Марк Грини - One Minute Out

“I only know what I told you. We are already sending another team. Eight men. They’ll be in Mostar late tonight. They’ll take out Vukovic at the first opportunity, and they know to keep an eye out for this American.”

Kostopoulos hung up and thought about the assassin. Belgrade assumed he’d come to kill Babic, but Babic was dead, and now the man was still there in the area, targeting the men who were there to kill Vukovic. What on earth for?

The Greek sex trafficker looked out over the Adriatic again and found it suddenly less beautiful. More ominous. A vessel would arrive here in Hvar the day after tomorrow. He would board and then they would head down the coast, where they would pick up the merchandise. Then he, along with the merchandise, would continue to the next stop in the pipeline, where most of the items would be sold off to other groups.

Everything was still functioning in the system, but Kostopoulos couldn’t shake the worry that this American, whoever the fuck he was, would show up again.

He reached for his phone and dialed the number for his contact with the Consortium. It was a call he didn’t want to make, but it was also a call he knew better than to avoid. “Jaco? It’s Kostas. I’m afraid we’ve more bad news.”

• • •

It was six a.m. when Talyssa Corbu sat down at the little table in the apartment and lifted the dzezva , a small copper pitcher. She poured thick Bosnian coffee into a chipped ceramic vessel the size of an espresso cup. She would have liked some cream and sugar with it, but she’d only found the coffee setup and an old bag of ground roasted beans in a cabinet, along with three cups and a pair of spoons.

She was glad to find these, actually, as the nearly barren cupboards in the tiny flat didn’t offer up many more options.

As she poured from the dzezva she noticed that her hands were trembling, and she thought it to be less the immediate fear and more the intense anxiety she had been feeling every waking moment for the past week and a half.

Her quest for answers about what happened to her sister was taking a toll on her body; this much was clear to her. And last night, with the plan to confront an evil man, then her subsequent abduction, and then the gun in her face . . . these events hadn’t helped her get over her anxiety, either.

She placed a second small cup on the table, and she looked back over her shoulder to see if she should fill it now with coffee or wait on the American to wake first. She saw him there in the darkness, lying curled up in a closet hardly designed to accommodate a full-sized man.

What a strange individual.

If she knew who he was it would help her trust him, but if she simply knew what he wanted, what his aim was in all this, then she would at least breathe a little easier. Talyssa had not known many good men in her life, and certainly none that were simultaneously as dangerous as this one.

No . . . nothing in her brain lined up right now. She looked at Harry again, watching him sleep. He’d been up most of the night while she rested, and then a couple hours earlier when she woke he told her he’d grab some rest. He’d taken her weapon with him into the closet, along with her phone; he’d left the door open so he could see her, and she had no doubt he was an incredibly light sleeper.

It was odd to her, as scared as she was and as unsure about this man as she felt, that she had no desire to run. She’d been in over her head coming here to Bosnia in the first place, and she also knew in the back of her mind that it was simply a matter of time before one of the evil men involved with Roxana’s abduction would spot her, and then it would be all over for her, too.

She was scared of this Harry, and she certainly didn’t trust him.

But she knew she needed him. He could go places she could not, and he most definitely could do things she could not.

Talyssa wasn’t above using a bad man to help her navigate her way through bad men.

She’d do anything to resolve this situation. Which is why the evening before she had told the American a series of lies about what had happened.

Harry simply couldn’t learn the truth, because if he did know, then she worried he’d be no help to her at all.

• • •

I wake up in the closet again in my Mostar flat, and see that dawn is just now breaking outside. A soft rain falls outside the window. The events of the evening before rush back into my mind like a flood, and I turn to look for Talyssa Corbu. I find her sitting in the living area, in the same chair and at the same little wooden table where Liliana and I sat the day before yesterday. She’s wearing jeans and a dark blue pullover, just staring out the window at the weather, or at the police station across the street, I can’t tell which.

She still looks like a little girl to me. Freshly dyed red hair and small mousy features. Pale skin and tired but fearful eyes.

But she’s got balls of steel coming here alone to find out who killed her sister, I’ll give her that much.

I smell coffee, and this is a surprise, because I didn’t know I had any coffee.

I close my eyes and ask myself what I’m going to do. I’d spent a couple hours before falling asleep trying to figure out the best way to grab Vukovic without a rolling gun battle through the middle of town.

My plan to take him late at night after he got home from work had been a good one; so good, apparently, that four other people had been planning on trying it themselves, but the nighttime kidnapping option is off the table now. I don’t want to stick around Mostar all day to wait for him to come back home. The Hungarians will have already reported in to their leadership, so there might well be another vanload of assholes already on the highway heading down here.

Nope, I’ve got to do this today, at the first opportunity.

And I don’t think Corbu will be much help. She’s a bean counter, not a cop.

And that means I’ll have to do this shit alone. Why should today be any different? I think.

I shake off my moodiness, climb up to my feet, and walk over to the Romanian. She pours me a cup from a little copper pitcher she must have found in a cupboard in the kitchen. I sit down and sip the hot coffee and it’s strong and good, better than I could have made. I’m no aficionado but to me it tastes like Turkish coffee, something I’m very familiar with.

Her first words of the day to me are, “You sleep in closets?”

I shrug. “I’m weird.”

She doesn’t reply. I know she’s still trying to get some kind of a fix on me. Her analytical brain hasn’t put me together yet, and it’s twisting her in knots.

After sitting together in silence for a moment, I say, “I’m going to roll him up during the day today.”

“Roll him up?”

“Capture.”

Corbu is surprised. “While he is working? While he is armed?”

“Everybody I meet is armed.”

“I’m not armed. You took my gun.”

I sigh. “Every bad guy I meet is armed.”

The woman seemed to marvel at what I was planning on doing. Then, “How can I help you do it?”

“You won’t be there, not when it happens, anyway. But I need a place to take him. Somewhere outside the center of town. You can help me find a suitable location.”

“The place in the hills where we parked last night?”

“Not there, exactly, too close to the road. But up in the hills, for sure. Go back in the woods on the other side of the street from the overlook, see if you can find a building or a clearing or some barn. I need it to be well hidden.”

“So you can question him?”

And now we’ve come to the moment of truth. Clearing my throat, I say, “Talyssa . . . your idea of an interrogation probably differs from mine. I know men like this Vukovic, and I know what he will be able to resist. I also know what he’ll respond to. We’re going to have to do this my way to get anything out of him.”