Page 21 of One Minute Out

It all comes back quickly. I’m in the closet of a third-floor walk-up flat in Mostar, Bosnia, overlooking the main police station. I rented it this morning after feeding Liliana and myself, and buying both of us new clothes. I also remember something about a fuzzy plan I had to help the women I left behind in the cellar, and that’s the only reason I’m not three hundred miles away by now in Zagreb, boarding a train to Prague for a flight back to America.

That was plan A. But Alpha is shot, and to be honest, I’m having trouble remembering a time where I actually executed a plan A.

I need to get back to the States, and I don’t need to be over here, fifteen miles from where I fucked up a farmload of gunmen last night, playing house with a sex-trafficked Moldovan woman in an attempt to rescue an unknown number of victims from an unknown number of perpetrators who are I don’t even know where.

Fuck. Plan Alpha is out the window, and so far plan Bravo isn’t looking too hot, either.

I think again about returning to the States. The Babic hit was a freelance assignment, but I also have a day job. Sort of. Contract work for the CIA. I used to be an actual employee, then they tried to kill me, and now we’ve patched some things up. They are still officially hunting me down, but the director of operations uses me as his own deniable asset, an off-book hitter in a blacker-than-black program called Poison Apple, so I have a little bit of pull and that keeps the American goons off my back, at least for now.

Yeah... everything about my relationship with the Agency is bonkers. They piss me off consistently, and I’m sure I am personally responsible for a sizable portion of antacid sales in the pharmacies in and around Langley. But I do help them out from time to time. Not sure what they do for me, really, but I guess I’m doing my civic duty or something by killing the enemies of America, and that’s important.

Isn’t it?

I could call my handler at the Agency, tell her what I saw here, and maybe enlist the assistance of the best intelligence service on Earth. But I decide against it. She’d probably just tell me to get my ass back to work, and the Agency would know in a heartbeat that I was the one who killed Babic.

And I don’t need that.

I look over the little flat now. The girl just sits at the window in the low light, smoking cigarettes I bought her to help calm her, staring out to the street in silence. Even in the dim here I can see the hard look in her eyes, but I figure it’s just what she’s been through these past few weeks.

Then I ask myself, What the hell am I doing here? I should bail on all this. I should walk away before this goes deeper, because everything always seems to go deeper if I stick around long enough. Yeah, I should get out, get back to the United States, back to the Agency. I can’t save those girls I saw at the farm. They’re in the wind by now, I’m sure of it.

Soon I sit up again, knowing all this thinking is a waste of time. Of course I’m going to see this through. I always do. And I always will, until the day I go lights out as a result of catching a supersonic hunk of copper-jacketed lead with my forehead.

That day is coming, I’m as sure of this as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

A minute later I sit down next to Liliana with a couple of bottles of Velibitsko beer in my hand. “How are you?”

“Fine,” she says, and she takes a beer, but she’s not fine. She just gazes out the window down at the station.

“Anything so far?” I ask.

“No. Nothing.” My camera sits on the table next to her, but I don’t think she’s even touched it. I look at my watch and see that it’s nine p.m.

“You need to take a break. I can watch, take pictures, show you when you wake up.”

“I don’t sleep very much.”

I imagine not, I think.

It’s quiet in the room for a moment, and then I ask, “You were kidnapped in Tiraspol by this group?”

“By another group. They were locals, Moldovans. Then I was sold into the pipeline. Moved from east to west. Each time a different group, but I do not know who in charge.”

“When they took you, what were you doing?”

She doesn’t look away from the front door of the police station across the street. She answers matter-of-factly. “I was working girl.”

She means a prostitute, and this surprises me. She doesn’t look like a prostitute.

“How long have you been doing that?”

“I make cakes in bakery in small town. But I want to live big city. I want to be something. I go to Tiraspol when I twenty, and no work, so...”

She stops there, but I get it.

I don’t ask her again how long she’s been a working girl. She looks thirty to me, but taking into account her impossibly tough life, I figure she’s about twenty-five.

Shit, with what she’s been through, she could be even younger.

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