Chapter 9
NINE
Six months later
On board the Svetlana
Twenty kilometers south of Petropavlosk
Kamchatka Peninsula
Russian Federation
They came from all over the country, mainly from small towns.
Two girls had been culled from the Pololsk Orphanage just outside the ring road of Moscow and one came from Ekaterinburg, but the rest came from small orphanages in small towns, cash-strapped, isolated.
The kind of place where for a ridiculously small sum of cash, the recruiters could take their time, choose carefully.
It was important that the girls be utterly and completely alone in the world.
There could be no vodka-soaked father, or poor aunt or some jobless cousin out there somewhere who’d had to park the girl in the orphanage until times improved.
The father might dry up, the aunt land on better times, the cousin find a job and then they’d come back to the orphanage only to find the girl gone.
And start asking questions.
That wouldn’t do. Everything had to run smoothly and seamlessly without any hanging threads.
These girls were completely alone. No one would come looking for them. Ever.
The whole world was in recession, but Russia, throughout her incarnations as a Czardom, the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation, had always been poor. The Motherland had always been a place where poor young girls fell through the cracks in the floor. Unwanted, unloved, alone.
Only now, through the magic of modern industrial organization and logistics, the girls had a use, became a commodity, earned money.
So the recruiters made the rounds of the small, out of the way orphanages, checking to make sure no stray relatives were around, and had their pick of the prettiest in each school.
It had been hard to tell what the girls really looked like.
They all shared a look—emaciated, lank, greasy hair, dead eyes.
But the recruiters had a good eye for bone structure and checked to see that the underlying health was good.
A little food, soap and shampoo and tiny dollops of affection carefully doled out did wonders.
The recruiters were good at their job and any mistakes…
well, no one was going to miss any of the girls.
The girls now filing onto the ship, escorted by professional nurses, already looked infinitely better than they had only a few weeks ago, a testament to the eye of the recruiters who had seen the potential beneath the grime and misery.
They’d been kept in a warehouse a hundred miles south of the city, fifty girls waiting for the last arrivals, waiting for this moment, for shipment.
Their time together in the warehouse had been the best time of their young lives.
The warehouse had been heated because even in June, the Kamkatcha Peninsula was cold.
They’d been fed and allowed to bathe. They’d had access to a TV with DVDs—mainly cheap pirated versions of ancient US films but the girls had been so starved of entertainment they were riveted to the screen for hours—and books.
Some girls hadn’t been taught to read, some could read only laboriously.
Some of the girls dove into the books and barely came up for air.
The warehouse had been abandoned decades ago, but workmen had come in the week before to install a generator, fix up crude lights hanging from the ceiling, set up portable toilets and an efficient space heating system.
The minor investment was worth it, because this was a trial run. If all worked according to plan, there would be regular shipments, using the warehouse as a staging area.
So the girls were rested and clean and well-fed when the buses came to pick them up in the warehouse way station for the first stage of a journey. If this transaction went well, as it surely must, the warehouse way station would be used many many more times.
This was the start of what everyone expected to be a lucrative supply line of fresh blonde meat.
There were eight million orphans in Russia alone, without even counting Belarus and Chechnya and all other the former Soviet Republics.
When the first shipment was complete, a bus came to pick the girls up and drive them to the ship moored at a small pier that had been built the week before in a natural harbor ten miles away.
No one noticed, or cared. It was a deserted land, a peninsula attached to the largest desert in the world, Siberia.
The business consortium running the logistical side of the operation had bought supplies in the city to the north, but Petropavlovsk was one of those cities where people minded their own business.
The only people on the streets were the drunks, and the desperate.
Still, the heads of the conglomerate felt it was best to be discreet, so the transshipment point had been located outside of the city.
It was also why boarding and landing were done by night.
The satellites overhead did not have IR capability.
That much their financiers, who had access to Russian secret services, who basically owned the Russian government, had told them.
Spy satellites were intensely focused on latitudes much further south.
This latitude covered the Scandinavian countries, Canada, Siberia.
Not much terrorism going on there, which was all the Amerikanski cared about these days.
There was minimal risk that the eyes in the sky would watch, take note, investigate. They were running a minor risk, true. It was best to minimize it by loading at night, even though nobody really cared too much. After all, they weren’t carrying fissionable material or drugs or arms.
Just girls.
The girls were obedient, biddable. They walked themselves aboard, they didn’t even need herding like cattle.
There were only two nurses on board to accompany the fifty girls.
The rest were crew members who knew very well the punishment if they touched a hair on the girls’ heads.
Death would be infinitely preferable to what would happen to them.
The girls were guaranteed a safe passage. They were valuable commodities and were expected to be ferried across the ocean and landed in excellent condition.
There was a spreadsheet available to the top members of the organization which was an excellent cost-benefit analysis.
Allowing for wastage, and allowing for a work life of fifteen years—after which the average girl found a creative way to kill herself—each girl represented, in exchange for a negligible investment, an overall profit of thirty million dollars.
Thirty-five to forty million if used hard, though then the length of useful life became quite short.
The girls filed obediently on board, four bunk beds to each cell. Space was tight but no one complained. There were clean sheets on the bed, they knew by now that they would have plenty of hot food. The nurses were dispassionate but not cruel. This was the best situation they’d ever known.
They would be ferried safely and comfortably to the other side of the ocean, to their final destination.
To market.
San Diego
Meteor Club
“More champagne, sir?” A beautiful young woman held a tray of crystal flutes in front of him. Franklin Sands accepted one, hefting the flute, admiring the way it gleamed like a beacon in the light. It sparkled, just like his life.
He loved this, loved everything about it. The large rooms full of designer furniture, the superb catering, the luxurious armchairs, the smell of expensive leather and the prosperity the rich men in the room exuded, the young beauties ready and willing to fulfill their every desire.
The young woman bending down to offer him champagne was almost beyond beautiful—a stunning brunette in a Valentino gown that showed off just enough of her glorious breasts. No one needed to sneak a peek. Every man in the room knew they could see them naked any time they wanted. For the right price.
The tray was solid silver and polished once a week, the flutes were Baccarat crystal and the Champagne itself was a ’2008 Veuve Clicquot. His supplier had sold him eight cases the week before.
He was sitting on an extremely comfortable Poltrona Frau sofa with a Philippe Starck coffee table in front of him.
The room was enormous but broken up into elegant, intimate spaces by the furniture, all by top designers.
Soft music played in the background. Sands chose his tracks depending on the age of the customers.
The average age tonight was around sixty so the music was a mix of classical music and unobtrusive covers of hits from the nineties when these men had been in their vital prime.
Now many of them needed stimuli Sands was only too happy to provide, for a fee.
“Sir?” The beautiful young woman who went by the nom de lit of Skye turned to his brand-new partner, Anatoly Nikitin. Nikitin waved her away irritably. Few men turned down anything Skye had to offer, but the Russian did.
She was one of his better investments, beautiful, willing and talented at her job. His accountant told him she grossed him a million and a half dollars per annum. Her deflowering alone had brought him a hundred thousand dollars. Tax free of course.
How could the Russian be so immune to her charms?
His new partner refused more or less everything in the Meteor Club, which had been designed to offer a man every possible pleasure, save drugs.
No drugs in the Meteor, save the legal ones.
He had every variety of prescription upper and downer and a whole range of Viagra-like pills. All legal.
You could indulge every pleasure your mind could conceive of legally here at the Meteor, and no police officer could touch you.
There were plenty of street rats plying illegal drugs. It was a dangerous, violent, filthy business that the state punished severely and quite rightly so. Only fools entered it, and they died young and badly.