Zero Hour Part 5

'Except that this isn't a K and R job, is it, Nicholas? When have you ever been involved in the commercial world?'

I'd known it wouldn't be long before she rumbled that one. Recovering kidnap victims is quite a business. If the victim is recovered alive, you can cop a percentage of the premium that would have been paid out by the underwriters in the event of a death, or on any ransom demand. It wasn't entirely risk free, but Anna was right - it was a long way from being on the receiving end of an RPG.

'I'm doing it for Jules.' I shifted my chair closer to hers. 'I couldn't tell you over the phone.'

She lifted a hand and stroked my face. 'You look really pale, Nicholas. You sure you're feeling OK?'

'Sure. Too many planes, that's all.'

She got to her feet. 'Why don't you fix the car? I'll phone and check the hotel reservation, then call Lena. I'll wait for you outside.'

'Lena?'

'There's nothing Lena doesn't know about trafficking.'

I walked away with a bit of a spring in my step. The only negative so far was that there weren't any hotels at the airport. If we did find Lilian, we might have to hole up somewhere with her until Tresillian sorted out the safe-house. The beauty of an airport hotel is that all you have to do is scan the departures board, see which plane's leaving next, and leg it to the sales desk.

3

It was only fifteen Ks into Chisinau. There were a surprising number of shiny new BMWs and Mercedes weaving their way between the clapped-out trucks and tractors, but the road still wasn't exactly choked with traffic.

The fields on each side of us looked absolutely knackered. As with most of the old Eastern bloc the heavy use of agricultural chemicals, including banned pesticides like DDT, had ripped the heart out of the land. And severe soil erosion from diabolical farming methods had f.u.c.ked whatever chance these places had of being self-sufficient.

Anna grimaced as we pa.s.sed a police car. 'I've been to more than fifty different countries and I've never seen cops as corrupt as the ones here.'

'They certainly don't hang around. I had to cough up a fistful of dollars to get through Customs.'

'I was stopped here twice in two hours once, both for completely invented offences. They target locals the same. They don't even wait for people to do something wrong. The moment they've finished fleecing one victim, they flag down the next.'

Anna was on a roll.

'And it's not just about driving. Their favourite trick on a slow night is to stop foreigners at random for "looking suspicious". Two hundred lei is the standard fine. If we get stopped on the street you'll be asked for your pa.s.sport. The law says that foreigners have to carry them at all times. Photocopies aren't good enough. If you're alone, keep saying you don't speak Romanian or Russian. There are no guarantees, but if you're lucky they'll be too lazy to pursue it.'

We hit the city proper. Many of the people on the streets looked pretty well turned-out, particularly the young guys.

I nodded at a fancy-looking restaurant. 'I thought we were supposed to be in Europe's poorest country. Who can afford to eat in a place like that?'

'You don't want to know. Moldova's the same as everywhere in the old Soviet Union. There's a handful of haves and a whole nation of have-nots.' She stared out of the window at the wide concrete esplanades. 'Most people in Moldova don't live like this. They sc.r.a.pe by on less than three dollars a day. Away from the towns, work is scarce. I wrote a piece about a small village a few kilometres from Chisinau where every male had sold a kidney to the West. In lots of villages, only children and grand-parents remain. Over a million have left the country to find work. That doesn't include the numbers who've been trafficked.'

'I take it Tarasov is one of the haves?'

'For sure.'

'And how do we explain all the Mercs and Hummers?'

'The Moldovans like to claim Transnistria can't function independently. They say it doesn't have the industry or infrastructure - but they do, and not just through weapons manufacture. There's a 480-kilometre border with Ukraine and it's not controlled. As well as the sale of old Soviet military machinery, extortion of businessmen and money laundering, there is huge trafficking in arms, drugs and, of course, human beings. About two billion dollars are being laundered every year in Transnistria and no one wants to give that up without a fight.

'But what should really have the rest of the world sitting up and paying attention are the dozen or so companies that produce arms around the clock. They've turned up in Chechnya, Africa, all over - even in Iraq in Saddam's day and now Afghanistan. International organizations don't accept that Transnistria even exists, so they can't visit and investigate. There, Nicholas - next right.'

Anna directed me off the main. A couple of turns later, we pulled up outside another drab Soviet-era monolith a dozen storeys high. 'Forget the arms business. Everyone should just have shares in ready-mixed concrete.'

The Cosmos was pretty much in the centre of town. I could see a bank with an ATM, a shopping centre, restaurants, and a Western-style supermarket with a multi-storey attached.

I parked in a guest s.p.a.ce and walked towards the entrance, my day sack over my shoulder. She trundled her wheelie a step or two ahead of me.

'To be fair to Stalin, the city had to be totally rebuilt after the Second World War. The little the Germans left standing was flattened by an earthquake.'

As we approached the reception desk she stopped for a moment. 'I stay here a lot. They know me. That's why we're in separate rooms.' Her eyes suddenly sparkled. 'Besides, we're working. See you back in the lobby in fifteen minutes. Lena isn't that far away.'

