In the case of Ana, she was taken one night in La Ceiba by gangs who first raped her, then smuggled her to America to be a prostitute. “Sadly,” she said, “it is true for some of the boys as well, although many of the men and women were not kidnapped, but were tricked to come here. Who does not want to come to America for education,
Heat scanned the lineup of vacant-eyed souls. Of course she knew about human trafficking — the underground industry of human servitude that kept the moral outrage of slavery alive and well in modern times. But here she saw it in the flesh, en masse. Men, women, and — as she learned from Social Services — children, as young as nine, caught in the historic form of abduction, abuse, and enslavement for the enrichment of their captors; and all who supported the system. Here before her were forty-six lives. What made her shudder was the certainty that they were the proverbial grain of sand on the beach.
Exhilarated by her rescue from bondage, Ana led Heat and Rook around the warehouse, describing the setup and the jobs done by each team. “That’s how they divided us, by specialty. And by literacy. You’ll see what I mean.”
The wide-open, twenty-thousand-plus-square-foot building was subdivided by task. In one end, plastic garbage bags were mounded high, filling one end of the immense, hangarlike space. The rest of the concrete floor was sectioned off by planks of wood that defined square borders where sorting was done. All work was done by hand. One team sorted each bag into raw materials that were carried to its designated section. An area each for: credit cards and credit card receipts; ATM cards and receipts; personal mail, which was then organized by type — bank statements, preapproved credit lines, mail order and Internet invoices that used credit cards, newsletters from professional organizations and clubs, and birthday cards to harvest dates of birth; cardboard shipping cartons with name and address labels; and hard goods, which included everything from discarded clothing with names and phone numbers, to luggage tags, and old technology — especially computer hard drives and old phones.
“This was all sorted on hands and knees all day and into the night. And then the trucks would come and bring more and more.”
Rook asked, “What happened to the good stuff you found?”
“Yes, the useful material with names and information that could be used to make IDs or to do fraud were boxed in those plastic bins and transported elsewhere to the people who would make false accounts or fake credit cards and such.”
“It must be worth millions,” he said to Heat. But she was looking elsewhere, across the huge room.
“Ana, what is that back there?”
“The confetti pile. Come, I will show you.” She led them to the back corner where they saw the shredded material FiFi had described. Shredded documents, which had been emptied out of plastic bags, laid out on the floor, and painstakingly — almost impossibly — assembled like jigsaw puzzles into completed car loan and mortgage apps, résumés, anything that got shredded for security from identity theft. “This is where they made me work,” she said. “Because they said I was patient and smart.”
Ana coughed back a tear and then kicked apart one of the nearly complete docs, a credit report for an apartment. It swirled to pieces in a mini gyre and drifted to the floor like snow in a globe. She liked it so much she kicked another and another until she collapsed. Nikki held her to comfort her and beckoned a social worker over.
But as quickly as she had crumbled, Ana sat up, wiping the tears, declaring she was fine. Heat said, “Ana, we can do this when you feel stronger, but I would like to ask you to look at some pictures.”
“I will do it now,” she said. “Truly, I am fine. I am free.” She smiled. Nikki took out her cell phone and scrolled to a photo of Fabian Beauvais. “Oh it is Fabby!” Ana was so excited she tried to take the phone. “He worked here, too, you know.” And then her face clouded. “Fabian was tricked to come her from Haiti after the earthquake. They told him he would have a better life. This was his life.” She turned to the room as the last of the forced laborers left for the shelter. “But Fabian, he got out. He got away. And helped his fiancée break free, too.”
Heat put her phone away. She couldn’t bear to carry this conversation any further.