Chapter One
If anyone recognized Lucas Randall, he was a dead man. He knocked on the plain black door and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The start of a beard sprouted from his grimy cheeks. Motor oil rimmed his fingernails, and the smell of it radiated from his clothes in subtle waves. Even his old scuffed trainers were smeared with grease. He hunched his shoulders and stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of a stained nylon jacket, shivering from the cold.
The woman who opened the door looked him up and down with eyes as pitiless as a great white’s.
“What you want?” she asked.
“Poodle.” He repeated the password he’d been given, feeling like a damned fool.
She hastened him inside with a short, jerky motion of her hand, and quickly closed the door behind him. She kept her
fingers on the latch as if she wasn’t sure whether or not he was staying.
The door behind her was open and gave him a limited view of an office.
“ID?” she demanded.
He pulled out a fake driver’s license and she took a picture of it with her cell and handed it back. No way in hell was he leaving this building without that cell phone. “How much?”
“Twenty minutes. One hundred dollars.” Her voice was high-pitched, and sharp as a razor-blade. She held out her hand.
The old crone might not be armed, but the look in her eyes was definitely dangerous. He hesitated. “I want an hour, and I want someone young. As young as possible,” he muttered gruffly.
“Five hundred dollars.” The expression in her eyes didn’t flicker. Her hand remained extended.
He dug out some bills. Palmed off five notes and slid the rest back into his pocket. Now she knew he was carrying plenty of cash.
She led him down the featureless corridor, past four doors on the left and two on the right. A white-painted banister led up a honey-colored wooden staircase to the second floor, but they walked past it and hooked a right. The place was nicer than most. A kitchen lay off to one side where two men with Asian features sat at a wide oak table drinking tea. A reinforced steel door with badass locks secured the rear exit. The extra locks wouldn’t keep the cops out indefinitely, but they would hold them off for a few extra seconds.
One guy stood at their approach—big, with a face that looked like he’d been dropped on it as a baby. The way his jacket hung lop sided from his burly shoulders signaled a weapon in his right pocket. He gave Lucas a hard stare, then shut the door in his face.
Anger slow-burned in Lucas’s gut, but he couldn’t afford to show it. The madam approached a door with the number “eleven” screwed into the varnished wood. She pulled a set of keys from her pocket and slid one into the deadbolt, unlocked it, and stepped inside the room. His heart pounded in anticipation. A girl of around thirteen sat on a twin bed that was made up with plain white bedding. A big teddy bear was propped up against the pillows. The girl had long blonde hair and blue eyes, and wore a simple cotton camisole that hugged the small buds of her breasts.
As he entered, the girl drew her knees up to her chin. The whites of her knuckles shone through her skin as she wrapped her arms tight around thin legs. There was a bruise on her throat and another on her upper arm.
The madam spoke to her sharply and the girl jumped off the bed, and stood awkwardly in her
underwear.
Lucas scanned the kid from top to bottom, and narrowed his eyes. “Too tall. Too blonde.”
“She’s young. Very pretty. Very good at pleasing men, yes?” The madam’s teeth flashed as she aimed a glare at the child. The teen dropped her arms from where they covered her breasts and put them on her hips instead. A sickly smile formed on her naked pink lips.
Lucas backed away, feeling as if his lungs were coated in filth.
“You like.” The old bitch was implacable.
He made himself glance at the girl’s pubescent breasts and take another half-step back. He hadn’t expected it to be easy, but this felt like the fast-track to hell.
“Not her. Not for five hundred bucks.” He shook his head. “She looks too much like my wife. What else do you have?” Like he was trading cars, not people.
The madam’s lip twitched in annoyance and the girl’s eyes widened in both fear and relief. On a normal day he bet he’d just earned the kid a punishment. Considering what was “normal” around here he couldn’t imagine what might constitute punishment.
The woman hesitated, probably remembering the thick roll of Benjamins stuffed in his back pocket. “There is one more,” she conceded with a calculating gleam in her eyes. She motioned him outside with a nod of her head, carefully locking the door behind her. They continued along the corridor.
Footsteps echoed behind them, making him glance over his shoulder, but the sound moved away and disappeared. The house was a warren of rooms and narrow corridors, which probably made it easier to operate without clients bumping into one another.
Lucas came to a door at the northeast corner of the house, and his brain buzzed with excitement.
The madam paused near the entrance and hesitated. “This one new. Virgin.” Her lips vacillated between a smile and a frown, as if physically torn between the need for caution and the promise of cold, hard cash.
He held her gaze. Nodded.
God, he hoped she was still a virgin.
