Page 171 of One Minute Out

“I don’t know what you do and I don’t know who you do it with, and I really don’t care. But you and I have built something, and you are not going to fuck it up!”

“It’s just work, babe. It’s not—”

“Bullshit!” Cage’s wife screamed. “You are a criminal, and I’m not talking about cooking the books. You’ve been doing that for twenty years. But whatever you’re into now, it’s changed you. Look, you can be gone as long as you want, you can fuck whoever or whatever you want while you’re gone, I can’t stop you. But you keep that shit away from me and the kids, and you keep us in the life you’ve given us. You are not going to take that away. Nobody is going to take that away from us. Do you understand me?”

Cage bit his lower lip, thought about his next words carefully. “I am doing my best to keep you out of any danger. Sean wants you to leave the house, just for a day or two, while he and Jaco take care of things. Please do this for me, honey.”

Heather Cage breathed into the phone for a few seconds, and Ken sat there listening, his eyes closed. “Charlotte isn’t here. She’s up in Arrowhead at the Ambertons’ lake house.”

“Call her. Tell her to stay right there.”

“She’s not going to answer her phone in the middle of the night, Ken.”

“Call her anyway. Do that, then take Justin and Juliet, and go.”

“Go where? The beach house?”

“No! Don’t go to one of our properties.” He thought a moment. “It’s almost one in the morning. Just go get a hotel. I don’t care where, but text me when you know where you’ll be. This will all be over and I’ll come—”

Heather hung up the phone.

Cage handed the device back to Sean. “They’re leaving.”

Sean had been listening in to the conversation. “Charlotte’s in Arrowhead, right?”

“Yeah. She’s fine.”

Cage then looked again to the girl he first met a month ago in a nightclub in Bucharest. He said, “So... all this is about you. Doesn’t that make you feel special?”

She turned away from him, gazed out the window.

His voice turned both sinister and sexual. “You thought things were tough before? Now I’m really going to punish you, and I’m going to love every second of it.” He smiled. “Jaco says we have to keep you alive. Anything else that happens to you is at my discretion, and you’ll pay dearly for this shit.”

The Romanian woman said nothing.

Cage leaned forward, close to her face. “I will fuck you up, and I’ll start today. By the time I’m finished with you, you won’t want to go home. You’ll want Jaco to fucking kill you to make the nightmares stop.”

“You are the devil,” Maja said.

“You bet I am, little girl.” Cage reached out, took her by the throat, and squeezed.

Sean Hall sat in the row in front of Cage and Maja, but he was still turned back in their direction. He grabbed his employer’s arm and pulled it away. “Keep your head in the game, Ken. We have to leave her in one piece to use her as insurance. She’s important.”

Cage shrugged away from his bodyguard’s grip, but he kept his malevolent eyes on the kidnapped woman, a cruel sneer of a smile on his face. “You just wait, bitch. You just wait.”

FIFTY-ONE

Carl and A.J. land, refuel, and patch up the helicopter on a darkened tarmac at Bakersfield Municipal Airport. They roll Shep Duvall’s corpse into a couple of thick contractor bags and tape them together, creating a poor man’s body bag, and then A.J. takes a cab back to the house to retrieve his truck. He returns with it, loads Shep’s lifeless body into the back, and then drives it to the parking lot of a hospital. Here he gently lays it under a tree at the edge of the lot, in sight of the emergency room.

After a prayer over his fallen friend, he drives back to the airport, where he and Carl drink coffee and wait, hoping like hell for another chance to go after the Director.

The rest of us make it back to Rodney’s place in Bakersfield at three thirty a.m.; we’ve treated Kareem’s shoulder, and he’s doing okay but bitching constantly about letting the mastermind of the entire Consortium get away.

It’s annoying, but I get it. I am bitching just as much as he is, and I didn’t even get shot.

The hostages are racked out on the floor all over the place. Most are still in a state of shock, but every one of them seems happy to be free from captivity, which is a relief, because I thought it possible, even after all the horrors these girls have undoubtedly suffered, that a few of them, at least, would side with their captors.

Some demand to speak to their embassy, but most understand that they are in the middle of a very fluid, if very low-rent, operation, and they calm the most anxious down. They all promise to sit tight, and we promise them we will help them get where they need to go soon.

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