The Boss’s Daughters

by Douglass, Carl;

  Damien meets David, Craig, and Rosalie at the Men’s Club and drives them down the one-way street—Lexington Avenue—to his real office in Turtle Bay, east midtown Manhattan. They exit onto 42nd Street, and he parks in the private basement parking area of the Chrysler Building—a place he has scrupulously kept secret for the past decade of his career as the capo di tutti capi—or general—of the Black Knights. Damien and his guests travel on the inlaid wood-lined express elevator to his office on the 71st floor. The gilt sign on the plate glass door informs the visitor that these are the offices of Turtle Bay Investment Fund Managers, Inc.

  Damien leads them down a hardwood floor hallway overlain with hand knotted Chinese silk runners past offices indicating the name of the occupant and his or her title. At the far end of the hallway, they come to the only door that has no glass. It is a solid and ornate mahogany work of art. Near the doorknob is a three by four-inch brass plate that reads simply, “CEO.” Only after the four enter the palatial skyscraper office with a view of the Hudson River on the west and a small portion of the Harlem River on the east, does he speak.

  “Okay, you have access to this computer in my office and only this one. You are getting to see into my secret business here only because I trust Ivory White and McGee completely. Nothing you learn here ever gets talked about outside of the very, very few people who need to know. You have this privilege because my two little daughters have been stolen, and I will turn over heaven and earth to get them back. I am not a nice man. I think you already know that. The consequences for any of this information you pick up getting out, especially to my … competitors … or the police would be … to put it delicately … drastic.”

  Damien’s face has that chiseled-in-stone visage that must have been on the face of Ozymandias as described by Percy Bysshe Shelley: whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command … and on the pedestal these words appear—”My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.” David, Craig, and Rosalie get the message and each have a brief inward shiver. Working for McGee has its distinct benefits, but some of the characters they deal with cause them to doubt their choice of employment from time to time.

  He leaves the three computer experts to their work. They make a deep personal promise not to remember Damien’s passwords once they leave the Chrysler Building. By midnight, they have information they think might be useful. Damien had very recently been in a meeting with several of the crime syndicate leaders with whom he was plotting a treaty to recognize criminal enterprise territories and to respect them. Disrespect of the contractual arrangements could be a capital crime they learn. They also learn that the Genovese family refuses to meet with Damien—a racist show of disrespect that Damien has no intention of forgetting. He has assigned Alphonso Vergansi, his only Italian underboss, to find out for sure who is the elusive boss of bosses of the Genoveses. He also called a man named Hector “Ice-man” Aguilara in Los Angeles and paid for a first-class plane trip for the man to come to Harlem.

  There is no information on this computer about legitimate business. The other business described in the electronic folders is difficult to decipher because it is presented in heavily colloquial language with the frequent use of idioms of the black underworld. The gist of the records is evident: “Hos” followed by a listing of areas with a few definite addresses in one column and a number in a second column adds up to more than ten million a month. The addresses include locations in almost every city in the United States and Canada with a population over 200,000. “Fun &” is a more obscure heading and its addresses are fewer—limited to the largest cities in the country. The numbers column adds up to more than a hundred million, but the numbers are declining by about ten or fifteen percent every year for the past ten years.

  Rosalie says, “The numbers rackets,” and her coworkers agree.

  Another column is headed, “The Law.” There are three columns and twelve rows: the first column is a ten-digit number, presumably a telephone number; the second column is a first name; and the third column is a very succinct descriptor such as “reliable,” “a bit crazy,” “spooky and unpredictable,” “good at short notice,” and “woman.” The twelve rows have only sets of mixed numbers, letters, and computer signs with a total of fifteen characters each; for example, the second row is 12/12/92☺§HIA_w. McGee’s computer experts are sure that the obtuse identifiers are computer logins for a select group of individuals, but no one without a list of the names associated with the apparently random groupings of numbers, letters, and symbols could use the information.

  Craig sums up what they all presume, “Hit men.”

  Chapter Six

  “Are the bad men gone, Cinnamon?” Paprika asks her big sister.

  “I think so, Paprika,” Cinnamon answers.

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s a house; and we are locked in one of the bedrooms.”

  The room is moderately well lit by fluorescent lighting from behind the base boards below and from a cornice projecting out from the top of the beige-colored walls above. The girls make a quick inspection. The room is not quite as expensively decorated as their rooms at home, but it is a reasonably nice prison. The floor is carpeted wall-to-wall with a plush beige-colored carpet that has multiple spots of half a dozen different colors. There is a bright red round table with two small brightly painted chairs. On the table are coloring books, crayons, colored pencils, and an assortment of highlighters. There is a queen-size bed covered with a brightly patterned duvet, a Barbie Doll set, and a plush fuzzy teddy bear, toys and books on the bedside tables, and a medium-sized bathroom with twin sinks, a shower, and a bathtub. There are separate piles of fluffy large towels. The closet in the bedroom is empty of clothing but has several dozen clothes hangers.

