by Osborne, Jon
$250,000 – 792600010003
Blankenship swallowed away the bile that flooded into his mouth and removed the other two badges before studying those next:
$500,000 – 927852620302
$1,000,000 – 832000018462
“What the fuck, Blankenship? This is completely unacceptable! I should have your fucking badge and gun for pulling some amateur bullshit like this! Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Blankenship’s already overworked heart nearly exploded inside his chest at the sudden sound of a very angry voice booming out from the doorway. He cut his startled stare over to the doorway to see Bill Krugman standing there. The Director’s usually calm face was mottled red with fury. His usually impeccable silver hair sat wildly askew on the top of his head. Dark brown circles of exhaustion ringed the bottoms of his eyes. “Sir, I’m sorry-“ Blankenship began.
Krugman cut him off with an enraged look. “Shut the fuck up, Bruce,” the Director snarled. “Just shut the fuck up before I fire your insubordinate ass right here on the spot just for being so goddamn stupid. We’ll deal with your insubordination later, though, don’t you worry about that. Anyway, what have you got here?”
Blankenship lifted one of the babies from the bed, the one with the silver hair. Krugman stared at it from across the room and squinted his dark brown eyes in disbelief. “Is that supposed to me?” he asked incredulously.
Blankenship nodded. “I believe so, sir.” Placing the silver-haired doll back down onto the bed, he picked up the other two babies at the same time next. The Director looked at both of those before he closed his eyes in frustration. “You and Agent Wexler, I presume,” he said, breathing out slowly through his nostrils.
“From all appearances, sir.”
Krugman opened his eyes again. “So, how long ago did you get here?”
Blankenship checked his watch. “Just about five minutes ago, sir. These dolls are the only things I’ve found so far.” He held up one of the paper badges and turned it over so that Krugman could see the reverse side. “Dollar amounts and overseas bank account numbers. The email I got earlier this morning leads me to believe that this is just the first step in the game. More instructions to follow.”
Krugman shook his head. “Great. Just fucking great. Exactly what we need right now with Jack Yuntz shooting the shit out of everyone out there like the entire world’s his own personal goddamn shooting gallery.” Krugman paused and glanced down at Blankenship’s gloves. “Got any more of those things on you?”
Blankenship shook his head, relieved beyond words to have Krugman’s mind back on work. With any luck at all, the Director might even forget about his blatant insubordination altogether. Who knew? Stranger things had certainly happened in the history of the world.
Letting out a small breath he hoped Krugman wouldn’t notice and knowing that only time would tell his fate on that particularly unpleasant issue, Blankenship said, “Not on me, sir, but I’ve probably got a spare set out in my car.”
Krugman stretched his neck from left to right until Blankenship heard a string of vertebra pop. A dark blue vein throbbed crazily on the left side of the Director’s throat, all thick and fat with blood. Pressing his lips together into a firm line and putting his hands on his hips, it looked like Krugman had reached the end of what had already been a very short rope now. “Well, Blankenship,” the Director barked. “What the hell are you waiting for? Go get the goddamn things already. We’ll search this room together.”
CHAPTER 37
Pulling on the fresh pair of thin latex gloves that Bruce Blankenship had just handed him, Bill Krugman felt his veins flood with adrenalin as Blankenship began to search under the bed. The potent chemical raced through his system and made it nearly impossible for him to even think straight, much less process the many jumbled thoughts that were bumping around inside his skull.
Krugman’s body tingled with an almost indescribable high. His mind buzzed with the electric thrill of the chase, every synapse in his brain seeming to fire at once. His muscles tensed, preparing to spring into action at a moment’s notice.
Krugman breathed deeply through his nostrils in satisfaction, smelling the plastic-y odor of the gloves and loving the way the familiar scent tickled his nose and set his olfactory sense on fire. He’d missed that smell.
“I’ve got something here, sir.”
Blankenship’s voice knocked him out of his reverie. As Blankenship emerged from under the bed, Krugman could see that he was holding a small, shiny silver object in his hands. “What is it?’ Krugman asked, squinting his tired brown eyes for a better look. He patted at his left breast pocket for his reading glasses. No luck. He’d left them sitting on the dashboard out in his rental car.
Blankenship finished getting to his feet and handed the object over. Krugman took it and studied the etched lettering on front: HD. “A cigarette case,” Krugman said, stating the obvious but not giving a crap. Pressing a tiny button on the side of the case to open it, he saw a single Gitane cigarette nestled inside. “A French brand, if I’m not mistaken,” he said, smelling the pungent scent of tobacco. He looked back up at Blankenship. “Initials, probably, so that could be good.” He turned the cigarette case over in his hands and examined it some more. “Anyway, do you think our kidnappers left it behind? You said there were two of them, right?”
