Марк Грини - One Minute Out

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 at 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.