The Woman Who Stopped Traffic Read online

  Natalie wondered again about this engagement – about allowing herself to be sucked back in. Was she really going to go through with it? Should she? Hadn’t she walked away from all this? Right now she could be back in the Bahamas, meditating on the beach – and yet there was something else at stake here.

  Nefarious ends.

  Human trafficking: remote and removed from her life. Or was it?

  She remembered a New York Times article way back in 2001. Naked Capitalists: There's No Business Like Porn Business. It claimed pornography was worth $10–14 billion in America – bigger than any of the major league sports, bigger than Hollywood even. Porn was ‘no longer a sideshow to the mainstream, it was the main stream’. And what a vast underground river it had turned into. Natalie had done the math: assuming the average porn consumer spent a couple of hundred bucks a year on his or her habit, that implied more than 50 million people. Maybe a few consumed an awful lot. Maybe the industry was smaller than the article claimed. Or maybe, with the growth of broadband access and free web content since, that number vastly underestimated consumption levels now.

  What a dismal prospect. The average family man, just yards away from his wife and two-point-something kids, entombed in his study, expression bovine – and then there was the age factor.

  Inwardly, Natalie had recognized that most men lusted after women aged up to around 35, or thereabouts. Yet, clandestine research had suggested an age closer to half that. Her last significant partner had once asked her to dress up in school uniform – pigtails, white shirt, short plaid skirt: the whole nine yards. She later found a way into his online history, and there uncovered his stash: Barely Legal, Cheerleader Orgy, College Freshmeat – “All standard porn,” her friend Stacey tried to reassure her. “Dogs bark, cats meow, guys check out porn. Come on, it’s just how their brains are wired, simple creatures that they are!” But ‘Barely Legal’ sounded like an elastic concept, and never more so than now.

  Was it legal in some parts of the world to sell a thirteen year-old girl for $8,250? Maybe it was. Was it possible that many millions of men wanted a woman of dubiously young age in the role of performer, escort, mistress – ‘wife’ even? Possibly they did. Did Clamor, with its 350 million members and 145-country presence, represent a new and unique means of matching demand with supply?

  Clamor.us/TriumphantGardensHotelandGiftShop – the group space that had momentarily flashed up at the Friday presentation: how many such groups were running on Clamor? How many girls, all told? What physical routes did the girls take: northwest through the former Soviet countries, eventually to the US East Coast? Or via the Pacific? What route did the money take?

  Natalie had seen a 60 Minutes documentary on human trafficking suggesting the process was always the same: girls were enticed into independent lives elsewhere, usually with the lure of some glamorous role – perhaps nothing more than a regular paying job behind a bar. But once they’d entered their bargain with the trafficker, they were isolated altogether, their passports seized. They were ‘seasoned’ – physically and psychologically abused, likely raped and threatened with reprisal against family members in their home towns and villages. They learned that their transit ‘debts’ needed repaying, that these debts were accumulating enormous levels of interest. They had to work. Girls earned $400 an hour in major Western cities and could be put to work for fourteen hours a day with an efficient booking system. But they saw none of it.

  For their trafficking masters, their cost could be recouped over a single weekend. How many such girls around the world were implicated?

  Nguyen had not yet given her a job description. That was fine. She’d always done well with shaping her own role. Now that she’d spent the weekend getting orientated, she would propose a three-step approach. She activated the digital recording function of her watch. Her friend Verity had bought it for her as a 30th birthday present, from a store in London called Spycatcher.

  “One: analyze Clamor group data using a ‘clean’ machine and approval of local law enforcement – in place of your nocturnal attempts at the same, Tom. Not sure which law enforcement org, local FBI maybe. Present report to Clamor management team, better still Board of Directors. Invite feedback.

  “Two: solution. Tom, you had it dead right: can’t just be technical fix. We’ll need to arrive at set of processes that organization buys into. Ideally, fraud investigation team reports to Chief Financial Officer. Possibly updating a Board sub-committee direct through IPO period. Team needs to work with stakeholders inside and outside the company: FBI, external PR, others t.b.i.,” to be identified.

