Page 104 of Born for Starlight

Ferraz took one more step past the door.

Matt's gun caught him behind the ear.

The big man went straight down.

Costa and Julian spun toward the sound. Julian's mouth opened wide, and Matthew practically jumped on him, one hand clamped over the scream before it was born, and rode him down into the wall.

Nobody else made a sound.

Seven thirty-eight. The girls went on the block at eight.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ferraz weighed a lot more unconscious.

Vargas and I dragged him down the empty corridor, and Pinto walked Julian behind us with one hand clamped on the back of his neck. Every door on this side of the building was shut for the night. The janitor's closet three doors down locked from the outside, with the key sitting right in the door. Some problems solved themselves.

Vargas checked Ferraz's pulse. Strong and steady. Good. A dead security chief would bring more trouble later if things went sideways for us tonight.

Julian got zip ties on his wrists and a strip of tape from the gear bag over his mouth. His eyes were doing all his talking, and what they were saying would've cost him his family-friendly rating. I put him on the floor next to the man who'd have gladly buried him in the yard. Then I shut the door on both of them and turned the key.

"Four million downloads," Pinto said.

"Four million," I agreed with a sigh.

We took Costa to the office across the hall. Not hers. She didn't need that man's fear in the room where she was fighting her own war, and her cover needed a resting patient behind that door, not this.

She'd hear every word anyway. The net stayed hot. My rule.

Vargas zip-tied Costa to the desk chair while the man talked, in English, fast, about misunderstandings and about all of us being reasonable men. I let him run at the mouth while I pulled the manila envelope out of the bag that had come through the front door with Angelica's name on it. Dantas had had a man on Costa's family since noon. Then I sat on the edge of the desk in front of him, and I answered him in Portuguese.

"Let's talk about your family, Frederico."

He stopped mid-word.

It worked that way with everyone. A man heard his own language come out of a stranger who'd been English-only all afternoon, and he understood, all at once, just how badly he'd been had. The language did half my work for me.

The photographs did the rest.

I laid them on his knees one at a time. The older girl at the private school gate in the upscale neighborhood far from here, in her uniform, laughing at something on her phone. The younger one getting onto the bus with her backpack. His wife in the market on Rua Grande, picking through mangoes.

"They're beautiful girls," I said. "Healthy. The right age."

"Please." His voice came apart on the word.

"What happens if we take them? Your daughters. Your wife. Sell them to the Asian markets. We can do that. No problem at all." I squared the photos against my thigh. "Hell, think of the money we'd make."

He was crying now, and he wasn't performing it. Snot and tears and his chin trembling. I'd watched this man dab his lip with a handkerchief all day like a nineteenth-century duchess, and now he couldn't reach his own face to wipe it.

"What do you want?" he got out. "Please. What do you want?"

"We want in on the action here. This is a good operation. We want to meet your bosses, and we know some of them are here tonight."

"I swear to you, they're not."

The strange thing was, I believed him. A man this scared had no room left for lying. Whatever he knew, he was spending it as fast as he could find it.

"You're going to get us into that auction."