Twilight of Innocence

By I.R. Craig

Anna Kühn, a young girl, is abducted in Germany and trafficked through Europe to an unknown destination and fate. In pursuit is the one man who has the skills and experience to save her. Helped by a beautiful, but naïve, investigative journalist and a military trained underwater explorer and pilot, the th

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookTrail Publishing
• Release date: Jun 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637672297

I.R. Craig

I R Craig is retired and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with his wife of forty years. He has worked in the finance, insurance, retail and government sectors as a trainer and manager throughout the UK, Europe and the Middle East. A qualified pilot and diver he enjoys riding his mountain bike off-road and shooting when the weather permits on the North East Coast of England.

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Copyright © 2021 I.R. Craig.

Paperback: 978-1-63767-228-0

eBook: 978-1-63767-229-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021908510

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 1

There grows a common woody shrub in Columbia which has large seemingly innocuously fragrant white-and-yellow drooped blossoms, called angel trumpets. The seeds produced by these beautiful flowers, from what the locals call the borrachero shrub, or drunken-binge tree, when ground down and extracted via a chemical process, produces a white powder. Experts call it hyoscine or scopolamine. Many call it the devil’s breath.

Some people would argue that the devil’s breath does not create a zombie-like state or make the recipient open to suggestions to commit acts they would never do in a conscious state of mind, like emptying their banks accounts for robbers, or signing fraudulent legal documents. Or, as it’s been claimed, that the devil’s breath had been used by the Nazis, the KGB, and the CIA as a truth drug, not without them discovering some severe side effects, however. Others would argue it was just another urban myth.

The man who carefully steered his ordinary, grey Volkswagen Polo onto a track leading down to a farmhouse off a quiet country road in central Belgium would argue differently. He had used the devil’s breath many times during his professional lifetime, including very recently over the last few days. It was with total success on a number of men whom he had interrogated at length in their own homes or other remote places similar to the one he was visiting today.

The man in the grey car had no time for the niceties of the normal prolonged interrogation methods he usually employed on interrogees. Normally, he adopted the Hanna Scharff method. His approach was always friendly and courteous with the interrogee, usually outside the confines of an interrogation room in a pleasant outdoor area, bar, or restaurant with security. He never asked direct questions for information, just let the conversation flow between him and them.

Pretending he knew it all anyway, he’d feed the wrong information back to see how the person reacted to it, showing absolute surprise when corrected or staying silent if the interrogee said nothing. He was a master of active and reflective listening techniques, usually on a 60 to 40 per cent basis. If the interrogee was talkative, he would speak only 20 per cent of the time to their 80, soaking up everything he was told. His hit rate on obtaining information was second to none in his old organisation on traitors, criminals, and terrorists. Nor did he have time for more violent methods of torture, including waterboarding, cutting, and other brutality. He wanted quick, complicit answers to his questions, as he knew time was not on his side. The devil’s breath helped provide that objective, quickly, and efficiently.

Most of these men to whom he had exposed the drug woke up eventually. After twenty-four hours in hospital beds under police guard, they came to feeling disoriented and dizzy, with pounding headaches, and their bodies felt as if they had gone through a cage fight. Handcuffed to their hospital beds, they found themselves being questioned at length and later charged with abduction, rape, and murder, some of them historical offences going back many years and spanning all of Europe.

The police were perplexed with their memory loss, at first thinking it was a ruse to avoid answering their questions. But doctors said they actually had no memory of the person who visited and drugged them and who subsequently telephoned the police with names, crimes, and the whereabouts of the perpetrators. The police discovered that very few of these people lived in cities or towns but usually in quiet rural villages, farms, or relatively remote places where they could ply their nefarious inclinations and trade without interruption from nosey neighbours or authorities.

Memory loss is one of the major side effects of the devil’s breath, which blocks the neurotransmitters to the brain’s short-term memory. The victim cannot remember anything about the incident. Their visitor and informer to their crimes was invisible—a grey man, as he had been during most of his working life. Where security cameras had been in place, the recordings had vanished or had been professionally erased. All but one of the men had survived their exposure to him. The visitor felt no remorse at this person’s demise. That man was a killer, and for many years, his prey had been the most vulnerable in society, and because of well-placed friends, he got away with his crimes. The police were treating his death as murder. To the police, the grey man was a dangerous wanted person. Just whom he was dangerous to was open to discussion.