  She paused. Her ultimate ‘deliverable’ would need to be a 200–300 page instruction manual detailing everything: the technical parameters of the fraud monitoring software, the full job descriptions of the head of fraud and the investigators, the processes for engaging law enforcement…

  “Three: Clamor should forge strategic alliance with anti-trafficking organization, pref making meaningful financial contribution to it. Ultimately Clamor’s actions will be ruled on as much in court of public opinion as anywhere, should it come to that...”

  Her $250,000 fee sounded excessive. But avoiding a scandal in this arena was certainly worth that much to the company, and she knew better than to expect the Clamor team’s respect and attention if she hung around their Sunnyvale office for free. Perhaps she would give most of it to the anti-trafficking organization that the company allied with.

  The sound-activated recorder clicked off. Once the file was downloaded to the voice recognition module of her laptop, it would kick out an email ready for her – and Nguyen’s – review.

  The car’s dashboard showed 15:27. She’d made it as far as the downtown section of the arterial 5 Freeway, a canyon formed by the busy office buildings either side. Traffic was already slowing to a crawl in the right lanes ahead of the 520 turn off. To the left, cars and trucks went by, tires sticky on the asphalt. But her lane had stopped. A curtain of the famous Seattle rain was crossing Lake Union. Soon, heavy raindrops turned the metal surfaces of the car into a timpani drum. Scarlet taillights spangled in the windshield. She flipped the wipers to FAST, sloshing a half-bucket of rainwater onto a neighboring car. Considerate!

  Which reminded her: she reached for her iPhone and looked up Ray’s number.

  “Hi, I have an appointment with Ray at four,” she told the cool-sounding executive assistant who answered. “I’m afraid I’m going to be late.”

  There was a pause. “He doesn’t seem to have you on his calendar.”

  “We arranged it by email over the weekend. It was meant to be just coffee.”

  “Hold on,” the assistant said, and came right back on: “He’s actually in a meeting, which may run for a while.”

  Natalie hesitated. “Well could you ask him to call me when he gets out?”

  “I’ll let him know. He’s got your number?”

  “Sure.” She gave it again.

  The cars and trucks around her seemed to murmur imprecations now, back on gridlocked I-5. The rain intensified, sounding like a rice bowl being emptied. She ran her hands round the edge of the steering wheel. Had she got the dates mixed up? Picking up her iPhone again, she hurriedly accessed email:

  Hi Ray,

  Long time I know. I happen to be in town Monday at short notice and wondered if you’d like to grab coffee?...

  Scrolling back up:

  stranger! great to hear from you. sure, im around. what time will be you over on the darkside?

  She hit REPLY:

  Chaos on the 520 bridge. Just spoke with your e.a. – may need to resched. so sorry

  Certainly they would need to resched: it was gone 4:30 by the time she exited the freeway, just a half-mile further on. Ray had not called her back and she was due to meet Stacey and Melinda at five. Cursing the traffic, her old town, corporate life and the twenty-first century in general, she made her way towards Seattle’s waterfront Public Market, parking in front. At least the fish thr
owers were happy, tossing their slippery catch for tourists. Water ran down from broken gutters in unbroken lines.

  Stacey and Melinda still worked over on the Eastside, but lived in the more lively downtown corridor. The Alibi Room was a favorite of theirs: intimate, dark and hidden away. They liked the unpretentious northwest menu, they liked the slightly conspiratorial name itself, and they loved the bellinis.

  The place never failed to bring back memories. It was where they ended up the night Natalie was promoted to first ever female head of security. It was where they celebrated the evening Melinda got engaged, and where they toasted Melinda a week later when she got un-engaged. It was where they went after Stacey learned of her mom’s illness. And it was where Melinda and Natalie could be found that other night she didn’t care to remember. Melinda Dayne was an old family friend from South Carolina. Stacey Stafford, from Tennessee, had been Natalie’s roommate through boarding school. She’d gone on to nearby Georgia Tech, been in Atlanta for the Olympics and – after the bombing there – had almost gone into security herself.

