One Minute Out Read online

  Shit.

  I can fly a corporate jet this size, but I’ve never done it transcontinentally, and I imagine that’s not something one normally just does on one’s own, with no guidance and little sleep.

  But what choice do I have? I start for the jet stairs so that I can go out and close the aft hatch. I don’t even know if the aircraft is fueled, but I’ll figure that out when I get in the cockpit.

  But when I step up to the top of the stairs, I see a gun pointed right at me at a range of three feet.

  A woman is holding the weapon, a large-framed Sig, and she motions for me to step back into the cabin.

  I do so, then sit, and she comes in and turns on all the lights.

  Zack says from the back, “The cavalry has arrived. Just as well; I’m guessing you’d have slammed us into a mountain in Iceland.”

  I look at Zack, thinking about my plan B. While turned away from the woman at the front bulkhead with the gun on me, I hear her speak.

  “It’s you.”

  I turn back. Huh? There is nothing more disquieting in my life than to be recognized, and at first this fires my defenses up. But quickly I recognize her, too.

  The last time I was on an Agency transport, she was the flight attendant.

  She and I were also virtually the only survivors of a gunfight on a tarmac in the UK.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.”

  She lowers the pistol.

  “This is a step down from that Gulfstream you used to ride on.”

  “I believe that aircraft has been retired from service. Too many holes in it.” She smiles. “I’m just glad to be working. I never got a chance to thank you for saving my life.”

  “Not how I remember it. You took an unlucky hit, I bandaged you up, and then I left. You’d have made it, anyway.”

  She shakes her head. “But you taxied the jet out of danger and then you—”

  In the back of the aircraft Zack says, “Are you fucking kidding me right now? You’ve charmed the stewardess?”

  Now the woman glares at the big man in the cowboy boots. “I’m not a fucking stewardess, asshole!”

  This makes me laugh, and I haven’t had much reason to laugh tonight.

  “Check your loyalties, lady. I’m on an op for the DDO. This dude is freestyling.”

  She looks at me as she replies to him. “I’m on the same op for the DDO that you’re on, Romantic. Doesn’t mean I can’t say hi to an old friend.” She taps her pistol against the side of her leg. “Also doesn’t mean I’m going to let him steal my jet.”

  Right. I turn to Zack. “Call the pilots,” I say. “Let’s go to Langley.”

  He looks at his watch. “Travers is thirty minutes away. The pilots will be here in five. We’re fueled and ready; they just have to light the fires and kick the tires. When the Ground Branch boys get here, we’ll go home. Just as we planned.”

  I sit back in the cabin chair. Plan B is my only plan now, and I’m wondering if I would have had a better chance trying to fly the Falcon home myself.

  I guess I’ll never know.

  FORTY

  Chris Travers is the last of the six CIA operators to board the Falcon, and I’m glad to see they all made it out of the gun battle. They cram into the tight confines of the jet, with Chris sitting in front of me.

  Most of the guys look my way like I have a horn sticking out of my forehead, but Travers shakes my hand.

  I’m not happy to see him, but I do owe him some thanks. “I appreciate the heads-up back there in the alleyway.”

  Travers shrugs. “Was supposed to bring you back alive.”

  “Right. So . . . you’re TL now. Congrats.”

  He shrugs again, then takes a beer passed to him by one of his teammates. “It’s tough barking orders at these degenerates.” A couple guys laugh, but most of them are still securing their gear.

  Then Travers says, “Quick question. The boys and I have a bet you can settle.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you schwack Ratko Babic last week? I say yes, most of these other dipshits say no.”

  “No,” I reply.

  Travers grins, turns to his team. “That means yes!”

  One of the other guys says, “It also means no, Chris.”

  The Falcon 50 begins taxiing towards the runway while the SAC team argues.

  Zack is next to me now, and I can see him looking my way, but I avoid his gaze as long as possible. We take off, and an awful smell fills the air.

  I look around for its origin for a moment. I’m not sure, but it seems like one of them either jumped or fell into a canal.

  Finally, not ten minutes into the flight, Zack leans over to me.

  “I’m missing something here, aren’t I?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . you didn’t want to come back to Langley. But you showed up here, and you let Travers and his team board. You could have gotten that pistol off Sharon. She wasn’t going to shoot you, and you knew that.”

  “Your point?”

  “You’ve just, basically, shanghaied yourself. Now . . . gotta ask, why would you go and do a thing like that?”

  “I needed to get to the States.”

  With a quizzical look he says, “Really? You ready to go back to work?”

  I shake my head. “Not to go back to work at Poison Apple. I have to do something else first, and I need your help.”

  “And Hanley will be cool with it?”

  I reach for my beer now. “No, Hanley won’t be cool with it at all.”

  Zack drains the last of his Corona and has another passed down his way. When it arrives without a lime he yells back towards the men sitting near the galley, and Sharon grabs an uncut lime and hands it to a Ground Branch guy I heard called Teddy. Teddy tosses the lime the length of the cabin, and Zack catches it, then pulls a pocketknife and cuts off a chunk. “Now, Six, you know me well enough to know I follow orders. And my orders are to get you back to Matt.”

