One Minute Out

by Mark Greaney

  “My name is—”

  Maja interrupted. “No. You know the rules. Don’t say your real name.”

  “No one can hear us if we speak softly.”

  Maja looked at the floor. “I don’t want to know your real name.”

  The woman leaned closer to Maja. “Fine. They call me Anke here. Where are you from?”

  “Romania,” Maja said.

  “I am from Kiev. Ukraine.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wanted to tell you, because you look older than many of the others.” Maja had just turned twenty-three, and this did put her as one of the older women in the group.

  “Tell me what?”

  “I have learned that one of us is a spy.”

  Now Maja looked up in surprise. “A what?”

  “A Serbian guard told me when we were getting off the bus. He likes me, I guess, and before they left he whispered that I should watch what I say to the others because one of the girls was put in here to inform on the rest of us.”

  Maja looked around in the dim. “That . . . that sounds crazy. Nobody is here because they want to be.”

  Another woman, Maja knew her to be Moldovan, leaned into the conversation.

  “Maybe it’s crazy,” the Moldovan said, looking at Maja. “Or maybe it’s you.” Louder she said, “Maybe you are the informant.”

  “I . . . I am not an informant.”

  Others tucked closer on the floor, listening in as the Moldovan girl continued. “I have been watching you. I have been raped twice. Once in Belgrade, and once last night in the forest. Most of the other girls have been raped, as well.”

  All of the girls within earshot nodded.

  “Others have been beaten. But you? I haven’t seen them lay a finger on you.”

  Another young woman, also one of the Ukrainians, said, “I saw her touched. In the woods the other night. One of the men selected her, dragged her a few feet. But then he put her back in line when the other man yelled at him.” She eyed Maja now. “It was like you were being protected for some reason. Why?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I swear I don’t understand what is happen—”

  The first woman hissed at her. “Liar. You are working with them.”

  She tried to protest, but the rest of the group moved away from her, leaving her alone on the floor in the middle of the room.

  With everything that had happened so far, Maja didn’t think she had any more tears left in her, but she began to cry again.

  * * *

  • • •

  Talyssa Corbu and I find ourselves sitting a couple blocks away from the main police station in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on a hilly residential side street off Ante Starcevica. It’s pouring rain; Talyssa has her coat on and an umbrella in her hand, but she’s not worried about the weather at present. Instead she’s trying to psych herself up to walk straight into the police station and reveal to some possibly very bad people that she is here to unmask their very bad actions.

  I sure as shit wouldn’t want to do it, so I can understand her reluctance.

  I’m trying to psych her up, too, but I can see that accomplishing her task this afternoon is going to take reserves of strength I have no confidence this young woman possesses.

  But she’s all we’ve got right now, so I’m sending her in.

  Together we decide she will identify herself as a Europol criminal analyst, and say that she is investigating rumors of a sex trafficking pipeline run by an international consortium, a pipeline that leads from far in the East to right here in Dubrovnik. The local police will be able to check out Talyssa’s credentials easily enough, and when they do, they will speak to her superiors, who will quickly tell them she has taken a leave of absence from work—work that involves coordinating with European law enforcement agencies on money laundering and other financial fraud.

  At this point Talyssa’s story of her hunt for the ringleaders of a human trafficking network will unravel, and it will be obvious to the local cops that she has gone rogue for some reason and has no sanction for her work here. Then—we hope, anyway—the crooked cops and whatever gang is working with the pipeline in Dubrovnik will determine that the woman and her questions are at once dangerous and easy to silence, so they will pay her a visit, either to kill her or to scare her into giving up her hunt for answers about the Consortium.

  We are lucky that Talyssa and her half sister have different surnames, as they were born to different fathers. We know Talyssa won’t be able to talk to the police without producing some sort of identification, and I have no way of obtaining quality forged documents for her in the time we have available to us, so on the off chance Roxana is still alive, she won’t be endangered by this fact.

  The women and girls I saw in the basement in Mostar, if they are reachable at all, will soon be distributed all over the world, dispersed into the wind where I will never be able to help them. For this reason we hope our thin backstory holds, because we’ve no time to craft a better one.

  Hope isn’t a strategy, I know, but we need a break.

  We arrived in town last night and I rented two rooms. One was a top-floor pension in the walled Old Town, and the second a larger apartment, also in the Old Town, but in a basement several blocks from the first.

  The first room is Talyssa’s: high on the hill on the southern side, backing up to the medieval outer wall that separates the Old Town from the ocean. Here she will wait for whoever the Consortium sends after her. I chose the location carefully after walking the neighborhood and the staircases of the building. I’ve checked her window to make sure it opens, and I’ve looked at the roof and the courtyard out front, deciding on several courses of action depending on our enemy’s tactics. I’ve picked a place in the large pedestrian-only Old Town so the opposition can’t just roll up in a convoy of vans and snatch her out of her bed and race away without me having time to stop them. No, with the location I’ve chosen, they will have to come on foot, climbing flight after flight of outdoor cobblestone stairs through narrow alleyways. I will be lying in wait and able to see and hear them coming by any route available to them long before they get to her building, much less through the courtyard, into the entrance, and up the three flights of stairs to her room.