  There are indications on the wall that a large window was once there but has been removed and plastered over. There is no doorknob on the only door granting entrance and exit from the room. There are no locks on the door from the inside. Cinnamon pushes on the door, but it does not move a millimeter. She knocks on it and hears a metallic sound behind the thin wood façade. She attempts to squeeze her small fingers under the door, but the space is too tight.

  “You try, Paprika. Your fingers are smaller.”

  She tries, but even her little girl fingers are too thick.

  “Are we going to be here forever, Cinnamon?” the younger sister asks with a quavering voice trying not to cry any more.

  “No, little sister. We are going to find a way out. We’ll find a place where we can knock a hole in the wall and crawl through, or we’ll trick the bad men and sneak around them.”

  The suggestion sounds as ridiculous as it is, but just the mental gymnastics of trying to find a way to escape is therapeutic.

  “We can bash the guy who brings us food and steal his keys. That’s what Daddy would do … but he’s big and tough, and we are little and weak,” Paprika says, and gives in to a few tears that cannot be restrained.

  Cinnamon gives her a hug.

  “I’m hungry,” Paprika says. “Do you think they are going to let us starve?”

  “I don’t. There is some reason why we are being kept in a nice room; so, I’ll bet we get decent food. For now—until we can figure out what to do to escape—I think we should pretend to cooperate; so, they don’t get mad at us.”

  “Okay for now. But when I get a chance, I am going to kick one of them in the place were boys hate to get kicked.”

  Both little girls begin to laugh.

  Upstairs in their bleak dark room, Lydia and Chet are plotting their escape on a more serious level.

  “Can anything in the trays or plates or cups be made into a shiv?” Chet asks.

  “It’s all pretty innocuous stuff—paper and flimsy plastic. I think our martial arts skills are going to be more effective weapons,” Lydia answers.

  “You’re right, Lydia. I might add that our brains are more likely to prove t
o be the best weapons. We need to brainstorm about how we go about tricking and overpowering the guy who feeds us. Speaking of which, what I wouldn’t give for a great artery-hardening cheeseburger and a pile of curly fries.”

  “Now that you mention it, I’m getting pretty hungry myself. They took our watches; so, I can hardly even guess what time it is. It seems like we’ve been in here for two months.”

  “More like two hours, but I don’t fault your guesswork.”

  Lydia becomes thoughtful.

  “Chet, I think the first thing we have to do is to learn as much as we can about where we are, what kind of a place this is, and what kind of people we are dealing with.”

  Chet slides his hands around on the walls to see if there is a light switch, not really expecting to find one. His expectations are met. Lydia taps the walls—more accurately percusses the walls—like a doctor doing a chest examination, listening to an indication of a hollow spot where maybe there is nothing but wallboards separating an empty space between them. After ten minutes at her task, she gets the hang of it and finds that she can determine when she is tapping over a two-by-four upright framing board and when she is in the space between them. She covers most of the room in the next fifteen minutes and decides that there is nothing special about the wall construction—no sounds coming back from the percussion to indicate metal or board paneling.

  Chet says, “So, maybe if we can choose the right time when the kidnappers are not right in the next room, we can employ those vaunted karate kicks of ours and punch a hole through the wall.”

  “I think that is a real possibility, partner,” Lydia says. “After all, mean drunks and wife beaters do it all the time. That’s where the brain part is going to have to come into play. We have got to learn their routine; so, we can attack the wall at a time when it won’t be so obvious.”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Chet, “so we don’t get our brains blown out.”

  “Speaking of that, what do you think has happened to Andy? The poor guy’s first day on the job, he gets abducted by a bunch of thugs; and nobody knows where he is.”

  “Or whether he is even still alive,” Chet says angrily.

  The condo phone rings, and Angelina gets up quickly to answer it.

  “Let it ring twice more before you answer, Angelina,” says Caitlin. “It is better not to have them think you are too anxious.”

  The phone chimes again.

  “You need to demand proof of life but tell them the deal’s off if they harm the girls in any way. Tell them your husband agrees.”

  The phone chimes the third time.

  “Hello,” answers Angelina slightly breathlessly.

  “Hey, broad, what kept you? You think this some some kinda little game you rich girls get to play?”

  Caitlin, McGee, Ivory, and Grant are listening to every word via the connections Caitlin and Grant made an hour before.

  “I was in the bathroom,” Angelina lies without a trace of guile in her voice.

  Caitlin says to herself, This girl is a good actress; it looks like she will be able to rise to the occasion.

  “Awright. Next time sit on the phone.”

  “I will. How are my girls?”

  “We’ll get to that in a coupla minutes. First, I’m gonna lay out what you—just you—are gonna do and when to pay the ransom. The kids are fine, by the way.”

  “We have….”

  “Stuff a sock in it until I finish with the instructions. This is how it’s gonna go down: you will obtain twenty-five million dollars in bearer bonds called Baklava bonds obtained in high denominations of Turkish lira [TL] issued by Finans Bank Anonim Şirketi. The bank’s simpler trade name is ‘Finansbank.’ The company’s head office is in Istanbul. Now write this down: its address is “Büyükdere Cad. No: 129 Mecidiyeköy.” You will have to make the purchase initially in euros from Deutsche Bank in Bonn and then use the euros to purchase the Turkish bearer bonds. Do you understand what I have just said?”

