One Minute Out

by Mark Greaney

  A few vomited, the undulating road and the terror both competing for attention in their stomachs.

  Finally, the bus stopped, then began creeping forward. It stopped again, rolled a few meters forward again, and then stopped again. This continued for minutes, and Maja thought it likely they were at a border crossing. This meant they would be passing by police or border guards, but she didn’t get excited with hopes of rescue. She’d been through other border crossings since she was taken over a week earlier, with other men guarding her, other vehicles transporting her.

  They’d gone through checkpoints before, and they’d always been allowed to pass. She suspected that whoever was manning the checkpoints had been well aware of the nature of the cargo in the blacked-out bus, and they’d taken money to let it through.

  Soon the big vehicle returned to its previous speed on the winding roads, and Maja felt certain they were now in another country.

  After another fifteen minutes of driving through hills, the bus rolled to a slow stop. One of the Serbians stood; Maja noticed he had a bandage on his arm and another around his head, and he shouted to the vehicle for everyone to get out and line up single file.

  When Maja stepped out of the bus and into the night, a fresh terror washed over her. She saw they were off the road in a gravel parking circle, surrounded by dense forest.

  She’d expected a new dungeon. A farmhouse or a warehouse or some sort of out-of-the-way building. But they were out in the middle of nowhere.

  No . . . this didn’t look right at all.

  Once all the girls were lined up by the bus, the man with the bloody wrapping around his head stepped in front of the group. He hadn’t been the leader of the Serbian security men. No, that man was nowhere to be seen now. This man, whatever his name was, had been just one of the junior guards before tonight.

  She had no idea why he’d been promoted but wondered if that meant all the men above him were dead.

  Maja’s Russian wasn’t great, but she knew enough to understand.

  “There is a price to be paid for attempting to leave our care.”

  Our care? Had Maja understood him correctly?

  She fully expected the Ukrainian blonde to interject here, but when she did not, Maja realized the bravest of the group was as unnerved by these surroundings as she was.

  The injured guard continued. “We have tried to treat you all with respect and kindness. And yet our kindness is rewarded with murder.” He repeated his assertion. “There is a price to be paid.”

  Girls began to sob; this new leader looked around to the four men with him, motioned to a younger man with a thick black beard, and said something in their native language. The man handed his rifle off to a mate and walked up to the line of girls, looking at each one closely with a flashlight. He made a few sounds of disgust as he stepped from one to the next, but on the sixth prisoner, a nineteen-year-old Maja knew as Stefana, he stopped. With a violent motion he reached up and slapped her across the face, and as she fell towards the graveled parking circle, he grabbed her by the hair and began pulling her towards the trees.

  She screamed, but this only caused him to pull her along more roughly.

  A second guard and then a third grabbed girls from the line; these men held on to their rifles as they dragged the women into the darkened forest. The two Serbians watching the row of prisoners kept their weapons trained on them while the sounds of violent rape echoed around the trees.

  Girls still in the line fell to the ground in despair. Maja cried, but she kept her feet.

  The two remaining men talked while they guarded the group of twenty; they seemed to have a short argument, but soon one of them—not the new leader—slung his gun over his shoulder and walked forward. He was older, well into his forties, and he looked over a couple of the hostages standing by the bus, but quickly his flashlight’s beam centered on Maja herself.

  He reached up and grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off-balance, began pulling her towards the woods.

  “Ne! Ne! Ne!” No was one of the few words she knew in Serbo-Croatian, and she said it now, over and over, as panic threatened to overwhelm her.

  But before the gangster could get her off the gravel and into the grass, the new leader of the group called out to him, and he stopped.

  Maja could not understand, but whatever he said instigated an argument between the two. While the women in the woods continued to cry out, these last two men entered into a full-on shouting match.

  But then it ended, and the man holding Maja’s arm yanked her back to the bus, where she was ordered to sit down on the gravel with all the others.

  Save one. The older guard walked down the line, shined his light on more faces, and then grabbed another young girl. Despite her cries and pleas, he pulled her off into the woods while Maja looked on, mouth agape.

  She didn’t understand. Why had she been spared?

  She put her hands over her ears to drown out the pitiful cries from the trees, but a man in the forest shouted and she peered into the darkness. She saw a figure, a young Bulgarian girl of sixteen she knew as Diana, running off. She was naked other than socks, and she was sprinting, her long legs leaping over obstacles like a gazelle.

  “No,” Maja whispered. And then she shouted it. “No!”

  A Serbian guard rose to his feet, pulled his pants up and cinched them, and then reached down to the forest floor and retrieved his rifle. Other men shouted at him, two of them taking off in pursuit of the girl, but the man with the rifle leveled it, aimed carefully, and fired a single round, just seconds before Diana would have disappeared into thick foliage.

  The gunshot echoed off the trees and into the night.

  Maja watched in horror as the sixteen-year-old tumbled to the ground and lay still.

