Ransom

by Danielle Steel

  When Ted came home that night, Shirley was sound asleep, and the house was quiet. The boys' rooms were empty now. He had bought a small house in the Sunset District years before, and on his days off, he loved to walk on the beach and watch the fog roll in. It always made him feel human again, and peaceful, after a tough case, or a bad week, or something that had upset him. There were a lot of politics in the department, which sometimes stressed him, but generally, he was an easygoing, good-natured person. Which was probably why he still got along with Shirley. She was the hothead in the family, the one who got angry and raged at him, the one who had thought their marriage and relationship should have been more than it turned out to be. Ted was strong, quiet, and steady, and somewhere along the way, she had decided that was enough, and stopped trying to get more out of him. But he also knew that when she stopped arguing with him, and complaining to him, some of the life had gone out of their marriage. They had given up something, passion for familiarity and acceptance. But as Ted knew, everything in life was a trade-off, and he had no complaints. She was a good woman, they had great kids, their house was comfortable, he loved his job, and the men he worked with were good people. You couldn't ask for more than that, or at least he didn't, which was what had always annoyed her. He was content to settle for what life offered him, without demanding more.

  Shirley wanted a lot more than what Ted demanded of life. In fact, he demanded nothing. He was content with life as it was, and always had been. All his energies had gone into his work, and their boys. Twenty-eight years. It was a long time for passion to survive, and it hadn't for them. There was no question in his mind, he loved her. And he assumed Shirley loved him. She was not demonstrative, and rarely said so. But he accepted her the way she was, the way he accepted all things, the good with the bad, the disappointing with the comforting. He liked the security of coming home to her every night, even if she was sound asleep. They hadn't had a conversation in months, maybe even years, but he knew that if something bad happened, she'd be there for him, as he would be for her. That was good enough for him. The kind of fire and excitement Rick Holmquist was experiencing with his new girlfriend was not for him. Ted didn't need excitement in his life. He wanted just what he had. A job he loved, a woman he knew well, three kids he was crazy about, and peace.

  He sat at the kitchen table, and had a cup of tea, enjoying the silence in the peaceful house. He read the paper, looked at his mail, watched a little TV. At two-thirty he slipped into bed next to her, and lay in the dark, thinking. She didn't stir, didn't know he was lying next to her. In fact, she rolled away from him and muttered something in her sleep, as he turned his back to her, and drifted off while thinking about his caseload. He had a suspect he was almost sure was bringing heroin in from Mexico, and he was going to call Rick Holmquist about it in the morning. As he reminded himself to call Rick when he woke up, he sighed softly, and fell asleep.

  Chapter 3

  Fernanda Barnes was staring at a stack of bills, as she sat at her kitchen table. She felt as though she had been looking at the same stack of bills for the four months since her husband died, two weeks after Christmas. But she knew only too well that even though the stack seemed the same, it grew bigger every day. Each time the mail came in, there were new additions. It had been a never-ending stream of bad news and frightening information since Allan's death. The latest being that the insurance company was refusing to pay on his life insurance policy. She and the attorney had been expecting that. He had died in questionable circumstances while on a fishing trip in Mexico. He had gone out on the boat late at night, while his traveling companions slept at the hotel. The crew members had been off the boat, at a local bar, when he took the boat out and had apparently fallen overboard. It had taken five days to recover his body. Given his financial circumstances at the time of his death, and a disastrous letter he'd left for her, filled with despair, the insurance company suspected it was a suicide. Fernanda suspected that as well. The letter had been given to the insurance company by the police.

  Fernanda had never admitted it to anyone, except their attorney, Jack Waterman, but suicide had been the first thing she thought of when they called her. Before that, Allan had been in a state of shock and panic for six months, and kept telling her he was going to turn things around, but the letter made it clear that even he didn't believe that in the end. Allan Barnes had had one of those extraordinary lottery-ticket-type windfalls at the height of the dot-com era, and sold a fledgling company to a monolith for two hundred million dollars. She had liked their life fine before. It suited her perfectly. They had a small, comfortable house in a good neighborhood in Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus, where they had met in college. They had married in the Stanford chapel the day after graduation. Thirteen years later, he had hit the big time. It was more than she'd ever dreamed of, hoped for, needed, or wanted. She couldn't even understand it at first. Suddenly he was buying yachts and airplanes, a co-op in New York for when he had business meetings there, a house in London he claimed he had always wanted. A condo in Hawaii, and a house in the city so vast that she had cried when she first saw it. He had bought it without even asking her. She didn't want to move into a palace. She loved the house in Palo Alto that they had lived in since their son Will was born.

