O’Neill glanced to his right at the rusty hull of the small container vessel, called a feeder, that the crane was starting to unpack. Named the Estivado, it was a Costa Rican ship with a French crew that flew a Panamanian flag. Having picked up containers from her before, O’Neill knew there was nothing on the Estivado’s cargo manifest, such as machine tools, that would set off any Homeland Security threat-matrix alarms. In fact, most of the nine hundred LEGO-like red metal boxes aboard the ship contained navel oranges and tangelos out of Toluca, Mexico.
Most, O’Neill thought, as the weight of the lowered container settled onto the trailer attached to the truck with a slight thump and a creak.
But not all.
He shifted the five-hundred-horsepower Volvo into gear and pulled away from the crane and around a red brick warehouse to the end of another line of idling trucks. He nervously drummed the top of the Marlboro box sitting in his cup holder as he sat waiting.
This last part was the gut check. The line he was in was for the Homeland Security vehicle imaging scanner, where the in-sides of all containers had to be inspected by an X-ray machine before they were allowed to leave. Remembering his very specific instructions, O’Neill waited until it was right before his turn and then immediately sent a wordless text message to a number he’d already preprogrammed into his phone.
He assumed the text was a signal to someone working in the security office, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t really want to know. He just held his breath as he slowly rolled between the goalpost-like metal X-ray poles that bookended the security lane.
There was a traffic light with a gate arm on t
he other side, where you had to wait after you went through the scanner. O’Neill stared at the red light, his heart ticking like a clock attached to a bomb. He was wondering how much prison time they would give him for smuggling several metric tons of coke, and what his clueless wife and daughters would think, and how did one actually hang oneself in a prison cell, when the green light suddenly flashed and the arm tilted up.
O’Neill Zippoed himself a victory cigarette as he clutched and shifted and pulled out.
CHAPTER 53
AN HOUR LATER, still following specific instructions, O’Neill pulled into an I-95 rest stop just south of the New York State line and unhitched the trailer. A minute after he pulled away, a spanking new cherry-red Peterbilt 388 swung in front of the cargo container, and three hard-looking Hispanic men in jeans and denim work shirts hopped out. The largest of them checked the container’s seal and locks carefully before nodding to the other two to hook it up.
The final destination of the shipment was a warehouse on the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Inside, just beyond its open steel overhead door, a white Mercedes S600 sedan with tinted windows was parked beside a large silver Ford van. After the warehouse door was safely back down, an effeminate Hispanic man in seersucker shorts and a butter-colored tennis sweater exited the van and checked the seal and locks on the container. When the foppish man nodded, the driver of the truck, who had been waiting with a pair of bolt cutters, clipped the container’s heavy padlocks and swung the doors back.
“Vámonos!” the truck driver called.
There was a pause, then out of the mouth of the container came young girls. Sweaty and disheveled, they gasped and squinted at the clean air and light after spending three days in the box. They were dirt-poor Mexican country girls who’d been told they were being recruited for factory jobs in the U.S. fashion industry. Not one of them was over fourteen. One of them was only eleven.
As the men helped them down to the floor of the warehouse, the driver’s door of the white Mercedes popped open and out came Manuel Perrine’s right-hand woman, beautiful Marietta herself. Even in their exhaustion, the girls marveled at her white Chanel summer pouf dress, the white Chanel purse draping from her slim, cinnamon-tan arm, her white Chanel watch. Beautiful and serene and all smiles, she went among the tired girls with a checklist and a digital camera, taking pictures and pausing here and there to inspect skin and hair and teeth.
She quickly divided the girls into categories and prices. The last shipment had been overpacked, and there had been some damage to the material. A girl had died on the second day, and several of the rest of them had become so ill, they, too, had to be destroyed.
What had Manuel called it?
Spillage. Exactly.
There had been no spillage this time. The sex-slave trade was a new avenue for the cartel, but, as she did with everything, Marietta was picking up the learning curve quickly.
Marietta clopped to the van on her pristine white heels and handed the dapper pimp her checklist and camera. They spoke quietly for a moment, the wiry, almost pretty dark-skinned Dominican nodding thoughtfully at her recommendations before returning his hungry gaze to the line of unkempt girls.
“Who wants a treat?” Marietta called in Spanish as she took a plastic bag of snack-size Milky Ways from her white purse and tossed it into the van.
The famished girls flooded into the vehicle, giggling. In a moment, they were buckled into their seats, chewing ravenously, chocolate on their cheeks and chins. The pimp, already behind the wheel, looked at them over the driver’s seat, his soft, seemingly friendly face beaming like a proud father’s.
“This is Mateo. He will take you to where you’ll be staying,” Marietta told them gently in Spanish as the warehouse’s steel door rolled back up. “He’ll make sure to get you to a phone right away so you can call home and tell your parents that you’re okay, okay?”
The girls—like Madeline and her friends responding politely to Miss Clavel—thanked Marietta in unison.
Marietta slipped on a pair of whimsical Chanel sunglasses and stuck her tongue out at them playfully.
“Bye, now. I’m so proud of you all,” Marietta called, tossing a wave and a blown kiss over her sleeveless shoulder as she headed back for the Mercedes.
“You made it, girls!” she said. “You really made it. Welcome to America!”
CHAPTER 54
AT LEAST THE lobby security guard wasn’t lying down on the job, I thought as I arrived at the U.S. attorney’s secret office on lower Broadway. Even after I flashed my shield and showed the guard my driver’s license, he made no less than three phone calls before he allowed me to go upstairs.
Tara was on the other side of the elevator door when it opened on the seventeenth floor. I was instantly reminded how lovely she was. She was wearing a crisp Tiffany-blue blouse and a tobacco-colored skirt, her dark hair shining.