One Minute Out

by Mark Greaney

  But Cage didn’t go to the G-Wagen. Out in front of the Hollywood dance studio, he moved over to a bench and answered the phone in an angry tone, while his bodyguard remained a few feet behind.

  “Not the best time, Jaco.”

  “Sir, I need this encrypted.”

  The American sighed, tapped a couple of keys that encrypted the call on his end, and said, “What’s up now?”

  “It’s about the Balkans.”

  “I told you to handle that.”

  “I need someone who can make a decision, sir.”

  Cage sat on a bench by the parking lot, his head sagged. “Dammit,” he said, while looking around to make certain no one was in earshot. “What’s the fucking problem now?”

  Jaco’s voice was its usual businesslike tone. “It was thought the killings in Bosnia were associated with an assassination attempt on the man running the way station. Something unrelated to the pipeline.”

  “Some uber assassin, right?”

  “Yes, sir. But if that were the case, we’d expect that man to be long gone from the area where the killings happened, and we’d also expect him to pose no more threat to the pipeline.”

  “But?”

  “But by all reports, the man who killed Babic the other day also kidnapped the Mostar police chief this afternoon, local time.”

  The American replied with, “And why does that interest me in the slightest?”

  “Because Chief Niko Vukovic worked for the pipeline.”

  Cage felt hot anger welling within him. “So . . . you are saying someone is fucking with my operation.”

  “It seems that way, sir. The entire police force in the Mostar area is looking for their chief, of course, so I hope to have news before long. If he’s recovered alive, then—”

  “He’s been grabbed by an assassin. Finding him alive doesn’t sound very likely, now, does it?”

  “No, sir. But even if he isn’t recovered alive, we can hope for clues. Obviously, the cops will turn the area upside down looking for the assassin whether he keeps Vukovic or kills him and dumps the body.”

  Cage said, “Is this something Kostopoulos can handle?”

  “No, sir. I know a lot about this mysterious Gray Man. He’s just too good.”

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “I want to get my team together. Fly into Dubrovnik, the next stop in the pipeline. It will take some time; my men are spread out all over the world right now. But we’ll get in there and protect the shipment, keep an eye out for this American bastard.”

  Cage waved a hand in the air. “Approved. If the Greek and his Albanians can’t get it done, then it’s up to you and your boys. I’ll be at the market in Venice in two days. I sure as hell don’t want this maniac showing up there. This gets dealt with now, and it gets dealt with hard! Got it?”

  The pause was short, and the reply bore all the deference of a military man serving his master. “Yes, sir. I’ll get the boys together.”

  Kenneth Cage hung up his phone, shaking his head in disgust. He wasn’t worried about his overall operation in the slightest. It was strong and secure, and the men, women, and organizations under him in the Consortium would do what needed to be done. No, he was bothered by the fact that his day had been sullied with talk of hit men and kidnappings.

  Cage didn’t consider himself a criminal. Just one hell of a good businessman.

  A partner in a Hollywood production company valued north of eight hundred million dollars, he was also senior partner in a hedge fund with assets under management seven times that.

  With a business degree from Wharton, he’d gone into banking in the eighties and computer programming in the nineties, he had been at the vanguard of virtually all the advances that technology had brought to the finance industry in the past three decades, and he’d made a name for himself—and a fortune along with it—exploiting the markets with the latest electronic tools.

  He created and managed a hedge fund at the height of the dot-com bubble, but with the bust his fortunes evaporated overnight. This hit him hard, not because his investors lost mightily but because he’d grown accustomed to both the lifestyle and the sense of personal power that came along with his riches. After a single lean year he decided, without a moment’s guilt or indecision, that he would regain his stature by any means necessary.

  Cage used his vast skill set in computers and finance to begin laundering money. First for the doctors and lawyers who were his hard-hit fund’s clients, helping them protect endangered assets from their wives, their business partners, and Uncle Sam. But soon he developed both tactics and processes that could clean dirty money on a much larger scale.

  By the stock market crash of ’07 he found himself recession proof, because he was hard at work for drug cartels, third-world dictators, high-end corporate and government embezzlers, even revolutionary and terrorist organizations, along with a host of other shady clients.

  Through his efforts, aircraft and even cargo ships full of palletized cash were turned into sound, legal assets, and though he’d gone to great lengths to keep himself safe and out of the eyes of police, those in the underworld knew that there was a shadowy man in the United States who could get their massive amounts of currency turned into heavy balances held in untraceable offshore accounts or into hard assets like property, luxury cars, and jewelry.

  Cage had the brains, the know-how, and the sheer creativity necessary for his work, and he loved it as passionately as he loved Heather and his three kids.

  For the first several years that he worked in illegal finance, he was more than satisfied to play the exciting shell game of money laundering, and play it better than anyone else.

  And though he was a dedicated family man while at home, he began to enjoy his role on the periphery of the underworld when away. This wasn’t hard for him, as his work introduced him to the top criminal industries on Earth: drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and human trafficking.

