WE ALL GOT a good six or seven hours of sleep after finding the CD, so the Wises, Tavia, and I were looking rested and ready to go when we filed into the lab at Private Rio the next morning.
Seymour Kloppenberg and Maureen Roth, however, had been up all night and looked it.
“You get into the CD?” I asked.
“It was encrypted, but yes,” Sci said, and he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He turned to his computer keyboard and typed.
The large screen above the workbench opened and revealed instructions in a primitive, blurry font, all capital letters.
LOAD MONEY IN WHITE UNMARKED FORD PANEL VAN NO REAR WINDOWS.
ANDREW WISE DRIVER, WEARS BLUE WORKMAN’S COVERALL, NO HAT, NO GLASSES.
NO FATHER? THE GIRLS DIE.
NO OTHER PASSENGERS IN VAN OR THE GIRLS DIE.
NO POLICE OR THE GIRLS DIE.
NO PRIVATE OR THE GIRLS DIE.
NO TRACKING DEVICES OR THE GIRLS DIE.
EXCHANGE TO TAKE PLACE IN OPEN, PUBLIC, LIT AREA OF OUR CHOOSING.
YOU HAVE UNTIL MIDNIGHT MONDAY, AUGUST 1, TO PREPARE.
“We can get a van like that in Rio, right?” Cherie asked.
“I’m sure,” Tavia said. “How soon can you get the thirty million?”
“It’s waiting at the national bank,” Wise said.
“They want fifty million,” Cherie said.
“I’m not giving them fifty.”
Cherie’s face went cherry red. “They’ll kill the girls.”
“No, they won’t,” her husband said. “I told you. They’ll see a whopping stack of cash in the back of that van and it won’t matter whether it’s thirty million or fifty.”
“But—”
“Jack?” Wise said impatiently. “What’s the likelihood of kidnappers stopping to count when we deliver that amount of money?”
“In a public, lit place?” I said. “Small. They’re going to want to see money and lots of it, but they won’t be counting exact figures until they’re long gone.”
“See?” Wise said to his wife. “And the girls will be just as free and safe as if we’d spent fifty million for their return. In business, we call that a bargain.”
“In life, we call that endangering the lives of your own flesh and blood to cut costs,” Cherie shot back.
Wise ignored her, said to me, “Get one of those vans and put in the most sophisticated and least detectable tracking devices you can find. I want them buried in the money. Can you make that happen?”
I looked to Mo-bot, our expert on these kinds of things. She nodded.
“Wait! What?” Cherie exploded. “Are you kidding me? The note explicitly says tracking them will mean Alicia and Natalie die.”
“Not if we have the girls in our possession before turning on the trackers by remote control,” her husband said. “That way we win it all. We get our darlings back. We get the money back. And we see the kidnappers thrown in jail.”
Chapter 39
Monday, August 1, 2016
11:10 p.m.
EVEN IN THIS day and age of billionaires, it is an awesome thing to see thirty million dollars’ worth of currency banded, stacked, and strapped to a pallet. More than a thousand pounds of cash. If it dropped on you, you’d be squished. Kind of takes your breath away, really.
But Wise seemed unimpressed as a forklift loader moved the pallet and the small mesa of money into the back of the van. He shut the rear door, locked it, and then shook the hand of a bank official who wished to remain anonymous.
We jumped down off the loading dock into a wide alley in back of a depository of the Central Bank of Brazil. The overhead door began to descend behind us.
Only an incredibly well-connected multibillionaire had the kind of juice to make a transfer like that happen on short notice in a foreign country. I started reappraising Wise as we walked around the van. Behind the Asperger’s facade, he had one of the quickest minds I’d ever encountered. And he had this almost unnatural cool when he had to make his most difficult decisions. I don’t think he felt even a flicker of emotion when he’d decided to put thirty million dollars’ worth of reais into the van instead of fifty.
Wise was confident in the extreme, but I wondered whether he might be riding for a fall.
“Sure you want to be the driver?” I asked one last time.
“It’s required of me,” he said. “So I’ll do it. Now what?”
“You get in the van, I get in that car over there with Tavia and your wife, and we wait for further instructions.”
“But we don’t even know how the instructions are supposed to come.”
“We’ve got it covered,” I said.
We did. The concierge at the Marriott had been told to call us immediately if anything was delivered there. Sci and Mo-bot were monitoring all of the Wises’ e-mail accounts and cell phones, and Tavia and I were paired with their phones as well. Anything that came to them, we would see.