by Jim Beegle
“Amy …”
“Mark …” she began. But he knew that they didn’t have much time and he wanted to make sure he got some needed information out of her.
“Amy, listen to me. Are you listening?”, he asked her, shifting in his chair so he could write and listen at the same time. It took a moment for her answer to come back to him.
“Yes, I’m listening.”
“Good. Sweetheart, I need to know some things really fast. I’m going to ask you questions and I want you to answer yes or no to them, OK?”
“Yes” she said, already responding the way he had asked her too.
“Good girl. I am not sure how long we can talk, so we need to hurry.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked, trying to keep her talking and in control of her voice. There was a pause before she spoke.
“No.”
He breathed a brief prayer of thanks before continuing. “Is anyone listening to this conversation that you know of?”
“No”
Once again the breaks seemed to fall in his favor. “Do you know who is holding you?”
There was another pause before she replied to his question. “No.”
Mark was writing down her “yes” and “no” answers, as he moved down his list. His eyes and pen moved to the next question. “Is there more than one person holding you?”
“Yes” she told him.
He wrote Y-E-S under the last question asked, before speaking again. “Amy, I want you to try and relax. I’m going to do exactly what they tell me. I will make sure they don’t have any reason to hurt you. Understand?” His wife did not say anything but he could almost see her nodding her head on the other end of the phone. “I’m so sorry I put you in this position, but I will make sure you get back safely. I promise. Amy, just do what they tell you to and I will see you soon.”
“Mark,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. “I’m so scared.”
“I know, Sweetheart.” As he spoke his hand tightened on the phone receiver turning his knuckles white again. “So am I.” He looked back at his list. “Amy,” he said, but before he could say anything else there was a noise again at the other end of the conversation. The next voice he heard was the now familiar electronically disguised one he had already come to hate.
“That’s enough for now.” The voice said. “We need to talk business. Are you listening?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Good. We want to make this as easy for everyone as possible so here’s what is going to happen. You’re going to have the funds in all the other accounts wired into one account in the Bahamas. We aren’t going to make you physically withdraw the money and hand it over to us. We are going to handle the entire transaction by wire. Wire the money in, turn the account over to us, and we will return your wife. Nice, easy, and simple.”
“It’s going to take some time,” Mark told the voice.
“You have until tomorrow afternoon.”
“That’s not going to work.” He said with as much meek determination as he could muster into his voice. “I need to be in Nassau to arrange the transfers. Some of this money is in Asia. By the time I get to Nassau tomorrow and then to somewhere I can arrange for the transfers, the markets in Asia will be closed for the day. Some of the money is in Europe; it’s going to be hard enough just to get the European accounts transferred tomorrow. This ain’t like going to an ATM, sliding my card in and making a withdrawal. Even under normal circumstances, just doing a transfers would be hard enough. I need more time.” Mark pleaded.
He desperately hoped that the logic of his argument and the tone of his voice would persuade the man at the other end of the line. There was some truth in what he had just said. But, he was also pretty sure that if he called Mr. Roddy he could get the money wired sooner, maybe even tonight. He was hoping the people using Amy’s phone didn’t know that. But, he needed some time to work out the rest of his strategy; at least twenty-four hours, he figured.
“How much time?” The voice finally asked. Mark had been anticipating this question and had been frantically trying to work out a timetable of events in his head.
“Two days. I need until Thursday.” He said, holding his breath as he spoke. This request did not result in an immediate denial. Instead, there was a noise on the other end. Mark could only make out bits and pieces pieces of a conversation. He figured the man who owned the voice he had been speaking with had placed his hand over the mouthpiece and was talking to his partners. The answer he got to his request was unexpected but not unwelcome.
“Stay where you are, we will call you right back.” The line went dead.
This was a good sign. They had not rejected his request out of hand. He knew they would come back and propose a compromise. Having until Thursday would be nice, but he had no illusions of being allowed that much time. He was pretty certain that what he needed to accomplish could be come within thirty-six hours. But he really didn’t have a solid plan yet, and the play for time was an effort to allow him at least tonight in to work out all the details.
Not for the first time today, Mark realized that his mouth was dry. His tongue had a pasty feeling as he moved it over his teeth. As soon as he replaced the receiver he went to the bathroom and selected one of the glasses wrapped for his sanitation and protection. Running water from the tap until he was sure the water standing in the pipes had been flushed out, he filled the cup and drank deeply. Draining the glass he replaced it on the counter and walked back into the main room just as the phone rang. He managed to scoop it up on the second ring.
“Yes.” Mark said without any preamble.
“Thursday’s unacceptable,” the voice said. “Wednesday morning.” Mark had participated in enough negotiations to understand the voice was not telling him it had to be done Wednesday morning but, was proposing a compromise. Just as Mark had assumed, they would not allow him to have all the way until Thursday, he also reasoned that the farther he could stall into Wednesday, the better.
