Chapter 6: Shipment

The boat with the girl from Crete came in just after sunset. As the guys in Iraklion had said she was worth waiting for, Freddie felt. At least with only her on board, there wasn't any problem with getting her unloaded while the archaeologists were around. They had finished up at the site once the light started to go, so the boat coming in just after dusk had been OK.

Freddie had been looking forward to this one arriving. She made up the set. There were six of them now. An afro-carribean girl, one Japanese, an Australian, two from Pakistan and now this very English looking girl; pale skinned, brown haired, and with the sort of figure that should appeal to the traditionalists among his customers.

Freddie always found the girls' reactions to their arrival in the cellar amusing. Their horrific realisation of their situation gave him a thrill. This one was no different. Freddie had let her captors bring her in from the boat with her head still covered by a hood. He'd watched her tentative footsteps on the cold stone floor of the corridor from the dock as they had pushed her forwards. He'd smiled as she started at the clang of the steel door between the dock and the cellar itself. He listened as she tried to control the panic in her breathing beneath the hood. She wasn't doing very well, as they hurried her forward the short snullfles and whimpers beneath the hood told of her increasing terror.

Then they took her hood off. The cellar was lit dimly so it didn't take her long to get used to being able to see again. And what she saw did nothing to comfort her. There were the two masked men that had been her constant companions from the last few days. And there was another man; older, staring at her with an appraising glance, and, most worrying of all, without a mask.

Freddie studied the way that her body betrayed how her captors had treated her. Good work with the ropes he thought, not elaborate, just effective. And whatever they had used to stuff her mouth was working too. It didn't matter down here of course, there was no one to hear her, or at least no one that could do anything to help her, but Freddie was always pleased when adequate precautions were taken. She was whimpering a little behind the strips of tape strapped across her face. It gave her an appealing charm. The poor girl's clothes were cut and torn, of course, but that didn't matter. She wouldn't be needing them. Freddie studied her body. They'd chosen well from the perspective of her physical conformation.

The girl looked around again and realised that not only was she in the centre of a room surrounded by steel barred cells, each of them except one was occupied by a naked and ball- gagged woman. Her muffled squeals increased. Freddie smiled again, delighted by her response. He nodded towards the empty cell and the girl's captors hustled her inside. The door clanged shut behind her. Clegg shook the hands of the two men and followed them back out to their boat. They were gone less than fifteen minutes after arriving. They would be back in Sithia before morning. Their commission would be paid within the week. Freddie liked to keep the commercial side of things straight. It avoided problems.

Clegg didn't bother with the girl immediately. She would keep, helpless, silenced and alone in her cell. Besides, he had other things to do. From the terrace of his villa Freddie watched the boat slip back out to sea. He looked across to the valley where the archaeologists were working. They were definitely a thorn in his side. They were showing no sign of finishing their digging. Quite the contrary; there had been a lot more coming and going in the valley. They'd got themselves a small hut down there now, a rickety wooden building that had arrived on the back of a truck.

The next morning, Freddie went down to the site, just to keep an eye on what was going on.

Bethany greeted him cheerily. "Hullo!"

"How's it going?" Freddie said.

"Slowly, but that's how we work. This isn't something we can rush at. Look, I'll show you." Bethany led the way to a trench where Stacey was working. The trench was only about six inches deep, little more than a scrape in the floor of the valley. Stacey was gently brushing at a piece of pottery that was protruding from the floor of the trench, cleaning soil away from one side of it, slowly exposing the curvature of the pot as it dived away beneath the surface.