4

Lena Kamenka's office was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a run-down apartment building south-east of the city centre. An old woman scrubbing her doorstep with a brush and bucket pointed us to a staircase. There was a look of disapproval on her wizened face. Some things, it said, are best swept under the carpet and left there.

I followed Anna down the metal steps and stood behind her as she pressed the buzzer.

The girl who answered the door was in her early twenties. She had the kind of jet-black hair you can only get from a bottle.

'Welcome. Please come in.'

She led us along a corridor, past a battered sofa and coffee-table. The walls of Lena's office were lined with archive boxes. She sat behind a small desk strewn with files, waffling away at warp speed on the phone. She greeted Anna with a smile and a nod.

'You would like coffee?' The girl smiled shyly.

'Thank you.'

She left the room and Lena gestured to us to sit down. She carried on her conversation for another ten minutes in about three different languages. When she finally hung up, she threw her arms round Anna and greeted her like a long-lost sister.

I guessed Lena was about thirty. In a stylish blouse, grey cardigan and sharply tailored trousers, she looked more like a lawyer or businesswoman than a social worker - or she would have done if it hadn't been for her short, spiky blue hair and long, silver-painted fingernails.

She joined us at a small table covered with yet more files and loose-leaf binders. Photocopied head shots of young women stared up at us from their covers. Most were teenagers. One looked no older than twelve. None of them looked like Lilian.

Lena was a repatriation specialist. Her main task was bringing trafficked Moldovan girls home. Nearly all of them had been sold into prost.i.tution abroad.

'You are lucky to catch me in.' Lena sighed. She spoke English like it was her first language. 'I have to go to Odessa today to collect a girl off the ferry from Istanbul. There's usually somebody on it for us. As for the airport, sometimes I think I should just take my bed up there and move in.'

Brothel raids in countries like the UK, Germany and Holland produced many of her clients. Her number was on the walls of police stations all over the world.

Lena tapped her cell phone. She'd positioned it carefully in front of her and kept checking the signal every minute or so. 'I never switch it off. Sometimes they're just metres from the pimps. I might have only seconds to get their details. Often they don't even know what country they're in.'

'What do you do then?'

'I tell them to look out of the window. A road name, a bus number. Sometimes I'll get caller ID, but I can't call back unless they tell me to. It's too dangerous.'

We needed to cut to the chase here. 'Anna told you my paper is interested in trafficking into London, yeah?' I leaned in. 'What's the chain, Lena? Does it start with a kidnapping?'

'Sometimes, yes. They drug girls, take them from the fields. Sometimes they drag a drunken city girl off the street and bundle her into the boot of a car. But they don't need to go to all the trouble of beating them up and smuggling them out of the country if the girls are happy to travel of their own free will. Sometimes they even pay their own fares. The gangs call it "happy trafficking". These ones are even given fake pa.s.sports if they want to get away to start a completely new life, away from the poverty - or whatever else it is they're trying to escape from. The gangs prefer these girls. If they're not bruised and battered they'll earn more as prost.i.tutes.' She sighed. 'It's only when the person who meets them has taken away their pa.s.sport that they discover the broken promises, and by then it's too late. The ones with fake ID are lost for ever.'

She looked up as the black-haired girl came back in with a tray carrying three steaming cups. She put the tray down on Lena's desk and busied herself with an ancient fax machine. Then she lit herself a cigarette and joined us.

'There isn't anything happy about happy trafficking, is there, Irina?'

The girl stared at me for so long I thought she was never going to speak. Then I realized she didn't quite know where to begin.

'I was seventeen. I was at college. I was training to be a teacher. English teacher. One day a girl I went to school with came to see me. She was working at an expensive restaurant in Greece, she said. She was making a good salary. She could get me such a job if I wanted. I needed more exams to graduate, but also I needed money. My mother was ill.' Irina took a drag and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. 'I agreed to go with my friend. She organized everything. She drove us to Odessa, and came with me on the ferry to Istanbul. Then she put me on a plane to Athens. She said she would join me later.

'Another "friend" met the flight. He told me the waitress job was finished. He said he could take me to Italy. There was work in Italy, he said. On the journey, he asked me strange questions. "Do you have any scars? Will your parents come looking for you?" We arrived in Milan and there was no restaurant. That was when I found out what my school friend had been working as. And to buy her freedom and get back to Moldova, she had promised to recruit a new girl.'

She inhaled again, more deeply this time. She was bracing herself. 'In Italy, the "friend" took me to meet some men in an apartment. Russian men. They said I had to help them repay their investment. I said no, so they beat me. They said they would kill me if I didn't do what they said, and give them what I earned each day.

'I kept saying to them I must go back to Mother. My mother was sick. She needed medicine. They didn't listen. I had to work seven days a week, from the afternoon to early morning the next day. Twelve hours every day, except when I had my period. The Russians took everything. They said if I tried to escape, the police would bring me back to them. The police were their friends.

'There were three other girls. We were all locked in the same room until a customer came. We had to wear big T-shirts. For six months, I did this work. The customers paid fifty euros for half an hour. Sometimes I made a thousand euros a night. I got nothing.

