One Minute Out Read online

  I see dark clothing, facial hair on some, longer hair on others.

  Again I use the app on my phone to check the cameras I’ve hidden in stairwells and passages I can’t see from here. Everything seems quiet other than the men moving straight up the middle.

  But even though I don’t see others on my cams, I wonder if there are more around.

  The men close on my position with confidence, climbing stairs through the night as one. They are cohesive, an organized unit, each man comfortable that the other has his back.

  The men’s hands are empty, but that means nothing. They’ll have weapons.

  I work with just a few operating principles, but one of them is ironclad: every motherfucker I come in contact with has a weapon.

  I speak softly, careful to not show any anxiety now, though I’m feeling a ton of it. “Talyssa?”

  I guess I failed, because her own voice changes suddenly; apparently, she can sense the change of gravity in mine. “Yes. Yes, I’m here. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s showtime. I’ve got men approaching, and they fit the mold. They’re about two minutes from us at their current pace.”

  “Oh my God . . . what do I do?” Her voice cracks as she speaks.

  “First, stay calm. I’ve got everything under control.” This is a lie; I’d only really have control of this situation if I were up here on the roof in a sand-bagged position with an M60 belt-fed machine gun. But I tell myself that showing confidence I don’t have is for her own good. Quickly I move in a low crouch along the angled tile roof to the west side of the building, out of the view of the men approaching from the north. While doing so I say, “I need you to go to your window and open it.”

  I grab the rope and step up on the ledge. Rappelling down quickly, I arrive at her window in just seconds. She is just now opening it, her purse and a backpack over her shoulder.

  Our comms channel is still open, but we are five feet away so she can hear me through her earpiece and in person. “Come to me. Grab me around the neck.”

  She moves closer, but she looks down and then backs up a little. It’s only about thirty feet to the cobblestones, which isn’t that far, but it’s plenty far enough to kill her if she fell.

  I urge her on. “You’re fine. Come on.”

  She comes closer again, but she doesn’t put her foot up on the windowsill, and it’s going to be impossible for me to haul her out while holding the rope.

  “Work with me, Talyssa.”

  “I . . . I can’t. I’m—”

  “Really bad dudes will be coming through that door behind you in one minute. You want to take your chances with me, or with them?”

  She looks back to the door, makes no move towards me, and she’s just out of reach. I’m straining on the rope as it is.

  I try a joke. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

  But she looks at me, then back at the door. She has a fear of heights, which is not unreasonable, but I also sense that she has a fear of me.

  I get that, too, I guess.

  She’s nearly panic-stricken now. “I . . . I can’t do this. I’ll meet you downstairs. I’ll find a back way out. I’ll hurry.”

  “There’s no time for that. Trust me. Just step up and—”

  But she’s already turning away and rushing to the door of her room.

  Son of a bitch.

  I quickly rappel down towards the passageway on the west side of her building, and while doing so I try to come up with a new plan. I’ve got to work with the situation before me, because my original scheme is up in smoke. Fortunately, I have a rich history of shit going wrong for me to fall back on.

  I speak softly for the mic in the earpiece, not wanting my words to carry in the narrow passage. “Run down the stairs to the ground floor and find a window, as far away from the main entrance as possible. Do not go out into the courtyard because you’ll walk right into them if you do.” I don’t know for sure that they won’t send men around the back or sides of the building. I would. But I do know for sure they’ll send men straight up the middle, because I saw them advancing up the stairs without any defensive tactical posture.

  I could see it in their walk, in the way they moved—these guys aren’t worried about shit.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “I’ll come around back to meet you.”

  “Yes,” she says again, and I hear nothing but stress in her voice.

  Once on the ground I release the line, pull off my gloves, and jam them in my pack. I start moving towards the rear of the building, and I keep trying to calm her.

  “You’re fine, just get out of there.”

  “I’m in the kitchen. The window opens. I’m climbing out now.”

  “Okay, keep quiet.”

  I near the building’s edge at a silent run, my hand brushing the stone of the wall as I slow to look around. I haven’t drawn my weapon and hope I don’t have to; a single gunshot in these narrow stone corridors would bring every bad guy down on me in seconds. And even though I have a silencer in my pack, the report of suppressed Glock 19 fire is still louder than a snare drum at a heavy metal concert.

  I want to maintain stealth, but how the next few minutes go down is not up to me. Instead it’s up to the Romanian woman I’ve tied myself to in this op, and the assholes coming to get her.

  Just before I peer around the corner, I hear noise in the back passageway. The scuffle of footsteps on stone. I whisper, “Move quietly. I can hear you running from here.”

  But Talyssa’s reply in my ear causes me to stop in my tracks. “Just climbing out the window now.”

  And this is bad news, because it tells me there is someone else running behind the building.

  “Wait,” I say, but I can hear the sounds of her climbing out the window, both over my earpiece and through the echoing of her movements along the passages.

  I look around the corner and I see two men in black tracksuits running on the cobblestones, and they see Talyssa as she finishes climbing out of the window. They charge towards her before she even turns to face them.

