One Minute Out Page 22

  The others looked at Roxana with malevolence as she followed Claudia farther down the corridor to the stateroom at the end of the hall. It was the same size as the other two, although it was empty.

  The older woman turned around and smiled. “This will be your room.”

  “My room?” She stepped inside slowly and saw a pair of designer jeans, a black turtleneck, and conservative underwear, all laid out for her on the bed. On a rolling hanger next to the bathroom were several zipped-up garment bags, and boxes of shoes were stacked in the corner.

  “Yes, dear. You won’t be kept with the others.”

  “But why not?” she asked, though she worried that she already knew.

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” said the woman. “I’ll have food sent in. You should take a shower. I’ll be back to speak with you before long.”

  The American turned away and walked back up the hall; Roxana watched her go, then looked down at herself. She was filthy, wearing threadbare cotton pants and a shirt gray with grime given to her in Belgrade. Her long brown hair was tied up, but oily.

  Here in the pristine surroundings of the stateroom she was so much more aware of her messy appearance than she’d been in the past week. She was exhausted; her body ached from pervasive stress, hard floors, and cramped conditions; but right now all she wanted to do was get clean. She closed the door to the stateroom—the two men halfway up the hallway never even looked her way—then stepped into the bathroom.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I finally do get a view out into the mouth of the bay, it’s been twenty minutes since I’ve seen the yacht. I’d expected it to be right where I last saw it, but as I arrive at the far bank of the island I slow, my eyes locked to the distance. After a few moments I stop, fight to get my binos out of my pack, then bring them quickly to my eyes.

  The yacht is there, but much farther out than before. It’s sailing to sea with a northwesterly heading, and it’s already too far away for me to make out any features, even with my binos.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  I am dejected and exhausted all at once, but then an idea strikes me. I pull out my phone, zoom in as far as I can, and take several pictures of the distant vessel.

  And then I call Talyssa.

  “Harry?”

  “It’s me.”

  Her voice instantly turns hopeful. “What did you find out at the President hotel?”

  “I saw the girls.”

  “Did you see . . . did you see Roxana?”

  “I couldn’t make out any faces. I’m sorry, I was too far away. They were taken to a yacht offshore.”

  “A yacht?”

  “A big one. Where are you now?”

  “According to my GPS, I’m in a little town called Stikovica. It’s on the coast just fifteen minutes north of Dubrovnik. I ran out of gas. I left the scooter in the woods and am sitting at a bus stop, waiting for morning so I can rent a car or get on a bus or . . . or . . . I don’t exactly know what I’m doing.”

  I look to the GPS and see exactly where she is. The yacht will probably motor past her location within minutes, but it will likely be well out to sea, and she doesn’t have binoculars that would allow her a chance to get the name off it.

  But she might still be able to help.

  “If I send you a couple of images, can you lighten them so we can read the name of the vessel on the stern?”

  “No problem. I can Bluetooth it to my laptop and do it from here.”

  “Good.” I text her the pictures, then glance up at the lights of the distant boat, barely more than a pinprick now. I know the girls from the red room in Bosnia are on board, and I feel so utterly helpless watching them go.

  She says, “I’ve got the images. This will take me a few minutes.”

  That yacht is headed north, so even though I don’t know its name, who owns it, or where the hell it’s going, I’m going to haul ass to the north to be in position to intercept it.

  I consider stealing a boat to go after it, but decide against it. A yacht that size probably cruises along at around fifteen to twenty knots; I can steal a car onshore and move three times that speed in the same direction.

  Thirty minutes later I’ve boosted a Volkswagen Golf from a lot next to an apartment complex up the hill, and I’m negotiating my way out of Dubrovnik, being very careful to avoid any roads near where I tipped the van earlier, because there is no doubt they will be full of cops.

  And I do my best to avoid cops, even when they aren’t also evil sex traffickers.

  My phone rings, finally, and I snatch it up. “I thought you forgot about me.”

  Talyssa says, “No . . . I just needed some time to—”

  “Save it. I’m picking you up.”

  “What?”

  “I’m ten minutes from Stikovica. Tell me exactly where you are.”

  She does so. I hang up and stomp the pedal down to the floor.

  * * *

  • • •

  Talyssa Corbu is right where she said she’d be, standing near the train station. She climbs in with her pack, and then I floor it back onto the highway as the first hues of dawn appear to the east.

  Before she says anything, she puts a couple of candy bars and a bag of chips in my lap and opens a bottled water for me. “The stores were still closed, but I found vending machines outside the station. I thought you might—”

  I’ve already ripped into a chocolate bar and am wolfing it down. I put the water between my knees and unscrew the cap.

  She finishes her sentence while staring at me. “—be a little hungry.”

  Between bites I say, “I thought you said it would just take a few minutes to get the images lightened.”

  “What? Oh . . . it didn’t take long at all.”

  “You found the name of the vessel?”

  “I found more than that.” For the first time since I met her, Talyssa is speaking with authority in her voice. “The ship is La Primarosa. I went to Vesselfinder.com, which is a website that displays a map with real-time marine traffic, along with other voyage information, using data uploaded from the vessels’ transponders to the AIS, the—”

  I interrupt, because I know what AIS is. “The Automatic Identification Service.”

