One Minute Out

by Mark Greaney

  Again, I can’t be certain their job isn’t to pick up the Romanian criminal analyst, but I can’t imagine why, if they were ready to detain her now, they would let her walk past four cops not far from the exits of the pedestrian and walled-in Old Town, only to be detained by more guys hundreds of stair steps higher and farther away from the exits.

  It would serve no purpose, I tell myself, and then I rethink things and pick up my pace even more, because the third group could potentially be hitters. Assassins. And if this is the case, they’d have every reason to kill Talyssa Corbu far from the heavy pedestrian traffic of Stradun.

  I continue up the stairs, and I check in with the girl.

  “You doing okay?”

  Softly she answers; I can hear the labor of her climbing the stairs in her voice. “You should know how I’m doing. You said you would be watching me.”

  “I am watching you. No, don’t turn around, just trust me.”

  “Trust again,” she mumbles. Then, “I don’t see anyone following me or paying me any attention. I’ve been stealing glances in windows and such.”

  I roll my eyes as I move in her direction. “Leave that part to me, please. Just walk.”

  “Trust you, you mean.” There is a mocking tone in her voice.

  I consider telling her about the surveillance I saw, but I don’t want to scare her. Instead I just say, “Don’t go straight to your flat. Make your next right, follow that alley for a couple of minutes, give me time to get ahead of you and look at the area up there.”

  “You think they are waiting for me there?” she asks, a little nervously.

  The answer is an almost definite yes, but I say, “Let me find out first.”

  EIGHTEEN

  I head straight for the address Talyssa gave the police captain, and when I get there a couple minutes later, I see a tiny children’s playground, no larger than half a basketball court, across the narrow cobblestone passage from Talyssa’s building.

  Three grown men sit in the playground. One of the three is on his phone, standing by the gate in the park, twenty feet away from the other two. He’s lean and wiry, but with the same almost military-style short hair worn by the two other pairs of men I saw a few minutes back. And it’s apparent to me now that the opposition is pretty sure Talyssa is acting alone, outside the bounds of her duties for Europol, because the other two tough-looking goofballs maintaining this watch are sitting on opposite ends of a children’s seesaw in the middle of the little playground. One of them has his back to the building where Talyssa’s flat is located, but the other is facing it directly, and they’re idly chatting in Serbo-Croat as if they don’t have a care in the world.

  For a second I wonder if these three might not be involved in all this, so relaxed is their posture here, but then as I walk past I see the dude on the phone look up, check me out, then turn to flash his eyes quickly on the stone steps up to the building across the passageway.

  It’s obvious to me that he’s here on a job, and the job involves looking for people and monitoring a location.

  He’s oppo, they all are . . . no question about it.

  I sit down on a bench on the cobblestones one hundred feet away from them, and I check the cameras I have stationed all around.

  Seeing no one else who appears threatening, I speak softly so that only Talyssa can hear me. “You cool?”

  “I’m fine, Harry. What is the situation up there?”

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious you did a good job selling your story back at the police station. There are some men here waiting around for you, but I don’t think they’ve come to pick you up. They’re just here to see if you are going where you said you were going.”

  Nervously she asks, “What . . . what do you want me to do?”

  “Come up to your building, don’t pay any attention to the three guys in the playground, and go up to your room.”

  “But . . . but what if you’re wrong? What if they just shoot me?”

  “Nobody’s shooting anybody.” I amend this. “Unless it’s me shooting them.”

  She whispers more softly now, as if to herself, but I can hear her. “Oh my God.”

  “Trust me,” I say, probably for the tenth time. “It will be fine.”

  I spend the next couple of minutes pretending to look at my phone, until finally Corbu walks past me. She sneaks a glance my way but I glance down, willing her to just play cool. She strolls along next to the low stone wall of the playground, ignoring the men there, all three of whom I’m now watching carefully. Their eyes are on her, but they do a pretty good job of looking disinterested. Cops, for sure. I am guessing they’re all probably detectives.

  Like the men in the more touristy part of the Old Town, I don’t know if these guys really are part of the pipeline, or if they’ve just been sent here as lookouts by the brass on the take from the traffickers. I’d hate to have to shoot them without more knowledge of their intentions, but my right hand is inches from the Glock on my hip and I am certain I can have it out and on target faster than any of these big goobers can get their hands on the grips of their weapons.

  Talyssa disappears up the steps into the stone courtyard of her building, heading towards a staircase at the back that will take her up to her room. I look back down at my phone and soon hear the three men talking softly. Stealing a quick glance, I see the guy who’d been on his phone walking away, leaving the two men on the seesaw.

  In my earpiece I hear Talyssa. “Did everything go okay?”

  “Yes. I count a total of seven men tailing you.”

  “Seven?” There is a fresh shock in her voice.

  “Yeah, but they are just watchers. These aren’t the troublemakers.”

  “The troublemakers . . . they are coming later?”

