Chapter Nine

4:55 a.m. The kidnappers’ safe house becomes animated like an African killer beehive under attack. Two men back the SUVs onto the lawn and leave the engines running and all doors open. Another two abductors rush into the dark room where the two security guards have been sitting handcuffed to stiff backed chairs for hours. The kidnappers release the leg bindings and jerk them upright. Chet cries out in pain from his back; and his partner, Lydia, crumples to the floor. Her cramped legs will not hold her up yet. Both of them receive several hard kicks and force themselves to become upright.

“Better!” growls the kidnapper. “Move out! NOW!”

Lydia Fairchild and Chet Nichols from the New York Protection Service stumble along as best they can on legs as stiff as new brooms.

Lydia knows she will regret it, but she asks anyway, “Where’s our guy, Andy Lusesky? We have to know. He’s our partner. Be a human being.”

“Shut up!” the abductor says by way of response and gives each of them a backhand slap across the face.

He pushes the two security guards down the stairs and into the SUV on the right and shoves them into the backseat. He pushes the childproof locks and sits in the shotgun seat ready to leave.

A minute later, Cinnamon and Paprika Paxton are frog-walked to the SUV on the left and lifted bodily into the backseat and the childproof locks are engaged. The large vehicles pull out into the street and turn in opposite directions out of the neighborhood of the safe house. It is 5:22 a.m.

At 8:45 a.m., they meet in the parking area in the rear of a slum neighborhood and move their captives at the double into a two-story walk-up apartment—a dump. The Paxton girls are now in a room they would be unhappy to make their dog live in. They cry some more. The girls’ security guards are thoroughly disoriented and have no idea where they are. They fear the worst for their fellow guard, Andy. From this point on, a guard is in the room with them and another with the children around the clock. The guard is holding a sawedoff 12 gauge, and neither the children nor the security guards think they have any chance of succeeding if they try and rush the guard in the room.

5:33 a.m. Ivory and four other former BK gangsters—his current day homies—come to a large three-story Tudor brick house which catches their interest. Every light in the place is on, and the front door is open.

“Suspicious,” says Booker T. Smith, the best watcher and man-hunter in Ivory’s retinue.

“Let’s find out what’s up,” Ivory orders, and the car stops abruptly and empties its five occupants.

Five minutes later, the five have given the “clear” notice for every room in the house.

“Lots of food, no people. Steel doors and rooms without windows. An empty pair of cuffs, and rolls of duct tape. This is the kidnappers’ safe house. They must have boogied outta here less than ten minutes ago,” announces Booker, stating the obvious.

Ivory nods and orders the men back into the car. He taps McGee’s phone icon.

“It’s me, boss. We found the place, but we’re too late. We’ll check with the cops. They are already on it; so, we won’t be violating our agreement with Damien.”

“Okay, but make the call an anonymous one on a throw-away. I don’t want Damien to go berserk because we dissed him. I presume they have headed south into the low country. You guys head for the Bronx and Five Points. I’ll round up three more sets and have them hit Brooklyn and Spanish Harlem; Caitlin and I will head for Red Hook. Let’s touch base every couple of hours.”

McGee turns to Angelina, “The cops are involved—nothing to do with any of our activities. A little girl was seen running from a man dressed in black earlier last evening, then very early this morning a girl was manhandled and thrown into a big SUV. That resulted in a preliminary Amber Alert and a heavy duty police search throughout Harlem and now through the city. Ivory and his homies found a house in a nice Upper East Side neighborhood with its doors open and lights on. They went in and found evidence that people had been held prisoner there. There was lots of food, no people. Steel doors and rooms without windows. An empty pair of cuffs, and rolls of duct tape. There was the kind of food kids eat in one of the rooms. We can only presume that this is about your girls. Right now, the police don’t have a name for the girl they are looking for. You and Damien are approaching a crossroads about telling the NYPD or the FBI what has happened. Do you want me to call him and get that dialogue going?”

“I don’t know what to do. Maybe we’d better talk to Damien. This sounds like it is getting dangerous.”

