Марк Грини - One Minute Out

I grab the rope and step up on the ledge. Rappelling down quickly, I arrive at her window in just seconds. She is just now opening it, her purse and a backpack over her shoulder.

Our comms channel is still open, but we are five feet away so she can hear me through her earpiece and in person. “Come to me. Grab me around the neck.”

She moves closer, but she looks down and then backs up a little. It’s only about thirty feet to the cobblestones, which isn’t that far, but it’s plenty far enough to kill her if she fell.

I urge her on. “You’re fine. Come on.”

She comes closer again, but she doesn’t put her foot up on the windowsill, and it’s going to be impossible for me to haul her out while holding the rope.

“Work with me, Talyssa.”

“I . . . I can’t . I’m—”

“Really bad dudes will be coming through that door behind you in one minute. You want to take your chances with me, or with them?”

She looks back to the door, makes no move towards me, and she’s just out of reach. I’m straining on the rope as it is.

I try a joke. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

But she looks at me, then back at the door. She has a fear of heights, which is not unreasonable, but I also sense that she has a fear of me.

I get that, too, I guess.

She’s nearly panic-stricken now. “I . . . I can’t do this. I’ll meet you downstairs. I’ll find a back way out. I’ll hurry.”

“There’s no time for that. Trust me. Just step up and—”

But she’s already turning away and rushing to the door of her room.

Son of a bitch.

I quickly rappel down towards the passageway on the west side of her building, and while doing so I try to come up with a new plan. I’ve got to work with the situation before me, because my original scheme is up in smoke. Fortunately, I have a rich history of shit going wrong for me to fall back on.

I speak softly for the mic in the earpiece, not wanting my words to carry in the narrow passage. “Run down the stairs to the ground floor and find a window, as far away from the main entrance as possible. Do not go out into the courtyard because you’ll walk right into them if you do.” I don’t know for sure that they won’t send men around the back or sides of the building. I would. But I do know for sure they’ll send men straight up the middle, because I saw them advancing up the stairs without any defensive tactical posture.

I could see it in their walk, in the way they moved—these guys aren’t worried about shit.

“Okay,” she says.

“I’ll come around back to meet you.”

“Yes,” she says again, and I hear nothing but stress in her voice.

Once on the ground I release the line, pull off my gloves, and jam them in my pack. I start moving towards the rear of the building, and I keep trying to calm her.

“You’re fine, just get out of there.”

“I’m in the kitchen. The window opens. I’m climbing out now.”

“Okay, keep quiet.”

I near the building’s edge at a silent run, my hand brushing the stone of the wall as I slow to look around. I haven’t drawn my weapon and hope I don’t have to; a single gunshot in these narrow stone corridors would bring every bad guy down on me in seconds. And even though I have a silencer in my pack, the report of suppressed Glock 19 fire is still louder than a snare drum at a heavy metal concert.

I want to maintain stealth, but how the next few minutes go down is not up to me. Instead it’s up to the Romanian woman I’ve tied myself to in this op, and the assholes coming to get her.

Just before I peer around the corner, I hear noise in the back passageway. The scuffle of footsteps on stone. I whisper, “Move quietly. I can hear you running from here.”

But Talyssa’s reply in my ear causes me to stop in my tracks. “Just climbing out the window now.”

And this is bad news, because it tells me there is someone else running behind the building.

“Wait,” I say, but I can hear the sounds of her climbing out the window, both over my earpiece and through the echoing of her movements along the passages.

I look around the corner and I see two men in black tracksuits running on the cobblestones, and they see Talyssa as she finishes climbing out of the window. They charge towards her before she even turns to face them.

I pull my pistol and whisper for the transmitter in my ear. “Run to your left. Go, go, go.”

But the men are on her in seconds; she screams as they tackle her to the stones, her voice simultaneously loud in my ear and echoing all around me.

I am only fifty feet away, but I don’t have a shot from here because I can’t be sure my 9-millimeter rounds won’t overpenetrate the bad guys and hit the woman. I decide to remain stealthy, to try to get to them before they see me so I can stick my knife into their ribs, but to my right I hear racing footsteps running in my direction along the western wall of the building.

Shit. The men holding Talyssa down pull her up to her feet; they clearly are not about to assassinate her, so I turn away from the Europol analyst and her captors and climb a narrow stairwell that leads up to a locked metal gate in the wall surrounding the entire Old Town.

Kneeling in the darkness I see two men run past, in the direction of Talyssa, and I know that the opposition—whoever the hell they are—has her now.

Softly I speak to her through our communications link.

“Stay calm, Talyssa. Don’t say a word. I’ll get you back. Try to keep your hair over your earpiece so they don’t see it.”

In my gut I feel wrenching pain as I realize that the girl I used for bait is now in mortal danger and, just like with the women in the cellar, it’s all my motherfucking fault.

TWENTY

Talyssa Corbu was yanked to her feet by the two men, and two more arrived a few seconds later. She tried to scream for help but a hand slammed over her mouth and nose. A man with a thick accent leaned into her ear. “We kill you if you make sound. Understand?”

Tears rained from her eyes as she nodded, and the hand came away. All four had hold of her body now; her arms were gripped tightly, a man behind grabbed the collar of her raincoat, and a fourth person manhandled her while ripping off the backpack and her shoulder bag, and feeling into every pocket of her clothing.

She heard Harry speak to her softly, and she turned around to look for him, but all she saw were two more men arriving at her position and helping the others. All the goons had dark hair, most had beards, and they wore dark clothing. One spoke into his mobile phone but he stepped away from her to do so, and she couldn’t make out the language.

There were smiles among the men, so proud they were that they’d captured her.

Soon they began pushing her forward, turning away from the wall at the eastern side of the Old Town and heading on foot down the first of many long stone staircase passageways that led down to the Stradun.

Talyssa was in the middle of the group, and though she mostly kept her head down out of abject terror, she did look to her left and right and regard the faces around her. These were cold, hard men. They weren’t police.

They were gangsters; she took them for Turks or perhaps Albanians, but she had no way of knowing until she heard them speak again. As a Romanian, she knew a few Albanians and a few Turks, and although she couldn’t speak either language, she could quickly identify it.

Her mind began racing. She came to the quick conclusion that there was no way the Consortium would have sent Albanians or Turks to kidnap her out of her hotel room in Croatia unless they had something awful in store for her. She wasn’t going to be driven to the edge of town and given a warning.