Page 42 of Billion-Dollar Ransom

“ARE YOU PEOPLE out of your minds?” James Haller shouted over the speakerphone. “I guess I can be glad that you called me with this bullshit instead of Mr. Schraeder.”

“Come on, Haller,” Nicky said. “The optics are pretty damning.”

“The only thing Mr. Schraeder cares about is the safe return of his family. And that includes his older son. Implying anything else would be slander.”

“If we didn’t follow up on this,” Nicky said patiently, “we wouldn’t be doing our jobs.”

“Here we go, typical FBI horseshit,” Haller said, his voice growing even louder.

“You want to know who set up that K and R insurance policy? I did. Personally. When you have a client as powerful and high profile as Mr. Schraeder, you have to cover all bases. He didn’t want me to do it, but I insisted. ”

“You talked him into spending forty million bucks a year,” Mike said, “just to… what did you say? ‘Cover all bases’? Come on.”

“Who is this? Is this Hardy?”

“Yeah, this is Chief of Detectives Hardy, with a take-home of a hundred and forty K per year.”

“You just proved my point,” Haller said.

He made a strange noise that could have been interpreted as a laugh.

“You and Nicky Gordon should stick to what the citizens pay you for. Namely, hunting down criminals for eventual prosecution. But when it comes to Mr. Schraeder’s personal and financial business, including the safe return of his family, leave it to the professionals. Anything else?”

“Don’t worry, Haller,” Nicky said. “We will absolutely find the mastermind behind these kidnappings. No matter how hidden—or well protected—they may be.”

“Is that supposed to mean something, Agent Gordon?”

“Thank you for your time,” she said, then hung up.

Nicky and Mike stared at each other for a moment, then broke into grins. It was a tension reliever, the only one they had.

“What an asshole,” Mike said.

“True, but for now we’re going to stick close to Haller and the rest of them. Because if Schraeder is the one behind his own family’s abductions, he must have had help. And Capital feels like the ideal partner in crime.”

They stood up and were preparing to leave the Sandbox when something occurred to Nicky. “You hear what he said about Tyler?”

“Yeah. Kind of hard to miss.”

“Father of the Year,” Nicky replied.

But as she spoke those words, she couldn’t help thinking of Kaitlin.

Nicky could imagine absolutely no circumstance or situation that would ever drive that kind of wedge between her and her daughter.

But if something like that ever did happen, Nicky knew she’d spend the rest of her days trying to fix it and begging Kaitlin for forgiveness.

So what could have happened between Schraeder and his son to cause that rift? And were they both so incredibly stubborn that they refused to even entertain the idea of trying to repair the damage?

Then the answer occurred to her, almost like an intrusive thought from her subconscious: Ambition.

Schraeder had been too busy building an empire to give his oldest child what he needed. Nothing mattered to the old man as much as the pursuit of the next goal.

Then Nicky realized something, with more than a chill.

And what am I doing right now instead of being with Kaitlin?