuff links on his wrists. His own little hand on the arm of a white wicker chair, the man was rocking him, they were on a green lawn above a crystal-blue sea; a woman now, a beautiful woman with hair pulled into a bun. She wore a two-piece bathing suit beneath a short cotton robe, turned to face a cortege of uniformed servants, one of them holding his hand; a man was sitting across from him, a black man with one white eye like a doll’s, he was drinking something amber and smoking a long cigar; a procession of black limousines, a white casket buried under flowers, men in suits wearing sunglasses; bright-colored flags snapping across a vista of low clouds, a pretty girl with long dark hair, she was wearing a snowsuit and had sunscreen on her nose; numbers floating on a small disk of black space; the girl again, she was laughing, her lips had not yet cracked, were not yet bleeding; there were arrows on the black disk, one red pointed to a letter, an
N,
the other to three white digits, a one, a nine, and another one; looking down from the sky through the windshield of a helicopter, it was landing in front of a massive stone castle in a dense jungle. The building had spires and buttresses and was surrounded by tall security fencing. Guards were posted at gates and next to the landing pad.

He was inside now, there was a circle of black men wearing black uniforms, the room was large and damp and windowless, the floors were dirt except for a small round wooden platform. There was a floor-to-ceiling pole in the middle of it with leather hand restraints near the top, there were a dozen women circled around it, facing it, stripped of their clothes and kneeling. The uniformed men stood behind them with automatic weapons pointed at their heads. Others, Caucasian and Latino men, crowded forward to see. He backed away from them all, followed a dark corridor toward a pale pink light behind a partially open door. He looked inside and the walls, like the floor and ceiling, were painted blood red. There was an examination chair with stirrups in the middle of the room, a young blond woman was strapped to it, face immobilized by a clamp over her head, her left hand and foot were wrapped in bloody bandages. She was facing a large television screen that was playing a video. The video was of a woman sitting in the same chair, a naked black man with white face paint was standing between her legs, he was penetrating her, his skin broken in bleeding lesions and secreting ulcers, his eyes were dead as if he were in a trance.

On a stainless-steel instrument table next to the woman were bolt cutters…

He was off the side of a mountain, canister of dye aimed at the rock wall, wind spiraling him as he fumbled with the clips on his harness, he reached down, trying to undo them…then he was upside down, watching the snow fall, as if from heaven….

“Sherry?”

She jerked her head toward the voice.

“Sherry?”

“Okay,” she said shakily. “I’m okay.”

“What did you see?”

“Numbers.” She nodded. “I saw the arrow he was making, but there were numbers on a compass, I think.”

“It wasn’t an arrow,” Metcalf said matter-of-factly. His arms still around Sherry’s waist, he was using his free hand to work a safety line through the dead man’s climbing harness, securing it to the fixed-line pitons anchored in the granite wall. “They’re numbers,” Metcalf said. “The canister shoots a single stream of dye. He was leaving us the team’s position in degrees. He must have been getting tossed around because they’re not pretty. The nine is lying at a forty-five-degree angle on top of the one. If you weren’t thinking about numbers, you might see an arrow with a circle on top of it.” Metcalf finished tying the safety line off and let the body go.

“Something happened before he could finish it, maybe the wind was banging him around and he dropped the canister or maybe the line broke or released and he got upended. We know he wasn’t finished writing because nineteen degrees points out there”—he nodded over his shoulder—“into space.”

“The one and nine were followed by another one,” Sherry said.

Metcalf broke another chemical pack and placed it in Sherry’s hand. “Hold this,” he said. “I’ll help you with that glove in a minute.”

He took the mike to his handset. “North Sickle, this is Sandstorm, over.”

There was a crackle of static. “Go ahead, Sandstorm.”

“Bearing one, nine, one, do you copy?”

“Copy, that’s one, nine, one degrees, Commander?”

“Affirmative,” Metcalf answered, then helped her with her glove.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She nodded, thinking the moment would have seemed anticlimactic except for what she had seen in that castle and the red room.

“You did good, Miss Moore. You did very good.”

“What will they do now?” she asked.

“This fellow’s not going anywhere, I clipped on a safety line to make sure. We’ll come back for him when the storms have passed through. My men up above will use the compass coordinates to search for snowbanks. You build snow caves into the side of an existing bank, not underneath it. Every bank on the compass line, they’ll probe with avalanche sticks. Find something hollow and they’ll dig.”

“Why are the coordinates so important?”

“There’s twenty acres up there. A three-degree variation would put them off mark a hundred yards for each quarter mile. Walk a mile and you’re four hundred yards off target. That’s the difference between here and the moon when you’re trying to find a six-by-six-foot hole under the snow.”

