Plan B Read Online Free PDF Page A

up. Her A-shirt had come up, exposing her belly, and I couldn’t help glancing.
    What I saw sickened me.
    Her abdomen was crisscrossed with raised red welts that looked like they’d been made by a rawhide whip or maybe an electrical cord. I could see that the long welts extended to her lower back, and probably to her buttocks as well.
    She’d been beaten, savagely and repeatedly.
    But the beatings weren’t recent. Some of the welts were deep red and had begun to fade. Some of them had turned into angry new scars. There were also bruises that had gone yellow and blue and purple, indicating that they were several days old, probably more than a week.
    She’d barely been a prisoner at Soler’s house for forty-eight hours. These beatings had been administered long before that.
    After a while Svetlana began to stir and make little noises. Her eyes came open briefly, then closed. Her face went through a series of expressions. She wrinkled her nose, frowned. Then she made a heaving, retching sound. I was there just in time with a kidney-shaped vomit bowl and a cool washcloth.
    “Hey,” I said softly a few minutes later as I released her from the gurney’s restraining straps. “Feel any better?”
    She sat up and glared at me. Her eyes looked a little out of focus.
    “That’s probably just a reaction to the sedative,” I said. “I’m sorry we had to do that, but you weren’t exactly cooperating. You were scared. I can’t blame you.”
    “Where…where am I?” she asked in English with a strong Ukrainian accent.
    I told her my name again. “Your father hired me to get you out of Soler’s house.”
    “You say you work for my… father ?”
    “I don’t work for him. I was hired by him to do this one job. In about two hours we’ll be landing at Gatwick Airport. You’ll be home. Not a prisoner anymore.”
    “A prisoner ?” she said. “I wasn’t a prisoner. I was finally safe!”
    I spoke very softly. “I’m sure that’s what Soler wanted you to think.”
    “Goddamn you!” Then she uttered a profanity that I hadn’t heard since the Special Forces. Not something I expected out of the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Was his name Vadim Kuzma?”
    I looked at her.
    “This man isn’t my father! Vadim Kuzma hired you to kidnap me!”
    *   *   *
    She must have suddenly gotten self-conscious about her thin cotton A-shirt and her welts and bruises, because she folded her arms across her chest. I handed her my ancient, well-worn commando sweater. Army issue. You couldn’t buy those anymore. Now they were made of acrylic and way too scratchy. She looked at the coarse ribbed wool, the shoulder and elbow patches, with distaste, as if it were some filthy rag I’d picked up off the street, but she pulled it over her head anyway. It pooled around her, made her look like a little girl playing dress-up on the floor of her daddy’s closet.
    Except for her face. There was, I now saw, a cynicism, a jadedness in her eyes that she was far too young to have.
    It took a good half an hour before I was able to convince her that it was safe to talk. She clearly lived in fear of Kuzma. I assured her that I had friends in the U.S. embassy in London who could arrange for her to return to Ukraine immediately.
    “I ran away from home almost two years ago,” she said. “We lived in a village in Ukraine called Povvysoke, my mother and me, but I had to leave. I was…drowning. Suffocating. I found a job in Odessa as a waitress, dancing on tables at a bar, and then a man came one day and said I was beautiful and asked if I wanted to be a model. I could make thousands of pounds a day. What should I say?”
    “It was a prostitution ring,” I said. Odessa, Ukraine’s port city, had become one of the world’s hot spots for the international sex trade. The police there were underfunded and overbribed. Organized crime rings dispatched scouts there to recruit vulnerable young girls with bogus offers of glamorous jobs in