One Minute Out

by Mark Greaney

  He spits inside the bag, and bloody phlegm drips out of it, down onto the tunic of his uniform.

  I ask with more authority in my voice. “Where . . . were . . . they . . . taken?”

  “They gone. I don’t know where. I don’t know what happens before Mostar, I don’t know what happens after Mostar.”

  Talyssa Corbu surprises me by stepping forward and shouting now. “Liar! I saw you in Belgrade with the Branjevo Partizans. You picked up the girls, brought them to the farm near Mostar.”

  His head cocks to the side; perhaps he’s surprised to hear a woman’s voice, but he makes no reply.

  I lean closer to his face. “Oh, shit, Niko. You’re lying to me? I guess it’s time to knock your block off.” I punch him again. It’s not a particularly hard blow, but I am pacing myself. Still, my right hand throbs with pain and I think I’m going to have to look around for something else to bang against his face if this goes on much longer.

  More blood and spit drip out of the bag. Corbu has stepped back against the graffiti-covered wall, apparently surprising even herself with her outburst.

  I say, “Okay . . . if you know about Belgrade, the previous stop in the pipeline, then I bet you know about the next stop.”

  His head shakes hard. “They tell me nothing. Belgrade is Serb mafia, like here. That’s why I go there. I work with them. The next stop . . . it is different group.”

  “What group?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where does the pipeline lead?”

  Niko just shrugs. “I do not know. The men who run it . . . they are somewhere else. I do not know. Not mob.” The bag stops moving, and it appears he is thinking for a moment. Then he says, “I don’t think mob. Not Serbian. All I know. It is business. Only business.”

  “Only business?” I say with growing rage, and I realize I have to smack this asshole again, but this time, Corbu beats me to the punch. Literally. She appears on my left, charging forward, and she throws a crazy haymaker at Vukovic’s head.

  The Romanian woman hits the Serb in the cheekbone, and I can tell by the sound of the impact that Talyssa Corbu is going to feel the strike a lot longer than Niko Vukovic.

  She clutches her hand in pain, and I’m certain she’s regretting the first and only punch she’s ever thrown in her life. I pull her back a few feet. “Let me handle the rough stuff.”

  Ignoring her injury, she says, “My sister.” She pulls out the photo and gives it to me with her uninjured hand.

  I return to the police chief again. “I need you to look at a picture of a girl, and I need you to tell me, truthfully, if you have seen her.”

  He snorts a laugh. “One of the whores? That’s what you want? One of the whores?”

  “She’s not a whore!” Talyssa shouts, and she rushes forward again, swinging the same fist as before. I catch it before she makes contact, not for the prisoner’s benefit but for hers, and I spin her around and walk her back to the corner.

  “Allow me,” I say, and I walk forward now and hammer Vukovic’s face with a left jab.

  Speaking to Talyssa, he says, “They are all whores. Like you . . . whore.”

  I slug him harder now, connect with his right cheekbone. His head pops back and I know he’s going to feel that all the way down his spine, because I feel it all the way up to my shoulder.

  As his head hangs again I say, “I’m going to show you a picture.”

  “Who cares? Who cares about this woman?”

  “I do. Which means you’d better care, too.”

  I put my balaclava back on and yank off his hood. He looks at the picture without any emotion as blood runs from his nose and mouth. “Never seen her,” he says.

  I can’t tell if he’s being truthful, but I push him. “You’re lying again, and you are trying my patience.”

  He shakes his head once more. “No. I don’t have time to look at all the property.”

  I bet he takes time to do more than that with the prisoners. I ball up a fist but calm myself and hold it back, deciding to try another tactic. Taking the picture from him, I say, “You are worried about what I will do to you now, but maybe you should worry about whoever it was who sent the Hungarians after you.”

  He looks at me with confusion, his nose and mouth dripping blood. “Hungarians?”

  “Three assassins were outside your building last night. I stopped them before they got to you.” When he says nothing I add, “You’re welcome.”

  “Lie,” he says. “I have no problems with Hungarians.”

  “I could be wrong,” I say, “but I’m guessing someone high above you in all this wants to send a message to other little people in the pipeline about the price of failure. They brought these guys in from another gang.”

  Niko does not respond for a long time. Finally, he whispers, “Pitovci.”

  Talyssa leans into my ear and whispers, “Slovakian mafia. From up north in Bratislava.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “When I worked for the Romanian federal prosecutor’s office we dealt with them. They are active in Bucharest.”

  To Vukovic I say, “But the Slovakian mafia didn’t order the hit on you, did they? Somebody else is pulling their strings.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “It was the Consortium, wasn’t it?” I don’t know what the hell the Consortium is but, again, I’m doing a presumptive interrogation approach, and sometimes it requires taking a chance.

  His eyes rise to mine, and I know I’ve struck gold.