  “They’re probably coming later, yeah.” I hope this to be the case, but I don’t say that to the scared woman in her room. Instead I say, “Just stay where you are, keep your bag nearby. I’m going to get on the roof of your building so I’ll be able to cover all the stairwells they can climb when they come for you.”

  “When they come . . . how will you get me out of here?”

  I have a plan for this, but I don’t want to tell her about it yet, because I don’t want her to freak out. I say, “Don’t worry. That part is easy.” And this is true, as long as she doesn’t freak out.

  Pushing concern for this out of my mind, I rise from the bench and head off in the opposite direction of the park, with plans to double back behind Talyssa’s building and climb through a window so I can make my way inside the courtyard.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jaco Verdoorn dozed in the cabin of the Gulfstream jet, sitting in the middle of a team of nine men, most of whom were also asleep. It was only ten p.m., but this brief rest between jobs was likely all this team was going to get for a while, so the men were taking advantage of it.

  In Verdoorn’s lap was an open dossier on his target in the Balkans. Courtland Gentry, former CIA officer, now on the run from the Agency.

  His information came from the SSA, the State Security Agency of South Africa, his former employer. SSA had the file because the Americans had shared it years ago, when they first deemed their former employee a threat and issued a “shoot on sight” sanction against him.

  Verdoorn had spent nine years in the intelligence realm and had been involved in his nation’s hunt for the infamous Gray Man, to no effect, but to great and lasting frustration to the forty-one-year-old. He knew the dossier in his lap from back to front, had all but memorized it.

  But now he was back in the game, hunting the Gray Man again, and he couldn’t have been happier about it.

  Verdoorn had left his nation’s intelligence services four years ago to found White Lion, a private security concern registered on the island of Crete. White Lion had paperwork to show a robust list
of clients, but in truth they only worked for one organization now, the Consortium, and one man, Kenneth Cage.

  All the shell companies that acted as White Lion’s official clients served some sort of purpose in the Consortium, and White Lion billed them for work such as convoy operations in Nigeria, personal protection in Ukraine, and professional risk-management consulting in Germany.

  Verdoorn had a staff of dozens, all hard men well aware of the organization they serviced and the industry in which it did business, but tonight he flew south towards Croatia with only his nine best assets. These were all former South African military officers, all highly trained with weapons and tactics, but beyond this, each and every one of them had learned the art of invisibility.

  It was Verdoorn’s own fascination with and study of the Gray Man, years ago when he was put on the hunt, that made him mandate to his assets that they dress, behave, and operate in the field not as members of an intelligence service or a military unit but as regular members of the public. To this end they made dozens of adjustments to normal operating procedure regarding dress, communications, equipment, tactics, and the like.

  They didn’t work in teams of two or three, an instantaneous tip-off to some watchers. No, Verdoorn’s assets each operated alone when on surveillance missions, while remaining in covert communications with one another.

  These nine men, plus Verdoorn, were elite specialists in the tradecraft of remaining clandestine, and Jaco Verdoorn had employed this team on dozens of operations for the Consortium around the world.

  The Gulfstream hit some turbulence, and this woke Verdoorn up. He looked out the portal at the night sky—he imagined they were somewhere over Austria about now—and he thought about going to the galley for a bottle of water.

  Just as he was about to release his seat belt, the phone next to Jaco Verdoorn flashed. He scooped it up. “Yeah?”

  It was the cockpit. The first officer was a White Lion pilot who, previous to joining the security firm, flew Saab Gripen fighters for the South African air force. “Call for you, sir.”

  “Send it through, Jimmy.”

  And for the next ten minutes, the president of White Lion corporate security and the director of operations of the Consortium spoke with Kostas Kostopoulos, the regional director of the Consortium in the Balkan states.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Gulfstream only had seating for nine in the cabin, but there was a belted seat in the aft lavatory, and here Rodger Loots slept, only somewhat annoyed to be assigned to the lav seat because he’d worked in conditions a hell of a lot more austere than a sleek corporate jet, even considering the fact he was sitting in the shitter.

  Loots stirred with the buffeting turbulence, then looked at his watch. It was twenty-two fifteen, and he figured they must be somewhere over Austria by now.

  Just then the PA in the lav chirped, and he heard his boss’s commanding voice. “Rodge . . . front and center, yeah?”

  Seconds later Loots squatted down next to Verdoorn in the center of the cabin. “What’s up, boss?”

  “We have a new target.”

  “Damn. Was hoping we’d get a shot at the Gray Man.”

  “We still might, actually. A woman who works for Europol is down in Dubrovnik asking questions about the Consortium.”

  “By name?”

  “By name.”

  “Shit.”

  “She went straight to the local cops, who we have in our pocket, and said she was part of an investigation into trafficking involving the pipeline and the Consortium.”

  “Shit,” Loots repeated.

  “Shit is right, but the police chief, who is with us, checked her story out with The Hague.” Verdoorn looked down at his notepad, now sitting on top of the Gentry dossier. Reading the notes he’d jotted down while talking to Kostas, he said, “Talyssa Corbu is an economic crimes analyst from Romania, she’s got nothing to do with trafficking, and, according to her employers, she is currently on a personal hiatus at work due to some sort of a family emergency back home in Bucharest.”

