Power and Empire

The contract security officers in the lobby of the fortresslike Dallas field office had checked Caruso’s credentials and assumed he was armed. The magnetometer beeped when he walked through, which was not surprising to the guards. He wasn’t local, but he was an agent, so everyone assumed he would be armed. They did not, however, know that he wore a wire neck loop and microphone connected to the small radio hidden under the tail of his loose shirt and tucked inside the waistband of his jeans. The tiny earpieces Campus operatives wore were designed to blend in, but he’d removed his to be on the safe side. FBI agents were trained to be highly observant, and wearing an obvious wire into the lion’s den was sure to earn him a case of the third degree from the Old Man — the notoriously territorial and protective special agent in charge of the Dallas office. This left Caruso blind to any communication coming from other Campus members but still able to feed pertinent information to them through the mic just out of sight below his collar. He knew it wasn’t quite sensitive enough to pick up everything that was being said around him, so he strategically repeated the important stuff while trying not to sound like too much of an idiot.

“Seriously,” he said, shaking Callahan’s hand as they stood in the hall outside the interrogation room. “You and I have the same goals here.”

Callahan took a step back and folded her arms, giving him an up-and-down once-over. She was attractive, in an I’ll-kick-your-ass sort of way. Her stylish blouse was unbuttoned one button farther than she probably realized. At first glance, her ponytail gave her a look of innocence, but one look from her green eyes warned that she was anything but.

At length, she held out her hand and snapped her fingers. “Let’s see your creds.”

“They checked them downstairs.”

Callahan scoffed. She reminded Caruso of his mother checking his hands for dampness to make sure he’d actually washed them before dinner. “Well, I want to check them again.”

He passed the black leather case to her and shot a glance at Tim Dixon while he waited.

“Don’t look at me for aid and comfort,” the supervisor said. “She just happened to ask you before I did.”

Callahan studied the ID card and the badge, obviously disappointed that they weren’t fake. “How did you find out about Feng so quickly?” Her lip curled up in disgust. “You must have had him under surveillance, and if that’s the case, why in the hell didn’t you step in and rescue the kids? Could there possibly be anything more important than that?”

Caruso took a deep breath. “First of all, I can’t speak to how I knew. But I can promise you that if I’d seen any children in danger, they would have become my highest priority. I would have gotten them out in a heartbeat.”

Callahan looked at him for a long moment and then handed him back his credentials. “I believe you on that one tiny count, Dominic Caruso. But that doesn’t mean I’m all giddy about having you attached to my hip. And anyway, if you are what I believe you to be, I fully expect you to lie to me at least a dozen times a day.” She turned back to the interrogation room, pausing with her hand on the door. Her eyes softened a notch. “Listen, I know what you’re doing is probably super-duper important in the great scheme of the geopolitical chess game. But the work my team is doing here isn’t a game in any sense of the word. We estimate that there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in recorded history — and many of them are just kids, being forced to do unspeakable things, sometimes in a rented box truck at some peach orchard servicing a line of migrant workers waiting their turn, sometimes on a webcam. Some piece of trash gets arrested for child porn and their defense attorney boohoos to the judge and says, ‘Oh, Your Honor, my client is just a collector. He would never touch an actual child.’ Well, I say people who collect baseball cards eventually go to a game. People tell me that in adults, at least, prostitution is a victimless crime. Maybe one case in a million they might possibly have a point. But you try and have sex ten or fifteen times a day and see how you feel. Johns are rapists — they just pay somebody for the experience.”

Caruso raised both hands in surrender. “I’m not arguing with you. Really, I am on your side.”

“I just wanted you to know why I’m so bitchy right from the get-go,” Callahan said. “There is so much inertia in this ocean of evil shit that I have to push back or I’ll drown, you know. Anyway, I haven’t quite figured out Eddie Feng’s angle yet. But he’s about to tell us where we can find a guy one step up the ladder in what looks like a major human-trafficking ring. Supposedly there’s some connection to a Chinese guy that goes by the handle of Coronet. That mean anything to you?”

“Coronet?” Caruso said, repeating it so Clark and the others could hear. “I’m interested to hear where we can find a link to him. Mind if I come along?”