The Boss’s Daughters

by Douglass, Carl;

  “The premiums must be a king’s ransom.”

  “They are, and I guess this is the time to cash in. I’ll make the arrangements with the insurance company.”

  “Will they honor the demand to avoid police?” Angelina asks.

  “It’s part of the insurance agreement. They make no demands other than proof that the named victims have actually been abducted.”

  “If you two are in agreement, we have several things to demand of the kidnappers when they call next. We have to have proof of life and a handwritten ransom demand note to take to the insurance company. We can alert the insurance company to have the funds ready for the wire transfer to Bonn, but we probably shouldn’t actually make the transfer until the kidnappers keep their end of the deal.”

  “I agree,” says Damien.

  Angelina softly gives her consent then goes into her bedroom and locks the door.

  Chapter Seven

  It is day two of the kidnapping of Cinnamon and Paprika Paxton—Chet Nichols, Andy Lusesky, and Lydia Fairchild, security guards from the private company, New York Protection Service, missing with them.

  Chet and Lydia have not heard anything in the past several hours suggesting that the kidnappers are still in the building where they are being held prisoner. Nor have they learned anything concerning the whereabouts of the two little girls for whom they have responsibility to protect or of their fellow security officer, Andy Lusesky. It is time to take a chance. They have determined that one area of the wall in their prison room sounds more hollow, and, therefore, more vulnerable.

  “Let’s do it,” Chet says.

  “Okay. On three,” Lydia says. “You go first.”

  Chet gives the wall a powerful karate back kick and drives his foot into the drywall panel. Neither he nor Lydia harbor any illusions that the kick would not be heard if anyone is still in the building beyond the wall, and the noise of his kick rivals the decibels of a shotgun blast. Lydia takes her turn, using a straight front kick that widens the area of damage to the wall. The noise of her kick is equally loud. Chet gives her a high-five. He backs up to get a little running room for his next kick just as the only door to the room flies open. Six men dash into the room and take down Lydia and Chet after a one minute struggle. One of the kidnappers brings in two stiff back metal chairs with arm rests, and the two captives are jammed into the chairs with sufficient force to jar their spines and to bruise their coccyx bones.

  The captors bind Lydia and Chet’s wrists and ankles to the chairs and slap duct tape over their eyes and mouths. Then, they are systematically beaten with a small-size baseball bat over their calves, their thighs, their backs, and their arms.

  “You wanna stay alive?” the machinelike voice asks, and Chet and Lydia nod in the affirmative.

  “You get a day to sit here hungry and thirsty to ponder your sins and your choices for the future. Do what you have to do about excretion. It was your choice to violate the rules, and you can sit around in your own stink as a result.”

  The pain in their throbbing contused muscles is severe, but they are surprised even to be alive. Both personal security guards have decidedly started considering the option that efforts to escape are futile and likely to be the cause of them being killed. The world looks bleak.

  Cinnamon is tired, angry, frightened, and working herself up to one of her explosions that her anger management counselor has been working for two years to get the headstrong girl to avoid. She tries to think of something else. She sings a little Jesus song from her Sunday school class at the AME [African Methodist Episcopalian] on Amsterdam Avenue. It does not help.

  The masked captor pushes open the door to the bedroom where Cinnamon and Paprika are being held captive. The captor is carrying a supper tray in each hand and is being careful not to tip over the trays and make a mess. Cinnamon decides this is her chance.

  She whispers to Paprika, “When I kick him, you run out the door and get to the street. This could be our only chance.”

  Paprika whimpers but says she’ll try.

  Cinnamon works up a head of steam and propels herself into the midsection of the captor who is struggling to maintain the balance of the trays. The eleven-year-old girl crashes her head in a nearly perfect spear block move into the most vulnerable part of the captor who screams, surprising both little girls and the female captor. The woman topples over unable to get her breath, and scatters food and utensils all around the previously neat bedroom.

  Cinnamon shrieks at Paprika, “Get outta here! Run, girl, run!”

