I’m inside his head now, I can see it.

“What are you going to do to me?” he asks.

“You have three choices. I can kill you right here, I can take you back home to where the next hitters from the Pitovci are probably already waiting, or I can just leave you here alive. Number one and number two both sound like more fun to me, but I’ll do number three if you give me something valuable to help us find those girls.”

Blood bubbles on his lips as he thinks. “I know one thing. Only one thing. I tell you, I tell you the truth, all the truth I know . . . and you will leave me here? Alive?”

I lean into his ear and speak softly. “I’m a man of my word. If you believe I’ll kill you because I said I will, you should believe I’ll let you go if I say I will.”

He hangs there and bleeds a moment while he weighs his options. He nods a little and starts to speak. I interrupt with, “Remember, it better be really fucking helpful.”

Finally he just says, “Dubrovnik.”

I cock my head. “Dubrovnik?”

“It’s a city in Croatia.”

“I know that, dipshit. What about it?”

“From Mostar, the whores go to Dubrovnik.”

“How do you know?”

“My men escort the trucks that come, then lead them to the Croatian border. They take the southern route, through the mountains . . . it goes to Dubrovnik.”

“Where in Dubrovnik?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not that helpful, slick.”

He shouts now, fear and anger in equal measures in his tone. “It’s all I know! It’s everything I have!”

Talyssa speaks up again. “That’s not a small town. How are we supposed to find them there?”

Vukovic’s head hangs again. “I have no answers. I don’t work in the pipeline, I just protect it here.”

I say, “And you’ve done one hell of a fine job, haven’t you?”

He looks up at my masked face, but not in anger. It’s more a look of resignation. I wonder if he knows he’s a dead man no matter if I spare him right now or not. This fact seriously hampers my ability to extract any more intel from him, but I have to try. “Tell me about the Consortium.”

With his head still low, he gives it up. “They run pipeline. They deal with Branjevo Partizans. Partizans deal with me. That it. That everything.”

He seems like he’s telling the truth, and I walk back to Talyssa. “How’s the hand?”

“It’s fine.”

She’s rubbing it still; it isn’t fine.

I say, “This is all we’re going to get out of this guy.”

“What happens to him now?” There are nerves in her voice, and I take that to mean she’s worried I’m going to just shoot my prisoner in the head and leave him hanging here like a piece of meat at the butcher shop.

Honestly, I like the imagery, but I need Talyssa, and I need her with her wits about her.

“We’re leaving him here. Alive. We’ll take your vehicle; mine’s been compromised.”

“But . . . how will we find the women?”

“We’ll discuss that on the way.”

We leave Niko Vukovic with his arms over his head. I don’t hand him the key. I do, however, pull my Jeep back down to the street and leave it there alongside the road.

His people will find him soon enough, and they will release him. Then, judging from the look on his face when he realized the Consortium had targeted him, I assume the Consortium’s people will find him, and then they will murder him.

And I, for one, won’t miss him.

* * *

• • •

We head south from Mostar, the terrified young Romanian criminal investigator looking for information about her sister’s disappearance, and me, an assassin on a poorly-thought-out quest to make up for my mistakes.

We’re a strange pair, to be sure, but for now, anyway, we have the same goal.

It’s quiet; a fresh gentle rain falls from the low gray summer sky. I look over to Talyssa; she’s rubbing her hand. I don’t see the woman who threw the punch in the bunker. I see the scared young accountant.

“How did you start working for Europol?”

She looks out the window as she talks. “I received an advanced degree in forensic accounting. I started working in economic crimes for the state prosecutor in Bucharest. After a few years I applied to Europol. Now I live in The Hague and work in money-laundering crime in the European Union.”

“And sex trafficking.”

“At the prosecutor’s office in Romania, following the money from the international criminal enterprises to the local gangs was a big part of my work. Hundreds . . . thousands of young women disappear every year in my country. They are trafficked and smuggled abroad, forced into prostitution, used as slaves, dehumanized. We could see the money making its way into the gangsters’ accounts, but it was laundered somehow, and we could never see where it came from. I moved to Europol thinking I could make a difference on a bigger level, but my office is not so interested in human trafficking. It’s seen as a law enforcement problem, not a forensic-accounting problem. They are wrong, of course, but I am still very junior, and no one listens to me.”

“I’ll listen. I want to understand what the Consortium is.”

“I have never heard the term when related to trafficking, but a consortium is just an association of organizations.”

“How does all this work, typically? Where are the victims taken?”

“They are taken to anyplace where the economy can support a large commercial sex industry. The developed nations. Europe, America, wealthier parts of the Middle East and Asia.”

“How are they taken?”

“Many different ways, but victimization is all about vulnerability. Statistics say ninety percent of sex trafficking victims suffer some kind of abuse before they are recruited. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, dire economic hardship. Often, all three.”

“What do you mean by ‘recruited’?”

“An unfair term, I agree, but that’s the term. It encompasses all the ways they are brought into the trafficking system. First, there are recruiters. These are usually women, and they make initial contact with the intended victim. Typically, this is called the grooming period. The recruiter uses money, flattery, and the like to get the victim pulled in. They make connections with them to earn their trust. And then, when they are more susceptible, transporters are brought in.”