Power and Empire

16

Kelsey Callahan pushed her chair away from the table, if only to put more distance between herself and the slimy little shit on the other side. Unlike the dark concrete-and-steel rooms depicted by Hollywood, the interrogation room at the Dallas federal building was carpeted and well lit. The table was veneer rather than real wood, purchased off a list of approved vendors by the General Services Administration. In this instance, the table and four chairs that surrounded it came from prison industries at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon. The taxpayers saved a little money, federal prisoners made a little money, and Callahan’s ass hurt from sitting in a piece-of-crap chair that threw her back into a helpless and uncomfortable knees-up position.

Trooper Sergeant Derrick Bourke sat next to her at the table. If the angle of his chair bothered him, he kept it to himself.

Eddie Feng was handcuffed in front and chained to a steel ring lag-bolted to the concrete floor underneath the institutional carpet. Callahan’s line of questions had seen his ashen pallor go nearly purple. Saliva foamed at the corners of his lips and his left eye twitched as if he were sending messages in Morse code.

“I am telling you,” Feng said for the tenth time. “I didn’t sleep with that girl.”

Callahan rolled her eyes. “But you already admitted that you did.”

Feng threw his head back, rattling his cuffs beneath the table. “How long do you really think anybody spends with one of those kids? Fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. I paid Parrot for two hours, just to keep her away from the other guys at the party.”

“How gentlemanly of you to keep her for yourself.”

“I told you we didn’t do anything!”

Callahan gave a little shrug. She had the upper hand now. “That’s not what Blanca says.”

“Well, she’s lying.” Feng wagged his head. “And anyway, she told me her name was Magdalena.”

Callahan sat up straighter in spite of the chair. “Magdalena?”

“Whatever her name is. She’s just a kid, you know. I felt sorry for her.” Feng’s eyes flicked to the mirrored wall. “Who’s back there? Who’s watching us?”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Bourke said.

Callahan banged on the table to get Feng’s attention. “Tell me about this USB drive.”

“I lost the damn thing…” He looked up, coming to a sudden realization. “If you have it, Magdalena… or Blanca, must have stolen it. She did, didn’t she? After what I did for her…”

Callahan just looked at him.

Feng continued to study the one-way mirror. “Could I get some coffee or something?”

Callahan shot a sideways glance at Bourke. “He makes a lot of demands for a kiddie diddler.”

Feng’s head snapped around. “Stop calling me that!”

“What do you prefer?” Bourke said. “Pedophile?”

“I’d prefer you called me Eddie,” he said. “I’m a reporter for True Word Daily. Just look it up online.” He was pleading now. “Seriously, guys. I’m in the middle of a very important story and had to appear to engage in certain behaviors in order to get them to trust me enough to get access to the right people. It was my legend. You know, a legend, like if you were going undercover.”

“I know what a legend is, Eddie,” Callahan said. This guy was convincing. He’d even managed to get the snot flowing, a sign his tears were probably real. But he was looking at some serious jail time, so he was obviously going to be distraught. It didn’t mean he was telling anything close to the truth about his involvement with Blanca Limón. Men who assaulted kids were very often the weepiest sad sacks on the planet.

Callahan pantomimed drinking motions toward the mirror. If it took a little coffee to get this bird to start singing, so be it. More often than not, there was a great deal of smiling and nodding right before she stuck it in and broke it off.

“Okay, Eddie,” she said. “I’ll get you something to drink, but you have to tell us a few things. For starters, I need you to give me the location of the party you were at when you met Blanca. She was with another girl, and that girl is still missing. I’m worried something happened to her.”

“Sure.” Eddie nodded quickly, seemingly eager to help. “I’m not sure of the address, but it’s in South Dallas. Anyway, she’s not there. These parties are transient. They bring the girls in vans and cars and then take them away afterward. Blanca and the others all got carted off by a guy they called Reggie right before I left.”

Callahan shot a look at Bourke. Feng’s description of the guy who had Blanca matched up, anyway.

“I don’t know,” Eddie continued. “If she’s not with Reggie, I’d say Matarife has her.”

Sergeant Bourke looked up from his notebook. “Matarife?”

“That would be my guess,” Feng said. He was already working on the map, both hands moving with the pen across the yellow legal pad since they were cuffed together.

Bourke shot a sideways glance at Callahan. “Matarife means ‘slaughterer.’”