  Paprika breaks out of her state of shock at what Cinnamon has done and makes a beeline for the door, which is still partway open. She finds herself alone in a wide carpeted hallway leading both left and right. She is left handed; so, she automatically makes the decision to run in that direction. It turns out to be a good choice because the stairs are located there, and she is able to get to them and down two flights before anyone reacts to the pandemonium going on in the girls’ bedroom. She can see the front door of the house twenty yards away, across an open slate rock floor foyer.

  Cinnamon jumps up from the floor where she lands beside the captor who is still fighting to breathe and charges for the door which is almost closed.

  The woman croaks out a command, “Stop, you little devil; or I’ll whup yoah backside until y’all cain’t set fa a week!”

  It comes out so weak and breathy that it is almost comical, and Cinnamon pays her no mind. She dashes into the hall and turns right. At the corner of the hallway is an L-shaped dead-end, and she has to reverse direction and run back the way she came. She passes the door to the bedroom just as the woman kidnapper opens it and steps out on wobbly legs. The woman makes an attempt to grab the fleeing girl but it is too-little-too-late, and the athletic child streaks for the stairs at the other end of the hall. She takes the stairs two at a time and makes it down one flight before running into two large men who have not had time to put on their ski masks. One is white and the other is black. As the brutes take her down, she has the odd feeling she has seen the white man before. In two minutes she is back in her bedroom, trussed up, and lying on the bed.

  The woman kidnapper is able to breathe now, and she tells Cinnamon, “I’ll get y’all, an’ ya gonna regret what y’all done fa a week, baby gull!”

  But for the moment, she has to join the other four kidnappers as they rush out of the house and onto the street to recapture Paprika. Paprika is smart enough to know that she cannot outrun the adults for long. She has three advantages over her captors: she has a three-minute head start; she is small; and she is smart. She has no idea where she is except that it is a residential neighborhood of stand-alone houses with large backyards. She rounds a block, then turns onto the next street going away from the kidnap house. She turns her head just enough to determine that her pursuers are not in sight. Then she ducks down a brick driveway and into a backyard with a lot of apple and peach trees, shrubs, cute little doghouses, and Disney character statues—exactly her kind of place. She runs behind a hedge and wedges herself onto the ground of a flower patch nestled among small sycamore trees and makes herself as small as she can. Her heart is thumping out of her chest, and her breath sounds to her like a steam locomotive.

  The kidnappers run out of the house in a tightly packed group of five in what is beginning to look like a proverbial Chinese fire drill. The white man who helped recapture Cinnamon takes charge.

  “We have to stop calling attention to ourselves. An adult man running after a child in this neighborhood will bring cops from every direction in a matter of minutes. Anyone have any idea which direction she ran?”

  The problem for the kidnappers is that the house they are using as a prison is located in the middle of the block. Paprika could have run left or right and then turned left or right when she got to the corner. The first permutation of directions is a factor of four, and there are only five of them to conduct a search with a dual goal of finding and recapturing the girl and not drawing the
attention of neighbors and police.

  “Everybody got a cell phone on them?” the white man asks the four African-American kidnappers.

  They nod.

  “Okay, everybody split up into twos and go to the end of the block and then split up again. Keep in cell phone contact with everybody. If you find her, don’t get out on a street with a flailing and struggling child. Call for help. We’ll search for thirty minutes, then come back and get into cars and start a grid search by car. I don’t need to tell you how crucial it is that we get that brat back unharmed and without us being seen. Think life in prison if this goes any more south than it already has. Now, let’s get going.”

  Damien switches his burner phone to off after his conversation with McGee. He checks his business phone book on his regular iPhone and finds the number for his insurance agent, who happens to be a close associate in the rackets and very aware of Damien’s business.

  “Hey, Damien, whus up?”

  “Hey, Phoenix. Got a big time problem which involves you.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “This doesn’t go beyond us two … nobody else, even family, the guys we trust the most, or anywhere close to cops.”