The man climbed out of his VW Polo a little stiffly, his age and active life now taking a toll upon his joints. Armed with the devil’s breath in a pressurised aerosol and an additional syringe in his pocket, the man strolled casually and none aggressively up to a farmhouse. He gently knocked on the door. He was a tall, thin, dapper man, with grey hair and an athletic build, in his late fifties or early sixties. He was dressed no differently from anyone you would meet on any street in Europe, where he could blend in without being noticed. His well-worn and chiselled, lived-in face would have been considered handsome by women, both now and in his younger days, as were the matching penetrating blue eyes. The chin had a cleft, and a small scar was visible where laughter lines etched the right side of his right eye. It was the product of an altercation with a man on an arctic beach during the Cold War, long, long ago.

The door opened slightly, and the visitor from the VW Polo immediately provided eye contact and a warm non-threatening smile. A man in his early forties stood in front of him, and the smell of cooking and an unwashed body assailed him. Food and drink stains marking his vest and the crotch of his dark trousers were similarly stained in dark and grey-white patches.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ said the visitor at the door in a friendly manner. ‘Can you help me? My VW sat nav seems to be giving me the wrong information. It keeps tripping in and out. I’ve been going around in circles for the last half hour. Could you tell me where I’m on this map, please?’ he pleaded gently in fluent Belgian while handing the man the map as a distraction device. When the unwashed man looked at the map, the visitor produced a small tube-like device and clicked a small trigger on the side of it, which released a fine compressed aerosol directly into the man’s face.

The man reactively covered his eyes with his hands, gasped, coughed, and inhaled. The devil’s breath simultaneously bombarded his neural system via his eyes and the mucous lining of his nose and mouth. The effect was immediate; the visitor could see the man’s pupils dilate to the size of saucers, and his face swelled up slightly. Although he was a little unsteady on his feet, he maintained his balance and posture and stared blankly ahead into the trees which shielded the farmhouse from prying eyes.

‘I think you should invite me in Gerd, don’t you?’ said the visitor firmly but quietly. The man did exactly as he was bid. The house obviously lacked a woman’s touch, being both dirty and dusty. There were unwashed dishes piled up in the sink covered in grey and green mould and old newspapers and magazines littering the floor. The repugnant smells of the man and the house hit the visitor’s nose, causing him to gag. He quietly ordered the man to sit down and to roll up his sleeve. The man did exactly as he was told to do, exposing an arm that had not seen soap for many weeks.

The visitor took out a syringe from his pocket and finding a vein, injected more scopolamine into the man’s lower arm. Still staring into the distance, the man licked his lips, as the drug made his mouth feel parched. Grabbing the man’s jaw, the visitor quickly examined his eyes and felt his pulse, in case he had given him an overdose. He could not lose the man to death now, as there was too much at stake. The visitor quietly informed the man that he was going to ask him some questions and that he was going to answer each and every one of them. Did he understand? The younger man nodded and in the affirmative while still staring blankly ahead.

The visitor then took out both a notebook and pen and a small handheld dictation machine to record the conversation. ‘Firstly, Gerd, how many children do you have captive here presently?’

‘Two. I had three, but one died recently after I played with her too roughly. She is buried in my garden with a few other past playmates. They keep themselves company, you know, in their own private little cemetery out there,’ said the man sarcastically and robotically, without feeling or remorse, while gesticulating with his hands towards a back window.

‘Where are the girls?’ the visitor demanded assertively.

‘Down in my secret playroom, in the cellar. They are caged for my pleasure and very occasionally with others. Or they may be trafficked on—if I’m paid a good price for them, of course.’

‘Do you have or know of any other children imprisoned in any other locations?’ the visitor said.

‘No!’ said the man with conviction. ‘I know of no others!’ This reply came as no surprise to the visitor, as he’d heard it more than once before from more of this man’s ilk.

The visitor took a worn photograph out of his pocket and asked the man, ‘Have you ever seen, imprisoned, or trafficked this little girl? She would be nine years old, blonde, with striking blue eyes. She speaks German, English, French, and Dutch quite fluently for her age.’

‘Ah! Anna. Yes, I have seen her. Pretty, very attractive, and sexy. I trafficked her to Zeebrugge for a regular client who paid big money for her a week or so ago. I think she was spotted and chosen by the client on the Dark Web.’

