Trapped in the Mayan Tattoo (31 page)

The voices sounded
faint enough that Abbi was pretty sure her bugging device would not pick up on
them. Catching bits of phrases, Abbi could hear “drop”, “GPS” and someone asking
if Miss Kowalski knew how to use it. There was laughter. Someone objected to
using her for this mission. Abbi knew that had to be the tall, thin man who
seemed against the idea at the law complex in Virginia. Then there were several
people talking, and it became hard to tell who was in the conference room.
Voices got louder but not clearer. Someone shouted, “NM has to be stopped.”
Someone else said more quietly, so quiet Abbi stopped and pressed her ear
against the wall of the tunnel to hear, “You don’t know what you’re talking
about. Wait until our meeting. It will all be clear then.”

Some little
children were coming through the duct behind them, giggling and talking in a
high pitch. It became impossible to hear the meeting room. Abbi and Louise slid
over and plastered themselves to the duct wall, allowing the small children to
pass through. Then a group of larger children found themselves waiting behind
Abbi and Louise. They didn’t wait quietly or patiently. Abbi scrambled quickly
through the ductwork, slid down the shoot at the end and plopped onto the
hearth of a revolving fireplace.

“That was great!”
she whispered and pointed that she’d like to try that again.

Hastily she walked
back through the museum where she and Louise waited in line to go up through the
ductwork for the second time.

It was all Louise
could do to keep up with Abbi. After two times through the ducts, Louise grew
bored as well as tired.  By the third trip, Abbi went alone and Louise walked
under the duct. Either from noise inside the ducts or silence at Operation
Missing Shoe headquarters, Abbi could no longer hear the bits of conversation. When
Louise tapped on the duct, Abbi knew the talk had ended and she had to slide
down. She had a strange feeling she was about to be reprimanded.

The final descent from
the shoot landed her at the feet of Big Sam, who waited on the platform of the
revolving fireplace. He posed as an employee, complete with name badge. He wore
the expression and body language of annoyance as he rubbed his ears. At his
right ear, she saw a tiny receiver. That’s when Abbi realized how squeaky the
ducts had been, how high pitched the squeals of the little children had been,
and how easily these sounds must have been transmitted.

“What are you
trying to do? Wear out the ductwork? We have other items of interest in our
museum and we close soon,” Big Sam said.

“Yes, sir,” Abbi
said meekly.

She wanted to ask
Big Sam what he knew about the new drop plan, but his stern face convinced her
that now was neither the time nor the place. She would hear the details soon
enough.

She and Louise
scooted away to the gift shop where displays of harmless items could be found,
from kaleidoscopes to sunglasses to x-ray spray that would allow a person to
read the contents of an envelope.

“I have that
stuff!” Abbi said. “Mrs. Hightower let me try it out!”

“Why?” Louise
asked when Abbi showed her.

“I don’t know,”
Abbi said. “To play spy, I guess.”

As they re-entered
the museum, Abbi read accounts of women who disappeared while doing espionage
during World War II and the kinds of rumors that spread about their outcomes. Fear
overcame her and for a moment she felt weak, suddenly remembering that her
mother was in grave danger, and if NM2 wanted to find Abbi, then she was in
danger too. How many other times had her mother risked her life in the line of
duty? Weak-kneed and worried, she wanted to go to the meeting and find out the
new details of negotiations.

In that moment Abbi
almost hated herself for not knowing more about her parents, for dismissing
their work as boring when she used to think her parents sold shoes, for not
seeing the many signs and signals earlier, for not recognizing the risks they
took to do their work. And she realized that, like the walls upstairs, like a
magician’s slight-of-hand, her parents had only allowed her see what they
wanted her to see. She still wasn’t sure what her father did and that made her
very curious. She had a lifetime of catching up to do—if it wasn’t too late.

“Mademoiselle,
let’s go back,” Abbi said with a renewed sense of urgency.  

“Why? We still
have time.”