  I’m completely improvising now. “They aren’t happy with you after what went down at the general’s farm. You are being made an example of, and then, after you’ve been brushed aside, you will be replaced.” He looks away, sniffing bloody air, but I press him. “Time is short, Niko. The Slovakians will send more killers, and I won’t be there to beat them up for you. Somebody wants you dead, Chief, and it’s the exact same people you’ve been serving.”

  I’m inside his head now, I can see it.

  “What are you going to do to me?” he asks.

  “You have three choices. I can kill you right here, I can take you back home to where the next hitters from the Pitovci are probably already waiting, or I can just leave you here alive. Number one and number two both sound like more fun to me, but I’ll do number three if you give me something valuable to help us find those girls.”

  Blood bubbles on his lips as he thinks. “I know one thing. Only one thing. I tell you, I tell you the truth, all the truth I know . . . and you will leave me here? Alive?”

  I lean into his ear and speak softly. “I’m a man of my word. If you believe I’ll kill you because I said I will, you should believe I’ll let you go if I say I will.”

  He hangs there and bleeds a moment while he weighs his options. He nods a little and starts to speak. I interrupt with, “Remember, it better be really fucking helpful.”

  Finally he just says, “Dubrovnik.”

  I cock my head. “Dubrovnik?”

  “It’s a city in Croatia.”

  “I know that, dipshit. What about it?”

  “From Mostar, the whores go to Dubrovnik.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My men escort the trucks that come, then lead them to the Croatian border. They take the southern route, through the mountains . . . it goes to Dubrovnik.”

  “Where in Dubrovnik?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not that helpful, slick.”

  He shouts now, fear and anger in equal measures in his tone. “It’s all I know! It’s everything I have!”

  Talyssa speaks up again. “That’s not a small town. How are we supposed to find them there?”

  Vukovic’s head hangs again. “I have no answers. I don’t work in the pipeline, I just protect it here.”

 
I say, “And you’ve done one hell of a fine job, haven’t you?”

  He looks up at my masked face, but not in anger. It’s more a look of resignation. I wonder if he knows he’s a dead man no matter if I spare him right now or not. This fact seriously hampers my ability to extract any more intel from him, but I have to try. “Tell me about the Consortium.”

  With his head still low, he gives it up. “They run pipeline. They deal with Branjevo Partizans. Partizans deal with me. That it. That everything.”

  He seems like he’s telling the truth, and I walk back to Talyssa. “How’s the hand?”

  “It’s fine.”

  She’s rubbing it still; it isn’t fine.

  I say, “This is all we’re going to get out of this guy.”

  “What happens to him now?” There are nerves in her voice, and I take that to mean she’s worried I’m going to just shoot my prisoner in the head and leave him hanging here like a piece of meat at the butcher shop.

  Honestly, I like the imagery, but I need Talyssa, and I need her with her wits about her.

  “We’re leaving him here. Alive. We’ll take your vehicle; mine’s been compromised.”

  “But . . . how will we find the women?”

  “We’ll discuss that on the way.”

  We leave Niko Vukovic with his arms over his head. I don’t hand him the key. I do, however, pull my Jeep back down to the street and leave it there alongside the road.

  His people will find him soon enough, and they will release him. Then, judging from the look on his face when he realized the Consortium had targeted him, I assume the Consortium’s people will find him, and then they will murder him.

  And I, for one, won’t miss him.

  * * *

  • • •

  We head south from Mostar, the terrified young Romanian criminal investigator looking for information about her sister’s disappearance, and me, an assassin on a poorly-thought-out quest to make up for my mistakes.

  We’re a strange pair, to be sure, but for now, anyway, we have the same goal.

  It’s quiet; a fresh gentle rain falls from the low gray summer sky. I look over to Talyssa; she’s rubbing her hand. I don’t see the woman who threw the punch in the bunker. I see the scared young accountant.

  “How did you start working for Europol?”

  She looks out the window as she talks. “I received an advanced degree in forensic accounting. I started working in economic crimes for the state prosecutor in Bucharest. After a few years I applied to Europol. Now I live in The Hague and work in money-laundering crime in the European Union.”

  “And sex trafficking.”

  “At the prosecutor’s office in Romania, following the money from the international criminal enterprises to the local gangs was a big part of my work. Hundreds . . . thousands of young women disappear every year in my country. They are trafficked and smuggled abroad, forced into prostitution, used as slaves, dehumanized. We could see the money making its way into the gangsters’ accounts, but it was laundered somehow, and we could never see where it came from. I moved to Europol thinking I could make a difference on a bigger level, but my office is not so interested in human trafficking. It’s seen as a law enforcement problem, not a forensic-accounting problem. They are wrong, of course, but I am still very junior, and no one listens to me.”

  “I’ll listen. I want to understand what the Consortium is.”

  “I have never heard the term when related to trafficking, but a consortium is just an association of organizations.”

  “How does all this work, typically? Where are the victims taken?”

  “They are taken to anyplace where the economy can support a large commercial sex industry. The developed nations. Europe, America, wealthier parts of the Middle East and Asia.”

  “How are they taken?”