  Despite Fernanda's protests, they had moved to the city four years before, when Will was twelve, Ashley was eight, and Sam was just barely two years old. Allan had insisted she hire a nanny so she could travel with him, which Fernanda hadn't wanted either. She loved taking care of her children. She had never had a career, and had been fortunate that Allan had always made enough to support them. It had been tight sometimes, but when it was, she tightened the belt at home, and they squeaked through it. She loved being home with their babies. Will had been born nine months to the day after their wedding, and she had worked part time in a bookstore while she was pregnant the first time and never since. She had majored in art history in college, a relatively useless subject, unless she wanted to get a master's, or even a doctorate, and teach, or work at a museum. Other than that, she had no marketable skills. All she knew how to be was a wife and mother, and she was a good one. Their kids were happy and wholesome and sensible. Even with Ashley at twelve and Will at sixteen, potentially challenging ages, she had never had a single problem with their children. They hadn't wanted to move into the city either. All their friends were in Palo Alto.

  The house Allan had chosen for them was enormous. It had been built by a famous venture capitalist, who sold it when he retired and moved to Europe. But to Fernanda, it looked like a palace. She had grown up in a suburb of Chicago, her father had been a doctor and her mother a schoolteacher. They had always been comfortable, and unlike Allan, she had simple expectations. All she wanted was to be married to a man who loved her, and have wonderful children. She spent a lot of time reading up on experimental educational theories, she was fascinated by psychology in relation to childrearing, and she shared her passion for art with them. She encouraged them to be and become all that they dreamed of. And she had always done the same with Allan. She just hadn't expected him to make his dreams materialize to the extent he did.

  When he told her he had sold his company for two hundred million dollars, she nearly fainted, and thought he was kidding. She laughed at him, and figured maybe with some extraordinary luck, he might have sold the company for one or two or five, or at a wild guess, ten, but never two hundred million. All she wanted was enough to get their kids through college, and live comfortably for the rest of their days. Maybe enough so Allan could retire at a decent age, so they could spend a year traveling in Europe, and she could drag him through museums. She would have loved to spend a month or two in Florence. But what his windfall represented to them was beyond dreaming. And Allan dove into it with a vengeance.

  He not only bought houses and co-ops, a yacht and a plane, but he made some extraordinarily risky high-tech investments. And each time he did, he assured Fernanda that he knew what he was do
ing. He was riding the crest of the wave, and felt invincible. He was a thousand percent confident of his own judgment, more so than she was at the time. They started fighting over it. He laughed at her fears. He was plunging money into other companies that had yet to prove themselves, while the market was skyrocketing, and everything he touched turned to gold for nearly three years. It appeared that no matter what he did, or what he risked, he could not lose money, and didn't. On paper for the first year or two, their immense new fortune actually doubled. Notably, he invested in two companies that he had total faith in, and others warned him might plummet. But he didn't listen, not to her or the others. His confidence soared to dizzying heights, while she decorated the new house, and he chided her for being so pessimistic and so cautious. By then, even she was getting used to their new wealth, and starting to spend more money than she thought she should, but Allan kept telling her to enjoy it and not worry. She stunned herself by buying two important Impressionist paintings at a Christie's auction in New York, and literally shook as she hung them in their living room. It had never even dawned on her that one day she might own those paintings, or any like them. Allan congratulated her on her good decision. He was flying high and having fun, and wanted her to enjoy it too.

  But even at the height of the market, Fernanda was never extravagant, nor did she forget her more modest beginnings. Allan's family was from southern California, and they had lived more lavishly than hers had. His father was a businessman, and his mother had been a housewife, and a model in her youth. They had had expensive cars, and a nice house, and belonged to a country club. Fernanda had been seriously impressed the first time she went there, although she thought them both somewhat superficial. His mother had been wearing a fur coat on a balmy night, as it dawned on her that even living in the frozen winters of the Midwest her mother had never owned one, and wouldn't want to. The show of wealth was far more important to Allan than it was to her, even more so once his overnight success broadsided them. His one regret was that his parents hadn't lived to see it. It would have meant the world to them. And in her own way, Fernanda was relieved that her parents were gone too, and couldn't see it. They had died in a car accident on an icy night ten years before. But something in her gut always told her that her parents would have been shocked at the way Allan was spending money, and it still made her nervous, even after she bought the two paintings. At least they were an investment, or at least she hoped so. And she truly loved them. But so much of what Allan bought was about showing off. And as he kept reminding her, he could afford it.

  The wave continued to build for nearly three years, as Allan continued to invest in other ventures, and huge blocks of stock in high-risk high-tech companies. He had enormous confidence in his own intuition, sometimes counter to all reason. His friends and colleagues in the dot-com world called him the Mad Cowboy, and teased him about it. And more often than not, Fernanda felt guilty about not being more supportive. He had lacked confidence as a kid, and his father had often put him down for not being more brazen, and suddenly he was so confident she felt that he was constantly dancing on a ledge and totally fearless. But her love for him overcame all her misgivings, and eventually all she could do was cheer him on from the sidelines. She didn't have anything to complain about certainly. Within three years their net worth had almost trebled, and he was worth half a billion dollars. It was beyond thinking.

