Page 85 of One Minute Out

Then Talyssa and I both set the alarms on our phones to go off in four hours. The plan is to wake up at eight p.m., and to be down at the speedboat ready to go by nine.

Talyssa lies down fully clothed on one of the twin beds, while I pull a pillow and a comforter off the other and toss it in the bathroom, then lie down, unholster my Glock, and place it on the floor next to me.

I pray for sleep, but I also pray that I won’t dream of the red room yet again.

TWENTY-FIVE

The clouds over Los Angeles hung low in the morning, trapping the air and the exhaust of four million morning commuters. Street-level Hollywood was smogging up a couple hours after dawn, but high in the Hollywood Hills, the air was somewhat cleaner and markedly cooler.

Ken Cage wore a Harvard sweatshirt and an LA Kings ball cap to ward off the slight chill, and he sat at a canopied glass table near the deep end of his infinity pool, sipping coffee with his sandaled feet up on the table. Before him his landscaped and manicured two acres cascaded down a steep slope. Beyond that, Hollywood was splayed out flat and wide, and in the distance the skyline of downtown LA seemed to lord over the entire scene.

While he sipped coffee and gazed out at the view, all three of Cage’s kids lounged around the pool, having just finished breakfast. This was family time, before Dad started his workday, but all of Cage’s kids stared into screens held in their hands.

His wife, Heather, sat next to him, and she also held a tablet computer in her lap. She read aloud an article about a museum exhibit one of her friends had recently curated, but Ken Cage barely heard her.

As he gazed out at the view, his mind wasn’t focused on his family, on his property, or on his work; it was focused on the next shipment of girls to Rancho Esmerelda. Two would be arriving from Asia in less than a week. Two more he’d see in Venice on his upcoming trip there, and then they would be flown back to America with Jaco in a jet owned by one of the Consortium’s shells.

There would be other new girls coming, but these four he’d chosen by hand, and he was looking forward to enjoying them all.

His most anticipated, without question, was the snotty Romanian bitch who’d spurned his advances but drunk his champagne, had come to his hotel suite but refused to sleep with him, had slapped him hard across the face when he tried to overpower her, like he’d done so many times before with so many of his conquests.

The night he’d met the drop-dead-gorgeous brunette, she’d been all too ready to talk to him and to drink his booze, but she’d also seemed a little standoffish and dismissive. And when, on the third night in a row they’d seen each other, she told him he was too old for her, he’d leaned over to Jaco and demanded she be delivered on a platter to him in the USA, no matter the cost. Jaco had protested; he claimed to sense a rebelliousness in her that would be more trouble than she’d be worth, but Cage liked this trait. In fact, her defiance ranked just below her beauty in reasons why the American ordered the young woman be rolled up and placed in the pipeline for delivery.

He wasn’t worried about rebelliousness, about defiance. At the moment, Cage knew, the girl sat aboard Kostas Kostopoulos’s yacht, getting mind-fucked by Dr. Claudia Riesling. He knew Riesling would rid her of part of her rebelliousness, and he’d rid her of the balance of it himself when she got here.

So now the girl was on her way. He didn’t remember what she told him her name was—there were so many women he met on his recruiting trips, after all—but he’d been told Riesling was calling her Maja. She, the Thai, the Indonesian, and the Hungarian would be the newest members of Rancho Esmerelda, just seventy minutes north of the Hollywood Hills, and he and his protection detail would make the drive up there whenever he could get away from his duties at home and at work.

His thoughts returned to his present surroundings, but only until he saw his personal protection agent, Sean Hall, step out of the two-thousand-square-foot pool house tucked deep into lush landscaping on the other side of the patio. The wiry and tan blond made his way purposefully along a small fieldstone footpath, past a pair of koi ponds, and towards the family he protected. He had iPhone EarPods in his ears, and his gesticulations as he walked suggested to Cage that the ex–Navy SEAL was fully engaged in conversation.

Ken looked down at his watch and saw it was not yet eight. Hall didn’t normally report in till nine thirty.

The two men made eye contact and Hall ended his call, pulled out the EarPods, and stepped onto the patio.

Charlotte, Ken’s sixteen-year-old daughter, sat on a lounge chair by the pool away from her parents. “Hey, Sean. You been surfing?”

He kept walking, but smiled as he replied. “As much as I can. You’ve been practicing on your board?”

“A little bit,” she said unconvincingly.

“Waves have been up at Zuma Beach. We’re still going next Wednesday morning, right?”

“Yeah, I’m down,” she replied, and then Charlotte returned her attention to her phone.

Sean passed and high-fived twelve-year-old Juliet, also on her phone on a lounge chair, and waved across the pool to seven-year-old Justin, who sat watching a YouTube video on his iPad.

Ken Cage’s head of security stepped up to his table, and Heather finally took her eyes off her tablet. “You’re early. Want me to get Isabella to bring you out some coffee so you can join us?”

The forty-year-old shook his head. “I’m good, but thanks. I just need to talk to the boss here a second.”

“Then you both are starting work early this morning, I guess.” She said it with an admonishing tone, but it was clearly focused on Ken and not Sean.

Cage saw a serious look on his bodyguard’s face, so when Heather’s eyes drifted back down to her device, Ken jerked his head towards the house. Hall nodded, indicating that whatever he had to say did, in fact, need to be said in private.

Cage finished the last of his coffee in a swig as he stood. “Just give me a couple minutes. I’ll be right back.”

His wife replied, “Ask Isabella if she can bring me a refill.”

“Will do, honey.”

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