Марк Грини - One Minute Out

Yeah, I knew it was going to be like this, though I was hopeful it would be all unicorns and rainbows.

Hope is not a strategy , I tell myself yet again. Then I tell myself, Screw it . I turn off my faux charm and let her have it. “Just cut the shit and do this for me! Lives are at stake.”

“Lives are at stake all the time, with everything we do. Every single day you run off to go find yourself, or whatever the hell you do during your hiatuses, lives are threatened. The program you belong to needs you, and you are out there—”

“ Please , Suzanne. Please get me something .”

She stops bitching, which is a first, and then she sighs, which happens all the time. Finally, she says, “I’ve never heard of the Consortium.”

“What about the pipeline?”

“What is that?”

“It’s kind of like an underground railroad for the trafficked women. A smuggling circuit the victims are put through by the Consortium.”

“No, I’ve never heard of that, either.”

She sounds credible, but again, she also sounded credible when she said she hadn’t been trying to shoot me in the head back in Scotland, and I retain doubts about that event.

I say, “Fine. But I bet you are sitting in front of a snazzy computer that has access to all sorts of supersecret files and databases, and you can query those terms in that context, and find out if the Agency has any intel I can use.”

“Yes, I do have just such a computer in front of me. But what do I get out of this?”

As I walk through the garden of the church in the cool morning, it occurs to me, and not for the first time, that everybody wants something from me.

“What do you get ? How about my unwavering devotion?”

“I already have a cat, Violator.”

Of course you do. “Just tell me what you want from me.”

“If I give you this intel, you will come back to D.C.?”

“Not immediately; I need actionable intel so I can act . But as soon as I’m done with—”

She interrupts. “Sorry, Violator. I need you. Your country needs you.”

“I’ll kiss your ass and I’ll kiss the flag, probably not in that order, very soon. But for now I need to know about the Consortium. Seems to be run by an American male in his fifties. He used the name Tom, but that’s going to be a pseudonym. There’s an American female psychologist and a South African involved, as well. A rich Greek dude . . . he’s dead. Don’t know his name.”

“How did he die?” she asks, but the way she asks tells me she has a pretty good suspicion that I killed him.

“Would you believe natural causes?”

Brewer just sighs again.

I continue. “The organization either owns or has access to a megayacht called La Primarosa . Right now it’s in the northern Adriatic, heading to Venice, unless they changed their plans.”

Brewer sounds like she’s typing all this into her computer. Then she says, “Fine. Give me an hour and I’ll call you back.”

This went better than I thought. Momentarily stunned by my powers of persuasion, I can’t even speak.

“Violator?”

I do my best to recover. “Uh . . . yeah. That’s great. Let me call you, though. One hour.”

The line goes dead, and I stand there in the middle of the well-kept church grounds, staring up at the steeple. It’s a magnificent sight on this sunny, warm morning, but all I can think about is tonight and the twenty-three women and girls who have been on my mind since Bosnia.

My best chance to save them is a woman who hates my guts, and an organization that regularly uses me, while offering little in return.

But if this doesn’t work, another option comes to mind. It chills me to think about employing plan B, but I may just be desperate enough to do so.

THIRTY-TWO

An hour later I’m parked at a gas station near the Italian town of Portogruaro. Talyssa is sitting in the car eating a pastry for breakfast, and I am lying twenty-five yards away in the grass by the parking lot, looking up at the sky. I’m tired as hell again, and I know I’m going to have to find a way to sleep before tonight. But that’s not all I need, so I call Suzanne Brewer back.

She answers, and I say, “Violator,” and then I play the game by the rules. “Iden code Whiskey, Hotel, Quebec, fiver, two, three, India.”

“Confirmed.”

“What did you learn?” I ask.

“I’m transferring you.”

“ Transferring me? It’s three a.m. there. You’re at the office?”

“I am now,” she says, her voice no more or less annoyed sounding than usual. She adds, “Hold,” and I do.

There is no hold music at CIA, which is too bad, because it’s a missed opportunity for them to have fun and play the Mission: Impossible theme song or some shit, but nobody at Langley I’ve ever met has that kind of a sense of humor.

Soon the line clicks. “Hanley.”

I launch up to a sitting position on the grass. Matthew Hanley is the deputy director for operations, the top dog in Ops. Brewer somehow got him into the building at three a.m. for this.

Matt and I go way back. He and Brewer are the only two people at Langley who know I’m doing contract work for the Agency, and that’s because I’m essentially doing contract work directly for Hanley, with Brewer as the go-between. Still, though Hanley and I have spoken quite a few times over the past couple of years, I was hoping to avoid going all the way up to him in my hunt for intel about an operation I’m running on my own.

But I mask my unease. “Hey, Matt. All good with you?”

“Not so great.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, it’s simple. I have three operatives in a special sub rosa unit. One of them is recovering from injury, one of them is a pain in my ass, and the other is AWOL.”

I thought I was the pain in his ass until he mentioned AWOL. “I’m coming back. I just got myself involved in something and I need a little intel to wrap it up. Brewer shouldn’t have bothered you with this.”

Hanley replies to this with “The Consortium. That means nothing to us. There are sex trafficking rings all over. In your area, Albania and Turkey are big players.”

I cock my head slightly. “How do you know what area I’m in?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“How is it—”

“Because of Ratko Babic.”

Matt knows I killed the general, or at least he thinks I did and he’s trying to get me to confirm it. If it were anyone else, I probably would play stupid, but it’s Hanley.

“Right.”

He adds, “I wasn’t going to ask you if you waxed old Ratko Babic, although from the minute I heard about his death, I knew that you did. Shit . . . everyone knows. But you’re basically admitting it, so I’ll just go ahead and say it.”

“Say what?”

“Nice work. Not perfect . . . you fragged a bunch of Serbian goons who were active-duty members of their intelligence service. They were also Branjevo Partizans, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over that, but our Balkan desk is running interference, insisting to the Serbs that the former asset who became a rogue hit man called the Gray Man was seen in Santiago, Chile, at the same time as the Babic killing.”

“If I don’t work for the Agency, then why does the Agency give a shit if the Serbs think it was me?”

“We trained you, didn’t we? We installed that wacky do-gooder moral compass of yours, didn’t we?”

“Yes to the first. No to the second.”

“Well, whatever. The Balkan desk will deal with Serbian intelligence. Wasn’t exactly like we had a great relationship with Belgrade in the first place.”