One Minute Out Page 9

  She looks scared shitless, and in a voice that confirms to me she is, in fact, scared shitless, she says, “My jacket. On the right.”

  I reach in and pull out a stainless semiauto that looks and feels like a piece of junk. I stick it in my back pocket, then say, “Anything else?”

  She shakes her head emphatically, and I believe her. She’s so tense I worry she might spontaneously combust, and quickly I realize that she doesn’t have much of a background in this sort of thing.

  Certainly not the way her three buddies obviously did.

  Thinking for a moment, I decide I might be able to get some info off her about Niko Vukovic. The Hungarians probably know more about the man and his movements than I do, after all.

  “Stay calm,” I say. “Just drive.”

  The young woman stares at me, still breathing heavily from her run. Finally, she asks, “Drive where?”

  “Let’s find someplace quiet to go talk.”

  “I do not . . . I do not wish to go with you.”

  “I do not give a shit.” Waving the pistol again, I say, “Drive!”

  She doesn’t say one word while she motors her way out of the hilly town, up a dark, steep road. Nor do I, as my own heart rate is still up after the alley fight and the mad sprint. I need to focus on breathing, but through her silence I can feel the terror emanating from her.

  I do nothing to calm her; her fear is a tool I can employ to earn her compliance, and I won’t give that up cheaply.

  Nearly ten minutes later I direct her to park in a quiet hillside overlook, mostly out of sight of the road and with no other vehicles around. She does as ordered, and then, with the lights of Mostar down below us, I take the keys out of the ignition and put them in my pocket.

  We are enshrouded in near darkness, but I can see her trembling hands well enough to know immediately if she reaches for a weapon, and my pistol is on my knee and ready for her.

  I say, “Your friends will all live, but they’re going to need a doctor. I want them out of town tonight.”

  “My . . . my friends?” She adopts a look of surprise and confusion. She puts on a good act, I’ll give her that.

  “Or,” I continue, “you could just leave them and run home on your own. Looked like that was what you were doing. It’s your call.”

  “I . . . I don’t have any friends here. I just arrived in Bosnia two days ago. I live in the Netherlands.”

  “Wait . . . you aren’t Hungarian?”

  “Who said I was Hungarian? I am Romanian.”

  Now I’m confused, but I try not to let it show. “You’re not with the three guys watching Vukovic’s house?”

  Now I see her first obvious lie.

  “Who is Vukovic?”

  Bullshit. Her mannerisms are all wrong for someone making a truthful statement. Whereas before her terrified eyes were locked to mine, now she glances down to the left and she brings one arm across her body, holding on to the steering wheel with it. These are tells I learned in my first day studying body language back at the CIA’s Autonomous Asset Develop ment Program in Harvey Point, North Carolina, and they are so obvious to me now I can often pick up on deception without making any effort to do so.

  I say, “You were watching Vukovic’s place, too. I don’t need you lying to me right now, and you don’t need me angry with you.”

  The woman looks out the windshield and nods. She looks exhausted. “Yes, I was watching the home of Chief Vukovic. I did not know others were doing this also.”

  “You didn’t see the three big Hungarians?”

  “No. I saw you, then I heard fighting in the alleyway. I didn’t know what was going on. When I saw you I got scared and ran.”

  “You got . . . scared?” I get scared all the time, but I don’t run into many people in the field who would admit this.

  She nods. She’s still scared. Her eyes show only mistrust and apprehension, all directed towards me. She says, “You are a gangster? You are part of the pipeline?”

  Slowly I cock my head. I reach with my non–gun hand into her purse in the backseat, and I pull out a wallet. Flipping it open, I don’t see a Romanian driver’s license at first. Instead I see an official-looking identity badge.

  And in my world, that’s never good news.

  Talyssa Corbu. Junior Criminal Analyst.

  Economic Crime Division. European Union Agency

  for Law Enforcement Cooperation.

  EUROPOL

  Terrific. The last time I checked, Europol had published international warrants for me on about ten different charges, from Dublin to Tallinn, from Kiev to Stockholm.

  Interpol, the world police organization, has a dozen more: from Hong Kong to Mexico City, and from Ho Chi Minh City to D.C. I’ve got a healthy fear of cops, because in their eyes I’m as bad a man as exists in this world.

  But even though this woman works for an agency that would like to see me thrown into a windowless cell somewhere, she clearly doesn’t know who I am, and she’s clearly not here for me.

  I say, “Europol coordinates with and supports law enforcement around the EU. Why would you be here, all by yourself, watching the home of a municipal police chief?”

  She looks at me with even more suspicion now, but I guess I’d be suspicious, too, if some jackwad beat up three dudes, jumped in my car, stuck a gun in my face, and then took me to a darkened roadside turnoff.

  “Is it any of your business?”

  “I’ve got the gun, so my business is whatever I want to make it.”

  She belts out a nervy laugh. “You are a gangster.”

  “I’m not a gangster. Gangsters work for gangs. I don’t. I’m self-employed.”

  She makes no reply, but I gather she doesn’t believe me. Her terror continues, and it’s absolutely palpable. Even in the poor light she appears almost ill to me.

