Джеймс Паттерсон - The Games

NO OTHER PASSENGERS IN VAN OR THE GIRLS DIE.

NO POLICE OR THE GIRLS DIE.

NO PRIVATE OR THE GIRLS DIE.

NO TRACKING DEVICES OR THE GIRLS DIE.

EXCHANGE TO TAKE PLACE IN OPEN, PUBLIC, LIT AREA OF OUR CHOOSING.

YOU HAVE UNTIL MIDNIGHT MONDAY, AUGUST 1, TO PREPARE.

“We can get a van like that in Rio, right?” Cherie asked.

“I’m sure,” Tavia said. “How soon can you get the thirty million?”

“It’s waiting at the national bank,” Wise said.

“They want fifty million,” Cherie said.

“I’m not giving them fifty.”

Cherie’s face went cherry red. “They’ll kill the girls.”

“No, they won’t,” her husband said. “I told you. They’ll see a whopping stack of cash in the back of that van and it won’t matter whether it’s thirty million or fifty.”

“But—”

“Jack?” Wise said impatiently. “What’s the likelihood of kidnappers stopping to count when we deliver that amount of money?”

“In a public, lit place?” I said. “Small. They’re going to want to see money and lots of it, but they won’t be counting exact figures until they’re long gone.”

“See?” Wise said to his wife. “And the girls will be just as free and safe as if we’d spent fifty million for their return. In business, we call that a bargain.”

“In life, we call that endangering the lives of your own flesh and blood to cut costs,” Cherie shot back.

Wise ignored her, said to me, “Get one of those vans and put in the most sophisticated and least detectable tracking devices you can find. I want them buried in the money. Can you make that happen?”

I looked to Mo-bot, our expert on these kinds of things. She nodded.

“Wait! What?” Cherie exploded. “Are you kidding me? The note explicitly says tracking them will mean Alicia and Natalie die.”

“Not if we have the girls in our possession before turning on the trackers by remote control,” her husband said. “That way we win it all. We get our darlings back. We get the money back. And we see the kidnappers thrown in jail.”

Monday, August 1, 2016

11:10 p.m.

Even in this day and age of billionaires, it is an awesome thing to see thirty million dollars’ worth of currency banded, stacked, and strapped to a pallet. More than a thousand pounds of cash. If it dropped on you, you’d be squished. Kind of takes your breath away, really.

But Wise seemed unimpressed as a forklift loader moved the pallet and the small mesa of money into the back of the van. He shut the rear door, locked it, and then shook the hand of a bank official who wished to remain anonymous.

We jumped down off the loading dock into a wide alley in back of a depository of the Central Bank of Brazil. The overhead door began to descend behind us.

Only an incredibly well-connected multibillionaire had the kind of juice to make a transfer like that happen on short notice in a foreign country. I started reappraising Wise as we walked around the van. Behind the Asperger’s facade, he had one of the quickest minds I’d ever encountered. And he had this almost unnatural cool when he had to make his most difficult decisions. I don’t think he felt even a flicker of emotion when he’d decided to put thirty million dollars’ worth of reais into the van instead of fifty.

Wise was confident in the extreme, but I wondered whether he might be riding for a fall.

“Sure you want to be the driver?” I asked one last time.

“It’s required of me,” he said. “So I’ll do it. Now what?”

“You get in the van, I get in that car over there with Tavia and your wife, and we wait for further instructions.”

“But we don’t even know how the instructions are supposed to come.”

“We’ve got it covered,” I said.

We did. The concierge at the Marriott had been told to call us immediately if anything was delivered there. Sci and Mo-bot were monitoring all of the Wises’ e-mail accounts and cell phones, and Tavia and I were paired with their phones as well. Anything that came to them, we would see.

I was growing confident that we’d covered all the bases and were prepared for anything. No matter what happened, we’d know where the money and the van went.

Mo-bot superglued tracking beacons that looked like machine-bolt heads in the spaces above the wheel wells and slid other, waferlike versions of the trackers deep in the stack of money. The devices were called slow-pulse transmitters.

Rather than emitting a constant, and therefore more detectable, transmission, the devices could be calibrated to send out a location at specific intervals. Mo-bot had them set on a thirty-two-second and then a forty-second cycle, and she would shut them down during the actual transfer.

Now all we needed was a meeting point.

Wise climbed into the driver’s seat. I returned to a black BMW X5 parked down the alley and got into the passenger seat. Tavia was driving. Cherie Wise sat in the back.

“Is my husband’s beeper thing working?” she asked.

“Sci?” I said.

“Sending a clear, strong signal,” he said.

“Told you we had it covered,” I said. “I’ve even got them tracking this car.”

Cherie checked her watch, said, “How long until they make contact?”

“Depends how much they want the money,” I said.

“Don’t be surprised if they make us stew awhile,” Tavia said. “Get us tired, a little disoriented, you know?”

Tavia was right. We sat and dozed in the alley until three a.m. with no contact made. Cherie was starting to make noises about returning to the Marriott where she could wait in bed when her cell phone buzzed an alert. A text coming in.

She looked at it and burst into tears. “It’s from Alicia. Or it’s coming from her phone, anyway.”

“We have a trap on Alicia Wise’s cell?” I asked.

“Pulling it up right now,” Mo-bot said.

“What’s it say?” Tavia asked, twisting around in her seat.

“An address. I think it’s in Leblon.”

“Give it to me,” I said, pulling the car alongside the van. I read out the address to Wise.

“Okay,” he said, putting the van in gear. “Let’s go bring our girls home.”

At first, delivery of the ransom payment went down the way I’d thought it would. The kidnappers routed Andy Wise to one address and then another in Centro, and since it was largely vacant at that early hour, Tavia and I and the two other cars manned with Private agents had to stay blocks away, watching the digital trackers’ updates on iPads and staying connected in real time over the radio and cellular links.

We never bothered to close the distance and instead paralleled Wise in the white van with four or five blocks between us, shutting down the trackers as he neared each address. After he got to the third, there was no new text message for almost five minutes.

Then my cell buzzed. The pairing between my phone and Wise’s was working. I had a text on my screen from Natalie Wise’s phone to her father’s.

This can be simple. You follow directions, you get your daughters back. In a few minutes we’ll give you a location where you are to park the van. You will see your daughters from afar, and you are going to walk away from the van. Someone will pick it up. If you do everything right, the girls will go to you, and our business is done. Simple. Agreed?

Agreed, Wise responded a moment later.

Go to the northeast corner of Rua Frei Caneca and de Março. Park where you can see to the north. Wait.

“Northeast corner of Frei Caneca and de Março,” Tavia muttered as she got us turned around. “That’s gotta be—”