  “What the hell is she doing in Dubrovnik, then?”

  “The Hague thinks she’s trying to crack some case open to get advancement. Something about money laundering. Sounds like she’s bloody bonkers.”

  “So . . . she’s workin’ off book?”

  “Totally. Swingin’ in the bloody wind. I looked at the names of the merchandise in the pipeline now and don’t see any relation to her. This seems like it is, in fact, her bid for a pat on the back and a shot at advancement.”

  “So since she’s on her own, we need to remove her.”

  “Bladdy right. The fact that she knows about the Consortium means she’s a dead woman. She’s staying in Dubrovnik. The cops have followed her and confirmed she’s alone, but the timing with the Gray Man activity over the border in Bosnia is too convenient for my taste. She’s workin’ with ole Gentry, I’m sure of it. She’s the face and he’s the brawn in whatever little scheme the two have cooked up.”

  “What’s our role, boss?”

  “The police chief in Dubrovnik wants this woman picked up tonight and disposed of. The Greek is sending a team of Albanians to take her from her pension and put a knife in her, then splash her in the Adriatic. But Kostopoulos has agreed to order them to hold her at a safe house till I get there. I want to question her before they put her on ice.”

  “We should grab her off the street ourselves. You know how it is with the Albanians. They’ve got the will . . . good hard heads for this sort of thing, decent shooters. But they’re not the sharpest tacks, are they?”

  Verdoorn shrugged. “No, they’re not. But taking the woman off the playing field at the first opportunity is the right call. Whatever intel she has, it’s a danger having it out there in public. I’ll go to the safe house and interrogate her myself, see what she knows about Gentry and who else she’s talked to. I’ll squeeze her hard, pass her back to the Albanians for disposal, and then we’ll go after our man.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Only problem is this. There is a shipment in Dubrovnik right now, sped up due to the Gray Man hit in Mostar. They’re waiting on transport, which isn’t coming till early tomorrow morning.” He added, “It’s a VIP shipment, and one of the items is tagged for special handling.”

  “Unlucky,” Loots said. He knew a VIP shipment meant the women being shipped had been picked out at other way stations and evaluated as being of especially high quality. This stock was sold in a special quarterly market, where criminal organizations around Europe and the Middle East could bid on merchandise that had the potential to earn them millions of euros throughout their admittedly short life cycle. These items could generate a dozen times what the average woman being sold into sexual slavery by the Consortium could produce.

  The special-handling item Verdoorn referred to meant a woman who was to be protected at all costs because of the destination she was heading to and the men who had ordered her taken. One of these special-handling captives was worth a dozen or more of the other VIP whores, and after a brutal indoctrination period of travel through the pipeline, these women were then treated with kid gloves. Their mental and physical health was improved through a time-honed process to make them ready for their duties ahead.

  Loots knew he was being told the shipment that was now passing through the area where the American assassin was causing trouble for the Consortium was a shipment that must be protected at all costs, only raising the stakes of this operation.

  He whistled softly. “The VIPs we can’t do much about other than to help the Albanians watch over them till they make it onto the boat. But why don’t we at least take the special-handling item out of theater? Get it out of danger and on to its destination?”

  “I’ve run into this before,” Jaco said. “Protocol mandates that merchandise, special handling or not, goes th
rough the pipeline to the end. It’s part of the psychological reeducation.”

  “Makes things difficult.”

  “It’s a process that’s been refined for years, and it’s working well. You, me, the rest of the shock troops: we’ll all have to shoulder the burden of finding this killer and protecting the merchandise all the way to market.”

  Loots said, “So you are saying we’ve a full plate. We’ll need to do this discreetly, too.”

  “That’s it, mate. We land at two hundred hours. Let’s wake the boys and tell them what they’re in for.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Moments later Verdoorn stood at the bulkhead and addressed the team, who were all now quite awake and interested. “We have to keep the pipeline secure for the current shipment and for future shipments. A situation has arisen in Dubrovnik, and we’re goin’ in to sort it out.”

  “Who’s the target?” a bearded man named Van Straaten asked.

  “We have a woman to interrogate, but she isn’t our ultimate target. The real target is an American. Courtland Gentry. Ex–CIA Ground Branch. A tier-one para, all the way.”

  “Military?”

  “No military or law enforcement service. I have no clue how he found his way into Ground Branch; it’s not in the file I’ve got, but we do believe he’s here working alone, or perhaps with limited support from some rogue law enforcement.”

  “The task, sir?”

  Verdoorn’s answer was succinct. “E.E.”

  Men nodded impassively, but they were all pleased. They knew that “extrajudicial execution” was a euphemism for assassination, and they knew their target would be in possession of great skill. When White Lion killed, their targets were usually hoodlums involved in the pipeline who’d gone astray. A “weapons-free” order against a former CIA Ground Branch paramilitary was a thrill to each and every one of Jaco’s troops.