“Not necessarily, Angelina. If all of this is related to your daughters, then it would appear that they are still very much alive and are being protected because they are such a potentially valuable asset.”

Before McGee can make the call, Angelina gets another call from the kidnappers.

“Did you call the cops, lady?”

“And hello to you. No, sir, we did not.”

“Who’s we?”

“My husband and I. We saw the news. Apparently, you lost control of one of our daughters, and several people called 9-1-1. Still we just kept quiet. We have the money ready, and we have done everything you asked so far. Don’t hurt the girls. I’m ready to leave for Europe and Turkey as soon as you give me the rest of your instructions. Nothing’s changed at our end.”

“I’m gonna believe you for now. So, here’s what you need to know: go in person to Deutsche Bank Bonn and ask for Herr Derrick von Krankenheiser, who is a senior accounts manager. Show him the documents from your bank or insurance company or whatever which verify that you have the money ready for transfer, and he will set up an account that can work smoothly with the Turkish bank. He knows absolutely nothing about my end of this transaction or that this is related to ransom. It is against German and Turkish law to be party to a ransom transaction; and the whole deal is off; and you won’t see your daughters again if Krankenheiser gets suspicious. Apprendere?”

“I understand.”

“One last thing: get an iPhone and arrange an account that allows use in both Germany and Italy. Call me after each step in the process. I can be reached at these burner phones: 845-308-6682 tomorrow, 845-308-2195, day after tomorrow, 845-308-9362, the day after that. Don’t bother trying to trace them. The phones will be discarded after each of those days. You get all that?”

“Yes.”

“Then you better get moving; you have a lot of travel arrangements to make in a short time.”

The caller hangs up.

Caitlin excitedly says, “Those cell phone numbers are Red Hook area codes. Maybe we’re catching a break and are going to be able to narrow the search.”

“What’re we waiting for?” McGee says. “Let’s get on the way. You call Ivory and I’ll get hold of the other three sets of searchers; and we’ll all head for Red Hook. After the Wednesday’s Child case, we are pretty familiar with the territory.”

“We are pretty popular with the Catholic community there after our help in bringing all of the St. Anne’s orphanage girls back. They’ll help us look,” Caitlin says.

She turns to her number two, Grant Lathrum, and asks, “How ‘bout you getting in touch with Sister Ophelia at St. Anne’s and set up a meet? Tell her only that we’re trying to find a couple of missing girls, and we need their help in a big way.”

“Consider it done, boss,” Grant says.

Angelina says, “This sounds promising. I’ll call Damien and finalize the arrangements to use his corporate jet. I should be able to leave late this afternoon. I’ll keep you posted.”

Ivory and his homies are in Five Points in the central lower area of Manhattan when Caitlin calls. They have been conducting a fruitless search of the many tenement buildings lining the streets in the area and are just passing a block where the Tombs [officially the City Prison Manhattan] is located—125 White Street. Ivory is driving. He makes a completely illegal bootlegger’s turn in the middle of the street, and they head for Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn. His number two, Booker T. Smith—sitting in the shotgun seat—holds on with both white-knuckled hands.

David Harger and his senior technical assistant, Craig Yankovich, and Caitlin’s assistant, Rosalie Hertel, are trolling through the area of Spanish Harlem between 96^th and 108^th Streets—the area that has thus far missed out on the city’s gentrification program, and is still the “Black Mecca”—with no more success than Ivory and his car load when Caitlin reaches Rosalie on her cell.

“That was Caitlin,” David says. “We’re leaving SoHa as fast as we can do it. Get us to Red Hook!”

The rendezvous point is St. Anne’s Orphanage near Red Hook Houses East, a huge drab dark red brick government project housing center. Sister Ophelia, abbess of St. Anne’s nunnery and senior sister of the orphanage; Father O’Leary of the Assumption of Mary parish; and Brigid O’Hanlon, one of the rescued girls from the Wednesday’s Child international kidnapping and rescue case—whose intrepid actions during the grueling period of captivity by Snakehead Gang human traffickers earns her the right to be part of the search that David Harger calls the Catholic sisters and Brigid about.

