Марк Грини - One Minute Out

And though he was a dedicated family man while at home, he began to enjoy his role on the periphery of the underworld when away. This wasn’t hard for him, as his work introduced him to the top criminal industries on Earth: drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and human trafficking.

An organization out of the Middle East that trafficked women from all over Asia and Eastern Europe into Western Europe employed his creative financial services, and on a trip to Marseilles Cage had been offered a taste of their wares. Cage enjoyed the power he saw in himself while subjugating and abusing the young women; it made him feel virile and potent, and soon he tweaked his illicit business model to cater specifically to this industry so he could be more involved with human bondage.

He didn’t traffic drugs or weapons himself, not because he had any moral aversion to doing so, but rather because that was not where his interests lay. He was a businessman, obsessed with the allure of expanding his realm, but though he might have made more money with drugs and weapons, he never ran the numbers to find out.

It didn’t matter, because Ken Cage’s heart and soul were in sex slavery.

Within a few years he led a large organization without a name; it was referred to among the players as simply “the Consortium.” He’d made arrangements with over two dozen other regional organizations around the globe: mafia groups from Turkey, Slovakia, Serbia, Greece, Italy, Belarus, and Ukraine, and criminal gangs in Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, Spain, and the United States.

He also developed, along with advice of the experts in the target regions, systems for finding and bringing the best product to market: Albanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian “recruiters” who snatched or coerced women and sold them into the pipeline.

The American mastermind saw himself as an overseer of a process and the inventor of a brilliant, efficient, well-oiled machine. Together the organizations and assets of his Consortium now accounted, by his money cruncher’s recent estimations, for roughly six percent of the world’s 150-billion-dollar annual human trafficking revenue.

Ten billion dollars a year filtered into the Consortium’s component parts, and the cash and the Consortium’s share of the world’s supply of slaves was growing in double digits. It was real money; men and women would kill to get it and to protect it from any threat to the Consortium, and men and women had killed to do just that.

Whether through assassinations, turf wars, or executions of slaves who either could not work or would not hold their tongues about the pipeline, the violence associated with the organization was truly staggering. And this was in addition to the rape, the humiliation and subjugation of human beings, and the theft of liberty and labor that took place as a matter of course in the day-to-day operations of the Consortium.

Police had been bought off; high government functionaries in developing nations had been corrupted.

Ken Cage had started it all, retained ultimate control over much of the oversight, but just as he had a rule that his involvement was hidden behind dozens of shell companies, he also had a rule that he would never, ever sully himself with violence. He had others to do that for him. Not only in the form of his security force—Jaco Verdoorn’s small but specialized unit of well-trained Afrikaner shock troops—but every single organization that assisted along the pipeline had their own killers and captors, corruptors, and enforcers.

MS-13, ’Ndrangheta, the Gulf Cartel, the Pitovci, the Branjevo Partizans: the names of the gangs and cartels and the other criminal concerns had meant nothing but news headlines to Cage before he started his process, but now they were integral to his own success.

The American in the Hollywood Hills was a supervillain masquerading as an everyman, albeit an outrageously wealthy one, and no one who saw him on the streets of LA would ever have a clue that the short and bald middle-aged man had almost single-handedly created a massive worldwide organization of abject misery.

That was by design. Cage compartmentalized his criminal behavior and his home life, and nothing was more vital to him than keeping those two worlds apart.

He took trips every four months or so to different source locations to personally pick out his own stable of girls and had them recruited by any means necessary and brought over to a large property owned by one of his offshores north of LA, where he would travel to sample the best of the best of his product.

He’d expanded the ranch into a compound of sorts, had it staffed with attendants for the women—prison guards, essentially—as well as a robust security team, and he’d invited his close friends and business associates to use the facility, and the product stored there, as they wished. Hollywood moguls, investment bankers, shipping magnates, the CEO of an airline: “the Ranch” became their own personal Disneyland of debauchery.

Over the previous winter Cage had traveled to Vilnius, Lithuania, spending time with his entourage in nightclubs. Jaco Verdoorn and his men ran his personal security detail. Cage and his associates chose six women over their week there, then returned home.

Recruiters took the women and placed them into the northern pipeline, and in a matter of weeks the girls were in California, standing before Cage.

But as was always the case, after a few months he grew tired of the new lot and wanted some fresh supply.

So six weeks earlier he’d gone to Bucharest, a return trip because his last time there had been fruitful. On this visit he picked out three women, including a stunning young brunette who chatted with him at length in a nightclub. The young brunette was half a head taller than him, and she possessed the highest cheekbones, the softest lips, and the most piercing eyes he’d ever seen.

He’d grow tired of her once she was his, but for now the anticipation of having her subjected to all manner of humiliation for his pleasure in his nest filled his brain with an impossibly rich mixture of “feel good” chemicals.

Cage lived for this shit.

He’d left Bucharest with instructions for his local recruiters to get that girl in the pipeline and over to him as soon as possible, by any means necessary.

And then he’d returned home to the world of a multimillionaire father, to baseball practice and dinners with friends in outdoor cafés on Rodeo Drive and evenings in the hot tub talking over family matters with his wife.

• • •

Ken Cage pocketed his phone, then started back towards the door to the studio, but he stopped himself. Turning to his bodyguard, he said, “Fuck it, Sean. Juliet’s done her bit. Heather’s already pissed at me for leaving. Might as well call it a day.”

“Back to the house, sir?”

Cage shook his head and began walking towards the Mercedes. Hall stayed with him. “Where Heather can yell at me? Hell no. We’re going to the Ranch.”

“Right, sir.”

FIFTEEN

Maja stared out at the ocean and the late-afternoon sun hanging over it, and she wondered where the hell she was. Her view was partially obstructed by the ruined wall of the large, old, bombed-out warehouse, but enough of the coast was visible that she could tell she was somewhere beautiful.

But it did not make her happy. Her predicament had not changed, only her view.

The last two days and all of this morning she and the others from Mostar had sat in the blacked-out bus, parked in an underground garage. They’d been fed fast food, and a pair of buckets had been placed in the back for the women to use as a toilet, but no one was allowed to leave or to make a sound. It was a miserable two days, and Maja’s back ached and her bleary eyes burned from crying and lack of sleep.