Page 51 of One Minute Out

“I... I don’t know. I swear I don’t understand what is happen—”

The first woman hissed at her. “Liar. You are working with them.”

She tried to protest, but the rest of the group moved away from her, leaving her alone on the floor in the middle of the room.

With everything that had happened so far, Maja didn’t think she had any more tears left in her, but she began to cry again.

•••

Talyssa Corbu and I find ourselves sitting a couple blocks away from the main police station in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on a hilly residential side street off Ante Starcevica. It’s pouring rain; Talyssa has her coat on and an umbrella in her hand, but she’s not worried about the weather at present. Instead she’s trying to psych herself up to walk straight into the police station and reveal to some possibly very bad people that she is here to unmask their very bad actions.

I sure as shit wouldn’t want to do it, so I can understand her reluctance.

I’m trying to psych her up, too, but I can see that accomplishing her task this afternoon is going to take reserves of strength I have no confidence this young woman possesses.

But she’s all we’ve got right now, so I’m sending her in.

Together we decide she will identify herself as a Europol criminal analyst, and say that she is investigating rumors of a sex trafficking pipeline run by an international consortium, a pipeline that leads from far in the East to right here in Dubrovnik. The local police will be able to check out Talyssa’s credentials easily enough, and when they do, they will speak to her superiors, who will quickly tell them she has taken a leave of absence from work—work that involves coordinating with European law enforcement agencies on money laundering and other financial fraud.

At this point Talyssa’s story of her hunt for the ringleaders of a human trafficking network will unravel, and it will be obvious to the local cops that she has gone rogue for some reason and has no sanction for her work here. Then—we hope, anyway—the crooked cops and whatever gang is working with the pipeline in Dubrovnik will determine that the woman and her questions are at once dangerous and easy to silence, so they will pay her a visit, either to kill her or to scare her into giving up her hunt for answers about the Consortium.

We are lucky that Talyssa and her half sister have different surnames, as they were born to different fathers. We know Talyssa won’t be able to talk to the police without producing some sort of identification, and I have no way of obtaining quality forged documents for her in the time we have available to us, so on the off chance Roxana is still alive, she won’t be endangered by this fact.

The women and girls I saw in the basement in Mostar, if they are reachable at all, will soon be distributed all over the world, dispersed into the wind where I will never be able to help them. For this reason we hope our thin backstory holds, because we’ve no time to craft a better one.

Hope isn’t a strategy, I know, but we need a break.

We arrived in town last night and I rented two rooms. One was a top-floor pension in the walled Old Town, and the second a larger apartment, also in the Old Town, but in a basement several blocks from the first.

The first room is Talyssa’s: high on the hill on the southern side, backing up to the medieval outer wall that separates the Old Town from the ocean. Here she will wait for whoever the Consortium sends after her. I chose the location carefully after walking the neighborhood and the staircases of the building. I’ve checked her window to make sure it opens, and I’ve looked at the roof and the courtyard out front, deciding on several courses of action depending on our enemy’s tactics. I’ve picked a place in the large pedestrian-only Old Town so the opposition can’t just roll up in a convoy of vans and snatch her out of her bed and race away without me having time to stop them. No, with the location I’ve chosen, they will have to come on foot, climbing flight after flight of outdoor cobblestone stairs through narrow alleyways. I will be lying in wait and able to see and hear them coming by any route available to them long before they get to her building, much less through the courtyard, into the entrance, and up the three flights of stairs to her room.

And I won’t just be trusting my eyes. In my pack of gear brought along for the hit on Ratko Babic, I brought a half dozen small remote cameras, all of which connect to an app on my phone. I hid two of these in planters in the courtyard and entryway of the building where Talyssa will be waiting, and two more cover angles around the outside that I won’t be able to see from my vantage point.

The tiny basement apartment I rented nearby can be converted into a torture chamber on the fly if I happen to get my hands on one of the men sent to silence the pesky Europol woman here on an unsanctioned mission to get intelligence on their operation.

We don’t move our belongings into either location. All my possessions I have in my backpack in the backseat, and all of Talyssa’s are either in her purse or in her roll-aboard in the trunk. Additionally, during the day I went shopping at a camping store on the eastern edge of the city, purchasing items I anticipate needing. I also bought a burner phone and a prepaid card at a gift shop.

I wish like hell I were on an Agency op, where I’d have access to intel and labor and gadgetry and the like, but I’m performing with limited resources and no support, so I have to make the best of it.

The rain beats down on the roof of the little Vauxhall Corsa four-door. “You’ve got this,” I tell her. “You’ll be great.” I say these lines with conviction, at least I think I do, and she gives me a little bob of her head in acknowledgment. But neither of us believes this plan of mine has much chance of going smoothly. I know it, and she lets me know she knows it when she articulates just exactly what I am fearing.

“But what if they just take me into custody while they check out my story?”

I’m ready with an answer, because I’ve been pondering this all day. “Tell them you are working with others. If they act like they aren’t going to let you out of there, call my burner phone and give me the names of the people you are talking to.”

“Right.”

“Once they check you out they’ll know you’re full of shit, but making that call will probably keep them from detaining you until they’re certain you’re a rogue.” I have no idea if this will work, but it sounds good, anyway.

She nods again distractedly, looks out at the rain in the direction of the station. Her facial features are pinched tight with worry, and the bangs of her short red hair hang over her eyebrows. “I better go.”

“I’ll be parked right here when you’re done.”

“Sure,” she says, and I worry she’s not going to be able to go through with it.

“Look. You can do this.”

I still can’t work out exactly how someone so petrified of the danger can manage to push forward the way she has done. I understand her sister is either dead or in desperate peril, and I understand she doesn’t trust local authorities to help... but I have never seen anyone this physically sickened by terror able to soldier on through the danger.

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