Callahan rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. This whole thing made her bones tired. There was a reason agents timed out of Crimes Against Children task forces. Her supervisor had warned her after her last emotional outburst that she was definitely coming to the end of her shelf life with the CAC.

Feng kept at his drawing, hunched over the legal pad. “I’ve never met him, but I hear Matarife is into some pretty nasty stuff.”

“Be more specific,” Bourke said.

Eddie shrugged. “I am actually onto something else for my story, so all this stuff with the girls was just extra. Believe me, once I got what I needed, I was going to make some calls and get the girls out of there.”

“Must have been really important,” Bourke said, “for you to leave them in slavery while you got your precious story.”

“You have no idea.” Feng hung his head. “But I understand how it looks… how it is. I should have called someone.”

“Yes, you should have, Eddie,” Callahan said. “But you can make a difference now. Let’s get back to what you know about Matarife.”

“All I heard was whispers. Rumor is he leads some kind of blood cult, but I think that’s just a story to scare the shit out of the competition. I haven’t put it together yet, but he’s somehow linked to a guy they call Coronet. That’s who I’m looking to find, Coronet. I suspect he works with a contact in mainland China. Sun Yee On triad, Tres Equis, Coronet — and the PRC. They’re all connected. I just haven’t put it all together yet.”

“Well, shit,” Callahan said. This was starting to spin out of her control. If it got too big, then Violent Crimes or one of the counterintel squads would muscle her out. “So tell me, Eddie. How do we find Matarife?”

Feng looked up from his map, which was incredibly detailed considering that he was drawing it with his hands cuffed. “He’s supposed to have a big house out in the country.”

Callahan pounded the table again. “Where is this big house?”

Feng shrugged. “Still working on that,” he said. “I haven’t managed to get myself invited out there. Until you arrested me, though, my next stop was a mid-level guy named Naldo Cantu who owns a string of massage parlors in South Dallas. He’s a real piece of work, just brutal to his girls. He keeps them strung out to keep them under control. Burns them with cigars for entertainment…” Feng shook his head, as if to clear away the image. “I know he pays a fee to operate in Matarife’s area. He’d have to know how to get in touch with the guy in order to pay him. Cantu will have some girls on hand. He always does. Could be this friend of Blanca’s is with him. I can tell you where he lives.”

“You can?” Callahan said, surprised at a glimmer of positive news.

“Sure,” Feng said.

Callahan patted her hand on the table. “Hurry up, then,” she said. “I’m not done with you yet, but if you know where Naldo Cantu is holding girls, I want to act on it right damn now.”

“Good,” Feng said. “Because there are probably some other things you need to know—”

An electronic buzzer sounded at the door, nearly sending Feng out of his skin. There was a heavy metallic click and Tim Dixon, one of the supervisory agents, entered. He had a tall Starbucks cup in his hand with steam coming off the top — which meant it couldn’t be for Feng. Prisoners got lukewarm coffee at best — in case they decided to try to weaponize their drink.

Feng dropped the pen on the table and rattled his cuffs. “What’s going on? Who is this? Is he one of the guys watching me?”

Callahan snapped her fingers to shush him, then looked up at Dixon, afraid of what his presence meant. Interruptions like this usually meant a lawyer had shown up.

The news turned out to be even worse.

Dixon leaned in to whisper in her ear. “There’s an agent named Caruso here to see you. Apparently, he’s out of WFO.”

“Okay.” Callahan shrugged. “What does somebody from the Washington Field Office want with me?”

“He knows you have Feng in custody,” Dixon said.

Callahan gasped. “We just scooped him up two hours ago.”

Dixon gave her a knowing nod. “Fancy that. And get this, the Old Man got a call from the office of the director about five minutes before this guy slithered in here, telling us to show one Special Agent Dominic Caruso all possible courtesy. He didn’t say it, but I’m thinking he’s gotta be counterintel. You have to admit, Kelsey, this whole case has a CI stink to it.”

Dixon had surely read Callahan’s 302 summarizing the interview with Blanca Limón, and now there was Eddie Feng’s reference to the People’s Republic of China. All this talk of spies and geopolitical competition brought spooks swarming around like blowflies to putrid meat.

Callahan wallowed up out of the prison-industries chair, knocking it over and hoping she smashed it in the process.

“What the hell, Tim? You know this is all wrong. We’re saving kids here, not working on spy shit. All possible courtesy my ass!”

Dixon sipped his coffee. “He’s standing right outside the window.”

“I don’t care where he is.” Callahan yanked open the door. “I will not hand over this investigation to a bunch of Washington counterintel weenies.”

