Ransom

by Danielle Steel

  “And if things go sour with the Barnes children, and something goes wrong? What if one of them is killed?”

  “It's your job to see that doesn't happen. Parents aren't generally as enthusiastic about paying ransom for dead kids. And it upsets the cops.”

  “Never mind the cops. We're going to have the FBI on our asses the minute those kids disappear.”

  “Yes, we will. Or you will. Or someone will,” Addison said pleasantly. “Actually, I'm going to Europe this summer. We're going to the South of France, so I'm going to be leaving this matter in your very capable hands.” And avoiding any possible implications that he was involved in it, of course. “By the way, if one of your men gets caught in the process of this, I am prepared to pay them half the promised amount. That should cover their attorney fees, and even a fairly reliable escape.” He had thought of everything. “And you, my friend, can either brazen it out here afterward, or disappear very comfortably to South America, where ten million dollars will buy you a very agreeable life, whichever you think best. We might even do some business together after that. You never know.” And Addison would be blackmailing him forever, of course, threatening to expose him to the FBI, unless he did whatever Phillip wanted. But no matter how he looked at this, what clinched it for Peter was his own children's lives on the line. Even if he hadn't seen them since they were toddlers, he still loved them, and he would die before he'd put them at risk. Or risk prison, or even the death penalty to protect them. All he could think now was that it was his responsibility to see to it that the Barnes children weren't killed in the course of the kidnap. It was the only thing he wanted, even more than the ten million dollars.

  “How do I know you'll pay?” When Peter asked the question, Phillip knew he was in. It was done.

  “You get two hundred thousand in cash up front. The rest paid into a Swiss account when the job is over. That ought to give you enough play money for now. The rest will come when we get paid. Not a bad petty cash account for an ex-con without a pot to piss in. Wouldn't you say?” And he had already said that Peter's previous debt to him was canceled. Peter didn't answer, he just stared at him, shaken by all he'd heard. In the last two hours, his entire life had gone down the drain again. There was no way he would ever be able to explain the money, and he would be on the run for the rest of his life. But Addison had thought of that too. “I'm prepared to say that I fronted you the money for a business deal with me, and the investment paid off brilliantly. No one will ever know.” But Addison would. And no matter how he cooked his books, there was always the risk that someone would talk. The prisons were full of guys who thought their asses were covered, until someone sold them out. And Addison would own his ass for the rest of his life. But he already did. The moment he explained the plan to him, it was all over for Peter. Or his kids. And the Barnes children for sure.

  “What if she doesn't have the money? If he lost some of it?” Peter asked sensibly. Stranger things had happened, particularly in the current economic climate. Fortunes had come and gone in the last few years, leaving in their wake a veritable Everest of debt. Addison only laughed at the idea.

  “Don't be ridiculous. A year ago the man was worth half a billion dollars. You can't lose that much money if you try.” But others had. Addison just refused to believe it about Barnes. He had been too smart to lose it all, or even most of his fortune, or so Addison thought. “The man was pure gold. Trust me. It's all there. And she'll pay. Who wouldn't? All she has now are her kids, and his money. And all we want is half of it. That leaves her plenty to play with, and her family intact.” As long as they stayed that way. That was going to depend now on the men Peter chose. It was all resting on him. His life had turned into a nightmare in the past two hours. Worse than ever before, and beyond anything he could imagine. He was risking the death penalty, or life in prison at the very least.

  Addison opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out an envelope of money. He had prepared it before Peter arrived. And he threw it across the desk.

  “There's a hundred thousand dollars in there, to give you a start. The other hundred thousand will be delivered to you next week, in cash, for whatever your petty cash needs are. It's against the ten million you'll get in the end. You walked in here a bum and an ex-con two hours ago, and you're walking out of here a rich man. Keep that in mind. And if you ever implicate me in any way in this, or even so much as breathe my name, you'll be dead within a day. Is that clear? And if you get cold feet, and try to back out, just think of your girls.” He had Peter by the ass, the balls, and the throat. And he knew it. There was nowhere for Peter to turn. “Start looking for your men now. Pick the right ones. I want to start watching her by next week. And when you pick your men, make clear to them that if they run with their hundred thousand, and skip out on us, they'll be dead within two days. I can guarantee that.” His eyes said he meant it, and Peter believed him, and knew it applied to him too.

  “When do you want to do this?” Peter asked, slipping the envelope into his pocket, and feeling numb. “What's your target date?”

  “If you hire all three men within the next week or two, I think if we watch them for the next four to six weeks, we'll know all we need to know about them. You should be able to make your move at the beginning of July.” He was leaving for Cannes on the first of July. He wanted to be out of the country before they did it. Peter could guess that much.

  Peter nodded and looked at him. His entire life had changed in the last two hours. He had an envelope full of money in his pocket with a hundred thousand dollars in it. And by the following week, he would have another hundred thousand dollars, and it meant nothing to him. All he had accomplished in the single afternoon he had spent with Phillip Addison was selling his soul in exchange for his daughters' lives. And with any luck at all, he would keep the Barnes kids alive too. The rest meant nothing to him. The ten million dollars was blood money. He had sold his soul to Phillip Addison. He might as well have been dead, as far as he was concerned. In fact, he was. He turned to walk out of the room, without saying another word to Addison, who watched him go, and just as Peter reached the doorway, Addison spoke up.

