“What’s your name?” I ask, although I know the answer. What I don’t know, however, is her state of mind. I need to find out if any bonds have developed during her captivity that will make her a threat to me or my mission.
“My name is Ma . . . it’s Maja.”
This is pretty standard in kidnapping situations. They’ve got her using a different name, both for operational security and as part of her reeducation process. But I know, without a doubt, that this is the girl from the picture with Talyssa.
Nobody looks like this.
I shake my head. “No, it’s not Maja. You are Roxana Vaduva.”
Her eyes shut and tears cascade down her cheeks. She sits down on the bed roughly and sobs softly with her face in her hands. “How do you know who I am?”
“Because Talyssa sent me.”
Tears flow, she collapses on the bed crying, and I look down at my watch.
I sit next to her, my pistol drawn and pointed towards the locked door. “Why are you up here with this old dude?”
She lifts her head, and with a hint of anger, she replies, “Why do you think? I was brought up to be raped. I haven’t been behaving, I guess, and this is how they punish you around here.”
“You’ve been held with the others?”
She shakes her head now. “I am getting VIP treatment, I have been told, because I am now the property of the head of the Consortium.”
This has me momentarily confused. “The head of the entire organization?”
“Yes.”
“No shit? Who is he?”
“I don’t know. He told me his name was Tom, but that might be a lie. I met him in Romania.”
“At the nightclub in Bucharest.”
“Yes.”
It’s clearly the man from the airplane that Talyssa had been tracking. This confirms Roxana’s sister’s suspicions, but we still don’t have any idea who this prick is.
I look over at the old dead guy in the robe. To myself I say, “Shit. I bet he knew the guy’s name.” Looking at the girl again, I say, “Anyone else on board in charge?”
“There was a South African man. He was making decisions. He calls himself John, but the man lying dead on the floor there talked about someone named Jaco. I don’t know if that’s John’s real name or not.”
“And this Jaco guy knows who Tom is?”
She nods adamantly and sniffs away wet tears. “He was there, in Bucharest. They were traveling together. Along with a bodyguard named Sean. There were some other bodyguards and some Romanian gangsters there with them, too.”
My attention is on this South African, because I’m astonished someone obviously so high up in the organization is here. Getting hold of this guy might be worth the added risk. “What does he look like?”
She describes him, and my hopes are dashed. This is the dude who left with the Greek goons on the tender.
“He’s off the boat now.”
She raises a finger. “There is someone else. A woman on board. An American psychologist called Dr. Claudia. The entire pipeline is not just a way to move the girls, it is a way to reprogram us for what is to come.”
She describes Claudia. I haven’t seen such a woman aboard, and don’t think I’ll be able to go hunting for her. No, I’ll take Roxana, in the hopes she can help us identify the men she met in Bucharest, because they are running this entire show.
“Okay. Any chance you know how to scuba?”
She shakes her head, a distant look in her eyes now.
“No problem. I’ll get you through this. I’ve staged a rig on the aft deck. We’ll get to it. You can breathe from my octopus, it’s my spare regulator, it attaches to my tank. We’re not going deep. The water is going to be cold without a wetsuit on, but I’ll keep my arm around you and we’ll stay close together all the way to the shore. We’re not very far from—”
“No.”
I stop midsentence and shake my head. Not this again. “Roxana, no one is going to come after your family. I can protect them.”
She speaks flatly now. “I am not leaving the girls below. You have to take us all.”
“It’s just me. I don’t have a boat or a submarine or a dozen Navy SEALs. It’s just me. Alone. How am I going to scuba dive with twenty-five women?”
Roxana deflates a little. “The yacht is going to Venice, I know that much. Tomorrow night there is something they call the market. They are going to sell off the women below, plus some more women they are picking up here.”
“Sell them to who?”
“Claudia says they’ll go to mafia organizations, oil sheiks, high-end prostitution operations around Europe and the Middle East. After tomorrow night in Venice, all these women will be gone, and there will be no way to save them.”
I just stare at her and say nothing, because even with this information, I don’t know how to save them.
She must see the uncertainty on my face. “You just have to go to the police there, they can find out where—”
I interrupt with, “The cops are useless in this. The pipeline only goes places where they control a section of the police.”
This doesn’t seem to surprise Roxana much at all. She just nods, looks to the floor. “I’m being taken to the Director. I can lead Talyssa to him. I don’t know how. Maybe I can find a phone or a computer or something to communicate with her once I get where I’m going and find out where that is.”
She’s as brave as her sister but, also like her sister, I’m not sure she fully understands what she’s in for. “Do you have any idea what is likely to happen to you between now and then?”
With a nod she says, “Of course. I will be raped. Beaten. I’ll be punished for you coming here.”
I am thinking the same thing, and I don’t know if I can deal with more of what I’ve been feeling since Mostar. Before I can reply, however, I hear a sound outside the bulkhead.
An outboard motor, increasing in volume.
The tender is returning to the boat.
“Don’t let them catch you,” she says. “Go.”
Telling myself I have a little time, I look away for a moment, and I begin to worry that I don’t want to know the answer to the question I’m compelled to ask. But I have to know. Turning back to her, I say, “What did they do to you after I left the red room?”
She sits back up on the bed and begins weeping again. “That night, after you left, they took us into the mountains. Raped some of the girls. Maybe most of them. One tried to run . . . she did not get far.”