  I pull my pistol and whisper for the transmitter in my ear. “Run to your left. Go, go, go.”

  But the men are on her in seconds; she screams as they tackle her to the stones, her voice simultaneously loud in my ear and echoing all around me.

  I am only fifty feet away, but I don’t have a shot from here because I can’t be sure my 9-millimeter rounds won’t overpenetrate the bad guys and hit the woman. I decide to remain stealthy, to try to get to them before they see me so I can stick my knife into their ribs, but to my right I hear racing footsteps running in my direction along the western wall of the building.

  Shit. The men holding Talyssa down pull her up to her feet; they clearly are not about to assassinate her, so I turn away from the Europol analyst and her captors and climb a narrow stairwell that leads up to a locked metal gate in the wall surrounding the entire Old Town.

  Kneeling in the darkness I see two men run past, in the direction of Talyssa, and I know that the opposition—whoever the hell they are—has her now.

  Softly I speak to her through our communications link.

  “Stay calm, Talyssa. Don’t say a word. I’ll get you back. Try to keep your hair over your earpiece so they don’t see it.”

  In my gut I feel wrenching pain as I realize that the girl I used for bait is now in mortal danger and, just like with the women in the cellar, it’s all my motherfucking fault.

  TWENTY

  Talyssa Corbu was yanked to her feet by the two men, and two more arrived a few seconds later. She tried to scream for help but a hand slammed over her mouth and nose. A man with a thick accent leaned into her ear. “We kill you if you make sound. Understand?”

  Tears rained from her eyes as she nodded, and the hand came away. All four had hold of her body now; her arms were g
ripped tightly, a man behind grabbed the collar of her raincoat, and a fourth person manhandled her while ripping off the backpack and her shoulder bag, and feeling into every pocket of her clothing.

  She heard Harry speak to her softly, and she turned around to look for him, but all she saw were two more men arriving at her position and helping the others. All the goons had dark hair, most had beards, and they wore dark clothing. One spoke into his mobile phone but he stepped away from her to do so, and she couldn’t make out the language.

  There were smiles among the men, so proud they were that they’d captured her.

  Soon they began pushing her forward, turning away from the wall at the eastern side of the Old Town and heading on foot down the first of many long stone staircase passageways that led down to the Stradun.

  Talyssa was in the middle of the group, and though she mostly kept her head down out of abject terror, she did look to her left and right and regard the faces around her. These were cold, hard men. They weren’t police.

  They were gangsters; she took them for Turks or perhaps Albanians, but she had no way of knowing until she heard them speak again. As a Romanian, she knew a few Albanians and a few Turks, and although she couldn’t speak either language, she could quickly identify it.

  Her mind began racing. She came to the quick conclusion that there was no way the Consortium would have sent Albanians or Turks to kidnap her out of her hotel room in Croatia unless they had something awful in store for her. She wasn’t going to be driven to the edge of town and given a warning.

  She was certain they were taking her someplace to torture her for information, and then to kill her.

  And wherever the hell Harry had run to, his promises to protect her rang hollow now. Still, she didn’t blame him. She’d panicked at the window: a lifelong fear of heights, a fear of most everything that had to do with danger, was to blame. If she’d just trusted the American, she wouldn’t be moments away from death now.

  Her teeth chattered and her mind raced, and she fought a wave of nausea as she continued down the steps.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’m hauling ass two blocks and two passageways to the left of and parallel to where Talyssa and the men in black are descending. I had to wait for them to pass my position before running here to the east, behind Talyssa’s building, past the window she climbed out of, and then I turned to my right to begin my own descent. Now I’m thirty or forty seconds behind the group, but I feel sure I’m making up for it with my speed.

  As I run I speak again to Talyssa, still softly, because this medieval neighborhood feels like one damn echo chamber. “Walk as slowly as you can. You have to slow them down.”

  I hear her speak to the men around her in English, her voice halting. “Please. Slow down. I can’t walk this fast.”

  A man snaps at her in a heavy accent. “No talking. Walk faster.”

  “I . . . I hurt my ankle when you knocked me down.”

  I can hear frustration in the man’s voice now as he speaks to the others in a foreign tongue that I think may be Albanian. When Talyssa says, “Thank you,” I know they are complying with her request and slowing.

  I run faster. At each little narrow intersection I glance to my right, hoping to see the group so I know I am getting in front of them. I’m having a hard time coming up with a cogent plan, but I’m definitely preparing for a confrontation. Taking on eight goons at the same time in an outdoor stone stairwell barely eight feet across seems like a bad course of action, but I don’t know that I have any choice.

  I consider letting them just take her and then following them to see where they go, but I see the flaw in that plan. If I lose Talyssa, then she’s dead. If the Consortium runs the chief of police of this town, if they have the juice to get a bevy of cops for a surveillance operation, then I don’t see why they would pull the cops and send in an Albanian gang to grab the woman if they plan on simply interrogating and intimidating her.