Sherry nodded.

“You ready?” He checked the lines and then her harness.

Sherry nodded again. “I’m fine.” And with that they began their slow ascent to 16,000 feet.

The Pave Hawk made two lifts off the Denali mountain that evening, the first to Providence Hospital in Anchorage with three surviving members of the American climbing expedition. They had been found a mile and a half from the ridge, dug into the wall between two peaks. The climbers were near death; none were aware the storm had ended. None were physically capable of digging their way out if they had known.

To say Metcalf was euphoric was an understatement. His energy was palpable, and it stayed with Sherry for the longest time. She felt an unmistakable sense of camaraderie. She had become a part of something much larger. She had become kindred to these men for a day.

The inn on Parks Highway was abuzz with excitement when they arrived on the second lift, but it was soldiers who greeted them, not reporters. No one in the civilian world yet knew what had taken place during the last six hours and 2,000 feet above basin camp on Denali. No one even knew they were there.

Thirty miles away, at the Talkeetna Ranger Station, reporters were being briefed on the progress of airlifts from basin camp. No hope was given for the teams caught above them.

A day later a United States senator from Washington would surprise the American public with an announcement that his daughter, Allison, had been one of the three climbers rescued from a ridge on Denali and that he wanted to personally thank Alaska’s Air National Guard, Denali park rangers, and the Army High Altitude Rescue Team involved in bringing all of the survivors off the mountain. No mention was made of Navy SEALs or the pilot of the Pave Hawk. No mention was made of Sherry Moore.

Around the base of Denali, there were still days of mourning ahead, bodies to be recovered and identified, funerals to be held, but life went on, and new teams of climbers were already forming in Talkeetna, making plans for their summit assault. The disaster had diminished to back-page news articles, part of the chronicle of the mountain’s recorded history.

Not so for Sherry Moore. To say she had been moved by the experience of clutching the side of a mountain would be a vast understatement. The enormity of where she had been was as vivid an image in her imagination as if she had stood, looking with good eyes, upon the summit herself. And yet it was impossible to enjoy that achievement, that memory—not without also remembering those women in the bowels of a castle in a jungle.

The memories of Sergio Mendoza were impossible to leave on Denali. They had become an obstruction in her life. The women would not give her peace until she came looking for them.

And she was terrified of where that might lead.

A queue formed at the double wood doors leading to the hotel’s banquet facility by an etched brass placard that read S
ASKATCHE-WAN
R
OOM
. Linen-covered tables occupied by perky hotel clerks throughout the week had been cleared of programs and floral arrangements, leaving behind wilted petals and the handful of laminated name tags representing those who’d never made it.

Inside the room, you could sense the mood of a final day. Airline tickets poked from pockets of wrinkled sports coats, people with slumped shoulders shuffled around coffee urns surrounded by mountains of sugared pastries. The ones with hangovers grinned slyly at co-conspirators. The gym rats still damp from their showers drew common looks of disdain.

There was a table at the back of the room with placards that read,
DUTCH
,
RUSSIAN
,
GERMAN
,
ARABIC
,
HINDI
,
FRENCH
, where yawning interpreters fussed with headphones as they brushed doughnut crumbs from lapels and sipped coffee.

The attendees were of all races, all cultures. They came from major cities and frontier outposts, from icy tundras to desert wastelands, as different in language and dialect and dress as anyone could be and yet there was an unmistakable sameness about them.

You saw it first in their eyes. When you spoke to them, they were slow to answer. They didn’t seek to interrupt or contradict or impress. They looked you in the eye and listened as if the act of listening required its own exclusive allotment of time.

The hotel’s comptroller had commented to the general manager that there was something creepy about them. “They make you feel naked, eh? Like they know your dirty secrets?”

“Please, everyone, five more minutes.” A woman tapped the microphone, provoking feedback, and the hangovers grimaced as stewards dashed to squelch the earsplitting howl.

The crowd around the coffee urns began to disperse, some to escape the noise, some for last-minute restroom calls in the lobby.

This time tomorrow they would all be back home. Back to their desks and a mountain of work because everyone knew that crime didn’t take a holiday, that the world was a busy place for the most senior law enforcement investigators on the planet.

