Page 17

Abby

SK Compound, Myanmar (Burma)

Three months later

“ W ake up, Abby.”

Lucky, the Thai girl who dealt drugs with Nico long ago, back on Ko Pha Ngan, shakes me gently. “If we’re late they’ll make us run again.”

I blearily swing my legs over the side of the bunk, rubbing my eyes. She gives me a sympathetic glance. “Bad dreams again?”

I nod.

“Don’t worry.” She gives me an understanding smile. “The nightmares fade after a while, I promise.”

Lucky should know. She’s been held captive here at Shway Kyaarpaann—or SK, as we all call the Myanmar scam farm—since she disappeared seven years ago, back when Nico and I knew her.

I shake my head, struggling to return her smile as we head to the communal bathroom. “I don’t know how you do it, Lucky. How you’re still so kind after so long in this place.”

She lifts a shoulder, her sloping eyes glowing with a warmth I can only admire.

“I am Thai, Abby. We are Buddhists. And Buddhists live by the four noble truths, all of which acknowledge the truth of suffering.” She touches my arm gently.

“I can choose to hate this place and suffer or find joy in the small things. And today”—she turns the shower on and grins at me—“we have hot water for our shower. This is definitely a joy.”

Her smile is infectious enough to cut through the cobwebs of sleep and the hopeless despondency of waking to another day in this place. It buoys me into my brief shower and lasts through breakfast.

It fades as soon as I enter the huge open-plan office, sit down at my desk, and put my headset on. I’m messaging a girl called Rachel, who I met on a dating site a month ago.

Well, I didn’t meet her.

Matthew James, one of my many aliases, met her. Matthew, according to his fake social media profile, is a day trader who lives in New York. It’s important that he lives a safe thousand miles from Rachel’s home in Topeka, Kansas, or else he’d have to actually meet her.

Rachel is a single forty-five-year-old teacher who owns her own home, has a modest salary, and has tucked away a small amount of savings.

Or rather, she had a small amount of savings, until Matthew recently convinced her to invest them in crypto.

Rachel thinks she has doubled her money. She’s very excited and keen to invest more.

Which is good, since Matthew is currently encouraging her to take out a second mortgage on her home to do exactly that. He’s also been promising that they will meet soon, in New York. He’s going to fly her there and take her out on a very expensive date.

Except the date will never happen. And when Rachel tries to withdraw her supposed investment, she will discover that her account never existed—and neither did Matthew.

I glance around warily to ensure none of the armed supervisors are watching. Please , I type into our private chat, do your due diligence, Rachel. Make sure you are very comfortable with this investment.

“You!” One of the meaner supervisors, a ferret-faced man with broken teeth, cuffs my head hard enough to knock me sideways on my chair and glares at my screen. “You giving warnings to client.” His Chinese accent might be thick, but unfortunately, he reads English all too well.

“I’m asking her to re-mortgage her house.

” I speak calmly, meeting his eyes. “This is how I gain her trust. It’s in the script.

” I wave a sheaf of paper at him, and he sniffs contemptuously, pressing the muzzle of his automatic rifle into my shoulder hard enough to leave yet another bruise.

“I watch you,” he snaps warningly before he turns away.

Of course you will. You’re always w atching.

I swallow my anger and lower my head, staring blankly at the script in my hand.

I wasn’t lying. While we have a lot of creative license in how we scam our unsuspecting victims, the script also gives us specific lines to gain their trust. Inviting people to do their due diligence is one of those ways.

People never do, of course.

Particularly lonely women who are being love-bombed day and night by the handsome, fictional Matthew James and his fake billionaire lifestyle.

But I can always hope. Which is why I ask all my victims, repeatedly, to check out what they’re investing in. I always pray they will work it out in time to save themselves from complete ruin.

Like everyone else held captive here, I walk a fine line between saving myself from death or disappearance and trying my hardest to save my victims from destroying their lives.

If we don’t make target each day, we have to run the Loop.

The five-mile running track circles our Myanmar compound, which was designed and built specifically to serve the multibillion-dollar online scam industry.

The Chinese triads who guard the compound make us run the Loop at gunpoint, dripping from the heavy Myanmar humidity.

It’s better than the alternative.

