by Tim Tigner
“What if they want to come in?”
“We’d offer them a cup of coffee. With the bookcase closed, there’s nothing for them to see. If we don’t act suspicious, they won’t become suspicious. We’re just guests of Kai’s, up for the weekend.”
The timer on Bruce’s watch began vibrating. Two hours had elapsed since Webb broke Rule One. Time to talk to their captives again.
Danica looked over with an appreciative expression as he silenced the alarm. “Ready to reengage?”
“Let’s see if they learned anything.” He keyed the mic. “Does everyone understand Rule One?”
The crowd jolted at the sudden sound. All eyes turned his way. Everyone except Achilles, whose focus remained on his deck of cards. Bruce had determined that the athlete was memorizing them. He’d flip through the deck, methodically and rhythmically, studying each card for about a second. Then he’d turn the deck over and flip back through, pausing on occasion, presumably at the points where his memory faultered. It was an impressive but worthless skill. Nonetheless, Bruce appreciated the discipline and focus.
While everybody who wasn’t in the main room returned in haste, nobody answered his question. Bruce repeated it with more bark in his robotic voice. “Does everyone understand Rule One: No questions?”
“Yes!” The reply came in chorus, but not everyone joined the choir. The cabal of bankers stayed silent.
Bruce refused to ask the question a third time. He wasn’t a fitness instructor or cheerleader. And as it turned out, a bit of disobedience would work in his favor. “Good. Welcome to the third day of your kidnapping.”
He paused there to let those two bits of information sink in, knowing they were dying to ask questions. Biting your lip at a time like this would be incredibly frustrating for anyone, much less an alpha male accustomed to having servants, subordinates and sycophants at his command. Fortunately, frustrated was exactly the kind of captive Bruce wanted.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Danica asked.
“More than I’d expected. How many years have we been kissing up to the likes of these guys hoping to curry their favor?”
“Too many.”
“Well we’re done with that, baby.”
Bruce returned to the microphone. “Everyone stand.”
There weren’t fifty seats in the big room, so a good portion of the guests were already on their feet, as were several of those whose chairs faced away from the camera. Most of the captives complied, including Achilles and Katya, but the belligerent bankers did not.
The eight of them were seated around the dining table, talking in hushed tones among themselves.
Bruce said nothing. He watched and waited.
“Come on, guys!” someone called from the crowd.
The other bankers all turned toward Trey, who mumbled something but didn’t move.
“It’s just as you predicted,” Danica said. “How did you know?”
“These guys fancy themselves to be big time negotiators and they’re playing by that handbook. They’re hoping to gain some power and land a concession. Thing is, they have no power. They literally can’t walk away. Their stubborn adherence to habitual tactics demonstrates their lack of lateral thinking. It’s a good sign for us. And, of course, it gives me the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the depth of the hole they’re in.”
Bruce waited through a few more pointless pleas, noting that Achilles didn’t step in. He didn’t react in any way. In fact, he looked completely relaxed. Bored even. Like a skilled chess player waiting for his amateur opponent to make the next move.
A bit concerned by that implication but still satisfied with the overall situation, Bruce walked to the utility room, opened the circuit breaker panel, and cut all power to the bunker.
21
Escape Clause
Western Nevada
KATYA EXPECTED the bankers’ disobedience to provoke some kind of a reaction, but she wasn’t prepared for what happened. Judging by the cries and gasps erupting all around her, nobody else was either.
The bunker went black. Not lights-out black. Not midnight black. It went completely black. Zero-light black. Buried coffin black.
It also went still. Still as a grave. Not the people, but the place. The people continued fidgeting. Rustling. Breathing. But the space they were in seemed to die. There was no background hum, no ozone disturbance, no air flow. It was shocking, disorienting and eerie.
Achilles immediately reached for her hand. Then he wrapped his arm around her waist and whispered lightly in her ear, “This is nothing but a negotiation strategy. A game. Don’t let it rattle you.”
Katya knew that remaining unfazed was the rational response, given the information at hand. It wasn’t like an earthquake or an explosion had sealed them in. They were where their captors wanted them, experiencing what their captors intended. But the chasm between knowledge and emotion was deep and wide. At least in her mind—as she was reminded every time the waiter presented a dessert cart.
Achilles, on the other hand, had a near robotic ability in that regard. He could close the chasm. Use logic to conquer irrational fear.
Katya would never forget the first time she saw him walk right up to the edge of Yosemite’s Half Dome and look over. From a dozen safe feet away, she asked, “How can you do that?”
His reply stuck with her. “How often do you fall when walking? And given that, what are the odds you’d fall now?”
As she parsed the statistics of hypothetical falls, a volley of vitriolic comments brought Katya’s attention back to their present predicament. “Just stand up!” “Please do what they say.” “Don’t play with our lives!” Three different voices, three different tones.
Neither Trey nor any of his banking buddies replied, but Katya heard chairs scraping the floor. First one, then a bunch more.
Everyone stood in silence, afraid to speak, afraid to move.