  Natalie’s discomfort persisted as she thought about seeing them again. Originally, the plan had been to come up Saturday afternoon. They would have gone out as part of a bigger group, then headed off the next day to the Cascade Mountains. In all probability, they wouldn’t have left before noon on the Sunday, so Stacey and Melinda had arranged to take Monday off work. They would have stayed at a friend’s log cabin, thrown wood on the fire, drunk lots of wine, told jokes and done some serious talking.

  Then came the turn of events at Clamor, and Nguyen’s out-of-the-blue offer. “Take it!” they’d implored her, sounding happy – that she was getting back in the corporate saddle, that perhaps the gang was getting back together. So why did Natalie feel such apprehension as she walked into the candle-lit bar, looking out for their familiar faces?

  There they were, at their usual table.

  She walked over and they hugged and kissed and said their hellos! – yet, it felt oddly restrained. The immediate ease and warmth of yesteryear wasn’t quite there. She thought she noticed a guarded look in their eyes.

  “You all OK?” she asked, slipping into deep southern.

  “Fine!” Fahn, they said. “So good to see you!”

  There was moment’s pause. “OK. I’ll get the drinks. What’ll you all have?”

  “Better make it wine – a chard,” Melinda said.

  “Me too,” said Stacey.

  Natalie strode over to the bar, noticing her friends sink back into deep conversation. A man dressed in black with lively grey eyes turned to her: “Hey, could I get a female perspective on something?”

  “No!” she said. She didn’t want to be hit on, but she surprised herself with the force of her rebuff. “I mean, not now. Sorry, I’m just here with my friends.”

  His hands shot up in a ‘that’s cool’ gesture.

  As she brought the drinks back, they looked up at her – with concern, again. After all the day’s events, she felt slightly light-headed. What was going on?

  “You all sure everything’s OK?” she asked again, quite tense now. “Melinda?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” and they started to catch up a little. But how differently, how hesitantly compared to times gone by. When Melinda got up to go the restroom and Stacey made as though to join her, Natalie couldn’t take it any longer:

  “Gals, what is wronng?”

  They looked at each other, then at her.

  “Stacey? Look, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it up here Saturday. I thought it was OK – that you were OK with that!”

  “It’s not about Saturday, Natalie,” Melinda took charge. “It’s about your page on Clamor.”

  The gnawing apprehension was back. “Huh?”

  “Your Clamor page,” Stacey agreed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The profile page you have here on Clamor,” for the third time.

  “Nuh-uh. I don’t have a Clamor page, I’m not on Clamor!”

  “Yes you are!”

  “No I’m not!” Natalie almost shouted, to the entire bar.

  “Come on Natalie, you’re de-fi-nately on Clamor.” And Melinda reached for her handheld, pushing it towards her.

  She was definitely on Clamor.

  Natalie gave up trying to navigate Melinda’s handheld and pulled out her MacBook. A moment later, she had the wi-fi password from the barman and the three of them huddled round her Clamor profile page, their faces lit white in the darkness.

  Natalie suddenly felt very weary. The lead photo of her was a simple headshot from several years back. She had about 20 friends, an odd assortment of people from over the years. Her English friend Verity was there, as was Hélène from Paris.

  “When did you guys become my friends?” It felt like she was outside her own body.

  “We got the ru-quest this morning. That’s the first time we saw it. We thought you’d caved and joined, an’ we were happy. Then we looked closer.”

  Her stated interests were all semi-familiar ones: yoga, ‘lotsa eastern philosophy’, self-inquiry, ‘going-within’, and on went the list of self-indulgent attributes.

  But it was the blog feed that sent her heart pounding in her chest cavity:

  ‘Feelin kinda antsy today. just went 4 a latte, gotta cut down on that caffeine. maybe I need 2 smoke something!’

  It went on to describe, in a rather hectoring tone, how glad she was to be free of her last job. How that last job had succkked!!

