One Minute Out Page 6

  Their heads lolled in the back with the bouncing on the roads, and Verdoorn showed his boredom with a wide yawn.

  This was just another day at the office.

  The driver stopped beside a ravine that ran along Big Pines Highway. This wasn’t a particularly out-of-the-way location, but it was the middle of the night now and there were no cars in sight and, anyway, this would just take a moment.

  The young women—one was a nineteen-year-old brunette from Belarus, and the other a seventeen-year-old Indonesian—were barely aware of their surroundings as they were let out onto the street, over to the shoulder, and up to a low metal railing.

  The two young women faced the ravine, both only now feeling a hint of confusion, because during their months of captivity, they’d never been out of the compound they were kept in, they’d never been in a car, and none of this felt exactly right.

  The Belarusian muttered through a tongue slurred with the drug injected into her, “What is happening?”

  The South African climbed out of the front passenger seat, pocketed his phone with a sigh, and then drew the SIG Sauer P220 pistol from the waistband of his khakis under his too-tight white polo shirt. As he leveled it at the back of the brunette’s head he said, “The Director grew tired of you, like he always does. Time to make way for the next shipment.”

  A gunshot rang out on the quiet hillside, and the young woman pitched forward, disappearing from view before the echo of the pistol’s report made its way back from the other side of the ravine.

  The Indonesian, even in her drug-induced stupor, recoiled from the loud noise, and she started to turn around, but Jaco Verdoorn fired again, striking her in the left temple, and she, too, tumbled over the metal railing and down into the thick brush.

  One of the other South Africans shined his tactical flashlight down the ravine. A cloud of dust rose, indicating the women had come to rest on the earthen floor.

  Verdoorn had already holstered his pistol and sat back down in the SUV by the time the light clicked off and the two other men returned to the vehicle. This wasn’t the first time Jaco had done this—this wasn’t even the tenth time—and he expected in a couple of months, certainly no more than four or five, he’d be back, either here or on some other little lonely mountain road, and he’d be doing it all over again.

  It was the job.

  It wasn’t the action he’d wanted, but the pay was good and, every once in a while, something interesting came up.

  As the vehicle rolled off to the west to begin its journey back towards Van Nuys, the South African’s phone rang and he answered it.

  “Verdoorn.”

  He listened a moment, cocked his head, then said, “Kostas, that is, indeed, distressing news. I’m gonna have to go to the Director with it, and he will be bladdy well displeased.”

  The Greek spoke a moment more, but Jaco interrupted him.

  “I don’t give a fuck who did it, I just know that—”

  The bald-headed man in the polo shirt hesitated suddenly. This story about an entire way station shot up, seven killed, a targeted assassination. Something about this triggered his brain. He changed his tune suddenly. “Who did it?”

  Seconds later, it was plain to the other two in the Mercedes that Jaco Verdoorn very clearly did give a fuck who did it. “You’re kidding me. How sure are they?” A pause. “Of course I bladdy well know who that is!”

  He listened now as the Greek talked about a Bosnian police chief who he felt should be killed for allowing the hit to happen, and Jaco agreed, but he wasn’t thinking about a police chief.

  No, he was thinking about the Gray Man.

  Courtland Gentry.

  Finally he hung up, called a contact in the Serbian government in Banja Luka for confirmation, and then hung up from that call and looked down at his phone.

  He thought about calling the Director immediately; the man did not like to be bothered during the night, but Jaco knew he’d have to get approval for the hit on the Bosnian cop. Still, as the wheels in the South African’s mind turned, he realized he would need more information about the American assassin before going to his boss.

  And he knew where to get it.

  With a pounding heart that only came from the prospect of hunting the most dangerous prey in the world, the South African smiled now.

  “What’s up, boss?” asked the driver.

  Verdoorn said, “Tryin’ to not get my hopes up too high, Samuel, but we might have ourselves a spot of fun on the horizon.”

  The man in the back spoke with sarcasm. “What, more exciting than this?”

  Verdoorn ignored him.

  The driver saw the look in his boss’s eye. “New target, sir?” Samuel knew there was only one thing that his boss considered fun.

  Verdoorn brought the phone to his ear as he placed the call. To his driver he said, still through a smile, “New target.”

  SEVEN

  I dream about the women in the cellar. I can’t make out any faces clearly, but I see eyes shining red: desolate, fearful, despairing orbs that track me wherever I move. I am enveloped by the sights and sounds of their prison; I sense the inevitable bleakness of their futures and, more disheartening, I see that they sense that bleakness, as well.

  And then, just before I wake up, I remember that this is all my motherfucking fault.

  Opening my eyes now, I realize that I am not in the red room, but I don’t know where I am. I wake up in a different hotel or apartment or flophouse or bunk bed with staggering regularity, so I’m used to the sensation. My left hand hurts, and the muscles all over my body feel strained and knotted: also nothing out of the ordinary for me.

  I’ve seen action, that much is clear by my aches and pains.

