Stolen Lives (40 page)

The rusting security gate that protected the premises was standing wide open.

“Police,” Thembi announced, stepping inside. “Now, if everyone could please … ”

He stopped just inside the door, and behind him David stood in silence as he took in the cramped and stinking room.

The reception area, where the Nigerian manager should be, was deserted. His threadbare chair was knocked over; a cash box lay open and discarded on the floor.

Moving inside, David saw that the owner’s office in the adjoining room was also unoccupied, although the radio in the corner was still playing softly, the dj’s cheerful voice incongruous in this rathole.

All evidence of a hurried escape. Thembi shook his head in dismay. “They obviously had a tip-off. Somebody warned them we were coming.”

“The car that left when we arrived,” David said. “Get one of our backup vehicles onto it. That could have been them, making a last-minute run for it. They must have had a lookout on the street who phoned in when he saw the backup waiting. Jesus Christ, the slippery bastards.” With an effort, he controlled himself, fighting the surge of anger that threatened to overwhelm him.

A failed raid. No arrests made, no suspects detained.

But at least they could help the trafficked victims.

“Let’s get the workers out of here.” David gestured towards the dimly lit passage.

He made a detour into the owner’s office as he passed. Surely there must be some evidence here? With so hurried a departure, perhaps something of value had been left behind.

David was out of luck. Apart from one full magazine of ninemillimetre bullets at the back of the desk drawer and two empty syringes on the floor, there was nothing. He smashed his fists onto the desk in frustration.

David had already turned back towards the door when a shout from Thembi made him break into a run.

“Sup! Come here, quick!”

David pounded down the passage, over weathered floorboards that creaked loudly under his weight.

Thembi was in the first bedroom, a gloomy, cramped prison. The naked bulb in the ceiling had blown, and dark blinds covered the room’s small window.

His captain was crouched over the bed in the corner.

“There’s no pulse here!”

David felt his own heart quicken with fear.

“He’s got no pulse at all,” Thembi repeated.

He?

Pulling the torch from his belt, David switched it on and aimed the beam at the figure on the stained foam mattress, curled into a semi-foetal position, one arm outstretched.

A slight, brown-skinned figure.

Kevin?

David felt his world tilt. The torch-beam wavered, arcing up onto the filthy basin near the bed before he forced it back down again and stared numbly at the sight before him.

A young Indian man, naked and emaciated, his eyes staring sightlessly ahead. Peering down, David realised, with sick relief, that the youth was too tall and his hair too long for him to be his son.

He trained the beam on his face. It wasn’t Kevin, but it could so easily have been.

Would he end up suffering the same fate?

In the crease of the dead youth’s left arm, a forest of needle tracks bore witness to the methods that his captors had used to subdue him.

David lifted the arm gently. To his horror, it was still warm.

“They obviously gave him an overdose,” he said in a voice that sounded hoarse and tense and strange. “Forcibly injected him with something—heroin, probably—to get him dependant, to keep him subdued, and then used it to kill him.”

Thembi glanced up and David saw his own dismay reflected in his captain’s eyes.

“The others,” he said. “What about the others?”

Together, they rushed from the room.

An hour later, the failed raid was over.

Paramedics had pronounced four of the trafficked victims— two men, two women—dead on the scene. The fifth, a woman, had suffered a fatal heart attack as they were loading her into the ambulance.

The witnesses were dead, the owners were still at large, and the security guard had vanished into thin air.

David stood with his team outside the gates of the brothel and stared at their blank, exhausted faces. He felt sick inside, filled with a toxic mix of anger and desperate anxiety. This disastrous, failed raid marked the end of Project Priscilla.

Worse still, all the daily markers—rush hour, home time, sunset, supper time, each one inspiring a new surge of hope, had been and gone. Now it was midnight. It was indisputably the end of the day, and Kevin was still missing.

Standing in the yellowish glow of a streetlight, David pressed his fists to his chest as he felt his world shatter around him.