“Any second now,” Achilles breathed into her ear.
Katya began counting seconds. She had nothing else to do and her mind needed the distraction. Seventeen passed before the lights came on and the refrigerator resumed its hum. The bankers were all standing. Apparently the camera had its own power supply and enhanced imaging. Either that or the person at the other end was a master of human psychology.
She sucked in a deep lungful of circulating air and turned toward the camera to wait.
Achilles continued to hold her tight.
“Don’t make me do that again,” the robotic voice commanded.
“We’re not afraid of the dark,” Trey said, his volume less than full-throated, his chest turned away from the camera.
“Yes, we are,” Webster said. “He doesn’t speak for us.”
“You’re a fool, Trey,” the robot said. “Tell him why, Kai.”
All eyes turned toward the bunker’s owner.
“Cutting the power kills more than the lights. It shuts down the fans. No fans means no fresh air.” The charismatic captain of industry began shaking his shaved head. “With fifty people turning oxygen into carbon dioxide, we’ll suffocate in a matter of hours.”
All eyes pivoted to Trey, who reddened but stayed silent.
“Now back to business,” the robot continued. “I want you to line up in front of the camera. Five rows of ten. Nice and neat like a military parade. Take all the time you want. I don’t need to go anywhere.”
The last comment left Katya favoring the master of human psychology explanation for the timing of the lights coming on.
The captives made relatively quick work of arranging themselves as instructed, although the final formation was more elementary school than military academy, by her estimation.
“Good. Now put yourselves in alphabetical order by last name.”
Disturbed by this development, Katya looked at Achilles. As a Kozara, she would no longer be by his side.
“I’ll be one step away,” he said with a reassuring smile. “This isn’t going anywhere. They
’re just conditioning us to follow instructions.”
Achilles appeared to be appraising their situation with the same deft insight and decisive familiarity that she would apply to a calculus equation. Was it possible that hostage taking had the equivalent of a mathematical order of operations? In retrospect, that made sense, but it wasn’t something she would have anticipated. In any case, Katya found it comforting that Achilles both knew what was coming and appeared unconcerned.
The queuing process reminded her of the Southwest Airlines boarding procedure, except people were comparing letters rather than numbers. It only took a minute. As a K for Kozara, Katya was 11/26 or 42 percent of the way through the alphabet, which landed her in the third row. Fate gave with one hand and took away with the other, putting her in the same column as Achilles, meaning there was just one person between them, but she was also directly beside Trey, whose last name was Huxley.
Sabrina wasn’t so lucky. She was at the other end of the fourth row, about as far from Oz as possible. Katya wondered if they weren’t married either or if Sabrina had just kept her maiden name.
The eye in the sky chimed back in. “When I call your name, repeat it and recite your Social Security number clearly and accurately. Then sit down. Jeremy Ziegler, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley.”
Ziegler complied, sounding to Katya like a military cadet.
“Ryan Williams, Senior Vice President, Pfizer.”
Williams also reeled off his SSN, then sat.
“Kurtis Westland, Principal, East-West Capital Partners.”
As the robot read the names and titles, Katya found herself impressed with the caliber of her fellow captives. Or at least their titles. Sabrina Saida turned out to be the CFO of a company called Personal Propulsion Systems. Katya wondered if PPS made skateboards or something more sophisticated.
Given her own start in a modest family many thousands of miles away, Katya felt a swell of pride when the robot announced “Katya Kozara, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Stanford University.” As her breast warmed, she wondered if invoking that emotion was the point of the exercise. Priming the pump, so to speak.
The voice answered her unstated question when it designated Kyle Achilles as an Olympian rather than a rock climber. While that revelation evoked a few nods, the recitation of Oz’s given name seconds later caused a much less positive and more widespread reaction. “Osama Abdilla, CEO, Personal Propulsion Systems.”
Katya could feel Trey swelling with a sense of vindication beside her. Although as Shakespeare so famously pointed out, the name didn’t mean anything, the optics couldn’t have been worse. The fact that “Osama” was followed by “No Social Security number,” didn’t help.
The voice left them no time to dwell on the news, supplanting it with a much more momentous reveal. “Quite a distinguished crowd, to be sure. Your ransom is two million dollars. Each. Figure out how you’re going to get it to me—without involving anyone who’s not with you in the bunker.”
22
The News
Western Nevada
BRUCE AWOKE FEELING REFRESHED. He’d really needed the nap. He hadn’t slept much for days, given the whirlwind of preparation required and the stress associated with pulling it off. Fortunately, it had all been worthwhile. You couldn’t ask for a better catch than what shook out of the Cinquante Bouches net. The decision to hit it during conference week was inspired.
Although the distortion software made his voice sound sinister, he’d smiled his way through the reading of all fifty business cards. The forty-eight genuine ones, and Seb and Webb’s fakes.
While Danica slept on, Bruce returned to their command center and opened the laptop. He typed in abc7news.com and found the story within minutes: “Big Mystery Above Napa Valley.”
