Authors: Douglas Corleone
I parked Pavlo’s ZAZ well out of sight. I double-checked my Glock, then exited the vehicle and started toward the pier. I stopped when a pair of headlights came into view.
I ducked behind another car and peeked through its side windows. The headlights were coming from a police cruiser, with two cops sitting in the front seat. They shone a large spotlight directly into the crowd of girls, but the girls didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. In fact, many of them appeared to be posing in the glare of the spotlight.
A lone woman who’d been standing at the edge of the crowd sauntered to the cruiser. She looked slightly older than the others. When she reached the vehicle, the driver’s-side window glided down. She leaned in, spoke to one of the officers, then clearly passed something off to him. I couldn’t quite make out what it was, but I had little doubt that it was an envelope filled with cash. Just as Marko and Pavlo had suggested back at the hostel.
It’s feeding time for the police,
Pavlo had said.
Like pigs at the trough.
Apparently satisfied, the officers extinguished their spotlight, rolled up their window, and slowly moved on.
I edged forward behind the row of cars. Less than two minutes passed before another set of headlights appeared. A new black Lincoln Town Car rolled to a stop before the crowd of girls. Unlike the police cruiser, this car garnered a significant reaction. The girls swarmed into the beams of light and exhibited their bodies with all the intensity of the dancers onstage at Palladium.
The windows of the Town Car were tinted, but that didn’t prevent a few of the girls from flocking to the sides of the vehicle, some lowering their tops, some raising their skirts, no doubt in the hopes of being chosen by whomever was seated in the backseat, leering out.
Finally, the woman who had presented the envelope to the police pushed her way through the throng. When she reached the rear window on the driver’s side, the glass glided down, and I saw a dark man in a gray suit and sunglasses greet her.
Negotiations were about to commence.
With everyone distracted, this was my chance to get aboard the boat. There was little cover except for darkness but that darkness was nearly complete. A sliver of moon sat high in the sky, throwing off little illumination on the starless night. Between that and my black suit, grass and sand to muffle my footfalls, I was pretty damn certain I’d make it just fine. If I was spotted, I’d duck behind the nearby retaining wall and ready myself for a firefight.
*
The boat was approximately sixty feet in length, with no one on the deck providing security. There had been no one watching the hostel, either, as far as I could tell. These men were either brazen or stupid or legitimately had little to fear. If I’d been a betting man, I’d have put my money on the latter.
Once I was aboard the boat, I glanced out at the crowd of girls. They continued to flaunt themselves in front of the Town Car, so I assumed the customer hadn’t yet made his selection as to who would accompany him to Antalya. Ana remained on the fringes, clearly not putting forward her best effort to be chosen.
I headed down the stairs to the cabin, my weapon drawn. There were lights on inside the cabin, the voices of carefree men carrying through the door. I pressed up against the door and listened. Surprisingly, I heard only two voices. I tried, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.
I gave it a minute, then twisted the knob and it turned. For a moment I feared that the boat didn’t have anything at all to do with the sex-trafficking operation—that I was about to walk in and point a Glock at a pair of retirees from Bulgaria exploring the Black Sea.
But when I pushed the door open, I found two well-dressed men in their midthirties, staring back at me. They barely reacted at all.
I said, “Marko and Yuri, I presume.”
“I am Yuri Bobrovnyk,” said the blond man seated to the left. He pointed to the dark-haired man seated to the right. “This is Marko Dyachenko.” He lifted a brandy snifter and took a sip. “And you are?”
“I’m the man looking for Lindsay Sorkin,” I said. “The six-year-old girl abducted from her parents’ hotel room in Paris six days ago and dragged across the European continent by thieves and lawyers and gangsters and police.”
Marko chuckled. “That sounds a bit redundant. I do not see much difference between those four groups, do you, Yuri?”
Yuri smiled, shrugged. “I could not pick one or the other out of a lineup.” He looked up at me. “Would you mind not pointing that gun on me? I assure you it is not necessary. I am unarmed.” He turned to Marko. “Are you armed?”
Marko shook his head. “I am not armed.”
