One Minute Out Page 4

  The old man was the worst. He’d beaten her and raped her, and he’d been seconds away from doing it again when the man in black appeared. Liliana was no fool; she saw the opportunity and raced up the stairs, hid in a closet while she decided on her next move, listening to gunfire and the frantic shouts of men downstairs. Then she heard the dogs in the house and finally she took a chance and ran for the back door next to the empty kennels. She saw no one outside at all, so she raced across the back pasture to the woods, hid in some brush for a few minutes, and now she wanted to find a road or a town or another house with a phone or anything that could help her out of this desperate situation.

  She ran on, her bare feet bleeding and thin branches whipping against her body, and she told herself she was in the clear, that no one was out here looking for her.

  This horrific ordeal was over.

  Just then a form spun in her direction from behind a tree, moved in front of her in the moonlight, took her by the mouth and covered it, and pulled her down to the ground.

  He had her in a headlock, held her facing away from him as they sat in the grass, with his other hand still tight against her mouth.

  She couldn’t scream, but she could bite. So she did.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s not my night. A dog bites my right hand, and now a woman bites my left. I pull away from her choppers before she sinks in deep enough to do damage, and I lean into her ear, stifling a scream of pain. With one arm wrapped around her neck and my hand still hovering over her mouth ready to stanch any noise, I say, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Guessing she might speak Russian, I say “Nyet problem, nyet problem,” which means “no problem,” and is an admittedly asinine thing to tell a woman who just left her terror dungeon to find herself racing barefoot through an ink-black forest pursued by vicious dogs and men with guns.

  Only to end up with some asshole holding her in a headlock telling her everything is cool.

  I loosen my grip, and in both languages I say, “I’m here to help you.”

  Her breathing is almost out of control for several seconds. Finally she swallows, controls herself. In English she says, “You . . . you are man in black?”

  She can’t see me, I’ve got her held facing away, so it’s a reasonable question.

  “Da. I mean . . . yes.”

  In the distance I hear barking dogs, but they aren’t close. I’d seen wild boar in the trees as I made it to the woods, so I wonder if the Malinois are off chasing the wrong fleeing prey.

  “You are British?” she asks softly.

  Why not? “Sure,” I lie, but I don’t bother to fake an accent.

  “The other girls?”

  “They would not leave.”

  To my surprise, she nods. “Yes. They have family, or they think they go somewhere better. I no have any family, and I know where they are going.”

  “Where are they going?”

  She shrugs. “Sex work in Europe, I think. But they no make money. They will be slaves. Just products to be used.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Liliana. What is your name?”

  “Prince Harry.” I’m British, might as well take advantage of it. She either doesn’t get the joke or doesn’t like the joke, but either way, she makes no response.

  I ask, “Where are you from?”

  “A village near Tiraspol. It is in Moldova.” I know where Tiraspol is, I’ve been there, but I don’t let on.

  “Why you here?” she asks.

  “I came for Babic.”

  “That is the old man?”

  “Yes.”

  “You kill him?”

  With a shrug I say, “I did.”

  “You Albanian mafia?”

  What a strange question, I think, but I just say, “No. Someone else hired me.”

  But then I think about it. That someone is unknown to me. Hell, for all I know, I am working for the Albanians, though that would be a first. I used a broker in this industry, a shadowy guy on the dark web who I know to be reliable enough. After he established my bona fides, he’d offered me something like ten ops over a couple of months, all of which I turned down, until the day I opened an e-mail to see “General Ratko Babic” on the top of the target portfolio.

  Yeah, I told myself at the time. This one, I’ll do. The pay was one point one million, but I would have worked pro bono. A half mil has already been put in my account in good faith, and my return display of good faith was to shoot that worthless sack of shit and let him bleed out, which I just did.

  Services rendered. Whoever the hell paid for this hit, be they sinner or saint, I expect them to be another satisfied customer.

  “I don’t know where to go,” the girl says, and I realize I’m thinking the same thing. All those women and girls back in that chamber of horrors are still there. There are still armed men around them, and the victims still have the fear of retaliation to their families if they go against the wishes of those holding them.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Maybe one week.”

  “There are kids in there, aren’t there?”

  Liliana nodded, still facing away. “One is fourteen. Two are fifteen. Two are sixteen.”

  Christ. I loosen my hold on the woman, and she scoots away a little, but she doesn’t get up and run. She just turns towards me. I still have my balaclava covering my face, so I let her do it.

  I say, “I have a Jeep. I can take you to Mostar. It’s not far. You can tell the police what happened. Maybe they can—”

  I stop talking when her expression changes. She regards me like I’m nuts. Slowly she shakes her head.

  “No police?” I ask.

  “Police are bad, Harry.”

  “Mostar police?”

  What sounds like a weak laugh comes from her, and she looks off to the sound of barking dogs, which now seem to be even farther away. “Mostar police. Belgrade police. Tiraspol police.”

