One Minute Out
The older man looked up from his croissant and said, “Well? Who is responsible?”
A pause. “An individual known as the Gray Man.”
Kostopoulos cocked his head. “An . . . individual?”
“We have no information that he was acting in concert with others.”
“One man? One man killed seven, including the general, who has been hunted for a quarter century? That sounds like a tall tale.”
Stanislav was a member of the Serbian mafia, the Branjevo Partizans, and he served as his organization’s link to the Consortium that operated the pipeline. Kostopoulos was the only contact in the Consortium he had ever met, and that was by design.
He said, “Belgrade has interviewed both the surviving security force and the whores, sir. Everything points to it being one very skilled man. Belgrade seems to know him by his moniker, Gray Man. They said no one else could have done this.”
Kostopoulos looked down to the water at the gorgeous summer morning. He didn’t believe the lone-assassin theory and thought the Serbian mob was a bunch of fools for even suggesting it.
“The merchandise was undisturbed?”
“There were twenty-four items on site. One is missing.”
“The missing item. What’s her story?”
“Moldovan. The whores say Babic was fucking her himself in another room when the gunman appeared. Nothing special about her. They don’t know where she is. Security men never saw her leave, but they were fighting it out with this killer at the time.”
After a nod and a bite into his croissant, the Greek said, “Obviously you will close down that way station.”
“Under way now, sir. The product is gone already, moved on to the next stop.”
“They are early for the next stop. We aren’t set to pick them up on the coast for three days. That could pose problems.”
“I’m sorry, sir. But there is nowhere in our area of influence that we can put them.”
“Banja Luka?”
“We are getting it ready now, but it won’t be secure for a few more days. Moving the whores on west was the only thing we could do.”
Kostas let a little frustration show now. “This will be costly. Time-consuming. Obstructive to our work. How, dear Stanislav, do we exact our revenge for this?”
“This Gray Man will be hard to find. He’s probably already far from here.”
Kostopoulos shrugged. “Assassins will come and go. Keep an ear out for him, and I’ll tell the other directors in the pipeline to do the same.
“But he’ll be long gone by now, so I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about revenge for the failures in your ranks.” After a pause he added, “The local constabulary there in Mostar was involved in protecting the operation, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir. Our contact there is a police chief in Mostar. A man named Vukovic.”
“I’d say he did a rather poor job. Do you agree?”
After a brief pause the Serbian replied, “Agreed.”
“We will make an example of him. Something that will show the other pipeline way stations that we do not accept underperforming from those we compensate well to keep our systems functioning safely.”
Stanislav looked uncomfortable for a moment.
The Greek picked up on this. “He’s one of Belgrade’s assets, and you don’t want to kill him. Is that it?”
“He is well positioned. He has helped us with many—”
“I can move the pipeline out of Belgrade’s area of influence. I can move the women via northern routes or south through the Mediterranean.”
Stanislav said nothing.
“I want a pound of flesh for this debacle. You can either find yourself a new chief of police in the little shit town of Mostar, or you can find yourself another endeavor as profitable as what I offer you.”
Stanislav sat up straighter. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not you offering us the work. It’s your masters in the Consortium.”
Kostopoulos bristled at this but fought any show of anger or insult. Instead he said, “I rule this area, and my opinion holds weight with the Director of the Consortium.”
Stanislav kept his defiant posture. “Then we ask you to contact him and request that he take no action on Vukovic. We have other needs for him in the area. If you are leaving Mostar anyway, why should you care if he’s still working for us?”
Kostas let it go, but he had no plans to contact the Director, and no idea how to do so, even if he did want to.
The Serbian left the Greek alone on his luxurious balcony and stepped back inside to head to the elevator, pulling a phone from his pocket as he did so.
Kostas Kostopoulos did his best not to let his temper flare in this work. He always tried to retain a dispassionate approach. So many other traffickers were thugs, gangsters, criminals through and through. But the organization Kostopoulos worked for, though they used petty gangsters for their grunt work, was made up of businessmen and businesswomen, not thugs. They acquired, produced, transported, traded, and profited on a product, and the fact that the product they dealt in was human beings had been tamped down by years of incredibly positive balance sheets and a growth line unparalleled in any other legitimate industry since the dot-com boom twenty years earlier.
Nobody in any position of authority in the endeavor thought of their product as people. They were resources. Assets.
Merchandise.
But despite the Greek’s desire to remain unemotional about what happened, he recognized that the shuttering of one of his pipeline way stations would hurt the monthly flow of product west, and this would ultimately reflect poorly on him.
Kostopoulos might have been a powerful regional director in one of the largest human trafficking organizations in the world, but he didn’t call the shots, and his dispassion now was tempered by the fact that he knew that some extraordinarily powerful and dangerous individuals were going to be very unhappy with him when he told them of last night’s events.
He’d have to make a call now, to obtain Consortium approval to send assassins after this Vukovic, because Kostas Kostopoulos didn’t make these decisions on his own.
* * *
• • •
Jaco Verdoorn didn’t like this part of his job, but it was not because he was squeamish or sensitive about murder.
He’d killed before, many times. He’d killed in combat, and he’d killed in security contract work, and he’d even killed once in a street fight in Pretoria.
But this? Tonight? This kind of killing, he felt, was far beneath him.