Andy McNab - Zero hour

'What do you do then?'

'I tell them to look out of the window. A road name, a bus number. Sometimes I'll get caller ID, but I can't call back unless they tell me to. It's too dangerous.'

We needed to cut to the chase here. 'Anna told you my paper is interested in trafficking into London, yeah?' I leaned in. 'What's the chain, Lena? Does it start with a kidnapping?'

'Sometimes, yes. They drug girls, take them from the fields. Sometimes they drag a drunken city girl off the street and bundle her into the boot of a car. But they don't need to go to all the trouble of beating them up and smuggling them out of the country if the girls are happy to travel of their own free will. Sometimes they even pay their own fares. The gangs call it "happy trafficking". These ones are even given fake passports if they want to get away to start a completely new life, away from the poverty – or whatever else it is they're trying to escape from. The gangs prefer these girls. If they're not bruised and battered they'll earn more as prostitutes.' She sighed. 'It's only when the person who meets them has taken away their passport that they discover the broken promises, and by then it's too late. The ones with fake ID are lost for ever.'

She looked up as the black-haired girl came back in with a tray carrying three steaming cups. She put the tray down on Lena's desk and busied herself with an ancient fax machine. Then she lit herself a cigarette and joined us.

'There isn't anything happy about happy trafficking, is there, Irina?'

The girl stared at me for so long I thought she was never going to speak. Then I realized she didn't quite know where to begin.

'I was seventeen. I was at college. I was training to be a teacher. English teacher. One day a girl I went to school with came to see me. She was working at an expensive restaurant in Greece, she said. She was making a good salary. She could get me such a job if I wanted. I needed more exams to graduate, but also I needed money. My mother was ill.' Irina took a drag and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. 'I agreed to go with my friend. She organized everything. She drove us to Odessa, and came with me on the ferry to Istanbul. Then she put me on a plane to Athens. She said she would join me later.

'Another "friend" met the flight. He told me the waitress job was finished. He said he could take me to Italy. There was work in Italy, he said. On the journey, he asked me strange questions. "Do you have any scars? Will your parents come looking for you?" We arrived in Milan and there was no restaurant. That was when I found out what my school friend had been working as. And to buy her freedom and get back to Moldova, she had promised to recruit a new girl.'

She inhaled again, more deeply this time. She was bracing herself. 'In Italy, the "friend" took me to meet some men in an apartment. Russian men. They said I had to help them repay their investment. I said no, so they beat me. They said they would kill me if I didn't do what they said, and give them what I earned each day.

'I kept saying to them I must go back to Mother. My mother was sick. She needed medicine. They didn't listen. I had to work seven days a week, from the afternoon to early morning the next day. Twelve hours every day, except when I had my period. The Russians took everything. They said if I tried to escape, the police would bring me back to them. The police were their friends.

'There were three other girls. We were all locked in the same room until a customer came. We had to wear big T-shirts. For six months, I did this work. The customers paid fifty euros for half an hour. Sometimes I made a thousand euros a night. I got nothing.

'And then, at the end of each night, the Russians had a game. They would come into our room and they would rape us all one by one. One of the girls cried so much they said the neighbours would hear. They crushed her toes under a door as punishment.

'Escaping was not easy. You cannot just jump out of a window and be free. And we had no money. Some of the regular customers were policemen. Our visas were renewed even though we were prisoners. But we talked about it a lot.

'The apartment was in a big old building. In the winter it was cold. We used to put a blanket in the big gap under the door to stop the draught. I was doing that when I suddenly had an idea. The door was locked from the other side, but they always left the key in. It was a big old-fashioned key. I pushed about a metre of the blanket underneath, and I used an eyebrow pencil to push the key out of the lock. It fell onto the blanket and I pulled it to our side. The others were too scared to come with me, but I ran.

'I ran and ran. A lady waiting for a bus gave me some money. I took a bus to another city.

'I went to a church and the priest telephoned Lena. She made all the arrangements and she was at the airport for me. Not my family. They were too ashamed. When I went home, the police came to my house two days later. They didn't want information about the Russians. They didn't want to know anything about my friend or her friend in Athens. All they wanted was sex. I said no. They said they would tell the Russians where to find me. They knew who they were. I called Lena and she rescued me – again. Now I help her with her work.'

Irina looked exhausted from retelling her story, but also defiant. 'I still work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But now it is with Lena, helping others like me. We will stop the trafficking one day.'

The way she said it convinced me she'd succeed – or die trying.

Irina went to make more coffee. Lena offered me a cigarette. I shook my head but Anna was straight in there. They both lit up.

'Who are these guys? Old-fashioned Mafia?'

Anna waved a hand at the case files that surrounded us. 'Or the Russian, Albanian and Ukrainian gangsters who run mixed cargoes of women, drugs and arms? Take your pick. But one thing is certain: they'll do anything to turn a profit. Lena told me about those speedboats being intercepted in the Adriatic. The traffickers threw the women overboard to distract the police and protect the heroin and the hardware.'

Lena nodded. 'But it must have hurt them. I'll tell you a sad statistic. After weapons and drugs, human trafficking is now the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world. Tens of billions of dollars a year. Obviously, trafficking on this level requires organization and cross-border networks. But at the Moldova end, things aren't so structured. Many of the recruiters are amateurs who see an opportunity and grab it. Friends betray friends. Even a family member sometimes, in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars. Maybe worst of all, it can be the person the girl shares her bed with.'

Anna and I exchanged a glance.

'Anna told me when she called that she's helping you research a piece on girls who end up in the UK – is that right? In which case, there's something you have to understand about Moldova. More than a quarter of the economically active population have migrated in search of work. A third of our GNP – a billion dollars – is money sent home from abroad.

'Irina and I go around the country, giving out our numbers and showing films. But it's an uphill struggle. Nobody wants to believe us. On TV, they have their noses rubbed in glossy images of life abroad. Maybe they only have to look next door to see a neighbour's new clothes or mobile phone. An unemployed girl who's starving isn't going to be put off by our warnings.'

That made a lot of sense, but our girl was bright and from a rich family. I was about to ask about university kids, but Lena hadn't finished.

'Moldova is important to the traffickers as a source, but the trade isn't centralized. There are local recruiters, but nearly all Moldovan girls are sold to non-Moldovan gangs. It isn't a vertical business model. Once they're out of the country, it's almost impossible to pick up the trail. We have to wait until the victims contact us.'