Page 24 of One Minute Out

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?”

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