  “Actually, it’s the Automatic Identification System.”

  “Right,” I say. “But boats and ships turn off their transponders all the time. There is no way in hell a boat full of sex trafficking victims would be broadcasting their location—”

  She interrupts me. “It is mandatory for vessels over three hundred tons, but they are allowed to turn it off in certain circumstances. Security threats being one of them. Sometimes wealthy people use their status to fly under the radar, so to speak, citing a safety issue to the passengers. If you have money, all you have to do is say you are worried about piracy, and they give you some latitude to turn it off.”

  “So, like I said, the Primarosa is not reporting to AIS, is it?”

  “No. It’s not. Not right now. But since I know the name and the general size, I was able to go into Vesselfinder’s database of boats and ships and find a listing for it, along with a photograph taken off the coast of Santorini two years ago.”

  “Primarosa is a girl’s name. I’ve heard it in Spain. Is it a Spanish boat?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s registered in Denmark to a company based in Cyprus. It’s a shell. It only exists on paper to serve as the ownership of the yacht.”

  “You can’t tell who actually owns the company?”

  “That’s what makes it a shell.”

  “So . . . a dead end?”

  “It would be, except for one thing.” She has confidence and energy in her now that I haven’t seen before.

  “What’s that?”

  “Me. Maybe I can’
t intimidate people or shoot people or anything else you do, but forensic accounting and banking is what I did all day, every day, until I came to the Balkans. If you keep driving north, I can work on digging into this yacht and its history. I will find us something that might help.”

  “Okay. North of us is Croatia, and northwest of us is Italy. There is nowhere else in the Adriatic to go, unless they turn around and head south, so I am assuming the yacht is going to Italy.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “I don’t know why it would leave Croatia only to return back to Croatia up the coast.”

  “Right,” she says, but she doesn’t seem sold on my theory.

  “It will take us six hours to get to the Italian border; I’ll need to know something before then about where it’s headed.”

  “I can do this,” she says, then she pulls her laptop out of her bag and retrieves her phone. She sets up a Wi-Fi hotspot while I drive, and soon she’s pulled up a map and is furiously clicking keys next to me.

  * * *

  • • •

  Twenty-seven nautical miles away, the Primarosa motored northwest through the warm predawn light at fifteen knots. Standing on the bow and looking out to sea, South African Jaco Verdoorn stood alone. His men did not come aboard with him; with twenty-three women, fifteen crew, and nine Greek mafioso on board, there simply was not enough room on the vessel for nine more men.

  Verdoorn sent Loots and the rest of his shock troops north by air to scout out the security situation up there. The Primarosa had one more stop to make before its final destination on this journey, just to take on a few more pieces of merchandise, but Verdoorn wasn’t worried about Gentry showing up there. The rest of the girls would be locked up on board the yacht; the Greeks had a dozen guns on board. Kostopoulos and his men had maintained the pipeline in the Balkans for years without incident, and the South African had at least enough confidence in them that they could watch over the merchandise while in transit on open water. If the Gray Man was working alone, or virtually alone, there was little chance he was going to attack a forty-five-meter yacht that was out to sea and on the move.

  He was legendary, but still, he was human.

  No, if Gentry came, it would be at the final destination of this trip, so that was where Verdoorn sent his men.

  As Jaco fantasized about getting Courtland Gentry’s forehead on the other side of the front sight of his pistol, he heard footsteps behind him on the foredeck. Looking back over his shoulder, he recognized the small stature and gait of Kostas Kostopoulos.

  He turned away and returned his gaze to the sea.

  Verdoorn relied on the old Greek and his organization, but he didn’t much care for the man, personally. He felt Kostopoulos had delusions of his own importance, was pompous and superior acting, and talked back to Verdoorn more than any of the other regionals in the Consortium. Kostopoulos knew that Verdoorn took orders from the Director, so the Greek treated the South African as a glorified errand boy.

  Verdoorn would have loved to slit the old bastard’s throat right then and toss him over the side of his own luxury yacht for the fish, but Kostopoulos was right about one thing: Jaco Verdoorn did not make decisions autonomously. While he ran this operation fully, he was beholden to the little American in California, the Director.

  Kostopoulos said, “They tell me you are berthing in the equipment locker. Unacceptable! I’ll happily give you my stateroom and move some product out of one of the lower-deck cabins for myself.”

  Verdoorn knew Kostopoulos wouldn’t “gladly” do anything of the sort. The foppish old man would be loath to give up his massive quarters on the upper deck. He’d do it, begrudgingly, but he’d martyr himself in the process, and the South African didn’t want to be tempted to toss the Consortium’s head of Balkan operations over the side because he was tired of hearing him talk.

  And, anyway, Verdoorn had lived for weeks at a time in the Namibian bush, months at a time in un-air-conditioned sandbagged emplacements in Afghanistan, years at a time in one-room apartments in a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg.

