Chapter 39: The Market
"This is it?" Conrad stared doubtfully at the run-down little warehouse sitting here at the end of Zonolite Rd, in Amsterdam's semi-industrial warehouse district. Alex had had a second interview with Yu, minus Cam this time, and his interest had shifted away from needling Cam and making her uncomfortable and more toward giving Alex enough information to be helpful. Although Alex had signed an agreement with his lawyer about giving him federal immunity, he must still be feeling that she had a trick up her sleeve.
Which she did, but wasn't going to enlighten him until it was time.
"According to the map, yes, this is it." Allie turned in her seat and looked at Cam, sitting quietly in the back. "Are you okay?"
Cam's voice sounded slightly strained. "Yes. I wasn't expecting the road to be this bumpy."
Conrad broke in. "Are you…wearing…" He broke off and swore. "Jesus. Cam, I'm sorry, I would have tried to take a smoother road if I'd known." Thinking about all the bumps they'd traveled over, and what Cam must have been feeling each time they went over one made him wince.
She smiled gently at him. "Conrad, it's okay. I'm going to have to be ready to put up with more discomfort than this fairly soon." She sighed. "Let's get ready to go in."
She had worn a simple button-front dress here, and no underclothing. Now, sitting in the back of the SUV with tinted windows, she slipped out of the long duster she wore, unbuttoned the dress, and slipped it off her shoulders. Underneath she wore nothing but her dog tags and a harness strapped around her hips that held some invasive pieces of equipment inside her body. The bumpy road down here to the warehouse had made her regret her choices, but there was no going back now, no matter how terrified she was.
She slipped the bead chain with her dog tags on it off over her head and handed it quietly to Allie, who teared up at the sight of them. "Please give them to Charlie."
"I will," Allie said quietly. "Cam…please know that we are grateful for this plan to get Shana back, but I do want you to know that you are coming back. We will never leave either one of you out here, and Clayton was serious about the one month rule. I…I couldn't bear it if we lost both of you."
"Three," Cam said quietly. "Snake Eyes died when we lost Shana, and if we don't find her he'll go looking for her on his own. You'll lose him too."
There was nothing either Allie or Conrad could say to that, so they didn't even try as Cam buttoned her coat, took a deep breath, and opened the door of the SUV.
The warehouse itself looked dark and deserted, the last one on the row of other mostly-deserted warehouses. The difference was that, if you looked closer, the graffiti was a little too carefully placed; the windows weren't broken, and they weren't dark because there was no light inside, they were dark because the insides of the windows had been painted a heavy, opaque black.
Conrad and Allie walked up to the front door, Cam following a step behind, eyes lowered, silent. Conrad was keeping one eye on the 'gang' of 'street rats' hanging out to one side of the door. Yu had told Alex to expect it, that these 'street toughs' were actually the guards to the place, so he wasn't surprised when one of them accosted the three Joes. "That's a couple of nice pieces of ass you have there."
Allie responded as a handler would, swiftly and aggressively, pinning him to the wall beside the door with a fist in his shirtfront. "Want to fix your tone?" she said, the angry edge in her voice only-half feigned. "I am not a piece of ass."
"Then this one is." A couple of the other toughs had fallen into either side of Cam, who kept her eyes fixed to the ground, silent and submissive.
"We're bringing her to market to sell for our employer, Alan Singletary." Conrad said easily to the guy who Allie was pinning to the wall. "Let him go, Allie."
She glowered, but let him go, establishing Conrad as the leader for their little group. The guy she was pinning didn't lose sight of that little detail; he addressed Conrad directly. "This one of his sex slaves?"
"This is one of those Asians he likes, yeah. Used up and tossed aside when she's so damaged he doesn't like her anymore.
"She don't look damaged." The guy addressed Cam directly. "Take off your coat."
Cam had warned Conrad and Allie that this might happen—he was going to challenge her obedience right at the door. Any free woman or untrained slave would hesitate to disrobe on a public street; even a hesitation or a reluctance to do so would be commented on and mark them as not being who they were supposed to be.