‘Go on, Gerd. Tell me more about Anna. How was she spotted? What did you do with her? and how did you traffic her?’

The stinking man was now under the full influence of the devil’s breath, talkative and candid, with no inhibitions about telling the truth. ‘She was kidnapped in northern Germany after been targeted. Someone had spotted her in the street. They uploaded pictures of her on her way to school on one of our discreet sites on the Dark Web. The client frequently checks this site to choose exceptional girls and boys, both for their own uses and for their discerning customers. Her age, beauty, blonde hair, facial and leg shape, and obvious virginity brought her to the immediate attention of the client.’

Feeling physically sick at this response and suppressing his anger and thoughts of imminent violence and ultimately visiting death on this subhuman creature, the visitor further asked, ‘So, to confirm, Gerd. The children are abducted for this client and shipped out of Europe via Zeebrugge. When and where was she sent?’

‘Over a week ago, on an articulated lorry with specialised hidden containers for trafficking children. The driver specialises in children trafficking and was a well-known paedophile—until, of course he reformed in a British jail to reduce his sentence. Despite this, he is seldom stopped by the British Border Force. He is recompensed with both money and sweet meat, when the client thinks it necessary to reward us our cravings and satisfy our fantasies. Anna was sent to the UK, entering through one of the east coast ports. Oh! How I fantasised what I could have done to Anna if she were mine to keep. I wanted to play with her so badly while she was in my cellar. She was so attractive and sexy in her school uniform, virginal in her white knickers, and I knew she really wanted to be taught about sex and men, you know what I mean? She was up for it. I was quite sore down below as I constantly fantasised about her.’

The man continued, ‘My mouth still waters at the thought of it, but it’s so dry now. Can I have a drink? The client who ordered her does not like spoiled goods, and every delivery is carefully examined for any damage, or so I’ve been told. I know of one trafficker who raped a specially sourced young boy and crossed the client. He was found choked to death on his own cock and balls in the sea off Holland. The pictures of his death were posted on the Dark Web as a warning to others. The client has an enforcer on this side of the North Sea. Again, I don’t know his name. However, I’ve been told that he can be recognised by a scar near one of his eyes and the tattoo on his neck of a bird of prey attacking another bird at collar height. He hides this tattoo now, usually with roll neck jumpers or high collars. Because of the tattoo, he is known as the Chicken Hawk. He gives the driver his instructions where to take the children to in the UK to hand to the next person in the chain. They never see his face, as it’s always at night and he stands well masked behind them. The client wants everything watertight—no faces or names.’

‘Who is this client in the UK? Do they have a name, and where do they live, Gerd?’ enquired the visitor with urgency.

‘No one knows who they are. Whoever it is, they are rich, powerful, and well connected. As I’ve said, they pay us considerable sums of money and other perks I’ve just mentioned, like protection from the authorities and money and sweet meat to keep us supplying them. Whoever it is, they are well organised and do not appear to be associated with any European crime families. We have trafficked dozens over the last few years, and to my knowledge, we have never been caught once. The client oils all the right wheels so the process is seamless—from capture to delivery of the sweet meat at their end of the chain. What happens to all these children is open to speculation.’

‘Dozens?’ probed the visitor with eyebrows raised in disbelief.

‘Yes! Dozens, from all over Europe and sometimes Russia and the Middle East as well,’ replied the man.

‘What is the name of the lorry driver, and who does he work for, Gerd?’ asked the visitor.

‘As I’ve said, we are forbidden to know the names of people who operate the pipeline. However, he has his own haulage company out of the UK, operating in Europe and the Middle East. I shouldn’t know this, but his trading name is TLLAS. Through false invoicing, his rigs were paid for with the money he earns trafficking children to the UK for the client,’ replied the younger man candidly.

The visitor knew many of the answers before he even asked the questions and wrote little in his notebook but checked the man’s facts by flipping through the pages. He looked at this piece of stinking human filth, suppressed the rising bile of revulsion and violent anger he currently felt, and ordered, ‘Now, Gerd, take me to the little girls in your cellar.’

Obeying the visitor, Gerd, the stinking man, smelled worse than usual with the sweat that was now seeping from his long-unwashed dirty pores. Meekly and unsteadily, he got up and moved towards what looked like a solid wood wall. On pressing a knot in the wood, a door opened in the wall, and a light automatically came on, allowing them to descend the stairs into the cellar. In the cellar, the younger man approached a stone wall and moved a cabin light anticlockwise. Part of the wall opened and scraped across the floor opening into another room.

