by Elise Noble
“Say your names, both of you,” I snapped.
“I’m Artemis Sacker.”
“Isolde S-S-Sacker.”
“And what do you want to say to your father?”
Isolde burst into sobs, leaving Artemis to answer.
“Just give these people whatever they want. Please. Please.”
Not bad. I turned the camera off. “The tears were a nice touch.”
Isolde wiped her face with a sleeve. “I just thought of the time when I was six and I told Daddy I wanted to be an astronaut and he told me girls didn’t become astronauts because our role in life was to grow up and find a good husband. And by good, he meant rich, because he wasn’t going to support us forever. Talk about ruining a childhood dream. The first part, not the second part. As soon as I turn eighteen, Artemis and I are both moving far, far away from that walking mannequin of misogyny.”
I gave her a tight smile. “Guess I’d better get ready to make this phone call.”
CHAPTER 9
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” I asked Fia half a second after my phone rang. This was taking too damn long. “Time’s ticking.”
I’d considered moving everyone out of the sphere, but I’d come to the conclusion it would cause more problems than it solved. We hadn’t brought enough vehicles to get everyone off-site in one go, and a large group in the park would draw too much attention. If we split up, having pairs of teenagers wandering around loose would make it difficult to coordinate if we had to change the plan on the fly. No, the sphere was the best place for us to be right now, as long as we could keep any nosy maintenance people out. Thankfully, they were focused on the Ferris wheel, where Bradley reported a middle-aged lady had suffered a panic attack in the next capsule. He’d been helping her with breathing exercises through the glass. Jeffrey had admitted to stopping the wheel as a distraction—a simple software override—but after the monkeys got involved, it seemed that restarting it wasn’t so straightforward. Thank goodness.
Brett was outside now, tentatively raising the alarm and establishing a false timeline. If the shit hit the fan and David Sacker did call the authorities, everyone would think the girls had been abducted at least half an hour before they actually left the park.
“Yeah, I know, I know. Sacker’s on the move.” Fia spoke quietly, and I could barely hear her above the noise of traffic, voices, and a siren wailing in the background. “He walked out of his building a minute after we arrived. There was a town car waiting.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t worry—Leo and I hopped on a couple of Citi Bikes and followed. Hurrah for bad traffic. There’s been a crash somewhere near Central Park.”
“You took Leo with you?”
“I figured it’d be a good cover. He’s better at surveillance now.”
“I bloody hope so.”
When Sofia first laid eyes on Leo, he’d been following one of her targets. She’d picked him out in about five seconds flat.
“Have faith, sister. Anyways, Sacker went into a townhouse on the Upper West Side. A blonde met him at the door, and according to Google, she’s not the current Mrs. Sacker.”
“A replacement?”
“Maybe. I mean, he stuck his tongue down her throat right on the doorstep, so…”
“Thanks, that’s useful. Is there somewhere nearby you can watch from?”
“There’s a café on the other side of the road. Leo’s gone inside to order us coffee and croissants, and I’m gonna check the back of the building.”
“Guess I’m ready to step over to the dark side.”
“Good luck. I’ll put breakfast on my expense account.”
The moment of truth. Everything was in place. Now it was my turn in the spotlight, and I couldn’t afford to fuck this up. Of course, I’d give the Monteiths the money myself if it came to it, but that wouldn’t teach David Sacker the lesson he so richly deserved.
I retreated to the passage and dialled. Artemis had given me her father’s private number, so there was no secretary to pick up. Mack would run my voice through a scrambler, and the feed I got through my earpiece would let me hear what Sacker heard.
The phone rang. And rang, and rang, and rang. Tell me I wasn’t going to bloody voicemail. I mean, should I leave a message?
“Yes?”
Thank fuck. Like every good CEO focused on making others’ lives a misery, Sacker was a slave to his phone.
“We have your daughters.”
Wow, I sounded like a robot in a straight-to-TV movie. At least there’d be no doubt that this wasn’t a regular call.
“Who is this?”
Oh, please. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that unless you do exactly what we say, we’ll kill them both.”
“Is this a joke?”
“When I hang up, you’ll receive an email with a video attachment. Then you’ll know we’re serious. The email will also contain the address of a Monero wallet.” Plus a handy virus that would install onto his device when he opened the video, but of course I didn’t mention that. “We want two million dollars by three o’clock. If you pay by two o’clock, the amount’s reduced to one and a half million. Think of it as a prompt-payment discount. Miss the final deadline, and Artemis and Isolde will die. Tell anybody about this call, and they die. Call the police, they die. Leave your girlfriend’s house, they die.”
The sharp intake of breath told me I’d rattled him with that last sentence. Good. There were roughly two hours to go until the first deadline. Enough time for him to work out how to use cryptocurrency if he didn’t already know, but not enough time for him or anyone else to stage an elaborate rescue. And now he knew we were watching.
“You’re bluffing.”
“Take a look at the video. Do you really want to be the man responsible for his daughters’ deaths? You make a million bucks a week. We’re talking ten days’ earnings here. Are they not worth that much to you?”