“Wednesday evening,” Mark offered. There was a pause on the other end but, not very long; this part of the negotiation did not take a committee meeting.
“No, we want to conduct our business, make the exchange, and finish up by the end of the business day at four o’clock. You can, I am sure, appreciate our desire to conclude all of our transactions quickly.”
“But, of course.” Mark replied with more than just a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “Noon on Wednesday?”
Once again there was a short pause. “That will do.”
“How will we make the exchange?” Mark asked as he picked up his pad and flipped to a clean sheet of paper.
“When will you go to Nassau? Where will you stay?” The voice asked.
“I will fly down tomorrow morning. As to where I will stay, I quite honestly have not gotten that far yet.”
The voice did not answer and it was obvious that he was working out the time that would be needed to facilitate the exchange. “Once you arrive in Nassau and find a hotel, call your wife’s cell phone again. You must contact us by one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
“Whose time?” Mark interrupted
“What are you talking about?” the voice said irritated at the disruption.
“One o’clock Dallas time? Nassau time? Whose one o’clock do I go by?”
“Oh,” was the only immediate reply he received right away. “One o’clock local time, local Nassau time,” the voice corrected itself.
“Thanks”
“Once you call us, you will need to give us your local number. I am not sure the caller ID system works in the Bahamas. Do you understand?” the voice asked.
“One o’clock, Nassau time, I call you with the number and I wait for a callback.”
“Very good.” The voice paused and shifted tone again.
“Mr. Vogel, this is not the time to try to be a hero. We have no interest in your wife beyond the purpose she is serving now. We
are not violent men. We only require a simple exchange: your wife for the money. We will be watching your every move, and by now you know we can do that. If we have any reason to believe you have gone to the police, you will never see your wife again. Once we have the money in our control we will simply vanish and not bother either one of you again. We will have no need to eliminate witnesses. You confident that all we want is the money. We will harm no one as long as you do exactly as we tell you to, just like you have done up to now. I would encourage you to just follow instructions. This will be over soon and you will have your wife back safe and sound.”
Mark realized that this was standard verbiage. Control the situation, keep people from getting excited, make it sound simple and easy. These things the voice had just told Mark was designed to assure him that, just like himself, these were reasonable men who were simply trying to conduct a reasonable transaction. It was reasonable too until you remembered that they were forcibly holding your wife against her will. He decided to do a little reassuring of his own.
“I will do what you tell me to do.” Mark told the voice. “You can have the money, I don’t care anything about that. I just want my wife back.”
“That is very understandable and reasonable of you. I am sure will work out to everyone’s benefit.” the voice said, very pleased with Mark’s reply. They had him moving to their side of the logic in play. They were pleased and it showed by the tone of the electronic voice. He was moving their way. Mark’s next statement to them shattered that assurance.
“I’m glad to hear that, but I want you to listen to me very carefully,” Mark said, lowering and flattening his. “If you harm Amy in any way, you have my word, I will collect all the money, and I will spend every penny of it as well as every day I have left on this earth until I find you. There will be no place to hide, and no place you can run. Do I make myself clear?” Mark had no way of knowing if he had been clear or not because the phone line simply went dead.
As soon as he put the receiver of the phone back in it’s cradle, Mark became a blur of motion. He literally threw his yellow legal pad into the opened briefcase and snapped the case shut. Picking it up off bed along with the coat he moved toward the door in one fluid motion. He was not sure if the resources of the people holding Amy extended all the way to Ft. Lauderdale or not but, he had no intention of finding out.
He was out the door of his room and moving towards the elevator within two minutes of hanging up the phone. It was now his desire to get back to the airport just as possible and get to Nassau tonight, not tomorrow.
While it would easy to miss seeing someone in the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport, the same could not be said for the terminal in New Providence. If they believed he was coming in tomorrow they could have someone watching the arriving flights and put a tail on him. He would not have any freedom to move about without the people holding Amy being aware of his actions.
Not that it would make that much difference if someone was following him once he got to Nassau but it would give him a few advantages. If the kidnappers didn’t have the luxury of being able to analyze his movements, he possibly prevent them from being able to deduce what he was up to.
He exited the hotel through the same glass doors he had entered less than an hour before and caught a cab without even bothering to check out. So much the better that the front desk reported that Mr. Vogel was still registered but not answering his phone should someone call for him.
The cab dropped him at the upper-level entrance to the Ft. Lauderdale terminal building and to the ticket counter for Bahamas Air. This time several hundred dollars and a quick glance at his passport got him a ticket on the eight forty-five flight that would make a stop in Miami before arriving in Nassau at ten minutes before eleven. He would have preferred a direct flight, but all those flights had already departed. There were other non-direct flights that also stopped in Miami, but they departed Ft. Lauderdale later than the Bahamas Air flight.
This one would have to do.