The madam held out her hand. “A thousand dollars. Thirty minute only. If you mark her, I will cut off your balls. If you
tell anyone about her, I will slit your throat.”
Lucas forced out an incredulous laugh. “Tell anyone? Who the hell am I gonna tell?” He looked at the woman like she was stupid and jerked his chin. “Let me see her first.”
The madam harrumphed and opened the door. Inside the gloomy chamber, a small figure was curled up on the bed. The room didn’t have a window, just a bucket in the corner and a simple twin bed covered in thin sheets.
He cautiously walked over to the frightened little girl who lay shivering under the top sheet, sucking her thumb. A scrape ran across her cheek, and her bottom lip was swollen and split. Long brown hair curled at the tips in a natural wave. He smiled. Huge eyes met his, scared and
defiant.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” He sat on the bed and pushed her hair behind her ear. She hunched tighter into a ball, obviously smart enough to know that whatever came out of his mouth was probably a lie. Relief that she was alive was pushed aside by rage that these animals had stolen her innocence and were willing to sell her body to the first pervert who walked in the door. Luckily for her this particular pervert happened to be an undercover FBI agent.
“A thousand dollars to touch. You pay now.” The witch near the doorway snapped the words with all the compassion of a dental drill.
Lucas got slowly to his feet and started digging in his back pocket as he approached the madam. The expression on her face was pure avarice, the thought of the money keeping her off guard. Without breaking his stride, he slapped his hand over her mouth. Her eyes went wide and
she struggled, muffled grunts and cries reverberating against his palm. Clamping her jaw shut over her sounds of protest, he forced her backward into the wall. He nudged the door closed with his foot.
The shifting of bedsprings told him the girl was moving. Dancing footsteps crossed the bare wooden floor.
“Have you come to rescue me?” she asked in a piping, too-loud voice.
Mia Stromberg.
The offer of a large reward in return for information on Mia’s
whereabouts had led to a tipoff from someone who wanted to remain anonymous. That someone had spotted a man carrying a sleeping child into this building, a child who matched the description of an eight-year-old girl who’d been kidnapped off the street yesterday morning.
“Yeah,” he told her. “But we have to be real quiet, princess, or the bad guys will hear.”
The madam’s eyes bugged as he wrapped his arm around her throat and gently squeezed, compressing her jugular, then her carotids, reducing the blood flow to her brain. Her face reddened as he purposely restricted the venous return to the heart and she lost consciousness. He felt no remorse. For a thousand dollars the woman had been more than happy to leave a pedophile in a room with an eight-year-old for the express purpose of having sex. There wasn’t a punishment harsh enough in his book.
As soon as the woman’s body sagged, he caught her under the arms and dragged her to the bed. He pulled off the leather belt she wore and used it as a gag, uncaring that
it would hurt when she woke. Tightly he cuffed her wrists and ankles with plastic zip-ties he’d attached to his own
belt.
He dug into her pocket and found keys along with a small plastic vial of drugs, probably roofies, and the cell phone.
A quick and dirty stakeout had revealed that not only were there a lot of male visitors to the property at all hours of the day and night, but had also identified the owner as being the woman Lucas had come to Boston to interview. Mae Kwon—now tied to the bed—was connected to a sex trafficking case he was working in North Carolina. That salient fact had made everyone sit up and reassess the situation. Authorities had assumed Mia Stromberg had been snatched for ransom, since her parents were dot com millionaires, but the sex trafficking aspect meant it was possible she’d been taken purely as a commodity to sell.
The FBI had picked up one of the guys leaving—a high profile lawyer with a wife and kids—and, in exchange for immunity and complete anonymity, he’d fed them a password he’d sworn would get Lucas in the door.
Ideally in a sex trafficking operation they’d take time to build the case. To photograph all the people coming and going from the property and figure out who the key players were. But with this little girl’s well being in jeopardy, they’d decided not to wait. Forensics would have to give them the evidence they needed to convict, and hopefully one of the players would roll on the others, sealing the deal.
Lucas tried the madam’s cell but couldn’t get a line. No surprise—the bad guys were using a signal jammer inside the building. He and his colleagues had speculated it was to stop the women who’d been forced into prostitution from being able to call for help.
He pocketed Mae Kwon’s cell and squatted down beside the child. “We’re going to walk very calmly and quietly out of here, okay, Mia?”
She stuck her thumb in her mouth.
“Don’t be scared and do exactly what I tell you. No questions, ’kay?” he whispered.
She held his gaze and nodded solemnly. Then she grabbed his hand and squeezed his fingers, making his heart clench in response.
