One Minute Out

by Mark Greaney

  “Yes.”

  I want to laugh, but this shit isn’t funny. “And to make sure you would blend in with the crowd, you chose candy-apple red. Is that it?”

  She runs a hand through her hair self-consciously. “It . . . I didn’t know it would look like this. I’ve never dyed my hair before.”

  I let it go. It is a damn miracle this girl is still alive with her nonexistent tradecraft, but she is. Beginner’s luck is a thing, but in my experience it’s nothing to bet your life on.

  I say, “You are blown. You are absolutely and positively compromised to the enemy.”

  “But I have to—”

  “No. Trust me, you are done with fieldwork. But . . . but there is another way forward.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t been compromised. Not yet, anyway. I can snatch Vukovic instead of you.”

  “Snatch? Is that like capture?”

  “Yep.”

  “But you are a one-man operation, as well. Correct?”

  “Yes, but . . . this is kind of what I do. No offense, Talyssa, but I’m guessing you’re a first-timer.”

  She looks at me for a moment, and I hate it when people look at me. Finally she says, “For what purpose do you want Captain Vukovic?”

  “I want to know where the women are.”

  She looks up at me. “One of them . . . she is close to you?”

  I shake my head. “I have a reason, but that’s not it.”

  “And when you have Vukovic, you will interrogate him?”

  I think, Sure, that’s one word for it. “Exactly,” I say out loud, knowing well that she and I probably have wildly divergent definitions of the word “interrogate.”

  Corbu gazes out the car windshield down at the city a moment, and then she finally nods. “I help you. I know about the sex trafficking business. I know how the industry operates, how the money is moved. It is my job. I can help with the interrogation.”

  “All right, then, let’s do this together,” I say, and I wonder suddenly if she is going to have the stomach for what will happen next.

  ELEVEN

  Kostas Kostopoulos looked out over the Adriatic Sea as the first hues of dawn cast flickers on the gently breaking waves. He’d only been up a few minutes, hadn’t yet bothered his cook to bring him his first coffee of the morning. He was awake now, earlier than usual, because he was waiting to hear news from Mostar.

  He’d spent the previous day on the phone arranging the hit on the chief of police and having the area searched for the Gray Man. The seventy-two-year-old Greek did not like dissatisfying his superiors with bad news that came out of events taking place in his territory.

  Kostopoulos knew his place; he was king of the Consortium here in the Balkans, but he wasn’t one of the Consortium’s top leadership, and just as he’d sent Hungarians to take out the police captain, the Consortium could always send assets from all around the globe to come after him if they chose to do so.

  Not that he expected them to. No, Kostopoulos was certain that once Vukovic was dead, the way station was completely sanitized, and a new way station, already under development in Banja Luka, opened for business, the matter would be forgotten.

  But first things first. He needed to know that the three Hungarians had completed their mission, and so far, he’d heard nothing.

  Just then, the phone rang on the tiled table in front of him. Looking at it, he saw it was his contact with the Pitovci mafia, the Slovakian organization that provided the Hungarian assassins.

  Kostopoulos answered. “It’s done?”

  The man said, “I just got a call from them. The team failed. All three men were injured and they are fleeing right now.”

  The Greek shouted into the phone, all pretense of control lost. “Imbeciles!”

  “They claim they were attacked by someone unrelated to Vukovic. He was an American. Alone.”

  Just like at the way station, Kostopoulos thought.

  The Slovakian added, “They say the man had incredible skill.”

  Just like at the way station.

  Slowly a panic began welling inside him, and he lashed out at the man on the other end of the phone. “Of course they would say that if he beat their asses, wouldn’t they?” He sat there for a moment, took control of his anger, and suppressed his new fear about the fallout from above from all this. Finally, he asked, “What happened?”

  “I only know what I told you. We are already sending another team. Eight men. They’ll be in Mostar late tonight. They’ll take out Vukovic at the first opportunity, and they know to keep an eye out for this American.”

  Kostopoulos hung up and thought about the assassin. Belgrade assumed he’d come to kill Babic, but Babic was dead, and now the man was still there in the area, targeting the men who were there to kill Vukovic. What on earth for?

  The Greek sex trafficker looked out over the Adriatic again and found it suddenly less beautiful. More ominous. A vessel would arrive here in Hvar the day after tomorrow. He would board and then they would head down the coast, where they would pick up the merchandise. Then he, along with the merchandise, would continue to the next stop in the pipeline, where most of the items would be sold off to other groups.

  Everything was still functioning in the system, but Kostopoulos couldn’t shake the worry that this American, whoever the fuck he was, would show up again.

  He reached for his phone and dialed the number for his contact with the Consortium. It was a call he didn’t want to make, but it was also a call he knew better than to avoid. “Jaco? It’s Kostas. I’m afraid we’ve more bad news.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was six a.m. when Talyssa Corbu sat down at the little table in the apartment and lifted the dzezva, a small copper pitcher. She poured thick Bosnian coffee into a chipped ceramic vessel the size of an espresso cup. She would have liked some cream and sugar with it, but she’d only found the coffee setup and an old bag of ground roasted beans in a cabinet, along with three cups and a pair of spoons.