“Now, listen to me…”
I hung up. There wasn’t anything else to say, not at the moment, so I strode back to the platform. When all heads turned in my direction, I nodded once. It was done. Artemis stiffened for a second, then sagged sideways against her sister. Isolde just grinned. For sure I’d misjudged her initially—under the airbrushed make-up, she was a rebel, and I liked that.
“What do we do now?” Jeffrey asked.
“Now? We wait, and we hope Jimbo and his buddies keep your colleagues busy for long enough that they don’t decide to take a closer look at the sphere.”
At least we could take an educational tour of the universe in the meantime. I stared at a map of the Big Dipper for a moment, then began to pace.
CHAPTER 10
NOTHING HAPPENED FOR a full two minutes. That didn’t surprise me. If I were Sacker, the first thing I’d do would be to phone Artemis and Isolde. Which would be pointless because their phones were turned off, but that’d take, say, thirty seconds each to get through to voicemail and leave his daughters messages. Perhaps he’d send a couple of texts as well? If he thought logically, he’d call Brett, who would tell him the girls were missing. Brett was also part of our early-warning system. If Sacker spoke to him, we’d get a clue where his head was at.
After questioning Brett, Sacker might need to throw on some clothes—depending on how far he’d got with his mistress—and then he’d check his email. Mack’s bomb had landed in his inbox thirty seconds after I hung up—his private inbox, not his work one.
“Sacker’s taken the bait,” Mack told me. “He’s on a Windows laptop. Just finding my way around now.”
I lived my life firmly in the grey zone, that blurry line between black and white, between wrong and right. I didn’t always abide by the law, but today, I’d wandered a little too close to the dark side for comfort. It left me twitchy. Perhaps it was fitting that this drama was unfolding in the gloom of the sphere? With just the emergency lighting on, the place looked more like a warehouse than outer space.
Isolde fell into st
ep beside me. “Do you think Daddy will pay?” she asked.
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
“I don’t think he will. He cares more about his bank balance than he does about us.”
“Maybe he’ll surprise you?”
Isolde made a face. “He doesn’t do surprises. Order is the name of the game. If it’s not on his calendar, it doesn’t happen.”
“We’ve got vision,” Mack announced. “Check your phone. Still working on sound.”
Without thinking, I swiped up and was greeted by the sight of David Sacker in a hastily tied silk robe, seated in front of his laptop at what appeared to be a dressing table judging by the bottles of perfume and moisturiser at the edges of the picture. Mack had taken over his webcam. Which on any other job would have been great, but he wasn’t alone. A half-naked blonde was leaning over his shoulder, her long hair brushing the keys. And of course, Isolde saw her.
“Ah, shit,” I muttered. “Sorry.”
She just shrugged. “Like I said, he’s ruled by his schedule. We’re due a new stepmom. It’s been two years since he married the last one.”
“You’re not upset?”
“Not really. They’re basically interchangeable. The only problem is keeping up with the names. Hey, Artemis—we’re getting a new stepmom.”
Artemis groaned. “Another one?”
“Sure looks that way, although you can hardly tell the difference between her and Shandi.”
“Shandi? He’s married to Carissa at the moment.”
Isolde rolled her eyes. “Right. Carissa. I bet the new one’s twenty-five. They’re always twenty-five. In ten years, he’ll be scouting our friends for hook-ups.”
“Can you just stop talking?” Artemis asked.
“Why? It’s the truth.”
Mack spoke up again. “Sacker just googled ‘What is a Monero?’”
“That’s got to be a good sign, right?”
Last month, Bradley had read a book on Chinese spirituality, and before he even finished the first chapter, he’d been gushing about cosmic duality and feng shui. In between rearranging my furniture and planting a six-foot-high statue of Buddha next to the helipad, he’d lectured me on the concept of yin and yang—the belief that two sets of opposing yet complementary energies govern the universe. Dark and light. Sun and moon. Male and female.
Negative and positive.
After today, I was starting to believe in it because as soon as we got one tiny bit of good news, the bad news followed.
“Uh-oh,” Mack said.
“What?”
“They just caught Jimbo.”
Ah, crap. Our unwitting partner in crime would soon be back in monkey jail. And it was harder for us to follow the goings-on in the park now because Mack had shut down most of the cameras.
“We oughta create a website called ‘What is a Monero?’ with really, really simple instructions.”
“I could get Agatha to do it, but Sacker’s a CEO. Surely he should be able to follow one of the basic how-to pages that’s already out there?”
Yeah, so CEOs weren’t necessarily smart. I’d found that out through years of experience. Case in point: Sacker still hadn’t called Brett.
“Possibly.”
“I’ll get Agatha to write out instructions just in case. If he looks like he’s having trouble, we can email them.”
This was the part of the job I hated the most. The waiting. Where events were out of my control and there was little I could do to alter the outcome. Isolde headed back to her sister and they set about changing their appearances for the trek across the park. Dan and Carmen were still drilling the kids through their stories, and I caught Ana’s eye. Nodded towards the wormhole. While she checked the route to the main door again, I headed back the way we’d come in.
