Page 83 of Nightfire

He ripped off his jacket as if it were on fire, ran his hands through the two outside pockets again, the inside pocket, over and over again. Carefully inching his fingers along the lining just in case, all the while knowing that it wasn’t there.

The thumb drive. The thumb drive with the entire auction data—photos, statistics, measurements. Doctor’s certificates. And above all, the names of those admitted to auction. Doctors, lawyers, CEOs, all in a blind auction bidding to buy prepubescent girls.

That thumb drive contained dynamite and if he lost it, his life was over. And the ending would not be pretty. The vory were not known for their mercy.

He kept that drive on him at all times. Where⁠—

And suddenly, he knew. The whore Consuelo had it. He’d taken his jacket off for the interrogation, no use getting the leather wet. Somehow the thumb drive had fallen and she undoubtedly had it. He’d left her lying on the floor in her own vomit. She’d have seen it, picked it up.

All the information in the drive was encrypted but there was no way he could be without it when the ship landed with the girls. The data was necessary to set up the auction. There was at least ten million dollars’ worth of intel on that disk, maybe more, depending on how the auction went. It was to be an anonymous online auction, but they couldn’t organize it without the data on that fucking thumb drive.

The girls at the Meteor, at his insistence, had been injected with a tiny RFID transmitter, under the guise of vaccinations against STDs. There was a way he could track them all on his cellphone but it would be time-consuming to download the data and then scroll through to find Consuelo.

Pirat charged in quarter hour segments. Nikitin still had seven minutes. He uploaded the code for the RFIDs, the login and passwords and asked for him to check for Consuelo.

Pirat was fast. Inside a minute, he had an answer.

He was expecting her to be at the Meteor but instead he got the message:

RFID tag # 3701 at 1147 Birch Street. Morrison Building.

Where in building?

He typed.

He stared at the answer in shock.

Company called RBK Security.

It all went smoothly, much more than she expected. Consuelo had stared at the blank wall in front of her with the plaque stating RBK Security next to it for long moments, starting to panic, when it whooshed open and a smiling, kindly woman in an elegant suit and cropped, gray hair stood on the other side.

“Call me Marisa,” she said in a slightly accented voice and Consuelo felt immediately better.

It was a busy place, a rich place, where rich successful people did whatever it is they did. Consuelo had no concept of the outside world. She’d been a whore since her virginity had been auctioned off and before that she’d been groomed to be what she was now.

She never even saw much of the outside world. When she walked in, it was as if walking into another universe, a better one.

One where women weren’t half-naked and on display like meat at a butcher’s shop. And where the men weren’t glassy-eyed with alcohol and lust, almost sub-human in their desires, like animals with money.

This was her daily life and she realized how impossibly deficient of everything that made life meaningful it was. The only saving grace was solidarity with the other girls, but since the Russians had come with their harsh new regime, they avoided each other. They couldn’t help each other.

Everyone knew what had happened to Consuelo. No one could have helped her, so they avoided her. She’d walked out of the Meteor this morning without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Here it was so different. Everyone was busy with something that mattered, valued for what they were, what they knew. She eyed everything greedily, simply absorbed into her pores the cool, calm atmosphere where no one was buying anyone else.

This was going to be her new world. It was either that or die.

Marisa walked her across this enormous lobby that smelled fresh and clean, and not of perfume and alcohol, down a corridor and stopped in front of another blank wall.

A green light flashed on a camera above the door and it whooshed open. “Come in,” a deep voice said.

This was it. This was her last refuge and her last hope.

She looked across another large space at two very large men, standing. For a second, she wondered why they were standing and then it hit her like a blow.

They were standing for her.

As if she were a lady.