“You’re right,” Miller said after an uncomfortable moment. “I suppose we owe you that much after what you and Carli went through. As you know, I hitched a ride in the ambulance with the paramedics while they worked on Canfield on the way to the hospital. I was able to convince her to reveal the location where the exchanges of the girls take place.
“As Krall alluded to in his remarks to Carli, the agreement with his contact was that he be permitted to enjoy the girls, provided he did no permanent physical damage to them, for one week before turning them over to the broker for export out of the country.
“Initially, Angela—Agent Canfield—refused to provide any details that could be considered helpful, but, as we got closer to the hospital, her condition worsened dramatically. She had continued hemorrhaging during the trip after already losing so much inside the house. Finally, the lead paramedic, who worked like a hero trying to save her, came straight out and admitted to her that he didn’t think she would survive the ambulance ride.”
Bill listened, transfixed, to the final, awful moments of a woman he had thought he was getting to know, but who had conned him completely. As Miller spoke, it occurred to Bill that he wasn’t the only one she had fooled. Miller was hurting, too. He took a sip of water from a plastic cup at his bedside, and the agent continued.
“Once it sunk in to her that she really was going to die and had nothing to gain by keeping her mouth shut, Canfield spilled everything—in abbreviated form, of course. Since we still have a few days before Carli is supposed to be delivered, the plan is simple. We’re keeping Angela’s death under wraps, and we’ll use the information we learned to round up as many of these slimy dirt bags as possible.”
“Well, you have no teenager to deliver now, so how are you going to do that?”
“Special Agent Kim Adkins, stationed out of the Albany office, is going to become Carli Ferguson for a few hours. Agent Adkins is an experienced, twenty-five-year-old professional who looks like a seventeen-year-old high school girl. In most law enforcement scenarios, being that youthful-looking is a serious handicap, but for this situation, it’s perfect.”
“I don’t understand. How is this even possible? Human trafficking? Right here in the United States? In the twenty-first century?”
Miller frowned. “You might be surprised,” he said. “According to our own statistics compiled by the U.S. State Department, between six and eight hundred thousand people are trafficked against their will each year across international borders. Of that number, seventy percent are female, and as many as half are children. And the majority of these victims are forced into the commercial sex trade.”
Bill stared at the young FBI agent in horror. “That’s unbelievable.”
“Believe it,” Miller said simply. “Worldwide, human trafficking is the third most profitable criminal activity, behind only the drug trade and arms trafficking, with an estimated seven billion dollars in profits earned annually.”
“But right here? In the United States?”
“Oh, yes,” Miller answered. “We’re not unaffected. Much of the trafficking occurs in developing nations, where few if any barriers to the practice exist. But American girls are prized in certain parts of the world, particularly blonde, fair-skinned ones. Virgins are even more valuable. Spiriting them out of the country is the most difficult part of the process, but once they’re outside our borders, it’s almost impossible to get them back.”
“Why?” Bill asked, sickened by what he was hearing.
“Worldwide,” Miller answered, “a three-tier system has been developed to determine which countries are doing the most—as well as the least—to put an end to this practice. In the most recent report, issued by the U.S. Department of State in 2009, seventeen nations worldwide have been identified as ‘third tier’ states, meaning they take virtually no action to combat the practice of human trafficking. Some of those include Saudi Arabia, where we theorize Carli was headed, as well as Kuwait, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, and others.”
“Wait a minute. Back up for just a second.” Bill could feel his blood begin to boil. “Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? Those are countries American soldiers have fought and died to protect. Are you telling me my child was headed to Saudi Arabia to be some sheik’s sex slave?”
“We believe so,” Miller answered quietly. “And you won’t get any argument from me about it being against everything we stand for, or at least, everything we should stand for. But the real risk for the traffickers in an operation such as this is in smuggling the girls out of this country. Once that happens, the issue becomes a diplomatic one, rather than a law enforcement one, mostly due to the cultural barriers between societies.”
Special Agent Mike Miller scuffed his shoe on the grey and white tiles of the hospital floor. “Canfield knew all these statistics as well as I do. Maybe better. I don’t understand how she could have been a part of any of this.”
“Canfield was irreparably broken,” Bill said. “And she alluded to what she called ‘an early retirement from the FBI’ when she was trying to justify her actions as she held a gun on me. Just how much money do you think she was making on these slave trades?”
Miller shrugged. “We have a team of specialists going over her banking records, so we should have pretty specific numbers available shortly, but, if I had to guess, I would say she alone was netting well over sixty thousand dollars for every girl she helped smuggle out of the country.”
Bill whistled, doing the math quickly in his head. “She told me she found Krall and turned him after his first couple of kidnappings and murders. That means she was involved in ten successful cases. If she made anything close to what you think, that’s well over a half-million dollars!”
Miller nodded. “And tax-free, too.”