  “Good luck. Stay in touch.” Peter nodded and walked out of the office, and took the elevator downstairs. It was seven-thirty when he stepped outside. Everyone had left hours before. There was no one else around as Peter leaned over the garbage can on the corner and threw up. He stood there retching for what seemed like a long time.

  Chapter 9

  As Peter lay in bed in the halfway house that night, he thought about contacting his ex-wife. He wanted to warn her to be especially careful with the girls. But he knew she'd think he was insane. He didn't want Addison pulling a stunt on him, and holding them hostage until he accomplished the task he'd been assigned. But Addison was smarter than that. He knew that if he put Peter's kids at risk or worse, Peter would have nothing left to lose, and would expose him. So as long as Peter did what he had been hired to do, the girls were safe. It was the only thing he had done for his daughters in the last six years, or maybe their entire lives. He had bought their safety at the expense of his own. He was still having trouble believing they would be able to pull it off. But if he picked the right people, maybe he could. It was all about who he hired now. If he picked a bunch of sloppy, careless criminals, they might panic and kill the kids. What he had to find now was the real thing. The smoothest, toughest, coldest, most competent men in the business, if there was such a thing. The men he knew from prison had already proven their ineptitude by being caught, or maybe their plans had been flawed. Peter had to admit that Addison's strategy was very smooth. As long as Allan Barnes's widow had the money he wanted at her disposal. It was unlikely she kept a hundred million dollars in cash at home, in a cookie jar.

  He was thinking about all of it, as he lay on his bunk, and his roommate walked in. He was going to look for a room in a decent hotel the next day, nothing too showy or expensive. He didn't want to make a sudden show of wealth he c
ouldn't explain, although Phillip Addison had told him he was going to put him on the books of one of his minor subsidiary companies as a consultant. It was allegedly a market research firm, and was in fact a front for one of his drug rings. But it had been operating for years without a problem, and could be traced nowhere to him.

  “How'd it go today?” the roommate asked. He had spent a killing day working at Burger King, and reeked of burgers and french fries. It was only a modest improvement over the way he'd smelled the week before, when he'd worked in a place that served fish and chips. The whole room had smelled of fish. The burger smell was only slightly better.

  “It went okay. I got a job. I'm going to move out tomorrow,” Peter said in a dead voice. The roommate was sorry to see him go. Peter was quiet and didn't bother him, and minded his own business.

  “What kind of job?” He could see Peter was a classy guy, he just had that look about him, even in jeans and T-shirts, and he knew he was educated. But even with an education, he was in the same boat as everyone else when he got out of prison.

  “Doing market research. It's no big deal, but it'll pay rent and food.” Peter looked unenthused. He was still feeling sick about it. He felt like his life was over. He almost wished he was back in prison. At least there, life was simple and he still had hope of a decent life one day. Now he no longer did. It was over for him. He had sold his soul to Satan.

  “That's nice, man. I'm glad for you. Want to go out and eat something to celebrate?” He was a decent guy, who'd done time in the county jail for dealing marijuana, and Peter liked him, although he was a slob to live with.

  “No, that's okay. I have a headache. And I have to go to work in the morning.” In fact, he was going to start thinking, and already was, about the men he was going to hire for Addison's project. It was going to be excruciatingly delicate to find people who wouldn't expose him if they turned him down or he decided to reject them, if he thought they were too risky. He wasn't going to share the plan with them until he met them, trusted them, and had checked their credentials. But it was still going to be a delicate matter hiring them. He had a pain in the pit of his stomach just thinking about it. So far, he had only one man in mind. He hadn't been convicted of kidnapping, but Peter suspected he was the right kind of person for the job. He knew who he was, and roughly where he had gone when he left prison. All Peter had to do now was locate him. He was going to start in the morning, after he moved to a hotel. Just thinking about it, he tossed and turned all night.

  He went to look for a hotel the next morning when he got up. He took a bus downtown, and found a place on the fringes of the Tenderloin, at the southern base of Nob Hill. It was small and impersonal, and just busy enough so no one would pay attention to him. He paid a month's rent in advance, in cash, and then went back to the Mission, to the halfway house, to pack his things. He signed out at the desk, left a note for his roommate, wishing him luck, and then took a bus downtown again. He went to Macy's and bought some clothes. It was nice being able to do that again. He bought some slacks and shirts, a couple of ties, a sport coat, a leather baseball jacket, and some sweaters. He bought new underwear, and a few pairs of decent shoes. And then he went back to the hotel where he had taken the room. He felt like a human being again when he cleaned up, and walked down the street, looking for someplace to eat. There were hookers wandering by, and drunks in doorways. There was a drug deal going down in a car parked outside, and other than that, there were businesspeople and tourists. It was the kind of neighborhood where no one paid much attention to you, and you could get lost easily, which was exactly what he wanted.

