The Games Read online

  NO FATHER? THE GIRLS DIE.

  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.”

  Chapter 39

  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.”

  Chapter 40

  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—”

  She floored the accelerator of the X5, said into her microphone, “Andy, you’re going to be parking next to the Sambadrome. It’s where they have the big samba contests dur
ing Carnival.”

  “Never been there, but I know what it is,” Wise said. “Describe what I’ll be seeing, please.”

  Tavia thought, said, “Think the grandstands at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and then think twenty times the size of those grandstands and lining both sides of Fifth Avenue for roughly half a mile. You’ll be looking up a wide, empty concrete street. Park where you can see the entire length of the parade route, but expose yourself and the van as little as possible. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess I’ll know it when I see it,” Wise replied.

  Cherie unclipped her seat belt, shifted so she was behind and between me and Tavia. She stared through the windshield and slowly, gently, moved her hands against each other as if she were washing them.

  “This is going to work,” Cherie said in a wavering voice. “I’ll have them back in my arms soon.”

  “That’s the plan,” I said.

  “I want us taken to the jet immediately afterward,” she said. “The hell with the Olympics. We’re just not staying. The girls will understand, I’m sure. And Andy, well…there are some things in life not worth fighting about.”

  Tavia and I exchanged glances but didn’t join the conversation our client was having with herself. After a while in our business, you learned that people did and said strange things when there were lives on the line.

  On the screen of the iPad, the van’s icon reappeared.

  “You’re close, Andy,” I said into the microphone.

  “Just ahead,” Wise replied.

  “We’re shutting down the trackers in three hundred feet,” Mo-bot said over the radio. “Camera will come on at the parking spot. You’ll have to adjust its position so we see what you do.”

  She’d given Wise a high-end digital camera small enough to be hidden in the palm of his hand.

  The icon disappeared from the screen.

  “Parking,” Wise said.

  Tavia pulled over six hundred yards east on Valadares Avenue. Cherie leaned over the seat when the iPad screen came to life. We were getting Wise’s view via the camera. He’d parked the van diagonally, facing into the Sambadrome. He had us looking through the windshield across a security chain at the road and the flanking grandstands that on a big night during Carnival would be filled with tens of thousands of people. Now the place was so empty it looked forlorn. It was a forgotten venue except for a few nights a year. A secluded spot in the middle of the city. Perfect for trading hostages for money.

  The iPad screen flashed with bright lights. Headlights.

  Wise said, “There’s a white van coming into the other end.”

  “Hold the camera steady and I’ll zoom in,” Mo-bot said.

  A moment later we saw the van turning sideways about one hundred yards inside the north end of the Sambadrome.

  “They had to have cut the security cable at that end,” Tavia said.

  Wise got a message from Alicia’s phone. Leave the van. Walk south on de Março.

  Wise texted back, Not until I see girls leave van.

  For a few tense moments there was no reply. Then the side door of the other white van slid open. The girls, bound at the wrists and blindfolded, were pushed out by two figures wearing masks and blue workman’s coveralls. They held pistol-grip shotguns to the girls’ heads.

  Then they tore off the blindfolds and Cherie Wise gasped with joy. “It’s them. Oh, thank God, it’s them.”

  Wise got a text from Alicia’s phone. Get out of the van and go, it said. Or see them die.

  “Get out, Andy!” Cherie screamed.

  He texted back, Not until I see them walking away.

  After a long moment’s hesitation, the gunmen nudged them to move. Uncertainly, the girls began walking east, away from their captors and toward the grandstands.

  The camera moved, refocused from its position on the dashboard. Due to the curved windshield, we got a skewed image of the girls starting to climb the grandstands and the audio of Wise leaving the van and shutting the door.

  “Walking away south,” Wise said.

  “Car two, secure the girls, evaluate, and transport to our doctor,” Tavia said. “Car one, you’ve got Mr. Wise.”

  “Where are we going?” Cherie asked.

  “After the money,” I said.

  Tavia put the car in gear and floored it. We’d no sooner gotten up to speed than a masked man in a blue workman’s jumpsuit appeared on the iPad screen, caught by the camera on the money van’s dashboard. He had bolt cutters and snipped the security chain into the south end of the Sambadrome.

  Someone climbed into the passenger side. We heard the driver’s-side door slam. The van took off, screeching into the road between the grandstands, heading north fast toward the other white van, which was turning around.

  That’s all we saw before one of the people in the van swore and grabbed the camera. The screen went jerky and twisty: The ceiling of the van. The chest of a blue workman’s suit. The window opening as the van accelerated, and then the camera was hurled into the stands, spinning in the air and catching fleeting images of the fleeing Wise girls climbing higher and higher.

