Girls still in the line fell to the ground in despair. Maja cried, but she kept her feet.

The two remaining men talked while they guarded the group of twenty; they seemed to have a short argument, but soon one of them—not the new leader—slung his gun over his shoulder and walked forward. He was older, well into his forties, and he looked over a couple of the hostages standing by the bus, but quickly his flashlight’s beam centered on Maja herself.

He reached up and grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off-balance, began pulling her towards the woods.

“Ne! Ne! Ne!” No was one of the few words she knew in Serbo-Croatian, and she said it now, over and over, as panic threatened to overwhelm her.

But before the gangster could get her off the gravel and into the grass, the new leader of the group called out to him, and he stopped.

Maja could not understand, but whatever he said instigated an argument between the two. While the women in the woods continued to cry out, these last two men entered into a full-on shouting match.

But then it ended, and the man holding Maja’s arm yanked her back to the bus, where she was ordered to sit down on the gravel with all the others.

Save one. The older guard walked down the line, shined his light on more faces, and then grabbed another young girl. Despite her cries and pleas, he pulled her off into the woods while Maja looked on, mouth agape.

She didn’t understand. Why had she been spared?

She put her hands over her ears to drown out the pitiful cries from the trees, but a man in the forest shouted and she peered into the darkness. She saw a figure, a young Bulgarian girl of sixteen she knew as Diana, running off. She was naked other than socks, and she was sprinting, her long legs leaping over obstacles like a gazelle.

“No,” Maja whispered. And then she shouted it. “No!”

A Serbian guard rose to his feet, pulled his pants up and cinched them, and then reached down to the forest floor and retrieved his rifle. Other men shouted at him, two of them taking off in pursuit of the girl, but the man with the rifle leveled it, aimed carefully, and fired a single round, just seconds before Diana would have disappeared into thick foliage.

The gunshot echoed off the trees and into the night.

Maja watched in horror as the sixteen-year-old tumbled to the ground and lay still.

“No!” the girls sitting by the bus croaked out now.

Maja began weeping heavily, for the senseless death of the young girl, for the brutal rapes that were happening before her eyes, and for the fact that she had been singled out and spared the fate of the others.

She didn’t understand it, not any of it, but even though her brain was riddled with shock, that last part confused her most.

Maja vomited onto the gravel in front of her, over and over, while the mournful cries of the women around her resumed.

SIX

   The balcony overlooking the azure water was lined with potted plants and trees, keeping the large space cool despite the warm morning sunshine. The tallest of these cast shade on the breakfast table with the seventy-two-year-old man seated at it, but they had been positioned so as not to obstruct his view of the sea.

Hvar was a resort town on an island off the coast of Croatia, so although it saw a lot of tourists in July, it would be absolutely filled to the brim with foreigners in August. For now, though, the man who owned the penthouse apartment above the rocky coastline enjoyed the relative calm of the streets below, and the fact that although there were a number of pleasure craft offshore, they weren’t choking out the beautiful bay and he could still see the crystal-green water.

He would leave in a few days, remain outside Croatia for the month of August, and this way he would avoid the highest of the high season.

Kostas Kostopoulos was not Croatian, although he kept a penthouse here. He was Greek, and his own nation would become even more crowded in August than Croatia, so he wouldn’t bother with going home. No, he planned on heading to Venice for work, and then he would take another business trip to the United States. He’d remain in Los Angeles for the month, and only return to the Adriatic when the summer holiday season died down.

Kostopoulos didn’t like crowded streets; he barely ventured out of his properties into the masses, and only did so when business forced him to.

The Greek oversaw the Southern European trafficking channels, from Turkey to the south and Ukraine to the north, all the way to the terminus of his territory on the eastern edge of Western Europe. He’d built an empire over decades: drugs, guns, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, illegal immigration. He had made hundreds of millions of euros in these endeavors. But the pipeline of women trafficked for sex work from Eastern Europe into the West was his most profitable revenue stream, and he was only a regional director of a much larger enterprise, known to those involved as the Consortium.

Kostas wondered how much the person who ran the operation earned from his European network, and he marveled at his best guess. He had no idea who this person was; he himself worked through the Consortium’s Director of operations, a South African.

But whoever the Director of the Consortium was, Kostas was sure he or she was in possession of a spigot that poured pure gold.

As he sipped his coffee, the sliding glass door opened behind him, and a bearded man stepped through in a rush, passing two burly bodyguards. He stopped at the table.

In English Kostopoulos said, “Good morning, Stanislav. Hope you don’t mind if I finish my breakfast. Sit, take a few breaths, calm down, then tell me what’s so important.”

The younger man did as instructed; he even took a sip of pineapple juice, already poured in crystal, when the older man motioned towards it. But he rushed through the act, spilled a little down his chin, then hurriedly put the glass back on the table. He spoke with a Serbian accent, but the Greek talked to Serbs daily, so it wasn’t difficult for him to understand.

“There has been a disruption in the pipeline.”

Kostas Kostopoulos showed his displeasure with slightly sagging shoulders but nothing more. “Where?”

“Mostar.”

The Greek took a bite of yogurt, then said, “General Babic and his Belgrade men.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Details?”

“Attacked last night. Seven men dead, including Babic.”

The Greek sighed now while he buttered his croissant. He displayed a subdued countenance, though this was highly distressing news, to be sure. Still, he wouldn’t let the Serbian see him react with the shock he felt. “So who is interfering with my business interests this time? The Turks again?”

“Belgrade doesn’t know who ordered it, but they think they know who carried out the operation itself, and they believe this was not an attack on the way station, but simply an attack on the general.”