One Minute Out Read online

  To this I shrug. “You may be right about that.”

  She looks at me, then again says, “You are good man.”

  A good man? She’s got me all wrong. For the third time I say, “You aren’t thinking straight, Liliana. Get some rest.”

  EIGHT

  It was an especially beautiful summer morning in the Hollywood Hills. Three kids—a ten-year-old boy and girls of twelve and sixteen—lounged around the infinity pool behind an Italian Renaissance Revival mansion, a woman in her forties looked gorgeous while sipping her coffee at a table on the expansive back patio, and landscapers and gardeners toiled around the steeply graded two-acre property. The skyline of LA was striking in the distance; the smoggy haze that usually blanketed the city was less pronounced than usual.

  And all this filled fifty-four-year-old Kenneth Cage with a sense of peace.

  His palatial home had been built in the 1940s for a Hollywood mogul, and an impressive list of actors and musicians had resided there over the years. Cage himself was attached to the world of entertainment via one of his businesses, but he had more money than any five of the movie stars or rock stars who’d ever lived at this Hollywood address.

  And this home was but one of six he kept here in the United States. There was Steamboat Springs and Boston and New York and Jackson Hole and Lake Tahoe, and he had his eyes on a four-hundred-acre winery in Sonoma County.

  All this wealth and property came with a cost, of course. Even now as he sat at his kitchen island, looking out the open patio door and enjoying his family while they enjoyed the fruit of his labors, in the distance he also counted three men patrolling the well-manicured grounds. There were three more somewhere around here he couldn’t see, and the house was lined with cameras, all fed into a control center with yet another security officer monitoring them.

  The leader of Ken Cage’s security detail was an ex–Navy SEAL and LAPD SWAT officer named Sean Hall, and while the other men rotated in three shifts throughout the day, Hall lived in a detached two-thousand-square-foot pool house just off the patio, and he went everywhere his boss went from the hours of nine a.m. until Cage was tucked into bed at night.

  Right now Sean was still in his pool house, because Cage had a strict rule: no work before nine. That meant no bodyguards inside the mansion, no phone calls or e-mails, no spreadsheets or PowerPoints or business-related visitors.

  Cage traveled on business regularly, but he was a family man and, when he was home, he carved out time for Heather and the kids.

  Cage always told others that he regarded the security precautions as one of the ancillary and necessary costs of success, but the truth was, he liked the feeling of significance it conveyed when he walked as the nucleus of a group of beefy ex-cops and military men. Heather didn’t like the intrusion into her life brought on by the bodyguards, but Ken truly didn’t mind, because it fed his massive ego.

  He finished his breakfast on the marble kitchen counter, chatted briefly with his son about the Dodgers’ win over the Twins the night before, and looked over some art made by his twelve-year-old daughter, pronouncing the watercolor to be magnificent.

  Soon his three kids were swimming and splashing in the big infinity pool overlooking the city skyline. Heather would join them as soon as she changed into her bathing suit, but now she sat on the sofa with her husband in the living room, enjoying her coffee and his companionship before he retired into his home office for the workday.

  They were in the middle of a discussion about colleges for their daughter; Cage had gone to Princeton and then Wharton while Heather had graduated from Harvard, but Charlotte wanted to go to UCLA and get a degree in fine arts. Heather was pushing for Ken to use his clout to try to get her into Harvard, and just as Ken tried to shift the conversation back to Princeton, his mobile rang and he glanced down at it, saw the number, and furrowed his brow.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Heather.

  “It’s eight fifty and this is work. On my cell.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t punch in till nine when I’m home. Everybody knows this is my family time.”

  She smiled back at him. “You’ve been a good boy lately. I’ll let you off the hook today.”

  Ken chuckled. “Nope. I’ll get rid of him and go hang with the kids while you get your suit on.”

  Despite the work interruption, Cage answered the phone with a little smile on his face. He couldn’t help it. Life was good. With a light and airy voice he said, “Hey there. I’ll call you back in about fifteen—”

  Ken Cage stopped talking. As he listened his smile faded, and he stood. To Heather he said, “Gotta take this. Sorry, babe.”

  He turned and headed for his study. When he closed himself in, he walked over to his antique walnut partner’s desk, picked up a remote, and pressed a button. Instantly his office stereo system, a half-million-dollar Backes & Müller BM 100, began projecting the lifelike, warm, rich sounds of a thunderstorm throughout the room.

  He sat down and spoke in a low and gruff voice utterly different than the one he had been using with his family. “We’re going encrypted.”

  “Encrypted,” came the confirmation from the man on the other end of the line, speaking with a heavy South African accent. Now Cage tapped some unmarked buttons at the bottom of his phone system. The sound over the line changed a little, as did the tonal qualities of the men’s voices, but the two could hear each other without difficulty.

  Cage opened with, “Fuck, Jaco. You know the rules. No calls till nine.”

  “Something’s happened.”

  “I told you to send the two whores back home and then get over to Berlin. You need me to hold your hand for that?”