It was business as usual at Michelin Three-Star restaurant Cinquante Bouches Friday night, until it wasn’t. With no recollection of anything that happened after serving the appetizer course to the fifty diners who each prepaid four hundred dollars for a nine-course meal, the twenty-four members of the restaurant staff all awoke on the kitchen floor around 2:00 a.m. “No one was injured and nothing was missing,” Maître d’ George DuChamp told ABC 7 reporter, Tanya Stewart. “The guests were gone, but the food remained. No one has any idea what happened.”
Bruce skimmed ahead until his attention snagged on the word “police.”
“Napa Valley Police and paramedics responded to a 911 call placed at 1:53 a.m. They searched the premises while paramedics tended to the victims…. Although the investigation remains open, the only physical evidence that a crime was committed is the single needle mark on the left arm of each employee…. No less mysterious is the fate of the diners, who have yet to be identified….”
Satisfied by his quick scan that the complete text contained nothing of concern, Bruce settled back to watch the accompanying video at his leisure—feet up, sipping coffee.
~ ~ ~
A hundred miles from Bruce’s laptop, FBI Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Vic Link was watching the story live. It began playing on the screen in Pequeño Pecado as the counter attendant handed him his breakfast burrito. Vic had planned on dining in the car while driving up to Incline Village, but ended up eating on his feet in the diner’s lobby instead.
The case on the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe was better than some. The latest in a series of home invasions. But the one in Napa might be a dream.
Napa had once been Vic’s territory, back when he worked out of Sacramento. Two years ago, promotion to Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge, ASAC, had brought him to Nevada. It had looked like a good move, and had set him up for his ultimate goal, SAC of a field office. But his new boss had promptly posted him to Reno, where he ran a much smaller operation. This looked logical enough on paper given Reno’s status as Nevada’s second city, but Vic quickly divined the truth. His boss had minimized any threat to his authority by vanquishing an ambitious deputy to the Little League. Now Vic’s only short-term hope for promotion was landing a case that caught national attention.
Alas, the Napa case wouldn’t be it. He was stuck on the wrong side of the state line. Nonetheless, the thought prompted Vic to call his buddy Peter back in Sacramento. It never hurt to check in.
23
New Information
Western Nevada
WITH ACHILLES to her left and Sabrina and Oz to her right, Katya leaned against the walkway railing and studied the scene below. The mood in the bunker had evolved rapidly and radically after the announcement of the ransom demand, and she was glad to be up out of the fray.
Achilles looked her way and asked a characteristically open-ended question. “What do you see?”
She loved the way their brains aligned even though their native perspectives were very different. She was a Moscow native and mathematician. He was an accomplished athlete and former clandestine operative. Beyond their age, bilingual ability and recent experience, their biographies had little in common—but they always clicked.
“I see two categories of people: the relaxed and the anxious.” Fortunately, the majority fit into the former category. Unfortunately, she wasn’t one of them.
“How do you account for the split?”
Obviously interested in her answer, Sabrina and Oz cocked their ears. “It comes down to cash. Who has access to two million dollars, and how difficult it will be to part with it. Two hours ago, everyone was staring blindly into the abyss. Now everyone knows just how deep a hole they’re in.”
“At least they think they know,” Achilles clarified. “Pretty soon, I suspect the rich will start to realize that payment doesn’t guarantee freedom.”
“What about those of us who don’t have two million at their disposal?” Sabrina asked, preempting Katya’s own question.
As a college professor just two years out of graduate school, Katya had nowhere close to two million dollars. She could scrape together twenty thousand dollars if pressed, but two million was way out of reach. She
gathered that Sabrina and Oz had similar circumstances.
“I’m sure the mastermind up above has made contingencies for that.” As she spoke, Katya realized that Achilles was right, of course. The people behind this had clearly planned with great attention to detail, and getting paid would have been second on their list of concerns—right after avoiding capture.
While Katya mulled that over, Kai Basher came up to join them. Although he looked like a drill sergeant, he acted more like a politician, ever mingling, engaging and moving on. Katya saw it as his means of burning off tension. Ironically, the real politician, Governor Rickman, tended to keep quietly to himself.
Achilles took advantage of Kai’s arrival. After the perfunctory, “How you doing?” “How do you think?” exchange, he said, “Tell me about the manual elevator.”
“What about it?”
“What’s the weight limit?”
“Two hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Is that strict?”
Kai gave Achilles an odd look, but he answered the question. “There’s a mechanical stop that kicks in if it’s overloaded.”
“Is there a crank inside so you can raise and lower yourself?”
“Yes, but it’s not a hand crank. It’s a foot crank, and it’s a lot slower.”
“How does it work?”
“There are pedals built into the floor. You shift your weight from left to right like on a step trainer.”
“Who is ready to pay?” the robotic voice interrupted.
Everyone turned toward the bankers.
After a bit of commotion, one of Trey’s allies rose to his feet. Wesley had Scandinavian blond hair, light blue eyes, and a physique that made Katya think he’d played football in college, but never since.
He walked to the red box and looked up at the camera. “I’m ready to pay.”