Chapter 32: Trafficking

"You promised her you weren't going to hunt him down." Harold.

"I know."

"You also promised her you'd never lie to her."

"I know."

"He doesn't have to," Shaw piped up from where she was sitting. "I'll do it."

"No one's touching Paul Carter." Reese thundered.

"Except you." Shaw wasn't intimidated by him.

Reese didn't respond. Instead, he turned to Finch. "Did you know about this?"

"I knew Joss had filed for divorce because of conflict with Paul. I knew there'd been a hospital report from the night before she went to the lawyers. And it was for a scalp laceration. No, I didn't know everything that happened."

John deflated, leaning against the edge of Finch's desk. "I can't believe anyone could have said those things about Joss. Or to her. Especially when that person had married her, professed to love her and care for her the rest of her life, and she's the mother of his son. She nearly died giving birth to Taylor." He was still shaken by the fact that he'd come so close to losing her, first to Walker, and then to the HR plants at the hospital. He'd never, ever be able to forget the image of her bleeding, broken body nailed to the crossbeam up on Panther Mountain. That image would stay with him the rest of his life, and so would the memory of the sick, black terror he'd felt when he'd seen her, that first moment, when he'd thought she was dead. It had only been a moment, a moment before her chest had risen, fallen, and he'd known she was alive—but that moment had been an eternity.

If he'd been Taylor's father, married to her when she had been in the hospital, watching her give birth to his son, nearly dying—both of them—he would never have been able to say those hurtful, cutting words to her. No matter how angry he got, not even if he was drunk and angry at the same time. And he couldn't imagine how Paul Carter had been able to say those things, not once, not twice, but so many times—enough times that it had stuck with Joss, sank into her psyche deep enough for her to believe it. "She's not a nobody. I'll get her to see that if it takes me the rest of my life."

He had no idea he'd spoken aloud until he saw Finch and Shaw exchange significant glances. And he sighed, waiting for an inevitable Shaw wisecrack.

To his absolute surprise, she didn't comment. Instead she got up from her chair and said, "Well, while Joss is at work, want to help me do a little cleaning-up?"

Reese perked up. When Sam Shaw said 'cleaning up' she meant the kind with guns and adrenaline. "What's up?"

"Remember that guy you kneecapped in the alley by the market? And the businessman with the despicable taste in little boys?" Shaw grinned wolfishly. "Finch was kind enough to pass on your message. You're right, it was right up my alley. I paid him a little visit."

"What was the body count like?" Reese eyed her narrowly.

"The boy's in foster care now. Better off there." She avoided answering his question about the body count. "However, during the course of my…conversation…with him, it turns out that he has a wide circle of acquaintances with the same despicable tastes. I managed to convince him of the error of his ways, and so he gave me the location of the next monthly gathering of these friends, during which a meal of 'young lamb' is served up for those with 'discerning' tastes."

John felt the cold, angry predator named 'Reese' awaken in him, fury uncoiling slowly in his lower belly. He welcomed it, as an outlet for the anger he felt against Paul Carter for what he'd done to Joss, and channeled it into anger at this ring of pedophiles who would victimize innocent children. One he couldn't do anything about; the other…

Reese smiled, his mouth a cold, hard, grim line. "Let's go clean up."

A nice part of town. Lots of Lincolns, Porsches, even a few exotics in the parking garage attached to the apartment building. Reese paused for a moment, looking at a midnight-blue Porsche, wondering what it would be like to take Carter for a ride in it. She'd like it, he was sure.

If she could get past the fact that he'd stolen it. She put up with the purple GTO he'd stolen from Hector Alvarez, but he was fairly sure she wouldn't approve of a stolen Porsche. With a reluctant sigh, he turned away from them. They'd shortly be sitting in a NYPD impound lot, anyway.

The apartment building itself was a ritzy place—too high-priced, in Reese's opinion—but he knew that behind some of the highest-priced doors was the worst crime. Money bought—and hid—a lot of vices. The entire building was owned by the occupant of the penthouse, but the 'party' that was supposed to go down tonight would be in the basement. The soundproofed basement, to be exact. Probably better to keep children down there, keeping people from hearing a child's screams.

The back of the apartment building had a shallow set of steps leading down to the basement. He was all set to pick the lock, but Shaw informed him with a sly smile that she'd been here a few days previous, taking a tour of the building as a prospective tenant and had quietly jimmied the basement door lock so that when the building's maintenance crew left for the day and locked everything up, that door wouldn't lock all the way and still allow them ingress into the building.