They closed the door behind them, locking the evil woman inside. An image of scared blue eyes flashed through his mind, and his fingers tightened on Mia’s.
The average age of a teen entering the sex trade in the US was between twelve and fourteen. A lot of the kids had been sexually abused and ran away from whatever home they had. Often, no one knew or cared what became of them. Many were coerced into prostitution and then felt trapped. Escaping the downward spiral became more and more difficult for children with few options when they already believed they were on the wrong side of the law.
Heat signatures of the three adjoining properties along this backstreet suggested there were upwards of thirty individuals trapped inside. But, having seen the young blonde girl with the big blue eyes, he couldn’t abandon her any more than he could have left little Mia Stromberg behind.
They reached the door with the number eleven on it. It was hard to curb
his impatience as he
methodically tried each key on the madam’s keychain. Finally the lock turned, and he and Mia slipped inside.
The blonde girl’s pupils went huge, and she scooted backwards on the bed. “What do you want?”
“He’s come to rescue us.” Mia whispered dramatically to the other girl. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Lucas hid his grin. The kid was like a real-life Disney princess.
He looked around for anything he could use as a weapon, but there was nothing, not even a window to break. He checked the drawer of the bedside table. Condoms and lube. The older girl’s cheeks reddened and inside he stumbled a little. She looked the same age as one of his
nieces—older than Payton Rooney had been when she’d been taken from her home in that first defining moment of his life, but far too young for this exploitation.
“What’s your name?” he asked, quickly closing the drawer.
The girl looked at them like it was a trick. “They call me Rosie.”
“What’s your real name?” Lucas gestured her urgently to his side.
“Becca.” The girl relented and scrambled off the bed to join them. “Are you really going to get us out of here?”
“Yes.” Or die trying. He listened intently at the door but silence pressed hard against his ears. Quietly he eased it open and let them out, then closed it softly behind them. He moved to the front of their little procession. Mia’s hand curled over his as if she was afraid he might leave her behind.
Not a chance.
They reached the main corridor with the front door in sight, and he felt a moment of lightness that they’d made it. Then the doorbell rang and they all froze. Footsteps echoed from the kitchen. He was about to make a dash for the front door when a third man came out of the office. This guy was younger than Lucas, well-dressed, slim build, Asian features. The man’s eyes widened as he took in the girls at Lucas’s back.
“Up. Quickly,” Lucas ordered, and the girls dashed up the staircase.
His heart ricocheted in his chest as the guy reached under his jacket, but no shots rang out as Lucas herded Mia and Becca upstairs. The traffickers were probably reluctant to risk hurting the girls—not because they cared about them, but because they were valuable. The guys who ran this place probably figured they had him cornered. Lucas heard the men conferring downstairs, barking instructions to one another in a foreign language.
Shit.
He started knocking on doors. “FBI. This is a raid. Put your hands up and exit the room immediately.” He banged on six doors and finally heard noises behind one of them. Business must be slow on a Wednesday morning.
A door opened, and Lucas dragged out a terrified looking middle-aged guy doing up his pants, along with two young ladies wearing nothing except satin teddies. The sound of pounding feet on the stairs had him pushing the kids inside the room and slamming the door, making sure it was locked.
This room was vastly different from the plain accommodations he’d seen downstairs. There was a four-
poster bed on a raised platform, a mirror on the ceiling and the wall. Plush red velvet drapes. Sex toys on the bedside table, the funky scent of semen and latex in the air.
He tried not to gag.
And if the real thing wasn’t enough, the huge TV screen was turned to a porn channel. Mia’s eyes doubled in size. Lucas stepped in front of it and urged her toward the window that overlooked the front street. He tried to unlock the catch, but it was screwed shut. “Christ knows what would happen if there was a fire,” he muttered.
“Mommy says it’s wrong to curse,” Mia scolded him.
Despite the mounting tension, he and Becca shared an amused glance. The doorknob rattled. The sound of metal scraping metal as someone tried a key in the lock. The smile on the older girl’s lips wobbled.
Lucas grabbed a wooden chair from beside a vanity.
“Stand back.” Time to signal his need of assistance. He slammed the chair into the old sash window, and glass exploded into a million different pieces. That should do it.
The men on the other side of the door went silent as they reevaluated the situation. Six agonizing seconds later, he heard the sound of a truck pulling up outside and a series of shouted instructions. Then the unmistakable sound of a breacher busting the front door out of its frame.
The troops had arrived.
“I’m an FBI agent. Help is on the way,” he told the two girls. They held onto one another as he went to the bedroom door and listened. He couldn’t hear anything on the other side, so he unlocked it and eased out, just in time to catch sight of one of the men he’d seen in the kitchen, fleeing into a bedroom at the rear of the building.