  “Are you certain, or are you guessing?”

  “Always police. Police from Mostar come to farm.”

  I say, “We have to help the girls.”

  “I want to help girls. But girls gone. Never see girls again.”

  “How do you know?”

  She shrugs now, looks me hard in the eyes. “Because you came.”

  I feel that pain in the pit of my stomach that comes the moment I realize I fucked up. I went into this with the objective of making the world a better place by taking an evil man out of it, but in doing so, I just might have condemned many others to a horrific fate.

  Gentry, what have you done now?

  I stammer as I talk. “Someone down there told me they would all be beaten for what I did tonight. Is that . . . true?”

  She nods assuredly. “It does not matter that they no responsible for what happen. The men . . . very bad. They punish for this.”

  Slowly I ask, “Will they kill them?”

  She shakes her head now. “No. They no kill them. Women are money to them. Thousands of euros a day. The men never let them go while they can make money.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “Serbian mafia. Local police, too. I think old man pays police for protection.”

  I change gears. “Would you recognize the policemen who you saw at the farm?”

  “Recog-nize?”

  “If you see them again, will you know them?”

  She nods. “They rape me. I sex with them. Of course I see faces.”

  “Right.” I want to drop this chick off in Mostar and put this entire clusterfuck in my rearview, but I know I can’t do that. I’m responsible for those women now, for the simple reason that I showed up tonight and imperiled them even more than they already were. It may not make sense to others, but I accept
it.

  Their fate . . . simply put . . . is my fate.

  I say, “Look. If I take you to Mostar, you can show me the policemen who came here.”

  Again, I get the “what’s wrong with you” look from the young woman.

  “If they see me, they kill me. Why I go to Mostar? I want go Moldova.”

  “I can protect you, then I will get you back home. I promise.”

  “How you protect me?”

  “Sister, I just killed six . . . correction, seven men back there. Believe me, I can protect you.”

  Her eyes widen. I don’t brag about killing as a rule, but I need her to know I’m deadly serious about this. Apparently, she isn’t quite buying it yet because she asks, “Why? Why you care? No one care about the girls in the pipeline.”

  “The pipeline?”

  “Da. The pipeline. Our countries, into Serbia, into Bosnia. From here I don’t know. Someone say a boat, but I don’t know where boat going.”

  “How many girls?”

  She shrugs. “In Belgrade? Fifty in the apartment. Here? Twenty, twenty-five in the cellar.”

  “Where are the other girls? The girls you saw in Belgrade and Sarajevo?”

  “I do not know. They take away. Do not return.”

  Jesus. “I can’t help them, but maybe, if we’re fast, we can help these women. Find out where they are going next. I have to do something.”

  Again, she asks me, “Why?”

  “Because I came,” is all I can say, parroting the reason she gave me that the women would be brutalized even beyond what they were already being subjected to.

  “Come with me to Mostar. One day. Two, tops. We’ll watch the police station, and you try to find one of the cops who came here.”

  I tell myself there might still be time to save all those trafficked humans I saw in the cellar. I don’t know if it’s true, but I have to believe. “Liliana, will you help me, please?”

  “You get paid for killing old man?”

  The question comes out of nowhere and it surprises me. I’m so surprised, I answer honestly. “Yeah. A lot.”

  She nods slowly, taking this in. Then, “Good. I am very hungry.”

  I nod and smile in the dark. I can work with this woman.

  I help her to her feet. “We’ll be in Mostar for breakfast.”

  With a sort of noncommittal shrug she says, “Okay, Harry. I go with you. I find policeman, but you cannot stop the pipeline.”

  I don’t have to stop it, I just have to pull a few girls out of it so my conscience will leave me alone.

  I’m no saint, I’m just a slave shackled to his principles, just like those women were shackled to one another.

  We’re all in this together now, like it or not.

  FIVE

  Five minutes after the gunfire ended upstairs, the women and girls sat huddled together in the cellar in darkness, because no one dared to get up, pull the slack in the chains on their ankles, fumble around the dead body by the open door, and flip the red light back on.

  Already the smell of blood added to the closed room’s stench.

  Between the sniffs and coughs and sobs from the group, a new sound emerged. The prisoners heard frantic, angry voices on the stairs down the hall, and they shuddered as one.

  Lights shone in the stairwell, then came closer, the shouting between three men continuing. These Serbian guards were known to all of the prisoners down here, and as one of them flicked the red light back on, the other two waved their guns at the group, causing a few fresh shrieks of terror.

  One of the security men checked over the dead body on the floor, and then two of them carried him away with no small struggle while the third closed the door.

  Only when the loud lock engaged did the women and girls begin talking among themselves about what they had just witnessed and what it all meant for them now.

  Some worried they would be killed because of what they had seen, others that they would be beaten or otherwise brutalized, and every last one of them was certain nothing good would come of this event.

