Free China Wife by Hedley Harrison Page B

seen to be in any way involved in this, however remotely. Whatever needed to be done was going to have to been done very carefully and initially probably outside of the formal inter-country links.
    â€˜Our problem,’ Susie continued, ‘is that we don’t really know enough about what is going on beyond half stories and vague suppositions. The linkages to the UK, and within the UK, are convoluted, and are seemingly mixed up in the rivalries between the long-standing trafficking groups and intruding Chinese gangs. One thing is clear; to protect our Brazilian interests we have to unravel what is going on in the UK before we can move on to the international ramifications.’
    David knew exactly where the meeting was going!
    â€˜And an independent investigation would both give credi bility to the problem but also avoid any suggestion of British Government interference.’
    It was the first significant thing that David had said, but it justified his being there, and even if it sounded like he was writing his own terms of reference Susie gave him an amused but grateful look. Being the good Foreign Office girl that she was she was always looking for the win-win situation, and getting David to make the investigation, something that he was well capable of doing, was in her view the way to achieve that end.
    And, much to David’s amusement, Susie installed herself as the link to the investigation.

11
    David Hutchinson had had no idea about Susie Peveral’s role in coordinating diplomatic and intelligence services. Their relationship hadn’t developed sufficiently for her to share government secrets with him.
    People trafficking was as old as time and, despite its evolution from the traditional slave trade to its modern variations developed by the sex industry, there was still a huge base load of people movements that were fundamentally economic.
    People had always wanted to move to a better life and there were always people ready and willing to help them and to exploit them; this, too, was as old as time. The only things that had changed with the evolution of modern society were the ever-increasing range of countries from where the desperate economic migrants originated and the sophistication, reach, and commercial and technical knowhow of the organisations that trafficked them. Basically people trafficking was big business and it was Susie’s firm conviction that its control was in the hands of large criminal syndicates that operated as much out of the importing nations as the exporting ones.
    Susie knew all of this and more in great depth. Combating the traffickers was also big business and it was Ms Peveral’s role in life to see that British knowledge and expertise were shared and used to maximum effect. Her seniority allowed her considerable freedom of action; this, coupled with a flexibility of mind that David readily recognised, also allowed her to stepoutside the more traditional Foreign Office modes of thinking. This wasn’t always popular but it was the basis of her accelerated rise up the Civil Service ladder.
    The combined use of both diplomatic and intelligence sources, something that it had been hard for Susie to get acknowledged and established outside of the normal historic run of the Cold War, the War on Terror and other such openly international challenges, had achieved some notable successes. These successes were not so much in the head count of illegal immigrants captured and returned to their source countries – that was a sad business that nobody took much pleasure in – it was more in the mapping of the traffickers’ organisations and geographical activities. The complexities of the immigrant pathways and the complexities of the money-laundering routes that Susie Peveral and her cohorts had discovered forced a new awareness of the problems on to the world’s political leaders.
    The biggest shock to the British political consciousness was the scale of