Featured image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay
“Don’t ask. I will not try to explain it nor will I go into deeper detail of our operations. I will, however, tell you a bit about my first assignment. That is all you get.” The last statement was said looking her directly in the eye. This conversation was over and I was leaving. Somehow she managed to figure it out from that look and nodded.
“I was about your age when they approached me. By that time I ticked all the right boxes. I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t brought in via the normal route of grooming through college then sent for training. Instead, I was sent out on my own with a sack of cash and a dossier. The target was going to be in the city where I was working. It was to be a weekend hit. I wouldn’t even have to take time off work.”
“They, whoever they really are, knew the target would be in a general area with run down buildings. He was a child sex trafficker. Bringing in Asian girls and boys all under the age of twelve for sale into the sex trade. Yes, it was happening on our soil. How they were getting in doesn’t matter. What mattered is that he, the children and some of the buyers would all be in one of these buildings with pretty heavy security. Law enforcement cannot get a search warrant for a generic location and they had nothing on this guy.”
“Let’s just say, this wasn’t the kind of area a white guy went unnoticed. There was a bit of information in the dossier about suspected buyers. Let’s just say most of them weren’t going to go unnoticed either. To me that meant the run down building would have an attached parking structure so the buyers could exit their vehicles without being seen.”
“When I say run-down I don’t mean some long abandoned building which no longer had running water or electricity. With a shipment of kids they would need facilities to clean them up for auction and sale. They would need some secure room or series of rooms from which the kids could not escape. They would also need some kind of large space with lights and decent acoustics if they weren’t going to bring some kind of sound system and they most definitely didn’t want a sound system which could be heard outside or through a window.”
“According to the dossier there should be twenty to thirty buyers at the auction. Premium buyers normally get a private viewing many hours before the auction.”
She looked at me rather confused. I rose my eyebrows indicating she could ask her question.
“Premium buyers?” she queried.
“Those willing to pay up to ten times auction price for the choicest items. Yes, they are referred to as items. At auction the items would bring anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Those which don’t sell are usually executed. Too much trouble to move them to a different auction in a different city to try again. Premium buyers will pay anywhere from fifty thousand to a quarter million for the choicest of the lot. They aren’t buying items to put on the sex treadmill at a pleasure house. They are buying pets. Playthings to amuse themselves with. Some they will tire of and eventually sell off to a house or trade to another in their circle. I’m told it’s a rather tight knit group. Eventually, every child in that auction which did not get executed would end up working at a sex house. Some would just have a more scenic journey. I’m told some don’t get sold to prostitution houses until their mid teens.”
“How horrible” she whispered with a tear rolling down her cheek.
“Do you really think someone woke up one morning and decided to kidnap a bunch of Asian kids, smuggle them to America and try to sell them?” I asked. She looked back with confusion and tears in her eyes. “It’s an industry driven by demand. Somewhere long ago one or more people desiring such a commodity approached some organized crime group which was already smuggling people or drugs into this country and paid for a few items. A few of their friends wanted some and thus a pipeline formed. These aren’t business models which were thought out in advance, they evolved. Most likely the first children ever sold were the children of adults being brought over here to be slave labor. Yes, it still happens in certain areas of the country. Usually despicable areas and in industries with horrible reputations. Taking the children was an incentive for the parents to keep quiet and working, having been told they would see their children once their debt had been paid.”
“I was sent to end this particular evolution.”
[…] <Previous-Part Next-Part> […]