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  “But Roxana’s tough. She’s really tough.”

  “So . . . what is our plan now, Harry? We just leave Roxana with them and wait to hear from her?”

  “No. We’re going to Venice. They will be there tonight, unless me showing up on La Primarosa changed their entire agenda.” I can’t rule out that possibility, but so far the pipeline seems to have continued on despite my harassment, with only a few diversions.

  Talyssa asks, “And when we get to Venice? What will we do there?”

  “The other girls will be sold off, and they’ll all go to different groups, different countries. If I can’t stop it tonight, I’ll never get another chance to save those victims I saw in Bosnia.”

  But I sure as hell can’t save those women by myself. I’ve been trying and failing at this since that night in Mostar when my actions made their awful predicament even more awful.

  I know now that I need a hand, and I also know where to go for it.

  Maybe.

  “This has gotten too big,” I say. “We’re going to have to try to bring in some help.”

  “But . . . the police are corrupt.”

  “I’m not talking about the police.”

  “Who, then?”

  I sigh and then drive in silence for a moment. Only when she asks me a second time do I reply. “Some acquaintances. But you need to understand one thing. They will either make the situation better, or they will make the situation worse. It’s only out of desperation that I’m reaching out to them.”

  “But who are they?”

  “I can’t tell you,” I say, and then I turn back to her. “Trust me.”

  She nods and looks out the window. Soon she starts to sniff back tears, no doubt thinking about Roxana, somewhere out to sea.

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour later we’re in the Italian town of Villa Opicina as the sun rises onto a clear morning. Talyssa is sitting on a stone bench in front of a church, and I’m walking around the grounds with my earpiece in. No one is in sight this early save for a couple of nuns who passed me by a minute ago, and they didn’t exactly trigger my threat radar, so I feel secure enough for now.

  I place a call that I’ve been considering, but dreading, for days and days now.

  It’s two a.m. in D.C., which means I’ll be waking up someone on the eastern seaboard, but I honestly don’t give a shit.

  After five rings the call is answered with a sleepy female voice. “Brewer?”

  “Hey. It’s me.”

  Suzanne Brewer is my handler at CIA. To say our relationship is difficult would be underselling it significantly. She is not my biggest fan, which is also an understatement. In fact, it is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that she tried to kill me a couple months ago.

  I don’t trust her, but right now, I’m out of options.

  “Me, who?” She’s just being difficult. It’s par for the course from her.

  “It’s Violator.”

  She takes a few more seconds to wake up; I can hear her climbing out of her bed and walking, probably over to a computer in her house.

  She says, “Iden code?”

  I groan to myself and want to tell her, For fuck’s sake, you know who this is! But I don’t. Not because I’m above that sort of talk, but because I need something from her now.

  I answer with a clipped, “Iden to follow: Whiskey, Hotel, Quebec, fiver, two, three, India.”

  The pause is brief. The voice is annoyed. “Iden confirmed.”

  I lay on the charm now, as thick as I can. “How’s it goin’?”

  “It would be ‘goin’’ better if you were working instead of on another one of your vacations.”

  I think about the past week and realize how much I wish I could take a vacation from this vacation. But I say, “I’ll be back soon. Sooner, actually, if you give me a little help. It’s really important.”

  “You wouldn’t be calling if you didn’t need help. You wouldn’t be calling at this hour if it weren’t important. What do you want?”

  This is going well, so far. I decide to add to my charm offensive to reel her in.

  “You feeling better?”

  Suzanne Brewer had been shot a couple of months earlier; she fell into my arms, in fact, and I guess I probably saved her life. That’s how I remember it, anyway, although my recollection of the incident is a bit fuzzy.

  I hope that’s how she remembers it, as well, to earn me a little more respect in her eyes so she’ll give me what I need.

  But she barks back at me. “I asked you what you wanted.”

  Nope, the ice queen is as frosty as ever, despite the fact that I stopped her from bleeding out back in the UK.

  I reply with, “I need whatever the Agency knows about a sex trafficking ring referred to as the Consortium.”

  “Perhaps you are confused.”

  “Confused about what?”

  “Let me explain how this is all supposed to function. You work for this intelligence agency, Violator. This intelligence agency does not work for you.”

  Yeah, I knew it was going to be like this, though I was hopeful it would be all unicorns and rainbows.

  Hope is not a strategy, I tell myself yet again. Then I tell myself, Screw it. I turn off my faux charm and let her have it. “Just cut the shit and do this for me! Lives are at stake.”

  “Lives are at stake all the time, with everything we do. Every single day you run off to go find yourself, or whatever the hell you do during your hiatuses, lives are threatened. The program you belong to needs you, and you are out there—”

  “Please, Suzanne. Please get me something.”

  She stops bitching, which is a first, and then she sighs, which happens all the time. Finally, she says, “I’ve never heard of the Consortium.”

  “What about the pipeline?”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s kind of like an underground railroad for the trafficked women. A smuggling circuit the victims are put through by the Consortium.”