  “Sounds pretty much like business as usual.”

  “Believe me, it’s not.”

  “Is this a K&R insurance matter, bro?”

  “Yes.”

  “You on a secure phone?”

  “A burner.”

  “I’m not. I got your phone number ID. I’ll get my own burner, never used, and call you right back.”

  Three long minutes pass.

  “Hey, Damien.”

  “Okay, Phoenix. This is the long and short of it: my two baby girls have been kidnapped, and the fools that took ‘em are demanding twenty-five mil by a week from now.”

  “Whew.”

  “Yeah. They have a good plan. No cops; they only deal with Desireé. I’m not sure they even know her fake name.”

  “I don’t even know that.”

  “I guess it’s time you did. She’s living under the name of Angelina Paxton with my two daughters, Cinnamon and Paprika. The girls were abducted yesterday afternoon.”

  “Those cute little spices. We’ll turn over heaven and earth to get them back.”

  “Not yet. I have McGee and Ivory White on it. They are as discreet and effective as you can get. They are handling a lot of the details.”

  “I’ll get you the money, but you know these things take time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Depends. Could be as much as a couple of weeks.”

  “The kidnappers told Desireé they’d kill the kids if we don’t comply. We have a week.”

  “I’ll give it my best shot, bro. How’s it supposed to go down?”

  “The insurance comes up with the money. The kidnappers don’t need to know that or how much the coverage really is. Then, the money gets wire-transferred to Deutsche Bank in Bonn, Germany. I guess Desireé will have to go to Bonn to get the next step underway.”

  “Which is?”

  “Funds transfer to an Istanbul, Turkey bank called Finansbank. They create bearer bonds which Desireé brings back to New York in time to give them to the kidnappers, and we get our girls back.”

  “You sure about this, Damien? I mean, I don’t want to bring up nasty stuff, but the fibbies never advise parents to pay. It don’t work. And bearer bonds? I think they are pretty much illegal, aren’t they?”

  “In the United States, bearer bonds have historically been the financial instrument of choice criminals like me and you for money laundering, tax evasion, and other concealed business transactions. In response, new issuances of bearer bonds have been severely curtailed in the United States since 1982. I did a bit of research and learned that in the United States all the bearer bonds issued by the US Treasury have matured. They no longer pay interest to the holders. Those outstanding can still be cashed in at face value, but there are very few left. However, other countries still issue them or allow their private financial institutions to do so. The Turkish government encourages foreign investment, and has a Foreign Direct Investment Law with implementing rules that have eliminated most restrictions on foreign investors and granted them the same legal status as Turkish companies under the Commercial Code. The important thing about Turkey and countries like it that allow bearer bonds is that their bonds have to be honored at any nation’s banking institution which recognizes its money. They have what they call the Capital Markets Law. It allows—and, in fact—encourages investors to purchase and sell all kinds of capital market instruments, including all types of securities—State Partnership Bonds, bearer bonds, state issued securities, and to establish mutual funds. All of these create a system which protects investors who want to deal in bearer bonds without having to be registered or to give a reason for their purchase like the US requires. The Turkish State will—if necessary—act as an intermediary in the purchase and sale of such securities.

  “The Turkish lira is fully convertible, at least from the Turkish side, because the country is recognized by the IMF as having achieved article 8 status.”

  “So, what’s article 8?”

  “I even wrote it down. Under article 8, ‘no limitation may be imposed on the buying and selling of foreign exchange within the scope of current items in the balance of payments. Profits from these transactions must be freely convertible.’ That is to say, Turkish bearer bonds are legal, and the guy who has one can turn it in for cash in almost every developed country. Obviously, there are countries—like Italy, Portugal, and Spain—that are not so uptight about it.”

  “I presume that means the kidnappers can disappear with their untraceable bearer bonds, cash them in, and sit around on the beach under the swaying palm tree and drink mint juleps or mai tais for the rest of their days.”

