“That happened to me, but I was so much more than that girl who was kidnapped.”

Elizabeth Smart

One day, Daro called Esmerelda into his office. 

“Yes, sir,” a touch of apprehension in her voice. He was used to it and didn’t notice.

“Ezz, I want you to teach Pip to feed the girls. When she has that down, I’d like you to train her to medicate them, too. You have too many things to do to be wasting time on them. What do you think? Is she up to it?”

“I’d say so, sir. That girl is quite precocious as we both know, and somehow seems as strong as a man. I don’t know how that could be. But I caution you. Dealing with those girls on a personal basis is not like dealing with livestock. Sooner or later, she will bond with one or more of the girls and that will break her heart. When that happens, you’ll have no end of trouble with her. There is no way to protect her from it.”

“How do you deal with it?”

“I’m a wise, old, heartless woman who can see the way the world is turning. The people trade, harsh as it can be, has always been with us. We are no better than ants in many ways. How do I know this? My roots are in this country. Our stories handed down from generation to generation are mostly lost now, but enough survive to preserve the flavour of our history. We, the little people of the land, can see how other little people of the land conduct their affairs. When we pay attention, we understand that people have not come so far from their roots after all, despite schools and new things such as machinery and easy travel. We are all still ants.”

“You don’t think she can do it then?”

“She can do it, but not without some way to harden her. She comes from a soft background that is protected from harsh realities. You will have to eventually give her over to the guerrillas or the paramilitaries to learn how harsh life can be. If she can survive that life, she will then be capable of learning this one. If she can’t develop an insensitive core, this life will kill her eventually and others with her. 

“Okay, let’s do this, Ezzy. Tell me how she’s getting on with the girls in a week. I think I want to grow this girl. She’s smart, but she must never become capable of opposing me or want to oppose me. I need someone young and long-term that I can trust. She might be it. If she isn’t, she’ll be good practice. Can you imagine, a girl trafficking girls? That will be something! All right, I’ve rambled enough. Make it happen.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir, but if I may say so, it's clear you have never been a parent.”

He laughed. "How can that be harder than what I do now?"

"You don't really care about the people you deal with. You do care about this girl. She will consume you."

He snorted. "If you say so."

She didn’t leave. “Is there something else?”

"Yes, may I venture to suggest you get her some suitable clothes? The girls will not pay attention to a pipsqueak dressed the same way they are. The girls will need to know that Pip’s direction is to be followed, or there will be chaos.”

Heledaro scratched his chin. “You have a point. Tell Pedro to get her something when he’s in town next.”

“That won’t do. Pedro knows nothing about what little girls need. To get the best out of Pip, you need her to be happy and confident that her directions and her status have meaning, or there will be  unrest in the henhouse.”

“Okay, you do it. See Enrico for the money from petty cash. Nothing too fancy, though. I just want to have her feel good about herself. I don’t want a Queen Bee. She’s growing on me. That’s dangerous for a man in my position. Despite all the thousands of girls I’ve known, I’ve never seen anything like her. Have you?”

“No sir, and thank you, sir.”

…

By the end of the first week, Pip was comfortable with her new responsibilities. She was especially happy to have a new wardrobe. Small improvements in apparel do a lot to improve a girl’s mood. She was not insensitive to the girls in her care. But for circumstance, an accident of birth, and her own precociousness, she knew she could suffer the same fate. As time went on, the girls came to confide in her. They told her what went on behind closed doors, particularly Heledaro’s door.

Even though she was only eight, she’d already had all the sexual experience she wanted in her young life and could only sympathize with her wards. She didn’t dare to say anything to her lord and master. She’d seen plenty of examples by now of how one word from him could change the misery of life in the dorm to abject despair. The best that could be done was to make things as comfortable for the girls as she could within her limited means.

One thing she was able to accomplish was to improve the quality of meals the captives were fed. To that end, she started experimenting with the foods to see what effects were possible, if any. There was no point, she reasoned, to be learning about food and not put that knowledge to practical use.

To start with, with Esmerelda’s blessing, she reduced the amount of bread they ate until they were down to zero. Then, she cut out dairy and increased the amount of vegetables. Some girls got sick. Most just became lethargic, then in all cases, between three days and a week later, the girls were healthy again and full of energy. She had to increase the sedatives. She did the same thing to herself to see if the same thing would happen to her, and of course, it did. In her case, the lethargy reduced her usual efficiency for a few days. She documented  everything.

They weren’t getting any caffeine or sugar, and the meat portion was meagre. Usually, there would be none unless someone shot an agouti or a peccary.

The inevitable day always came when the girls were unchained and loaded into a truck. There were plenty of tears between Pip and the girls. When they were gone, she realized that she had no record of who any of them were. That seemed wrong. She decided she’d keep a record of each girl in the future; who she was and where she was from and a phone number. She had no idea what she would do with such information, just that it was important that someone cared.

Each week or so, another batch of girls arrived. Pip supervised their cleanup, settling in and sedation. When she wasn’t supervising, she quietly interviewed each girl as soon as they were emotionally able. She recorded the personal information of each, along with a description, since she had no camera.

Having the list presented another problem. Hiding it. In the end, the dog houses seemed the only place on the property where her handiwork would not be discovered. That was not going to work for long, though. Eventually, the dogs themselves would lift their mats and eat her records.

If there is one thing a man like Heledaro controls, it’s access to what every straight man wants: young girls with no strings attached and no reason for guilty feelings afterward. 

And no matter that man’s station in life, he wants to dip his wick and get away with it. Heledaro had the girls, the access and the place to make it all happen. His hacienda was often home to many parties. Rich men of all ages visited from all over the world. Not to the home hacienda, to the club hacienda. The club was on the edge of Cartagena but still far from the main thoroughfare. It was a series of huge halls that could be rented. The halls were like the spokes of a wheel, with the central hall in the middle. They were all individually discreet, but in the event of a huge party, they could be joined via sliding partitions in some suites. 

