Same old song...Covenant Series, book six...
"Four days ago, a cargo ship landed at the docks, its valuable cargo was unloaded at the terminal and fast tracked to keep as few people there in the loop as possible. By the time the single aluminum cargo container was loaded onto a truck and driven out of the terminal the girls inside had already been secured, prodded, beaten, and when able, taken advantage of, during their overland trek before they found themselves stuffed into the aluminum cargo container that would become their home for weeks as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean."
"As vile as this story is, it’s nothing new. Human trafficking has always been a lucrative business. The only difference now is the legality of it all. Figuratively and relatively, what’s going on now isn’t entirely illegal in the good old U.S. of A anymore. Sure, slavery is illegal, kidnapping, you bet, add rape and extortion and yeah, it all looks like an open and shut case."
"One hitch. The sweeping anti-immigration sentiment and the laws that followed back in the twenties. We’ve hacked away at some of it, the worst of the outright racist propaganda sure, but it still stands as fact, non-citizens have no rights. None. They aren’t even technically considered people and therefor they have no rights of personage. For you and me, it changes nothing. I kill a foreign national, my ass is going on trial and then to jail, but if as a part of the national infrastructure, say someone working for the port authority, I ignore or neglect the plight of a foreign national or a few dozen of them all at once, oh well, plausible deniability. No one will ever know how many immigrants have died on a roadside or in a warehouse somewhere because the national infrastructure simply cannot be held accountable or the whole thing crumbles."
"There is a whole string of people that know about these shipments, who is involved, what’s entailed, and where they are going and what sort of life they will be left to lead. Those towards the top of that string get to do their part and then recoil in disgust when their former partners are finally found out. Don’t think of this as a snake, because the head of this snake already got flattened out and turned into furniture along with half a dozen of his closest associates."
"Think of this crime in particular and those involved in it at every level as a stain. A big wet ink spill slowly seeping through the fabric of a shirt from places unknown. You move the shirt, you try to find out where the stain came from, but its all too little, too late. The damage is done and once more, the stain just keeps spreading on the shirt no matter what you do."
"Tran is dead and gone, I don’t condone the way he went out, but I sure as shit won’t shed a tear over his passing. Most of his lieutenants are dead or ran back to the home country while most of the lower level grunts are just doing the job they already do while they wait and see who steps up to fill the vacuum of power in New York’s criminal underworld. Hence the stain and not a snake talk."
"Nothing I’m about to do will stop the stain. Maybe it won’t spread quite so fast in one small part of the shirt, but that’s about as close to fulfillment as I get from sticking my toe in this water."