Blankenship nodded. “Yes, sir. At least two of them, according to the girl out front. Could be more than that, though. Or fewer. Hard to say for sure until we get more to work with.” Looking around the filthy room, Blankenship then answered Krugman’s first question. “As for the kidnappers leaving the cigarette case behind – either by mistake or on purpose – that’s also tough to tell, sir. This place is a real shithole. Probably doesn’t get cleaned more often than once a month, if that. I’ll have the case checked out for prints, though, of course. Still, I find it pretty hard to believe that our kidnappers left it behind by mistake, especially with the engraved initials on front. Seems to me like they’re running a pretty sophisticated operation so far and they wouldn’t do something that stupid. Hell, they knew I’d be over here just as soon as I got the email.”
Krugman nodded. Made sense. And putting aside for now the usually reliable man’s uncharacteristic display of insubordination just half an hour earlier, Blankenship was a damn fine agent – one of the finest under Krugman’s command. Really knew his stuff. Always had known his stuff ever since Blankenship had first signed on with the Bureau back in the 1990s. A real good family man, too, which Krugman knew from firsthand experience, having met Madison and the couple’s adorable twin girls several times over the past few years during various FBI social functions. Blankenship marked exactly the kind of person that the FBI went well out of its way to recruit but very rarely ever found. And Krugman didn’t think he wanted to risk losing a man of Blankenship’s caliber over a mild case of insubordination that might be difficult to prove anyway. So fuck it. He’d let the insubordination ride. No sense in losing a war just to win an ultimately unimportant battle. “True,” Krugman said in response to Blankenship’s estimation of the kidnapper or kidnappers’ skill level that may or may not have resulted in the mistake of leaving behind the engraved cigarette case, “but the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.’
Blankenship looked around the room some more and sighed. “Could be either one of them, I suppose – mice or men – considering the state of this place. Perfect habitat for rodents, if you ask me. Including the human kind.”
Krugman lifted his eyebrows, duly impressed. “Nice turn of phrase there, Agent Blankenship.” He shook his head to chase away the thought and handed the cigarette case back to the agent. No time to play word games, however clever those word games might be. “Anyway, bag this thing up and get me a list of all the kidnappings for ransom in the United States over the past ten years. If you’re right about these creeps having experience in the field, it might provide us with another useful lead to follow.”
&nbs
p; “Yes, sir. I’ll get on it right away.”
While Blankenship did as he was instructed – this time, at least – Krugman made his way into the unsanitary bathroom twenty feet away and opened the mirror hanging above the disgusting sink: the second-most obvious hiding place in the filthy motel room right after the underside of the bed. The steady drip-drip-drip coming from the rusty faucet filled his ears and gave him a pretty good idea of why Chinese water torture had always been so particularly effective.
When the mirror was opened, he wasn’t surprised to find the sheet of lined notebook paper taped to the back that was facing two empty shelves meant for storing medications. The message the note conveyed had been scrawled in blood-red lipstick and written in a more masculine-looking script this time:
Pay first installment by two p.m. today. Further instructions will be provided to you upon receipt.
CHAPTER 38
Back at the FBI field office two hours later, Blankenship worked on his computer while Krugman pored over a list of kidnappings for ransom in the United States over the past ten years.
Blankenship leaned back in his chair and smacked his keyboard with the palm of his right hand in frustration, rattling the plastic rectangle on his desk and nearly spilling his long-cold coffee all over his desk blotter. World’s greatest dad or not, as his mug so boldly claimed, he’d been at it for forty-five solid minutes now but as far as he could tell the email he’d received this morning had been bounced around among various servers located overseas before reaching him via the Internet connection at the Manor Inn. Clearly, as he’d theorized earlier to Krugman, they weren’t dealing with amateurs here. Instead, they were dealing with cold-blooded professionals.
Krugman looked up at the sudden noise and wrinkled his drawn and weathered face. “Jesus Christ, Bruce. You scared the living shit out of me over here. Don’t do that to again, OK? I’m way too old to take it and I can’t afford to skip a single heartbeat at this point in my life. Anyway, what is it? What’s going on?”
Blankenship shook his head in irritation and flicked a loose paper clip that was sitting on the corner of his desk onto the floor. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “but this goddamn email is just about impossible for me to trace without getting a search warrant first. And I highly doubt that we’re likely to get a search warrant from the Cambodian government, where the originating server is located, as far as I can tell.”
Krugman flipped a page on his printout from his seat five feet away in a faux-leather armchair beneath the overhanging fronds of a plastic palm tree. “No way to get around it?”
Blankenship shook his head again. “Nope. None that I can figure out, anyway.” Computer whiz or not, Blankenship was stumped. Though they’d stumbled onto his turf by sending him the email, it seemed that the people he was chasing here weren’t computer illiterate themselves.
Smart and heartless: always a dangerous combination.
Krugman pursed his lips and moistened his right index finger before flipping another page on his printout. “Well, just keep at it. Maybe you’re missing something. Remember: even if we find ourselves in a marathon here instead of a sprint we can still win the race.”
