Ant goes off with Anders and Erik for additional target practice, while Levy and Parker hang back with me.
“So. You’re Gasparín,” she says with a smile.
“Yes,” I answer cautiously, unaccustomed to people knowing my nickname.
“How the hell did you take down so many organizations? Our team is pretty good at it, but there are still places we can’t go. How did you get into that place in Peru, for instance?”
Looking around, I make sure my nephew is nowhere near us. Directing this to Levy, I warn, “You can’t tell him.”
“Okay…?”
I check the space again, then go for the direct explanation. “I was younger and dumber back then, so I used to let them take me in.”
Parker, all four foot eleven of her, recoils in horror. “Youlet them take you in? As in, you let them traffic you?”
Levy’s eyes widen, and his hand goes to his mouth. “What happened to you?”
“I never viewed it as things happening to me. I mostly worked on domestic traffickers at first, hoping that’s where Ant ended up.”
We go quiet, knowing that’s not at all what happened.
“What’d you learn with the domestics?” Parker asks.
“From what I could tell, the company workers at the locations—mostly manufacturing and domestic labor—didn’t understand where the trafficked workers were sourced from. For example, it’s not unusual for a manufacturing company to go out and legally hire workers from another country, sponsor their green cards, and put them in apartments close by. All of that is contract work, with all sides agreeing to the terms. In the places I ended up, however, no one, save for me, was there of their own free will.”
“Did anyone tell the companies or the homeowners that?”
I shake my head. “It was made very clear that if any of us said anything, we would not make it home. Ever.”
“What did you do?”
“I would work with them for a few weeks, get people to talk to me. Most, of course, were too afraid, but some had been in this life for a very long time and had some good insight.”
“What kind of insight?”
I sigh, hating this truth. “No matter the country, there was a general consensus that this kind of trafficking goes on because the government largely turns a blind eye. Also, stagnant wages mean the working-class folks can’t afford to make ethical choices.”
“How do you think it gets fixed?” Parker asks, genuinely interested.
“This is all stuff that has to be fixed at the government level, which we can’t do right now.”
“Not yet,” she verifies. “What’s your second-best option?”
“It was only me, so I started taking out the kidnappers. They were often the least monitored of the trafficking organizations, and I could take out a lot of them and prevent people from getting sucked into the machine in the first place.”
“I assume the organizations noticed the missing kidnappers when their numbers started decreasing.”
“True. But they were so far upstream, I could cripple an entire organization before they realized there was a problem.”
Parker’s taking notes on her phone, and she stops to laugh. “Shit, Javier. That’s smart.”
“Or very dumb,” Levy says, horrified.
“Oh, it was stupid, for sure. But I got lucky.”
Some thought crosses Parker’s mind, and she shifts uncomfortably.
“Ask what you need to ask.”