  Now I want to calm her down a little, because she’s no good to me while she’s this amped up, and I don’t need her tossing her cookies in my lap. I say, “Relax, Ms. Corbu. It’s possible you and I aren’t enemies. I’m after Vukovic, too.”

  “Why?” she asks with genuine surprise.

  “You first.”

  “I am . . . I am here looking for someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I . . . I don’t have to tell you.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “You really have no idea how this whole ‘being held at gunpoint’ thing works, do you? I’m pretty sure that, in fact, you do have to tell me.”

  She doesn’t speak for fifteen seconds, and then she starts to cry. I don’t love making women cry, but I don’t let off the pressure, because I don’t know what the hell is going on here.

  I shout now. “Who?”

  And then, to my surprise, the meek little mouse shouts back at me. “My sister! I’m looking for my sister!”

  I didn’t see that coming.

  “Your . . . your sister?”

  Talyssa Corbu nods, tears dripping into her lap. She looks like a child again as she speaks through sobs. “Roxana. She disappeared nine days ago. Her flatmate said she went to a nightclub in Bucharest, where she lives, and then she never came home. I flew in the next day. Local police were no help, even to me, a Europol analyst. They said she probably ran off to Germany or Italy or France like all stupid girls. But Roxana would never do that. I did everything I could to find her, but then the police tried to stop me. I reached out to my office for assistance, but they just told me I needed to deal with family issues on my free time. I had to take a leave of absence to continue looking for her alone.”

  “That’s harsh,” I say.

  “Then my mother received a phone call that I was later able to trace to Belgrade. She said the man had a Serbian accent, and this Serb said he found my mother’s number in Roxana’s phone. He wanted her to know he’d p
ersonally killed her daughter for meddling in the affairs of the Serbian mob.”

  I blow out a sigh. She’s not looking for her sister. Whether she can admit it to herself or not, she’s looking for her sister’s body.

  She keeps talking, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

  “The man on the phone said he shot her in Belgrade and then threw her into the river. Her body hasn’t been recovered.” She looks at me, and her sad and exhausted eyes fill with hope for an instant. “Maybe . . . maybe she isn’t dead.”

  It’s not my place to force her to face the facts. Instead, I say, “What did . . . what does your sister do for a living?”

  “She is a student at the University of Bucharest.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well . . . she is an actress, too.”

  With an incredulous look I repeat her words. “An actress.”

  “Yes. Some TV commercials. Some plays. Nothing that paid the bills.”

  “But why was she in Belgrade? And why would she be involved with the Serbian mob?”

  The young woman looks down at her hands. “I have no idea.”

  She knows. Or at least she knows more than she’s letting on. But I let it go for now. “So what did you do?”

  “I drove to Belgrade. I had this crazy idea I could get local authorities to help me because of my position, but Europol has no jurisdiction in Serbia. The cops there were okay at first. They searched the banks of the Danube River, said they’d make inquiries into the underworld. But after I kept coming back, kept pressing, they threatened to have me deported. In the end I used resources at Europol to trace the call my mother received. The caller was using software to prevent a trace, but I had a friend in the technical division find the origin of the number. It was the phone of the wife of a man who has been on a European criminal organization watchlist. He is a member of the Branjevo Partizans, the most dangerous mafia group in Serbia.”

  “And . . . let me guess, you went, alone, to go spy on him.”

  “I went outside his place of business, a pool hall in the Branjevo neighborhood. I was too scared to go in.”

  Fear can be a healthy thing. “Keep going,” I say.

  “When he left, I followed him to a bar, and from there he went with other men to a building near the river. I had downloaded hundreds of faces from the database of Serbian gang members, and I started matching them up. There were a lot of known gangsters from the database right in front of me.

  “Doing research on the faces I saw, I realized some of them were involved in human smuggling. The local police had records of this, and I had access to the records.”

  “Via Europol.”

  “Yes. My work involves tracking the proceeds of organized crime, and the sexual slavery market is the third-largest criminal enterprise on Earth, behind drugs and counterfeiting, and ahead of weapons, so I do know quite a bit about that world.”

  “The world your sister got herself involved in.”

  Talyssa looks out the window for a moment. With a little anger in her voice, the first emotion I’ve heard other than fear, she says, “She wasn’t involved in that world. She was just a college student. A kid.”

  I let it go. “Your work at Europol. You’re not a cop. You’re a bean counter?”

  “I am a forensic accountant. A data analyst.”

  “A bean counter,” I repeat. “And yet, there you were, following mobsters through a foreign city. Alone. Very brave.” I want to say it’s braver than she appears now, but I catch myself. I did just see her preparing to attempt a solo entry on the home of an armed police officer with two bodyguards, so I realize I should probably give her more credit.

  She dismisses my comment with a wave.

  “I was able to ID most of the men there, but there were a few not in the database. I took pictures of them, ran them through facial recognition, and discovered the identity of one of them.”

  “Niko Vukovic, Mostar Police.”

  She corrects me. “Captain Niko Vukovic, chief of the Mostar Police.” She wipes away the last of her tears. Either she is comforted to talk about this with someone, or else she is fully absorbed crafting a make-believe story for me.