Blankenship sighed heavily and checked his watch. Almost noon already. Speaking of sprints. Though he’d feared it would drag ass all day long when he’d first made it into the office this morning, time was absolutely flying today, which certainly didn’t mark a good thing considering the circumstances. After Krugman had discovered the ransom note taped to the reverse side of the mirror back at the filthy motel, additional forensics personnel had showed up en masse at the scene to sweep the place, descending on the Manor Inn like a swarm of hungry locusts descending on a Nebraska wheat field. Nothing else had been turned up, though, even after the room had been thoroughly flipped upside down. No prints to be found anywhere – not even on the engraved cigarette case bearing the initials HD: the perfect surface for yielding such results. Another promising lead that had seemed to go up in a quick puff of smoke right in front of their eyes.
Blankenship sighed again, even more heavily this time. Add that one to the ever-growing list. He’d checked in at the Four Seasons yesterday afternoon in an attempt to review the security video there, but the manager on duty had told him that the entire system had been shorted out on the night that Helen Morgan had done the mattress mambo with the dashing former president of France.
Blankenship closed his eyes and gritted his teeth in disgust, still unable to believe the stupidity of some of the people in this world. No doubt the shorting out of the security system had been the work of the good “Nicholas Sarkozy” himself. And the guest log at the prestigious hotel had revealed that the kidnapper had actually signed in under the ridiculous pseudonym, paying in cash and somehow escaping notice of all the political experts stationed behind the front desk in the process. An hour later, speaking with the staff on duty the previous Friday night over at the Oak Barrel Bar on Euclid Avenue had just turned up another dead end. Nobody remembered a goddamn thing. No ATMs or gas stations around the bar that might’ve provided him with video evidence of what the male part of kidnapping team looked like, either.
Blankenship took a deep breath through his nostrils and cursed his rotten fortunes. Still, with any break at all in this seemingly never-ending run of horrendous luck, maybe Helen Morgan’s soiled underwear would yield some traceable DNA. Certainly worth the effort of finding out. But he was still waiting to hear back from Maggie Flynn down in the DC lab about the results of the testing. The panties had been priortized, she’d told him, but these things still took time.
Too bad time was the one thing they didn’t have here.
Blankenship blew out a slow breath through his mouth and stretched his aching neck before looking down at his watch again. “You absolutely sure you don’t want to pay the first installment of the ransom, sir?” he asked. “Seems to me like we’re gambling with the baby’s life by not paying. Zachary Paulson’s got plenty of money, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Hell, he probably wouldn’t miss even the quarter-million they’re asking for first. It wouldn’t be any skin off his nose. One fewer fancy car, maybe. If nothing else, though, it might buy him some peace of mind.” Blankenship paused. “I know that I’d sure as hell pay if I were in his shoes. You can’t trade money for the life of your kid after they’re gone, after all.”
Krugman lifted his silver eyebrows on his wrinkled forehead and let out a slow breath of his own. “I know, Agent Blankenship,” he said, “but the first rule in these situations is to not negotiate with terrorists, no matter how hard they might come at you. I know that it seems counterintuitive at times, especially with the Paulson baby still out there and in clear and present danger, but we’re actually playing the percentages by withholding the cash. Keeps the kidnappers hungry. They didn’t go to all this trouble just to teach us a lesson if we don’t listen, you know. They want to be paid.”
Blankenship nodded. Made sense, he guessed. Love of money was the root of all evil and all that: one of the few things the Bible had seemed to have gotten right and hadn’t subsequently contradicted itself on. And hard as it might be for him to get to grips with at the moment while he dealt with the enormous mental pressure of being ultimately responsible for a baby’s life or death, he knew that the Director hadn’t chosen his course of action randomly. Krugman knew what he was doing here, and he’d play things by the book that he’d practically written himself, just like he always did. After all, you didn’t get to his lofty position in the FBI by making the wrong calls. And after more than forty years with the Bureau the old man wasn’t likely to change his stripes anytime soon, anyway. Tigers never did. Especially the alpha males.
For the next two hours, Blankenship and Krugman stayed mostly silent, speaking to each other only occasionally while they dutifully plugged away at the work in front of them, both trying their best to ignore the thunderous ticking of the circular clock on the wall. Blankenship couldn’t help but to check both the clock a
nd his watch every ten minutes or so, though, hoping against hope that the rapidly approaching two p.m. deadline wouldn’t live up to its extremely ominous-sounding name.
At exactly two-oh-five p.m., Blankenship’s computer chimed, signaling an incoming email. He sat up straighter in his chair and felt a hot jolt of adrenalin flood through his veins. The subject line of the email continued the aviation theme from earlier in the morning, obviously a reference to the horrific kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby back in the 1930s – the most infamous case of child abduction and subsequent murder in the history of the United States:
RIGHT ENGINE OUT, ONLY ONE ENGINE LEFT TO GO
Blankenship turned to Krugman, his heart pounding away so forcefully inside of his chest that he wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Krugman could hear it from five feet away. “We’ve got another communiqué from the kidnappers, sir,” he said.
Krugman rose to his feet and crossed the few feet separating them. Standing behind his subordinate, he looked on over the Blankenship’s left shoulder while Blankenship opened the email. The words they read inside the email were even more chilling than the ones in the message Blankenship had received earlier that morning. Seemed like several lifetimes ago now:
