Chapter 18
ZINAIDA
The shipping yard at Avonmouth is a looming mass of piled containers and dim lighting.
A light mist is falling as Sally helps me through a gap in the metal railing fence.
“NCA is already in place,” she murmurs, nodding at a line of containers to our right as we take up our own positions on the roof of another one.
I can’t see anything, but I take her word for it.
Sally and Ana have been here since midday.
I just arrived, with the bulk of our team and a van that is hidden on a side road, ready to transport anyone we might find.
I don’t know where Luke is. He disappeared this afternoon in the silent, unobtrusive manner he does everything. One minute his quiet bulk was there, seeming to occupy the entire Pigalle Mayfair space, and the next he was just . . . gone. Despite telling me that he’d be here tonight.
And why is it that annoys me quite so much?
He didn’t ask about tonight’s operation. He didn’t even seem particularly bothered by the fact that I clearly left him out of the planning and the details, a decision which, despite their lack of verbal objection, I’m well aware Sal and Ana don’t agree with.
I’m not sure what is starting to annoy me more, the way he’s seduced my entire staff or the fact that no matter what I do or say, Luke simply never seems to get pissed off.
Because you’re just a fucking job to him, Zinaida, remember?
As if I could forget. Luke’s words have been running on a loop in my head ever since the other night in his apartment: “Identifying holes in your security is my job. I took a contract to protect you.”
He couldn’t have made it clearer that he doesn’t plan to cross that infamous line of his. Which means that I am in the very unaccustomed position of wanting something that I can’t have.
“That’s the one we’re opening, over there.” Sally nods at a container with numbers so faded I can barely make them out. “Whoever brought it in has done a good job of covering their tracks. Took us a while to find it.”
“How long have the containers been here?”
“Off-loaded from the ship three days ago, I believe, but only arrived in the storage yard today.”
I swallow a sudden, fierce burst of rage.
Three days on the docks, on top of whatever time they’ve already spent stuffed in that tiny space during the voyage here. Three days wondering if they’ve been forgotten altogether.
And that’s if the women inside are still alive at all.
“Zin.” Sally eyes me warily. “There’s still time to reconsider this.”
I keep my expression carefully neutral. Not for the first time, Ana and Sally both expressed concern about tonight’s mission. It isn’t concern for their own safety, they both hastened to add.
It’s the fact that we’ve crossed so many of the wrong people lately that, sooner or later, in Sally’s words, we’re going to find ourselves up against something we’re not ready for.
Part of me knows she has a point. And I know that what they are both really asking me to do is bring Luke in.
That would be the smart thing to do. The responsible thing.
But fuck him, too.
I hired Luke Macarthur to find out who the leak was in my operation. Instead, it feels like he’s taken over every part of it. Worse, it feels like everyone in my business likes it that way.
But none of them—with the exception, to some extent, of Anatoly and Nadja—really understand what it took for me to get from the cage in my father’s back room to the head of a billion-dollar corporation. None of them did the dark work that earned me my reputation.
No matter how competent my staff are, how familiar with the shadows, none of them have embraced that darkness, become one with it, in the way I’ve had to. It’s the price I’ve paid to stay on the inside of the sick world of trafficking I’m determined to destroy.
Luke Macarthur thinks he can just walk in and run that part of my world. Just slip into the darkness with the same kind of lethal stealth he slipped into my life.
But I know that the darkness isn’t a security job to be managed.
It’s a way of being, an edge that never takes a break.
It’s ugly and it’s relentless, and if Luke is so fucking determined to be a part of it, then he can damned well prove himself the same way anyone in our world does: with blood, violence, and savagery.
And this has nothing to do with your little face-off in his apartment the other night, Zinaida, does it?
But so what if it does? I play games with men. They don’t play them with me.
Luke seems to think he can just jump in the ring and start throwing punches.
Well, I’m taking the fucking gloves off.
“We’re not reconsidering,” I tell Sal, taking up position beside her on the roof of a container.
“There’s at least two dozen women in that container.
