Page 35 of One Minute Out

I want to laugh, but this shit isn’t funny. “And to make sure you would blend in with the crowd, you chose candy-apple red. Is that it?”

She runs a hand through her hair self-consciously. “It... I didn’t know it would look like this. I’ve never dyed my hair before.”

I let it go. It is a damn miracle this girl is still alive with her nonexistent tradecraft, but she is. Beginner’s luck is a thing, but in my experience it’s nothing to bet your life on.

I say, “You are blown. You are absolutely and positively compromised to the enemy.”

“But I have to—”

“No. Trust me, you are done with fieldwork. But... but there is another way forward.”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t been compromised. Not yet, anyway. I can snatch Vukovic instead of you.”

“Snatch? Is that like capture?”

“Yep.”

“But you are a one-man operation, as well. Correct?”

“Yes, but... this is kind of what I do. No offense, Talyssa, but I’m guessing you’re a first-timer.”

She looks at me for a moment, and I hate it when people look at me. Finally she says, “For what purpose do you want Captain Vukovic?”

“I want to know where the women are.”

She looks up at me. “One of them... she is close to you?”

I shake my head. “I have a reason, but that’s not it.”

“And when you have Vukovic, you will interrogate him?”

I think, Sure, that’s one word for it. “Exactly,” I say out loud, knowing well that she and I probably have wildly divergent definitions of the word “interrogate.”

Corbu gazes out the car windshield down at the city a moment, and then she finally nods. “I help you. I know about the sex trafficking business. I know how the industry operates, how the money is moved. It is my job. I can help with the interrogation.”

“All right, then, let’s do this together,” I say, and I wonder suddenly if she is going to have the stomach for what will happen next.

ELEVEN

Kostas Kostopoulos looked out over the Adriatic Sea as the first hues of dawn cast flickers on the gently breaking waves. He’d only been up a few minutes, hadn’t yet bothered his cook to bring him his first coffee of the morning. He was awake now, earlier than usual, because he was waiting to hear news from Mostar.

He’d spent the previous day on the phone arranging the hit on the chief of police and having the area searched for the Gray Man. The seventy-two-year-old Greek did not like dissatisfying his superiors with bad news that came out of events taking place in his territory.

Kostopoulos knew his place; he was king of the Consortium here in the Balkans, but he wasn’t one of the Consortium’s top leadership, and just as he’d sent Hungarians to take out the police captain, the Consortium could always send assets from all around the globe to come after him if they chose to do so.

Not that he expected them to. No, Kostopoulos was certain that once Vukovic was dead, the way station was completely sanitized, and a new way station, already under development in Banja Luka, opened for business, the matter would be forgotten.

But first things first. He needed to know that the three Hungarians had completed their mission, and so far, he’d heard nothing.

Just then, the phone rang on the tiled table in front of him. Looking at it, he saw it was his contact with the Pitovci mafia, the Slovakian organization that provided the Hungarian assassins.

Kostopoulos answered. “It’s done?”

The man said, “I just got a call from them. The team failed. All three men were injured and they are fleeing right now.”

The Greek shouted into the phone, all pretense of control lost. “Imbeciles!”

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