Who: Max What: Narrative & Life-changing event thing Where: Dhaka → Langley → NY When: This spans the past week+ Warnings/Rating: Talk of sex trafficking
Dhaka was hot.
Max had been in the Faridpur district for days, and it was only the determination to set things right that kept her from giving up. Her hips ached, and the brothel district that she'd traced the name sale origination point to was despairing in a way that she wasn't accustomed to. She'd spent countless hours in the main brothel house, skin browned and passing with the experience of someone who had spent so much time in this part of the world since she was just a girl. She spoke Bengali well, and she thought it was fitting that all of this led back to Bangladesh, where her life had almost ended twelve months earlier.
But Faridpur was a different kind of terrible, and the large, windowless building that Max was calling home was known as Joinal Bari. The building was a government sanctioned brothel, and it was sad in a way that Max had no fucking clue how to be alright with. Days spent pretending to be a madam, one wanting to buy girls that were young enough to still have baby fat on their faces, and all she could think of was Amanda.
But she was close, and she knew she was close, so she played the game.
Before all this mess, slipping into a role for undercover work had been second-nature, but it was harder now. All the months away from it, all the distraction of not being sure of her own two feet, it made it all harder. She decided, while negotiating a price of 2,000 takas for a sleepy looking girl of 13, that she'd take the agency up on the offer of the school, once she was back. The madam that was selling the girl was promising that she brought in 500 takas a month, and Max was performing cash conversions over and over, trying to come to grips with the fact that she'd just purchased a human being for 25 American dollars. And it was all legal, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it, CIA or not.
She found the room with the computer at 1:30 in the morning, just before the brothel cut the power for the evening, and the machine looked so entirely out of place in this bright version of hell. The man sitting at the computer, his back to the door, was oblivious to any threat in this place. Who would fear anything from little girls with no rights or voice? Not him, and Max took pleasure pulling the knife from her sharee and sliding it between his ribs.
She shoved the dead body onto the dirty ground, and she wished for Dylan as soon as her fingers touched the keys. He could have gotten what they needed in five minutes. It took her a painstaking hour, and she was sure she left tracks everywhere. But she didn't give a shit. The list of names and buyers was sent electronically to Langley and, when the order came back, she downloaded the attached virus to the computer, so that it would infect the entire network and allow agents to keep track of any other transactions here on those networks.
She had to stay three more days, worried about being caught the entire time, but the women in the brothel were so unimportant that no one thought it was one of them. Max sat, hijab pulled low over her face, and waiting for clients along with all the other sellers of flesh, and no one so much as looked at her.
When she left a day later, she told the other women that she was taking her girls to the Madaripur's brothel, where there was less competition for business. No one questioned that either, and she left in the morning, four girls in tow. She gave them money, and she left them with the office for Women and Children Affairs, all with the knowledge that nothing would change for them.
Her flight home wasn't a flight home at all. She flew to Langley, where she spent the day receiving a much better reception than during her prior visit to CIA headquarters. A task force was being created, she was told, to go after the name sale buyers. They assumed she'd want the lead and they were willing to overlook what had happened with Jack and Dylan, as long as they didn't want to file official complaints.
She turned them down, and she didn't have even have to sleep on it.
The school in the desert, which would train and re-train field agents, had once seemed like some kind of punishment, but it didn't feel like that anymore. She'd get to run it, which meant no Reed to deal with, and she agreed to serve as a consultant for Davis, should he need her, and she felt good by the time she left Langley, keys, comm and a new future in her pocket.
She traded in her ticket to Vegas, wanting to stop and see her daughter first. She'd head home after. After all, there was plenty of time.