“We can’t go to
the meeting like this, and I feel grubby. We’ll need to get back into our
business clothes and look the part,” Abbi said.

“Ok,” Louise said,
still trying to text her parents. “Abbi, something seems wrong. My parents
always text back!”

“Yeah.” Abbi said,
reminded of her parents’ dangerous situations. “Come on, Foo Foo!”

“Don’t start that
stuff!” Louise whispered. “I’m not going to get kicked out of here because you
can’t behave, Miss KOO-KOO Kowalski!”

“OUCH!” Abbi whispered
to Louise as she felt for the panel that would get them to the hidden staircase
and back to their tiny suite near the mission’s headquarters. “That’s just
cruel.”

“Don’t get mean
with me!”

“That was fun, but
I’m too stressed to enjoy it. Didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

By the time Abbi
got them into the secret passageway, it seemed that Louise forgave her, maybe
sensing that it was purely in fun and not to be hurtful. At least, that’s all
Abbi intended. Obviously, Louise felt some stress too.

           
Back in the tiny
apartment, Louise showered and refreshed. Abbi had a few minutes for
much-needed exercise to the upper body, and then doing some pushups and situps.
While she exercised, she reflected on recent events. She stopped her exercises
abruptly to cross check some things in the folders.

The first few
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are often the hardest to place but she could see the
patterns developing. Key pieces which created a border gave shape to the puzzle:
her mother’s drawings were actually tattoos, and a couple of tattoos that Mrs.
Hightower had photographed on the girl matched them perfectly. The drawings left
out in plain view on her mother’s desk, the labeled folders left out for her to
find, and the actual tattoos—these all helped formed the outer edges of the
puzzle. Now it became clear that the unfinished report and folders—all filed in
her mother’s computer under the file name “Fred’s Boots”—and the drawings had
all been so carefully placed, organized, and labeled leaving little doubt that
they were intended for her eyes, especially the folder labeled, “In the Event…”.
That folder Abbi did not open. Nor did she print it.

The other compiled
folders that Abbi brought with her contained news articles, sometimes circled,
about a notoriously dangerous gang. This was the best source Abbi had found
about a sort of club with lifelong membership or, as an article mentioned,
possible ownership. The article called it a modern slave trade. Sometimes very
poor parents would sell their children as a last resort to give them a better
life. This information helped fill in the center of the puzzle. Actual cases of
kidnappings and human trafficking—the girl named Maria. Abbi had seen this
missing persons report but had not realized its significance.

As her mother started
closing in on this particular rescue mission, she must have sensed trouble, had
a premonition, something that made her leave a trail of evidence for Abbi to
follow. Several times in the week before her mother went missing she had sent
Abbi into the office to grab a pen or to get something out of a drawer. That’s
when Abbi would notice things scattered on the desk, sometimes drawings, other
times news articles. And her mother, herself, had advised Abbi that there was a
secret locking system for a hidden side drawer and showed her how to operate it.

            Abbi cleaned the last
bit of dust off her mind’s lens she looked through and focused hard.

            Membership in NM2 meant
a lifetime commitment, cemented by such things as tattoos and initiation rites
that sometimes included doing a ritualistic killing or being raped by multiple
men. Getting out of NM2 alive was next to impossible. So what would their
incentive be to let Miss Shoe leave, once they realized who she was? For an
organization with so much wealth, the incentive had to be more than money. But
what?

Abbi read the
report of a girl who managed to escape but had to change her identity. The girl
told harrowing stories to authorities and still had tattoos and internal scars
from her ordeal. She had gotten involved because of her boyfriend. Later, because
she talked to authorities, the girl was found stabbed to death in the Killing
Forest, even after her change of identity!

            Again Abbi’s knees felt
weak. This group was extremely dangerous, and her mother was now caught in its
terrifying web.

            Louise came out of the
bathroom.

            “Your turn,” she
announced.

