A Walk Across the Sun (49 page)

“Sounds delightful,” Thomas said. “A worldwide convocation of creeps.”

“A fair assessment. Anyway, there's a guy in the FBI's Washington office named DeFoe. He's wicked smart—served with the Green Berets and knows everything about computers. He's been tracking child porn on the Web for years. Nobody knows how he stands it, but the psychologists keep passing him. He's a mIRC guru. The guy never sleeps. For a long time he was working on breaking into this back channel called XanaduFuk.”

“No doubt its users are fine, upstanding citizens,” Thomas said.

“A regular bunch of Boy Scouts,” Porter replied. “So the guys DeFoe was chatting with mentioned it, but nobody told him how to access it. It's like a secret society. You don't ask to be invited. The host invites you first. Wonder of wonders, he got a message from the host about a month ago. The guy goes by the screen name Spartacus.”

“That's original,” Thomas said.

“As you'll see, the man's creativity lies in other areas. DeFoe started chatting on XanaduFuk around the clock. He figured out pretty quickly that the users were sex tourists because they talked about places like Thailand, Cambodia, and Moldova. But they never talked about the kids. They talked about drinking expensive wine. Now DeFoe is a teetotaler, so he went out and bought a book on wine. He started talking about it in his chats, and it opened up a whole new world. It's amazing what people will confess when they think they're anonymous.”

“Aren't they?”

“Yes and no,” Porter replied, changing lanes and passing a slowmoving big rig. “Be patient. I'm getting to the good part. After about a week, DeFoe heard somebody talk about drinking a certain Italian wine in the United States. Eventually he asked Spartacus where he could buy a bottle. This is when things got hairy. The guy invited DeFoe into a peer-to-peer conversation. No witnesses. Entirely private. The guy used the opportunity to ask DeFoe a question that was meant to separate the men from the boys. He asked DeFoe what it feels like to taste young cunt.”

“Dear God,” Thomas said.

“Exactly. DeFoe, however, is a pro, and he gave just the right response. Spartacus liked it so much he gave him a gift. He sent DeFoe a link to a website. When he followed the link, he found a porn site specializing in Eastern European girls. The site had a pay option and a password dialog.

He tried the password Spartacus gave him and went down the rabbit hole. The place he found is called Kandyland.”

“What is it?”

“A place where beautiful children are sold to perverts.”

Thomas closed his eyes and listened to the whistle of the wind outside the car windows. “You mean permanently?”

“No, I should be more precise. They are rented.”

Thomas opened his eyes again. “How does Sita figure in to this?”

“I'll explain in a minute. But there's another side to the story you have to hear first. The Justice Department has been looking for Kandyland for almost two years. We've broken up ring after ring, and every pimp has heard of it, but no one knows where it is. For the last twelve months, we've been building evidence against the largest trafficking network on the Eastern Seaboard. The places these guys source is astounding—truck stops, strip joints, escort services, and underground brothels from Maine to Miami Beach.”

Porter paused and weaved the car through a pack of delivery trucks.

“Six months ago, we got a tip from one of our sources that a man named Dietrich Klein was involved. Our techs did a bit of wizardry and we found him. East German native, probably a former Stasi officer, emigrated to the U.S. after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and married a prom-queen-turned-exotic-dancer. Go figure. They live in a ritzy suburb north of here. He's been in investing and real estate and now trades as a ‘success consultant,' whatever that means. He travels a lot. People speak highly of him. He pays his taxes. His reported income is lower than we would expect, but not too low.”

“You gotta love the new economy.”

Porter laughed. “Everybody's a consultant these days. In any event, Klein checked out. We thought our source was making things up, but he was insistent. The Bureau decided to monitor Klein's cell phone calls. It took a while because the guy is extremely sophisticated. But we put the puzzle together and hit pay dirt. He made regular calls to nondescript landlines in five major eastern cities—Newark, Harrisburg, Baltimore, Memphis, and Atlanta. We ran the traces and put assets on the owners. All of them turned out to be connected to the sex trade.”

“How does Kandyland fit in?”

“I was just getting to that. Agent DeFoe accessed the site for the first time about a month ago. The cheapskates who paid a hundred bucks a month got pictures only. Prepubescent girls doing things you don't want to think about. The perverts willing to shell out more cash got access to another part of the site. They were invited to join the fun in person. For a thousand bucks an hour, they could have a photo shoot with a girl. For anywhere between twenty and forty thousand a night, they could have a child all to themselves. A number of the girls were advertised as virgins. They commanded the highest price.”

“This is wild stuff.”

“Tell me about it.”

“By the way, where are we going?” A minute before, they had taken an exit onto U.S. Route 19 North toward Roswell and Alpharetta.

“You'll see soon enough. Let me finish my story.”

“Please. I gather you're getting to the point.”

Porter went on, “DeFoe sent some of the images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and got another agent to cross-check them with Interpol's database. A number of kids were clear matches. Meanwhile, DeFoe did what only DeFoe can do. In less than twenty-four hours, he succeeded in tracing the Kandyland site back to a computer in the Czech Republic.”

“The East German connection.”

“Perhaps. It's owned by a university in Prague and it's infected with a virus called a Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse allows a hacker to turn the infected computer into a ‘slave' to transfer data and even to run programs from a distance. The slave computer protects the hacker from being discovered. It is the same thing as a digital identity shield.”

“Okay.”