  She and Allan had always been happy together, even before they had money. He was an easygoing nice guy, who loved his wife and kids. It had been a joy they shared each time she gave birth, and he truly adored his children, as she did. He was especially proud of Will, who was a natural athlete. And the first time he saw Ashley at her ballet recital, at five, tears had rolled down his cheeks. He was a wonderful husband and father, and his ability to turn a modest investment into a windfall was going to give their children opportunities that neither of them had ever dreamed of. He was talking about moving to London for a year at some point, so the kids could go to school in Europe. And the thought of spending days on end at the British Museum and the Tate was a major lure for Fernanda. As a result, she didn't even complain when he bought the house on Belgrave Square for twenty million dollars. It was the highest price that had been paid for a house there in recent history. But it was certainly splendid.

  The children didn't even object, nor did she, when they went to spend a month there when school got out. They loved exploring London. They spent the rest of the summer on their yacht in the South of France, and invited some of their Silicon Valley friends to join them. Allan had become a legend by then, and there were others making nearly as much money as he had. But as with the gaming tables in Las Vegas, some took their winnings and disappeared, while others put them back on the table and continued to gamble. Allan was continually making deals, and huge investments. She no longer had any clear understanding of what he was doing. All she did was run their houses and take care of their kids, and she had almost stopped worrying about it. She wondered if this was what being rich felt like. It had taken her three years to actually believe it, and for the dream of his success to finally seem real.

  The bubble burst finally, three years after his initial windfall. There was a scandal involving one of his companies, one he had heavily invested in as a silent partner. No one actually knew officially if, or to what extent, he had invested, but he lost over a hundred million dollars. Miraculously, at that point, it scarcely made a dent in his fortune. Fernanda read something about the company going under in the newspapers, remembered hearing him talk about it, and asked him. He told her not to worry. According to him, a hundred million dollars meant nothing to them. He was well on his way to being worth nearly a billion dollars. He didn't explain it to her, but he was borrowing against his ever-inflating stocks at that point, and when they started to collapse, he couldn't sell them fast enough to cover the debt. He leveraged his assets by borrowing to buy more assets.

  The second big hit was harder than the first, and nearly twice the amount. And after the third hit, as the market plummeted, even Allan began to look worried. The assets he had borrowed against were worth nothing suddenly and all he had left was debt. What came after that was a swan dive so staggering that the entire dot-com world went with it. Within six months almost everything Allan had made had gone up in smoke, and stocks that had been worth two hundred dollars were worth pennies. The implication to the Barneses was disastrous, to say the least.

  Complaining bitterly about it, he sold the yacht and the plane, while assuring Fernanda and himself that he would buy them back again, or better ones, within a year, when the market turned around again, but of course it didn't. It wasn't just that he was losing what they had, the investments he had made were literally imploding, creating colossal debt as all his high-risk investments fell like a house of cards. By year's end, he was staring at a debt almost as enormous as his sudden fortune. And just as she hadn't when he made the windfall on the first company, Fernanda didn't fully grasp the implications of what was happening, because he explained almost nothing to her. He was constantly stressed, always on the phone, traveling from one end of the world to another, and shouting at her when he got home. Overnight, he became a madman. He was absolutely, totally panicked, and with good reason.

  All she knew before Christmas the year before was that he was several hundred million in debt, and most of his stock was worth nothing. She knew that much, but she had no idea what he was going to do to fix it, or how desperate their situation was becoming. And miraculously, he had made many investments in the name of anonymous partnerships and “letterbox” corporations, which were set up without his name being publicly disclosed. As a result, the world he did business in had not yet caught on to how disastrous his situation was, and he didn't want anyone to know. He concealed it as much out of pride as because he didn't want people to be nervous about doing business with him. He was beginning to feel as though he was surrounded by the stench of failure, just as he had once worn the perfume of
victory. Fear was suddenly in the air all around him, as Fernanda silently panicked, wanting to support him emotionally, but desperately afraid of what was going to happen to them and their children. She was urging him to sell the house in London, the co-op in New York, and the condo in Hawaii, when he left for Mexico right after Christmas. He went there to make a deal with a group of men, and told her before he left that if it worked out, it would recoup nearly all their losses. Before he left, she suggested they sell the house in the city and move back to Palo Alto, and he told her she was being ridiculous. He assured her that everything was going to turn around again very quickly, and not to worry. But the deal in Mexico didn't happen.

  He had been there for two days, when there was suddenly another catastrophe in his financial life. Three major companies fell like thatched huts within a week, and took two of Allan's largest investments with them. In a word, they were ruined. He sounded hoarse when he called her from his hotel room late one night. He had been negotiating for hours, but it was all bluff. He had nothing left to negotiate with, or trade. He started crying as she listened to him, and Fernanda assured him that it made no difference to her, she loved him anyway. That didn't console him. For Allan, it was about defeat and victory, climbing Everest and falling off again, and having to start at the beginning. He had just turned forty weeks before, and the success that had meant everything to him for four years was suddenly over. He was, in his own eyes at least, a total failure. And nothing she said seemed to console him. She told him she didn't care. That it didn't matter to her. That she would be happy in a grass hut with him, as long as they had each other and their children. And he sat at the other end and sobbed, telling her that life just wasn't worth living. He said he'd be a laughingstock around the world, and the only real money he had left was his life insurance. She reminded him that they still had several houses to sell, which all together were worth close to a hundred million dollars.