“But?”

“But by all reports, the man who killed Babic the other day also kidnapped the Mostar police chief this afternoon, local time.”

The American replied with, “And why does that interest me in the slightest?”

“Because Chief Niko Vukovic worked for the pipeline.”

Cage felt hot anger welling within him. “So . . . you are saying someone is fucking with my operation.”

“It seems that way, sir. The entire police force in the Mostar area is looking for their chief, of course, so I hope to have news before long. If he’s recovered alive, then—”

“He’s been grabbed by an assassin. Finding him alive doesn’t sound very likely, now, does it?”

“No, sir. But even if he isn’t recovered alive, we can hope for clues. Obviously, the cops will turn the area upside down looking for the assassin whether he keeps Vukovic or kills him and dumps the body.”

Cage said, “Is this something Kostopoulos can handle?”

“No, sir. I know a lot about this mysterious Gray Man. He’s just too good.”

“What is it you want from me?”

“I want to get my team together. Fly into Dubrovnik, the next stop in the pipeline. It will take some time; my men are spread out all over the world right now. But we’ll get in there and protect the shipment, keep an eye out for this American bastard.”

Cage waved a hand in the air. “Approved. If the Greek and his Albanians can’t get it done, then it’s up to you and your boys. I’ll be at the market in Venice in two days. I sure as hell don’t want this maniac showing up there. This gets dealt with now, and it gets dealt with hard! Got it?”

The pause was short, and the reply bore all the deference of a military man serving his master. “Yes, sir. I’ll get the boys together.”

Kenneth Cage hung up his phone, shaking his head in disgust. He wasn’t worried about his overall operation in the slightest. It was strong and secure, and the men, women, and organizations under him in the Consortium would do what needed to be done. No, he was bothered by the fact that his day had been sullied with talk of hit men and kidnappings.

Cage didn’t consider himself a criminal. Just one hell of a good businessman.

A partner in a Hollywood production company valued north of eight hundred million dollars, he was also senior partner in a hedge fund with assets under management seven times that.

With a business degree from Wharton, he’d gone into banking in the eighties and computer programming in the nineties, he had been at the vanguard of virtually all the advances that technology had brought to the finance industry in the past three decades, and he’d made a name for himself—and a fortune along with it—exploiting the markets with the latest electronic tools.

He created and managed a hedge fund at the height of the dot-com bubble, but with the bust his fortunes evaporated overnight. This hit him hard, not because his investors lost mightily but because he’d grown accustomed to both the lifestyle and the sense of personal power that came along with his riches. After a single lean year he decided, without a moment’s guilt or indecision, that he would regain his stature by any means necessary.

Cage used his vast skill set in computers and finance to begin laundering money. First for the doctors and lawyers who were his hard-hit fund’s clients, helping them protect endangered assets from their wives, their business partners, and Uncle Sam. But soon he developed both tactics and processes that could clean dirty money on a much larger scale.

By the stock market crash of ’07 he found himself recession proof, because he was hard at work for drug cartels, third-world dictators, high-end corporate and government embezzlers, even revolutionary and terrorist organizations, along with a host of other shady clients.

Through his efforts, aircraft and even cargo ships full of palletized cash were turned into sound, legal assets, and though he’d gone to great lengths to keep himself safe and out of the eyes of police, those in the underworld knew that there was a shadowy man in the United States who could get their massive amounts of currency turned into heavy balances held in untraceable offshore accounts or into hard assets like property, luxury cars, and jewelry.

Cage had the brains, the know-how, and the sheer creativity necessary for his work, and he loved it as passionately as he loved Heather and his three kids.

For the first several years that he worked in illegal finance, he was more than satisfied to play the exciting shell game of money laundering, and play it better than anyone else.

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.