  If Jaco Verdoorn felt chastened, he didn’t show it in his voice. “Sorry, sir, but this isn’t about the two items you asked me to deal with. A new situation warrants your attention.”

  “What situation?”

  “Bosnia, sir.”

  “You know what? Stop. I don’t have time for any drama right now. I’ve got to prepare for the trip next week to—”

  “A hit man killed seven, including the man running the Mostar way station, a former Serb general named Babic.”

  Kenneth Cage, the Director of the Consortium, froze in place at his desk for a moment. Then he said, “Well . . . that’s pretty dramatic. Who hired the hit man?”

  “The Serbs think a Croatian concern was gunning for Babic due to his activities in the nineties, and when they found out where he was living, they outsourced the hit so they didn’t start anything directly with either Serbia or Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

  Cage knew the name Ratko Babic, but he’d known nothing about Babic working for him. He’d not even known Mostar was a way station. He never concerned himself with the minutiae of his operation, considering himself above that level of work. He delegated power both to optimize efficiency and to keep his hands clean.

  Cage wasn’t ready to involve himself in these dirty affairs across the globe directly. “I can’t believe I’m talking to you about this shit. You need to handle stuff like this before it makes its way up to me.”

  “Frankly, sir, we’ve never encountered anything like this.”

  With a sigh, the man in Hollywood said, “The regional director over there in Croatia . . . he’s the Greek guy, right?”

  “Kostas Kostopoulos, yes. I’ve been in contact with him.”

  “Tell him he’s got carte blanche to find this asshole and terminate him. That’s the word you guys use for this sort of shit, isn’t it?”

  “It’s . . . it’s one way of putting it, I suppose. But I’m not sure Kostas’s people are the right men for the job.”

  “Why not?”

  “They have limited range and no influence anywhere other than in the Balkans. This might be something I need to handle alone. I can find him, and I can eliminate him.”

  Cage looked down a
t his phone. “You? You’ve got better things to do running my day-to-day operations than going on a personal safari for some hit man.”

  “Respectfully, I think he could pose a threat to our interests, and I should also take steps to—”

  “C’mon, Jaco,” Cage said. “You aren’t a man hunter anymore. You are helping me run a ten-billion-dollar-a-year business.”

  A pause from the other end, and then the South African responded with obvious disappointment. “Yes, sir. I’ll tell the Greek to look for the assassin.”

  Cage hung up, then looked at the grandfather clock on the wall. It was after nine now, so he opened up an e-mail to check this month’s numbers in Denmark.

  As the Director of the Consortium, he was responsible for keeping his eyes on the bottom line.

  But his attention didn’t stay on work for long. This new situation in Bosnia, the removal of the two girls, a trip he had planned to Italy in just a few days, and the arrival of his next shipment of merchandise, including two new girls he’d taken a particular interest in . . .

  There was a lot for Ken Cage to think about these days, a lot of balls in the air. He began poring through the Danish numbers, telling himself he’d spend the full day in his home office.

  * * *

  • • •

  Police captain Niko Vukovic left his station at ten p.m., climbing into his SUV with his driver and his chief protection agent, both well-trained officers, with a chase vehicle rolling behind with two more cops. They drove north towards Vukovic’s residence to the south of the urban center of Mostar, just on the east side of the small but swift Neretva River.

  A gray Mercedes panel truck followed the two SUVs the entire way, but traffic was dense enough tonight, and none of the five cops picked up on the tail.

  The two police vehicles pulled into a small quiet square three blocks from the river and stopped in front of an old gray building close to the street. The two bodyguards who weren’t also drivers climbed out with the captain, then walked him into his residence.

  A few minutes later the pair of guards exited the building, leaving Niko Vukovic alone inside.

  Once the protectee was safely ensconced in his residence for the evening, the two SUVs rolled out of the square.

  None of the four cops providing security for their chief noticed the gray van rolling slowly up a road on the far side of the square, finally coming to a standstill ten meters before the intersection.

  Two individuals sat in the van now, but there were three in total in this team of Hungarian hit men. The third, the unit leader, was busy back at the hotel, preparing their escape route, poring over maps, circling areas of major congestion.

  The Hungarians were all active-duty members of their own country’s national police force, but they also worked a side job as enforcers for the Pitovci, an organized-crime entity based in Bratislava, Slovakia. Normally their duties for the Pitovci kept them in and around Budapest where they lived and worked, just over the border from the Slovakian capital, but today they had been sent much farther abroad, all the way here in southern Bosnia.

  The men had driven themselves down and checked into a local hotel with forged passports, but they had no plans to stay in town long. A night to reconnoiter, and a night to act, and then they’d race back north.

  These men had killed before, and they were confident they had it down.

  The passenger in the van made a call on his mobile, waited a moment, then said, “He’s home; his security has left for the night. No, they didn’t even stay with him. I’ll text you the address. Fifteen minutes from the hotel. Karoly and I can do it right now if you want.”

  “No,” came the reply. “We have a plan. We are sticking to it. Tomorrow night, all three of us.”

  “Oke’, boss. You want us to stay here?”

  “For another hour. Just to make sure he doesn’t have any visitors.”

