Brett Battles - Shadow of Betrayal

The woman stood and walked to the door. “Be safe,” she said, and then she was gone.

Marion hugged Iris tightly, feeling the child smile against her cheek. So innocent. So vulnerable, yet almost always happy. She would be childlike for life, thanks to a genetic misfire, but in a way Marion envied that. But it was also that misfire, that malformed chromosome giving the child Down syndrome, that had made her both unwanted in her own community yet desired by men with guns who tried to steal her in the night.

That’s why Frau Roslyn had hidden the child at the first hint that her orphanage was going to be searched again. She had told Marion a few weeks earlier that there was a group on the lookout for discarded children of a certain type—those with traits that in the West would label them “special needs.” Specifically those with either autism or Down syndrome. Other facilities had been searched, and word had spread among those who cared for the orphans in the city to be on their guard. Why someone wanted these children, Frau Roslyn had no idea. But whatever the answer was, she’d told Marion it could not have been good. And when Iris came into her possession, Roslyn had made Marion promise to do what she could to help keep the child safe. Only Marion hadn’t realized at the time it would turn into this.

After what she and the child had been through, Marion knew she’d done the only thing she could have. And no matter how difficult, it had been the right thing. She was even starting to rethink her plan to find Iris a real home once they were safe. The child’s home should be with her. How could it not be?

That was if Marion didn’t get them killed first.

She brought Iris back to New York on the first flight another colleague, one who worked at the UN headquarters in Manhattan, could get her and Iris on. At JFK Airport, she had been tense as she approached passport control. She had chosen to go with the set of documents bearing her own name, but still worried about those Noelle had given her for the child. But Iris’s papers had held up, and they were both allowed into the country without a second look.

Marion got a hotel room not far from Port Authority, but her sleep that night was counted in minutes, not hours. She told herself it was jet lag, though she knew that wasn’t true. She’d been on edge for several days straight and now didn’t know how to turn it off. She was up and out of the hotel with Iris before 7 a.m.

“They’ll keep looking for her,” Frau Roslyn’s cousin Jan had said. “You need to get her away. Once you do, you need to disappear. Don’t let anyone know where you are. These people will find you. And once they have the girl, they’ll kill you.”

She knew she should get out of New York, but there was something she needed to do first.

She purchased an umbrella stroller for Iris from a Duane Reade drugstore on Fifth Avenue, then found a Kinkos.

Using one of the pay-by-the-minute computers, she searched for any news from Côte d’Ivoire about similar abductions, either attempted or successful. She needed to try to find out what was going on, knowing it might be the only way to save the child. But there was nothing; no news that even hinted at anything other than what could best be described as normal kidnappings and abductions. She almost quit there, telling herself she should be satisfied with the results, that the desire for Iris was an aberration, that Jan had just been overly cautious. And now that she and Iris were thousands of miles away, everything would be fine.

But she knew there was one more place she should check, a database that had more information than could be found in even the most ardent Internet searches.

She glanced around the computer room with the sudden feeling a thousand eyes were staring at her. But the two other customers and the attendant behind the desk were preoccupied with their own concerns, and none had a direct view of her computer screen.

She allowed her nerves to calm for a moment, then typed an address into the Web browser. Using her own password, she logged on to the United Nations employee site. Her friend Noelle back in Côte d’Ivoire had promised not to process her leave of absence for several days, thus ensuring she would still have access to the site. Still, Marion held her breath until the home screen came up.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

It didn’t take her long to navigate to the section she was looking for. Again, she had to use her password. Access to this area of the site was limited to those who worked in certain departments.

She selected the databases she was interested in, typed in her parameters: kidnapping, children, Down syndrome, disabled, Côte d’Ivoire. She hit Enter. Nothing came up. She decided to change up her search tags, changing Côte d’Ivoire to western Africa in case there were some reports from the surrounding area. This time the search took all of forty-five seconds to complete. When it was done, it presented her with a list of seventy-three potential matches. But while she’d been looking for additional cases in Côte d’Ivoire and the surrounding area, she’d actually found reports from countries spread across the globe: Guatemala, Rwanda, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mexico, and at least a half-dozen other developing nations.

Marion skimmed the list. She had seen similar reports before. Most would be secondhand observations from locals telling UN officials what they had seen. She eliminated those that were of no interest to her. When she was done, she was still left with forty-four items, many of them several pages long. Beside her, Iris stirred in the stroller. She’d be awake soon, wanting something to eat and some attention. Marion decided the best route was to print out the ten most promising reports and take them back to her hotel to read.

By the time she finished, Iris was fully awake, and sitting in her lap.

Iris made a fussy noise as if to say she wanted to be anywhere but here.

“Just one more,” Marion whispered in the child’s ear.

She hit Print, then logged off the computer.

After collecting her printouts, she wheeled Iris up to the counter to check out.

“Cute girl,” the woman said as she handed Marion her change.

“Thanks,” Marion said.

“Is she yours?”

“Eh … no,” Marion said, taken aback by the question. Beside the fact that it was rude, Marion’s sense of security kicked in. A Caucasian woman with an African baby would be remembered. “I’m just babysitting for a friend.”

“Well, it looks like you’re doing a pretty good job,” the woman said. “What’s her name?”

Another moment of panic. “Emily,” Marion said, then immediately regretted it. Emily was her sister’s name.

The attendant leaned over the counter. “Hi, Emily. How are you?”

Iris smiled at the woman.

The look on the woman’s face began changing from one of happiness to one of curiosity. Marion knew the woman had seen there was something different in the child’s face—the epicanthic folds at the corner of the girl’s eyes, her nose broad yet smaller than normal.

Before the woman could say anything, Marion wheeled Iris toward the door and out onto the street. As they headed away, she knew she could never return to this particular branch again.

She got them a room in a hotel just off Times Square. That evening, after Iris fell asleep on the bed, Marion was finally able to read through the reports. Some were only a paragraph, and some were several pages. A few had been investigated, but most had not. There was a note in the report from Bangladesh saying the story was probably fabricated, and that the people involved were most likely just trying to get some money out of the UN.