“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.
I was growing confident that we’d covered all the bases and were prepared for anything. No matter what happened, we’d know where the money and the van went.
Mo-bot superglued tracking beacons that looked like machine-bolt heads in the spaces above the wheel wells and slid other, waferlike versions of the trackers deep in the stack of money. The devices were called slow-pulse transmitters.
Rather than emitting a constant, and therefore more detectable, transmission, the devices could be calibrated to send out a location at specific intervals. Mo-bot had them set on a thirty-two-second and then a forty-second cycle, and she would shut them down during the actual transfer.
Now all we needed was a meeting point.
Wise climbed into the driver’s seat. I returned to a black BMW X5 parked down the alley and got into the passenger seat. Tavia was driving. Cherie Wise sat in the back.
“Is my husband’s beeper thing working?” she asked.
“Sci?” I said.
“Sending a clear, strong signal,” he said.
“Told you we had it covered,” I said. “I’ve even got them tracking this car.”
Cherie checked her watch, said, “How long until they make contact?”
“Depends how much they want the money,” I said.
“Don’t be surprised if they make us stew awhile,” Tavia said. “Get us tired, a little disoriented, you know?”
Tavia was right. We sat and dozed in the alley until three a.m. with no contact made. Cherie was starting to make noises about returning to the Marriott where she could wait in bed when her cell phone buzzed an alert. A text coming in.
She looked at it and burst into tears. “It’s from Alicia. Or it’s coming from her phone, anyway.”
“We have a trap on Alicia Wise’s cell?” I asked.
“Pulling it up right now,” Mo-bot said.
“What’s it say?” Tavia asked, twisting around in her seat.
“An address. I think it’s in Leblon.”
“Give it to me,” I said, pulling the car alongside the van. I read out the address to Wise.
“Okay,” he said, putting the van in gear. “Let’s go bring our girls home.”
Chapter 40
At first, delivery of the ransom payment went down the way I’d thought it would. The kidnappers routed Andy Wise to one address and then another in Centro, and since it was largely vacant at that early hour, Tavia and I and the two other cars manned with Private agents had to stay blocks away, watching the digital trackers’ updates on iPads and staying connected in real time over the radio and cellular links.
We never bothered to close the distance and instead paralleled Wise in the white van with four or five blocks between us, shutting down the trackers as he neared each address. After he got to the third, there was no new text message for almost five minutes.
Then my cell buzzed. The pairing between my phone and Wise’s was working. I had a text on my screen from Natalie Wise’s phone to her father’s.
This can be simple. You follow directions, you get your daughters back. In a few minutes we’ll give you a location where you are to park the van. You will see your daughters from afar, and you are going to walk away from the van. Someone will pick it up. If you do everything right, the girls will go to you, and our business is done. Simple. Agreed?
Agreed, Wise responded a moment later.
Go to the northeast corner of Rua Frei Caneca and de Março. Park where you can see to the north. Wait.
“Northeast corner of Frei Caneca and de Março,” Tavia muttered as she got us turned around. “That’s gotta be—”
She floored the accelerator of the X5, said into her microphone, “Andy, you’re going to be parking next to the Sambadrome. It’s where they have the big samba contests during Carnival.”
“Never been there, but I know what it is,” Wise said. “Describe what I’ll be seeing, please.”
Tavia thought, said, “Think the grandstands at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and then think twenty times the size of those grandstands and lining both sides of Fifth Avenue for roughly half a mile. You’ll be looking up a wide, empty concrete street. Park where you can see the entire length of the parade route, but expose yourself and the van as little as possible. Does that make sense?”
“I guess I’ll know it when I see it,” Wise replied.
Cherie unclipped her seat belt, shifted so she was behind and between me and Tavia. She stared through the windshield and slowly, gently, moved her hands against each other as if she were washing them.
“This is going to work,” Cherie said in a wavering voice. “I’ll have them back in my arms soon.”
“That’s the plan,” I said.
“I want us taken to the jet immediately afterward,” she said. “The hell with the Olympics. We’re just not staying. The girls will understand, I’m sure. And Andy, well... there are some things in life not worth fighting about.”
Tavia and I exchanged glances but didn’t join the conversation our client was having with herself. After a while in our business, you learned that people did and said strange things when there were lives on the line.
On the screen of the iPad, the van’s icon reappeared.
“You’re close, Andy,” I said into the microphone.
“Just ahead,” Wise replied.
“We’re shutting down the trackers in three hundred feet,” Mo-bot said over the radio. “Camera will come on at the parking spot. You’ll have to adjust its position so we see what you do.”
She’d given Wise a high-end digital camera small enough to be hidden in the palm of his hand.
The icon disappeared from the screen.
“Parking,” Wise said.
Tavia pulled over six hundred yards east on Valadares Avenue. Cherie leaned over the seat when the iPad screen came to life. We were getting Wise’s view via the camera. He’d parked the van diagonally, facing into the Sambadrome. He had us looking through the windshield across a security chain at the road and the flanking grandstands that on a big night during Carnival would be filled with tens of thousands of people. Now the place was so empty it looked forlorn. It was a forgotten venue except for a few nights a year. A secluded spot in the middle of the city. Perfect for trading hostages for money.
The iPad screen flashed with bright lights. Headlights.
Wise said, “There’s a white van coming into the other end.”
“Hold the camera steady and I’ll zoom in,” Mo-bot said.
A moment later we saw the van turning sideways about one hundred yards inside the north end of the Sambadrome.
“They had to have cut the security cable at that end,” Tavia said.
Wise got a message from Alicia’s phone. Leave the van. Walk south on de Março.
Wise texted back, Not until I see girls leave van.
For a few tense moments there was no reply. Then the side door of the other white van slid open. The girls, bound at the wrists and blindfolded, were pushed out by two figures wearing masks and blue workman’s coveralls. They held pistol-grip shotguns to the girls’ heads.