“You think they are waiting for me there?” she asks, a little nervously.

The answer is an almost definite yes, but I say, “Let me find out first.”

EIGHTEEN

   I head straight for the address Talyssa gave the police captain, and when I get there a couple minutes later, I see a tiny children’s playground, no larger than half a basketball court, across the narrow cobblestone passage from Talyssa’s building.

Three grown men sit in the playground. One of the three is on his phone, standing by the gate in the park, twenty feet away from the other two. He’s lean and wiry, but with the same almost military-style short hair worn by the two other pairs of men I saw a few minutes back. And it’s apparent to me now that the opposition is pretty sure Talyssa is acting alone, outside the bounds of her duties for Europol, because the other two tough-looking goofballs maintaining this watch are sitting on opposite ends of a children’s seesaw in the middle of the little playground. One of them has his back to the building where Talyssa’s flat is located, but the other is facing it directly, and they’re idly chatting in Serbo-Croat as if they don’t have a care in the world.

For a second I wonder if these three might not be involved in all this, so relaxed is their posture here, but then as I walk past I see the dude on the phone look up, check me out, then turn to flash his eyes quickly on the stone steps up to the building across the passageway.

It’s obvious to me that he’s here on a job, and the job involves looking for people and monitoring a location.

He’s oppo, they all are . . . no question about it.

I sit down on a bench on the cobblestones one hundred feet away from them, and I check the cameras I have stationed all around.

Seeing no one else who appears threatening, I speak softly so that only Talyssa can hear me. “You cool?”

“I’m fine, Harry. What is the situation up there?”

“Well, it’s pretty obvious you did a good job selling your story back at the police station. There are some men here waiting around for you, but I don’t think they’ve come to pick you up. They’re just here to see if you are going where you said you were going.”

Nervously she asks, “What . . . what do you want me to do?”

“Come up to your building, don’t pay any attention to the three guys in the playground, and go up to your room.”

“But . . . but what if you’re wrong? What if they just shoot me?”

“Nobody’s shooting anybody.” I amend this. “Unless it’s me shooting them.”

She whispers more softly now, as if to herself, but I can hear her. “Oh my God.”

“Trust me,” I say, probably for the tenth time. “It will be fine.”

I spend the next couple of minutes pretending to look at my phone, until finally Corbu walks past me. She sneaks a glance my way but I glance down, willing her to just play cool. She strolls along next to the low stone wall of the playground, ignoring the men there, all three of whom I’m now watching carefully. Their eyes are on her, but they do a pretty good job of looking disinterested. Cops, for sure. I am guessing they’re all probably detectives.

Like the men in the more touristy part of the Old Town, I don’t know if these guys really are part of the pipeline, or if they’ve just been sent here as lookouts by the brass on the take from the traffickers. I’d hate to have to shoot them without more knowledge of their intentions, but my right hand is inches from the Glock on my hip and I am certain I can have it out and on target faster than any of these big goobers can get their hands on the grips of their weapons.

Talyssa disappears up the steps into the stone courtyard of her building, heading towards a staircase at the back that will take her up to her room. I look back down at my phone and soon hear the three men talking softly. Stealing a quick glance, I see the guy who’d been on his phone walking away, leaving the two men on the seesaw.

In my earpiece I hear Talyssa. “Did everything go okay?”

“Yes. I count a total of seven men tailing you.”

“Seven?” There is a fresh shock in her voice.

“Yeah, but they are just watchers. These aren’t the troublemakers.”

“The troublemakers . . . they are coming later?”

“They’re probably coming later, yeah.” I hope this to be the case, but I don’t say that to the scared woman in her room. Instead I say, “Just stay where you are, keep your bag nearby. I’m going to get on the roof of your building so I’ll be able to cover all the stairwells they can climb when they come for you.”

“When they come . . . how will you get me out of here?”

I have a plan for this, but I don’t want to tell her about it yet, because I don’t want her to freak out. I say, “Don’t worry. That part is easy.” And this is true, as long as she doesn’t freak out.

Pushing concern for this out of my mind, I rise from the bench and head off in the opposite direction of the park, with plans to double back behind Talyssa’s building and climb through a window so I can make my way inside the courtyard.

* * *

• • •

Jaco Verdoorn dozed in the cabin of the Gulfstream jet, sitting in the middle of a team of nine men, most of whom were also asleep. It was only ten p.m., but this brief rest between jobs was likely all this team was going to get for a while, so the men were taking advantage of it.

In Verdoorn’s lap was an open dossier on his target in the Balkans. Courtland Gentry, former CIA officer, now on the run from the Agency.

His information came from the SSA, the State Security Agency of South Africa, his former employer. SSA had the file because the Americans had shared it years ago, when they first deemed their former employee a threat and issued a “shoot on sight” sanction against him.

Verdoorn had spent nine years in the intelligence realm and had been involved in his nation’s hunt for the infamous Gray Man, to no effect, but to great and lasting frustration to the forty-one-year-old. He knew the dossier in his lap from back to front, had all but memorized it.

But now he was back in the game, hunting the Gray Man again, and he couldn’t have been happier about it.

Verdoorn had left his nation’s intelligence services four years ago to found White Lion, a private security concern registered on the island of Crete. White Lion had paperwork to show a robust list of clients, but in truth they only worked for one organization now, the Consortium, and one man, Kenneth Cage.

All the shell companies that acted as White Lion’s official clients served some sort of purpose in the Consortium, and White Lion billed them for work such as convoy operations in Nigeria, personal protection in Ukraine, and professional risk-management consulting in Germany.