“So DeFoe sent a request for assistance up the chain of command, and the FBI reached out to the Czech national police. The Czechs got permission from the university to access the computer, and the FBI sent a Cyber Action Team to Prague. The cyber guys passed their data along to DeFoe. DeFoe then traced the Web traffic to an Internet service provider in North Carolina. By this time, DeFoe was the man of the hour and everyone was marching to his orders. DeFoe flew down there, thinking he was going to find a link to Kandyland's home server. But it turns out that this particular service provider offers its customers the ultimate privacy—anonymous access to the Internet. No digital footprint.”

“And this is legal?”

“It's the Wild West, remember? The regulators are light-years behind the innovators. So the U.S. attorney applied some muscle, and the service provider gave DeFoe the keys to their mainframes. After two weeks, he was able to isolate a range of computers sending data to Prague. They were also able to confirm hundreds of computers
receiving
data from Prague.”

“You mean the sickos?” Thomas asked.

Porter nodded. “Exactly. The U.S. attorney had to get a search warrant, but when he did, he found the mother lode. The sending computers were registered to an account held by one of Dietrich Klein's dummy corporations. DeFoe didn't know this right away. He had to forward it through the chain of command. When we saw it, we knew that part of the mystery of Kandyland was solved.”

Thomas thought for a moment and saw a hole in Porter's story. “But the fact that Klein is involved doesn't tell you where the girls are being held.”

“True,” Porter agreed. “It only tells us that he's running one of the most extensive trafficking rackets in U.S. history.” He paused. “Now for the end of the story. Sita is the key. DeFoe got back to Washington on Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, he logged into the Kandyland site. He noticed that a new gallery had been added on the premium side of the site. The girl looked to be Indian. He sent a couple of images along to NCMEC. They got back to him right away and told him about a notice my office sent out in response to your voicemail. I had to get permission to use it, but we have a mass distribution list—sort of like an electronic version of the old ‘all points bulletin.' Just about everyone who works on the issue of child exploitation in the United States was instructed to watch for her.”

Thomas shook his head in wonderment. “I had no idea you would be able to do that.”

Porter waved off the compliment. “So NCMEC informed my office of DeFoe's discovery. I contacted DeFoe directly and told him your story. Let's just say he was touched. It turns out he's an orphan too. He hatched a plot to get Sita out. We took it up to the assistant director in charge of the Washington field office, and he contacted the deputy director. The DD was hesitant at first. He didn't want to move on the Kleins until we could take down the entire ring. It took us three days of preparation to coordinate the stings, but we made it happen. Everything is going down tonight. The Bureau is working with local cops in eight different cities. We have a SWAT team on hand for the Atlanta operation.”

“What's the plan?” Thomas asked.

“It's simple. DeFoe posed as a pervert and rented Sita for the evening. He wired earnest money to an offshore bank account and received an e-mail from the Kandyland webmaster directing him to a truck stop north of Atlanta. He's supposed to come alone at eleven tonight. The e-mail said he would be escorted from that point.”

Thomas marveled at the serendipity of the events Porter had described. “After everything we've done to find her, it all came down to a picture and a phone call.”

Porter took the exit for the North Point Mall and pulled into a massive, mostly empty parking lot. He maneuvered the car to the rear of the lot and parked beside a gray beast of a vehicle bearing the designation FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION MOBILE COMMAND CENTER.

The door to the command center swung open as soon as they got out of the car. They were greeted by a tall black man wearing a no-nonsense smile.

“Agent Pritchett,” the man said, extending a hand and welcoming them into the air-conditioned vehicle. “I'm special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office.”

“Pleasure,” Thomas replied, looking around.

The command center was staffed by half a dozen agents and outfitted with a dizzying array of electronics, laptops, and flat-screen monitors. Everyone was extremely busy, but most made an attempt to acknowledge the newcomers.

“It's a home away from home,” said Pritchett. He gestured at a man sitting nearest to the door. “Meet Special Agent DeFoe, the brains behind this operation.”

Clean-cut and ruggedly handsome, DeFoe looked the part of a former commando far more than present computer junkie. He stood and grasped Thomas's hand.

“Andrew told me about your work in India and France. I'm impressed.”

“The feeling is mutual,” Thomas replied.

Pritchett offered them cups of coffee and pointed at a cluster of empty chairs.

“Please, take a seat,” he said. “It's all hurry up and wait in this business.”

“Are you going in by yourself?” Thomas asked DeFoe after he and Porter sat down.

“I wouldn't have it any other way,” he replied, smiling easily. “I don't get to do much fieldwork these days.”

“What are your chances of success?”

DeFoe didn't blink. “Nothing's guaranteed, but I think we'll get everybody out alive, including the suspects. The SWAT guys are the best of the best.”

Thomas glanced at Pritchett. “You think you know where the girls are?”

“We're ninety percent certain,” he responded. “Klein lives with his wife in a neighborhood not far from here. He has a main house and a guesthouse. We've been monitoring traffic to the property since we first started watching him. We noticed a frequency of traffic entering and leaving the guesthouse during the late night and early morning hours. When we connected him with Kandyland, it all made sense.”

“The guy would be that brazen?” Thomas was astounded. “If I were running a child sex ring, I'd want to keep it as far away from me as possible.”

“Actually, what he's done makes perfect sense. When you're dealing with merchandise like this, you don't leave it to hired guns.”

“Okay. So tell me about this guy. How does a person get into the slave trade?”

“He doesn't see it that way. To him it's all a matter of economics.”

“Fair enough. But my point is this: if I wanted to buy and sell human beings, I wouldn't know where to start.”