“You must listen, Kyle,” the woman said calmly. “You must. Or Rochelle will die.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he felt his legs weakening. He clutched the banister with his free hand.
“Everything is going to be fine so long as you listen and do exactly what you’re told.”
“I have money,” he said quickly. “I can get you money.” And then he thought, Shit, it’s Sunday. But he could find a way. He knew there’d be a way. When you had the kind of money he had, the bank was open whenever you wanted it to be open.
“This isn’t about money,” the woman said.
“What, then? The cars? You want the cars? Take them. But please, please don’t hurt Rochelle. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“I don’t want anything of yours. I want you to do something for me. First, the ground rules: You will not call the police. You will not inform anyone in any way about what is transpiring. If you do anything to alert anyone to what’s going on, your wife will run out of air and she will die.”
“I get it. I get it. What is it you want? What is it you want me to do?”
“You’re going to find for me another picture very similar to the one you got a minute ago. And then you’re going to get rid of it.”
Then Nicole got specific.
“DON’T normally see you here on a Sunday, Mr. Billings,” the security guard at the Whirl360 front desk said as Kyle strode across the lobby.
“Hi, Bob,” Kyle said. “Just popping in for a second.”
Bob hit a button, and overlapping Plexiglas panels retracted to allow Billings to pass through. A few yards beyond that, Kyle hit the elevator button. As the doors parted and he stepped into the empty box, he touched his finger to the Bluetooth device clipped over his ear.
“Let me talk to Rochelle,” Kyle said.
The voice in his ear said, “One second. Say hello.”
“Kyle?” His wife sounded like she was several feet away from her captor, as though the woman had held the cell phone up to the air.
“There,” she said. “You’ve heard her. She’s just fine. Took the bag off her head so she could breathe a bit more easily. And that thing with Bob, that was very good. You sounded very natural. You’re doing just fine.”
“Okay, the door’s about to open.”
“That’s fine,” Nicole said. “I’m here if you need me.”
Kyle entered the main office space of Whirl360. It wasn’t like other companies here. Sure, there were dozens upon dozens of workstations throughout the open-plan environment, but few firms ringed the work area with pool tables and foosball and video games. When Whirl360 employees needed a break, they pushed themselves away from their monitors and played a few rounds of virtual golf, battled space aliens, watched some 3-D television. And when they felt recharged, they went back to work.
The office was quiet today. Only a handful of employees were seated at their terminals, entering in new images from Whirl360 cars that were photographing city streets around the globe every second of every minute of every hour of the day.
“Hey, Kyle.”
“What’s happening, Kyle.”
“How’s it going, Kyle.”
Everyone felt they needed to say hello.
He gave each of them a nod, found the computer station where he always worked. No individual offices here. Everyone, no matter where they were placed on the corporate food chain, worked here in the main room.
Kyle wished he could have done what he had to do from home, met the hostage taker’s demands immediately. But Whirl360 had one of the most hacker-proof systems on the planet. Access from beyond the building was impossible.
“I’m at my desk,” Kyle said quietly enough that no one in the office could hear.
“Excellent,” Nicole said. “We’re fine here.”
“I do this thing for you, we never hear from you again,” he whispered.
“That’s right. You erase the image, you wipe it from the system like it was never there, and we’re good.”
“I’ve got your word on that,” Kyle said.
“Of course,” Nicole said.
“Okay, I’m in.” A flurry of keystrokes. “New York…Orchard Street…This shouldn’t take long.”
NICOLE took the phone away from her ear, rested her hand on her thigh. If Kyle had anything to say to her, she’d hear it. She was feeling optimistic. She could tell he wanted this to be done as quickly as possible, that he wanted to please her. He wasn’t going to fuck this up.