53

“Xavier’s not your friend?” Salimovic smiled at Jade again. “That’s a pity. Such a shame. It would be so easy for me to open the front door and let you go.”

“You aren’t going to let me go,” Jade said. “Even if I told you Xavier’s life history and gave you his exact gps coordinates, you still wouldn’t let me out of this house.”

She stood her ground, even though she was tempted to turn and run. The action would be pointless. If she did, she knew she’d have four bullets in her before she even reached the door.

She couldn’t see a way out of this.

Suddenly, Jade wished she could speak to David, just one last time.

The stuffed animals on the wall looked down at her, their beady eyes seeming to convey silent sympathy.

“True,” Salimovic said. He thought for a moment and then nodded once, as if he’d reached a workable solution to a problem that had been bothering him. “And you know what? I think I believe you. If you aren’t with him, I have no further use for you.”

He raised the gun.

And then Jade heard the whisper behind her, as soft as smoke.

“Toulouse.”

Down.

Without giving herself time to think, Jade flung herself onto the floor, her chin hitting the flagstones just as a shot went off, so loudly she thought her eardrums might burst.

Salimovic staggered backwards, looking down in disbelief at the bloody hole in his stomach. He tried to raise her Glock, but Jade was too quick for him. On her feet in an instant, she managed to wrench it out of his hand. The effort made her wrists burn, and she was forced to hold the gun in a two-handed grip.

She backed away from Salimovic, swinging her weapon round to aim it at the black man who had now emerged from behind the curtain.

Xavier Soumare simply held out one rake-thin arm and limped towards the trafficker. Salimovic had dropped the knife and was clutching his stomach, his face twisted with pain and his hands slippery with blood.

Xavier shot him again in the gut, and Salimovic grunted. He took another step backwards, and then his knees buckled and he sat down hard, as if he had been pushed.

His fingers scrabbled for purchase on the flagstones as he tried to get up again.

Aiming carefully, taking his time, the black man fired two more shots, one into each of the trafficker’s hands.

Salimovic let out a high-pitched wail.

He lifted his arms and gaped at his damaged hands. Sheets of blood flowed over his wrists and down onto the floor. He sagged sideways and, with an agonised groan, crumpled to the floor.

Lying in a pool of his own spreading blood, he started to scream and shout out words in a language Jade did not understand.

Then Xavier turned to face her, but even with her trusty Glock aimed squarely at his chest, Jade still shivered when she saw the coldness in his eyes.

“Out,” he said.

Slowly, Jade moved towards the doorway.

Outside, Salimovic’s tirade was still audible. The wind had dropped and a few stars were visible. No storm after all, not tonight. Just the threat of one.

After he had slammed the front door, Xavier began to cough; it was a rough, rattling, phlegmy sound. And once he’d started, he couldn’t seem to stop. At one point he doubled over, spluttering and gasping for breath so desperately that Jade thought he was going to choke to death. She watched him intently, gripping her gun with hands that felt increasingly stiff and painful.

Toulouse.

By whispering that word, Xavier Soumare had saved her life.

Jade bit her lip. How could this man have known the secret language that she and her father had shared?

When he had stopped coughing, Xavier collapsed onto the grass like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Struggling into a sitting position, he turned his blank, unsettling gaze on Jade again.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was difficult to see in the poor light, because both the sleeve and his skin were dark, but Jade thought that what he was wiping away was blood. “Jade de Jong,” he said in a hoarse, unsteady voice.

Jade felt her mouth fall open.

“How do you know who I am?”

“I found out. Asked some questions. I even watched you at home with your police detective friend one evening. I took photos of you, too.”

Xavier’s teeth gleamed in the dim light.

Jade swallowed as she remembered the three distinctive marks of the tripod, aimed directly at her window. That had been Xavier? But why?

“Somebody asked about me at the hospital where I was born, as well. Was that you too?” she said.

A small headshake. “No. Mathilde did that. We thought she would cause less suspicion.”

“Why did you want information on me?”

“Curiosity.”

In response to Jade’s incredulous glance, he continued.