  “Mergertem.” I understand. The Hungarian in the passenger seat ended the call, then looked to the driver. “Wouldn’t be hard. Small-town Bosnian police chief. What’s the big deal?”

  “You know Zente. If he makes a plan, you are not going to change it.”

  “Yeah,” the other man said. “He does like to be the boss, doesn’t he?”

  * * *

  • • •

  The road where the van sat had a good view to the building across the tiny square, but from the Hungarians’ vantage point they were unable to see a darkened alcove in front of a small mosque to the right of the intersection in front of them. There, a lone woman stood in a black raincoat, and she kept her eyes on the same building as the men on her left, who she was also unable to see.

  Talyssa Corbu was twenty-nine years old, thin, with small elvish facial features and short dyed red hair mostly hidden by the hood of her jacket. She was a foreigner here in Bosnia and, also like the men sitting thirty meters to her left in the van, she was associated with law enforcement.

  This was Talyssa’s second day in Mostar. On the first she’d staked out the police station for ten hours before seeing what she wanted to see, and then she had followed Niko Vukovic home. She’d come back this morning, saw him head in to work around ten a.m., and then tried breaking into the man’s apartment building in broad daylight. But Vukovic had good locks and a better security system, and his building had several other units nearby. Moreover, he lived next door to a private day care that created a lot of come-and-go activity on the sidewalk out front during the daytime hours.

  So she had abandoned this plan, and instead she spent the day here in the tiny little park at the center of the square a kilometer north of the Old Bridge, waiting for Vukovic to come home.

  Now she waited for his light to switch off.

  Minutes later it did, and then Talyssa Corbu wrote the time down and began walking away.

  Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she’d get what she came for.

  It was a good line for her to repeat through her head, but the truth was she had little real confidence in her plan.

  Unlike the Hungarians, Corbu was not here on the job for anyone. No, this was personal, as personal as things got. She was in a foreign country planning on extracting information from a city police chief, and she had no training whatsoever to do so.

  But she also had no choice.

  She made her way back to her hotel a few minutes later, climbed the stairs to her room, all the while trying to come up with a better plan than the one she had now, because she worried that the one she had now would get her killed long before she found what she was looking for.

  NINE

  Liliana and I get up at five a.m. and drive to Sarajevo, arriving at the main train station at eight, right in the middle of the morning flow of commuters. Since she doesn’t have a passport, I spend most of the drive from Mostar talking her through the tradecraft I employ to avoid immigration officials on trains, and as soon as we arrive I book her a long, circuitous trip that will take her north into Croatia, then northeast into Hungary, then south into Romania, then finally east to Moldova. With a little luck and the info I give her she’ll make it home fine, and I also hand her five thousand euros in case she needs to drop some bribes along the way to ensure all goes smoothly, as well as to help her get started when she makes it back home.

  This route will keep her out of Serbia, and I make her promise to get off the train in Moldova before she gets to Tiraspol, where she can take a local bus to her little town.

  She’ll be fine, I tell myself. At least in the short term.

  Long term? I don’t know what this experience has done to her, but I can take a guess.

  I feel bad for Liliana, because even if this is over for her . . . it’s not over for her.

  The public address system announces the boarding of the train to Zagreb, and Liliana looks up at me without speaking.

  “Take care of yourself” is al
l I can manage.

  She hesitates, and I realize she’s trying to think of something to say, as well. I figure she could just say Thanks, but I’ve got her all wrong.

  “The other girls, Harry. They are not like me. They don’t deserve what happened to them.”

  Jesus. This woman is so psychologically damaged I don’t know if she’ll ever recover. It’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen in the past day. Not the violence, the murder, the kidnapping, the rape. It’s the fucking with people’s brains that is the end result of shit like this.

  Like someone once fucked with mine.

  This world. I swear to God. If there weren’t just a few good people left in it I’d burn it down to the ground with me inside.

  I wish I had a way to make her understand that what happened to her isn’t her fault, but I’m not that guy. All I say is, “Go home. Be safe. Find out what makes you happy, and then do it. Everybody’s got to do something that makes them happy.” I give her a smile, or my version of one. It’s stressed, tired, forced . . . but it’s all I’ve got at a moment like this.

  She nods and boards the train. I wonder about her, whether she’ll go back to her village or whether she’ll go back to Tiraspol to start turning tricks again. I have no idea.

  I’m a gunfighter. Full stop. So much of the other stuff that happens around me is over my head.

  I tell myself this so I don’t think about it too much, but it doesn’t really work.

  I think about it all the time.

  A minute later I’m in my Jeep, heading back to Mostar, ready to beat the holy fuck out of some piece-of-shit dirty cop because, just as I told Liliana, everybody’s got to do something that makes them happy.

  * * *

  • • •

  Shortly before ten p.m., the three Hungarian police officers working for the Slovakian mob stood in the shadows of a side street just twenty-five meters from the foyer to Vukovic’s old building, smoking cigarettes and doing their best to control the adrenaline that had been rising in their bodies all day as the moment their target arrived home from work approached.