  “The next day Vukovic was back there, with a bus and some other men in cars. The bus had plates from Bosnia and Herzegovina. They all drove off on the highway to the west. I began to think maybe Roxana had been kidnapped by the smugglers and not killed. I thought that if this was about smuggling women, Bosnia is the next country to the west of Serbia. Perhaps this policeman was involved in whatever happened to my sister, and she was on the bus.”

  With only half the doubt I’m feeling in my voice, I say, “You . . . a woman who didn’t see three big Hungarian hit men standing thirty meters from her. You . . . an accountant, no less, personally and single-handedly followed a convoy of vehicles all the way across two countries, for four hundred kilometers.”

  “Of course not. I didn’t follow them. Instead I flew directly to Mostar and waited for Vukovic to show up back to work, which he did two days later.”

  “Why did you do that if you didn’t know what was in the bus?”

  A long pause now, then, “There were women in the bus.”

  “You saw them?”

  She looks away. It’s tough to tell if her distrust in me is what’s leading her delays in answering, or if she’s just making this shit up as she goes along.

  “Yes. Just a few girls getting into the vehicle. They looked scared, exhausted. But I’m sure there were others in that bus.”

  “Why do you think that—”

  “Because the windows were blacked out with paper. They were hiding something. Why a bus if they weren’t hiding people?”

  “How big was the vehicle?”

  “A commercial Daewoo. I looked it up. It has seating for thirty.”

  She may not have a mind for tradecraft on the streets, but she does have a hell of a mind. Both Ratko Babic and Liliana Brinza had said there were about twenty-five girls at the Mostar farmhouse, and while I didn’t take the time to count heads, I estimated roughly that number myself. Twenty-five women and girls, along with a few guards, would just fit in a bus of that size so, for the first time, a part of her story checks out with my own knowledge.

  She says, “I knew I would lose the girls if I followed Vukovic, but I thought I could make him tell me where they were taken.” Her head droops, and I wonder if she’s about to cry again.

  “And you brought a gun.”

  “I bought it on the street in Belgrade. I don’t even know if it works. I’m afraid to test it.”

  “Your plan was to . . . to do what, exactly?”

  “I wanted to get into his house. Wave the gun in his face. Intimidate him.”

  I don’t want to insult her by telling her she wouldn’t intimidate me if she waved a flamethrower in my face, so instead I say, “Your plan is dangerous. He’s got security around him, day and night, apparently.”

  “Yes.”

  “So your idea won’t work.”

  She looks up at me now. “Apparently not, because I’ve been kidnapped by a gangster.”

  “Kidnapped?” I ask in surprise, then consider the fact that I have a Glock 19 pistol on my knee, pointed vaguely in her direction. I holster it but say, “I haven’t searched you, so if you make any sudden moves, we’re going to have a problem. But otherwise . . . I have no intentions of hurting you. Looks like you’ve been through enough already. And I’m not a damn gangster.”

  Holstering the gun seems to calm her down, but I can tell she still sees me as a potential enemy.

  I drum my fingers on my leg a moment, then say, “Here’s my problem with your story, Talyssa. You can lie about what you’ve been doing for the last week, you can fake your entire timeline, but you can’t fake the smell of terror that is pouring off you right now. You loo
k like you haven’t slept in a week. How am I supposed to believe you took on the Belgrade mob all by yourself, and you’re in the middle of a one-woman op against the head of the police here, a man who has armed bodyguards and a man who, you say, is tied to the mob? How the hell are you able to—”

  “Because of Roxana! Because she’s my sister! Because I’m all she has!” Talyssa screams it. “She is either dead, or she’s their prisoner. But either way, I have to find her, or find out who killed her.” She begins weeping again. “I have to.”

  If this part of her story is an act, it’s a damn good one.

  Through sobs she asks, “What is your name?”

  “Harry.”

  “Harry what?”

  “Just Harry.”

  “Let me ask you, Harry, whoever you are. Have you ever lost a loved one? Someone you cared about more than anyone in the world?”

  Yes, I have, more or less, but I don’t answer her. Still . . . I think about this, think about the anguish I felt back then, and I dial back my skepticism about her story. “Okay. There’s more to you than meets the eye. I can believe that.”

  Sniffing back more tears, she nods. “But you’re right. Pointing a gun at the captain will probably just get me killed.”

  “And even if it doesn’t, with that crazy bright red hair of yours, it won’t be long before the opposition IDs you, realizes you’re following them, and then they will grab you.”

  “They’ve . . . they’ve already identified me. In Belgrade.”

  I was wondering how a girl like this was able to tail mobsters without getting made. Apparently, she wasn’t.

  “As the bus was leaving, I tried to get the license plate number, so I stepped out in the street. They had a truck following the bus. I didn’t know.”

  “A chase car,” I say. “Pretty standard stuff.”

  “Yes, it chased after me, but I managed to get on a streetcar and get away. I don’t know if they told others what I looked like and what I was doing, but—”

  “Trust me, they did.” I look at her hair. “Let me guess. After you were blown, you dyed your hair thinking it would throw them off.”