In the background, Mack was grumbling about obsolete drivers for the microphone, and should she risk installing updated ones? Perhaps if she made a pop-up box that said it was an automatic update, Sacker wouldn’t get suspicious. Then the blonde said something, flipped her hair, and flounced across the bedroom. Sacker went after her.
“How long will installing an updated driver take?” I asked Mack.
“A minute or so.”
“Do it.”
The passage to the fire exit was clear, and by the time I got back to the platform, Sacker was still pacing the townhouse bedroom, the blonde trailing behind him like a forlorn puppy.
“The Ferris wheel’s turning again,” Mack said.
“Send Bradley back to the car when he gets down. We’ll want to make a swift departure.”
“Sure, I’ll do that. And we should have sound…now.”
A pause, and then the blonde’s voice reached my ears. Ouch. If it got much higher in pitch, the neighbourhood dogs would come running.
“It’s probably a stunt,” she said. “For YouTube or something. Come back to bed, baby.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
Sacker scrubbed a hand through his hair, leaving it skew-whiff. Getting a little stressed? Well, so was I, because if they treated this as a joke, then the Monteiths wouldn’t get their money. What was wrong with Sacker? Was he really blind enough to his daughters’ personalities that he thought they’d be capable of playing such a sick prank? Granted, the “abduction” wasn’t entirely above board, but it was far from a social media scam. I’d met the girls less than an hour ago and I already knew they had neither the audacity nor the need to trick their father like that.
“They’re attention-seeking. Remember last month when Artemis interrupted dinner with some question about school?”
“That was kind of a big deal, Chantelle. She was thinking of changing her major from politics to videography.”
“There you go—videography.” Chantelle waved a hand towards the laptop. “See? It’s just another project for her.”
“Neither of the girls was holding that camera.”
“So? It was probably that hanger-on Artemis hired. What a waste of money! He got the lighting totally wrong. Everyone knows you should use a ring light for close-ups.”
Ugh. The woman was just awful.
“You’re right! What’s his name?” Sacker snatched up his phone and began scrolling. “Brent? Trent?”
“Brett?”
Sacker found the number, dialled, and switched the phone onto speaker while it rang. Meanwhile, Chantelle had a brainwave. Must have fried every tiny fucking cell in her skull in the process, but she picked up her own phone and checked Instagram.
“He’s with them today.” She waved her mobile triumphantly. “Told you.”
Brett answered. “Hello?”
“It’s David Sacker… Artemis and Isolde’s father. Are they with you?”
“They were, but I can’t find them. Like, they disappeared right in the middle of SciPark, and now their phones are turned off. Why? Did they call you?”
“What do you mean, they disappeared?”
“I went to take a leak, and they were sitting in the shade checking Insta, and when I came back, they weren’t there anymore. So I figured they’d gone to the car to get a charger or something, but that was nearly an hour ago, and the charger’s still in the car and no one remembers seeing them. Man, this whole place is in chaos—a bunch of monkeys got out. A couple of the rides broke down too. Maybe the girls got caught up in the crowds? Want me to get Artemis to call you when I find them?”
“I already got a call,” Sacker said. His voice had dropped to a strangled whisper, a far cry from the “I’m right, you’re wrong” tone he customarily used.
“That’s great—what did they say?”
A commotion at the other end of the platform caught my eye. Jeffrey Monteith was on the phone, and he didn’t seem happy. Dan was there in a second, first listening and then gesturing. A pep talk by the look of things.
David Sacker didn’t have that support. He’d deflated onto a tackily ornate chair in front of the dressing table while Chantelle pouted b
ehind him, and he was most definitely out of his element. This was one situation he couldn’t order and argue his way out of.
“The call wasn’t from the girls,” he told Brett. “They appear to have been abducted.”
“What?” A long pause. “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny.”
“You think I’d joke about something like that?” Sacker snapped.
“N-n-no, sir. They’ve been kidnapped?” That was a nice note of fear in Brett’s voice. “Have you called the cops? I should tell park security. There’re cameras and—”
“No! The person who called said…they said not to contact the police.”
“So what the hell do we do?”
“They want a ransom.”
“You’re gonna pay it?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t—”
“Out now!” Dan directed.
Fuck. “What’s happening?”
“The maintenance crew’s coming in. Jeffrey tried to stop them, but the park director overruled him.”
Okay, we’d planned for this. While the crew came in through the main entrance, we’d retreat to the vestibule by the emergency exit, then leave in small groups. Except…
“Slight hitch,” Mack said.
Don’t tell me problems, tell me solutions. “What hitch?”
“I left the camera pointing at the fire door turned on so I could monitor any movements, and a group of park rangers is standing right next to it, chatting.”
And then from Bradley, “Hey, it’s me. What’d I miss?”
CHAPTER 11
FORGET MY EARLIER comment. The waiting wasn’t the worst part of a job. No, the point when everything went wrong at the same time, that was the worst part.
“Sorry, sorry, he just helped himself to an earpiece,” Mack said.
“Bradley, go back to the car. We’re dealing with a situation.”
“What situation? Can I help? I’m excellent at helping.”
“Sure, you can help. Just go ask the staff hanging out behind the sphere if they’d mind fucking off because we’re all about to get caught.”