“He is not armed either,” Yuri said in his thick Ukrainian accent. “See? Neither of us is armed. We present no threat.”
I lowered the Glock a few inches, pointed it at the floor between them, ready to raise it if I glimpsed any sudden movement. I stood at an angle so that I could see if anyone was about to descend the stairs to the cabin.
“Thank you,” Yuri said. He had a smooth, clean-shaven face with a dimpled chin. “Now, how can we help you, Mr. Guy with the Gun?”
“Where’s the little girl?”
“Why do you think we would know this?”
“You’re a sex trafficker,” I said. “You peddle women.”
“Exactly,” Yuri said. “Women, not children. Tell me, Mr. Guy with the Gun, who wants little girls? Sickos, perverts. Why would I risk my business, destroy my reputation to deal with such deviants? The customers who pay me hundreds of thousands of euros to ship my women abroad would shop elsewhere. The police I pay off would stop protecting me. Some crazy man with a gun, someone like you, looking for his daughter or niece, would come onto my boat and blow my fucking head off. Why would I want that, tell me.”
“So,” I said, “you expect me to believe that if I went out there right now and talked to those young girls, I would hear nothing but good things about you and your operation. Is that right?”
“No,” Yuri said, setting his snifter down on a coffee table. “The girls who were not selected this evening will be very disappointed that they are not going to Antalya. Many of them stood out there in the freezing cold for several hours dressed in practically nothing, hoping to impress my customer. If you survey those girls tonight, most will probably express very little job satisfaction. But that goes for most businesses, no?”
“Most businesses don’t drug their employees,” I said, “or use violence when they don’t do as they’re told.”
“Drugs?” Yuri said with a laugh. Marko joined him. They looked like two partners who’d recently started a successful dot-com and were now basking in all its glory. “You think I provide these women with drugs? Heroin, cocaine, oxy, it is all expensive. Let them buy their own fucking drugs. I offer no health plan. As for violence, if I was prone to violence, right now I would cut out your tongue. My mother did not raise me to strike women. Never in my life would I harm one of these girls.”
“How about men, then?” I said. “How about your cousin Osip?”
“Osip?” Yuri said, puzzled. “You know my cousin?”
“Holy shit,” Marko said to me. “You were listening in on our conversation at the hostel.”
“My cousin Osip,” Yuri continued, “is in Moldova recruiting women.”
“Not according to your buddy Marko here,” I said. “According to Marko, Osip’s rotting in hell.”
Marko smiled broadly. “What do you think Moldova is? Heaven?”
Yuri said, “My cousin Osip is a fuck-up. He screwed around with too many girls, passed around the crabs. So I sent him to Moldova. According to a study I read in a magazine, it is the unhappiest place on earth.”
“Actually, it was in a book,” Marko corrected him.
Yuri nodded. “Oh, yes. A book. What was it called?”
“The Geography of Bliss.”
Marko turned to me. “Amazon. Currently under ten dollars U.S.”
*
Yuri didn’t bother with any threats, just asked that if I had any further questions about his business I contact him beforehand to set up an appointment. I had half a mind to pistol-whip the two of them and drop them overboard just to see how well they could swim.
Once I stepped off the boat, I turned the ringer to my BlackBerry back on. A few moments later, I spotted Ana. The crowd had thinned, but there were still a few girls left, smoking and engaging in conversation, perhaps waiting for another Town Car to arrive. Ana stood with two other girls, both thin as rails and scantily dressed. When she noticed me, Ana motioned me over.
“This is Mariya, and this is Lavra,” Ana said by way of introduction. “Girls, this is my friend Simon.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I told them, then turned to Ana. “I’m sorry, but we have to get going.”
“I understand.” Ana reached into my front pants pocket and removed a small wad of hryvni. She divided them equally and handed one half to Mariya and one half to Lavra. To me, she said, “I promise to pay you back.”
“No worries,” I told her.
The girls thanked us and kissed both of us on both cheeks before stumbling away.
“I know those girls will spend that money on drugs but I couldn’t help myself,” Ana said as we walked through what was left of the pack.