She nearly ran headlong into a dark-haired man wearing faded jeans and a face full of stubble over a passive smile.

He gave her a wink that made her want to punch him in the nose, then said, “I think I can help you with that last part.”

The contract security officers in the lobby of the fortresslike Dallas field office had checked Caruso’s credentials and assumed he was armed. The magnetometer beeped when he walked through, which was not surprising to the guards. He wasn’t local, but he was an agent, so everyone assumed he would be armed. They did not, however, know that he wore a wire neck loop and microphone connected to the small radio hidden under the tail of his loose shirt and tucked inside the waistband of his jeans. The tiny earpieces Campus operatives wore were designed to blend in, but he’d removed his to be on the safe side. FBI agents were trained to be highly observant, and wearing an obvious wire into the lion’s den was sure to earn him a case of the third degree from the Old Man — the notoriously territorial and protective special agent in charge of the Dallas office. This left Caruso blind to any communication coming from other Campus members but still able to feed pertinent information to them through the mic just out of sight below his collar. He knew it wasn’t quite sensitive enough to pick up everything that was being said around him, so he strategically repeated the important stuff while trying not to sound like too much of an idiot.

“Seriously,” he said, shaking Callahan’s hand as they stood in the hall outside the interrogation room. “You and I have the same goals here.”

Callahan took a step back and folded her arms, giving him an up-and-down once-over. She was attractive, in an I’ll-kick-your-ass sort of way. Her stylish blouse was unbuttoned one button farther than she probably realized. At first glance, her ponytail gave her a look of innocence, but one look from her green eyes warned that she was anything but.

At length, she held out her hand and snapped her fingers. “Let’s see your creds.”

“They checked them downstairs.”

Callahan scoffed. She reminded Caruso of his mother checking his hands for dampness to make sure he’d actually washed them before dinner. “Well, I want to check them again.”

He passed the black leather case to her and shot a glance at Tim Dixon while he waited.

“Don’t look at me for aid and comfort,” the supervisor said. “She just happened to ask you before I did.”

Callahan studied the ID card and the badge, obviously disappointed that they weren’t fake. “How did you find out about Feng so quickly?” Her lip curled up in disgust. “You must have had him under surveillance, and if that’s the case, why in the hell didn’t you step in and rescue the kids? Could there possibly be anything more important than that?”

Caruso took a deep breath. “First of all, I can’t speak to how I knew. But I can promise you that if I’d seen any children in danger, they would have become my highest priority. I would have gotten them out in a heartbeat.”

Callahan looked at him for a long moment and then handed him back his credentials. “I believe you on that one tiny count, Dominic Caruso. But that doesn’t mean I’m all giddy about having you attached to my hip. And anyway, if you are what I believe you to be, I fully expect you to lie to me at least a dozen times a day.” She turned back to the interrogation room, pausing with her hand on the door. Her eyes softened a notch. “Listen, I know what you’re doing is probably super-duper important in the great scheme of the geopolitical chess game. But the work my team is doing here isn’t a game in any sense of the word. We estimate that there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in recorded history — and many of them are just kids, being forced to do unspeakable things, sometimes in a rented box truck at some peach orchard servicing a line of migrant workers waiting their turn, sometimes on a webcam. Some piece of trash gets arrested for child porn and their defense attorney boohoos to the judge and says, ‘Oh, Your Honor, my client is just a collector. He would never touch an actual child.’ Well, I say people who collect baseball cards eventually go to a game. People tell me that in adults, at least, prostitution is a victimless crime. Maybe one case in a million they might possibly have a point. But you try and have sex ten or fifteen times a day and see how you feel. Johns are rapists — they just pay somebody for the experience.”

Caruso raised both hands in surrender. “I’m not arguing with you. Really, I am on your side.”

“I just wanted you to know why I’m so bitchy right from the get-go,” Callahan said. “There is so much inertia in this ocean of evil shit that I have to push back or I’ll drown, you know. Anyway, I haven’t quite figured out Eddie Feng’s angle yet. But he’s about to tell us where we can find a guy one step up the ladder in what looks like a major human-trafficking ring. Supposedly there’s some connection to a Chinese guy that goes by the handle of Coronet. That mean anything to you?”

“Coronet?” Caruso said, repeating it so Clark and the others could hear. “I’m interested to hear where we can find a link to him. Mind if I come along?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Caruso grinned. “Not really.”