  “No!” the girls sitting by the bus croaked out now.

  Maja began weeping heavily, for the senseless death of the young girl, for the brutal rapes that were happening before her eyes, and for the fact that she had been singled out and spared the fate of the others.

  She didn’t understand it, not any of it, but even though her brain was riddled with shock, that last part confused her most.

  Maja vomited onto the gravel in front of her, over and over, while the mournful cries of the women around her resumed.

  SIX

  The balcony overlooking the azure water was lined with potted plants and trees, keeping the large space cool despite the warm morning sunshine. The tallest of these cast shade on the breakfast table with the seventy-two-year-old man seated at it, but they had been positioned so as not to obstruct his view of the sea.

  Hvar was a resort town on an island off the coast of Croatia, so although it saw a lot of tourists in July, it would be absolutely filled to the brim with foreigners in August. For now, though, the man who owned the penthouse apartment above the rocky coastline enjoyed the relative calm of the streets below, and the fact that although there were a number of pleasure craft offshore, they weren’t choking out the beautiful bay and he could still see the crystal-green water.

  He would leave in a few days, remain outside Croatia for the month of August, and this way he would avoid the highest of the high season.

  Kostas Kostopoulos was not Croatian, although he kept a penthouse here. He was Greek, and his own nation would become even more crowded in August than Croatia, so he wouldn’t bother with going home. No, he planned on heading to Venice for work, and then he would take another business trip to the United States. He’d remain in Los Angeles for the month, and only return to the Adriatic when the summer holiday season died down.

  Kostopoulos didn’t like crowded streets; he barely ventured out of his properties into the masses, and only did so when business forced him to.

  The Greek oversaw the Southern European trafficking channels, from Turkey to the south and Ukraine to the north, all the way to the te
rminus of his territory on the eastern edge of Western Europe. He’d built an empire over decades: drugs, guns, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, illegal immigration. He had made hundreds of millions of euros in these endeavors. But the pipeline of women trafficked for sex work from Eastern Europe into the West was his most profitable revenue stream, and he was only a regional director of a much larger enterprise, known to those involved as the Consortium.

  Kostas wondered how much the person who ran the operation earned from his European network, and he marveled at his best guess. He had no idea who this person was; he himself worked through the Consortium’s Director of operations, a South African.

  But whoever the Director of the Consortium was, Kostas was sure he or she was in possession of a spigot that poured pure gold.

  As he sipped his coffee, the sliding glass door opened behind him, and a bearded man stepped through in a rush, passing two burly bodyguards. He stopped at the table.

  In English Kostopoulos said, “Good morning, Stanislav. Hope you don’t mind if I finish my breakfast. Sit, take a few breaths, calm down, then tell me what’s so important.”

  The younger man did as instructed; he even took a sip of pineapple juice, already poured in crystal, when the older man motioned towards it. But he rushed through the act, spilled a little down his chin, then hurriedly put the glass back on the table. He spoke with a Serbian accent, but the Greek talked to Serbs daily, so it wasn’t difficult for him to understand.

  “There has been a disruption in the pipeline.”

  Kostas Kostopoulos showed his displeasure with slightly sagging shoulders but nothing more. “Where?”

  “Mostar.”

  The Greek took a bite of yogurt, then said, “General Babic and his Belgrade men.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Details?”

  “Attacked last night. Seven men dead, including Babic.”

  The Greek sighed now while he buttered his croissant. He displayed a subdued countenance, though this was highly distressing news, to be sure. Still, he wouldn’t let the Serbian see him react with the shock he felt. “So who is interfering with my business interests this time? The Turks again?”

  “Belgrade doesn’t know who ordered it, but they think they know who carried out the operation itself, and they believe this was not an attack on the way station, but simply an attack on the general.”

  The older man looked up from his croissant and said, “Well? Who is responsible?”

  A pause. “An individual known as the Gray Man.”

  Kostopoulos cocked his head. “An . . . individual?”

  “We have no information that he was acting in concert with others.”

  “One man? One man killed seven, including the general, who has been hunted for a quarter century? That sounds like a tall tale.”

  Stanislav was a member of the Serbian mafia, the Branjevo Partizans, and he served as his organization’s link to the Consortium that operated the pipeline. Kostopoulos was the only contact in the Consortium he had ever met, and that was by design.

  He said, “Belgrade has interviewed both the surviving security force and the whores, sir. Everything points to it being one very skilled man. Belgrade seems to know him by his moniker, Gray Man. They said no one else could have done this.”

  Kostopoulos looked down to the water at the gorgeous summer morning. He didn’t believe the lone-assassin theory and thought the Serbian mob was a bunch of fools for even suggesting it.

  “The merchandise was undisturbed?”

  “There were twenty-four items on site. One is missing.”

  “The missing item. What’s her story?”

  “Moldovan. The whores say Babic was fucking her himself in another room when the gunman appeared. Nothing special about her. They don’t know where she is. Security men never saw her leave, but they were fighting it out with this killer at the time.”