  “Many different ways, but victimization is all about vulnerability. Statistics say ninety percent of sex trafficking victims suffer some kind of abuse before they are recruited. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, dire economic hardship. Often, all three.”

  “What do you mean by ‘recruited’?”

  “An unfair term, I agree, but that’s the term. It encompasses all the ways they are brought into the trafficking system. First, there are recruiters. These are usually women, and they make initial contact with the intended victim. Typically, this is called the grooming period. The recruiter uses money, flattery, and the like to get the victim pulled in. They make connections with them to earn their trust. And then, when they are more susceptible, transporters are brought in.”

  To this I just say, “The pipeline.”

  “Exactly. Vukovic said the Serbs pass them off. I imagine whoever they pass them off to passes them off again. Finally, they will be sold into slavery.”

  “Do they ever escape?”

  “Sometimes. Not terribly often. But if they escape their captors in a foreign country they are treated like illegal immigrants by the local governments. They have no rights, they are just shipped home. There is no witness protection, so if they say anything to the cops, the traffickers will know.

  “The sad part is that many who escape return home to the same hardships they were drawn away from. Women and girls are often revictimized, time and again.”

  I think of Liliana Brinza, and I hope this doesn’t happen to her again.

  “Christ,” I say.

  “The people running the pipelines and other systems like it have this down to an art. The way stations are hellholes, but they are also refuges. Food, music, the bonds made between the captors and women, the drugs administered to them. It’s all part of the plan. These young women and girls go into a system that has been honed for hundreds of years. Thousands of years.”

  And here I am, getting in the middle of all this.

  She sighs loudly now, then asks, “How can we possibly locate them in a city the size of Dubrovnik?”

  “I have an idea. But you may not like it.”

  “Anything. I’ll do anything to find out who is responsible.”

  “I was hoping you might say that.” I breathe out a long sigh, knowing this idea isn’t great, but it’s all I have. “We use you as bait.”

  She looks up at me slowly as I drive. “Bait?”

  “Look, the cops have been tainted at each stop on the pipeline. Not just here in Mostar, but in the other locations, as well.”

  “Yes.” I can tell she gets it. “So . . . so you are saying I go to the police in Dubrovnik and start asking questions?”

  “Exactly.”

  “About my sister?”

  “I wouldn’t do that. If there is one chance in one hundred she could still be alive, you will endanger her by letting the opposition know you are looking for her. She just may become too incriminating for them to keep around.”

  Talyssa thinks about this for a long time. “I can’t do that. I think she is gone . . . but without a body, I do not know for sure. So . . . what do I say?”

  “Tell them you know about the pipeline, and you know about the Consortium.”

  “But . . . what do I know about the Consortium?”

  “Nothing, really, beyond the name. Throw that out there. Ad-lib. Like I did back there with Niko.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then return to your hotel and let me take over. They’ll come for you, I’ll get you out before they take you, and then I’ll be there to see who they are and where they go.”

  She sits in silence a moment. I start to waffle. I even consider telling her we’ll think of something else because this is too dangerous. But I know there is nothing else.

  She knows this, too. “Yes. That is the best idea.”

  “Not sure it’s the best idea, Talyssa, but it’s pretty much the only idea I have.”

  “When do we leave for Dubrovnik?”<
br />
  I’ve turned on the highway through high hills towards mountains in the south. “We’ll be there in a few hours.”

  She nods and we drive on.

  I’ve made it out to her like our plan will be much easier than I envision things, because if Dubrovnik is, in fact, the next stop along the pipeline, the people who run this thing are going to be looking for us there. The same guy—me—shot up one of their way stations and then snatched one of their police conspirators, so it’s no great leap to assume I’ll turn up again at the next stop in the line.

  If they normally had five guys with guns around the girls, now they will have fifteen. If they would normally send two guys to pick up Talyssa when they realize she’s on to them, now they will send six.

  My involvement in this whole thing has made it more difficult for everyone—victim, friend, and foe alike.

  Nice work, Gentry.

  This is going to get complicated, and it’s just me and the accountant with the missing sister against an opposition we haven’t even identified yet.

  Yeah, any way you look at it . . . this blows.

  FOURTEEN

  Kenneth Cage sat in a plastic chair, staring at the girl dancing in front of him. She moved with grace, but with a look of intensity on her face that would tip off an expert that she was struggling to remember her moves.

  She stopped and bowed, and the crowd clapped politely.

  Ken Cage, on the other hand, stood up and cheered.

  Juliet was his twelve-year-old daughter, after all, and as far as he was concerned, she was magnificent.

  Soon he sat back down and watched the next girl at his daughter’s ballet recital take the stage.

  He knew he’d be stuck here for another hour, but just as he steeled himself to endure the rest of the damn dancing, his phone vibrated in his pocket. Heather glared at him as he looked down to it, but when he saw who was calling, he turned away from her and left the room.

  His bodyguard moved into position behind him, radioing the driver of the Mercedes outside that the principal was moving.