Beyond the high walls, deep in the dense jungle, lie the anonymous graves of those who either won’t cooperate or repeatedly miss target.

We all know it happens.

The most recent disappearance was a Sudanese man, an illegal refugee who’d answered an ad in Bangkok to work in a call center. I originally met him on the boat which took us from Thailand across the Moei River to Myanmar.

He didn’t believe me when I told him he’d been kidnapped. I’m not sure when he realized the truth. Was it when we were pushed off the barge onto an abandoned riverbank and met by armed guards? Was it during the long walk through the dense jungle to the SK compound?

Or was it when the compound doors locked behind him, and he realized for the first time there was no way out?

Either way, he’d refused to cooperate, no matter how much they punished him. He wouldn’t run scams, and he wouldn’t help recruit other illegal refugees. Finally, he tried to escape.

That was when they shot him. In the middle of the compound courtyard, so we could all watch.

They do that every so often. They like to remind us of the consequences of trying to escape.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people held captive in the large dormitories here.

The name of the scam farm might mean Gold Lotus in English, instead of the Good Shepherd, and the conditions might not be as squalid as they were in Bogotá’s El Buen Pastor, but this place is no less of a prison than that was.

Even worse, here there’s no foreseeable end to our term of imprisonment and no clear way out except via a jungle burial.

Another message from Rachel pops up on my screen: I love talking to you so much!

I force myself to match her tone. I can’t believe I’ve found someone as special as you , I type, swallowing my self-disgust. I’m falling more in love with you every day.

You’re amazing, Matthew , she types back, with a star-eyed emoji. You’ve changed my entire life. I feel so lucky. I can’t wait to finally meet you!

I respond in kind, keeping up the endless stream of toxic drivel, trying to distract my mind from what I’m doing.

Unlike the Sudanese man, and many others held here, I knew what was coming long before I ever reached Myanmar.

I knew from the moment I woke up in an abandoned mining camp in far north Australia three months ago, to find a fat man in a Banderos jacket called Turbo handing me a bottle of water and a stale sandwich.

If only it had stopped with Turbo.

Fat and ugly as he was, Turbo was also harmless. Kind, even. Enough that I almost convinced myself I had a chance of escaping before whatever hell was coming next.

Except the mining camp was deep in the Australian desert, which is more of an effective prison than any guns or electric fences could be. And when Turbo’s friends came for me a short time later, I had no chance to escape before I was shoved in a car and drugged again.

When I woke up the next time, I was inside a shipping container, along with two dozen other unfortunate captives, all stuffed in so tightly we could barely breathe.

I honestly thought I would die.

When the doors of the shipping container opened two weeks later, and I smelled the unmistakable Thai air, I almost wished I had.

I’d known from the moment the Banderos took me that my chances of escape were minimal. But up until those doors opened in Thailand, I’d still clung to hope.

Hope that it was the Cardenas cartel behind my kidnapping.

Rodrigo Cardenas might terrify me. But I also know what to expect from him. Rodrigo might like to cause pain, but he isn’t a psychopath. Rodrigo, I might have had a chance of surviving.

But Jacey, the kingpin psychopath with no real name? With a face he will famously kill to protect, rather than risk anyone being able to identify him?

No. Jacey is something different altogether. Something nobody survives, especially not an Australian country girl who should never have escaped him in the first place.

And Thailand is Jacey’s territory. Jacey’s, and the triads he hires to do his dirty work for him.

The moment those doors opened I knew for certain the darkest shadows from my past had finally caught me. The faceless man had just been hiding in them, like some hideous spider, until I walked right back into his web.

Three months later, I still don’t know what the fuck he plans to do with me. I haven’t even laid eyes on him.

That’s the other thing about Jacey: he likes to toy with people. To play psychotic games. It’s what he does, the way he keeps everyone jumping to his tune.

But I know he’s here. This place has Jacey’s corrupt stench all over it. Maybe he’s not always physically present, but I’d lay any bet that he controls every dollar that comes in or goes out of these walls—and that this is only one branch of his insidious underworld empire.

The computer dings with a new message, and I open it reluctantly.

What kind of hobbies do you have, Matthew? It’s Rachel’s lunch hour. Right now she will be eating macaroni salad at the desk in her classroom. She’s a lonely woman.

They’re all lonely. That’s how we pick them.