As we passed them, I glimpsed each girl’s pale, skeletal face, and I felt as though I were looking at the walking dead. Some of them appeared no older than sixteen.
Sixteen,
I thought.
Sweet sixteen. Hailey’s sixteen. Would be sixteen.
I looked into the eyes of a brunette who appeared to be from the West, and I was rocked by a sudden certainty that I was looking into the face of my only child. The resemblance was too striking for it not to be her.
“Hailey?” I whispered.
The girl looked at me oddly, then muttered something in Russian and turned away.
Ana must have heard me. She placed a cool palm on my cheek and guided my face down to hers.
“Simon,” she said softly.
For a moment the images in my head froze in place. If asked where I was or what I was doing there, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. I’d have drawn a complete blank.
Finally, Ana nudged me forward. “These girls, they are all volunteers,” she said sadly. “Simon, I am afraid we have hit a dead end.”
My head turned back to the brunette, almost of its own accord, and my eyes followed her as she made her way up the beach’s incline to the street.
I continued watching her as she staggered to a waiting car. I was mesmerized, in a complete trance, my thoughts floating back a decade to Georgetown, Washington, D.C., to holding Hailey in my arms while she unwrapped presents on Christmas Eve.
Then a chirping noise smacked me like cold water in the face and returned me to the present. I looked at Ana, lost myself in her eyes again.
“Answer it,” she said, obviously still concerned about me. “It is your phone.”
Chapter 41
An hour later, Ana and I were on an overnight train heading north to Kiev, the country’s capital. The call I’d received was from Ana’s brother, Marek Staszak, back in Warsaw. He said he wasn’t about to leave Lindsay Sorkin’s fate in the hands of the Polish police. So, after Ana and I had left for Ukraine, he had returned to Mikolaj Dabrowski’s office with a private investigator and seized the lawyer’s desktop computer. He and the investigator then took the hard drive to a private company that handled the extraction of encrypted data and personally waited in their office for the final results.
The experts determined from where the images on Dabrowski’s computer originated, and Marek thought it more than a mere coincidence that most of the obscene material came from a so-called children’s modeling agency based in Kiev. Known as Ukrainian Darlings Studios, the alleged agency posted photos and sold images using several domains on the Internet, including UD Models, UD Dreams, UD Holidays, UD Magazine, and UD Island, among others.
Once he gathered this information, Marek contacted a close friend in the Senate, the upper house of Polish parliament. His friend had widespread connections that included the deputy head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Ministry of the Interior in Ukraine. The deputy head quietly confirmed that there was an ongoing investigation involving both the Ukrainian authorities and Interpol. The modeling agency was indeed a front for a hard-core child-pornography ring that had been in operation roughly seven years. More than eighteen hundred girls and boys between the ages of eight and sixteen had allegedly visited the agency voluntarily, though it was clear that the images sold on some of the UD sites depicted children as young as four.
No raids had yet been conducted and none was expected for several months, so authorities had ample time to use surveillance and other techniques to acquire evidence that would result in an airtight case. There was also the issue of rounding up as many users of the sites as possible. The users ranged in age from twenty-two to seventy-eight and spanned at least forty-two countries.
“Who is the leader of this agency?” I had asked Marek after he provided me a location. “I need a name.”
“I can give you two names, Simon. They are brothers. Dmitry and Viktor Podrova of Lviv. At least one of them is thought to be running the day-to-day operations in Kiev.”
Now, as the train rumbled along the flat Ukrainian countryside, Ana dozed with her head on my shoulder. We had a first-class sleeper compartment for two, yet we hadn’t moved to the bed. Wired on espresso, I stared absently out the window at pitch-black fields and thought of the girl at the beach who had resembled Hailey.
You’re out of your mind, Simon. How the hell would you even know what Hailey looked like today? You can barely picture her as a child anymore. You constantly need to pull the photo of her and Tasha from your wallet, or else you’ll risk losing the faces of both forever.
I turned my head for just a second, and when I did, I could have sworn I saw someone’s face, a man staring into our compartment.
Just a trick of the imagination, Fisk. You’re tired, possibly hallucinating. You should go to bed, get some sleep.