Page 60 of One Minute Out

“Shit,” Loots repeated.

“Shit is right, but the police chief, who is with us, checked her story out with The Hague.” Verdoorn looked down at his notepad, now sitting on top of the Gentry dossier. Reading the notes he’d jotted down while talking to Kostas, he said, “Talyssa Corbu is an economic crimes analyst from Romania, she’s got nothing to do with trafficking, and, according to her employers, she is currently on a personal hiatus at work due to some sort of a family emergency back home in Bucharest.”

“What the hell is she doing in Dubrovnik, then?”

“The Hague thinks she’s trying to crack some case open to get advancement. Something about money laundering. Sounds like she’s bloody bonkers.”

“So... she’s workin’ off book?”

“Totally. Swingin’ in the bloody wind. I looked at the names of the merchandise in the pipeline now and don’t see any relation to her. This seems like it is, in fact, her bid for a pat on the back and a shot at advancement.”

“So since she’s on her own, we need to remove her.”

“Bladdy right. The fact that she knows about the Consortium means she’s a dead woman. She’s staying in Dubrovnik. The cops have followed her and confirmed she’s alone, but the timing with the Gray Man activity over the border in Bosnia is too convenient for my taste. She’s workin’ with ole Gentry, I’m sure of it. She’s the face and he’s the brawn in whatever little scheme the two have cooked up.”

“What’s our role, boss?”

“The police chief in Dubrovnik wants this woman picked up tonight and disposed of. The Greek is sending a team of Albanians to take her from her pension and put a knife in her, then splash her in the Adriatic. But Kostopoulos has agreed to order them to hold her at a safe house till I get there. I want to question her before they put her on ice.”

“We should grab her off the street ourselves. You know how it is with the Albanians. They’ve got the will... good hard heads for this sort of thing, decent shooters. But they’re not the sharpest tacks, are they?”

Verdoorn shrugged. “No, they’re not. But taking the woman off the playing field at the first opportunity is the right call. Whatever intel she has, it’s a danger having it out there in public. I’ll go to the safe house and interrogate her myself, see what she knows about Gentry and who else she’s talked to. I’ll squeeze her hard, pass her back to the Albanians for disposal, and then we’ll go after our man.”

“Sounds good.”

“Only problem is this. There is a shipment in Dubrovnik right now, sped up due to the Gray Man hit in Mostar. They’re waiting on transport, which isn’t coming till early tomorrow morning.” He added, “It’s a VIP shipment, and one of the items is tagged for special handling.”

“Unlucky,” Loots said. He knew a VIP shipment meant the women being shipped had been picked out at other way stations and evaluated as being of especially high quality. This stock was sold in a special quarterly market, where criminal organizations around Europe and the Middle East could bid on merchandise that had the potential to earn them millions of euros throughout their admittedly short life cycle. These items could generate a dozen times what the average woman being sold into sexual slavery by the Consortium could produce.

The special-handling item Verdoorn referred to meant a woman who was to be protected at all costs because of the destination she was heading to and the men who had ordered her taken. One of these special-handling captives was worth a dozen or more of the other VIP whores, and after a brutal indoctrination period of travel through the pipeline, these women were then treated with kid gloves. Their mental and physical health was improved through a time-honed process to make them ready for their duties ahead.

Loots knew he was being told the shipment that was now passing through the area where the American assassin was causing trouble for the Consortium was a shipment that must be protected at all costs, only raising the stakes of this operation.

He whistled softly. “The VIPs we can’t do much about other than to help the Albanians watch over them till they make it onto the boat. But why don’t we at least take the special-handling item out of theater? Get it out of danger and on to its destination?”

“I’ve run into this before,” Jaco said. “Protocol mandates that merchandise, special handling or not, goes through the pipeline to the end. It’s part of the psychological reeducation.”

“Makes things difficult.”

“It’s a process that’s been refined for years, and it’s working well. You, me, the rest of the shock troops: we’ll all have to shoulder the burden of finding this killer and protecting the merchandise all the way to market.”

Loots said, “So you are saying we’ve a full plate. We’ll need to do this discreetly, too.”

“That’s it, mate. We land at two hundred hours. Let’s wake the boys and tell them what they’re in for.”

•••

Moments later Verdoorn stood at the bulkhead and addressed the team, who were all now quite awake and interested. “We have to keep the pipeline secure for the current shipment and for future shipments. A situation has arisen in Dubrovnik, and we’re goin’ in to sort it out.”

“Who’s the target?” a bearded man named Van Straaten asked.

“We have a woman to interrogate, but she isn’t our ultimate target. The real target is an American. Courtland Gentry. Ex–CIA Ground Branch. A tier-one para, all the way.”

“Military?”

“No military or law enforcement service. I have no clue how he found his way into Ground Branch; it’s not in the file I’ve got, but we do believe he’s here working alone, or perhaps with limited support from some rogue law enforcement.”

“The task, sir?”

---