  “Well then, I’ll just have to appeal to that hard heart of yours.” This is my plan B, and if possible, it may have an even lower probability for success than my plan A.

  Zack squeezes lime juice into his bottle. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

  “I’m doing the right thing, man. I’ve uncovered something big, something awful, and it involves Americans. I want to stop it.”

  Zack replies with one word. “Yawn.”

  “I’m targeting a massive sex trafficking consortium.”

  He still looks bored by my spiel as he gulps his Mexican beer. “Sex trafficking.”

  “I’ve been working with an analyst from Europol. Her sister’s been taken. They run the girls from the east, through the Balkans and then to Italy, where they are sold. We know this particular outfit is making billions of dollars a year, so we estimate they have tens of thousands of victims around the world.”

  An eyebrow rises on Hightower’s otherwise impassive bearded face. “That’s bad.”

  I nod slowly, looking into his eyes. “A lot of them are just kids, Zack.”

  With this he puts his beer down on the table in front of me, and then he looks away. “That’s real bad.”

  “Damn right it is. Talyssa and I are this close to breaking it wide open. Right now she is getting intel we can use to pinpoint the leadership of the organization, but we already know they are located somewhere on the West Coast.”

  Zack doesn’t respond to this. He’s silent for several seconds, in fact, and I think I’m getting through.

  But then he says, “I have orders, Six, and when I have orders I don’t listen to anything else. Sorry, dude. That’s a fucked-up sitrep you just gave me, and your heart’s in the right place, as always, but I do what I’m told.”

  I shake my head. “Not this time. This time y
ou are going to help me.”

  “You should know better than that by now. Remember when I was tasked with killing you? What did I do?”

  “You failed.”

  He sighs in frustration. “Fair enough, but I did my fucking best, didn’t I?”

  “And I bet you regret that every day.” It was sarcasm, but he doesn’t pick up on that.

  “Not once, man. Not once. I don’t ponder over the wisdom of my orders. I joined up with this outfit knowing it wasn’t all about me. You, on the other hand, just go wherever the wind blows you.”

  “But you aren’t an Agency employee anymore. You’re a Poison Apple asset, and that means you can, and should, think for yourself. I’m not asking you to do one damn thing against Hanley, the Agency, or America. I’m just asking you to do what’s fucking right.”

  He hesitates a moment, but I can tell he’s not giving in. “Sorry, man.”

  I want to hit him in the face, and apparently it registers in my eyes.

  “Calm down or I’ll get the boys to restrain you.”

  I control my urges and lean back in the leather chair. It’s time to play my next card.

  “What if I told you Matt Hanley was in on it?”

  Zack pauses, then laughs. “Hanley’s a sex trafficker, right.” When I don’t respond, he says, “C’mon, dude. No fucking chance.”

  I turn to Travers. “Chris, where did you get the intel that I was near the Casino of Venice tonight at midnight?”

  Travers looks to Hightower, not sure if he should tell me. Zack just shrugs like it doesn’t make any difference.

  Chris says, “Brewer. I asked where it originated from and she said that was ‘need to know.’”

  I look to Zack, and Zack is confused now. To Chris he says, “You are the TL on the ground. You would need to know the origin of the intel so you could evaluate it.”

  Travers replies, “That’s what I’m sayin’.”

  “Zack,” I interject. “I told Hanley I was going to Venice to get help so I could combat this thing called the Consortium, something he said he knew nothing about. Fourteen hours later Hanley puts Ground Branch right on top of me, in a Mala del Brenta stronghold far away from my known contacts in the city, right when the Consortium is holding a sale of kidnapping victims. How the fuck does that happen if he doesn’t have knowledge of the Consortium?”

  Hightower doesn’t have an answer.

  I lay it on even thicker now. “If you’d been there with me, in Bosnia, when I saw them. If you had seen them led around like cattle on a yacht in the Adriatic like I did. If you’d heard the stories about what has been done to them like I have. If you’d talked, face-to-face, with two of the victims like I have . . . then I know you’d help me out.”

  Hightower is on the fence, I can see it in his normally confident face. He says, “We’ll talk to Matt when we get back. This shit will all get straightened out.”

  I think about punching him again but this time I mask it better. I take a slow breath and play the last card in my hand. “Zack . . . you told me you had a kid. A daughter.”

  Zack leans back in his chair dramatically. “Don’t you dare fuckin’ play the daughter card right now, Six.”

  “I’ll play any card I have in my hand. She’s, what? Twelve? Denver, did you say?”

  “She’s thirteen, you son of a bitch, and I think she’s in Boulder but I don’t even know because I’ve never even met her. You need to can this shit, brother, before I—”

  I talk over him. “I didn’t see any thirteen-year-olds in the dungeon I found in Bosnia. But I was told there were two fourteen-year-olds in the group. Lots of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds.”

  Travers is listening in. He mumbles softly. “Bosnia? So then you did schwack Babic.”

  I don’t deny it this time. “He was running a way station where the smuggled women were brought along the pipeline to the West. It was a fucking horror show.”