The basement looked exactly like all the other basements he'd ever seen in these New York City apartment buildings. Mops, buckets, cleaning supplies, workmen's tools for household fixes. It wasn't until Sam had led him almost all the way through the basement and he saw a faint rectangular outline in the drywall behind a shelving unit that he got the first inkling of something illegal, and he pulled his Sig at the same time Shaw pulled her Beretta. They both checked clips, thumbed off safeties, then Shaw screwed on a silencer on her gun. "Don't want them to know we're coming. Don't want to give them a chance to get rid of the evidence." Then she took a deep breath, looked at him. "Ready?" All business. Cool and calculated.

He simply nodded, gathering himself together, locking down all of his emotions, letting the coldly logical predator called Reese take over his body, his mind. He locked down all of his emotions, felt in his pocket for the extra clips he always carried, then brushed a fingertip over the bullet in his pocket. "Ready."

She grabbed the edge of the shelving unit and swung it out.

The shelving unit was affixed to the portion of the wall that constituted the door; as she swung it out, the wall came with it. Beyond was a white hallway, short, plain…and at the end of the hallway was a short, very round man, sitting with a magazine of some sort open in his lap. He looked up as they entered the hallway, yelped and stood, reaching behind his back—presumably for a gun. "Hey! You're not invited—"

He got no further. The silencer at the end of Sam's gun coughed discreetly, and the man dropped. Reese took a quick look as they both strode on past, not wanting to deal with this guy on their six if Sam hadn't finished the kill—but she had, from the spreading stain on his chest. Perfectly placed for a heart shot. It never ceased to surprise him that a skilled doctor like Sam Shaw could be such a ruthless and efficient killer, but she wouldn't be here, and he wouldn't know her, if she wasn't. He didn't know how she reconciled those two halves of herself—the healer and the killer—but apparently she wasn't having any problems with either side because of her choice of actions.

So be it. How she dealt with her internal conflicts was her business.

He took the lead this time, swinging the second door, the interior one that Fatman had been guarding. Not very well, but then, Reese and Shaw were here looking for a fight, and he hadn't. Surprise could be a very effective element sometimes.

And it seemed that the 'guests' at this particularly obscene little party hadn't the foggiest notion that they'd been found out. As Reese and Shaw walked in, men standing around nursing drinks and talking in low voices turned, startled. Reese's eyes flicked over all the occupants of the room, seeing who was there, making quick decisions about who was—and was not—going to be a threat.

A sudden noise from a corner—a whimper—caught his attention, and his eyes flicked there. And what he saw made him raise his gun and fire off one quick kill shot. A little girl, dressed in a ridiculously frilly bright pink dress. Some gross slobbering ugly man was pawing over her, had torn one shoulder off the dress, had his hand up the frilly skirt—probably why the little girl was crying. And there were three more children, in the corner; two more girls, one boy. None of them over the age of ten.

Mr. Ugly never knew what hit him.

The little girl screamed as his blood spattered the pink dress. Shaw and Reese moved together this time; Shaw went to the children's corner, putting herself and her weapons between the children and any other possible threat as Reese advanced into the room.

"What do you think you're doing? Who do you think you are?" said a voice, and Reese eyed the speaker, gun at the ready. Tall, dark hair slicked back, most people would have considered him handsome. Reese remembered seeing the guy on TV as some magazine's 'most eligible bachelor'. Rich little handsome playboy. Well, money bought a lot of vices. And this vice was a particularly vicious one.

"I might ask you the same questions. But we both already know the answers to that, don't we." It wasn't a question. "This party's over." He waved his gun in a gesture that encompassed the entire room, then quickly trained it back on the guy's heart. "So is yours. Permanently."

"I have some very powerful friends. This isn't over, not by a long shot. Hey, we can work this out, you can have your pick…"

Reese was in front of the man in a moment, one hand fisted in the guy's collar, his Sig inches from the guy's cheek. "You have nothing to offer that I could want. Except your life."

Out the corner of his eye he saw a quick, furtive movement; a gun, being drawn out from behind another man's waistband. The man thought he was being discreet; he found out differently half a second later as Reese's bullet found his heart. There was a faintly surprised look on his face as the impact of the bullet sent him stumbling back against the wall, where he slid down it in a smear of blood, didn't move again.