  “Um hmmh, that’s it if we can’t get witnesses or snitches who can get us an identity to look for.”

  “I can get the money PDQ because the insurance arrangements presume the potential for just such an emergency, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Get it. Put it into a readily available and usable account, but don’t turn it over to us yet. We have to hear from the kidnappers first, and they have to give us proof of life before we can go any further. I think the girls are too valuable to them to cause them harm or to kill them, at least intentionally; so, I think they will do it within the next seven days. Then Desireé will head off to Germany and then to Turkey to get the bonds in hand. The transfer arrangements will probably be pretty complicated and dicey, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Paprika calms down over the next hour after finding the backyard hiding place. She knows she has to keep absolutely quiet and still. She establishes a simple plan: once it gets dark, she will come out of hiding and sneak around until she finds a house with people in it she can see, preferably a family. She will knock on the door and tell him she is the little girl they are talking about on the TV and the internet. Simple.

  She hears a friendly voice calling her name, “Paprika. Paprika. Are you there? I’m a friend. Your mommy sent me to pick you up. I need to help you get away from the bad men.”

  Paprika starts to get up; but in the past two days, she has lost a great deal of her trusting nature; so, she listens. Nobody seems to be in the yard where she is. She hates to think that she will miss someone coming to save her. It is tempting to yell back, but she resists.

  “Paprika, honey, I’m here to help. Your mommy sent me. If you can hear me, come over to where I am.”

  It can’t hurt to investigate, can it?

  She lifts her head and looks over the fence. There is no one in the yard with her. The voice must be coming from the sidewalk by the house. She crawls super quietly to the wide entrance into the backyard, keeping inside the flower beds and by shrubs and trees. The voice calls out again but is obviously getting farther away. She wants so much for it to be someone who can get her
back home. Maybe he already has helped Cinnamon. She begins to hope.

  Now, the voice is getting quite a ways away. She decides to take a chance. She hurries out to the edge of the trees in front of the house and sees the back of a man walking away.

  “Paprika. I’m Uncle Kenny. Your mommy, Angelina, sent me. If you can hear me, and you are hiding, come out. We have to hurry, or the bad men will catch up to us.”

  It is too enticing, too genuine sounding; so, Paprika cautiously sneaks up the block behind front yard hedges until she is directly across from “Uncle Kenny.” The hedge is eight feet tall and completely opaque to anyone looking in, but Paprika can push her face far enough in to make out the dim figure of the man who is making the siren call to her.

  “I’m Paprika,” she says in a voice only slightly above her usual conversational level.

  The man stops dead in his tracks and swivels his head around to try and determine the direction from which the voice is coming.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you very well,” he says. “Please. Are you Paprika?”

  “Yes,” the little girl says, a little louder this time.

  He hears her but is not entirely certain where she is. He cannot see anything that indicates her location.

  “Come out; so, we can hurry away. My car is just two streets down and is waiting for us. We can’t wait around. They’re coming.”

  “What’s the password?” Paprika asks.

  She remembers what her mommy told her and that it would let her know if a man was trying to trick her.

  “I … I … I forgot. Your mommy told me, but I just can’t remember. Give me a hint. We can make it like a game, honey.”

  “You’re a liar,” Paprika calls out, quite a bit louder this time, forgetting the crucial need to hide in her excitement.

  The password is “snow flake,” and the man does not have a clue. Paprika is doing what her mother taught her to do in their fun but serious drills. She is running full out like a gazelle being chased by a determined leopard.

  This time the man zones in on Paprika’s voice with laser beam accuracy, and he runs towards the hedge. Paprika runs back the way she came as fast as her young legs can carry her. Two yards down the hedge is much lower, and she has to crawl. She hears the man trying to get through the gates of the yards where she has been. The gates are locked. He curses. When he gets to the yard with the lower hedge, he jumps over and runs back to where Paprika’s voice came from. She runs into the shrubbery and flower beds of one more yard and then back into the yard where she spent the several hours hiding. Now, she can hear the man running towards her.