So she shrugged out of the duster.
There were exclamations of surprise as the guards saw her scarred skin. "God damn, I thought Singletary's last one looked bad with the brands all over her. This one's worse!"
The leader demanded sharply, "Slave. What happened to you?"
Cam said evenly, "Master Singletary was playing with fire. It got out of control and I got burned." There actually had been a fire on the Singletary estate, as Yu had told Alex; his landscapers had been burning autumn leaves and the fire got out of control and had burned a small shed on the property before they got the fire put out. Cam had used that as part of her cover story; if anyone asked about the scarring, she was in the shed when it burned.
"If that had been me I'd have put you down. Damaged meat ain't no good." The lead tough sneered.
"Master Singletary spent a lot of time and took special care to train me for particular services. That made him decide that I was worth saving, but once I healed and he got another slave who can do what I do and isn't as ugly as I am, he decided to send me here to be sold."
The tough grinned. "Good luck selling that here. You'll be lucky if you get five thousand for her." He swung the door open, and Conrad and Allie walked through, just in time to hide their shock. "Five thousand?" Allie choked as she leaned in close to clip the leash to Cam's collar.
"Shana's worth a quarter of a million to the right buyer." Cam said quietly. "Let's go."
And once inside they got an even bigger shock.
On the warehouse floor were dozens of what looked like pens for animals at a livestock fair; except that these pens held humans. People. Although it looked chaotic and bewildering at first, Conrad and Allie soon realized that the warehouse was actually divided into four sections and a sign in front of each section told you what sort of slave you could buy in each one. Closest to the door on the right side of the warehouse was a sign that said 'brown', and the pens inside held Latino and Hispanic men, women, and children, divided by age, gender and labor purpose; one pen said 'manual' and held mostly men; another said 'domestic' and had mostly older women; another pen said 'male—sex' and had young men in their late teens to early twenties; the pen next to this one said 'female—sex' and in front there were four pens of children, two with signs that said 'girls to 10' and 'girls 10-16' and two corresponding pens of boys. Allie had to fight a swift and nasty battle with her conscience as she saw an older white man dressed in jeans and a cowboy hat bend over one screaming girl who was in the 'girls to 10' pen and stick his hand between her legs.
"Jesus God," she whispered to Conrad as sick horror washed over her. "This is…this is… I've never…" She couldn't even tell him what she thought. Sick? Abominable? Horrific? Disgusting? They were all that but there was no being able to describe what she felt. Words just weren't adequate.
"I know," Conrad said, keeping his voice low. "Allie, oh God, the thought of Shana here, being pawed over and ogled and fondled against her will by strangers—I want to bring every one of the Joes here and free every slave, shoot every single last bastard in here looking to buy a person. I heard about human trafficking but this…" he took a deep shuddering breath. "This is monstrous."
They passed through similar sections for 'blacks', then walked more slowly through the section for 'whites'. In the pen marked "female—sex," they stopped for long moments, searching every face for a pair of green eyes and fiery hair, found none. "She's not here." Allie's voice caught in a near-sob. "She's not here. We were so certain she would be here."
"She could have come through and gone by now. Remember it's been three weeks and we don't know what route the cargo vessel she was on took." came Cam's quiet voice from behind them. "There's someone watching us, back there by the 'yellow' female sex slave pen. I don't know if he's watching you or me, likely me because he thinks you might be here to unload me but I can't be sure. So let's keep moving. You'll have to approach the dealer for 'female—sex' and see if he'll pay anything for me; if not, there's a pen all the way in the back for the 'damaged meat'—the people who are in too bad a physical shape to be used for anything else except violent sex or death films."
"No." Allie said firmly. "We are not going to leave you in that pen. If they don't buy you at the sex slave pen we're going to take you out of here and try to get you in another way."
Conrad approached the dealer at the Asian 'female—sex' pen. "What do you want?" The dealer said bluntly.