  I’m on the floor of a closet with a gear bag under my head, which also tells me I’m operational. I always sleep in closets when I can for my own security, and I’m more comfortable here on the floor than alone in a comfortable bed.

  You get like this when people make killing you their life’s work.

  I lie there, shake off the dream, and remember the reality that was last night. Babic, the women and girls, the dogs, the gunfire and shouting and running.

  And then I remember Liliana.

  Did she leave? I sit up quickly. When I lay down she had already fallen asleep in the bed, so my eyes go there.

  I see only tousled bedsheets.

  Shit.

  But I scan to the right and find her in the little living room of the apartment, sitting at a table by the window, looking down at the street into the night.

  I lie back down, pleased to see that at least one of us is working.

  It all comes back quickly. I’m in the closet of a third-floor walk-up flat in Mostar, Bosnia, overlooking the main police station. I rented it this morning after feeding Liliana and myself, and buying both of us new clothes. I also remember something about a fuzzy plan I had to help the women I left behind in the cellar, and that’s the only reason I’m not three hundred miles away by now in Zagreb, boarding a train to Prague for a flight back to America.

  That was plan A. But Alpha is shot, and to be honest, I’m having trouble remembering a time where I actually executed a plan A.

  I need to get back to the States, and I don’t need to be over here, fifteen miles from where I fucked up a farmload of gunmen last night, playing house with a sex-trafficked Moldovan woman in an attempt to rescue an unknown number of victims from an unknown number of perpetrators who are I don’t even know where.

  Fuck. Plan Alpha is out the window, and so far plan Bravo isn’t looking too hot, either.

  I think again about returning to the States. The Babic hit was a freelance assignment, but I also have a day job. Sort of. Contract work for the CIA. I used to be an actual employee, then they tried to kill me, and now we’ve patched some things up. They are still o
fficially hunting me down, but the director of operations uses me as his own deniable asset, an off-book hitter in a blacker-than-black program called Poison Apple, so I have a little bit of pull and that keeps the American goons off my back, at least for now.

  Yeah . . . everything about my relationship with the Agency is bonkers. They piss me off consistently, and I’m sure I am personally responsible for a sizable portion of antacid sales in the pharmacies in and around Langley. But I do help them out from time to time. Not sure what they do for me, really, but I guess I’m doing my civic duty or something by killing the enemies of America, and that’s important.

  Isn’t it?

  I could call my handler at the Agency, tell her what I saw here, and maybe enlist the assistance of the best intelligence service on Earth. But I decide against it. She’d probably just tell me to get my ass back to work, and the Agency would know in a heartbeat that I was the one who killed Babic.

  And I don’t need that.

  I look over the little flat now. The girl just sits at the window in the low light, smoking cigarettes I bought her to help calm her, staring out to the street in silence. Even in the dim here I can see the hard look in her eyes, but I figure it’s just what she’s been through these past few weeks.

  Then I ask myself, What the hell am I doing here? I should bail on all this. I should walk away before this goes deeper, because everything always seems to go deeper if I stick around long enough. Yeah, I should get out, get back to the United States, back to the Agency. I can’t save those girls I saw at the farm. They’re in the wind by now, I’m sure of it.

  Soon I sit up again, knowing all this thinking is a waste of time. Of course I’m going to see this through. I always do. And I always will, until the day I go lights out as a result of catching a supersonic hunk of copper-jacketed lead with my forehead.

  That day is coming, I’m as sure of this as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

  A minute later I sit down next to Liliana with a couple of bottles of Velibitsko beer in my hand. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” she says, and she takes a beer, but she’s not fine. She just gazes out the window down at the station.

  “Anything so far?” I ask.

  “No. Nothing.” My camera sits on the table next to her, but I don’t think she’s even touched it. I look at my watch and see that it’s nine p.m.

  “You need to take a break. I can watch, take pictures, show you when you wake up.”

  “I don’t sleep very much.”

  I imagine not, I think.

  It’s quiet in the room for a moment, and then I ask, “You were kidnapped in Tiraspol by this group?”

  “By another group. They were locals, Moldovans. Then I was sold into the pipeline. Moved from east to west. Each time a different group, but I do not know who in charge.”

  “When they took you, what were you doing?”

  She doesn’t look away from the front door of the police station across the street. She answers matter-of-factly. “I was working girl.”

  She means a prostitute, and this surprises me. She doesn’t look like a prostitute.

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “I make cakes in bakery in small town. But I want to live big city. I want to be something. I go to Tiraspol when I twenty, and no work, so . . .”

  She stops there, but I get it.

  I don’t ask her again how long she’s been a working girl. She looks thirty to me, but taking into account her impossibly tough life, I figure she’s about twenty-five.

  Shit, with what she’s been through, she could be even younger.

  I don’t know why I say the next words that come out of my mouth, but it’s probably due to the crippling guilt I am feeling right now about my responsibility for the fate of those women in the red room. “What happened to you . . . it isn’t your fault.”

  She waves a hand. “Other girls taken from nightclubs, from normal jobs, from other places. Other girls tricked into sex. I taken from brothel. I make sex for money. I am not victim.”