  “No, I’ve never heard of that, either.”

  She sounds credible, but again, she also sounded credible when she said she hadn’t been trying to shoot me in the head back in Scotland, and I retain doubts about that event.

  I say, “Fine. But I bet you are sitting in front of a snazzy computer that has access to all sorts of supersecret files and databases, and you can query those terms in that context, and find out if the Agency has any intel I can use.”

  “Yes, I do have just such a computer in front of me. But what do I get out of this?”

  As I walk through the garden of the church in the cool morning, it occurs to me, and not for the first time, that everybody wants something from me.

  “What do you get? How about my unwavering devotion?”

  “I already have a cat, Violator.”

  Of course you do. “Just tell me what you want from me.”

  “If I give you this intel, you will come back to D.C.?”

  “Not immediately; I need actionable intel so I can act. But as soon as I’m done with—”

  She interrupts. “Sorry, Violator. I need you. Your country needs you.”

  “I’ll kiss your ass and I’ll kiss the flag, probably not in that order, very soon. But for now I need to know about the Consortium. Seems to be run by an American male in his fifties. He used the name Tom, but that’s going to be a pseudonym. There’s an American female psychologist and a South African involved, as well. A rich Greek dude . . . he’s dead. Don’t know his name.”

  “How did he die?” she asks, but the way she asks tells me she has a pretty good suspicion that I killed him.

  “Would you believe natural causes?”

  Brewer just sighs again.

  I continue. “The organization either owns or has acces
s to a megayacht called La Primarosa. Right now it’s in the northern Adriatic, heading to Venice, unless they changed their plans.”

  Brewer sounds like she’s typing all this into her computer. Then she says, “Fine. Give me an hour and I’ll call you back.”

  This went better than I thought. Momentarily stunned by my powers of persuasion, I can’t even speak.

  “Violator?”

  I do my best to recover. “Uh . . . yeah. That’s great. Let me call you, though. One hour.”

  The line goes dead, and I stand there in the middle of the well-kept church grounds, staring up at the steeple. It’s a magnificent sight on this sunny, warm morning, but all I can think about is tonight and the twenty-three women and girls who have been on my mind since Bosnia.

  My best chance to save them is a woman who hates my guts, and an organization that regularly uses me, while offering little in return.

  But if this doesn’t work, another option comes to mind. It chills me to think about employing plan B, but I may just be desperate enough to do so.

  THIRTY-TWO

  An hour later I’m parked at a gas station near the Italian town of Portogruaro. Talyssa is sitting in the car eating a pastry for breakfast, and I am lying twenty-five yards away in the grass by the parking lot, looking up at the sky. I’m tired as hell again, and I know I’m going to have to find a way to sleep before tonight. But that’s not all I need, so I call Suzanne Brewer back.

  She answers, and I say, “Violator,” and then I play the game by the rules. “Iden code Whiskey, Hotel, Quebec, fiver, two, three, India.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “What did you learn?” I ask.

  “I’m transferring you.”

  “Transferring me? It’s three a.m. there. You’re at the office?”

  “I am now,” she says, her voice no more or less annoyed sounding than usual. She adds, “Hold,” and I do.

  There is no hold music at CIA, which is too bad, because it’s a missed opportunity for them to have fun and play the Mission: Impossible theme song or some shit, but nobody at Langley I’ve ever met has that kind of a sense of humor.

  Soon the line clicks. “Hanley.”

  I launch up to a sitting position on the grass. Matthew Hanley is the deputy director for operations, the top dog in Ops. Brewer somehow got him into the building at three a.m. for this.

  Matt and I go way back. He and Brewer are the only two people at Langley who know I’m doing contract work for the Agency, and that’s because I’m essentially doing contract work directly for Hanley, with Brewer as the go-between. Still, though Hanley and I have spoken quite a few times over the past couple of years, I was hoping to avoid going all the way up to him in my hunt for intel about an operation I’m running on my own.

  But I mask my unease. “Hey, Matt. All good with you?”

  “Not so great.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, it’s simple. I have three operatives in a special sub rosa unit. One of them is recovering from injury, one of them is a pain in my ass, and the other is AWOL.”

  I thought I was the pain in his ass until he mentioned AWOL. “I’m coming back. I just got myself involved in something and I need a little intel to wrap it up. Brewer shouldn’t have bothered you with this.”

  Hanley replies to this with “The Consortium. That means nothing to us. There are sex trafficking rings all over. In your area, Albania and Turkey are big players.”

  I cock my head slightly. “How do you know what area I’m in?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “How is it—”

  “Because of Ratko Babic.”

  Matt knows I killed the general, or at least he thinks I did and he’s trying to get me to confirm it. If it were anyone else, I probably would play stupid, but it’s Hanley.

  “Right.”