Conrad bristled. "We're here with one of Master Singletary's slaves. He's tired of her and wants us to sell her for him."
"An owner abandon, eh?" The dealer peered at Cam, standing a step behind Allie and Conrad. "What's it's name?"
Conrad and Allie stared at each other; they hadn't thought about that, before they could hesitate long enough for the pause to be noticeable, however, Cam herself stepped forward and sank gracefully to her knees. "This slave is called hole, Master," she said.
Hole? Allie mouthed to Conrad, but Cam was still speaking.
"Master Singletary called this slave hole because that is all this slave is good for. A hole to be used in any way my Master sees fit." Allie wanted to choke; it was a vile way to describe a woman.
"Master Alan Singletary?" The dealer looked slightly more interested. "Singletary always brings in well-trained slaves. Might be scarred up some, like you, but still well-trained. What do you do?" He looked at Conrad and Allie. "Is it trained to do anything special?"
"Everything, Master."
"You seem awfully young to say 'everything'." The dealer sniffed disdainfully. "Come here and demonstrate your skills." He looked enquiringly at Conrad. "If that's okay with Master Singletary."
Conrad looked down at Cam, saw the almost imperceptible nod. "Not at all. Go ahead." He forced the words through stiff lips. Allie tried not to flinch, tried to force herself to look nonchalant and matter-of fact as the harness came free of Cam's lower body.
Her face twisted in an expression of agony as he started, but not a sound escaped her gritted teeth except for a panted hiss. She leaned forward over the rail of the pen, gripping it with her hands, bracing herself; her hips ground into the rail, and Allie winced at the splinters that dug into her skin, but thankfully the whole sickening, disgusting incident was over quickly. He pushed off her, and Cam's legs buckled, dumping her onto her knees beside the pen. Her head was down so they couldn't see her face, but her shoulders heaved; it took every last ounce of self-control Allie possessed not to take Cam in her arms and comfort her.
The dealer pulled his pants up as if nothing had happened, then started pulling his belt out of the loops on his pants as Cam climbed to her feet and grabbed the rail again; only Allie and Conrad noticed the tiny tremble in her knees.
Conrad had to grab Allie's wrist tightly to keep her from stepping forward; Cam's screams filled their ears as the heavy, supple strap of leather snapped over her bare skin. Five times, hard enough to bruise. When he finally lowered the strap, Cam collapsed to the floor, curled up in a tight ball, sobbing, and Allie wanted to scream, to shoot the son of a bitch, anything.
She had no idea how she managed to keep herself from not going to Cam; how she managed to not run to her friend, hug her, take her out of there. Conrad said something to the dealer, who said something back, and money changed hands; then Conrad took her arm and somehow she forced herself to turn, to walk away from Cam, her friend and fellow Joe, crying on the floor behind her, and leave the warehouse. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she would never know, afterward, how she did it; all she knew was that she was finally, suddenly, in the front seat of the SUV and Conrad was driving. They made it back to their hotel; it was only as they were parking that Allie finally broke down and cried, sat in the front seat and sobbed and cried, feeling guilt and regret and shame settle on her shoulders. Conrad leaned across the front seat, and she buried her face in his shoulder, crying. "We have to go back," she sobbed. "We have to go back. We can't leave her there. Jesus, Conrad, she went through three years of stuff like that…how did she survive it? How could Shana survive having that done to her?"
Conrad held her as she cried, stroked her hair, and tried hard not to break down himself. Rage had risen in him as he saw Cam fighting to comply, to submit. "If we go back we might get her back, Allie, but she'll hate us for doing it. She wants to find Shana, and we've gone too far. To pull her out now will invalidate the sacrifice she made to go in there." Because it was a sacrifice, a sacrifice that Conrad had no idea how she'd been able to make. He'd never forget, for the rest of his life, the image of Cam lying there crying—and superimposed over that was the image of Shana in the same position, screaming, crying, writhing. And he prayed fervently that this plan was going to work.
Too many of the Joes had already made too many sacrifices for it not to work.