Page 26 of One Minute Out

“No,” came the reply. “We have a plan. We are sticking to it. Tomorrow night, all three of us.”

“Oke’, boss. You want us to stay here?”

“For another hour. Just to make sure he doesn’t have any visitors.”

“Mergertem.” I understand. The Hungarian in the passenger seat ended the call, then looked to the driver. “Wouldn’t be hard. Small-town Bosnian police chief. What’s the big deal?”

“You know Zente. If he makes a plan, you are not going to change it.”

“Yeah,” the other man said. “He does like to be the boss, doesn’t he?”

•••

The road where the van sat had a good view to the building across the tiny square, but from the Hungarians’ vantage point they were unable to see a darkened alcove in front of a small mosque to the right of the intersection in front of them. There, a lone woman stood in a black raincoat, and she kept her eyes on the same building as the men on her left, who she was also unable to see.

Talyssa Corbu was twenty-nine years old, thin, with small elvish facial features and short dyed red hair mostly hidden by the hood of her jacket. She was a foreigner here in Bosnia and, also like the men sitting thirty meters to her left in the van, she was associated with law enforcement.

This was Talyssa’s second day in Mostar. On the first she’d staked out the police station for ten hours before seeing what she wanted to see, and then she had followed Niko Vukovic home. She’d come back this morning, saw him head in to work around ten a.m., and then tried breaking into the man’s apartment building in broad daylight. But Vukovic had good locks and a better security system, and his building had several other units nearby. Moreover, he lived next door to a private day care that created a lot of come-and-go activity on the sidewalk out front during the daytime hours.

So she had abandoned this plan, and instead she spent the day here in the tiny little park at the center of the square a kilometer north of the Old Bridge, waiting for Vukovic to come home.

Now she waited for his light to switch off.

Minutes later it did, and then Talyssa Corbu wrote the time down and began walking away.

Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she’d get what she came for.

It was a good line for her to repeat through her head, but the truth was she had little real confidence in her plan.

Unlike the Hungarians, Corbu was not here on the job for anyone. No, this was personal, as personal as things got. She was in a foreign country planning on extracting information from a city police chief, and she had no training whatsoever to do so.

But she also had no choice.

She made her way back to her hotel a few minutes later, climbed the stairs to her room, all the while trying to come up with a better plan than the one she had now, because she worried that the one she had now would get her killed long before she found what she was looking for.

NINE

Liliana and I get up at five a.m. and drive to Sarajevo, arriving at the main train station at eight, right in the middle of the morning flow of commuters. Since she doesn’t have a passport, I spend most of the drive from Mostar talking her through the tradecraft I employ to avoid immigration officials on trains, and as soon as we arrive I book her a long, circuitous trip that will take her north into Croatia, then northeast into Hungary, then south into Romania, then finally east to Moldova. With a little luck and the info I give her she’ll make it home fine, and I also hand her five thousand euros in case she needs to drop some bribes along the way to ensure all goes smoothly, as well as to help her get started when she makes it back home.

This route will keep her out of Serbia, and I make her promise to get off the train in Moldova before she gets to Tiraspol, where she can take a local bus to her little town.

She’ll be fine, I tell myself. At least in the short term.

Long term? I don’t know what this experience has done to her, but I can take a guess.

I feel bad for Liliana, because even if this is over for her... it’s not over for her.

The public address system announces the boarding of the train to Zagreb, and Liliana looks up at me without speaking.

“Take care of yourself” is all I can manage.

She hesitates, and I realize she’s trying to think of something to say, as well. I figure she could just say Thanks, but I’ve got her all wrong.

“The other girls, Harry. They are not like me. They don’t deserve what happened to them.”

Jesus. This woman is so psychologically damaged I don’t know if she’ll ever recover. It’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen in the past day. Not the violence, the murder, the kidnapping, the rape. It’s the fucking with people’s brains that is the end result of shit like this.

Like someone once fucked with mine.

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