Page 72 of One Minute Out

She shook her head. “You saved my life. I put yours in danger by not trusting you on the rope, and still you came for me. Thank you.”

I say, “I think you are drunk.”

She looks me over a moment. “Maybe you didn’t do it for me. Maybe you did it for the women you are trying to save. But still... thank you.” She reaches out and squeezes my forearm, then retracts her hand and puts it back in her lap.

I ask, “Did the men say where they were taking you?”

“Not to me, no. But they did say something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Romanian is a Romance language. Albanian is not. But both are from the Balkan sprachbund.”

She’s a smart woman. I’m lost already.

And she sees it in my face, apparently. “I can’t speak Albanian, not at all, but I can understand some words and phrases.”

“And they spoke openly in front of you?”

“Yeah.”

“Not very professional of them,” I say. “In fact, we can’t trust it. It could have been disinformation.”

She picks some grit from the car crash out of the back of her arm, wipes a little blood off her hand onto her jeans. “They were very agitated after you showed up, for good reason. I don’t think they were thinking about being professional or trying to deceive me when we left the Old Town. They were all screaming at one another. At me, too.”

“Yeah, I heard. What did they say?”

“I heard the driver say something about a boat.”

“A boat?”

“Yes. He definitely said a boat, and then he said something strange. He said, very clearly, ‘next to the president.’”

“The president?”

“Yes. I am sure of it.”

“The president of Croatia?”

“I have no idea what he was referring to.”

I pull hard to the side of the road and slam on the brakes.

Talyssa grabs the dashboard to keep from being propelled forward. “Why are we stopping?”

I don’t answer; instead I lift my phone and look at the GPS, move the map back farther west, in the direction the van was headed. After a few seconds I find what I’m looking for. “The Valamar Dubrovnik President Hotel. On the tip of the peninsula. Fifteen minutes from here.”

Talyssa looks out the window at the darkness, then back to me. “That must be it. Let’s go, then.”

I grab my pack out of the backseat, then fish through it a moment. Pulling out her phone and her pistol, I hand both items back to her.

“What... what is happening?”

“I’m going on alone. We will stay in communication with each other. We’re lucky you survived tonight. I’m not pushing it again.”

“But... my sister.”

“You can do more to help your sister by supporting me than you can running around with me.”

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