The room was dark. The visitor could hear furtive movement at the back of the dark room. The visitor smelt the girls before he saw them. Gerd flicked a switch, and the room was flooded with light. Two pathetic, filthy, wraith like girls with grey-blue faces that had long been without sun, around 10 years old, sat at the back of a cage, huddled against the bars, hugging each other in mutual support and abject fear; obviously, they were awaiting more of the horrors which had already been visited upon them, which no child or adult should ever experience. On seeing this, the visitor pressed his nails into the palms of his hands to suppress the anger at this stinking subhuman creature who called himself a man. He wanted to kill him slowly. However, the visitor had another course of action in mind that would leave Gerd in a continual cycle in a living hell of lunacy. The visitor only killed if it was absolutely necessary. To him life was always sacrosanct—unless he, his family, or his colleagues were threatened.

‘Open the cage now, please, Gerd,’ the visitor ordered the stinking man. Compliantly, he did so. The girls pressed themselves farther back in the cage for refuge, which would have been impossible to obtain. There was no place they could go to for safety.

While opening the cage, the man said sickly, ‘Come here, girls. Daddy’s here, and you know what happens if you don’t please me, don’t you?’ Turning to the visitor, he said, ‘You can enjoy them if you like. Nice, tight, hairless, and compliant, with only one owner—me!’ He smirked with a total lack of guilt or empathy for his bestial behaviour, as if he were describing an old second-hand car or playing torturing a dog.

The visitor spoke to the girls quietly, assuming they would fear him, saying he was not here hurt them but to rescue them and that he would get the police to take them back to their families. They reacted by loosening their hugs of mutual support to each other as he gestured for them to come out of the cage. To show he was no threat, he manhandled Gerd out of the way, slapping him savagely across the head as he did so, then pinned him to the wall. He pointed to the two girls where the stairs were so they could leave the cellar. Warily and cowering, the two girls made their way past them out of the cage. He ordered the man into the cage and to stay there quietly until he returned. Still well under the influence of the devil’s breath, he did what he was asked to do. The visitor locked the cage door behind him.

The visitor followed the two girls upstairs and led them to the kitchen, where he threw open the cupboards and invited them to eat and drink while he said he would ring the police. Ravenously they fell upon the food, juice, and other soft drinks, as their sexual abuser had starved and denied them both food and water to obtain their compliance with his wishes and to continually torture them. Still wary of the visitor, one of them had a sharp knife in her hands and watched him constantly, her eyes and its tip following him around the room. Although he already knew who they were, the visitor asked the girls their full names and where they came from and said he would inform the police as to their whereabouts. He told them to eat as much as they wanted and not to move until the police arrived, and he said he was going back down into the cellar to deal with the evil man. He returned to the cellar full of anger and hate for the subhuman monster he had left there. There was one more thing he had to do before he called the police.

Those who are more susceptible to overdosing on scopolamine are prone to hallucinations and may slip into complete psychosis. The visitor knew this as he unlocked the cage and injected more of the drug into the compliant stinking man’s arm. He whispered into Gerd’s dirty, ear which smelt of unwashed hair, old ear wax, and cooking, ‘You are going to see each and every one of the rotting corpses of children you have killed over the years. Smell them, hear their pitiful cries for mercy, there pleas to their mothers, their screams of physical and mental pain. Then, finally, you will see their faces in their death throes. These images and sounds will never leave your mind.’

As the visitor locked Gerd back in the cage, he said, ‘The children you have murdered will always be with you. You will see them in the dark and in the light, and you will have no peace from them or their cries.’ He switched off the light and climbed the cellar steps to where the girls were in the kitchen. The visitor began to hear the slow, ever- increasing whine of fear, which turned into a primal scream of terror as the hallucinations began in his scopolamine-ravaged brain.

‘Let me out, let me out. For God’s sake, let me out. Leave me alone.’ The stinking man banged on the bars of the cage. ‘They wanted it and manipulated me into having sex with them. It was their fault, not mine. They seduced me with their looks and bodies.’ Within five minutes, the monster had totally lost his mind, his bladder, and his bowels. The police would find him crouched in a foetal position, gripping his legs under his chin with horrified eyes, darting from side to side at things only he could see. Only unconsciousness or death would release him from this torment.