As soon as he had his ticket Mark looked at his watch and saw that he had just a little more than thirty minutes before the flight would board and over an hour before it left. He decided to make good use of his time. The first thing he did was turn off his phone.
Amy’s abductors knew he was in Ft. Lauderdale. If they were tracking his phone it would show them he was no longer where he was supposed to be.
He found a rare payphone, dialed information to get the US reservation number for the Atlantis Resort, the same hotel he had stayed in on his first and only trip to Nassau. The virtual operator gave him the number and then connected him. Within a very short time, he was able to make a reservation for later that night.
He then passed through security and entered the boarding gate area of Ft. Lauderdale International. The building had a nice open and airy feeling about it. There were very few people milling around the terminal this time of night, especially on a Monday, which helped contribute to the lofty feeling of the building. Most of the people there were coming into the building complex, not from the front of the building like Mark had, but elsewhere on the concourse as planes arriving from other parts of the country disgorged their passengers. Most of the rest of them were just bored airport employees looking for some way to kill time before the end of their shifts.
On the way to his gate, Mark passed a food court at which point his empty and abused stomach made a rather loud request for something to eat. It didn’t take much urging. Before he realized that you could get service in an airport that fast, he was seated at one of the little tables in the dining area with a beer and two slices of pizza for company for company. The food was good and, even though he tried to force his mind not to wonder about how long it had sat under the heat lamps.
As he ate his mind was finally on the road to full recovery and almost ready to hand the process of solving the current problems back over to the logic and reasoning side of his brain.
His flight was being called as he entered the gate area and, without breaking stride, he handed his boarding pass to the gate agent and boarded the plane. He found his seat, but before settling into it, he took the yellow pad from the briefcase. He had a lot to work out in the next two hours.
As the plane was being pushed from the gate by the squat but powerful tractor, called a mule, Mark was already trying to find a way to deal with the issue he considered the most problematic; namely, how to exchange the information about the money for Amy at the same time so, at the very worst, neither side would have an advantage over the other.
There had to be a way to structure his plan so that he would have the upper hand. Maybe not throughout the entire process of the exchange, but for long enough that he could be certain Amy was safe and out of harm’s way. When the plane began to taxi onto the runway, work was already well underway on his intricate word sketch of what he needed to happen.
Mark continued to work as the plane made the short one-hundred-mile hop from Ft. Lauderdale to Miami. He continued working through the deplaning and boarding process and like a man who was just starting to walk again after a prolonged period in a cast, his mind assumed more control with each passing mile in the air. By the time the plane began it’s slow and final descent into Nassau, and Mark had a reasonable thought process for solving most of the problems that he would face.
There was only one obstacle remaining: it would take at least seventy-two hours to accomplish everything he needed to do, and he now had just a little over thirty-six. He was going to need some help.
During the course of his education, Mark had taken more than his fair share of tests, and just as with most other things in life, there is an art to test-taking. Mark’s unique approach to that art began with reading the entire test, front to back, before attempting to answer any of the questions.
This process helped him to quickly identify the questions that he did not have a ready answer for. He had also discovered that sometimes in the process of asking one ques
tion the professor would actually provide the answer to another. A similar process was at play here.
By knowing, or at the very least suspecting, who was behind Amy’s abduction, it freed up the other people on his list of suspects to conceivably be in a position to help. It would also be nice to have a pair of non-emotional eyes looking for flaws in his plan. He could not shake the feeling that his current predicament was the result of trying to this alone.
As he had done weeks earlier, Mark presented himself and his passport to the nattily-dressed customs agent at the Lynden Pindling International Airport. He repeated his lost luggage story to the man who looked sympathetically at Mark as he inspected the contents of his briefcase: a yellow pad, a laptop computer, and several file folders containing papers that easily supported his claim of traveling on business. No luggage meant nothing smuggled. The customs and immigration agent wished more people would travel to the island luggage-less as he stamped Mark’s passport.
The law of supply and demand was at work at that late hour. The slow trickle of people arriving at the airport greatly reduced the number of cabs in the queue seeking a fare, coupled with the fact that it was almost Tuesday morning, and a few weeks before Christmas, guaranteed there would be no rush for the few cabs that waited at the curb like backup players at a college homecoming game. It took under thirty minutes for Mark to find a cab, get to the Atlantis, check in, and gain access to his room.
His stomach sent out yet another request for food, which Mark chose to ignore. There was too much to do and he had to get busy doing it right now. Phone calls would have to come first. He opened his computer, launched Outlook, and found the numbers he needed. He sincerely hoped that no one at the other end of his early calls would be annoyed enough about being awakened in the wee hours of the morning to refuse him help.
The first call was placed to the person of whom Mark would ask the most. He was relieved to discover that he was not interrupting anyone’s sleep due to the time difference. They talked for more than an hour; Mark started his narrative from as near the beginning of the Cecil story as time allowed, and quickly brought the circumstances up to the present.