  No. They could have used dirty cops for that. The fact that they didn’t kill her immediately tells me they need to take her to a secondary location, perhaps with plans to torture information out of her, and the fact that they brought in a foreign criminal gang to snatch her tells me they then plan on killing her.

  Either way, right now I’m Talyssa Corbu’s only hope.

  * * *

  • • •

  Just as I sprint through the next intersection, doing my best to stay as far from the streetlamps as possible, I gaze to my right again, expecting another narrow east-west street. But instead I see I’ve run out into the northwestern edge of a large triangle-shaped open-air area, two blocks wide. The entourage is just entering the square on the southeastern side, and though I’m forty yards away, in low light, and in front of them, there is no way they can miss a man running at top speed.

  I hear immediate shouts, both echoing around me and through my earpiece from Talyssa’s microphone and, just as I disappear from their view, I see two of the eight men peel off and come my way. They are a minute out if they move along the square at a careful pace, but less than half that if they run.

  I figure they’ll run, because they won’t know for sure I’m with Talyssa and won’t immediately move in a defensive posture. They find me curious enough to send a couple guys to check, and I’m sure someone has told them to be on the lookout for a lone male operator in all this, but they aren’t going to just open fire.

  I don’t think.

  And I won’t open fire on them. I have no qualms about killing a couple of kidnappers, but I want to avoid a direct confrontation, if possible, while there are so many guns around the girl. At the same time, however, I don’t want to go into full retreat, where I’ll likely lose my chance to get her back.

  Looking towards the sky as I run to the north, I make my decision.

  I’m going up.

  To my left a copper drain spout climbs the side of the three-story building, all the way to the roof. I adjust my backpack and start heading up, moving as quickly as possible, hoping like hell I can get over the lip of the tiled roof before the two Albanians make it onto my little stairway passage. For a brief moment I consider pulling my pistol and firing a couple of rounds into the cobblestones to slow their approach, but instead I just concentrate on climbing as fast as I can.

  My knuckles scrape against the ancient walls behind the drainpipe as I struggle for handholds, and the toes of my boots dig for purchase as I climb. Quickly I realize I’m not going to make it all the way before the men arrive below me, but I chose a pipe out of the illumination of the streetlamps, so I do have another way to remain undetected. On the second floor I swing away from the pipe and step onto the ledge of a darkened window. I squat down, positioning my body totally within the window’s frame, next to a planter with a small orange tree in it, and then I freeze.

  Below me two men run into view, pistols swinging low in their hands, and they continue down the eight-foot-wide staircase towards the main street of the Old Town, still several blocks away.

  Since I’m in my black clothing and squatting in front of the black window, twenty feet above their heads and in dim light, they don’t see me. Once they travel another block down, I reach back out to the drainpipe, carefully take hold, and swing my body off the window ledge. Quickly I continue my ascent up to the roof.

  Getting up the overhang is tricky, but the drainpipe helps as I dangle off it and climb out, hand over hand, until I can pull myself up onto the tiles.

  The building I’ve chosen is on the opposite side of the street from Talyssa and her captors, and this puts me farther away from her, with two narrow north-south passages between us. I run along the angled roof and see that there is one more connected building before the next east-west street, so I leap down to it, its roof a few feet lower than the one I climbed onto.

  Rushing again through the dark, I tell myself I ca
n make the leap across the narrow alley to the next roof, one story lower because it’s farther down the hill that descends to the center of the Old Town. I pick up my pace, pull my backpack off my back, and swing it in my arm as hard as I can. I let it go, and it flies through the air in front of me over the street. While it sails on, I time my footfalls so my last one will land right at the roof’s edge, and then I leap, giving it everything I have.

  I sail over clotheslines full of drying laundry, my feet and arms flailing.

  I make it over the narrow street and land tumbling onto the roof, using my forward momentum to keep from rolling off the steep tiles. The Glock on my hip bites into me when I bang it on the hard surface, but I’m up on my feet with the momentum of my roll and I lean down and snatch my pack as I climb, sliding it over my shoulders.

  I’m well behind Talyssa and the others now, still two blocks west of me, and I don’t yet have a plan as to what I’ll do if I manage to catch up.

  But I keep going. If I don’t reach her before they get her piled into a van and out of here, or I don’t get to my vehicle to tail them, then I won’t get another chance.

  Almost out of breath, I speak softly for Talyssa’s earpiece as I run on. “Slow them down. You have to slow them down.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Talyssa heard the transmission from the American; she could tell from the desperate tone of his voice and the exertion that she hears along with it that he was doing his best to get to her, and she was certain she would die if he did not. Already she could see a large square that ended at the main street of the Old Town, just a few blocks below her, and the gate that led out the eastern side of the walled pedestrian-only space was just to the right on the far side. She imagined there would be a car waiting out there for her, and she’d be in it in a couple of minutes unless she did something to slow them down more until the American could arrive.

  The two men who had ventured off to check out the man running a couple of blocks over were still gone, but the other six men surrounded her, and they jostled her when she tried to slow again.