Ensuring the two girls that the man was locked up, and they were safe from him, the visitor rang the police using the man’s landline, explaining where he was and that he had found two abducted girls and provided their full names. He also informed them that the perpetrator was locked in a cell in the cellar and that they would find other children’s bodies buried in the garden. He left the phone off the hook, telling the girls they could speak to the police by this phone, and then he said goodbye. The two little girls were too busy eating as he began to leave through the front door. He saw one of them move towards the phone, where the sound of a woman’s concerned voice could be heard calling out for someone to answer the telephone call.

The visitor wanted to help the girls more. However, he was on his own personal mission, and time was running out. With tears in his eyes, he left the two little girls, knowing they had a long journey of mental and physical recovery in front of them, if they ever recovered. Police cars and an ambulance, sirens screaming, streamed past the indistinct grey VW Polo he was driving as he made his way to Zeebrugge to find the owner of TLLAS Ltd and perhaps meet with the infamous Chicken Hawk.

Chapter 2

All the European news channels continuously regurgitated their reports of five paedophiles being arrested in ten days across Europe and eight abducted children having been rescued. The arrested men and one female were having their property and grounds searched for evidence. One paedophile had died of an unknown drug overdose, administered by a person or persons unknown. The pathologists were still trying to identify the drug and the bodies of three dead children, of perhaps Middle Eastern extraction, who had been found dead in his cellar.

The visitor, driving his grey Polo away from the scene of the rescue, was listening to his favourite classical music channel when it was interrupted by a news flash. The announcer declared there had been another discovery of more abducted children in a remote Belgian farmhouse. Police were anxious to speak to a tall, older man seen in the area at the time and appealed to the public to come forward if they had seen anything suspicious. The public, on the other hand, had other ideas where paedophiles were concerned. Death was too good for them, and they wished good luck to the man who had both uncovered them and killed them. The newsflash confirmed that the two young girls were on their way to hospital. The police had discovered they were not in any fit state to talk to the police—just that a tall kind man had attacked and rescued them from the smelly man, known to them as Gerd, who had imprisoned and hurt them and how one of their friends had died with them.

This new development was transmitted throughout the world and was a front-page news story in every newspaper in Europe. On seeing and hearing this, many parents and relatives renewed their hope that their abducted children would be found alive. To some, it would bring joy, to others the end of their heartbreak so their mourning could properly begin.

In a wet and different country where the clouds hung like a dirty grey dishcloth, laden with torrential Atlantic rain, far from Belgium shores, a well-dressed woman, dripping with gold jewellery, looked out of a panoramic window high above the grey and white Atlantic rollers, the rain running off the windows in front of her in wide rivulets. Through these large picture windows, designed to eliminate any noise, she watched the wind whip white mares tails off the peaks of the waves which battered the black, grey, and brown cliff far below her vantage point. Her mood matched the weather exactly. Dark and stormy. The BBC had just reported the new information. Seeing this and deep in thought over the consequences, she slowly sipped her favourite coffee and decided she needed to contact the one man who could stop the disruption to their European supply chain of sweet meat and revenue.

They have never met. Not even a photograph had passed between them. However, over the years, he never failed to carry out her instructions efficiently and effectively, the last one being the murder of an associate who had crossed her and her husband with soiled goods. An example have been required not only for their suppliers in Europe but the rest of the world, via the Dark Web. Moving to her large, ornate antique desk, she unlocked and opened a drawer and withdrew a birthday card and a well-thumbed novel. In conjunction with a page and a paragraph from the book, she carefully wrote an elaborate birthday message and enclosed half of a £50 note. Keeping the other half of the £50 note, she entered its number into her diary. This would be used to identify the other portion. E-mails, texts, and telephone calls could be intercepted by Cheltenham and Menwith Hill in Yorkshire and decoded. Simple greeting cards seldom were, and the birthday message hid a message in a simple book code. Each type of greeting card she sent designated the action she wanted the Chicken Hawk to take.

On the envelope, she addressed it to a nondescript Postbus on a street in Holland. She had done this many times before to contact the Chicken Hawk, who checked his mailbox regularly. This time, however, the birthday message, based on a simple rotated book code, requested a face-to-face meeting with him in Rosyth in five days, after he had eliminated those responsible for disrupting their supply line of sweet meat. After sealing the envelope, the woman picked up a