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Forensic accountants tracked the money that flowed in and out of the AMPS accounts. And, as Ananke had said, since Mithras had gotten increasingly sloppy, it was easier than we anticipated to find his capos and their soldiers. More arrests were made weekly, and with it came more confessions and more evidence against AMPS.
As I’d suspected, Cronos wasn’t the one to build the trafficking ring; it had been his grandfather.
Between the devastation in the aftermath of World War I and by the Great Depression, men and women were desperate for work. Many were forced to give their children up to orphanages, and Rávdos’ grandfather knew exactly how to exploit them for profit. Vast amounts of it. Rather than help them get the jobs he’d promised, he sold them as slaves.
It was Cronos’ father who’d added sex trafficking after World War II, when money flowed more easily than it had twenty-five years previously, and even more women and children especially were displaced.
Perhaps in his madness, Cronos had believed that he and Cassandra were helping the orphans they sponsored and then sold to uberwealthy Middle Eastern customers in particular. When those same men came back for more, neither Rávdos asked what had happened to the ones previously purchased. At one point in her interrogation, Cassandra eerily said that all sales were final.
The trail of victims wasn’t as easy to track, but my understanding was that we were making inroads. A fund had been set up from the money recovered from AMPS accounts to aid those who were rescued in rebuilding their lives.
No one in the coalition was naive enough to think that other criminal organizations, like the Calabrian Syndicate, hadn’t swept in and folded as many of AMPS’ capos and soldiers into their enterprises as they could get to before we did.
Charlene was put in protective custody, and the supposition was, once she’d given her testimony, she’d be placed in a witness-protection program.
Francesca went to stay with Cayman and Bexli immediately following the arrest of both her daughters, and when they asked her if she wanted to remain and live with them, she tearfully and happily accepted.
From what they’d said, Francesca believed Cassandra had either run away or been abducted. When the police on Gozo weren’t interested in helping her find her daughter, she assumed whoever took her, if that was what had happened, had paid them off. As the family was impoverished, she didn’t have the means to hire someone to look for her daughter, so she lived with the heartbreak. It was only Cassandra’s threat of killing both Francesca and Charlene that kept the latter from telling her mother her oldest child was still alive.
Each day, we received further briefs serving as a reminder that the day would soon arrive when it was time for us to return to England and resume our fight against the human traffickers of the world. Neither of us could quit. Neither of us wanted to.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Magnet as we sat by the warmth of the fire, drinking hot cocoa with the homemade marshmallows I’d learned to make from my grandmother’s recipe.
“Tell me.”
“I want to help Puck find Seshat and their baby.”
“Do you?” I looked into his eyes.
“It feels like the right thing for me—for us—to do.”
“It’s interesting you should say that.”
He cocked his head when I got up from the sofa, went into the other room, and came back with my cell phone. I swiped the screen and typed the words, “We’re ready,” before hitting send on the message to Nemesis.
“What’s going on?”
“While you were shoveling the snow, I called Nem and told her I planned to talk to you tonight about our next mission. She told me to let her know when we were ready.”
“Does she know we’ve already decided what it will be?”
I nodded. “That was the other thing I planned to talk to you about. How important it was to me to find Seshat and help reunite their family. It is the right thing for us to do. To undo the wrong perpetrated by Cassandra and Cronos. And, Magnet?”
“Yes, my love?”
“You should know we won’t be traveling to America alone.”
“We won’t?”
I shook my head.
“Who else will be going?”
“Nemesis said she’s made arrangements for a plane big enough to transport every member of the coalition who wants to go.”
“And how many will that be?”
“All of them.”