“I knew your mother. Elise Delacourt. At one time, we were very close.”

His words punched Jade’s breath out of her lungs more effectively than a boxer’s right hook.

“How … how did you know her?” she asked, when she could speak again.

“We worked together.” Xavier regarded her closely as he spoke. “She was one of us, a long time ago. Just like Mathilde.”

Then he bent over and coughed up what was undeniably a large clot of blood.

Jade’s mind was churning.

Xavier was a criminal in the foulest sense of the word; a modern-day slaver whose preferred currency was the very lives of the victims he trafficked.

She remembered the photo of her gentle, smiling mother, looking down with utter love at the baby in her arms.

Elise Delacourt, a criminal?

Impossible.

“No.” Her denial was automatic, but as she spoke, it dawned on Jade just how very wrong she had been.

Xavier Soumare and Mathilde Dupont were suspected traffickers only because of their association with Salimovic. The Scotland Yard detectives had assumed they were his accomplices. But it was now clear to her that the brothel owner had never even seen Mathilde, and had no close association with Xavier.

Was it possible that the pair had not been following Salimovic in order to do business, but rather hunting him down in order to kill him?

If that was true, then Xavier Soumare was not a trafficker at all, although he was undoubtedly a criminal. And, if he had worked with her mother in the past …

With a sudden rush of understanding, Jade realised that if she wanted to find out who her mother had really been, she could look to only one person for the truth.

Herself.

54

Edmonds stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the wine cellar. As the sun set, she had been listening to the sound of birds going to roost in the trees surrounding the villa.

After the birdsong had gradually died away, the only sounds left were the harsh shrieks of metal on metal coming from the cellar below, where the safe-crackers, who had arrived two hours ago, were hard at work.

Barak was leaning against a nearby wall. He stubbed out his cigarette and put the butt carefully in a plastic bag before lighting up a fresh one.

It was a tricky safe. They’d had to knock away half the wall to get it loose, and now they were having to cut their way into it.

“Well, I’ve got accommodation organised for us,” Richards said, closing his mobile phone. “Two rooms at a little place in the village.”

“Thanks.”

“The detectives were telling me that there’s a rather scenic waterfall a short way up the hill from here.” Richards shifted from foot to foot and Edmonds thought she heard an unfamiliar tone in his voice. Was it nervousness?

“It’s a bit late now, and we’ll have a busy day tomorrow I’m sure, but I wondered if you’d like to take a walk up there with me? Before breakfast, perhaps? When I’m working in a foreign country I always try to walk somewhere. It gives you the feel of the place, you know.”

Edmonds stared at Richards in surprise. She had the distinct impression that he was not just inviting her to do some exercise with him, but pretty much asking her on a date. And while taking a walk in the early morning to visit a waterfall might not be the most romantic proposition she’d ever had … well, now that she thought about it, it was certainly not unromantic. In fact, it sounded pretty good.

Even so, Edmonds decided she should say no.

The reasoning behind her decision was just too long and complicated, and she was getting tired of explaining it to prospective suitors. She’d had a disaster of a relationship a few years back. The man had hurt her, physically and mentally, and his abuse had left scars—scars of both types—that still hadn’t completely healed. Even three years down the line, romance and relationships had yet to re-enter her life plan.

Seeing that Richards was already looking disappointed, she realised that her body language must have given her decision away.

Which was why Edmonds was as surprised as anybody to hear herself say, “Thanks. I’d like that.”

Richards blinked. Then an enormous smile spread across his face. Behind him, through a cloud of smoke, she could see the Cypriot detective nodding in solemn approval.

“Great. That’s wonderful. You know, I didn’t think … I mean … ”

At that point, Richards was interrupted. A shout from downstairs signalled that the safe was finally open.

Edmonds hurried down the staircase and pulled on a pair of gloves in case any trace evidence could later be obtained from the items inside its thick steel shell. Then she knelt down on the cold concrete floor next to Barak. Down in the cellar the air was thick with the smell of scorched metal. The safe hadn’t given up its contents without a fight.