Nemesis: Innocence Sold Read Free Page A

it. Sometimes you’re really dumb, Danny.”
    His sister had never been able to lie to him, and her uncomprehending reaction made his deliberations over the last weeks seem so absurd that he had to laugh. “OK, well, thanks. That’s pretty clear. But what’s up with you and that call you just took?”
    “Nothing important. I’d have been able to get a spot at a medical convention in Atlanta, after all, from the waiting list. It has to do with alternative treatment methods for children in comatose states. I definitely wanted to go, but not with you here.”
    Ann’s regret was obvious, and Daniel vaguely recalled a conversation with Stephan, whose wife was a doctor. “Is that the event with Henrik Fischer?”
    Ann nodded enthusiastically. “How do you know him? That’s pretty unusual for the team doctor of a special unit.”
    Since the world of medical luminaries to which Fischer belonged was fairly small, Daniel wasn’t particularly surprised. “Listen, go to Atlanta, and I’ll see to it that you get to speak privately with Henrik. And so you don’t have to worry about your little brother, I’ll fly back to Hamburg.”
    “You’re not serious, are you?”
    “I am. Henrik is a very good friend of Stephan and his wife. Are we agreed?”
    “I mean the part about flying back. You just got here.”
    “That doesn’t matter. I have plenty of free flights. Besides, I have a feeling my sister will be showing up in Hamburg soon. Not to visit her neglected brother, of course, but to take a look at Henrik’s clinic.”
    She gave him a withering look. When that failed to achieve the desired effect, provoking only a grin, she threw a pot holder at him. “Light the grill, Danny.”
    Smiling, he saluted.
    Sandra felt tired and rubbed her eyes. She avoided looking at the clock in the lower corner of her laptop. The increasing brightness outside her window showed that dawn was already breaking, and she had once again forgotten the time. But she had the feeling of being so close to a breakthrough that she couldn’t stop.
    Despite her tiredness, she intently focused on the screen. By now she had developed a sense of how to interpret the text in the chat room and how to decipher which lines were harmless insinuations and flirting and which held hidden meanings. There were still ten users making promises to each other that they would never keep in real life.
    In her mind, she formulated an ambiguous response to SexyHexy while she waited for Killer007 to answer the question from God666. Finally the text she had been waiting for appeared: “Will bring the perfect flower with me. Yellow on top, brown below. Waiting has paid off. Meeting in 2 d. 4y/50k.” The entry disappeared from the screen so quickly that the person who had sent it must have deleted it immediately after sending. Even if one of the others had noticed it, he would have thought it had to do with a harmless date because of the banter that had preceded it. Sandra read it differently: in two days a four-year-old boy with blond hair and brown eyes would be sold for fifty thousand euros.
    She typed an answer to the person calling her- or himself a sexy witch and suggested, in uncouth language, that she wasn’t interested in vanilla sex but was looking for something new. Earlier she had already discreetly woven in comments implying that she had enough money to afford exotic things.
    After having been invited into this chat room, she had hoped for quick success. Instead she was still looking for clues and had nothing solid to go on. She didn’t ask for sex with minors directly because she was afraid of destroying any chance of a breakthrough. She had to be patient and wait for “them” to make contact with her. She remained certain that repulsive deals were being made on this corner of the Internet. She said good-bye with a yawning smiley and logged out while a little program developed by her brother saved all the new lines of text. She smiled at the thought of