The building was a low rise, only three stories high, its halls spacious and extravagant. It was where the best of the best-trafficked girls were brought for final appraisal, pricing and eventual sale. 

The facilities included live-in residences where the ultra-rich and powerful could get comfortable while on a buying trip. The currency was not cash or drugs. It was art, the safest form of international money laundering. 

The walls were lined with paintings by local artists. They came in many shapes and sizes with extravagant carved frames, also created by local artisans. Each and every painting commemorated the exquisite female form. There were no prints here. Each painting was an original. 

Heledaro commissioned and bought all of his contract artists’ work without exception. The models were the high-end trafficked girls who went on to become sex toys. The low-end girls became organ donors. None were wasted. The sex toys were sold to foreign clients while the organ donors were sold to clandestine butcher shops for harvesting. Either way, it was all big money and risk-free.

A painting and a high-end girl were a package deal. The painting was a record that a legitimate transaction had taken place, but it was also the cover for whichever girl the purchaser was buying. A painting could be sold separately without the girl, but the price included a girl regardless. It had to be that way to keep the value of the paintings stable. The artists were commissioned exclusively by the cartel under contract as part of the marketing strategy. When the paintings were completed, they became part of a dark web catalogue. The girls weren’t moved until the sale, so they often left the henhouse one at a time in splendour unless they were organ donors. The demand for these girls was insatiable, and in most cases, the girls themselves bought into the lifestyle, with the added incentive of the drugs, of course. Once they were hooked, they could be made to do anything. But they were never shipped as beautiful girls. They were shipped as plain Janes to avoid detection and recognition should they come to anyone’s attention. It was a flawless system that ran on money and private vessels.

Moving the girls back and forth to the art complex where the paintings were done was the most time-consuming and at the same time, the most vulnerable part of the operation. Its strength still came from the drug trade and the men he employed to run it. Heledaro’s vast holdings included shipping, aviation and food exports. He had small jets at his disposal and the crews to man them as needed. But most of the girls weren’t moved by aircraft or private yachts, they travelled in container ships with specially outfitted containers designed for restrained, drugged, human cargo. The amenities on board were by necessity, sparse. Food was at a minimum due to restricted waste removal abilities.

The containers themselves were somewhat modified but not enough to alert port authorities. They had built-in trackers and fittings to enable the installation of panels that girls could be hidden behind. They had vents that allowed for restricted air movement. Girls were perishable goods, and dead ones were worthless.

Since all of the human trafficking was one way, from Colombia to the Orient, or the other way to Spain or Turkey. There was almost no effort on the part of the smugglers to ensure the girls arrived in good mental health. Mental health was not a concern. Whatever shape the girls were in upon arrival was never an issue between seller or buyer. Some girls made it to their destinations in good shape, most were in okay shape, and occasionally, they were disposed of by the easiest way, either in Davey Jones’s locker or sold by midnight express to clandestine dog and cat food manufacturing facilities. Either way, they were never heard from again. They ceased to exist.

El Heledaro paid very close attention to market trends. His charts, which started years ago, had shown early on that as an economic factor, child trafficking was gaining steadily as a powerful economic indicator and a growing part of Colombia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2004, Heledaro was a major player involved in the global movement of nearly 2 million people, 80% of whom were women and children and of whom 50% were minors. Heledaro had long since come to the conclusion that drugs, while profitable, had taken a secondary place in his business structure to human trafficking. Even getting caught was nowhere near as dangerous as drug smuggling. He was changing the focus of his operation as early as 2006. He considered himself a benevolent source of genetic dispersal. He was improving the human gene pool. He found his operation becoming more and more popular in official circles. His nightclubs, featuring “high quality” trafficked girls, were frequented by certain politicians, government employees and members of the military. The police were on the payroll. It was simplicity itself to entrap those men without any fear of resistance or retaliation by bugging their rooms.

Locally, he made sure there was no whiff of his business. No women, girls or boys disappeared, and local crime was kept to a minimum. As Heledaro’s operations seemed to expand in every direction, he attempted various forms of legal enterprises to put a friendly face on the monster that was getting harder and harder to hide even in the jungle. It was one thing to run a drug lab or rather multiple drug labs, but quite another when the products were living, breathing people who had to be controlled but still kept animate enough to function at a high enough level to bring in the American dollars. It became Pip’s job to ensure the trafficking victims didn’t cause problems such as escaping, getting sick or killing themselves. 

They needed shelter, food, clothes, toiletries and beauty supplies. The expense was huge but far from an issue due to the high profit margins. The girls provided free services for which none of them were paid. The human rights violations were not a cost of doing business, they were the business. To do that, business required a heart of stone, a complete absence of emotion. The entire industry is run by and populated by sociopaths, people without a shred of empathy.

Heledaro knew exactly what he was doing when he instructed Ezzy to put Pip into the loop and have her take over looking after the captives. It would break her quickly or harden her to the point of usefulness to him. He had no expectations one way or the other. He’d long since stopped trying to anticipate who would react and how they would react to this ancient and thoroughly ugly business. People might proclaim abhorrence in public, then leap at the first opportunity to sample the fruits of brutality. Pip, by now, was already emotionally old for an eight-year-old going on nine due to her experiences thus far. As dispassionate as he was about it, he hoped she was leaning towards acceptance of the inevitability of her circumstances and the trade itself.

For her own part, Quinn’s given name was sliding away from her. Pip was easier to say and rolled off the tongue with a touch of humour, an emotion entirely lacking in the hijacked people trade. There was and is nothing funny about kidnapping, abuse and murder. He liked his lifestyle though, and he liked the money even more.