  Blowing out a sigh, I reply with, “After what has happened to you, only a true victim would say she was no victim.”

  But I see I’m not getting through to her. Talking isn’t my strong suit; it’s why I tend to shoot people in the face instead. But I try again. “If you help me help those girls, you can do some good.”

  She shakes her head. “You no help those girls. You hurt those girls when you came.”

  Yeah, I know.

  She looks me over. “Why you kill old man?”

  “He was a Serbian general in the war. A bad one. War crimes.”

  She rolls her eyes. “The war? You mean the war before I was born?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nobody care about that war. You come and kill him for it, and now the girls suffer.”

  I nod. “I get it.”

  She adds, “Girls are gone. Taken away, somewhere else.” After a moment of silence she softens, sips her beer, and says, “Soon new girls taken from Moldova.”

  “This shit happens every day around the world, doesn’t it?” I hadn’t even been thinking about the larger picture of this. Only the women and girls I saw who, by my actions, were condemned to more brutality.

  She shrugs. “I do not know the world. I know only Tiraspol, Belgrade, and here. But yes . . . every day some new girl has freedom taken away.”

  More to myself than to her, I say, “The shit I’ve seen in this life . . .” My voice trails off because the shit I’ve seen in this life is not really any of her business, but she surprises me with her response.

  She takes a long swig of the beer and then she turns to face me again. “The shit you see. What it make you want to do?”

  I think about the question. “It makes me want to kill people.”

  “Yes. I want kill people, too.” She nods. “But that does not make everything better.”

  Maybe she’s right. Maybe she’s wrong. I see the shittiest parts of humanity, and it is a soul-sucking experience, but at least I have an outlet. I am an assassin.

  A killer of men.

  Someone like Liliana . . . a baker forced into prostitution by economic hardship, then kidnapped into slavery. What can she do but sit there and take the world as it comes at her like a monster reaching out from under her bed?

  Neither of us speaks for over a minute. Finally I break the uncomfortable silence. “When you get home to Moldova, I wouldn’t go back to Tiraspol.”

  She nods. “I go back to bakery. It is safe. No one steal baker for sex traffic.”

  She has the right idea, and I clink my beer bottle against hers. She starts to bring it back to her mouth while she keeps her eyes across the street, but she stops suddenly and points out the window. “There! That cop, getting out of the car.”

  It’s a white SUV with the Mostar police logo in blue on the side. A driver climbs out and steps up to the sidewalk, opening the back door of the vehicle when he does so.

  “You know him? From the farm?”

  “Yes. He not in charge. But he always with man in charge.”

  The passenger side opens now, and almost as soon as the man steps out, Liliana recoils. “He man in charge.”

  A cop in his forties wearing a smart uniform takes off his cap, rubs his hand over his short gray stubble, and then replaces it.

  “That asshole right there?”

  “Da. Da.”

  “You know his name?”

  “I hear them call him Niko. That is all.” She begins to cry suddenly, her hardened look evaporating in an instant.

  Three men in total climb out of the vehicle, and another two emerge from a second, identical SUV. They all walk together up the steps to the front door of the police station. I take a few pictures, focusing on the one called Niko, then help Liliana out of
her chair and lead her back over to the bed by her arm.

  She is weeping still, and I sit her down. “You did great. You just made a difference. Get some rest. Tomorrow morning I’ll take you to the train station and tell you how to get home.”

  “What about Niko?”

  I smile a little in the dim light. “I’ll be back for Niko.”

  She nods slowly; I start to stand to return to the window, but she holds me by the wrist.

  “You are good man.”

  I’m not, but I say, “Thanks.”

  She pulls me closer, tries to lead me down onto the bed on top of her.

  I attempt to break away without making a big deal out of it, but her grip is surprisingly strong. I say, “You aren’t thinking straight, Liliana. You need to sleep.”

  There are fresh tears in her eyes now. “I know what you need. I give you what you need.”

  She’s wrong. I don’t need that. Not like this.

  “No, you aren’t thinking straight,” I repeat.

  I stop her advances as gently as I can, but gentle isn’t exactly my strong suit. Within seconds I have her arms pinned over her head, and only then does she stop trying to pull me down.

  She nods without emotion now. “This you like? You like rough?”

  Shit. “No. No. I’m sorry,” I say. “But I can’t.” I let go of her arms, but she doesn’t move them.

  She sniffs and looks at me quizzically. She doesn’t seem offended, just surprised. “Assassin who is gay, or assassin with girlfriend?”

  I marvel at the absurdity of this moment. “There is a girl.”

  Another dispassionate nod from the Romanian. “British girl?”

  The comment confuses me, but then I remember that I’m Prince Harry. Surprising myself, I don’t lie when I answer her. “No. A Russian girl.”

  I get yet another look from her like she thinks I’m an idiot. With all the certainty in the world she replies, “Russian girl? She take your money.”

  “Not this one.”

  Then, “Russian girl drink too much.”