'And then, at the end of each night, the Russians had a game. They would come into our room and they would rape us all one by one. One of the girls cried so much they said the neighbours would hear. They crushed her toes under a door as punishment.

'Escaping was not easy. You cannot just jump out of a window and be free. And we had no money. Some of the regular customers were policemen. Our visas were renewed even though we were prisoners. But we talked about it a lot.

'The apartment was in a big old building. In the winter it was cold. We used to put a blanket in the big gap under the door to stop the draught. I was doing that when I suddenly had an idea. The door was locked from the other side, but they always left the key in. It was a big old-fashioned key. I pushed about a metre of the blanket underneath, and I used an eyebrow pencil to push the key out of the lock. It fell onto the blanket and I pulled it to our side. The others were too scared to come with me, but I ran.

'I ran and ran. A lady waiting for a bus gave me some money. I took a bus to another city.

'I went to a church and the priest telephoned Lena. She made all the arrangements and she was at the airport for me. Not my family. They were too ashamed. When I went home, the police came to my house two days later. They didn't want information about the Russians. They didn't want to know anything about my friend or her friend in Athens. All they wanted was s.e.x. I said no. They said they would tell the Russians where to find me. They knew who they were. I called Lena and she rescued me - again. Now I help her with her work.'

Irina looked exhausted from retelling her story, but also defiant. 'I still work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But now it is with Lena, helping others like me. We will stop the trafficking one day.'

The way she said it convinced me she'd succeed - or die trying.

5

Irina went to make more coffee. Lena offered me a cigarette. I shook my head but Anna was straight in there. They both lit up.

'Who are these guys? Old-fashioned Mafia?'

Anna waved a hand at the case files that surrounded us. 'Or the Russian, Albanian and Ukrainian gangsters who run mixed cargoes of women, drugs and arms? Take your pick. But one thing is certain: they'll do anything to turn a profit. Lena told me about those speedboats being intercepted in the Adriatic. The traffickers threw the women overboard to distract the police and protect the heroin and the hardware.'

Lena nodded. 'But it must have hurt them. I'll tell you a sad statistic. After weapons and drugs, human trafficking is now the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world. Tens of billions of dollars a year. Obviously, trafficking on this level requires organization and cross-border networks. But at the Moldova end, things aren't so structured. Many of the recruiters are amateurs who see an opportunity and grab it. Friends betray friends. Even a family member sometimes, in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars. Maybe worst of all, it can be the person the girl shares her bed with.'

Anna and I exchanged a glance.

'Anna told me when she called that she's helping you research a piece on girls who end up in the UK - is that right? In which case, there's something you have to understand about Moldova. More than a quarter of the economically active population have migrated in search of work. A third of our GNP - a billion dollars - is money sent home from abroad.

'Irina and I go around the country, giving out our numbers and showing films. But it's an uphill struggle. n.o.body wants to believe us. On TV, they have their noses rubbed in glossy images of life abroad. Maybe they only have to look next door to see a neighbour's new clothes or mobile phone. An unemployed girl who's starving isn't going to be put off by our warnings.'

That made a lot of sense, but our girl was bright and from a rich family. I was about to ask about university kids, but Lena hadn't finished.

'Moldova is important to the traffickers as a source, but the trade isn't centralized. There are local recruiters, but nearly all Moldovan girls are sold to non-Moldovan gangs. It isn't a vertical business model. Once they're out of the country, it's almost impossible to pick up the trail. We have to wait until the victims contact us.'

'Where do they end up?'

She shrugged. 'All over. The Balkans were the big destination until about ten years ago. Now it's Russia, Turkey, Israel, Dubai, any European city ... The methods have changed, too. Traffickers have become smarter. Like I said, nowadays it's mostly happy trafficking. Victims are only allowed to go home when they've worked off "debts" and "fines" invented by their pimps or, like Irina's friend, if they undertake to send back one or two replacements.'

'What about the authorities? Supposing a girl is reported missing, what happens? Do the parents go to the police?'

She shook her head, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst out laughing. 'No. n.o.body goes to the police. We never share information with them. The most powerful gangsters are nearly always former cops - and so are their kryshy...' She looked at Anna, lost for the right word - the first time in an hour.

'Roofs.'

'Yes, their roofs - their protectors. These men are at the highest level of the police and the Ministry of the Interior. Before they'll even open a case they demand s.e.x or money.'

A phone rang, and stopped. Irina went over to the fax machine. She had to bend down to read the first few lines as the paper curled back on itself. 'From Spain ...'

Lena's mobile rang. She picked it up and signalled for quiet. She listened, then spoke quickly and urgently into the mouthpiece.

She looked at me. 'I'm sorry. I have to go.'

Irina handed her the sheet.

'A girl has just been found during a raid in Barcelona. I have to speak to her mother.'

I s.n.a.t.c.hed a glimpse of the picture. The face was bruised, but the girl it belonged to wasn't Lilian.

6

Str A Mateevici