Slavery was crime’s growth industry, its profits rapidly catching up with those to be made from illicit weapons and drugs. In some ways, the business model was far smarter. You could only sell a gun or a gram of cocaine once you could sell a sex slave ten times a night. But easy money bred tough competition. Visar lived in a permanent state of professional paranoia, constantly on the lookout for enemies, alert to every possible threat to his position, whether real or imagined.

He’d been taking a break on his 180-foot yacht, cruising the Dalmatian coast of Croatia with his family, when he heard that one of his senior lieutenants, Ergon Ali, had been trying to cut a deal with a rival boss. The information was false, planted to deceive, but it had the desired effect.

Visar sent a four-man team to the Berlin strip club that served as Ali’s base. They knocked Ali unconscious with the butt of a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, bundled him into the trunk of an S-Class Mercedes, shot him full of heroin, and hit the autobahn south. Fourteen hours later they arrived in Split, the Croatian seaside town that had once been the favored summer resort of the emperors of Rome.

Visar’s men topped up Ali’s dose to keep him quiet, then drove their Merc onto the ferry to the island of Hvar, sticking it next to a camper van filled with Australian students on a round-Europe tour. They spent the three-hour voyage in the ferry bar, matching the Aussies beer for beer. The only other occupant of the bar was sitting in the corner, a bearded man in a battered Panama hat, with a pair of binoculars around his neck, eking out a pot of tea and studiously consulting a book about bird watching.

When Visar’s men reached the villa, they dumped Ergon Ali, bound and gagged, in the cellar. They did not want to waste their boss’s time, so they spent the rest of the night and all the next day beating, electrocuting, and half-drowning the man who had once been their friend. Only when they felt that Ali was about to crack did they call Skender Visar to inform him that everything had been prepared for his arrival. By the time Visar hung up, the blades on his helicopter had already started to turn. He was on his way to apply the finishing touches to Ergon Ali’s interrogation. And Samuel Carver, bird watching now far from his mind, was waiting for him.