The room is rife with silence. Hardly any movements stir the mild air seeping from the vents in the ceiling. James stares at his laptop screen. Fredrik sits solidly, like a brooding, gorgeous giant with both hands resting on the table. Victor sits with his back pressed against his chair and his hands in his lap—always the power in the room, and anyone would know it just by looking at him even if they’ve never met him before. I feel their eyes on me—though not Fredrik’s—but I can’t bring myself to look at either of them.
Finally, the sound of heels tapping against the floor on the other side of the door echoes down the hall. The door opens and Nora, on her long legs and with beautiful blonde sweeping hair, enters the meeting room, closing the door behind her. She’s dressed in, of all things, a black women’s suit and tall black heels. A white collared shirt with an elegant ruffle pokes from beneath the suit jacket and lays perfectly about her chest, pulled up around her neck in a delicate fashion. Delicate—a word I never would’ve thought to associate with the likes of Nora Kessler.
“Cutting it close on time,” I speak up.
Nora sits down next to James, her back straight and refined.
“Yes,” she says with an apologetic smile and then reaches into her jacket pocket and withdraws a cell phone. “But I found Niklas.”
Victor and I glance at one another as Nora slides the cell phone across the table and into Victor’s reach. He picks it up and looks into the screen, tapping it once with his fingertip as it begins to fade to black. I lean over closer to Victor to get a better view.
“Barlow’s,” Nora announces. “He seems to be spending a lot of his time there, drinking”—I look into the screen to see several photos of Niklas sitting in a darkly lit bar with a shot of whiskey on the bar in front of him—“a different girl every night the past few nights. He’s staying in the hotel next to the bar.”
“That’s just thirty minutes from here,” I say, looking at Victor anxiously.
“Drinking and women,” James speaks up across the table from me. “Sounds like he hasn’t changed, really. I think it’s safe to say he’s all right.”
I frown at James.
“He’s not all right,” I say.
“But he will be,” Victor says.
He slides the phone back to Nora. She leaves it on the table in front of her.
Fredrik says nothing.
I slide back into my chair more comfortably and turn to Victor.
“Do you want me to go talk to him?” I ask. “Try to bring him back here so you can talk to him?”
Victor shakes his head.
“We’ll discuss Niklas later,” he says. “First, I have something else that needs to be addressed.”
Victor and Nora exchange a glance, giving off the impression that they’re the only two at the table who have already talked about it, whatever it is. I feel incredibly uncomfortable all of a sudden, but curious and eager, as well.
“What is it?” I ask.
Victor takes a deep breath and looks out at all of us. “There will be an important mission in the near future,” he says cryptically and his eyes fall on me, “not within the next year, but because it will take you at least that long to prepare for it—or rather to prepare Nora for it.” He glances at her briefly.
“OK,” I say, leery, “what kind of mission?”
He sits quietly for a moment and then says, “I need you to go back to Mexico.”
Confused, I reply, “Why Mexico?” But what’s so confusing is how obscure he’s being. “I have no problem going there, Victor. You give me a mission and I’ll carry it out. Mexico doesn’t scare me.” We’ve already gone back there once. We took out two of Javier’s brothers and freed some of the girls left in the compound. The mission didn’t turn out like I’d hoped and many of the girls I had once lived with when I was a prisoner there, had either already been sold, or killed by the time we arrived.
He looks away from my eyes momentarily.
“Victor, what is it? Just say it.”
Once again, I feel everyone’s eyes on me, even Fredrik’s this time, but I look at no one other than Victor.
“This mission will require something more than killing someone and coming back,” he begins. “For the next several months you’ll be training Nora for it.”
My eyebrows crease rigidly.
“Me training her?” It starts to dawn on me, what this whole mission will be about, but I let Victor fill in the gaps.
“You were on the inside,” he says to me, “and you know how things work. Everything. From the buying and selling of drugs, weapons and girls, to the way the girls were treated, to how they were killed. Nora can certainly handle any kind of mission given to her, but even she needs to be trained so she knows exactly what she’s dealing with.”
I look right at Nora, who sits quietly, but with confidence. “Wait a second,” I cut in, “so you’re saying you want me to train her to be a sex slave?” Somehow I can’t fit that image in my head no matter how I try.
James’ face lights up with creepy delight.
“Not necessarily,” Victor says. “I’ve talked to her at length about this and we both agree that the best way to approach that particular aspect of it is for her to become one of the girls, not just play the part.
“It’s best to become one of them,” Nora says, “if I fall into it like everyone else; not taught how to be one of them.”