Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

A structural engineer with a Stanford MBA, Andy and his company, Wise Enterprises, had slain giants, making billions in public works and telecommunications projects around the world: Hotels in Dubai. Tunnels in China. Hydroelectric dams in southern Africa. Cellular networks all over the Third World. In Brazil, WE had been involved in the construction of the World Cup stadiums and many of the Olympic venues.

Wise’s wife was no slouch either. An English major and former Peace Corps volunteer, she was a tough administrator with an advanced degree from Wharton. She ran WE Help, the Wise family’s philanthropic foundation, which gave away tens of millions of dollars every year to various worthy causes.

“Tell me again why I shouldn’t fire you, Jack?” Cherie said coldly by way of greeting.

“As ineffective as we were in this case, we’re still the best,” I replied, having anticipated the challenge. “Without Private’s help, you’ll be significantly weakened in your effort to find and free your daughters.”

Andy Wise stared at me like I was a disappointment, said, “Status of your investigation?”

“We’ve got every agent in the Rio office assigned to your case,” Tavia said, and she introduced herself.

“And I’ve mobilized a secondary team of my top operators. They’ll be leaving Los Angeles within the hour,” I said.

“So you are in the organizational stage,” Wise said, staring over my shoulder as if there were something behind me only he could see.

“And data-gathering,” I said, trying to speak his language. “Tavia’s joined forces with a favela insider who has a team tracking your daughters’ whereabouts. But, please, I’d feel better if we were in the limo.”

Cherie glanced around, said, “We aren’t safe here?”

“I think we’re perfectly safe here,” I said. “But I don’t want to take any chances until we know why your daughters were abducted. We’ll bring you to your hotel, talk on the way.”

The four of us climbed into the limo. Tavia and I sat in the seats facing backward, across from the couple.

When the doors were shut and locked, Wise rolled his head and rocked slightly, said matter-of-factly, “I don’t think there’s a question about why they were taken, Jack. The hostage and ransom business is booming in South America. Talk to the people at Global Rescue and they’ll tell you that.”

“Andy, stop,” Cherie said. “I’m sure they—”

Wise ignored her. “I’ve seen the statistics. I know the odds of us ever seeing our daughters safe and—”

“Stop it!” Cherie snapped. “They’re not statistics, Andy. They’re our daughters, for Christ’s sake!”

“Get emotional if you wish,” Wise said. “But the numbers don’t lie. It’s why I didn’t want them down here in the first place. I knew the threat. I informed you of the threat. But, no, I was ignored. The statistics were ignored just so you could make the girls look better on some future résumé.”

“That had nothing to do with it,” Cherie shot back. “I wanted them to see the world for real, not in the abstract. I wanted them to understand people and their plights on a gut, emotional level, not as some goddamned number or statistic.”

“And look where it’s gotten us,” Wise said.

Tavia’s cell phone rang. She answered, listened, said, “We’ll be right there.”

She hung up, turned around in her seat, and knocked on the divider, which lowered. “Change of plans,” she said. “We’re going to Private Rio.”

“Why?” Cherie asked. “I need a shower, a change of—”

“We’ve been contacted by the kidnappers, Mrs. Wise,” Tavia said. “They’ve sent a video of the girls.”

“Mom? Dad?” Natalie Wise sobbed. “You’ve got to help us.”

“Please?” Alicia whimpered. “We want to come home.”

“Oh God,” Cherie Wise said, and she buried her face in her husband’s chest.

We were in the lab at Private Rio, watching the video on a big screen. The billionaire rubbed his wife’s back mechanically and looked at his daughters with little affect, as if he considered the images nothing more than a gathering of blips and algorithms.

But I was studying everything the camera revealed. The girls were bound with leather straps to ladder-back chairs. The chairs were set about a foot from each other in front of a black curtain parted to show a painting of children on their knees praying.

Natalie and Alicia were frightened, filthy, and showing signs of abuse. Natalie, a redhead like her mother, had a severely swollen left cheek. Alicia, sandy blond and the smaller of the two, had a split lip and eyes that looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

Two masked figures in black appeared, a male and a female. The man’s mask had feathers and green sequins; the woman’s was more primitive, a rudely carved face with a diamond-shaped mouth and painted cat’s eyes.

In stilted, accented English, the man said, “We know who is these girls. Tell the Wises we want fifty million dollars or daughters to be executed. You have forty-eight hours to comply. Instructions to follow.”

The screen went blank.

“Pay them,” Cherie Wise said, unable to control the tears. “Tell them right now, we’ll pay.”

“Wait,” her husband said. “I want to hear—”

“Your options?” Cherie demanded, mouth open, incredulous, tears dripping down her cheeks. “There is no option, Andy. We pay. We get our daughters back, and we go on.”

He blinked, said, “Should the police know we’ve been contacted? That a ransom has been demanded?”

Tavia said, “You have to make that call.”

“Why wouldn’t we tell the police?” Cherie asked. “I want a manhunt.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “A manhunt makes them want to run. And if they run, at some point they’ll consider your daughters excess baggage, and they might decide it’s easier to kill them than let them go. We want to keep this small, contained, controllable.”

Cherie bowed her head, then said, “But no police?”

Tavia said, “The way the kidnapping went down says to me that it was done by people who’d had training. Military or police.”

“I’ve read about police kidnappings in Mexico,” Wise said. “Here too?”

Tavia nodded. “Seven, eight years ago, a prominent Brazilian businessman was kidnapped and held for ransom. The police took over the operation. They tracked the ransom money, found the kidnappers, and killed them. Then they kept the ransom money, claimed the kidnappers had taken off, and orchestrated a second payment. The businessman was later found dead at the bottom of a well.”

“I hate it here,” Cherie said, wiping the tears off her cheeks.

Wise studied his wife’s anguish, looked over at me, and said, “Find and rescue my girls before that ransom’s due, Jack, and I’ll pay you twenty percent of it — ten million dollars cash.”

The lab screen flickered, split, and then the aging — Grateful Deadhead face of Dr. Seymour “Sci” Kloppenberg was on the left and the kidnappers’ video on the right.

“You there, Jack?” Sci asked, staring out at us from inside Private’s jet.

“Right here, Sci,” I said. “Have you seen the video?”

“Yes, hold on a second, we’re having problems with the Wi-Fi in the jet and I want to have Mo-bot in on this as well,” he said before the camera went haywire and then went dark.

“Who was that man?” Cherie Wise asked. “He looked like a Berkeley refugee.”

“Sci used to teach at Berkeley, actually, but now he works for me.”

I explained that Kloppenberg was the polymath criminologist and computer forensics analyst who ran Private’s lab in Los Angeles and oversaw all of the company’s labs around the world. Sci was also the driving force behind making Private’s criminology labs so state-of-the-art that they met FBI, Scotland Yard, and Interpol standards.