  Even though he now earned millions a year for his work, he enjoyed rigor and self-denial. He felt it gave him his edge.

  Denying himself luxuries from time to time helped keep strict discipline and order in his mind.

  And there was something else Jaco did that he thought kept him sharp. He never sampled the merchandise. Never. He saw his job as that of an enforcer, felt he needed to be detached from the emotions of sex. Depriving himself of his sexual needs, he felt, made him a beast, made him loathe the product paraded before him, and it helped him do what he needed to do to keep strict discipline and order.

  Yes, the equipment locker wasn’t as posh as Verdoorn’s condo in Venice Beach or his ranch outside Pretoria. But it was a hell of a lot better than the shitty Jo’burg flat where he grew up.

  He waved the Greek’s comment away, but the old man continued.

  “If I had known before you boarded that you would be joining us, I would have made proper arrangements for you.”

  “Last-minute change of plans, Kostas. Since your regional network couldn’t end the threat to the shipment, I’m forced to escort it to market personally.”

  The Greek let out a laugh. “Everyone . . . the Serbs, the Hungarians, the Albanians . . . everyone has taken casualties from this.”

  Verdoorn turned to him. “I don’t give two shits about your casualties. I care about this shipment, and I care about the security of the pipeline. If you can’t handle either responsibility, I can—”

  “You know this man, don’t you?”

  Verdoorn took a breath, then turned back out to sea. “I know of him.”

  Another brief chortle from the Greek. “Yes, well, I am guessing you have a very healthy respect for his abilities, and that is why you are here now. You can insinuate that my people should have done better with him . . . but you know what they were up against.”

  Verdoorn let it go. The Greek was absolutely right; it was absurd to insinuate that Serbian and Albanian gangsters who had been trained as simple street thugs and knew nothing of the Gray Man should have been ready to deal with him, but the South African wasn’t going to give the Greek the pleasure of admitting this.

  Instead Verdoorn turned and leaned against the railing. Looking out over the lavish opulence around him, he found something new to complain about. “I never liked the idea of using this bladdy boat. Too fuckin’ showy for a smuggling operation.”

  Kostopoulos was quick to counter him here, as well. “Showy? Certainly so. But not conspicuous. This vessel sails up and down the Adriatic all the time. Navies and coastal patrol craft know it, customs and immigration know it, the other traffic out here knows it. The ports we visit are used to seeing it, and no one gives it a second glance.

  “But if we just threw the merchandise in a couple of low-profile, high-performance speedboats and ran them without lights, then they would be spotted and considered suspicious. The Italians or the Croatian navy would board them, and we’d lose our precious cargo.”

  Verdoorn made no reply, but the Greek continued his explanation.

  “Ever since the migration crisis in the area began, the coastal patrol and navies all over the European Mediterranean have stepped up their interdiction efforts. Boats are getting seized and captains are getting arrested for smuggling every day. But this method of ours is working, and it’s working well. We’ve been boarded a couple of times, but the compartments have never been thoroughly searched.”

  The South African kept his gaze over the water. “I don’t like it. Toss the merchandise in a fuckin’ freighter and ship them off to their final destinations.”

  “We do toss the items into freighters. All the time. But those items are destined to work as simple street whores in London or Germany or Holland. Lisbon, Stockholm, and Dublin. Class B or Class C material.
But the products we transfer on La Primarosa, the Director has estimated, will generate roughly five million euros each through their life cycle. Twenty-three items on board now, another six boarding tomorrow night. That means we are transferring one hundred fifty million euros of product for ourselves and our clients. But this revenue will only be realized if they make it safely to market in good condition. The two days on the water now will improve the selling price of every single one of those items below. What we will do for them here on board, both physically and psychologically, cannot possibly be done in the hull of an ocean freighter.”

  Verdoorn let it go. Instead he said, “Two of the items are not for sale. You’ve been told this, correct?”

  “I’ve been told. One is on board now. The one called Maja, who we’ve stored in cabin four. We pick up the other nonrevenue item tomorrow up the coast. They are calling her Sofia, and she can share Maja’s cabin.”

  The South African looked back out to the morning gloom, the Gray Man at the forefront of his thoughts. He’d have to call Cage soon, give him the bad news. The head of the Consortium was due to come in person to the market in Venice, and this worried Verdoorn even more.

  He made the determination to call Sean Hall, Cage’s bodyguard, and recommend they not make the trip. The boss wouldn’t like it, but Verdoorn deemed it the right move considering the threat.

  While he looked out to sea thinking of the difficult phone calls to come, the Greek said, “Interesting. Very interesting. The unflappable Jaco Verdoorn is nervous. Can’t say I’ve seen this out of you before. You really view this American as that much of a concern?”

  Verdoorn clutched the railing tightly with both hands and looked to Kostopoulos now. “To me and my boys? No . . . I don’t. But to all the other chattel marchin’ around with a gun workin’ for the pipeline? Yeah . . . yeah . . . he could take them all.”

  The Greek sniffed out a laugh, but Verdoorn only turned away and headed back up the deck towards his makeshift quarters.