  “Jesus,” Travers says, and then he turns and gives Zack a look like he’s an insensitive dick. “You’ve got a kid? How did I not know that?”

  Hightower doesn’t answer.

  I say, “Zack, a lot of people have died, a lot of people have been abused, and a lot of people have lost their freedom. Every one of those girls has a dad. Their dads can’t do shit for them. But you can. What the fuck do you stand for if you can’t stand against this?”

  Hightower looks out the portal next to him for a long moment, into nothing but darkness.

  But before he says anything, my sat phone buzzes in my pocket.

  Instantly I’m terrified something is wrong. I grab it and answer, knowing it’s Talyssa. “What’s happened?”

  In contrast to her last call, this time there is a buoyancy in her voice that I’ve never heard. “I’ve got something!”

  FORTY-ONE

  I can tell by Talyssa’s breathless tone that she has somehow found the big break we need, the one I wasn’t able to provide by skulking around Venice, taking pictures of billionaire pervs and dodging bullets.

  “What is it?”

  “The psychologist Roxana told you about on La Primarosa is Dr. Claudia Riesling. I found her through an account in Antigua attached to one of the accounts Meyer dug into. Her name wasn’t on the account information, but a personal bank account of hers had received monthly transfers from a shell corporation I tied to the Consortium.”

  I’m beyond impressed. I wonder how many idiots’ faces I’d have to bash in to get the same information.

  “Where does she live?”

  “She has a house in Pacific Palisades, California, and another in the south of France.”

  “Great. We just have to find out where she is now.”

  “No, we don’t,” Talyssa says.

  “We don’t?”

  “No, because we know where she is going to be tomorrow and the day after.”

  “Where?”

  “She booked a room at a luxury hotel in the San Fernando Valley for two nights.”

  I think about this for a second. “That’s not far from her home.”

  “An hour or so. I had a hunch her hotel stay was work-related, especially right after this trip to pick the women up. I looked at property records around it, ran a scan of ownership of anyplace that seemed large enough to be considered a ranch, and then I looked through the ones set up by corporations and trusts and such.”

  “Jesus,” I say. “How long did that take?”

  She says, “Maarten and I did it in a half hour. Anyway, there are a few large ranches nearby, and one of them is owned by one of the one hundred sixty-eight shell corps I’ve identified as being part of the Consortium. It’s a sixty-acre property north of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. Looking at Riesling’s credit card purchases, she stays at this nearby hotel every other month, usually for two to five nights at a time.”

  I wonder if that’s how many times they bring trafficking victims in from abroad.

  I don’t have a computer in front of me, because I’m basically a prisoner on this aircraft, so I can’t look up the property. But I get all the information I can from Talyssa and I borrow a pen and pad from Sharon and write it down.

  I then say, “You’ve done incredible work. Now, I need you to be very careful. Get out of there and watch your back; this Meyer guy might see an opportunity and take it.”

  Talyssa replies, “Maarten and I have an understanding, Harry. He won’t be any trouble.”

  I raise an eyebrow, wondering what she’s been doing without me there to guide her. But whatever it is, I can’t complain about the results.

  “Okay,” I say. “Find someplace to hide out. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  “Are you joking? I’m not going to stay over here and hide out.”

  “I don’t need you over here in the middle of—”

&
nbsp; “I’ll call you when I get to California.” And with that the line goes dead.

  I look over to Hightower, and I realize he’s been listening in on the conversation. Before I can speak, he says, “Let’s make a call to the boss.”

  I nod. “You’re doing the right thing, Zack.”

  FORTY-TWO

  We’re still five hours from landing when Zack Hightower takes the airphone sitting on the table next to him and punches a couple of buttons. He places the call on the cabin overhead intercom, and then we all sit there silently for half a minute listening to it ring before we hear a click.

  “Hanley.”

  I let Zack start things off, which he does with, “Hey, Matt. ID check Whiskey, Yankee—”

  “The package is with you?”

  Hightower clears his throat. “Yes, sir. You’re broadcasting on the intercom.”

  “The package is listening now?”

  “Yes, sir. He wants to speak with you.”

  “Violator,” Hanley says. His voice relays his annoyance, which is cute, because I’m fucking furious right now.

  “I have some questions for you,” I say.

  “Take me off the comms and we can talk.”

  I shake my head at Zack. “Everybody around me is TS/SCI with all appropriate read-ins, and what I’m about to say is personal, it’s not classified in any way, shape, or form. You pull me off comms and you are telegraphing to these seven men and one woman that you’re afraid of them hearing our conversation. Is that what you want?”

  Another pause; I can feel Hanley’s palpable sense of concern about what I will say.

  “Go on, then.”

  “You lied when you told me you didn’t know about the Consortium. You were the one who told Brewer where to task Ground Branch, which means you are well aware of their activities. You refused my request for resources in saving two dozen sex trafficking victims, and you sent men to pick me up to stop me from doing anything to the Consortium by myself.

  “I’m no detective, but that all tells me you are somehow involved in this international sex trafficking ring, either directly or else you are helping to cover up their activities.”