  “Not a word,” Angelina says. “Tell me the name of the bank in Turkey and whatever a bear bond is.”

  “It is called a bearer bond. B-E-A-R-E-R,” said the machine-distorted phone voice, sounding irritated and as if it were speaking to a slow child; but it repeated the difficult Turkish names.

  “I’ll make it simple,” the kidnapper continued. “Bearer bonds became for all practical purposes illegal in the United States in 1982, but they are still legal in many other countries. A bearer bond is a debt security—a formal legal document which is redeemable just like money, no questions asked. The bonds are issued by a business entity, such as a corporation like the Finansbank, or by a government. The Turkish bearer bond we want differs from the more common types of investment securities in that it is unregistered; no records are kept of the owner or the transactions involving ownership. Whoever physically holds the paper—namely me—for which the bond is issued, owns the instrument. This is useful for investors who wish to retain anonymity—so you see why we want to go this way.”

  “I guess so. I have no idea how to go about this, though,” Angelina says.

  “You’re a smart lady: use your iPhone. Transfer funds from your account or accounts to the Deutsche Bank in Bonn and talk to one of the savvy bankers there and give him instructions to be ready to accept your funds. To ensure speed and safety, we require you—and you alone—to carry out the transaction in Istanbul and to take physical possession of the actual bearer bonds.

  “In one week I will make another call to tell you how the transfer of the bearer bonds for the children will be carried out.”

  The kidnapper’s telephone clicked off.

  “We still didn’t get proof of life,” McGee says. “The next time you talk to the kidnappers, Angelina, you must insist on that.”

  “What should I do about the ransom?”

  “It is decision time. I think we should use a burner phone and call Damien to share in the decision. It is his money that will be used, I presume?”

  “Yes. I’ll make the call.”

  Five minutes and three attempts later, Damien answers his throw-away mobile phone.

  “I presume this is important,” he says.

  “Damien,” Angelina says, “the kidnappers called with ransom demand details.”

  “I’m sorry you had to deal with that, Desireé.”

  Damien is highly and persistently resistant to calling his wife by her assumed name in private.

  “What do they want?”

  “You know about the twenty-five million dollars. They want us to pay them with something called bearer bonds from a bank in Turkey. They demand that I go alone to Istanbul and take care of the arrangements personally. First, we would have to make a wire transfer from your account to the Deutsche Bank in Bonn in euros. The bank will make the transfer to the Turkish bank, and then I will go and get the physical papers … the bonds … themselves. I don’t know how to get them back to the United States. That will be a lot of bulk to try and get on flight back here. I think there are laws about how much money you can bring into the country.”

  “Ten thousand dollars. The plane won’t be a problem. I have a contract with a private jet corporation; so, you can fly back and forth without any customs problems. What we need to decide right now is whether or not to pay the ransom. Do we have proof of life?”

  “No, the kidnapper gave the instructions almost as fast as he could talk then hung up.”

  “Was McGee able to trace the call?”

  “Too brief.”

  “That puts us between a rock and a hard place. What does McGee think about paying the ransom?”

  “I’ll have to ask him. Hang on a minute.”

  Angelina turns to McGee who has been listening on the speakerphone.

  McGee says, “The FBI says don’t pay. Statistics are very hard to come by; but the evidence does not support benefit from paying a ransom for what is called a ‘stereotypical’ kidnapping—that is, an abduction of a child by a nonfamily stranger. In
an average year about 115 such kidnappings take place in the US; the rest of the more than 58,000 kidnappings are family related.”

  Angelina interrupts, “But does paying the ransom make the chances of recovery of the child or children—as in our case—more or less likely? What are the chances that we’ll get our children back, anyway?”

  “Apparently, ransom payment in stereotypical kidnappings is not better than refusing to pay. I hate to answer your second question; but unfortunately, forty percent of such kidnapped children are murdered, and four percent are lost without information ever being discovered about what happened to them. For your insight, the FBI says that parents only contact police in about twenty percent of cases of kidnapping.”

  Angelina starts to cry.

  Damien says, “I have something to say on the subject that might make a difference.”

  “What?” demands Angelina.

  “A few years ago, I took out kidnapping and ransom insurance on myself, you, Desireé, and Cinnamon and Paprika. I also included three of my top business associates. When I did that, the insurance broker told me to keep it a secret because knowledge of the insurance by the kidnapped person might cause him or her to act differently and to endanger himself and my company even more. The insurance guy told me that there are cases where having such knowledge has led to the victim colluding with the kidnappers. More often than not, such victims are murdered to hide the facts.”

  “And you didn’t tell me!” Angelina snarls, unable to control her anger. “That settles it once and for all. We are going to pay the ransom. It is the only thing we can control in this whole terrible mess. Damien, you must not deny my request to save our children. I would never recover, and I would never forgive you if you let them die for failure to part with the money. You have tons of it.”

  “Damien,” McGee asks, “how much insurance do you have?”

  “Fifty million.”