  And I won’t just be trusting my eyes. In my pack of gear brought along for the hit on Ratko Babic, I brought a half dozen small remote cameras, all of which connect to an app on my phone. I hid two of these in planters in the courtyard and entryway of the building where Talyssa will be waiting, and two more cover angles around the outside that I won’t be able to see from my vantage point.

  The tiny basement apartment I rented nearby can be converted into a torture chamber on the fly if I happen to get my hands on one of the men sent to silence the pesky Europol woman here on an unsanctioned mission to get intelligence on their operation.

  We don’t move our belongings into either location. All my possessions I have in my backpack in the backseat, and all of Talyssa’s are either in her purse or in her roll-aboard in the trunk. Additionally, during the day I went shopping at a camping store on the eastern edge of the city, purchasing items I anticipate needing. I also bought a burner phone and a prepaid card at a gift shop.

  I wish like hell I were on an Agency op, where I’d have access to intel and labor and gadgetry and the like, but I’m performing with limited resources and no support, so I have to make the best of it.

  The rain beats down on the roof of the little Vauxhall Corsa four-door. “You’ve got this,” I tell her. “You’ll be great.” I say these lines with conviction, at least I think I do, and she gives me a little bob of her head in acknowledgment. But neither of us believes this plan of mine has much chance of going smoothly. I know it, and she lets me know she knows it when she articulates just exactly what I am fearing.

  “But what if they just take me into custody while they
check out my story?”

  I’m ready with an answer, because I’ve been pondering this all day. “Tell them you are working with others. If they act like they aren’t going to let you out of there, call my burner phone and give me the names of the people you are talking to.”

  “Right.”

  “Once they check you out they’ll know you’re full of shit, but making that call will probably keep them from detaining you until they’re certain you’re a rogue.” I have no idea if this will work, but it sounds good, anyway.

  She nods again distractedly, looks out at the rain in the direction of the station. Her facial features are pinched tight with worry, and the bangs of her short red hair hang over her eyebrows. “I better go.”

  “I’ll be parked right here when you’re done.”

  “Sure,” she says, and I worry she’s not going to be able to go through with it.

  “Look. You can do this.”

  I still can’t work out exactly how someone so petrified of the danger can manage to push forward the way she has done. I understand her sister is either dead or in desperate peril, and I understand she doesn’t trust local authorities to help . . . but I have never seen anyone this physically sickened by terror able to soldier on through the danger.

  I want to just respect her for it and move on, but I am certain there is another part to her story that I haven’t explored yet.

  My thoughts drift away from this, because I see her staring catatonically out the windshield. She’s thinking about something, her trembling lip has returned, and she’s on the verge of becoming unhinged right before my eyes.

  I quickly say, “Listen. If something bad happens in there, if something goes wrong. If they take you in . . . I will get you out.”

  She turns to me with bloodshot eyes that are as imploring as her words. “Please, Harry. Whatever happens to me. You have to find out what happened to Roxana.” She sighs now, and adds, “Don’t worry about me. Worry about her. You can’t just come in shooting people in a police station.”

  That isn’t my plan, simply because it won’t work. I’m not the Terminator. “I promise that won’t happen. Just keep calm, play your role, and if I have to, I’ll play mine. Together we’ll find out about Roxana once this part is done.”

  This seems to help to some degree. Talyssa fixes her gaze in resolution and then, without another word, she climbs out of the little car and walks off in the rain.

  I watch her go, and I find myself picking holes in the parts of her story that don’t add up, and filling in the pieces with my own ideas of what might really be going on here.

  SIXTEEN

  At five p.m. Talyssa Corbu stepped through the doors of the main police headquarters, showed her credos at the front desk, and asked to speak to the highest-ranking person in the building. A smiling middle-aged and heavyset woman appeared and shook her hand, then ushered her into an office.

  Even though the Romanian couldn’t read the citations on the wall, she got a pretty good idea that this lady was, in fact, the top cop here in town.

  This meant that either someone lower on the totem pole was involved with the trafficking ring, no one in the police department here was involved in the pipeline, or this middle-aged female with an easy smile was, herself, involved in ferrying female sex slaves from the East to the West.

  Talyssa didn’t see much likelihood in the last option at all.

  In English the captain asked, “How can I help you, Miss Corbu?”

  “Thank you for seeing me. I’m here in town looking into allegations that women are being trafficked through Dubrovnik for the purposes of sexual slavery.”

  The woman blinked, but this gave away nothing to Talyssa, because Talyssa had no training to hunt for facial cues or body language that would tip her off as to whether the person she was speaking with was attempting to deceive her.

  “This is an investigation being overseen by Europol?”

  “Correct.”

  The captain looked again at Corbu’s credentials. “It says you are involved in economic crimes.”