  He adds, “I wasn’t going to ask you if you waxed old Ratko Babic, although from the minute I heard about his death, I knew that you did. Shit . . . everyone knows. But you’re basically admitting it, so I’ll just go ahead and say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Nice work. Not perfect . . . you fragged a bunch of Serbian goons who were active-duty members of their intelligence service. They were also Branjevo Partizans, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over that, but our Balkan desk is running interference, insisting to the Serbs that the former asset who became a rogue hit man called the Gray Man was seen in Santiago, Chile, at the same time as the Babic killing.”

  “If I don’t work for the Agency, then why does the Agency give a shit if the Serbs think it was me?”

  “We trained you, didn’t we? We installed that wacky do-gooder moral compass of yours, didn’t we?”

  “Yes to the first. No to the second.”

  “Well, whatever. The Balkan desk will deal with Serbian intelligence. Wasn’t exactly like we had a great relationship with Belgrade in the first place.”

  “Roger that. Back to the Consortium. Nothing? Really?”

  “Sex trafficking is the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, behind drugs and counterfeiting. It’s ahead of the sale of illegal weapons. So, yeah, I’m sure what you’re talking about is real, I’m sure the people involved in it are nasty, and I’m sure a lot of poor helpless victims are abused and enslaved by it. But the specifics of what you are telling us . . . the Americans, the South African, the pipeline, this doesn’t line up with anything we have.”

  “Can I get some help from you guys on this? Could you get Brewer to do a little digging?”

  Hanley breathes one of his trademark long sighs, and I can picture his huge frame inside his too-large suit puffing up and then shrinking as every ounce of air leaves his lungs. I can also picture what he’s about to say before he says it.

  I’m about to hear a big fat no.

  “No,” Hanley says. “You are a hard asset, a denied hard asset at that, unaligned with any existing structure in the Agency. You are not a case officer, not an analyst, not chief of any station. You don’t have read-ins on anything not directly linked to the work we assign you. You have absolutely no standing to ask for resources.”

  “I’m not asking because I think I am owed resources, I’m asking as a friend. I need some help. This is serious shit.”

  “You know what else is serious shit?”

  Yeah, I do, and again, I know what he’s about to say.

  “Your fucking job with us! That’s serious shit. I’ve got a backlog of work I need you to take care of.”

  “Get one of the other Poison Apple assets to—”

  “They’re already out there, Court, in the field, doing what they’re told, while you’re trying to save the world by yourself. Every day you’re not here pulling your weight is another day Romantic and Anthem are under more stress, more risk. Anthem isn’t even one hundred percent after what happened to her back in Scotland. You remember that little incident, don’t you?”

  My voice feels weak in my mouth as I answer back with “Yes, sir.”

  And then, just to hammer home a point that needed no further hammering, he says, “You’re risking your girlfriend’s life with all these crusades of yours, don’t forget that.”

  Hanley is referring to Anthem, one of the three Poison Apple assets. She is Zoya Zakharova, former Russian intelligence, and also formerly someone I was in something of a relationship with. The relationship is strained for a couple of reasons right now, not the least of which is that I shot her.

  I don’t claim to know all the rules of dating, but I’m pretty sure if you shoot someone then you can’t really refer to them as your girlfriend, but Hanley is turning the screws on me, because he knows I still care about her.

  But Zoya is tough, as tough as or tougher than I am, and as tough as or tougher than the women and girls I’m desperately trying t
o help.

  She can handle herself in the field.

  “Sorry, Matt. That shit doesn’t work on me. I’ll be back with you as soon as I can. First I’ve got to try to do something.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to Venice, and there I’ll talk to somebody who can actually help me.” I hang up the phone, knowing that this will piss Hanley off, but I don’t really care. He could have lifted a finger to get me some assets directed to this, and he should have done so.

  Fuck him. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to do me a favor, and the thought of how annoyed he’ll be when he realizes he did, in fact, help me out makes me smile.

  I walk back over to Talyssa, who pulls a hot croissant stuffed with ham and cheese out of a bag and hands it to me, along with a cup of coffee.

  “That didn’t look like it went well at all.”

  “Not great, no. But I have someone else I can call.”

  She cocks her head. “Who?”

  I answer with, “If I can’t work with the good guys, I’m going to work for the bad guys.”

  The Romanian woman looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, so I clarify. “Not those bad guys. Some other bad guys.”

  She has no idea what I’m talking about, and that’s for the best.

  I send a few texts before we get back on the highway, and then, a little more than an hour later, I get the call approving my request for a face-to-face meeting with a man in Venice.

  Talyssa doesn’t lift her head out of her computer for the next three hours of our drive. Every now and then she takes a bite out of an apple or sips some bottled water, but she remains completely focused on her work.

  Finally, as I’m arriving at the northern outskirts of Treviso, a city not thirty minutes from Venice proper, she leans her head back and groans like some sort of a wounded animal.

  “I take it something’s wrong.”

  She ignores me while she rubs her eyes, then takes a long swig of water. Finally she says, “I’m so close, but I can’t do anything.”

  “What do you mean?”