Page 32 of Billion-Dollar Ransom

“I CAN’T BELIEVE this. They fucking killed him!”

“What?” Mike Hardy asked. “Who?”

“Rubin Padilla was killed by Capital’s goons. Virgil Tighe just texted me. Seems almost proud, like we should be high-fiving him or something.”

Mike grunted and shook his head. “Damn it. I’m sorry, Nicky. I shouldn’t have pushed you into feeding Padilla to Tighe and those Capital meatheads.”

“Nobody pushes me into anything,” Nicky said, vaguely annoyed Mike was trying to take ownership of this screwup.

No, this was all hers.

As soon as they parked beneath 11000 Wilshire, Nicky began the exhausting daisy-chain process of contacting Randolph Schraeder. The main number brought you to the LA assistant, who then forwarded you to an assistant in the Nebraska office, who sent you to an assortment of assistants and advisers.

She needed to clarify things before more people died. Capital had to stand the hell down. And only the cranky billionaire could make that happen.

She had run the entire gauntlet, and the Nebraska adviser told Nicky he was “very confident” Mr. Schraeder would want to speak with her. She waited through a small eternity of “patriotic” hold music.

“Come on, Schraeder, pick up.”

But the adviser returned and said, “I’m sorry, Agent Gordon. Mr. Schraeder isn’t available right now. Would you care to leave a message?”

Nicky very badly wanted to say Yes, tell him this: Randolph, your self-sabotaging anti-government bias and your blind reliance on hollow mercenaries like Capital might very well get your family killed, you stupid ass.

But no—as long as Nicky was the head of this task force, she was forced to take the high road.

“Please have him contact me as soon as possible. There’s been a major break in the case.”

Next she tried James Haller at Capital, but received the same runaround from his phalanx of assistants and underlings.

Nicky found herself pacing the length of corridor between her office and the Sandbox like a caged predator looking for something to lash out against. But she wasn’t angry. She was processing . Physical movement helped.

The hunt for the spotter at the salon abduction, the man in the green cap, had stalled. Chunks of a burner phone were found, but they’d been destroyed beyond recovery, and there was no way to connect them to the unknown man anyway. Facial recognition so far was a dead end.

Rubin Padilla had been casually brushed off the chessboard.

There was no sign of a spotter at the abduction of the Schraeder children.

On top of everything else, there were zero leads out of Mexico, so they had no hard evidence in the Tyler Schraeder and Cassandra Bart abduction. The authorities there seemed to have other priorities.

And it wasn’t even nine a.m.

Mike clocked Nicky’s restlessness but stood up and chased after her only when she started blazing a trail to the elevators.

“Hey! Hold up! Where are you going?”

“They want to hide behind assistants, fine. I’ll show up at their front door.”

“Nicky, what are you talking about?”

“I’m headed to Capital and not leaving until they agree to stay out of our way.”

“Listen to me,” Mike implored, “you’re the head of this task force. You go over there, you don’t seem any more important than one of their assistants. It’s beneath you.”

“I’m not going to fight with their assistants,” Nicky said. “I’m going to have a heart-to-heart with Haller and make him understand that unless we work together—”

Nicky’s cell phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen.

“Who is it?” Mike asked.

“Someone who just saved me a trip.”