Dammit. There had to be another way out. He looked at Mia and Becca. He couldn’t leave them behind—but he shouldn’t take them with him, either.
No choice. He wasn’t letting them out of his sight, and he wasn’t letting these assholes get away.
“Follow me. We need to move fast, but quietly. Understood?”
Mia and Becca nodded, both desperate to get out of this hellhole.
He sprinted down the corridor and slid the last ten yards to the room where he’d seen the men disappear. For once
his luck was holding, and the door had caught on the latch rather than closing completely. He peeked inside but the room was empty except for a couple of unmade beds. Where the hell did they go? He wedged the door ajar with a chair so his colleagues would know which direction he’d taken. A silk robe swung back and forth on a metal hanger inside the walk-in closet. He shoved the robe aside and ran his hand over the wood. A hidden door sprang open when he pushed against the panel. Bingo.
The opening on the other side was as black as Hades.
“It’s like Narnia,” Mia whispered.
“Only scarier,” Becca agreed.
“Keep close. Hold hands,” he instructed quietly. Lucas turned on the light of his cell and felt his way along. He found a handrail, his foot searching out the first riser of the stairs as they began their descent. They crept down the twisting staircase. Suddenly the thundering sound of
footsteps got closer and closer. Then he realized it was the cops pounding up the stairs on the other side of the wall.
Becca tripped and he turned to steady her. “Easy.”
“Where are we going?” she asked, as if starting to doubt the wisdom of blindly following a strange man down a lightless tunnel.
Smart girl.
“I want to see which direction the fu—” He caught himself. “Which direction the men who held you go in, so the cops can catch them.”
They kept moving downwards. The staircase became so narrow his shoulders barely fit. It smelled old and musty, like the attic in his parents’ West Virginian summer home.
He had no idea how deep they’d gone but the coolness of the air and quietness made him think they’d reached basement level, maybe even lower. The tunnel started to level out and headed horizontally northwest. They sped up to a jog, following the indistinct sounds of the men ahead of them.
The loud noise of a rusty hinge grinding had him moving faster, but it was difficult to sprint when he was virtually blind and leading two children.
A sudden volley of voices up ahead had him slamming on the brakes. The girls crashed into his back with barely a sound. Survival instincts were out in full force. This wasn’t a game. He moved cautiously forward and edged around another corner. Three men stood beneath an open trapdoor near a short wooden ladder. They were arguing over a cell phone, saying something like “char yo” a lot.
Lucas frowned. What the hell was “char yo”?
Suddenly the madam’s phone in his pocket buzzed to life and all three of the men looked in his direction. Shit—they must have gone beyond the range of the signal blocker. He ducked back around the corner as bullets ripped into the exposed wall beside him. The clatter of footsteps told him they were heading up the ladder, but the bullets kept coming.
“FBI. You’re under arrest,” Lucas yelled. Now would be a great time to have a weapon, but they’d decided not to risk it for this particular op.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” came the reply. They’d obviously learned their English from Bruce Willis movies.
Mia clasped her hands over her mouth, eyes as big as golf balls. Lucas held back a grin even as tension mounted. He pulled out his cell and jabbed the number for the leader of the task force before passing it to Becca. “When someone answers, tell her to stay on the line.”
The shooting stopped, and the trapdoor banged shut. The loss of light had him poking his head out from behind cover. The men had gone. He clambered up the steps and shoved at the hatch, but something blocked it. The sound of a car’s doors slamming told him they’d got into a vehicle. He rammed his shoulder into the wood above his head, over and over again. He needed the make and model and maybe the plate of the vehicle.
“Tell them the perps are escaping by car,” he told Becca, who repeated everything he said into his cell.
The weight shifted above his head and he managed to open the door an inch. He got a flash of a sedan driving sedately out of the garage. “Silver Beemer.” He reeled off the tag number.
He gave the hatch another shove, and whatever was weighing it down shifted enough for him to force the entrance clear.
He climbed out and turned to help first Mia and then Becca up the ladder. Both girls looked around with dazed expressions. They’d been through hell, but they were alive. He gave them a reassuring nod. “You’re safe now.”
Mia’s brave expression immediately crumbled, and she started to sob. In the same instant, Lucas felt a shudder run beneath the soles of his sneakers. Army training kicked in, and he opened his mouth while simultaneously pushing both girls to the ground.
The force of the explosion threw him up in the air. He hit the ground like a paratrooper who’d pulled his ripcord a thousand feet too late.
Goddamn it.