  “That is true. I’m following the money, and it leads to traffickers, and it has led me, ultimately, to Dubrovnik.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about this investigation. Who are you working with on the ground here? Our federal authorities?”

  “I am here in advance of a formal investigation in Croatia. This is preliminary, more of a fact-finding mission.”

  “You aren’t coordinating with anyone? That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Unusual, yes. Unprecedented, no.”

  “May I see some of your evidence?”

  Talyssa had been expecting this. She rubbed her sweaty palms together between her knees, out of the captain’s view, and she measured her breathing as well as possible. “The police chief in Mostar was kidnapped yesterday. I’m sure you heard about it.”

  The chief replied, “Yes. Terrible, terrible thing.” And then she said, “His body was found in his home just a few hours ago.”

  Talyssa Corbu was poleaxed by this news, and she did a poor job of hiding her shock now. “Oh . . . I . . . I just understood he was missing.”

  The police chief regarded the Europol analyst curiously. “Europol is not terribly well informed, then.”

  “I . . . I’ve been working, haven’t checked in with the office in several hours.”

  “Well, let me bring you up to date. Apparently, Captain Vukovic was recovered alive yesterday, but then was killed sometime overnight along with two other police officers staying in his flat with him.”

  “I see,” Corbu said.

  “I’m sorry, what does this have to do with us down here in Dubrovnik?”

  Talyssa struggled to keep her voice as dispassionate as possible. “We . . . we have reason to believe Captain Vukovic was involved in the trafficking concern. There was a home where girls were kept, it was in his jurisdiction, and our investigations indicate Dubrovnik was the next stop along the pipeline.”

  “The pipeline?”

  “This is the name we are hearing. It begins as far east as Moldova or even Ukraine. Who knows? Russia, perhaps. And it leads as far west as Dubrovnik. After that . . . we don’t know. We’d appreciate any help you could provide about the movement of exploited women through this area.”

  The captain wasn’t smiling any longer. “You think the chief of police of Mostar, our neighbor, was tainted by this crime? Is it really help you want from me, or did you come to question me as a suspect?”

  “I am making no allegations at all. I am an analyst, not an investigator. I am merely asking for help from your office, Captain.”

  The older woman leaned back in her chair and waved a hand. “Well . . . I for one know nothing of the matter. Of course, we’ve broken up rings of traffickers in the past. Albanians, mostly. Some Turks. Horrible people, horrible crimes. But nothing recently, and nothing that came through Bosnia. I’ve never even met Captain Vukovic, personally, but he was well regarded, as I understand.”

  Talyssa felt her trembling mouth, pinched it shut quickly, then asked, “Have you heard of something referred to as the Consortium?”

  Again, the police chief blinked, but Talyssa didn’t register the gesture as significant.

  “In what context? I mean, there are all sorts of consortiums, aren’t there? It simply means a group of people or organizations affiliated to perform some sort of transaction or business.”

  With this last sentence Talyssa Corbu began to notice a definite defensiveness in the police captain. She raised an eyebrow. “I’m sorry. I thought I was being clear. I am speaking in the context of the trafficking of human beings.”

  The woman just stared at Corbu now, then looked back down at her credentials. “Again, as you said, you are a criminal analyst. And clearly quite junior. Help me, please, because I don’t understand your int
erest or your mandate.”

  This was just the suspicion Talyssa and the American hoped to elicit from the captain. Still, she swallowed hard, fear welling within her.

  “You can check it out with The Hague. I’m on a fact-finding trip. Very preliminary.”

  “Yes. I will be checking this out.” She looked up at Corbu. “Are you alone here in our city?”

  The Romanian’s heart began to pound even harder, and she squeezed the armrests of the chair. Harry had warned her not to oversell her power, because in order to serve as bait, she had to appear vulnerable.

  She answered, “I’m in contact with colleagues back at the office, but I came alone.”

  “Where are you from?” the captain asked.

  “I live in the Netherlands.”

  The policewoman leaned her forearms on her desk, her eyes narrowing. “Not what I meant. Where were you born?”

  There was a faint air of menace in the woman’s voice now.

  “I . . . I am Romanian. But I am here in my capacity as a Europol—”

  “These trafficked girls. Any of them coming from Romania?”

  Corbu fought the urge to leap to her feet and run out of the room. The captain was sensing something, picking her story apart before even checking with anyone back in The Hague. This was a dangerous dance, because the Romanian woman couldn’t appear like she really did have the pipeline figured out; that would mean Europol would have this information, too. No, she needed to give the police here the impression she was doing this on her own, but she also needed to cast enough uncertainty on this that they would let her leave the building to give them time to sort her story out.

  Corbu said, “I would imagine that women have been trafficked from Romania. They have a lot of missing-person cases. Young, impressionable girls. Girls who, quite simply, have vanished from our streets.”

  “So . . . this is personal to you in some way, isn’t it?”

  There was no empathy in the captain’s words, no concern about trafficked women or the investigator claiming to be looking for them. No, she was darkening by the minute, reaching a tone and demeanor that conveyed outright malevolence.