Page 5 of Billion-Dollar Ransom

AT THE PRECISE moment Boo Schraeder was leaving her favorite Beverly Hills salon, a luxury charter bus made a right turn from Mulholland onto Roscomare Road.

Classes at the Curtis School had ended for the day, and the private motor coach was beginning its two-mile route to deposit a dozen children at their homes in Bel Air.

The trip was short, but nonetheless, the bus was equipped with everything a child could possibly need for the journey—reclining seats, Wi-Fi, power outlets, and two private restrooms.

The driver glanced in the rearview at her young passengers, none of whom seemed to care about those amenities. All of them were bursting with the energy that only seven- and eight- and nine-year-olds have in the middle of the afternoon.

The driver? Please. She was eager to take a nap.

Not that such a thing was likely. She had another gig this evening, ferrying adults around some studio lot until midnight.

And then she’d be up again first thing to drive these same kids to school.

If she was exhausted now, how would she feel at five a.m. tomorrow?

She stifled a yawn, saw the speeding car, and stomped on the brakes at the last possible second.

The white BMW had blasted out of an obscured driveway. The car braked hard, and double screams of rubber on asphalt echoed through the canyon.

The driver yelled for the children to hold on. This vehicle was outfitted with every possible safety feature. The kids would be fine. But the driver was still paying off the loan for this luxury bus, and a wreck right now would be a financial nightmare.

Her first impulse was to scream something at the impatient moron who had almost crashed into a bus containing grade-schoolers. But the moron’s passenger—a woman—was up and out of the car so quickly, the driver reconsidered.

Especially when she saw that the woman was wearing a skintight mask that warped her features, almost like a nylon stocking over a bank robber’s face, and was holding some sort of device.

The driver lunged to lock the hinged loading doors, but the woman was already there, forcing them open with a gloved hand. This seriously can’t be happening. Not with the bus loaded with kids! Whatever this was, this creepy bitch wasn’t setting foot on her bus.

The driver pulled as hard as she could on the handle of the door mechanism.

The masked woman forced her weapon through the gap anyway.

Oh, no, you don’t, the driver thought and pulled even harder, putting her entire body weight into it, trying to exert so much pressure that the weapon would drop from the woman’s hands.

(That was the last thing the driver would remember.

Later—during intense grilling by the FBI—the driver would learn she had been jabbed by two metal barbs and subjected to fifty thousand volts of electricity, at which point there was nothing she could have done to protect those kids.

The electricity coursed through her system faster than her brain could commit anything to memory.)

The bus was under the kidnapper’s control now.