Марк Грини - One Minute Out

“Your plan was to . . . to do what, exactly?”

“I wanted to get into his house. Wave the gun in his face. Intimidate him.”

I don’t want to insult her by telling her she wouldn’t intimidate me if she waved a flamethrower in my face, so instead I say, “Your plan is dangerous. He’s got security around him, day and night, apparently.”

“Yes.”

“So your idea won’t work.”

She looks up at me now. “Apparently not, because I’ve been kidnapped by a gangster.”

“Kidnapped?” I ask in surprise, then consider the fact that I have a Glock 19 pistol on my knee, pointed vaguely in her direction. I holster it but say, “I haven’t searched you, so if you make any sudden moves, we’re going to have a problem. But otherwise . . . I have no intentions of hurting you. Looks like you’ve been through enough already. And I’m not a damn gangster.”

Holstering the gun seems to calm her down, but I can tell she still sees me as a potential enemy.

I drum my fingers on my leg a moment, then say, “Here’s my problem with your story, Talyssa. You can lie about what you’ve been doing for the last week, you can fake your entire timeline, but you can’t fake the smell of terror that is pouring off you right now. You look like you haven’t slept in a week. How am I supposed to believe you took on the Belgrade mob all by yourself, and you’re in the middle of a one-woman op against the head of the police here, a man who has armed bodyguards and a man who, you say, is tied to the mob? How the hell are you able to—”

“Because of Roxana! Because she’s my sister! Because I’m all she has!” Talyssa screams it. “She is either dead, or she’s their prisoner. But either way, I have to find her, or find out who killed her.” She begins weeping again. “I have to.”

If this part of her story is an act, it’s a damn good one.

Through sobs she asks, “What is your name?”

“Harry.”

“Harry what ?”

“Just Harry.”

“Let me ask you, Harry, whoever you are. Have you ever lost a loved one? Someone you cared about more than anyone in the world?”

Yes, I have, more or less, but I don’t answer her. Still . . . I think about this, think about the anguish I felt back then, and I dial back my skepticism about her story. “Okay. There’s more to you than meets the eye. I can believe that.”

Sniffing back more tears, she nods. “But you’re right. Pointing a gun at the captain will probably just get me killed.”

“And even if it doesn’t, with that crazy bright red hair of yours, it won’t be long before the opposition IDs you, realizes you’re following them, and then they will grab you.”

“They’ve . . . they’ve already identified me. In Belgrade.”

I was wondering how a girl like this was able to tail mobsters without getting made. Apparently, she wasn’t.

“As the bus was leaving, I tried to get the license plate number, so I stepped out in the street. They had a truck following the bus. I didn’t know.”

“A chase car,” I say. “Pretty standard stuff.”

“Yes, it chased after me, but I managed to get on a streetcar and get away. I don’t know if they told others what I looked like and what I was doing, but—”

“Trust me, they did.” I look at her hair. “Let me guess. After you were blown, you dyed your hair thinking it would throw them off.”

“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?”