  An organization out of the Middle East that trafficked women from all over Asia and Eastern Europe into Western Europe employed his creative financial services, and on a trip to Marseilles Cage had been offered a taste of their wares. Cage enjoyed the power he saw in himself while subjugating and abusing the young women; it made him feel virile and potent, and soon he tweaked his illicit business model to cater specifically to this industry so he could be more involved with human bondage.

  He didn’t traffic drugs or weapons himself, not because he had any moral aversion to doing so, but rather because that was not where his interests lay. He was a businessman, obsessed with the allure of expanding his realm, but though he might have made more money with drugs and weapons, he never ran the numbers to find out.

  It didn’t matter, because Ken Cage’s heart and soul were in sex slavery.

  Within a few years he led a large organization without a name; it was referred to among the players as simply “the Consortium.” He’d made arrangements with over two dozen other regional organizations around the globe: mafia groups from Turkey, Slovakia, Serbia, Greece, Italy, Belarus, and Ukraine, and criminal gangs in Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, Spain, and the United States.

  He also developed, along with advice of the experts in the target regions, systems for finding and bringing the best product to market: Albanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian “recruiters” who snatched or coerced women and sold them into the pipeline.

  The American mastermind saw himself as an overseer of a process and the inventor of a brilliant, efficient, well-oiled machine. Together the organizations and assets of his Consortium now accounted, by his money cruncher’s recent estimations, for roughly six percent of the world’s 150-billion-dollar annual human trafficking revenue.

  Ten billion dollars a year filtered into the Consortium’s component parts, and the cash and the Consortium’s share of the world’s supply of slave
s was growing in double digits. It was real money; men and women would kill to get it and to protect it from any threat to the Consortium, and men and women had killed to do just that.

  Whether through assassinations, turf wars, or executions of slaves who either could not work or would not hold their tongues about the pipeline, the violence associated with the organization was truly staggering. And this was in addition to the rape, the humiliation and subjugation of human beings, and the theft of liberty and labor that took place as a matter of course in the day-to-day operations of the Consortium.

  Police had been bought off; high government functionaries in developing nations had been corrupted.

  Ken Cage had started it all, retained ultimate control over much of the oversight, but just as he had a rule that his involvement was hidden behind dozens of shell companies, he also had a rule that he would never, ever sully himself with violence. He had others to do that for him. Not only in the form of his security force—Jaco Verdoorn’s small but specialized unit of well-trained Afrikaner shock troops—but every single organization that assisted along the pipeline had their own killers and captors, corruptors, and enforcers.

  MS-13, ’Ndrangheta, the Gulf Cartel, the Pitovci, the Branjevo Partizans: the names of the gangs and cartels and the other criminal concerns had meant nothing but news headlines to Cage before he started his process, but now they were integral to his own success.

  The American in the Hollywood Hills was a supervillain masquerading as an everyman, albeit an outrageously wealthy one, and no one who saw him on the streets of LA would ever have a clue that the short and bald middle-aged man had almost single-handedly created a massive worldwide organization of abject misery.

  That was by design. Cage compartmentalized his criminal behavior and his home life, and nothing was more vital to him than keeping those two worlds apart.

  He took trips every four months or so to different source locations to personally pick out his own stable of girls and had them recruited by any means necessary and brought over to a large property owned by one of his offshores north of LA, where he would travel to sample the best of the best of his product.

  He’d expanded the ranch into a compound of sorts, had it staffed with attendants for the women—prison guards, essentially—as well as a robust security team, and he’d invited his close friends and business associates to use the facility, and the product stored there, as they wished. Hollywood moguls, investment bankers, shipping magnates, the CEO of an airline: “the Ranch” became their own personal Disneyland of debauchery.

  Over the previous winter Cage had traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, spending time with his entourage in nightclubs. Jaco Verdoorn and his men ran his personal security detail. Cage and his associates chose six women over their week there, then returned home.

  Recruiters took the women and placed them into the northern pipeline, and in a matter of weeks the girls were in California, standing before Cage.

  But as was always the case, after a few months he grew tired of the new lot and wanted some fresh supply.

  So six weeks earlier he’d gone to Bucharest, a return trip because his last time there had been fruitful. On this visit he picked out three women, including a stunning young brunette who chatted with him at length in a nightclub. The young brunette was half a head taller than him, and she possessed the highest cheekbones, the softest lips, and the most piercing eyes he’d ever seen.

  He’d grow tired of her once she was his, but for now the anticipation of having her subjected to all manner of humiliation for his pleasure in his nest filled his brain with an impossibly rich mixture of “feel good” chemicals.

  Cage lived for this shit.

  He’d left Bucharest with instructions for his local recruiters to get that girl in the pipeline and over to him as soon as possible, by any means necessary.

  And then he’d returned home to the world of a multimillionaire father, to baseball practice and dinners with friends in outdoor cafés on Rodeo Drive and evenings in the hot tub talking over family matters with his wife.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ken Cage pocketed his phone, then started back towards the door to the studio, but he stopped himself. Turning to his bodyguard, he said, “Fuck it, Sean. Juliet’s done her bit. Heather’s already pissed at me for leaving. Might as well call it a day.”

