Page 57 of Born for Starlight

The nurse who'd called him had watched those girls walk out the front door with a man nobody knew. It sat wrong with her. She got angry, then she got smart, and she called a cop she trusted. Dantas. Now he was trying to find out whose palm got greased inside São Marcos. Somebody approved the release. Somebody signed. Somebody looked at three healthy little girls, then at a stranger's cash, and decided to look the other way.

I set the tablet down and made myself breathe.

Eight, maybe seven, years old. All three of them.

I knew what that age meant to these people. I'd known for three years. The pretty ones with clean paperwork got sold young, adoptions that mostly held up on paper. The ones they held until they went to a different kind of buyer. The kind who never asked for paperwork at all.

Those girls weren't rescued. They were purchased.

And I’d promised Angelica I'd find her.

I got up, walked to the balcony glass, and counted tiled roofs until I could think straight. It took a while.

Then I did the stupid thing. I logged into the old email account, the one I'd used at the LeeHy to reach my contact. The draft folder was empty, the way I'd left it. I had half a question typed into a new draft before I realized what I'd done.

Fuck!

I took my time deleting it, letter by fucking letter.

He’d said once only. That had been the deal, and he'd spelled it out twice so I couldn't pretend I'd misunderstood. Years inside buys a man the right to set his own terms. He'd given me one window. I'd used it. That door wasn't just closed, it was bricked over, and knocking on it again could get him killed.

So, the best source I'd ever had on this network was gone. Right when I needed him most.

Perfect.

That left the second string.

I ran through what I knew one more time, in case it looked different as dawn was breaking. It didn't. The money men above Aurora were excited that Angelica Drakos was coming.

Two months ago they'd wanted her plane in the ground. Now they couldn't wait to see her. What had changed?

They had plans for her arrival.

I hated that. With a fucking passion. And that was all I had. There was Luzia and excited rich men planning something. Something big was sitting out there in the dark where I couldn't see it, and we were due at Aurora in less than forty-eight hours.

For half a second I thought about calling Bruno. Then I thought about what Bruno would do with it. He’d be by the book. There would be Homeland Security liaison meetings, protocols and power plays. By the time his organization tried to take over, those girls would be long gone. Some missions you couldn't run by coloring inside the lines, and his conscience had never once colored outside them. Meanwhile, I didn’t even recognize the lines anymore.

But I still had people down here. A driver I would have trusted with my mother. A man at customs. A records clerk in Brasília who owed me his pension.

And Layla.

Layla had run the front of a private club in São Luís for six years, the kind of club where money men held meetings that never happened. She'd seen more of this network across an invisible reservation book than most agencies saw in a decade. She'd fed me things before. She wasn't placed like my once-only man. Nobody was. But she was smart, she was careful, and she hated these men with a vengeance that worried even me. I hated using her; we hadn’t left things on the best of terms, but when it came to working the network… Doing anything to stop it. She was all business. She'd never told me all of her story, but I knew enough of it, and it was brutal.

I sent word the way she'd taught me, an order to a wine broker who didn't exist.

Her answer came back inside ten minutes. She was awake at four o’clock in the morning too. In her line of work, that tracked. A time, a place, nothing else. The fish market, seven a.m., two blocks off the water. I confirmed the meet and closed the tab.

Then I sat in the almost dark and let myself think the thing I'd been stepping around for days.

Three years I'd used back channels and middlemen, and some of them stopped answering because they were dead. My contacts had spent years tracking the men who moved children. They'd watched women get moved too, and once the 'product' stopped being worth selling whole, the bastards sold them in pieces. For my people, shutting these operations down had stopped being a job a long time ago. It had become their quest.

And now I had a line on the money men. It was the highest in the organization I’d ever had a shot at. But these were the same men who had a hard-on for Angelica. The same ones who had plans for her arrival.

To get them, I had to be inside Aurora. But to keep her safe, I wanted her a thousand miles from all of it. My gut, my heart, my soul, all three wanted the same thing. Protect Angelica. But my job?

Goddammit!

I couldn’t see any way where I could have both. No way to take down the men, and keep Angelica safe.