  Chapter 41

  TAVIA HAD THE X5 going ninety westbound on Valadares Avenue. She dropped gears crossing de Março, and we shot past Andrew Wise, who was giving us the thumbs-up.

  “Don’t lose my money,” I heard him say in my earpiece.

  Tavia dropped the BMW into third, feathered the brakes, and sent us into a drifting power slide through the south entrance of the Sambadrome. She got the car straightened in time for us to see that the money van was almost at the other end of the parade ground. She floored it.

  The grandstands became a blur, but we were catching up. We hit ninety again. The money van swerved out onto Salvador Avenue, heading east toward Central. Tavia braked and downshifted again.

  “There are the girls!” Cherie yelled. “Stop!”

  Tavia glanced at me.

  “Do it,” I said.

  She hit the brakes. We skidded to a stop. Wise’s wife jumped out, and Tavia and I squealed off.

  A black Toyota turned into the Sambadrome, sped to our left.

  “That’s car one,” Tavia said. “Hold on.”

  She sent us into another smooth drift that kept the loss of speed and momentum to a minimum, then straightened the car out and accelerated once more. The money van was nowhere ahead of us. I looked at the iPad, saw the icon.

  “Go left on Trinta Avenue,” I said. “They’re heading north.”

  “I’ve got them now,” Tavia said. “No way a van’s outrunning this engine.”

  Three hundred yards. Two hundred. One fifty. I spotted the van now. It couldn’t evade us. And the trackers were performing—

  The icon on the iPad disappeared.

  “Shit,” Mo-bot said in my earpiece. “Either the tracking devices all died at once or they’re jamming our signals.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ve got the van right in front of—”

  A second white Ford panel van shot out from the road on our right, and at the same time a third white Ford panel van roared in from our left. Both vans swung into the gap between us and the money van. That van crossed an overpass and took the exit onto a cloverleaf ramp.

  We spiraled into a corkscrew left turn that shot us out onto Presidente Vargas Avenue, a wide four-lane thoroughfare that led straight east to the harbor front. The two vans directly in front of us began to slow and weave, keeping us from staying with the money van, which gained speed and distance.

  “We’ve got the girls and the mom, Octavia,” a female voice said over the radio. “En route to hospital. Little beat up, but okay.”

  “And we’ve got Wise,” a male voice said.

  Stuck behind the other two vans, Tavia spotted a police turnaround and crossed left through it and into the westbound lane. A pair of headlights came at us. Tavia flicked her headlights and floored it. The car swerved out of our way.

  We got past o
ne of the blocking vans in the other lane just before we reached the next police turnaround in the median. With a snap of her wrist, Tavia shot us through and back into the eastbound lane between the two vans.

  “One down, one to go,” Tavia said.

  We were crossing Camerino Road, heading straight for the harbor. The second van was right in front of us, swerving, trying to keep Tavia from getting around. I caught glimpses of the money van’s taillights two hundred yards ahead.

  Tavia got up on the bumper of the second blocking van. She deked left and then tried to get around on the right. The rear door of the van flew open. In the back, one of the guys in the blue workman’s jumpsuit was on his knees aiming an assault rifle at us.

  He opened fire.

  Tavia slammed on the brakes and swerved, but bullets strafed the hood and windshield of the X5. The glass shattered into a thousand little pieces. We couldn’t see a thing. Tavia had to slow and try to steer looking out her window.

  But it was too late. The vans had taken a left on a road heading north, and we missed it, forcing us to backtrack. By the time we got turned around, they were nowhere to be seen. We went north and were past Pier Mauá when I spotted a white panel van, probably the one holding all that cash, sitting on the rear deck of a tugboat that was picking up speed out on Guanabara Bay.

  “Reynaldo!” a male voice called over the radio. “We are under fire. Repeat, we are—”

  The transmission died.

  “That was Samuels,” Tavia said. “He and Branco had Wise!”

  “Andy?” I said into the microphone. I got no answer. “Mo-bot, do you have Wise’s beacon?”

  “Right here,” she said. “Tracker shows current location a half a mile south of the Sambadrome.”

  “On our way,” Tavia said.

  When we reached the spot where the tracking signal was coming from—an empty city lot—we found Samuels and Branco alive but unconscious, both with head wounds from blunt-force trauma. The back door of the car was open. Wise was gone. I walked with a flashlight and felt my stomach fall twenty stories when I spotted fresh blood spatter in the dirt and then the blue workman’s coverall.