The shot, however, sent the rest of the gusts of this particular little party into a mad panic. And the children; he heard high-pitched screams, but ignored them. Shaw would take care of them—she'd already picked off three without moving from the corner where she was protecting the kids; Reese raised his gun and almost casually took down four more. One kneecap, one heart shot, one in the middle of the back—that one would never walk again. He didn't feel any pity or remorse. The man deserved it. The other six party guests escaped out the door, no doubt thinking they'd gotten away with their lives.

But Reese had already marked them. They were going to get a visit from him, soon.

The playboy in front of him picked that moment to try and fight, thinking Reese distracted. A punch impacted Reese's chin, but it didn't even elicit a grunt; Reese had been hit far harder, by far better men than his piece of scum. And he answered it back with one of his own.

The playboy's head snapped back on his neck, impacted the hard concrete of the wall behind him. The man seemed stunned as Reese half-dragged, half-threw the man into a nearby chair. There were lengths of rope on a nearby table, close to a small, low metal cot—no doubt they'd been planning on tying the kids down before they'd started their entertainment.

Reese put that rope to better use, quickly and efficiently tying the man to the chair, hands behind the chair's high back, then surveyed the room. None of the guests who had been shot and wounded were going to be any threat; they were, for the most part, unconscious. One of the men Shaw had shot was dead. He turned to her in the corner. "Are they all right?"

The four kids were cringing in the corner; the little girl they'd seen when they came in, her hair done in a ridiculous mass of elaborate ringletted curls, spoke frantically, quickly.

"Is that Russian?" Shaw said incredulously.

Rese was already crouching beside the little girl, but he answered Sam. "Yes, it's Russian. She just asked us not to hurt any of them. She doesn't want to die." He turned to the little girl. "Who are you?" he asked her in mangled Russian.

"Sasha. This is Pyotr, my brother; and Marta, and Sveta." She spoke Russian, indicated the other children, all of whom seemed too terrified to speak.

His knowledge of Russian was rudimentary, at best. "Do you speak English?" A question in English. She shook her head. "But you understand it." She nodded. Good, since he understood Russian far better than he spoke it. "How did you get here? Where did you come from?" It a easier to ask her the questions in English.

She answered him in perfectly-understandable Russian. "We came here in a big black box on a ship. With many others. Some grownups, some children. The man who took us out of the big box spoke Russian, he told us to call him Unchi. The men who took us out spoke both English and Russian. They keep us at a house in the city. This is the first time we have been out in a long time."

Human trafficking. Reese gritted his teeth. That was bad enough, but they came in a 'big box on a ship'. A shipping crate or container? The only way that could have gotten past customs in New York was if someone on the New York end knew they were coming and had arranged to miss checking this particular container.

And the only way that would happen was if the connection on this end was HR.

He made a quick decision, rose from his couch, pulled out his cellphone. Digging into another pocket produced a small white card, and he dialed the number on it.

"Captain Benson." Right after the first ring.

"You're going to need to send a couple of detectives to…" and he rattled off the address to the apartment building. "There are three little girls and one little boy here, with bruises. And ten men, six with gunshot wounds. Four dead. And the ringleader is tied to a chair. I recommend you bring a Russian interpreter for the children."

A pause. "John?"

He disconnected the call, shoved the phone in his pocket. She was smart; she'd figure it out. "The police are on their way," he said to Shaw.

She frowned as she looked up at him. "But this sounds like HR's involved. If someone from HR comes to this little scene, the children will be no better off."

He didn't answer her, just reached into his pocket, dug out the Guardians' little brass coin, flipped it almost casually in the air. And he saw the moment she put the pieces together, saw the moment it clicked for her. "Oh. Yes. The clean unit."

"You'll be okay," he said to the little girl. "We have friends on the way. They'll make sure you're safe." He dug into his pocket for a picture he carried around with him—Simmons. "Did you ever see this man? Did you see him when you came out of the box on the ship?"

"I think so. Maybe. It was dark."

'I think so' was good enough for Reese. If there was something going on with HR in the city, Simmons knew about it. He had fingers in every illegal enterprise HR was connected with in the city.

"I guess the war Joss tied to start between HR and the Russians didn't work. Looks like they figured out they were getting played." Shaw spoke quietly as Sasha went to sit with her brother against the wall.

"Yes, let's hope they haven't figured out who was pulling the strings." He fervently hoped that HR hadn't figured it out yet, but at the same time, it made too much sense. Why else would HR have slipped plants in at the hospital, plants who discussed killing Joss?