Possibly more. Do you want to be the one greeting them when they turn up at Sophie’s House in a few years, branded like cattle, beaten within an inch of their lives, and addicted beyond sanity? ”
“Of course not.” Sally shakes her head. “But I want us all to be around long enough to save more than one shipment of girls.” She holds my eyes. “We could do with Luke’s skills on jobs like these. You said he’d be here. Where is he?”
“We did this long before Luke Macarthur ever showed up,” I say tightly, ignoring her question. “It’s what we do.” I give her a hard look. “You knew the dangers when you took it on.”
It’s a low blow, and I know it.
Sally looks away first, but I don’t miss the tension in her face. Thankfully, however, she stops talking, and we settle in to wait.
Not for long.
Just after midnight, three white vans enter the yard. Through a liberal coating of mud, I can vaguely make out what looks like a bull’s head logo on the side, but the name isn’t clear.
I count a dozen men in total. Most take up positions around the perimeter of the container, guns up. Two others cut the padlock on the container and pull up the lever to open it.
Even from fifty meters away, the stench of human waste, unwashed bodies, and fear hits me in a foul miasma as the door swings open.
At least it’s not the stench of decay.
Those nights are by far the worst. The nights when the containers are opened too late to save the people inside.
And those terrible moments are exactly what drive me to do this, no matter how dangerous it is.
I grip the steel edge of the roof as dim figures stumble out of the container, most too weak to stand without support. As expected, they’re all women, some of them extremely young.
“We could take out the transport crew,” Sally breathes in my ear. I can feel the fury churning inside her, see it in the white knuckles gripping her scope as she zooms in on the men below. “Most of them would be dead before they even knew we were here.”
“No.” I mouth the word into her ear. “We wait until they’re gone, or we’ll expose Niamh’s source.”
I don’t like it any more than she does. But my relationship with Niamh works on trust, and I’m not going to blow it tonight.
Even if it turns my stomach to watch as the weak figures are brutally pushed into the waiting vans.
One of the captive women calls something out that I don’t hear.
A guard knocks her brutally on the head with the butt of his gun, but he’s too late—the women in the other container, the one I’m waiting to open, clearly heard her, because they start yelling out and banging on the walls.
The sound echoes around the yard, worse than a ringing alarm.
“Shut up!” One of the guards kicks the closed container. “You stay quiet, or we’ll leave you to die in there.”
The noise subsides immediately, testament to the helpless terror of the victims behind the locked door.
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” the guard growls at the other men. They start slamming the van doors shut on the women they’ve taken from the first container.
Then, from the containers off to our right where the NCA team are concealed, there comes an audible thud. One of Niamh’s team has clearly slipped up.
The guard who kicked the container looks around warily, then goes very still, gesturing to the others for silence. He picks up his radio and murmurs something into it, then starts edging toward the hidden NCA agents.
Fuck.
“What do you want us to do?” Sally mouths in my ear.
“Nothing, yet.” I don’t want to show our hand unless we have to.
Ana touches my foot. Sally and I both look over our shoulders.
There are half a dozen men approaching from the rear, all strapped to the eyeballs.
The traffickers were expecting company.
The NCA are surrounded.
We’re all surrounded.
It looks like it’s going to be a fight, whether I want it or not. I close my eyes briefly.
Fuck it all to hell.
This is bad. Really fucking bad.
“Wait,” I mouth, and Sally nods grimly.
But the word is no sooner out of my mouth than the men who emptied the container start shooting. And once they do, the entire yard turns to chaos.
I spot Niamh, shooting from the shadows beside a container, another man beside her. She’s drawing most of the fire. Other members of her team, hidden in and among the stacked containers, start taking shots at the men by the vans.
None of them seem to realize there is a force approaching from the rear.
“Go,” I whisper to Sally, “and tell the others to back up the NCA.” She gives a low-voiced instruction into her earpiece, then she and Ana are gone in seconds, scaling down to the ground and melting into the lines between containers, heading around to come in behind the newcomers.
I see the shapes of the other women moving into place behind Niamh, covering her and picking off the men in front of them.
But the men just keep coming.
Jesus, did they bring a fucking army with them?
Then I realize the men coming to join the traffickers aren’t part of their force.
They’re wearing Port Authority uniforms.
What the hell?
This just went from bad to fucking disastrous.