  She was glad to find these, actually, as the nearly barren cupboards in the tiny flat didn’t offer up many more options.

  As she poured from the dzezva she noticed that her hands were trembling, and she thought it to be less the immediate fear and more the intense anxiety she had been feeling every waking moment for the past week and a half.

  Her quest for answers about what happened to her sister was taking a toll on her body; this much was clear to her. And last night, with the plan to confront an evil man, then her subsequent abduction, and then the gun in her face . . . these events hadn’t helped her get over her anxiety, either.

  She placed a second small cup on the table, and she looked back over her shoulder to see if she should fill it now with coffee or wait on the American to wake first. She saw him there in the darkness, lying curled up in a closet hardly designed to accommodate a full-sized man.

  What a strange individual.

  If she knew who he was it would help her trust him, but if she simply knew what he wanted, what his aim was in all this, then she would at least breathe a little easier. Talyssa had not known many good men in her life, and certainly none that were simultaneously as dangerous as this one.

  No . . . nothing in her brain lined up right now. She looked at Harry again, watching him sleep. He’d been up most of the night while she rested, and then a couple hours earlier when she woke he told her he’d grab some rest. He’d taken her weapon with him into the closet, along with her phone; he’d left the door open so he could see her, and she had no doubt he was an incredibly light sleeper.

  It was odd to her, as scared as she was and as unsure about this man as she felt, that she had no desire to run. She’d been in over her head coming here to Bosnia in the first place, and she also knew in the back of her mind that it was simply a matter o
f time before one of the evil men involved with Roxana’s abduction would spot her, and then it would be all over for her, too.

  She was scared of this Harry, and she certainly didn’t trust him.

  But she knew she needed him. He could go places she could not, and he most definitely could do things she could not.

  Talyssa wasn’t above using a bad man to help her navigate her way through bad men.

  She’d do anything to resolve this situation. Which is why the evening before she had told the American a series of lies about what had happened.

  Harry simply couldn’t learn the truth, because if he did know, then she worried he’d be no help to her at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  I wake up in the closet again in my Mostar flat, and see that dawn is just now breaking outside. A soft rain falls outside the window. The events of the evening before rush back into my mind like a flood, and I turn to look for Talyssa Corbu. I find her sitting in the living area, in the same chair and at the same little wooden table where Liliana and I sat the day before yesterday. She’s wearing jeans and a dark blue pullover, just staring out the window at the weather, or at the police station across the street, I can’t tell which.

  She still looks like a little girl to me. Freshly dyed red hair and small mousy features. Pale skin and tired but fearful eyes.

  But she’s got balls of steel coming here alone to find out who killed her sister, I’ll give her that much.

  I smell coffee, and this is a surprise, because I didn’t know I had any coffee.

  I close my eyes and ask myself what I’m going to do. I’d spent a couple hours before falling asleep trying to figure out the best way to grab Vukovic without a rolling gun battle through the middle of town.

  My plan to take him late at night after he got home from work had been a good one; so good, apparently, that four other people had been planning on trying it themselves, but the nighttime kidnapping option is off the table now. I don’t want to stick around Mostar all day to wait for him to come back home. The Hungarians will have already reported in to their leadership, so there might well be another vanload of assholes already on the highway heading down here.

  Nope, I’ve got to do this today, at the first opportunity.

  And I don’t think Corbu will be much help. She’s a bean counter, not a cop.

  And that means I’ll have to do this shit alone. Why should today be any different? I think.

  I shake off my moodiness, climb up to my feet, and walk over to the Romanian. She pours me a cup from a little copper pitcher she must have found in a cupboard in the kitchen. I sit down and sip the hot coffee and it’s strong and good, better than I could have made. I’m no aficionado but to me it tastes like Turkish coffee, something I’m very familiar with.

  Her first words of the day to me are, “You sleep in closets?”

  I shrug. “I’m weird.”

  She doesn’t reply. I know she’s still trying to get some kind of a fix on me. Her analytical brain hasn’t put me together yet, and it’s twisting her in knots.

  After sitting together in silence for a moment, I say, “I’m going to roll him up during the day today.”

  “Roll him up?”

  “Capture.”

  Corbu is surprised. “While he is working? While he is armed?”

  “Everybody I meet is armed.”

  “I’m not armed. You took my gun.”

  I sigh. “Every bad guy I meet is armed.”

  The woman seemed to marvel at what I was planning on doing. Then, “How can I help you do it?”

  “You won’t be there, not when it happens, anyway. But I need a place to take him. Somewhere outside the center of town. You can help me find a suitable location.”

  “The place in the hills where we parked last night?”

  “Not there, exactly, too close to the road. But up in the hills, for sure. Go back in the woods on the other side of the street from the overlook, see if you can find a building or a clearing or some barn. I need it to be well hidden.”

  “So you can question him?”

  And now we’ve come to the moment of truth. Clearing my throat, I say, “Talyssa . . . your idea of an interrogation probably differs from mine. I know men like this Vukovic, and I know what he will be able to resist. I also know what he’ll respond to. We’re going to have to do this my way to get anything out of him.”

