“If I send you a couple of images, can you lighten them so we can read the name of the vessel on the stern?”

“No problem. I can Bluetooth it to my laptop and do it from here.”

“Good.” I text her the pictures, then glance up at the lights of the distant boat, barely more than a pinprick now. I know the girls from the red room in Bosnia are on board, and I feel so utterly helpless watching them go.

She says, “I’ve got the images. This will take me a few minutes.”

That yacht is headed north, so even though I don’t know its name, who owns it, or where the hell it’s going, I’m going to haul ass to the north to be in position to intercept it.

I consider stealing a boat to go after it, but decide against it. A yacht that size probably cruises along at around fifteen to twenty knots; I can steal a car onshore and move three times that speed in the same direction.

Thirty minutes later I’ve boosted a Volkswagen Golf from a lot next to an apartment complex up the hill, and I’m negotiating my way out of Dubrovnik, being very careful to avoid any roads near where I tipped the van earlier, because there is no doubt they will be full of cops.

And I do my best to avoid cops, even when they aren’t also evil sex traffickers.

My phone rings, finally, and I snatch it up. “I thought you forgot about me.”

Talyssa says, “No . . . I just needed some time to—”

“Save it. I’m picking you up.”

“What?”

“I’m ten minutes from Stikovica. Tell me exactly where you are.”

She does so. I hang up and stomp the pedal down to the floor.

* * *

• • •

Talyssa Corbu is right where she said she’d be, standing near the train station. She climbs in with her pack, and then I floor it back onto the highway as the first hues of dawn appear to the east.

Before she says anything, she puts a couple of candy bars and a bag of chips in my lap and opens a bottled water for me. “The stores were still closed, but I found vending machines outside the station. I thought you might—”

I’ve already ripped into a chocolate bar and am wolfing it down. I put the water between my knees and unscrew the cap.

She finishes her sentence while staring at me. “—be a little hungry.”

Between bites I say, “I thought you said it would just take a few minutes to get the images lightened.”

“What? Oh . . . it didn’t take long at all.”

“You found the name of the vessel?”

“I found more than that.” For the first time since I met her, Talyssa is speaking with authority in her voice. “The ship is La Primarosa. I went to Vesselfinder.com, which is a website that displays a map with real-time marine traffic, along with other voyage information, using data uploaded from the vessels’ transponders to the AIS, the—”

I interrupt, because I know what AIS is. “The Automatic Identification Service.”

“Actually, it’s the Automatic Identification System.”

“Right,” I say. “But boats and ships turn off their transponders all the time. There is no way in hell a boat full of sex trafficking victims would be broadcasting their location—”

She interrupts me. “It is mandatory for vessels over three hundred tons, but they are allowed to turn it off in certain circumstances. Security threats being one of them. Sometimes wealthy people use their status to fly under the radar, so to speak, citing a safety issue to the passengers. If you have money, all you have to do is say you are worried about piracy, and they give you some latitude to turn it off.”

“So, like I said, the Primarosa is not reporting to AIS, is it?”

“No. It’s not. Not right now. But since I know the name and the general size, I was able to go into Vesselfinder’s database of boats and ships and find a listing for it, along with a photograph taken off the coast of Santorini two years ago.”

“Primarosa is a girl’s name. I’ve heard it in Spain. Is it a Spanish boat?”

She shakes her head. “It’s registered in Denmark to a company based in Cyprus. It’s a shell. It only exists on paper to serve as the ownership of the yacht.”

“You can’t tell who actually owns the company?”

“That’s what makes it a shell.”

“So . . . a dead end?”

“It would be, except for one thing.” She has confidence and energy in her now that I haven’t seen before.

“What’s that?”

“Me. Maybe I can’t intimidate people or shoot people or anything else you do, but forensic accounting and banking is what I did all day, every day, until I came to the Balkans. If you keep driving north, I can work on digging into this yacht and its history. I will find us something that might help.”

“Okay. North of us is Croatia, and northwest of us is Italy. There is nowhere else in the Adriatic to go, unless they turn around and head south, so I am assuming the yacht is going to Italy.”

“Why?” she asks.

“I don’t know why it would leave Croatia only to return back to Croatia up the coast.”

“Right,” she says, but she doesn’t seem sold on my theory.

“It will take us six hours to get to the Italian border; I’ll need to know something before then about where it’s headed.”

“I can do this,” she says, then she pulls her laptop out of her bag and retrieves her phone. She sets up a Wi-Fi hotspot while I drive, and soon she’s pulled up a map and is furiously clicking keys next to me.

* * *

• • •

   Twenty-seven nautical miles away, the Primarosa motored northwest through the warm predawn light at fifteen knots. Standing on the bow and looking out to sea, South African Jaco Verdoorn stood alone. His men did not come aboard with him; with twenty-three women, fifteen crew, and nine Greek mafioso on board, there simply was not enough room on the vessel for nine more men.

Verdoorn sent Loots and the rest of his shock troops north by air to scout out the security situation up there. The Primarosa had one more stop to make before its final destination on this journey, just to take on a few more pieces of merchandise, but Verdoorn wasn’t worried about Gentry showing up there. The rest of the girls would be locked up on board the yacht; the Greeks had a dozen guns on board. Kostopoulos and his men had maintained the pipeline in the Balkans for years without incident, and the South African had at least enough confidence in them that they could watch over the merchandise while in transit on open water. If the Gray Man was working alone, or virtually alone, there was little chance he was going to attack a forty-five-meter yacht that was out to sea and on the move.