Page 78 of Billion-Dollar Ransom
AT TWO MINUTES after eleven, the ransom directions were finally delivered to Nicky Gordon’s task force.
This time, the communication was not on an audiocassette. It was also not delivered to the field office by an unhoused person pressed into service. These directions appeared digitally, and simultaneously, on every screen and handheld device in the Sandbox.
Each member of the task force looked around, wondering how this was possible. Their internal chat system, built along the lines of a Slack platform, was highly encrypted and absolutely walled off from the outside world.
Nicky, though, knew exactly how: the mole. Wouldn’t take much to push a message to every available screen in the house if you were already in the house .
“Are we all seeing this?” Jeff Penney asked. “Holy God.”
Almost everyone had their eyes fixed on their screens, but Nicky resisted the urge and instead studied the people in the Sandbox, the diehards of the task force who remained here at this very late hour:
Mike Hardy, LAPD chief of detectives and her sometime lover
Hope Alonso, Nicky’s personal assistant
Jeff Penney, head of SWAT
Ross Lindbergh, FBI financial-crimes specialist
John Scoleri, Nicky’s boss, who wasn’t in this room but was on the floor (Long ago, Nicky had realized that the man had no life outside the office, especially during high-profile cases.)
In all likelihood, one of them was the mole.
Nicky examined their faces while a flurry of excited voices bounced around the Sandbox.
“They want more than a third of the ransom in cash and the remainder in precious metals or jewelry. They’re giving specific breakdowns, down to the types of pallets and cases to use.”
“Is someone relaying this to Virgil Tighe’s team at Capital in real time?”
“I’m on it, and they’re alerting the Schraeder team in Omaha. Private jet is on the tarmac and waiting. They didn’t want to leave in case the kidnappers decided they wanted the handoff to happen somewhere in Nebraska.”
“Okay, good thing, because it looks like they want their takeout delivery at the Santa Monica Airport.”
“Huh. The Pacific is right next door. Maybe the plan is to get the money out into international waters.”
“What, where they’re sitting ducks for the Coast Guard and air teams? No, that doesn’t make sense. They gotta have another exit strategy.”
Nicky watched their faces while also processing the kidnappers’ demands. The text on her screen was dense and loaded with absurdly specific details, as if the kidnappers were particularly cruel micromanagers.
Ultimately, Nicky knew, the details weren’t important.
The ransom delivery would surely maximize the kidnappers’ advantage (stealth) and minimize the task force’s greatest strength (manpower).
There was a reason the instructions had been issued so late at night.
It guaranteed there would be fewer agents on the case, and those that were there would most likely be exhausted.
But if Nicky could somehow read minds and knew beyond the shadow of a doubt who the mole in this room was, this could all be over in five minutes, following a brief but tense interrogation.
She glanced at Mike as he joined the others in the discussion.
She hated herself for this, but she had to ask: Was that genuine surprise on his face or was he just acting out a role, one that he and his former partner Tim Dowd had practiced for months on end?
Nicky didn’t want to believe Mike Hardy could be capable of this level of betrayal.
But a share of a billion dollars could make a man capable of almost anything.
“Hold on,” said Mike, rising from his seat. “What is this?”
Jeff Penney slammed the table with his fist. “What the hell is going on?”
As Nicky watched the screen, the ransom directions simply vanished, as if the sender had access to a global Undo button.
A moment later, a new message appeared. This one was only two sentences long.
“‘Ignore previous instructions,’” Nicky read out loud. “‘Revised delivery protocol to follow.’”