  Talyssa cocks her head. “You are saying . . . you are saying you are going to torture him?”

  “There’s a good chance he won’t tell us anything if we ask nicely, which means this is going to get ugly. If you don’t want to be around to see it, I get it. I’ll ask him questions about your sister’s murder if you want me to.”

  “Her disappearance,” she corrects.

  “That’s what I meant.”

  I can hear fresh nerves in her voice now. “Are you going to kill him when you have the information?” She thinks I’m a bad man, and she thinks I’m nuts. Yet still she seems all too eager to receive my help.

  “I’m not going to kill him,” I say, but I know I might be lying. There are a lot of ways that this can go down. It will be a violent encounter when I take him, and if that son of a bitch draws on me, I’m going to put a couple of rounds through his heart and end him. But I’m doing my best to keep Talyssa on board, because I need her help.

  Her continued suspicion is evident. “I still don’t know who you are, Harry.”

  “I’m the guy here to screw with the people who run the pipeline.”

  “But why? Why do you care? Did they kill your sister, too?” She says it sarcastically, but I can tell she needs to know something.

  “No.” I think about making up a story, but decide against it. This girl is being straight with me, more or less. Not completely, I know there is a missing piece to her narrative, but I haven’t pushed her about it yet. Still, she deserves some truth. “Two nights ago I went to a farm thirty kilometers from here. I was doing a . . . a thing, but I discovered a room full of sex trafficking victims. They wouldn’t leave with me, afraid of what would happen to their families back home.

  “I think there is a chance the women will be . . . will be punished for me showing up there. And I can’t just walk away from that. I need to try to help them somehow.”

  She seems astonished by what I just told her. “The way station? You found the way station here? You saw the women?”

  “I did.”

  Corbu reaches quickly across the table to where her jacket lies over a chair and shoves her hand into a side pocket. Startled by the rapid movement, I rise to my feet, spin towards her, and go for the pistol inside my waistband on my right hip, all in one motion. I draw faster than her hand comes out. “Don’t pull it!” I say with authority. I don’t know what “it” is, but she’s going for something obviously, and I’m trained to do whatever’s necessary to avoid surprises.

  She freezes solid, and the poor girl looks like she’s about to wet herself. In a stuttering voice she says, “It’s . . . it’s just a picture. I want to show you a picture.”

  “A picture? Bring it out slowly.”

  The hand comes out, there is a palm-sized photo in it, and I holster the gun. As Corbu offers it to me she eyes my Glock, now back on my hip. She asks, “What kind of thing were you doing at that farm?”

  “The kind of thing you really don’t want to ask about.”

  “You were trying to rescue the women?”

  I shake my head. She looks me in the eyes and registers my intensity, and she doesn’t ask me for any more details.

  As I take the picture from her, she says, “My sister, Roxana.” Corbu’s voice turns hopeful now. “Did you see her there? Anyone who looked like her? She doesn’t usually wear so much makeup, but this is the most recent photo I have. A cousin’s wedding in Timisoara in M
ay.”

  Before I even look I say, “The Serbian told your mother she was dead.”

  I watch pain in her face reappear, clouding over her new excitement. “Yes. I guess I am just holding out a little hope that—”

  “I get it.” Hope isn’t a strategy, as my mentor Maurice used to say, but it does go a long way in helping us deny the awful truth.

  I look down at the image now. Two women stand at a party in flowing dresses, a flute of champagne in each one’s hand. At first I don’t recognize Talyssa on the left. She has longer dishwater-blond hair in the photo, and now her hair is dyed red and cut shoulder length. And she’s wearing makeup, while now her face is unadorned. She’s by no means unattractive, but she’s relatively plain, her features all but nondescript.

  Kind of like me, I guess.

  Plus, it takes me a moment to associate the dressed-up, confident, happy woman in the picture with the buttoned-up, terrified, exhausted woman seated in front of me.

  But next to her in the photo I see another woman. She is stunning. Beyond stunning. She doesn’t even look real.

  Talyssa says, “I know what you are thinking. We don’t look like sisters.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” I say, but in truth, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.

  Roxana’s features are all soft, her eyes large, her lips full. Where Talyssa has blond hair, this woman is a brunette, and she is easily four inches taller than Talyssa.

  “We have different fathers. And she’s six years younger than me.”

  Looking over the photo, I feel sure I’ve never seen Roxana before in my life. I’d remember someone who looked like that, I’m certain.

  But I keep staring in silence for a few seconds. I really don’t remember any of the faces I saw in the cellar. I only remember Liliana; she is Moldovan, and she looks nothing like the girl in this photo.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t see her . . . but it was dark, and there were a lot of girls in the—”

  “Never mind. She’s dead. I know she’s dead. I keep telling myself not to think about finding her alive.” She pauses. “The only thing I can realistically hope to find are her killers. Maybe they will lead me to her body.” She looks at me with suddenly fierce eyes. “I’ll find you a place to take Vukovic. It will be far from the road, far from people, and covered.” With a cold smile she adds, “He can scream all he wants . . . and nobody will come to save him.”