Belgrade arrived in a haze of woodsmoke and diesel exhaust, the late April sky pressed low over the city like a gray lid. Lattimer had taken a budget flight from Luton the previous evening, traveling on a passport that listed his occupation as "consultant" and his destination as "tourism." He'd left Elena in London with strict instructions to wait for his signal, though he suspected she wouldn't. The ones who hired private investigators rarely possessed the patience their investments required.
The meeting was set for a café in Dorćol, a neighborhood of narrow streets and nineteenth-century facades that had survived both world wars and the NATO bombing campaign with the same weary stoicism. Lattimer arrived an hour early and positioned himself at a corner table with sightlines to both entrances. He ordered a Turkish coffee he didn't drink and watched the morning crowd: pensioners reading newspapers, students hunched over laptops, a woman in a gray headscarf feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons on the windowsill.
His contact was late. Twenty minutes, then thirty. Lattimer was calculating the probability of a setup when a man slid into the chair opposite him with the practiced silence of someone who'd learned to move without drawing attention.
"Nikolai Vasić," the man said. His English carried the faint musicality of a native Serbian speaker who'd spent too many years abroad. "You're Lattimer. You look older than your file photo."
"You look exactly like your voice on the phone. What took you so long?"
Vasić was maybe forty-five, with the gaunt intensity of a war correspondent and the nicotine-stained fingers to match. He wore a leather jacket that had been expensive a decade ago and carried a canvas satchel that clinked faintly when he set it on the floor. His eyes moved constantly, cataloging the room, the windows, the street beyond.
"I was making sure you came alone. You did. I was also making sure no one followed you from the airport. Someone did, but they lost interest when you took the taxi to the wrong address and walked the last kilometer."
Lattimer hadn't noticed a tail. He filed that discomfort away for later examination. "Who's watching the airport?"
"Everyone. Karavuk intelligence, McCaskey's private security, probably the Russians for good measure. The Zlatna Valley sits on a route that interests a lot of people for a lot of reasons." Vasić signaled the waiter for coffee. "Your message said you're looking for a missing British tourist."
"Leo Protor. Architect. Thirty-four. Last seen at the Horizon Hostel in Vranjevo on April fourth."
"I know who he is. I've been tracking disappearances in the valley for two years. Protor is number seventeen by my count. Seventeen foreign nationals who entered the Zlatna Valley and didn't exit it, at least not through any official checkpoint."
The number landed in Lattimer's chest like a fist. "Seventeen."
"Those are the ones I've confirmed. The actual number is likely higher. The valley has been swallowing people for centuries. The Romans lost a legion there. The Ottomans lost a garrison. The partisans used the caves as hideouts during the war and sometimes didn't come back. The difference now is that the disappearances are systematic."
Vasić opened his satchel and withdrew a folder, worn at the edges from repeated handling. He placed it on the table but didn't open it. "Before I show you this, you need to understand what you're walking into. The Zlatna Valley isn't just a geographic location. It's an economic ecosystem. The gold mines closed forty years ago. The textile factories moved to Bangladesh. The young people moved to Germany and Sweden. What's left is a population of aging farmers, a few tourist operators, and a network of criminal enterprises that have effectively replaced the legitimate economy."
"McCaskey's hostels."
"McCaskey is part of it, but he's not the architect. Horizon Hostels provides infrastructure—accommodation, transportation, cover identities for guests who need to disappear. But the network itself is older than McCaskey's involvement. It dates back to the Yugoslav wars, when the valley became a transit route for arms, drugs, and people fleeing the fighting. After the wars ended, the same routes adapted to peacetime commodities."
"Organs."
"That's part of it. The private clinic in Graz you asked about—that's real. It's called the Trakl Institute, named after the Austrian poet. On paper, it's a medical tourism facility specializing in cosmetic surgery and fertility treatments. In practice, it's a harvesting center. Wealthy patients from the Gulf states and Western Europe come for transplants. The organs have to come from somewhere."
Lattimer thought of Leo Protor, thirty-four years old, healthy, traveling alone in a region where a healthy body could be worth more than a lifetime of honest work. "And the Karavuk government?"
"The Karavuk government is not a monolith. Some officials are corrupt, some are simply overwhelmed, and some are genuinely trying to stop what's happening but don't have the resources. The Interior Ministry in the capital is three hundred kilometers from Vranjevo and has maybe a dozen officers tasked with policing the entire southern district. The municipal police in Vranjevo itself have six officers and one working vehicle. They're not going to start an investigation into a well-connected foreign company without evidence that would survive political scrutiny."