  It was everything Natalie had disavowed about blogging. She’d won prizes for her school essays, and who did she have to thank for that? It had taken her father years to become a featured columnist for Le Monde. He’d trained under the most experienced of reporters, his copy obsessively researched, proof-read, fact-checked, with earlier attempts shredded by editors bearing down their decades of experience on him, his later attempts finally accepted and vouchsafed by one of the world’s great news organizations. It had been an apprenticeship. A calling. And that was before considering the substance. A single memory flashed up, of an elderly man sitting at their apartment on the Avenue Kléber, mumbling to her father about worldly matters. The tobacco smell was as pungent in her nostrils as though it were yesterday. She must have been three or four at the time. The man was Jean-Paul Sartre, in the last year of his life.

  What would her father make of this self-referential nonsense were he still alive? She shivered and scrolled back to the photo area of the page. There she was on the beach, in a brown bikini, standing with hands in prayer position. She vaguely remembered the moment, with two other girls from the yoga organization, after snorkeling one afternoon: a Thank You to the wonders of the sea or some such. The photo had been cropped to focus on her glistening chest, down which water trickled. There was another photo of her on the beach, this time horseback riding. To avoid skin rash, she’d worn breeches and old boots. She remembered it well: galloping along in the early day with several others, sea spray and salt air and horse smell and the rhythmic movement of massive limbs filling her world. This time a three-quarter shot, from behind. Hers.

  A third photo: a close up, less flattering, revealing the fine lines spreading round her eyes. Others from the yoga studio… All real. Doubtless they’d been taken by retreat-goers and posted online somewhere, perhaps even the yoga retreat’s own website. None appeared to have been digitally altered. But the way they’d been edited together created an unmistakable impression:

  Look at Me! Am I not gorgeously desirable, glamorous and SEXY!?

  It was everything she’d tried to avoid for so much of her life. At boarding school, the daughter of Lorelei Chevalier-Smythe – not even a well-known model! – yet enough of one to make her an easy target for the comments and malicious gossip of other girls. Hence the avoidance of anything like these photos. Then she saw her whiteboard:

  Downwerd d oggie style oh YEAH

  Her profile page apparently lacked even the minimum level of secur
ity. Anyone could access it and write whatever they wanted. And everyone could read the result:

  Id like 2 ride that ! !

  Pricks. But it could have been a lot worse. Perhaps she was overreacting? The photos were not awful. The lewd comments were self-evidently the work of prying creeps. Others were weirdly complimentary:

  Super cool! Where d’ya get that bikini from?

  – one woman, a complete stranger, had posted. Ordinarily, closing a Clamor account – the foundation if not entirety of many peoples’ social lives – was an arduous old task if you lacked the account login and password. But she was now working for Clamor. She resigned herself to calling Nguyen or Malovich, finishing up the night with her friends, then emailing everyone in the morning: “my account was just hacked…” At the end of the day, no one had stopped breathing.

  Then she saw it.

  The continuation of the blog.

  Oh. My. God.

  – guess I was the wrong person for my last job, coz it succkked!! Or maybe I just sucked the wrong guy, but that’s another kinda job Ha Ha!

  She pushed the laptop away. Her girlfriends’ arms wrapped round her:

  “We didn’t know how to tell you,” one said soothingly.

  Noise and confusion…

  “RAY-mee!” Stacey and Melinda were chorusing to the barman across the room, who was flailing among the dusty, expensive bottles in one corner...

  “No-wh!” they called out: “The RAY-mee ex-oh!”

  Only the Rémy Martin XO Excellence would do for this one.

  She surprised herself by laughing out loud. What a strange gaggle they made! The whole room was watching. The shy barman poured a triple measure. She glugged it down, the sickly liquor coursing through her, warming her back up a bit.

  She opened the laptop again, suddenly realizing how the identity hijacker may have gone about it. “Don’t – look at that!” Stacey said, reaching to close it, but Natalie told her No, it was OK: she wanted to show them something.