“This is the last time I touch you,” I say to her. “Got it? But you must stay still.”
She doesn’t believe me. No surprise, but she’ll see. I take the ear plugs from my pocket and stick them into her ears, no easy feat with her head moving so wildly. Then I take the pillowcase and put it over her head. She writhes around, screams muffled.
I ignore her and check the room for cameras, running my fingers along the molding and the fixtures. They promise no cameras as a part of the terms of the auction, but one never knows.
I pull my tools from the pouch in my suit. The first thing I do is to I turn on the beacon so Aleksio and the others can get the location. Next, I use heat imaging equipment to plumb the walls in search of a mass of electronic equipment. If the server area doesn’t adjoin this room, my job is all the more difficult.
Ten feet down the wall to the west I pick up the telltale heat signs of servers. Good. I pull out my tiny circular saw, which runs from a battery pack. Very quiet. I move a dresser and cut a hole in the wall behind it. I run a cable through. I have only a rigid cable with which to maneuver a thumb drive into the port, something I practiced with our tech guy. Using these tools on the ends of rigid cables is like writing a message with a ten-foot-long pen—difficult, to say the least, and there is always the risk of toppling the stack. It takes me the better part of an hour to get the thing in.
When it’s in, I text out with the phone I smuggled in. The hack is live. I pull my cable out. This is going well.
That’s when I see her staring at me. She got the fucking pillowcase off, and she knows now. Will she talk if pressed? Will she use this information to secure herself favors in this place? To secure her freedom?
I put my finger over my lips, then I finish my job. I wrap the cables, shove them into the fat suit pouch, and carefully replace the panel I sawed away. I use a kit to mix up a pigment of putty and swipe it around, then I replace the dresser.
Fifteen minutes left. I turn to Nikki. Again the fear comes into her eyes. I shake my head and remove her earplugs, but not the gag. “I’m your friend,” I say. “Understand?”
She nods.
“You will say nothing of this.”
She shakes her head no, yes, no, grunting, desperate to communicate.
I sigh and remove the gag. “Take me with you,” she whispers. “You can do it. I can tell you how!”
I kneel in front of her. “If I take you with me, it means I rescue one person. But with what we learn here? We rescue everybody here today and everybody who will ever be here.”
“And I fucking care about that why?”
“Because I care about it, that’s why,” I tell her.
“Take me.”
“Not an option,” I say. “You have exactly two choices. You keep quiet about what you just saw and we pull you all out in two weeks, or you tell what you saw and you never get out.”
She gives me a piercing look, and I know she’s thinking about the angles. The third and fourth options. This is a type of girl I know well.
“You want to be a fool and try bargaining with these people?” I put my hands on either arm of her chair and get really close. “You think they’ll honor anything? I’m your only hope.”
She just watches me. She knows. She gets it. “I want to go home,” she whispers.
I stand. “I watch you all. It’s not so bad.”
She glares at me. “Yeah, not bad for me yet. But I won’t be in this room after your visit. I go somewhere worse. An underground brothel and it’s not nice like this one.”
“We’ll find you,” I say.
“Thanks a fucking lot,” she says.
I sit on the bed. We didn’t think of where Nikki would go after this. They will see her as having been used up. Her virginity gone. I can only imagine the type of brothel she’ll go to now.
“This is the best we can do. It’s this or nothing, Nikki. We’ll find you.”
She looks away.
I kneel in front of her. “We’ll come for you.”
She shakes me off with curses.
“Did you meet the other women here?”
She shrugs.
“Have you met the nun?”
She snorts.
“What’s so funny?”
“Her god isn’t helping her much, is he?”
“So it would appear,” I say. “How does she seem?”
“Um…like a nun,” Nikki says. “I don’t know why everyone loves her. Especially the Russian girls. All she knows is the Bible. She doesn’t remember shit from her past.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Amnesia. Like on a soap opera?”
I feel the blood drain from my face.
“She doesn’t remember shit until two years ago when she woke up in some tree on a mountainside. She only knows her name from a tattoo. She thinks Jesus is her savior.” Nikki flips her dark hair from her eyes. “Some savior. I think she should go see Jesus for a refund, if you ask me.”
Tanechka remembers nothing? A nun makes sense as a cover. But a nun with amnesia?