Page 14 of One Minute Out

She shrugs. “In Belgrade? Fifty in the apartment. Here? Twenty, twenty-five in the cellar.”

“Where are the other girls? The girls you saw in Belgrade and Sarajevo?”

“I do not know. They take away. Do not return.”

Jesus. “I can’t help them, but maybe, if we’re fast, we can help these women. Find out where they are going next. I have to do something.”

Again, she asks me, “Why?”

“Because I came,” is all I can say, parroting the reason she gave me that the women would be brutalized even beyond what they were already being subjected to.

“Come with me to Mostar. One day. Two, tops. We’ll watch the police station, and you try to find one of the cops who came here.”

I tell myself there might still be time to save all those trafficked humans I saw in the cellar. I don’t know if it’s true, but I have to believe. “Liliana, will you help me, please?”

“You get paid for killing old man?”

The question comes out of nowhere and it surprises me. I’m so surprised, I answer honestly. “Yeah. A lot.”

She nods slowly, taking this in. Then, “Good. I am very hungry.”

I nod and smile in the dark. I can work with this woman.

I help her to her feet. “We’ll be in Mostar for breakfast.”

With a sort of noncommittal shrug she says, “Okay, Harry. I go with you. I find policeman, but you cannot stop the pipeline.”

I don’t have to stop it, I just have to pull a few girls out of it so my conscience will leave me alone.

I’m no saint, I’m just a slave shackled to his principles, just like those women were shackled to one another.

We’re all in this together now, like it or not.

FIVE

Five minutes after the gunfire ended upstairs, the women and girls sat huddled together in the cellar in darkness, because no one dared to get up, pull the slack in the chains on their ankles, fumble around the dead body by the open door, and flip the red light back on.

Already the smell of blood added to the closed room’s stench.

Between the sniffs and coughs and sobs from the group, a new sound emerged. The prisoners heard frantic, angry voices on the stairs down the hall, and they shuddered as one.

Lights shone in the stairwell, then came closer, the shouting between three men continuing. These Serbian guards were known to all of the prisoners down here, and as one of them flicked the red light back on, the other two waved their guns at the group, causing a few fresh shrieks of terror.

One of the security men checked over the dead body on the floor, and then two of them carried him away with no small struggle while the third closed the door.

Only when the loud lock engaged did the women and girls begin talking among themselves about what they had just witnessed and what it all meant for them now.

Some worried they would be killed because of what they had seen, others that they would be beaten or otherwise brutalized, and every last one of them was certain nothing good would come of this event.

They hated the sick and cruel old man, but none of them were thankful that the masked man with the American accent had shown up and killed him.

The females were aged from fourteen to twenty-four, and they had traveled different paths to get here. Many had been duped, promised employment in casinos in Dubai or Italy, or jobs in fancy restaurants or five-star hotels where beautiful women were needed. These women were trafficked and smuggled from their home countries, and then told by dangerous gangsters that they would have to compensate the traffickers for their travel and housing, and the only way they had to earn the money to pay was via sex work.

Others had been recruited at nightclubs or outside Internet live-camera porn sites or even from brothels, told they could work as high-dollar prostitutes in the West, make a thousand euros a day entertaining wealthy gentlemen, and then, after a few weeks, they could go back home, their luggage stuffed with cash desperately needed for themselves and their families.

Some women believed this and went willingly, others had to be coerced over time, and still others felt certain it was some sort of a scam, but desperation at home forced them to hope for the best and go along with it.

And still others had been kidnapped outright, drugged in bars and pulled into taxis or vans, and driven off into the night.

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