“Go on, little one,” Apollo murmurs, his voice calm, soothing. “It’s all right.”
Yelena slowly walks off-screen, shoulders hunched up around her ears, her steps tentative.
A man moves into the frame, then, his back to the camera. He’s tall, slender, with golden blond hair coiffured to the side, perfectly styled. His suit is immaculate, tailored. He has a pistol in his hand. He looks over his shoulder at the camera, not quite revealing his face.
“To show that I am serious,” he says, his smooth voice betraying an American southern twang. “I shall administer thisonewarning. Any incursion will result in the next round going through his skull.” A pause. “You’ve been warned.”
He lifts the pistol and fires in one motion—I hear a scream off-camera: Yelena. Apollo’s arm explodes red at the elbow. He immediately curls around it, clamping the wounded arm to his belly, but his eyes are on Yelena, off-screen.
The video ends.
“It was sent to Harris a few hours ago. Apollo and Yelena must be rescued from withinbeforeany external assault can be made.” He retrieves his phone and pockets it. “My sources say that Spaulding is heavily guarded at all times, and that at any sign of danger, he is whisked away. So timing will be key. Rin, you must free Apollo and Yelena from their cell without alerting the rest of the personnel within, and you must wait to make your move to escape until after we have begun our assault. If he assumes his prize prisoners are secure he will allow himself to be removed from the danger, and wait until his crew can deal with the insurgency. But if he thinks anything is amiss, he will likely just go in and execute them rather than risk their escape.” He muses for a moment, then continues. “It must be a sudden and comprehensive assault from multiple angles, not leaving him any time to react except to escape. Then, you, Corinna, must effect your escape from the compound with Apollo and Yelena. We will have a vehicle waiting just outside with covering fire. The vehicle then will take you to a rendezvous a few miles away, where Harris will be waiting with a helo for extraction.”
“Uncle Harry is coming?” I ask.
Anselm nods. “All hands are on deck for this operation.”
Duke stares at me. “I don’t like it. At fuckin’ all. You’re walking into something you got no capacity to understand, Rin. You’re not posing as a hooker for a police sting, here. And shit, even that’s dangerous as hell. This? It’s fuckin’ suicide, and that’s the best-case scenario. Worst case is, you get gang-raped and then sold into real, actual fuckin’ slavery. And sure, we’d pull down the gates of hell itself to get you back, but not before you went through a nightmare you cannotbeginto fathom.”
“He is not incorrect, Corinna,” Anselm says. “You bear the most risk of all of us. We are all experienced in the risks of combat. Your part of this plan…?” He shakes his head, the rest unspoken but clear.
“I admit the idea of this plan makes me so scared I could puke.” I look from Alexei to Duke to Anselm. “But is there another way? That won’t get him killed, I mean.”
“This is dicey enough as it is,” Duke says. “There’s any number of ways it could go off the rails. But I’ve worked it over in my head a dozen ways, and I just don’t see it. Spaulding is clearly willing to kill Apollo, and probably the girl too. He’s that kind of a monster. But I don’t see a way of luring him out that won’t make him suspect something. You’ve got to have them hidden until the fireworks start, and then you’ll have to double-time it after we’ve gotten Spaulding to duck and run.”
“He’s in a fortified position,” Thomas points out. “Why would he run? Why wouldn’t he simply go down and wait it out?”
“Because we’re going to attack when the buyers arrive.” Anselm toys with the arm of his sunglasses. “I can confirm with a high degree of certainty that there will be a shipment of girls arriving at the fortress within the next few days—Corinna must be on that truck. A few hours after the girls arrive, there will be a convoy of buyers. My sources tell me this is Spaulding’s pattern. His...M-O. That is the phrase,ja? Modus operandi? He will go out to greet them himself. This is when we will attack. If we can put a round through his skull at this time, all the better. But I foresee him getting away initially.” There’s a pause, and his voice drops to a hiss. “I will hunt him down, and I will personally put my knife between hisverdammtenribs.” The murderous venom in Anselm’s voice shocks me to my core—the look in his eyes makes my blood turn to ice.
“Anselm, jeez.”
He only regards me with a cool expression. “You do not know the things I have discovered the last few days,liebchen.He is evil—evil. Your beloved’s grandfather…he trafficked in women, it is true. But those women were at least adults, and most of them had already chosen that profession—for the most part Vitaly only moved them from place to place, client to client. Perhaps they did not have a choice at that point, and it is disgusting that he did this—I do not excuse it. But Spaulding? I will have nightmares of the things I learned…the things I saw. Children. Little girls. Barely teenagers, at best. Passed from person to person, like…” he trails off. “No, what Spaulding does is not merely trafficking in prostitutes, even unwilling ones. He is worse—muchworse. ”
Duke looks at me. “And you’re gonna put yourself into that?”
Thomas looks at me. “Forgive me for how this will sound…” His eyes go to Anselm. “But is she not too old, in that case?”
Anselm shakes his head. “We are fortunate, in this. The young ones are his personal predilection. His playthings. The fortress is a place of business, and the bulk of his operation is in adults, not children. Even sex traffickers generally draw the line somewhere. This operation at the fortress is a staging ground for moving women to other venues. The buyers are what in another industry you would call middlemen, dealing not in the sale of the merchandise to the customer, but in moving the goods to the local distribution operators, the pimps, brothels, and madams, who then purvey them to the customer.” He exhales slowly. “This is why Corinna even stands a chance in hell of succeeding without being…harmed. It is business—and Spaulding does not allow his staff tosamplethe wares, so to speak. He himself will, but since this shipment is to be adult women, he will not be interested.”
“What about Yelena?” I ask.
Another shake of his head. “His preferred age is between eleven and thirteen. Yelena is safe from him—in that sense, at least. I know for a fact he would not hesitate to kill her, however.”
I’m chewing on my lower lip with agitated, nervous energy as I think about the plan we’ve outlined. “How do I find him? How do I rescue him? Where do we go? I can’t pick locks and I can’t guarantee I’ll find a gun.”
Thomas frowns. “Have you any training?”
I shrug. “I’ve learned self-defense from Sasha since I was a little girl. There was never anything like belts or tests, just…don’t let him get his hands on me—and the older I got, the harder he’d try. He even taught us how to counter someone with a knife. We also spent time at the range every week practicing with pistols, so I can hit what I’m aiming at.” I let out a breath. “Well, paper targets, at least.”
Alexei glances at me. “Your shooting practice. Was it range only?”
I shake my head. “The range was just what we called it. It wasn’t just a distance shooting thing. There was an underground room with targets Sasha could position in various places, with obstacles and fake doorways and noncombatant targets and stuff like that. He called it a mini C-Q-C training facility. So I’d have to, like, walk through rooms and find and hit targets, and Sasha would be there with a paintball gun, trying to hit me—I had to clear all the targets without being tagged.”
Duke frowns at me. “Wait, now. Hold on. You never told me this. I designed that practice compound—I assumed only the A1S operatives used it to keep their skills sharp.”
I shrug. “I assumed you knew—it’s not a secret Cal and I both worked at the range all growing up. We would have competitions, see who could clear the course fastest.”
Alexei smirks at me. “I am curious—who won?”
