The Games (Private #11)(21)

He blinked, said, “Should the police know we’ve been contacted? That a ransom has been demanded?”

Tavia said, “You have to make that call.”

“Why wouldn’t we tell the police?” Cherie asked. “I want a manhunt.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “A manhunt makes them want to run. And if they run, at some point they’ll consider your daughters excess baggage, and they might decide it’s easier to kill them than let them go. We want to keep this small, contained, controllable.”

Cherie bowed her head, then said, “But no police?”

Tavia said, “The way the kidnapping went down says to me that it was done by people who’d had training. Military or police.”

“I’ve read about police kidnappings in Mexico,” Wise said. “Here too?”

Tavia nodded. “Seven, eight years ago, a prominent Brazilian businessman was kidnapped and held for ransom. The police took over the operation. They tracked the ransom money, found the kidnappers, and killed them. Then they kept the ransom money, claimed the kidnappers had taken off, and orchestrated a second payment. The businessman was later found dead at the bottom of a well.”

“I hate it here,” Cherie said, wiping the tears off her cheeks.

Wise studied his wife’s anguish, looked over at me, and said, “Find and rescue my girls before that ransom’s due, Jack, and I’ll pay you twenty percent of it—ten million dollars cash.”





Chapter 20



THE LAB SCREEN flickered, split, and then the aging–Grateful Deadhead face of Dr. Seymour “Sci” Kloppenberg was on the left and the kidnappers’ video on the right.

“You there, Jack?” Sci asked, staring out at us from inside Private’s jet.

“Right here, Sci,” I said. “Have you seen the video?”

“Yes, hold on a second, we’re having problems with the Wi-Fi in the jet and I want to have Mo-bot in on this as well,” he said before the camera went haywire and then went dark.

“Who was that man?” Cherie Wise asked. “He looked like a Berkeley refugee.”

“Sci used to teach at Berkeley, actually, but now he works for me.”

I explained that Kloppenberg was the polymath criminologist and computer forensics analyst who ran Private’s lab in Los Angeles and oversaw all of the company’s labs around the world. Sci was also the driving force behind making Private’s criminology labs so state-of-the-art that they met FBI, Scotland Yard, and Interpol standards.

“Kloppenberg’s quirky, but he’s the only person I know who’s an honest-to-God genius,” I said, which provoked odd looks from both of the Wises. They obviously considered themselves somewhere high in that lofty realm.

“Who is Mo-bot?”

“Maureen Roth. She works for Sci as a technical jack-of-all-trades. She’s also one of the most well-read people I know.”

The screen flickered and returned, divided into thirds, the video of the girls in the middle, Sci on the left, and Mo-bot’s motherly face smiling on the right.

“We’ve got you,” I said. “Can you see us?”

“Yes, we’ve got it working now,” Mo-bot said.

“Apologies,” Sci said. “But we’ve both had a run at the kidnappers’ video in the last hour and come up with a few things for you.”

Kloppenberg said the video had been sent to Private Rio from an Internet café in Kuala Lumpur through a server in Pakistan.

“Got enemies in either of those places, Mr. Wise?” Mo-bot asked.

Wise thought and then said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Done work in those countries? Pakistan? Malaysia?”

“Both,” he said.

Sci said, “I find it telling that the video was sent to Private Rio and not to the Wises.”

“Good point,” Tavia said. “The kidnappers must have known the girls had Private Rio bodyguards. So they sent the video here first.”

“But how did the kidnappers know the guards were with Private?” Mo-bot asked. “They were in street clothes, correct?”

“Correct,” Tavia said.

Wise said, “Then someone in Private Rio talked, or my girls did.”

“The girls?” his wife said. “That’s absurd. They knew the risks. Why would they do such a thing?”

Wise cast an even gaze at her, said, “Natalie could have fallen in love again. Or Alicia could have been trying to impress someone. You know how naive, trusting, and impressionable they can be. So quick to become someone’s best friend forever or rally to some politically correct cause without doing the research necessary to justify their support. They’re just like…”

“Me?” Cherie demanded. “Why don’t you just say it?”

Her husband blinked, took off his glasses, said, “At times, yes.”

“Andy, I honestly don’t know why you stay with me.”

Wise frowned, clearly puzzled, said, “How do you make that logical jump?”

Sci cut them off, said, “We blew up some stills from the video, Jack.”

The images appeared one after another: the Wise twins in the chairs, the painting of the children kneeling in prayer, and the masks their captors wore.