Page 174 of One Minute Out

Ken just nodded and rubbed his eyes some more, then took his hands away and again looked right at Roxana. “What about her?”

Jaco didn’t hesitate. “She comes with us. If Gentry and his mates arrive, I’ll have a knife at her neck to slow them while you get away. If he makes contact with us, we’ll use her to bargain, or as bait.”

Roxana’s teeth chattered, but through the fear she recognized that she was about to go to the home of the Director. Ground zero of the Consortium.

She didn’t see this as yet a new danger.

No, this was her chance, her last chance, and she knew it.

FIFTY-TWO

Sixteen-year-old Charlotte Cage stepped out of the kitchen door of her girlfriend’s house in Bel Air, then walked down the driveway as the gate opened automatically in front of her, thumbing open her phone’s screen along the way. With a couple of clicks she ordered an Uber Lux to take her to her home in the Hollywood Hills, fifteen minutes away in morning traffic.

She wasn’t supposed to be here. Her mom routinely disallowed her daughter from overnighting with her eighteen-year-old friend, thinking Clara to be a bad influence, so Charlotte had quit asking permission. Instead she told her mom she was spending a couple of days at Lake Arrowhead with a friend her own age whom her mom trusted. This wasn’t the first time this summer she’d pulled this off, and she hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

As Charlotte stood there waiting for her ride, she noticed she’d missed a text message and a phone call. The text was from her mom, and it was demonstrative and unusual, but not particularly worrisome.

Call me as soon as you get this. Do not, under any circumstances, go to the house.

She didn’t bother listening to the voice mail.

As she climbed into the back of the BMW 5 Series that arrived to pick her up, Charlotte considered calling to see what was going on, but she decided against it. She also decided against complying with her mother’s wishes. She was only leaving the house so early this morning because she was meeting Sean for a surfing lesson. Sean didn’t work Wednesday mornings, and they’d made plans the week before.

She hadn’t said anything to him about Arrowhead, knowing all the time she’d be in town and excited to go surfing.

Charlotte told herself she’d wait to reach out to her mom till she and Sean got to Santa Monica with their surfboards, and she’d tell her she’d caught a ride from Arrowhead early this morning.

As the Uber drove through the narrow, winding streets in the Hollywood Hills, she told the driver to drop her off at the house next door to hers, not wanting her mom or dad to see her. From there she walked to a locked gate in the fence around her two-acre property, punched in the code, and let herself in. Closing it behind her, she headed down the steeply graded drive, then turned and moved across the sloping landscaped yard on the offhand chance her mom was standing at the living room window that overlooked the driveway.

She made her way around to the back of the property right at seven a.m., hoping no one in the house could see her as she rapped on the door to the pool house, but when Sean didn’t answer immediately, she began to worry that her mom could be standing in the kitchen dining area that overlooked the back patio. She tapped the code to the pool house into the keypad alongside the door, then stepped in when it unlocked.

“Sean?” she called out through the den and then again up the stairs. It was weird he wasn’t up, but she knew her dad gave him Wednesdays and Sundays off; it was Wednesday, so she figured he was just sleeping in.

Charlotte didn’t go upstairs to where Sean slept; that would be weird, she decided, so she texted him that she was here, then headed through the pool house to the storage room in the back. There she quietly dressed in her wetsuit, picked out a surfboard for today’s excursion, and began collecting other odds and ends she’d need for a morning at the beach.

•••

Three Mercedes-Benz G550 SUVs rolled down the driveway in front of Kenneth Cage’s Hollywood Hills mansion, then parked in a line in front of the house. A pair of Sean Hall’s men climbed out of the first vehicle, unlocked the door, and, while keeping their hands over the pistols secreted under their polo shirts and light sport coats, they scanned the area.

Seconds later one of them called into his radio, and all the doors to all the SUVs opened as one. Eight other men and two women, Roxana Vaduva and Dr. Claudia Riesling, climbed out and headed inside.

Everyone in the entourage had a mission this morning, and Jaco had tasked one of Hall’s men, much to Hall’s disapproval, to be in charge of Maja. He took her by the arm into the large kitchen at the rear of the house and sat her down at a table in front of the sliding glass door overlooking the pool and rear gardens, while he went looking for some cordage to tie her with.

He bound her tightly with an electrical extension cord but didn’t bother securing her to the chair because he didn’t want to deal with untying her from an object if they had to make haste to the SUVs.

Still, the girl he only knew as Maja was utterly compliant, so he wasn’t worried about her running off.

Sean Hall’s six security men took up positions around the home, their eyes cast out on the sharp hills and massive homes all around. Hall started to run over to his pool house for a change of clothes; he was still wearing an undershirt and jeans, but he’d only made it into the kitchen before Cage yelled from the living room, demanding that Hall, Verdoorn, and Loots follow him into his office to begin removing incriminating files and computer drives.

Sean turned to comply with his boss’s wishes, but on his way out of the kitchen he called across the room to his subordinate. “Don’t just sit there, Scott. Make us a pot of coffee.”

Claudia headed to the kids’ rooms after Cage directed her to a stack of suitcases in a hall closet.

Within five minutes of arrival, the Director and his people were all over the house, hurrying through their assignments, while a few miles away the pilots of the Gulfstream waited at LAX after filing a flight plan for San Jose, Costa Rica.

•••

It’s just after seven a.m. when we park next to an unused warehouse just outside the fenced-in grounds of Van Nuys Airport. We sit down at picnic tables along a chain-link fence, just twenty-five yards from where Carl’s bullet-pocked helicopter is parked on a pad at the end of the runway.

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