Page 17 of One Minute Out

The balcony overlooking the azure water was lined with potted plants and trees, keeping the large space cool despite the warm morning sunshine. The tallest of these cast shade on the breakfast table with the seventy-two-year-old man seated at it, but they had been positioned so as not to obstruct his view of the sea.

Hvar was a resort town on an island off the coast of Croatia, so although it saw a lot of tourists in July, it would be absolutely filled to the brim with foreigners in August. For now, though, the man who owned the penthouse apartment above the rocky coastline enjoyed the relative calm of the streets below, and the fact that although there were a number of pleasure craft offshore, they weren’t choking out the beautiful bay and he could still see the crystal-green water.

He would leave in a few days, remain outside Croatia for the month of August, and this way he would avoid the highest of the high season.

Kostas Kostopoulos was not Croatian, although he kept a penthouse here. He was Greek, and his own nation would become even more crowded in August than Croatia, so he wouldn’t bother with going home. No, he planned on heading to Venice for work, and then he would take another business trip to the United States. He’d remain in Los Angeles for the month, and only return to the Adriatic when the summer holiday season died down.

Kostopoulos didn’t like crowded streets; he barely ventured out of his properties into the masses, and only did so when business forced him to.

The Greek oversaw the Southern European trafficking channels, from Turkey to the south and Ukraine to the north, all the way to the terminus of his territory on the eastern edge of Western Europe. He’d built an empire over decades: drugs, guns, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, illegal immigration. He had made hundreds of millions of euros in these endeavors. But the pipeline of women trafficked for sex work from Eastern Europe into the West was his most profitable revenue stream, and he was only a regional director of a much larger enterprise, known to those involved as the Consortium.

Kostas wondered how much the person who ran the operation earned from his European network, and he marveled at his best guess. He had no idea who this person was; he himself worked through the Consortium’s Director of operations, a South African.

But whoever the Director of the Consortium was, Kostas was sure he or she was in possession of a spigot that poured pure gold.

As he sipped his coffee, the sliding glass door opened behind him, and a bearded man stepped through in a rush, passing two burly bodyguards. He stopped at the table.

In English Kostopoulos said, “Good morning, Stanislav. Hope you don’t mind if I finish my breakfast. Sit, take a few breaths, calm down, then tell me what’s so important.”

The younger man did as instructed; he even took a sip of pineapple juice, already poured in crystal, when the older man motioned towards it. But he rushed through the act, spilled a little down his chin, then hurriedly put the glass back on the table. He spoke with a Serbian accent, but the Greek talked to Serbs daily, so it wasn’t difficult for him to understand.

“There has been a disruption in the pipeline.”

Kostas Kostopoulos showed his displeasure with slightly sagging shoulders but nothing more. “Where?”

“Mostar.”

The Greek took a bite of yogurt, then said, “General Babic and his Belgrade men.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Details?”

“Attacked last night. Seven men dead, including Babic.”

The Greek sighed now while he buttered his croissant. He displayed a subdued countenance, though this was highly distressing news, to be sure. Still, he wouldn’t let the Serbian see him react with the shock he felt. “So who is interfering with my business interests this time? The Turks again?”

“Belgrade doesn’t know who ordered it, but they think they know who carried out the operation itself, and they believe this was not an attack on the way station, but simply an attack on the general.”

The older man looked up from his croissant and said, “Well? Who is responsible?”

A pause. “An individual known as the Gray Man.”

Kostopoulos cocked his head. “An... individual?”

“We have no information that he was acting in concert with others.”

“One man? One man killed seven, including the general, who has been hunted for a quarter century? That sounds like a tall tale.”

Stanislav was a member of the Serbian mafia, the Branjevo Partizans, and he served as his organization’s link to the Consortium that operated the pipeline. Kostopoulos was the only contact in the Consortium he had ever met, and that was by design.

He said, “Belgrade has interviewed both the surviving security force and the whores, sir. Everything points to it being one very skilled man. Belgrade seems to know him by his moniker, Gray Man. They said no one else could have done this.”

Kostopoulos looked down to the water at the gorgeous summer morning. He didn’t believe the lone-assassin theory and thought the Serbian mob was a bunch of fools for even suggesting it.

“The merchandise was undisturbed?”

“There were twenty-four items on site. One is missing.”

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