They’d run the gamut of topics throughout the week, from experts monitoring arms sales to rogue African states to breakthroughs in a Turkmenistan pipeline for heroin pouring out of Afghanistan. Lithuanian counterfeiters were moving euros to France and Spain, and biotechnologists in Miami were discovering new ways to detect chemical scents indicative of bombs. At Scotland Yard investigators were making strides identifying a source of radioactive isotopes that were being smuggled out of the old Soviet Union, including polonium 210, which had been used to kill former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

There remained but one speaker to deliver a single topic this morning. More seats in the room would have been vacated by early departures but for Helmut Dantzler’s reputation. He was a law enforcement legend, to say the least. His career began with an appointment to a branch office of Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt—Federal Criminality Agency—where he studied intelligence responsible for capturing Andreas Baader of the Baader-Meinhof gang in the early 1970s. By 1977 he was a member of GSG 9, the world-class counterterrorist unit best known for secretly flying behind a hijacked Lufthansa jet to Mogadishu, where they landed, then stormed and liberated eighty-six passengers from RAF radicals. In the 1980s Dantzler commanded GSG 9 responses to hijackings, hostage takings, and bombings on foreign soils, and in the early 1990s he transferred to Germany’s covert intelligence service to interpret the terrorist threat from abroad. It was during his time in intelligence that Dantzler had a first look at Russian migration into the Czech Republic and a new kind of crime, which, having nothing to do with terrorism, tore at his very soul.

Young women and little girls, mostly war refugees from the former Soviet states, were being routed toward the Czech border, unaware they were about to become slaves to organized crime.

Criminals responding to the collapsing Soviet superpower had graduated from trading black-market arms to trading people, meeting the demands of Germany’s burgeoning sex-tourism industry. Dantzler, appalled, was later quoted as saying that he knew at that moment what he had been preparing himself for all his life.

Dantzler put in his retirement papers and accepted a position with Interpol in France, where he had been granted permission to develop the first international bureau dedicated to monitoring human migration and exploitation. It would take a decade of intelligence gathering to convince the European Council to adopt a “Convention on Action” against trafficking human beings—even then a quarter of its members refused to ratify it—but by that time Germany had yielded its ignoble reputation as sex capital of the world to Southeast Asia, which in turn capitulated to South America in the twenty-first century. Brazil had become the sex-tourism capital of the world.

Dantzler stood in the back of the room by a glass wall overlooking the Saskatchewan River Valley. The river was gray. Above it spits of snow danced like chaff in the bright morning sunlight. He raised a shirt cuff and glanced at his gold Breitling, then drew the curtains.

The woman tapped the microphone again, gently blew into it, and smiled at the stewards waiting in the wings. Then she clapped her hands and gave them a thumbs-up.

“As you know, we’ve all had a long week. We’ve all absorbed a lot of information.” She made a show of wiping her brow. Her red lips parted broadly; her painted eyebrows raised, she looked around the room. “No more housekeeping issues, I promise. I’m sure everyone is sick of hearing those two words.”

There was muted laughter and sparse applause.

“Our final speaker, Helmut Dantzler, comes from Interpol to talk with us today. His topic will suggest different things to you, different images and emotions will come to mind, but it is truly a topic common to us, a topic of our time.”

The woman looked down at her notes.

“Long before the United Nations could agree on a definition for human trafficking, you were waging the battle against it in your own cities and streets. From human toys shipped to the United Arab Emirates to sweatshops in New York City, you investigated these cases one at a time, tedious prosecutions where your victims, mostly illiterate foreigners, were expected to draw sympathy from jurors of so-called peers in a country they had only ever seen from a locked window. You had no international laws to draw upon. To this day, police resort to weak local and regional statutes that are all but impossible to prosecute. You charge a murder here, a kidnapping there, sometimes an immigration and naturalization violation, but rarely, ever so rarely, are the men and women who are actually in the business of human commerce prosecuted in the world’s courts. Well, the world is getting smaller, ladies and gentlemen. Forty-one countries have now passed legislation to address human trafficking, from Pakistan to Sudan, from Miami to Bangladesh. The world is beginning to react to the reality and the horror of modern-day slavery. Last year there were nearly five thousand—not arrests, mind you—but”—she raised her hands and used two fingers to denote quotation marks—
“convictions,”
she said loudly, nodding vigorously, “and many within third-tier countries that have been selling their offspring since before recorded history.”

There was brief applause. The speaker took a sip of water from a bottle on the podium.

“Helmut Dantzler, as many of you know”—she replaced the cap on the bottle—“has waged war on many continents as an officer of GSG 9, but his most recent, the one that compelled him to a new avocation, was fought closer to his home and heart, between the borders of Germany and the Czech Republic, where a new kind of crime was beginning to dawn on the world. Like many of you, he has stories to tell. Like many of you, he was caught between organized crime and the constraints of German law and international politics. Helmut is no longer in law enforcement. He has joined the ranks of elite intelligence officers around the world at Interpol, where he wages his battle against human trafficking through the exchange of information. Please welcome Helmut Dantzler.”

