I place a call that I’ve been considering, but dreading, for days and days now.

It’s two a.m. in D.C., which means I’ll be waking up someone on the eastern seaboard, but I honestly don’t give a shit.

After five rings the call is answered with a sleepy female voice. “Brewer?”

“Hey. It’s me.”

Suzanne Brewer is my handler at CIA. To say our relationship is difficult would be underselling it significantly. She is not my biggest fan, which is also an understatement. In fact, it is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that she tried to kill me a couple months ago.

I don’t trust her, but right now, I’m out of options.

“Me, who?” She’s just being difficult. It’s par for the course from her.

“It’s Violator.”

She takes a few more seconds to wake up; I can hear her climbing out of her bed and walking, probably over to a computer in her house.

She says, “Iden code?”

I groan to myself and want to tell her, For fuck’s sake, you know who this is! But I don’t. Not because I’m above that sort of talk, but because I need something from her now.

I answer with a clipped, “Iden to follow: Whiskey, Hotel, Quebec, fiver, two, three, India.”

The pause is brief. The voice is annoyed. “Iden confirmed.”

I lay on the charm now, as thick as I can. “How’s it goin’?”

“It would be ‘goin’’ better if you were working instead of on another one of your vacations.”

I think about the past week and realize how much I wish I could take a vacation from this vacation. But I say, “I’ll be back soon. Sooner, actually, if you give me a little help. It’s really important.”

“You wouldn’t be calling if you didn’t need help. You wouldn’t be calling at this hour if it weren’t important. What do you want?”

This is going well, so far. I decide to add to my charm offensive to reel her in.

“You feeling better?”

Suzanne Brewer had been shot a couple of months earlier; she fell into my arms, in fact, and I guess I probably saved her life. That’s how I remember it, anyway, although my recollection of the incident is a bit fuzzy.

I hope that’s how she remembers it, as well, to earn me a little more respect in her eyes so she’ll give me what I need.

But she barks back at me. “I asked you what you wanted.”

Nope, the ice queen is as frosty as ever, despite the fact that I stopped her from bleeding out back in the UK.

I reply with, “I need whatever the Agency knows about a sex trafficking ring referred to as the Consortium.”

“Perhaps you are confused.”

“Confused about what?”

“Let me explain how this is all supposed to function. You work for this intelligence agency, Violator. This intelligence agency does not work for you.”

Yeah, I knew it was going to be like this, though I was hopeful it would be all unicorns and rainbows.

Hope is not a strategy, I tell myself yet again. Then I tell myself, Screw it. I turn off my faux charm and let her have it. “Just cut the shit and do this for me! Lives are at stake.”

“Lives are at stake all the time, with everything we do. Every single day you run off to go find yourself, or whatever the hell you do during your hiatuses, lives are threatened. The program you belong to needs you, and you are out there—”

“Please, Suzanne. Please get me something.”

She stops bitching, which is a first, and then she sighs, which happens all the time. Finally, she says, “I’ve never heard of the Consortium.”

“What about the pipeline?”

“What is that?”

“It’s kind of like an underground railroad for the trafficked women. A smuggling circuit the victims are put through by the Consortium.”

“No, I’ve never heard of that, either.”

She sounds credible, but again, she also sounded credible when she said she hadn’t been trying to shoot me in the head back in Scotland, and I retain doubts about that event.

I say, “Fine. But I bet you are sitting in front of a snazzy computer that has access to all sorts of supersecret files and databases, and you can query those terms in that context, and find out if the Agency has any intel I can use.”

“Yes, I do have just such a computer in front of me. But what do I get out of this?”

As I walk through the garden of the church in the cool morning, it occurs to me, and not for the first time, that everybody wants something from me.

“What do you get? How about my unwavering devotion?”

“I already have a cat, Violator.”

Of course you do. “Just tell me what you want from me.”

“If I give you this intel, you will come back to D.C.?”

“Not immediately; I need actionable intel so I can act. But as soon as I’m done with—”

She interrupts. “Sorry, Violator. I need you. Your country needs you.”

“I’ll kiss your ass and I’ll kiss the flag, probably not in that order, very soon. But for now I need to know about the Consortium. Seems to be run by an American male in his fifties. He used the name Tom, but that’s going to be a pseudonym. There’s an American female psychologist and a South African involved, as well. A rich Greek dude . . . he’s dead. Don’t know his name.”

“How did he die?” she asks, but the way she asks tells me she has a pretty good suspicion that I killed him.

“Would you believe natural causes?”

Brewer just sighs again.

I continue. “The organization either owns or has access to a megayacht called La Primarosa. Right now it’s in the northern Adriatic, heading to Venice, unless they changed their plans.”

Brewer sounds like she’s typing all this into her computer. Then she says, “Fine. Give me an hour and I’ll call you back.”

This went better than I thought. Momentarily stunned by my powers of persuasion, I can’t even speak.

“Violator?”

I do my best to recover. “Uh . . . yeah. That’s great. Let me call you, though. One hour.”

The line goes dead, and I stand there in the middle of the well-kept church grounds, staring up at the steeple. It’s a magnificent sight on this sunny, warm morning, but all I can think about is tonight and the twenty-three women and girls who have been on my mind since Bosnia.