  After a nod and a bite into his croissant, the Greek said, “Obviously you will close down that way station.”

  “Under way now, sir. The product is gone already, moved on to the next stop.”

  “They are early for the next stop. We aren’t set to pick them up on the coast for three days. That could pose problems.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. But there is nowhere in our area of influence that we can put them.”

  “Banja Luka?”

  “We are getting it ready now, but it won’t be secure for a few more days. Moving the whores on west was the only thing we could do.”

  Kostas let a little frustration show now. “This will be costly. Time-consuming. Obstructive to our work. How, dear Stanislav, do we exact our revenge for this?”

  “This Gray Man will be hard to find. He’s probably already far from here.”

  Kostopoulos shrugged. “Assassins will come and go. Keep an ear out for him, and I’ll tell the other directors in the pipeline to do the same.

  “But he’ll be long gone by now, so I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about revenge for the failures in your ranks.” After a pause he added, “The local constabulary there in Mostar was involved in protecting the operation, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir. Our contact there is a police chief in Mostar. A man named Vukovic.”

  “I’d say he did a rather poor job. Do you agree?”

  After a brief pause the Serbian replied, “Agreed.”

  “We will make an example of him. Something that will show the other pipeline way stations that we do not accept underperforming from those we compensate well to keep our systems functioning safely.”

  Stanislav looked uncomfortable for a moment.

  The Greek picked up on this. “He’s one of Belgrade’s assets, and you don’t want to kill him. Is that it?”

  “He is well positioned. He has helped us with many—”

  “I can move the pipeline out of Belgrade’s area of influence. I can move the women via northern routes or south through the Mediterranean.”

  Stanislav said nothing.

  “I want a pound of flesh for this debacle. You can either find yourself a new chief of police in the little shit town of Mostar, or you can find yourself another endeavor as profitable as what I offer you.”

  Stanislav sat up straighter. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not you offering us the work. It’s your masters in the Consortium.”

  Kostopoulos bristled at this but fought any show of anger or insult. Instead he said, “I rule this area, and my opinion holds weight with the Director of the Consortium.”

  Stanislav kept his defiant posture. “Then we ask you to contact him and request that he take no action on Vukovic. We have other needs for him in the area. If you are leaving Mostar anyway, why should you care if he’s still working for us?”

  Kostas let it go, but he had no plans to contact the Director, and no idea how to do so, even if he did want to.

  The Serbian left the Greek alone on his luxurious balcony and stepped back inside to head to the elevator, pulling a phone from his pocket as he did so.

  Kostas Kostopoulos did his best not to let his temper flare in this work. He always tried to retain a dispassionate approach. So many other traffickers were thugs, gangsters, criminals through and through. But the organization Kostopoulos worked for, though they used petty gangsters for their grunt work, was made up of businessmen and businesswomen, not thugs. They acquired, produced, transported, traded, and profited on a product, and the fact that the product they dealt in was human beings had been tamped down by years of incredibly positive balance sheets and a growth line unparalleled in any other legitimate industry since the dot-com boom twenty years earlier.

  Nobody in any position of authority in the endeavor thought of their product as people. They were resources. Assets.

  Merchandise.

  But despite the Greek’s desire to remain unemotional a
bout what happened, he recognized that the shuttering of one of his pipeline way stations would hurt the monthly flow of product west, and this would ultimately reflect poorly on him.

  Kostopoulos might have been a powerful regional director in one of the largest human trafficking organizations in the world, but he didn’t call the shots, and his dispassion now was tempered by the fact that he knew that some extraordinarily powerful and dangerous individuals were going to be very unhappy with him when he told them of last night’s events.

  He’d have to make a call now, to obtain Consortium approval to send assassins after this Vukovic, because Kostas Kostopoulos didn’t make these decisions on his own.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jaco Verdoorn didn’t like this part of his job, but it was not because he was squeamish or sensitive about murder.

  He’d killed before, many times. He’d killed in combat, and he’d killed in security contract work, and he’d even killed once in a street fight in Pretoria.

  But this? Tonight? This kind of killing, he felt, was far beneath him.

  These weren’t combatants. These were lambs at the slaughterhouse, he was the butcher, and there was no game in that.

  Still he drove in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes G-Wagen as it motored north away from Los Angeles, through Calabasas, west of the hills of the San Fernando Valley, checking his phone idly and thinking about the old days, back in the nation of his birth, back in his time in South Africa’s military and intelligence services.

  Those had been interesting times.

  So unlike tonight.

  Tonight he would put bullets into the heads of two young women, dump their bodies in a ditch, and then turn around to head to Van Nuys airport for a flight to Europe.

  The girls were all but unconscious in the backseat of the Mercedes. They’d been injected with heroin, not for the first time, and then they’d been helped out of the large property where they had been kept, folded into the SUV, and joined by Jaco Verdoorn and two of his men.