"What about Kostić?"
Vasić's expression shifted, something guarded moving behind his eyes. "Dragan Kostić was the seventh officer in Vranjevo. He was dismissed in 2016 after he tried to open a murder investigation into a German tourist who was found in a ravine with his kidneys missing. The official report said accidental death by misadventure. Kostić refused to sign it. He was fired within a week and spent the next three months in a psychiatric hospital for observation."
"He was institutionalized for refusing to falsify a death certificate?"
"It's a common tactic in Karavuk. Mental health commitments don't require a court order, and a diagnosis of paranoid delusion is an effective way to discredit anyone who asks uncomfortable questions. Kostić was released eventually, but the damage was done. His wife left him. His colleagues won't speak to him. He lives in a cottage on the edge of the valley and drinks homemade rakija while the network he tried to expose continues operating in plain sight."
Lattimer absorbed this, fitting the pieces together. Elena had described Dragan Kostić as a potential ally, someone who might help them navigate the valley's treacherous social terrain. The reality was more complicated. Kostić wasn't an ally—he was a warning of what happened to people who challenged the system without understanding its depth.
"I need to talk to him," Lattimer said.
"You won't like what he has to say. He's been warning about the trafficking for almost a decade. No one believed him when it mattered. Now he's a cautionary tale that parents tell their children to keep them from joining the police."
"Can you arrange the meeting?"
Vasić was silent for a long moment. He opened the folder and spread several photographs across the table. They showed a limestone gorge, a cluster of Soviet-era buildings, and a modern structure that looked jarringly out of place: clean lines, solar panels, a sign bearing the Horizon Hostels logo—a stylized sun rising over a mountain peak.
"This was taken three months ago," Vasić said, tapping the photograph of the modern building. "The Vranjevo hostel. Notice anything unusual?"
Lattimer studied the image. The building was larger than he'd expected for a hostel in a remote valley, maybe three floors with a basement level visible through ground-floor windows. The parking lot held two vehicles: a minibus with Horizon branding and an unmarked white van with tinted windows. "It's built to handle more guests than the valley normally receives."
"It's built to process people, not accommodate tourists. The basement level is the key. It connects to the old mining tunnels that run beneath the valley. Those tunnels can move a person from the hostel to the Austrian border without them ever surfacing."
"You've been inside?"
"I've been inside the legitimate hostels. The Vranjevo location is different. It's listed as a private retreat for corporate clients. The exemption McCaskey's lawyers filed under the investment protection act means it doesn't have to report guest registrations to the local authorities. It doesn't have to submit to health inspections or fire safety reviews. For all practical purposes, it's a private facility operating outside Karavuk law."
"And inside Karavuk law simultaneously."
"That's the genius of it. The exemption was written specifically to attract foreign investment in economically depressed regions. It was supposed to apply to mining operations and textile factories. McCaskey's legal team argued that tourism constitutes an industrial activity under the statute's definition. The court agreed. The precedent was set."
Lattimer understood then, with a clarity that settled into his bones like cold water. Silas McCaskey hadn't bought his way past Karavuk law. He'd used Karavuk law to create a space where his operations weren't subject to law at all. It was more elegant than corruption, and far harder to dismantle.
"There's something else." Vasić withdrew a final photograph, this one clearly taken with a long lens from a considerable distance. It showed a man in an expensive overcoat standing outside the Vranjevo hostel, flanked by two security personnel whose posture suggested military training. "This was taken six weeks ago. The man in the center is Silas McCaskey. He doesn't visit the legitimate hostels. He has regional managers for that. He visits Vranjevo personally, and he visits often."
Before Lattimer could respond, his phone vibrated with an incoming message. He glanced at the screen. It was Elena.
Call me immediately. Something's happened.
He excused himself from the table and stepped outside. The Dorćol street was quiet, a dog sleeping in a doorway, an old woman watering geraniums on a balcony. He dialed Elena's number.
She answered on the first ring. "Someone broke into Leo's flat. The police called me an hour ago. Nothing was taken—nothing obvious, at least. But his laptop is gone, and his backup drives. All his architectural work, his photographs, his research notes on the valley. Everything."
"Was there forced entry?"
"The lock was picked professionally. No damage. The neighbors didn't hear anything. The police are treating it as a routine burglary, but I know it's not. They knew exactly what to take."