  “Back to the house, sir?”

  Cage shook his head and began walking towards the Mercedes. Hall stayed with him. “Where Heather can yell at me? Hell no. We’re going to the Ranch.”

  “Right, sir.”

  FIFTEEN

  Maja stared out at the ocean and the late-afternoon sun hanging over it, and she wondered where the hell she was. Her view was partially obstructed by the ruined wall of the large, old, bombed-out warehouse, but enough of the coast was visible that she could tell she was somewhere beautiful.

  But it did not make her happy. Her predicament had not changed, only her view.

  The last two days and all of this morning she and the others from Mostar had sat in the blacked-out bus, parked in an underground garage. They’d been fed fast food, and a pair of buckets had been placed in the back for the women to use as a toilet, but no one was allowed to leave or to make a sound. It was a miserable two days, and Maja’s back ached and her bleary eyes burned from crying and lack of sleep.

  Then the girls from Mostar had been brought inside the ruined building during the daylight this afternoon, which surprised her because this was the only time she’d seen the sun since the night she was taken.

  Now she and the others, minus Diana, the poor girl who had been shot while trying to flee through the woods, were kept in a large open room with blown-out windows and trash all around. There was a view of a large body of water outside, but a fifteen-meter drop straight down onto broken masonry and concrete, sharp bent rebar and shattered glass meant no one here was going to jump out the window, run to the beach, and swim away. Bombs or tanks had attacked this building, but long ago, as Maja could see full-sized trees growing through the rubble below.

  She hadn’t paid attention in history class in school, but of course she knew about the war in Bosnia and Croatia and Kosovo and all those other places in the Balkans. This had to be Croatia, she felt almost certain, and the water in front of her the Adriatic Sea.

  When they’d climbed off the bus she’d been surprised to see that the Serbians were gone, and other men were watching over them now. Maja did not know what that meant. The one who ordered the women and girls about spoke English, and they were all darker-complected men. She couldn’t tell if they were Turkish or Albanian or perhaps even Greek, but they seemed more organized and professional than the group of gangsters who held them before.

  She had no clue if this was good news or bad.

  There was no door to this room, and no furniture, either, so the women and girls sat on the concrete floor. Any possible escape to the stairwell and then freedom was cut off by a group of five men who stood and sat near the open doorway.

  She had not been raped in the past two days, and she had not been raped in Bucharest or in Belgrade or in the cellar of the farmhouse. As far as she could tell, she was very much in the minority here in that regard. She didn’t know what this meant, only thought it could be because she kept her head down and avoided any eye contact with anyone, even with the other hostages.

  Just as she thought this, the leader of the new set of guards stepped closer to the group, and he spoke in English with an accent Maja, not a native speaker of English, could not identify.

  “We heard about the killing the other night. That wasn’t us. That was the Serbs.” He said “Serbs” like it sickened him to do so. “We wish you no harm, but if you try to leave our care, we will be forced to recover you, and then to punish you and everyone else for your misbehavior. Do not try to leave, and you will be treated with respect.”
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  Respect? Did he really say “respect”? Maja wanted to laugh at this, but she kept her eyes averted and her mouth closed.

  The man continued. “I suspect you all have been wondering why you are here and where you are going. I can only tell you this. You arrived early, due to the attack in Bosnia the other day. We were not ready to accept you, so we have put you here. Normally your quarters would be better, but we did the best with the time we had. Right now we are waiting on a boat, and it will arrive tomorrow night, and when it does arrive, you will all be taken to it and moved on to your next destination.”

  No one spoke still, but he answered the question everyone had. “You want to know where you are going, yes? I do not know. My men and I are here to keep you safe, and to put each and every last one of you on the boat. That is all we know.”

  He paused, as if waiting for questions, but no one dared. Finally he said, “I’ve heard all about this American who tried to rescue you, and then committed another attack on the process in Bosnia.”

  Maja didn’t know anything of another attack.

  “Just be aware. My men are nothing like the Serbian hoodlums you’ve been surrounded by. My men are trained. Skilled. We will remain vigilant, but we are unafraid of this masked man.

  “Now,” he continued, “we will be here for the rest of today and all day tomorrow. I suggest you rest, eat when the food arrives, and relax. I know the Serbians do not allow talking. That is not us. Talk to each other if you wish, but do so softly, or you will all lose privileges.”

  The leader turned away and left the room, leaving four more armed men standing around or sitting on broken windowsills.

  Maja sat quietly, her long dark hair hanging in her eyes, until a woman scooted over to her and sat close.

  “Do you speak Russian?” the woman asked in Russian.

  Maja did speak some, but she didn’t feel like talking. “Nyet.”

  “English?”

  Maja hesitated. She was afraid to speak but was certain this woman had heard her speaking English back in Belgrade. There was no denying it now. “Yes.”