I look around the corner and I see two men in black tracksuits running on the cobblestones, and they see Talyssa as she finishes climbing out of the window. They charge towards her before she even turns to face them.

I pull my pistol and whisper for the transmitter in my ear. “Run to your left. Go, go, go.”

But the men are on her in seconds; she screams as they tackle her to the stones, her voice simultaneously loud in my ear and echoing all around me.

I am only fifty feet away, but I don’t have a shot from here because I can’t be sure my 9-millimeter rounds won’t overpenetrate the bad guys and hit the woman. I decide to remain stealthy, to try to get to them before they see me so I can stick my knife into their ribs, but to my right I hear racing footsteps running in my direction along the western wall of the building.

Shit. The men holding Talyssa down pull her up to her feet; they clearly are not about to assassinate her, so I turn away from the Europol analyst and her captors and climb a narrow stairwell that leads up to a locked metal gate in the wall surrounding the entire Old Town.

Kneeling in the darkness I see two men run past, in the direction of Talyssa, and I know that the opposition—whoever the hell they are—has her now.

Softly I speak to her through our communications link.

“Stay calm, Talyssa. Don’t say a word. I’ll get you back. Try to keep your hair over your earpiece so they don’t see it.”

In my gut I feel wrenching pain as I realize that the girl I used for bait is now in mortal danger and, just like with the women in the cellar, it’s all my motherfucking fault.

TWENTY

   Talyssa Corbu was yanked to her feet by the two men, and two more arrived a few seconds later. She tried to scream for help but a hand slammed over her mouth and nose. A man with a thick accent leaned into her ear. “We kill you if you make sound. Understand?”

Tears rained from her eyes as she nodded, and the hand came away. All four had hold of her body now; her arms were gripped tightly, a man behind grabbed the collar of her raincoat, and a fourth person manhandled her while ripping off the backpack and her shoulder bag, and feeling into every pocket of her clothing.

She heard Harry speak to her softly, and she turned around to look for him, but all she saw were two more men arriving at her position and helping the others. All the goons had dark hair, most had beards, and they wore dark clothing. One spoke into his mobile phone but he stepped away from her to do so, and she couldn’t make out the language.

There were smiles among the men, so proud they were that they’d captured her.

Soon they began pushing her forward, turning away from the wall at the eastern side of the Old Town and heading on foot down the first of many long stone staircase passageways that led down to the Stradun.

Talyssa was in the middle of the group, and though she mostly kept her head down out of abject terror, she did look to her left and right and regard the faces around her. These were cold, hard men. They weren’t police.

They were gangsters; she took them for Turks or perhaps Albanians, but she had no way of knowing until she heard them speak again. As a Romanian, she knew a few Albanians and a few Turks, and although she couldn’t speak either language, she could quickly identify it.

Her mind began racing. She came to the quick conclusion that there was no way the Consortium would have sent Albanians or Turks to kidnap her out of her hotel room in Croatia unless they had something awful in store for her. She wasn’t going to be driven to the edge of town and given a warning.

She was certain they were taking her someplace to torture her for information, and then to kill her.

And wherever the hell Harry had run to, his promises to protect her rang hollow now. Still, she didn’t blame him. She’d panicked at the window: a lifelong fear of heights, a fear of most everything that had to do with danger, was to blame. If she’d just trusted the American, she wouldn’t be moments away from death now.

Her teeth chattered and her mind raced, and she fought a wave of nausea as she continued down the steps.

* * *

• • •

I’m hauling ass two blocks and two passageways to the left of and parallel to where Talyssa and the men in black are descending. I had to wait for them to pass my position before running here to the east, behind Talyssa’s building, past the window she climbed out of, and then I turned to my right to begin my own descent. Now I’m thirty or forty seconds behind the group, but I feel sure I’m making up for it with my speed.

As I run I speak again to Talyssa, still softly, because this medieval neighborhood feels like one damn echo chamber. “Walk as slowly as you can. You have to slow them down.”

I hear her speak to the men around her in English, her voice halting. “Please. Slow down. I can’t walk this fast.”

A man snaps at her in a heavy accent. “No talking. Walk faster.”

“I . . . I hurt my ankle when you knocked me down.”

I can hear frustration in the man’s voice now as he speaks to the others in a foreign tongue that I think may be Albanian. When Talyssa says, “Thank you,” I know they are complying with her request and slowing.

I run faster. At each little narrow intersection I glance to my right, hoping to see the group so I know I am getting in front of them. I’m having a hard time coming up with a cogent plan, but I’m definitely preparing for a confrontation. Taking on eight goons at the same time in an outdoor stone stairwell barely eight feet across seems like a bad course of action, but I don’t know that I have any choice.

I consider letting them just take her and then following them to see where they go, but I see the flaw in that plan. If I lose Talyssa, then she’s dead. If the Consortium runs the chief of police of this town, if they have the juice to get a bevy of cops for a surveillance operation, then I don’t see why they would pull the cops and send in an Albanian gang to grab the woman if they plan on simply interrogating and intimidating her.

No. They could have used dirty cops for that. The fact that they didn’t kill her immediately tells me they need to take her to a secondary location, perhaps with plans to torture information out of her, and the fact that they brought in a foreign criminal gang to snatch her tells me they then plan on killing her.

Either way, right now I’m Talyssa Corbu’s only hope.

* * *

• • •

Just as I sprint through the next intersection, doing my best to stay as far from the streetlamps as possible, I gaze to my right again, expecting another narrow east-west street. But instead I see I’ve run out into the northwestern edge of a large triangle-shaped open-air area, two blocks wide. The entourage is just entering the square on the southeastern side, and though I’m forty yards away, in low light, and in front of them, there is no way they can miss a man running at top speed.