Lattimer leaned against the café wall, thinking. Someone was monitoring Elena's movements, had known she was building a case, had moved to eliminate the evidence Leo had compiled before his disappearance. "Did Leo have anything on cloud storage? Anything they couldn't access physically?"
There was a pause. He heard her breathing, the sound of London traffic in the background. "He sent me files a few months ago. Architectural files, he said. I never opened them. I was too busy with work. I forgot they were there."
"Open them now. And don't do it from your own computer. Go to an internet café, use a machine that isn't linked to your identity. Whatever's in those files, someone doesn't want it found."
"I'm going to New York," Elena said, her voice shifting into a register Lattimer recognized: the tone of a decision already made, an action already set in motion. "McCaskey's headquarters is in Manhattan. I've contacted a firm there, Whitmore & Dine. They specialize in corporate liability cases. They're willing to take it on contingency."
"Elena, filing a lawsuit is not the same as finding your brother."
"It's the only leverage I have. Karavuk won't investigate. The Met won't investigate because it's outside their jurisdiction. But if I can prove McCaskey's operation is connected to Leo's disappearance, an American court can compel discovery. Bank records. Internal communications. The things McCaskey has spent twenty years hiding."
"And if you're wrong?"
"I'm not wrong. Leo was investigating the valley. He found something, and now he's gone. The same day his flat is burglarized, someone breaks in and takes only his research. That's not a coincidence. It's a cover-up."
Lattimer didn't argue. She wasn't wrong about the pattern, only perhaps about its meaning. There was a difference between investigating a crime and pursuing a vendetta, and he could already feel Elena sliding across that boundary, the momentum of her grief and fury carrying her toward a point where the distinction would blur and then vanish entirely.
"Be careful in New York," he said. "McCaskey's lawyers will bury you in motions. Whitmore & Dine are good, but they're not cheap, and they're not miracle workers."
"I'm not looking for a miracle. I'm looking for a courtroom."
She ended the call.
Lattimer returned to the café. Vasić had finished his coffee and was studying the photographs with the expression of a man who'd spent too long staring at images of things that couldn't be unseen.
"Your client is filing a lawsuit?"
"Civil suit. New York. Protor versus McCaskey et al."
Vasić almost smiled. "The 'et al' will be the interesting part. McCaskey's legal architecture is designed to distribute liability across dozens of subsidiaries. You can't sue a man if you can't prove which company he was acting through."
"She's not trying to win. She's trying to expose something."
"Same thing, in the end." Vasić gathered the photographs and returned them to the folder. "I'll arrange the meeting with Kostić. Day after tomorrow, his cottage in the valley. Don't bring your phone. Don't bring anything with a GPS chip. And don't tell your client where you're going. The less she knows about what we find in the valley, the safer she'll be."
"Safe isn't what she's looking for."
Vasić stood, slinging his satchel over his shoulder. "Then she's in more danger than she understands. The valley doesn't just kill people, Detective Lattimer. It changes the people who survive it. You'll understand what I mean when you meet Kostić."
He left through the back entrance, disappearing into the maze of Dorćol's alleys with the same practiced silence he'd arrived with.
Lattimer remained at the table for a long while, the cold coffee untouched before him. Outside, the gray sky had begun to darken, threatening rain. He thought about the seventeen names in Vasić's folder, the eighteen-month-old Europol message warning of territory best avoided, the limestone cliffs that had swallowed a Roman legion and a German tourist and a British architect who'd gone looking for something called the Third Crossing.
And he thought about Elena Protor, halfway across the continent, preparing to file a lawsuit that would put her name on documents Silas McCaskey's lawyers would read within the hour. She was painting a target on her back, and she didn't even know it yet.
His phone vibrated again. This time it was an email from Elena, forwarded from the address Leo had used to send her his architectural files months ago. The attachment was a collection of photographs: building schematics, survey maps, and something that made Lattimer's breath catch.
It was a blueprint, hand-drawn in blue ink on yellowing paper, showing a cross-section of the Zlatna Valley. The surface features were labeled in English. But beneath the surface, in the honeycomb of abandoned mine tunnels that ran for kilometers in every direction, someone had sketched a secondary network. Rooms. Corridors. Storage facilities. And at the center, a chamber labeled with three words in Leo Protor's handwriting:
The Processing Floor.
Lattimer closed the email and ordered a second coffee.
The rain began to fall over Belgrade, drumming against the café windows, and somewhere in the Zlatna Valley, Dragan Kostić was waiting to tell him the things that had already destroyed one man who'd tried to expose the truth.
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