The boy’s name was Jason Anderson, and sure enough, his parents were loaded. They quickly paid the $100,000 ransom, but Lassiter was worried because the boy could tell the cops what he looked like and how he’d picked him up.
So, Lassiter killed Jason Anderson, and learned his second lesson. None of the victims could be allowed to see him or know anything about his operation.
He used the $100,000 as seed money to set up what would eventually become his kidnapping empire. Within three years, before his 25th birthday, he found the formula he needed. That’s when he’d set up his base and hired the best staff he could to do the dirty work for him. They never met him, and they didn’t care. As long as they got their cut from each kidnapping, they didn’t even want to know the boss.
The formula had worked well for the past fifteen years. One of his staff would take the victim and keep them locked up in the local vault. They were totally sedated the whole time, so they couldn’t say anything about who was involved or where they were kept. The ransom asked for a million bucks, to be paid by bitcoin, and after two days, the victim was either released or killed.
Magic.
The formula could be repeated endlessly across the country.
Now, though, Colonel Peter Lassiter wanted more. There was money in his scheme but no particular excitement anymore.
Today, he was making a list (and he chuckled as he thought of checking it twice, as if he were the reverse Santa Claus).
There were four names remaining on the list. He was trying to work out who the best victim would be. There were a lot of factors. Who had the worst protection? Who could actually get the most ransom money? How would he do the kidnapping? Could he even find their schedule to work out the best opportunity?
Of course, he could. That last one was a given.
At the top of the list was Taylor Swift. She had more money than God, it seemed, and she was the most famous person on his hit list. He already had her schedule for the next week printed, and there was a key point where she would be flying in a private plane from LaGuardia to LAX. That would be perfect.
The second person was Giles Hamilton, who had invented an app for smartphones that allowed security access for all devices in your home, connecting through the electrical grid to cheap devices (sold separately) that monitored everything. He was worth well over a billion dollars. The downside was that few people knew his name. Not much glitz there.
The next was a top Hollywood actress. Lassiter didn’t watch many movies, so he didn’t recognize her name. She would be easier, but she didn’t have deep pockets like Swift.
And the last name was Erika Sabo. The more he stared at the names, the more his eye was drawn to hers.
Little security, publicly available information about her scheduling, and her church probably had tons of money rolling in. Lots of positives. The only negative was that she wasn’t as well known as the others, so the publicity may not be as widespread.
Not as exciting.
But, maybe exciting enough.
He googled her again, to find photos of her from every angle. Every day there seemed to be tons more images. Her name was spreading. Her appearance on The Tonight Show the prior evening had increased her name recognition ten-fold. Maybe that would continue to happen, especially if the parlor trick she’d planned for tonight panned out. Like everyone else, he had no idea why she wanted people to look outside at midnight, but he’d be doing just that. If it was a good trick, her value would skyrocket.
But, Taylor Swift was already a superstar…
Decisions, decisions.
Like everything else Lassiter did, though, he knew that somewhere in his sub-conscious, the decision had already been made. He stared again at Sabo’s name and smiled.
Chapter 27
The day started off the same as any other. Nobody talked about it being anything special. I checked the photos I’d taken the day before and selected a grouping that would work well. I was cataloging everything Erika did with photos, and every day had way too many pictures to use them all. I uploaded fifty or so and reluctantly deleted the rest. I suppose there could be a case for keeping them, as part of some comprehensive record of every bite she took or every laugh she shared with her team.
Screw it. I chose the ones I thought best represented Erika’s day without overdoing it.
What would today bring? None of us knew. I think if anyone would have known it would have been Chris Spinnie. Over the past couple months, she’d grown especially close to Erika. I knew Erika used Chris as a sounding board for new ideas.
This time, though, Chris just shook her head when I asked.
“Nope,” she said. “Got no idea.”
I looked hopefully at Erika’s other closest followers, but nobody seemed to have a clue.
Our Lady God was good at keeping secrets.
We knew only what she’d said in the interviews… something was going to happen at midnight, and we were all to be outdoors at that time to watch it.
Tonight was a full moon. Other than that, I wasn’t aware of anything special. It was a warm spring day, and the temperature would still be quite nice, in the low fifties, and it was going to be clear skies. I wondered if Erika had arranged that, but it was most likely a coincidence.
Or maybe not. The thing about Erika is that none of us really saw her do anything that looked like a miracle. Maybe she’d cleared the skies for us tonight. How would we ever know?
That was one of the reasons she gave for not doing any public miracles. If it was something small, like making the weather nice, how could she prove it was her? If it was something closer to home for somebody, like curing somebody’s illness, the skeptics would say the patient was in on it and had never been sick in the first place. Anything that couldn’t be immediately explained would be challenged by magicians, who would then try to duplicate whatever she did.
She didn’t want that kind of nonsense. In interviews, she’d say miracles weren’t necessary. “What is necessary is faith.” That was her best-known comment, and she’d delivered it a hundred times since coming out to the public.
This time, though, she’d promised a miracle. Every newspaper in the country and every news site on the internet carried the commitment. Most of them claimed it was a hoax, and cited examples of magicians like Houdini or David Blaine who seemed to perform miracles. They were tricks. In the country’s eyes, Erika was already a fraud.
At 10:00, Erika came out of her study and nodded at me. I walked over to her.
“Morning,” I said.
“It’s gonna be a good day.”
“Any special shots you want?”
“You’ll know what to get. You always do.”
Erika always complimented her staff, which was surprisingly good at motivating us.
She picked out a banana and slowly peeled it. “You want to ask me something?”
I felt guilty, and maybe I looked it. I think, sometimes, I felt overwhelmed by reverence. Being in the presence of somebody you know for a fact is a supernatural creature is overwhelming. I sometimes felt my body shake in disbelief. No, not disbelief, because I did believe. It was more like being crushed by the truth. And even after all this time, I was intimidated by her, wanting to ask her questions but afraid she’d think I was an idiot.
Well, no time like the present, especially when she’d invited me.
My mind went to my grandmother. Ariela Abelman was still the person who I was the closest to. Even though she’d died four months earlier, I thought of her every day. I thought of her ordeal as a child, being sent to the Nazi extermination camps, and how she only lived by the fluke of having Russian troops happen to arrive at the right time.