Cage looked down at his phone. “You? You’ve got better things to do running my day-to-day operations than going on a personal safari for some hit man.”

“Respectfully, I think he could pose a threat to our interests, and I should also take steps to—”

“C’mon, Jaco,” Cage said. “You aren’t a man hunter anymore. You are helping me run a ten-billion-dollar-a-year business.”

A pause from the other end, and then the South African responded with obvious disappointment. “Yes, sir. I’ll tell the Greek to look for the assassin.”

Cage hung up, then looked at the grandfather clock on the wall. It was after nine now, so he opened up an e-mail to check this month’s numbers in Denmark.

As the Director of the Consortium, he was responsible for keeping his eyes on the bottom line.

But his attention didn’t stay on work for long. This new situation in Bosnia, the removal of the two girls, a trip he had planned to Italy in just a few days, and the arrival of his next shipment of merchandise, including two new girls he’d taken a particular interest in . . .

There was a lot for Ken Cage to think about these days, a lot of balls in the air. He began poring through the Danish numbers, telling himself he’d spend the full day in his home office.

* * *

• • •

Police captain Niko Vukovic left his station at ten p.m., climbing into his SUV with his driver and his chief protection agent, both well-trained officers, with a chase vehicle rolling behind with two more cops. They drove north towards Vukovic’s residence to the south of the urban center of Mostar, just on the east side of the small but swift Neretva River.

A gray Mercedes panel truck followed the two SUVs the entire way, but traffic was dense enough tonight, and none of the five cops picked up on the tail.

The two police vehicles pulled into a small quiet square three blocks from the river and stopped in front of an old gray building close to the street. The two bodyguards who weren’t also drivers climbed out with the captain, then walked him into his residence.

A few minutes later the pair of guards exited the building, leaving Niko Vukovic alone inside.

Once the protectee was safely ensconced in his residence for the evening, the two SUVs rolled out of the square.

None of the four cops providing security for their chief noticed the gray van rolling slowly up a road on the far side of the square, finally coming to a standstill ten meters before the intersection.

Two individuals sat in the van now, but there were three in total in this team of Hungarian hit men. The third, the unit leader, was busy back at the hotel, preparing their escape route, poring over maps, circling areas of major congestion.

The Hungarians were all active-duty members of their own country’s national police force, but they also worked a side job as enforcers for the Pitovci, an organized-crime entity based in Bratislava, Slovakia. Normally their duties for the Pitovci kept them in and around Budapest where they lived and worked, just over the border from the Slovakian capital, but today they had been sent much farther abroad, all the way here in southern Bosnia.

The men had driven themselves down and checked into a local hotel with forged passports, but they had no plans to stay in town long. A night to reconnoiter, and a night to act, and then they’d race back north.

These men had killed before, and they were confident they had it down.

The passenger in the van made a call on his mobile, waited a moment, then said, “He’s home; his security has left for the night. No, they didn’t even stay with him. I’ll text you the address. Fifteen minutes from the hotel. Karoly and I can do it right now if you want.”

“No,” came the reply. “We have a plan. We are sticking to it. Tomorrow night, all three of us.”

“Oke’, boss. You want us to stay here?”

“For another hour. Just to make sure he doesn’t have any visitors.”

“Mergertem.” I understand. The Hungarian in the passenger seat ended the call, then looked to the driver. “Wouldn’t be hard. Small-town Bosnian police chief. What’s the big deal?”

“You know Zente. If he makes a plan, you are not going to change it.”

“Yeah,” the other man said. “He does like to be the boss, doesn’t he?”

* * *

• • •

The road where the van sat had a good view to the building across the tiny square, but from the Hungarians’ vantage point they were unable to see a darkened alcove in front of a small mosque to the right of the intersection in front of them. There, a lone woman stood in a black raincoat, and she kept her eyes on the same building as the men on her left, who she was also unable to see.

Talyssa Corbu was twenty-nine years old, thin, with small elvish facial features and short dyed red hair mostly hidden by the hood of her jacket. She was a foreigner here in Bosnia and, also like the men sitting thirty meters to her left in the van, she was associated with law enforcement.

This was Talyssa’s second day in Mostar. On the first she’d staked out the police station for ten hours before seeing what she wanted to see, and then she had followed Niko Vukovic home. She’d come back this morning, saw him head in to work around ten a.m., and then tried breaking into the man’s apartment building in broad daylight. But Vukovic had good locks and a better security system, and his building had several other units nearby. Moreover, he lived next door to a private day care that created a lot of come-and-go activity on the sidewalk out front during the daytime hours.

So she had abandoned this plan, and instead she spent the day here in the tiny little park at the center of the square a kilometer north of the Old Bridge, waiting for Vukovic to come home.

Now she waited for his light to switch off.

Minutes later it did, and then Talyssa Corbu wrote the time down and began walking away.

Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she’d get what she came for.

It was a good line for her to repeat through her head, but the truth was she had little real confidence in her plan.

Unlike the Hungarians, Corbu was not here on the job for anyone. No, this was personal, as personal as things got. She was in a foreign country planning on extracting information from a city police chief, and she had no training whatsoever to do so.

But she also had no choice.

She made her way back to her hotel a few minutes later, climbed the stairs to her room, all the while trying to come up with a better plan than the one she had now, because she worried that the one she had now would get her killed long before she found what she was looking for.

NINE

   Liliana and I get up at five a.m. and drive to Sarajevo, arriving at the main train station at eight, right in the middle of the morning flow of commuters. Since she doesn’t have a passport, I spend most of the drive from Mostar talking her through the tradecraft I employ to avoid immigration officials on trains, and as soon as we arrive I book her a long, circuitous trip that will take her north into Croatia, then northeast into Hungary, then south into Romania, then finally east to Moldova. With a little luck and the info I give her she’ll make it home fine, and I also hand her five thousand euros in case she needs to drop some bribes along the way to ensure all goes smoothly, as well as to help her get started when she makes it back home.