  They hated the sick and cruel old man, but none of them were thankful that the masked man with the American accent had shown up and killed him.

  The females were aged from fourteen to twenty-four, and they had traveled different paths to get here. Many had been duped, promised employment in casinos in Dubai or Italy, or jobs in fancy restaurants or five-star hotels where beautiful women were needed. These women were trafficked and smuggled from their home countries, and then told by dangerous gangsters that they would have to compensate the traffickers for their travel and housing, and the only way they had to earn the money to pay was via sex work.

  Others had been recruited at nightclubs or outside Internet live-camera porn sites or even from brothels, told they could work as high-dollar prostitutes in the West, make a thousand euros a day entertaining wealthy gentlemen, and then, after a few weeks, they could go back home, their luggage stuffed with cash desperately needed for themselves and their families.

  Some women believed this and went willingly, others had to be coerced over time, and still others felt certain it was some sort of a scam, but desperation at home forced them to hope for the best and go along with it.

  And still others had been kidnapped outright, drugged in bars and pulled into taxis or vans, and driven off into the night.

  But now, after all these twenty-three women had been through, after all they’d heard from others about their experiences, after the passport confiscations and the locked doors and the sexual abuse many had been subjected to by the old man and the police here or by gangsters at the apartment building in suburban Belgrade, all along this underground railway of hell . . . now they all knew. Their decisions, well intentioned or not, were not important now.

  They were slaves.

  Some of the girls held on to the hope that once they worked off their debt, they would be allowed to return to their homes, to their families. But it wasn’t much hope. Others, usually the older women in their twenties, insisted none of them would ever see their homes or families again.

  And now this. They had no idea what the evil men holding them would do to them now.

  The new, even deeper sense of hopelessness in the red room was god-awful.

  And fresh sounds of men shouting at one another in Serbo-Croatian in the hall on the other side of the door only made it worse.

  * * *

  • • •

  A twenty-three-year-old woman sat in the back of the little room, leaning against a threadbare cushion propped against the back wall, her head in her trembling hands, and she thought of home.

  The day she was kidnapped she had been given a new name, as had all the others, and they were ordered to never speak their given names again, not even to one another.

  This woman had been called Maja by her captors, and it was her name now, as far as anyone in the room knew. Maja looked drawn and pale, with dark circles under her eyes that were evident even in the poor lighting. She hadn’t worn makeup or taken a bath in days; she’d been shuttled from one dank room to another, or transported in a bus with armed guards and covered windows; and though she’d been fed regularly, the food was low quality and she’d been forced to eat with her filthy bare hands.

  Her humanity had been taken from her along with her identity.

  But she was one of the lucky few who had not yet been raped. She assumed it was only a matter of time, though, so she felt no great comfort in this fact.

  The door clicked, then opened. One of the Serbians appeared, a rifle around his chest and blood smeared all over his T-shirt. He took in the scene, and Maja could tell he was still amped up from the fighting—he was angry and, she sensed, even scared.

  The man spoke in Russian to the group. Only some of the girls spoke the language, but no one here spoke Serbo-Croat, so it
was better than nothing.

  Maja’s mother spoke Russian fluently, and she’d learned enough as a child to follow the man’s words.

  “Your hero ran away, leaving you behind. He will be found, caught, and killed. More men are coming in now, and you . . . you all will be disciplined for what has happened here tonight.”

  The same blonde who had spoken to the masked gunman fifteen minutes earlier spoke up again, this time in Russian. “We had nothing to do with—”

  She stopped talking when the man hefted his rifle and pointed it at her, then shined the tactical flashlight mounted on the rail into her eyes. She and the other girls recoiled at the brightest light any of them had seen in days.

  “One more word and I paint this room with all of your blood!”

  Two more gunmen appeared behind the first, and they all conferred quietly with one another. Finally, one began unlocking the women from their chains. The first man said, “We are all leaving now. Follow us, and if you try anything, we will shoot you.” No one moved. After a few seconds he screamed, “Stand up!” The women and girls stood and moved huddled together out of the room, past the Serbians, and up the hall. Some cried when they saw the dead bodies of the guards lying unattended in the stairwell, and upstairs they struggled to pass two dog handlers whose snarling, snapping beasts chomped the air as they tried to get to the prisoners.

  All the women were put on a bus; Maja thought this one was different from the one they’d arrived on, but just like the other bus, the windows on this vehicle had been blacked out with cardboard. They sat in silence save for some sobs of terror, and soon the engine came to life, armed Serbians filled the front seats, and the bus began rolling off.

  None of the victims knew where they were going or what would happen to them when they got there, but that had been the case for Maja since the beginning of this ordeal.

  The bus drove for an hour through tight mountain roads; the women were continuously admonished and threatened if they made any noise, so they did little more than look at the headrests of the seats in front of them and worry about both their short-term and long-term futures.