THE OCEAN CONSTELLATION towered over the pier like a skyscraper, dwarfing the FBI sedan as it pulled alongside the ship’s massive blue hull. At a thousand feet long and over five stories high, the thing was a behemoth, the biggest moving object Stevens had ever seen. Brightly colored containers covered every inch of deck space, stacked four and five high like Legos, and for the first time, Stevens began to comprehend what an impossible task the Customs and Border Protection guards faced in stemming the flow of contraband—be it women, drugs, guns, or anything else—into the country.
He and Windermere had landed in Newark a little before two. Met a special agent from Newark’s Organized Crime division, a fair-skinned, solid guy named LePlavy, and by three, they were on the pier, driving through a customs checkpoint and navigating the chaotic mess of trucks and trains and dockworkers scattered beneath the giant orange gantry cranes that loaded the ship.
There were ships everywhere. Containers by the thousands. There was no way that anyone could check every box that came into the country, Stevens decided. Hell, even checking one container in five would be an impressive feat.
Beside him, LePlavy seemed to read his mind. “I did a little research on this ship of yours,” he said, pulling the car to a stop beside a spindly gangplank hanging from the Ocean Constellation’s flank. “Apparently she off-loaded over a thousand boxes in Newark last week. Almost half of those came from Trieste.”
“Any chance you got a list of the cargo in those boxes?” Stevens asked him.
“I did. None of them said ‘women.’”
Stevens glanced at Windermere. “Needle in a haystack territory again,” Windermere said. “Even if nothing on the manifests raised any flags, maybe we can isolate single boxes, work through every shipper individually. Maybe something jumps out at us.”
“Five hundred boxes,” Stevens said. “That’s a lot of digging.”
Windermere nodded. “Sure is,” she said, reaching for the door handle. “So let’s hope one of these sailors can give us a clue.”