Tall, rigid, elegant in his mocha-colored suit, he approached the front of the room as stragglers moved in from the rear. Dantzler paced through loud applause and stood at parade rest before the audience until it ended.

“In Brooklin, Canada, scientists are manipulating atoms in a field called nanotechnology. It is assured to be a trillion-dollar industry by the year 2015. They hope, among other things, to build molecule-sized robots they can inject into our bloodstream to fight cancer, increasing our life span by twenty years and then perhaps fifty.” He paused. “In Bihar, India, mothers poison their newborn daughters with the sap of oleander to keep them from bleating for breast milk. This happens every day of every year. There is no food in the family to support another girl.” He looked at his hands, paused, and looked back at the audience.

“We can only wonder that these things happen in the same century,” he said. “That they happen on the same planet. Major Lamb in introducing me mentioned that the world is growing smaller. We know more about each other than ever before, and let me assure you, that knowledge is a good thing. Education is a step toward a greater humanity, toward a union of cultures.”

Dantzler’s thick German accent reverberated across the silent room.

“One day we hope that all people benefit from life-prolonging advances. And we should hope through progressive law enforcement to protect all people from the human malignancy that has too long hidden behind religion and politics. It is high time we direct the light upon the transgressors and not the transgression. It doesn’t take a German to know that child labor is wrong in Munich and it doesn’t take an American to realize forced prostitution is wrong in Los Angeles. These are human issues, not issues of state.”

He dropped his arms to his sides and looked at the toes of his shoes for a long moment. “Ah,” he sighed, “but you’re thinking I am an old man, an idealist. The world is more complicated than that, you all know. There will always be borders. There will always be corrupt leaders. There will always be organized crime. And, you are thinking, there will always be laws that will constrain our efforts as investigators. So where does that leave us?”

He looked up again, finding eyes around the room.

Dantzler took a folded document from an inside breast pocket and held it up in the air. “I went over the enrollment last night and performed some math in my room. You are two hundred and nine people with an average of fourteen years’ experience. That means there are three thousand years’ worth of experience in this room. I retired with only thirty-two.”

Muted laughter.

“I didn’t come here to tell you anything today. I came here to listen. I want to hear your stories about human trafficking. You all have them, your war stories, if you will. We all possess knowledge of things our prosecutors could never introduce into a court of law. We know the tidbits of intelligence that frustrate law enforcement officers all over the world, those things we know to be certain, but cannot prove to be true.”

Dantzler pointed out at the crowd. “And I want the person sitting next to you and the person behind you and him across the room and her by the coffee urn to hear it, too, because while the world really is getting to be a smaller place, the criminal networks are getting larger. Now more than ever we need to communicate.”

Dantzler stepped off the podium.

“You stare at your open cases for hours looking for the missing piece, when all along it is sitting in a jail cell in Lyon. The number of a TransAsia flight between Taipei and Phnom Penh, the key code for a Cadillac parked in Queens, New York, the name of a ship whispered softly in the alleys of Rome or Buenos Aires. In isolation these things mean nothing, but added to the sum knowledge of the investigator sitting next to you it might open new doors, so no, I didn’t come here to talk to you today. I came to listen, to hear your stories. You might not remember each other’s names a year from now, but you will never forget these stories. And that will be enough to get you talking to each other, burning up the phone lines as they say, making the world a smaller place in which to hide.”

Dantzler stepped away from the microphone and walked to the front row. He pulled an empty chair into the aisle, put a leather loafer upon it, and leaned on one knee, elbow pressing flat the razor crease in his trousers.

“I’ll go first,” he said. “In Germany there was a woman who operated a visa factory.”

He spoke loudly, without the benefit of a microphone.

“It was a difficult time for us. Our government had just relaxed border constraints between Germany and the Czech Republic. No one bothered to look at the visas anymore, legitimate or not, they mattered little to our border police. We estimated at the time that one out of twenty visas represented a human slave from the Czech Republic or more likely from Ukraine to their east. One particular woman who produced visas selected her victims from ads placed on Russian websites looking for domestic help for wealthy Germans. She required photos and proof of date of birth. She met them in front of Theater Imago in Hamburg and introduced them to their new employers—it was always one of three men who then spirited them to a windowless building in Bielefeld, where they were stripped of everything they owned, beaten, and forced to watch snuff films in the very room in which they were filmed. The psychological impact of the films was sufficient to suppress thoughts of escape. Afterward they were introduced to heroin and forced to prostitute themselves in the Mafia-owned nightclubs. If they refused, they would become one of the snuff film’s terminal stars. The woman’s name was…”