            Feeling numb, Abbi
closed up the contents of the files and returned them to her briefcase. Then
she quickly gathered her clothes and toiletries and went to bathe, still deep
in thought.

Abbi remembered a
video clip of an interview with a Latina who had become a member of the group. The
interview had aired on a cable news network. At the time, Abbi didn’t know of
the organization or the rescued girl or her mother’s study of the group. Although
the girl’s face had been blurred to protect her, the girl bravely told of the
lure of the organization. At first, the unidentified girl had thought it had
something to do with religion, with Mary, mother of Jesus. That’s how her
boyfriend convinced her to join, that and being able to buy things cheaper. She
was told she could go to college if she joined and NM would pay for it. All
these promises came with hefty price tags but a new recruit would not know that.
Later the girl had discovered that initiation requirements to join sometimes involved
deadly consequences. The victim would not discuss on air the requirements for
her initiation but, after her initiation, she was admitted into the
organization. She said in the interview that she wasn’t allowed to leave or
contact family, not even when she explained how unhappy she had become. She was
given a number of tasks to do, endless tasks, as if she owed the organization
every moment of her day, every part of her body. The interviewer avoided asking
for specifics but the girl reported that most girls who joined became domestic
slaves and some were expected to bear children to help increase numbers in the
organization. Abbi shuddered as she remembered this interview. When the girl
broke free and went to police, she was arrested and treated like a criminal. An
international human rights organization intervened, pleaded her case, and then helped
relocate that girl, providing her with a new name, a new life. The documentary had
been made to raise awareness.

How awful, Abbi
thought, to be kidnapped, treated like that, and then arrested!

That was NM, a
radical human rights group, known for its communes and its promise of a better
life. Although life in the commune was harsh, NM attempted to provide a better
way of life for the people inside its walls.

On the other hand,
the faction that split, NM2, was of a different design and used drug
trafficking and human trafficking for sex as their business models. Faster
money. That is what her mother had discovered, pursued, and they were the ones
involved in her kidnapping.

“GK just texted. C
is coming,” Louise yelled.

Abbi could barely
hear her. She turned off the shower.

“C? Is that really
necessary? Don’t they have people on payroll to do interpreting?” Abbi asked,
feeling a tightening in her stomach. She didn’t feel right about this girl and
wasn’t sure why.

“This is a small
contract job,” Louise said. “She overhears things. GK says she’s so pretty and innocent-looking
that the bad guys don’t think she can understand what they say. GK says she’s
amazing! I think he likes her, but what’s not to like?”

           
After the
interview with Mrs. Hightower, Tina fell into a deep exhausted sleep. When she
awoke, she saw her laptop and remembered her assignment.

            She stretched, swallowed
down some liquids that were to serve as her dinner, and thought about how hard
it would be to try to talk to Gopher again. She hated him for what he had done
to her, what he apparently did for a living. It had grown into a deep down revulsion.
Admittedly, she brought it on herself, starting with the picture she sent him
and believing the lies he told. She didn’t imagine that he would send it out to
others. For that, and everything else, she would get him, and get him good. All
she had to do was to get the conversation going and then the FBI would take
over. Piece. Of. Cake.

            The broth felt wonderful
and tasted delicious when she added a little salt. If it would just stay down,
that would be a start toward getting better. She ate as if she’d been starving.
A nurse came in and was pleased with Tina’s appetite. She took her temperature
and reported that the fever was gone, and that Tina looked like she felt
better.

            “Much better!” Tina
said. “Could you please hand me my laptop?”

            “Feeling social?” the
nurse asked as she accommodated the request.

            “I feel like making
things happen,” Tina said with a smile. Bad things to bad people, she thought,
but she wouldn’t divulge in the inner workings of her heart.

            “Well, then, if you’re
finished eating, we’ll get this stuff cleared away and you can enjoy some peace
and quiet.”

            “Thanks,” Tina said. She
took a moment while her tray was being removed to frame her thoughts. She
wondered if Gopher responded to yesterday’s message.