Марк Грини - One Minute Out

“I needed to get to the States.”

With a quizzical look he says, “Really? You ready to go back to work?”

I shake my head. “Not to go back to work at Poison Apple. I have to do something else first, and I need your help.”

“And Hanley will be cool with it?”

I reach for my beer now. “No, Hanley won’t be cool with it at all.”

Zack drains the last of his Corona and has another passed down his way. When it arrives without a lime he yells back towards the men sitting near the galley, and Sharon grabs an uncut lime and hands it to a Ground Branch guy I heard called Teddy. Teddy tosses the lime the length of the cabin, and Zack catches it, then pulls a pocketknife and cuts off a chunk. “Now, Six, you know me well enough to know I follow orders. And my orders are to get you back to Matt.”

“Well then, I’ll just have to appeal to that hard heart of yours.” This is my plan B, and if possible, it may have an even lower probability for success than my plan A.

Zack squeezes lime juice into his bottle. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

“I’m doing the right thing, man. I’ve uncovered something big, something awful, and it involves Americans. I want to stop it.”

Zack replies with one word. “Yawn.”

“I’m targeting a massive sex trafficking consortium.”

He still looks bored by my spiel as he gulps his Mexican beer. “Sex trafficking.”

“I’ve been working with an analyst from Europol. Her sister’s been taken. They run the girls from the east, through the Balkans and then to Italy, where they are sold. We know this particular outfit is making billions of dollars a year, so we estimate they have tens of thousands of victims around the world.”

An eyebrow rises on Hightower’s otherwise impassive bearded face. “That’s bad.”

I nod slowly, looking into his eyes. “A lot of them are just kids, Zack.”

With this he puts his beer down on the table in front of me, and then he looks away. “That’s real bad.”

“Damn right it is. Talyssa and I are this close to breaking it wide open. Right now she is getting intel we can use to pinpoint the leadership of the organization, but we already know they are located somewhere on the West Coast.”

Zack doesn’t respond to this. He’s silent for several seconds, in fact, and I think I’m getting through.

But then he says, “I have orders, Six, and when I have orders I don’t listen to anything else. Sorry, dude. That’s a fucked-up sitrep you just gave me, and your heart’s in the right place, as always, but I do what I’m told.”

I shake my head. “Not this time. This time you are going to help me.”

“You should know better than that by now. Remember when I was tasked with killing you? What did I do?”

“You failed.”

He sighs in frustration. “Fair enough, but I did my fucking best, didn’t I?”

“And I bet you regret that every day.” It was sarcasm, but he doesn’t pick up on that.

“Not once, man. Not once. I don’t ponder over the wisdom of my orders. I joined up with this outfit knowing it wasn’t all about me. You, on the other hand, just go wherever the wind blows you.”

“But you aren’t an Agency employee anymore. You’re a Poison Apple asset, and that means you can, and should , think for yourself. I’m not asking you to do one damn thing against Hanley, the Agency, or America. I’m just asking you to do what’s fucking right.”

He hesitates a moment, but I can tell he’s not giving in. “Sorry, man.”

I want to hit him in the face, and apparently it registers in my eyes.

“Calm down or I’ll get the boys to restrain you.”

I control my urges and lean back in the leather chair. It’s time to play my next card.

“What if I told you Matt Hanley was in on it?”

Zack pauses, then laughs. “Hanley’s a sex trafficker, right.” When I don’t respond, he says, “C’mon, dude. No fucking chance.”

I turn to Travers. “Chris, where did you get the intel that I was near the Casino of Venice tonight at midnight?”

Travers looks to Hightower, not sure if he should tell me. Zack just shrugs like it doesn’t make any difference.

Chris says, “Brewer. I asked where it originated from and she said that was ‘need to know.’”

I look to Zack, and Zack is confused now. To Chris he says, “You are the TL on the ground. You would need to know the origin of the intel so you could evaluate it.”

Travers replies, “That’s what I’m sayin’.”

“Zack,” I interject. “I told Hanley I was going to Venice to get help so I could combat this thing called the Consortium, something he said he knew nothing about. Fourteen hours later Hanley puts Ground Branch right on top of me, in a Mala del Brenta stronghold far away from my known contacts in the city, right when the Consortium is holding a sale of kidnapping victims. How the fuck does that happen if he doesn’t have knowledge of the Consortium?”

Hightower doesn’t have an answer.

I lay it on even thicker now. “If you’d been there with me, in Bosnia, when I saw them. If you had seen them led around like cattle on a yacht in the Adriatic like I did. If you’d heard the stories about what has been done to them like I have. If you’d talked, face-to-face, with two of the victims like I have . . . then I know you’d help me out.”

Hightower is on the fence, I can see it in his normally confident face. He says, “We’ll talk to Matt when we get back. This shit will all get straightened out.”

I think about punching him again but this time I mask it better. I take a slow breath and play the last card in my hand. “Zack . . . you told me you had a kid. A daughter.”

Zack leans back in his chair dramatically. “Don’t you dare fuckin’ play the daughter card right now, Six.”

“I’ll play any card I have in my hand. She’s, what? Twelve? Denver, did you say?”

“She’s thirteen, you son of a bitch, and I think she’s in Boulder but I don’t even know because I’ve never even met her. You need to can this shit, brother, before I—”

I talk over him. “I didn’t see any thirteen-year-olds in the dungeon I found in Bosnia. But I was told there were two fourteen-year-olds in the group. Lots of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds.”

Travers is listening in. He mumbles softly. “Bosnia? So then you did schwack Babic.”

I don’t deny it this time. “He was running a way station where the smuggled women were brought along the pipeline to the West. It was a fucking horror show.”

“Jesus,” Travers says, and then he turns and gives Zack a look like he’s an insensitive dick. “You’ve got a kid? How did I not know that?”

Hightower doesn’t answer.

I say, “Zack, a lot of people have died, a lot of people have been abused, and a lot of people have lost their freedom. Every one of those girls has a dad. Their dads can’t do shit for them. But you can. What the fuck do you stand for if you can’t stand against this ?”

Hightower looks out the portal next to him for a long moment, into nothing but darkness.

But before he says anything, my sat phone buzzes in my pocket.

Instantly I’m terrified something is wrong. I grab it and answer, knowing it’s Talyssa. “What’s happened?”

In contrast to her last call, this time there is a buoyancy in her voice that I’ve never heard. “I’ve got something!”

FORTY-ONE

I can tell by Talyssa’s breathless tone that she has somehow found the big break we need, the one I wasn’t able to provide by skulking around Venice, taking pictures of billionaire pervs and dodging bullets.

“What is it?”