  He had no desire to draw attention to himself.

  After dinner, he spent half an hour on the phone. He knew who he was looking for, and he was surprised how easy it was to find him. He decided to take a bus to Modesto in the morning. And before he did, he bought a cell phone. One of the conditions of his parole was not having a cell phone. It was a standard condition for parolees who had gone to prison for dealing drugs. Addison had told him to buy one. And now, without question, Addison was the boss. Peter knew there was no way his parole agent would know he'd bought the phone. He had notified him of his job and change of address that morning and his P.A. sounded pleased.

  Peter called Addison in the office, and left him the cell phone number on his voice mail, and also the phone number at his hotel.

  Fernanda was cooking dinner for the children that night. They were getting more and more excited about getting out of school for the summer. Will was particularly excited about playing lacrosse at camp for three weeks. And the others were excited about their plans too. And when they left for school the next day, she drove downtown, to meet with Jack Waterman. They had a lot to talk about. They always did. She liked him, she always had, although these days he was the voice of doom. He was the attorney who was handling Allan's estate, and before that they had been friends for years. He had been stunned by the mess Allan's affairs were in, the catastrophic decisions he had made, and how they impacted Fernanda and the kids.

  His secretary poured her a cup of coffee when she walked in, and Jack sat across the desk from her with a grim expression. He hated Allan for what he'd done sometimes. She was such a nice woman, she didn't deserve this. No one did.

  “Have you told the kids yet?” he asked, as she set the coffee down and shook her head.

  “About the house? No, I haven't. They don't need to know yet. We're not putting it on the market till August. It'll be soon enough then. They don't need to worry about it for three months. Besides, it may take a while to sell.”

  It was a huge house, and an expensive one to keep up. And the real estate market hadn't been doing well. Jack had already told her that she absolutely had to sell it and have the money in her hands by the end of the year. He had also told her to strip the place and sell as much as she could separately. The furniture certainly. They had spent nearly five million dollars furnishing the house, some of which couldn't be recouped, like the marble they'd put in all the bathrooms, and the state-of-the-art kitchen. But the Viennese chandelier they had paid four hundred thousand dollars for could be sold at auction in New York, and might even bring a profit. And there were other things she could remove and sell throughout the house. She also knew that once they started stripping the place, it would be upsetting for the children, and she was dreading it. She tried not to think of it as she smiled at him, and he smiled back. She had been a hell of a good sport for the past four months, and he admired her for it. Fernanda said she wondered if Allan had ever considered what this would do to her. Knowing him, Jack suspected it had been the farthest thing from his mind. All he thought about was business, and money. There were times when Allan only thought of himself, both during his meteoric rise to dotcom celebrity, and as he plummeted at record speed on his way down. He was a handsome, charming, brilliant guy, but there had also been something very narcissistic about him. Even his suicide had been all about his own despair, without even thinking about her, or the kids. Jack wished he could do more for her, but for the moment he was doing all he could.

  “Are you going anywhere this summer?” he asked, as he leaned back in his chair. He was a nice-looking man. He'd gone to business school with Allan, and then law school after that. The three of them had known each other for a long time. He had had his own griefs over the years. He had been married to an attorney, and she died of a brain tumor at thirty-five. He had never married again, and they hadn't had time to have kids. His own loss made him sympathetic to Fernanda's grief, and he envied her the kids. He was particularly worried about what she was going to live on after they paid Allan's debts. He knew she was thinking about getting a job in a museum, or teaching school. She had figured out that if she taught at Ashley and Sam's school, or even Will's, they might give her a break on their tuitions. But they needed a lot more than that to live on. They had gone from rags to riches to rags again. A lot of people had, in the wake of the dot-com blaze, but their story was more extreme tha
n most, thanks to Allan.

  “Will is going to camp, and Ash is going to Tahoe,” she explained. “Sam and I are staying here. We can always go to the beach.”

  Listening to her made him feel guilty that he was going to Italy in August, and he almost wanted to invite her and the kids to join him, but he was traveling with friends. There was no current woman in his life, and he had had a soft spot for Fernanda over the years, but he also knew from his own experience that it was far too soon to approach anything of the kind with her. Allan had been gone for four months. And when his own wife died, he hadn't dated anyone for a year. But the thought of it had crossed his mind several times in the past few months. She needed someone to take care of her, and so did her children, and he was very fond of all of them. Fernanda knew nothing of his feelings for them.

  “Maybe we can go to Napa for the day or something when the kids get out of school,” he suggested cautiously, and she smiled at him. They had known each other for so long that she thought of him as a brother. It never even occurred to her that he wanted to ask her out and was biding his time. She had been off the dating market for seventeen years, and hadn't even thought of reentering it. She had more important things to think of first. Like their survival, and how she was going to feed her kids.

  “They'd like that,” Fernanda said in answer to his invitation to Napa.

  “I have a friend who has a boat too. It's a beautiful sailboat.” He was trying to think of ways to cheer her up, and entertain her children, without being pushy or offensive. And she looked at him sheepishly as she finished her coffee.