Марк Грини - One Minute Out

“Roger that. Back to the Consortium. Nothing? Really?”

“Sex trafficking is the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, behind drugs and counterfeiting. It’s ahead of the sale of illegal weapons. So, yeah, I’m sure what you’re talking about is real, I’m sure the people involved in it are nasty, and I’m sure a lot of poor helpless victims are abused and enslaved by it. But the specifics of what you are telling us . . . the Americans, the South African, the pipeline, this doesn’t line up with anything we have.”

“Can I get some help from you guys on this? Could you get Brewer to do a little digging?”

Hanley breathes one of his trademark long sighs, and I can picture his huge frame inside his too-large suit puffing up and then shrinking as every ounce of air leaves his lungs. I can also picture what he’s about to say before he says it.

I’m about to hear a big fat no.

“No,” Hanley says. “You are a hard asset, a denied hard asset at that, unaligned with any existing structure in the Agency. You are not a case officer, not an analyst, not chief of any station. You don’t have read-ins on anything not directly linked to the work we assign you. You have absolutely no standing to ask for resources.”

“I’m not asking because I think I am owed resources, I’m asking as a friend. I need some help. This is serious shit.”

“You know what else is serious shit?”

Yeah, I do, and again, I know what he’s about to say.

“Your fucking job with us! That’s serious shit. I’ve got a backlog of work I need you to take care of.”

“Get one of the other Poison Apple assets to—”

“They’re already out there, Court, in the field, doing what they’re told, while you’re trying to save the world by yourself. Every day you’re not here pulling your weight is another day Romantic and Anthem are under more stress, more risk. Anthem isn’t even one hundred percent after what happened to her back in Scotland. You remember that little incident, don’t you?”

My voice feels weak in my mouth as I answer back with “Yes, sir.”

And then, just to hammer home a point that needed no further hammering, he says, “You’re risking your girlfriend’s life with all these crusades of yours, don’t forget that.”

Hanley is referring to Anthem, one of the three Poison Apple assets. She is Zoya Zakharova, former Russian intelligence, and also formerly someone I was in something of a relationship with. The relationship is strained for a couple of reasons right now, not the least of which is that I shot her.

I don’t claim to know all the rules of dating, but I’m pretty sure if you shoot someone then you can’t really refer to them as your girlfriend, but Hanley is turning the screws on me, because he knows I still care about her.

But Zoya is tough, as tough as or tougher than I am, and as tough as or tougher than the women and girls I’m desperately trying to help.

She can handle herself in the field.

“Sorry, Matt. That shit doesn’t work on me. I’ll be back with you as soon as I can. First I’ve got to try to do something.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Venice, and there I’ll talk to somebody who can actually help me.” I hang up the phone, knowing that this will piss Hanley off, but I don’t really care. He could have lifted a finger to get me some assets directed to this, and he should have done so.

Fuck him. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to do me a favor, and the thought of how annoyed he’ll be when he realizes he did, in fact, help me out makes me smile.

I walk back over to Talyssa, who pulls a hot croissant stuffed with ham and cheese out of a bag and hands it to me, along with a cup of coffee.

“That didn’t look like it went well at all.”

“Not great, no. But I have someone else I can call.”

She cocks her head. “Who?”

I answer with, “If I can’t work with the good guys, I’m going to work for the bad guys.”

The Romanian woman looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, so I clarify. “Not those bad guys. Some other bad guys.”

She has no idea what I’m talking about, and that’s for the best.

I send a few texts before we get back on the highway, and then, a little more than an hour later, I get the call approving my request for a face-to-face meeting with a man in Venice.

Talyssa doesn’t lift her head out of her computer for the next three hours of our drive. Every now and then she takes a bite out of an apple or sips some bottled water, but she remains completely focused on her work.

Finally, as I’m arriving at the northern outskirts of Treviso, a city not thirty minutes from Venice proper, she leans her head back and groans like some sort of a wounded animal.

“I take it something’s wrong.”

She ignores me while she rubs her eyes, then takes a long swig of water. Finally she says, “I’m so close, but I can’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been going back through everything I have on the Consortium, all the relationships between all the companies, all the capital equipment I can trace to them: the plane, the yacht, stuff like that. I’ve traced bank accounts to the Caymans and the Dominican Republic and Crete and Luxembourg . . . but I’m no closer to finding out who the people are who run this thing.”

I was hoping she’d be able to pull a rabbit out of her hat with her research, because I have serious doubts about my plan for tonight. Still, I see that she tried. “Sometimes there is no answer.”

“There is an answer, it’s just not available to me. If someone could hack into one of the law firms around the world that set up these offshore accounts, then they could swim upstream into the account information.”

“You think the name of the Director of the Consortium would be tied to these accounts? I don’t know much about money laundering, but I know they keep an air gap between themselves and the illicit money.”

“Of course the accounts won’t have the names of the people in charge, but they will have information on where the transfers came from: investment firms, hedge funds, real estate brokers. That could . . . no . . . that would lead me to the actual men and women who run this whole thing.”

Her plan sounds about as likely as mine now. “Yeah, but you can’t hack into the law firms. Can you?”

She shakes her head. “No. I can’t. I mean, there are people out there who can, but they are criminals, and they sure as hell won’t work for me.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Some of them. Europol is involved with investigations around the EU where we have identified hackers.”

“Are they in jail?”

She shrugs, rubbing her neck. “Some are. Most aren’t. The wheels of justice move very slowly in Europe. It’s not like in America, where they put you in the gas chamber the day after they know you did it.”

Her English is amazing, but her knowledge of the nation of my birth is lacking.

An idea comes to me slowly, and even as it begins to form, I ask her about it. “These people under investigation. Do they know you are watching them?”

“Well, technically Europol isn’t watching them. Their nations’ law enforcement entities are. But I do know who some of these people are.”

“Where is the closest hacker who has the skills to do what you need?”

She thinks this over carefully. It looks to me like she enjoys the mental exercise of remembering the names and locations.

She says, “There’s some good ones in Romania.”

“Do they have protection?”

“Well . . . they work with organized crime, but virtually all of the black-hat hackers at this level do.”