Page 41 of Lethal Abduction

But I can always hope. Which is why I ask all my victims, repeatedly, to check out what they’re investing in. I alwayspray they will work it out in time to save themselves from complete ruin.

Like everyone else held captive here, I walk a fine line between saving myself from death or disappearance and trying my hardest to save my victims from destroying their lives.

If we don’t make target each day, we have to run the Loop. The five-mile running track circles our Myanmar compound, which was designed and built specifically to serve the multibillion-dollar online scam industry. The Chinese triads who guard the compound make us run the Loop at gunpoint, dripping from the heavy Myanmar humidity.

It’s better than the alternative.

Beyond the high walls, deep in the dense jungle, lie the anonymous graves of those who either won’t cooperate or repeatedly miss target.

We all know it happens.

The most recent disappearance was a Sudanese man, an illegal refugee who’d answered an ad in Bangkok to work in a call center. I originally met him on the boat which took us from Thailand across the Moei River to Myanmar.

He didn’t believe me when I told him he’d been kidnapped. I’m not sure when he realized the truth. Was it when we were pushed off the barge onto an abandoned riverbank and met by armed guards? Was it during the long walk through the dense jungle to the SK compound?

Or was it when the compound doors locked behind him, and he realized for the first time there was no way out?

Either way, he’d refused to cooperate, no matter how much they punished him. He wouldn’t run scams, and he wouldn’t help recruit other illegal refugees. Finally, he tried to escape.

That was when they shot him. In the middle of the compound courtyard, so we could all watch.

They do that every so often. They like to remind us of theconsequences of trying to escape. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people held captive in the large dormitories here. The name of the scam farm might mean Gold Lotus in English, instead of the Good Shepherd, and the conditions might not be as squalid as they were in Bogotá’s El Buen Pastor, but this place is no less of a prison than that was. Even worse, here there’s no foreseeable end to our term of imprisonment and no clear way out except via a jungle burial.

Another message from Rachel pops up on my screen:I love talking to you so much!

I force myself to match her tone.I can’t believe I’ve found someone as special as you, I type, swallowing my self-disgust.I’m falling more in love with you every day.

You’re amazing, Matthew,she types back, with a star-eyed emoji.You’ve changed my entire life. I feel so lucky. I can’t wait to finally meet you!

I respond in kind, keeping up the endless stream of toxic drivel, trying to distract my mind from what I’m doing.

Unlike the Sudanese man, and many others held here, I knew what was coming long before I ever reached Myanmar. I knew from the moment I woke up in an abandoned mining camp in far north Australia three months ago, to find a fat man in a Banderos jacket called Turbo handing me a bottle of water and a stale sandwich.

If only it had stopped with Turbo.

Fat and ugly as he was, Turbo was also harmless. Kind, even. Enough that I almost convinced myself I had a chance of escaping before whatever hell was coming next.

Except the mining camp was deep in the Australian desert, which is more of an effective prison than any guns or electric fences could be. And when Turbo’s friends came for me a short time later, I had no chance to escape before I was shoved in a car and drugged again.

When I woke up the next time, I was inside a shippingcontainer, along with two dozen other unfortunate captives, all stuffed in so tightly we could barely breathe.

I honestly thought I would die.

When the doors of the shipping container opened two weeks later, and I smelled the unmistakable Thai air, I almost wished I had.

I’d known from the moment the Banderos took me that my chances of escape were minimal. But up until those doors opened in Thailand, I’d still clung to hope.

Hope that it was the Cardeñas cartel behind my kidnapping.

Rodrigo Cardeñas might terrify me. But I also know what to expect from him. Rodrigo might like to cause pain, but he isn’t a psychopath. Rodrigo, I might have had a chance of surviving.

But Jacey, the kingpin psychopath with no real name? With a face he will famously kill to protect, rather than risk anyone being able to identify him?

No. Jacey is something different altogether. Something nobody survives, especially not an Australian country girl who should never have escaped him in the first place.

And Thailand is Jacey’s territory. Jacey’s, and the triads he hires to do his dirty work for him.

The moment those doors opened I knew for certain the darkest shadows from my past had finally caught me. The faceless man had just been hiding in them, like some hideous spider, until I walked right back into his web.

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