Sister Ophelia takes charge as soon as McGee’s people gather in the orphanage chapel.

“Brigid and I, and Father O’Leary have been on the phones since you called, David. We are eternally grateful for all that the McGee people did during the Wednesday’s Child case. We have a phone canvass underway already, and in half an hour to forty-five minutes we’ll have maybe two hundred people coming to St. Anne’s for instruction in how to conduct this search. How long have the girls been missing?”

“Two days,” McGee says. “I can’t thank you enough for volunteering. You people are able to blend in and not attract attention to yourselves—a lot better than we can. We are grateful to have your boots on the ground.”

“We’re only too happy to be of whatever help we can,” says Father O’Leary.

The “ground” to be covered is largely a multi-ethnic and polyglot crime-ridden slum. The location now occupied by the Red Hook Houses was the site of a shack city for the homeless—called a “Hooverville”—in honor of the despised US president at the time. Red Hook as a whole and the Red Hook Houses especially are ringed by a nearly impenetrable barrier of slums. No child or woman would ever consider stepping out of one of the project buildings in the dark, and police do not come in the night except in the direst of emergencies and then only with a small army of officers to watch each other’s backs. The search will—of necessity—have to cover the industrial waterfront, the fetid sewage polluted Gowanus Canal area, and the adjacent Carroll Gardens. Gowanus Canal and its environs which is a cesspool of crime, violence, and drug abuse whose only saving grace is that it provides the principal means of entry into Carroll Gardens. That neighborhood has an element of charm—tree-lined streets, beautiful old brownstones with front and back gardens, a diverse array of restaurants and bars, good local delis and Italian markets. The main charm is that it is away from the Gowanus neighborhood. Carroll Garden’s Smith Street is constantly buzzing with inebriated foot traffic with a bar between every other storefront. The search crews do not plan to search there for a long time for the very fact that it is too nice a place.

Caitlin gives the gathered crowd of volunteers pointers on how to look, see, and not be seen.

“Remember, you have an equal value to the girls for whom we are searching. We do not want anything bad to happen to you. Don’t linger too long, make too many passes, or otherwise call attention to yourself in those worst areas. If you see something suspicious, call in. If you see something dangerous, take no action yourself. Call us or the police. We are determined that none of us will come to harm during this mission.

“We are looking for two big black SUVs, but the kidnappers have probably ditched them by now. Ride with your windows down; walk slowly and all the time look for something out of place. Is a girl waving at you from an upstairs window? Is there a crude sign calling for help or displaying ‘SOS,’ or anything else to get your attention? Go with a partner, never alone. If you are approached by thugs or maybe even suspicious kidnappers, run, scream, call 9-1-1, or whatever it takes. Check in to headquarters—that’s here at St. Anne’s—every hour. Sister Ophelia and Brigid will be manning—or womaning—the phones. While I’ve been talking, McGee, Ivory, David, Craig, and Rosalie have marked up a map of Red Hook into search sections. Sister Ophelia and Brigid will keep a record of what areas have been covered.”

Booker says, “Me and the homies will be organizing the vehicles. Our main job will be to patrol around and make sure you don’t run into any nice boys who forget their manners and need an attitude adjustment. Think of us as the safety inspectors.”

Booker is a very large, very powerful-looking man with a shiny bald head, a single gold earring, and a wifebeater shirt. He works out, and his 250-pound frame is lean for all of its size. He is compact and has two gold front teeth with cutout stars which reveal the underlying brilliantly white incisors. He looks like a pirate about to overrun a crew trying to repel boarders. Ivory is a tall powerful man with very well-defined muscles. He has a lean and hungry look, like Shakespeare’s Cassius. He is no less an imposing creature than Booker, and no one has any doubts about the man’s ability to preserve and to protect those for whom he is charged to defend. The volunteers are—to a person—all glad to have Booker and Ivory on their side.

Sister Ophelia smiles at her passing memory of Caesar speaking about men he wants and those he fears, “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”