He lay on his back in a world of hurt, ears ringing and vision blurred.
What the hell just happened?
After a few seconds of staring up at the corrugated roof of the garage, sirens started screaming in the distance. It was hard to breathe because of the smoke and dust and ring of fire encircling his ribs. He coughed and swore, coughed and swore again.
The bastards had blown up the tunnels.
Sonofabitch.
He rolled onto all fours and crawled to where Becca lay unmoving on the garage’s dirty flagstones.
Mia hacked noisily a few feet away, but at least she was conscious. Internal injuries were a real possibility—the most lethal aspect of any explosion was blast overpressure. Air waves traveling at supersonic velocities that could rupture lungs, kidneys and bowels. He needed to get them all to the hospital ASAP, but in the meantime Becca’s face was bloodless. He checked her pulse and airway and started CPR. Mia staggered to her feet.
“Grab my cell phone,” he told her and pointed to where it lay.
Tears made streaks in the dust on her face.
“Call SSA Sloan.” He didn’t explain how to do it. Kids seemed hardwired into technology. “Put it on speaker.”
She did as he asked and held the phone toward him as it rang. Becca wasn’t breathing.
“Is she okay?” Mia asked.
“Randall?” Sloan answered.
“Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t pause the CPR.
“What’s your sitrep?”
Supervisory Special Agent Carly Sloan was a former military operator and solid team leader, but she sounded fraught.
“We followed three perps through underground tunnels to a nearby garage but they set off an explosion that prevented us from giving chase.” He repeated the details of the car they’d escaped in as he continued to pump blood through Becca’s veins and force oxygen into her young lungs. So much for promising they were safe. He heard Sloan give orders for an APB. “We need a bus for a teenage girl caught in the blast. She’s not breathing. Also an eight-year-old female needs to be checked for internal injuries.” As did he.
“Mia Stromberg?” Sloan asked urgently.
“Yes, ma’am. She’s safe. Tell the team I locked up the female perp in a ground floor bedroom in the northeast sector of the house. I saw at least two other females and a male client on the first floor. Not sure where they went.”
“Where are you?” There was an odd catch in Sloan’s voice.
Finally Becca’s chest started moving on its own, and
she drew in a rasping breath. Randall heard more sirens and struggled to his feet. He needed an idea of where they were in relation to the command post to direct the ambulance. Outside the garage, he whirled in a circle. His mouth fell open when he spotted the column of dust rising into the air where the houses had been standing.
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah.” SSA Sloan’s voice was hoarse with emotion. “No kidding.”
The bastards had dropped the entire row, along with everyone inside—including cops, federal agents, trafficked women, and one of their own. The chance of surviving that devastation was slim to zero, but they had to try to rescue whoever might be alive.
“How many of our guys were inside?”
“Four agents. Eight Boston PD cops.” Sloan’s voice cracked.
And Christ knew how many others locked in those rooms, including Mae Kwon, who could have been a gold mine of information if they’d gotten her to talk.
Grief fused with anger and settled into his blood like a virulent cocktail. Those dirtbags had killed indiscriminately to save their own asses. It would take months to sort through the debris. Months to piece together the evidence. Months to identify the dead.
As forensic countermeasures went, this was a doozy.
He gave Sloan directions for the medics and noticed Becca’s eyes had closed again. “Shit. I think the girl’s stopped breathing. Get the paramedics here ASAP.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Just send a bus.” He ran to Becca’s side and gave her a series of quick breaths. He put his phone on the ground beside him. “Supervise the rescue. I’ve got this.”
“Negative, Agent Randall,” Sloan bit out, obviously in motion. “It’s possible you have the
only witnesses left alive. We need them safe. Understood?”
He put his finger to Becca’s carotid, but the thrum of life was eerily silent.
Goddammit.
“I want to go home.” Mia started crying. “I want my mommy and daddy.” She wiped her face on her T-shirt.
“You’ve been very brave, sweetheart. Just hold on a little longer while I try to help Becca.”
“Is she gonna die?”
The teen’s lips were an austere shade of blue, her skin paler than his mother’s finest porcelain. His own heart thrashed so hard he could feel it hammering against his sore ribs. Hers lay inert in her chest.
“Come on, Becca. Come on!” Desperation made him pound her sternum more forcefully. The sound of a siren grew closer, but not close enough.
“They’re here!” Mia shouted excitedly, looking outside the door.
Finally. But Lucas had the terrible feeling they were too late to save the kid who lay lifeless at his side. And it didn’t seem fair that right on the cusp of freedom, Becca had once again had her life stolen away from her as if she didn’t matter. As if she was worthless.
