Free Plan B by Joseph Finder

 
    There’s nothing more dangerous than stealing a powerful man’s most prized possession.
    But I had no choice.
    I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an ambulance in a very wealthy neighborhood in Barcelona. It was two in the morning on a moonless night, and since there were no streetlights in this very upscale part of town, we were shrouded in darkness. The ambulance was a boxy white Nissan van whose black vinyl seats were cracked and sprung. The interior stank of stale cigarette smoke. The medical equipment did not inspire confidence. But I wasn’t complaining: The ambulance was borrowed.
    “What I don’t get,” said the man behind the wheel, “is why.”
    The man was named Benito, and he was a private investigator, formerly an officer with the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía. He was small and scrappy, with dyed black hair and a soul patch and an ugly white scar on his right jaw. He had the small dark button eyes of a rag doll. His teeth were tobacco stained. He smoked almost constantly, but out of deference to me, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over an hour. I’m not one of those antismoking fascists; that’s not why I don’t like being around lighted cigarettes. The problem was that, even though I hadn’t smoked in years, since the army, I was always on the verge of backsliding.
    “Why what?” I finally asked.
    “Why you do this.”
    “I thought I explained.”
    “Not what we doing now,” Benito said, “but why.” Benito’s accent was heavy, but his English was almost fluent. His British mother had moved to Barcelona to teach English and ended up marrying a Basque.
    “Like I said, a guy hired me.”
    “But you don’t need the money. This is risky. Really dangerous. Why would you do this if you don’t have to?”
    I didn’t answer. Most people assumed I was loaded because my father was this famous Wall Street financier. “Infamous” was maybe more accurate. The only reason anyone had heard of him was because of all the news stories: how he went fugitive before he was arrested for a massive insider-trading scam, how they caught up with him and put him on trial and locked him up. People assumed he’d left his family a lot of money, hidden somewhere offshore. They didn’t realize that he’d left us with nothing.
    “How much this guy pay you, anyway?”
    “It’s never enough,” I said. “Not why I do it.”
    “Hope it’s good reason, that’s all I say.”
    I shrugged. “When it’s a dad trying to get back his daughter, I figure that’s a pretty good reason.”
    “Yeah? He must be good friend.”
    “I barely know him,” I said.
    I’d been hired by a rich Ukrainian I’d met in London. His name was Vadim Kuzma, and he lived in a big white stucco house in South Kensington. He was obviously mega-wealthy. A mutual friend had introduced us at some boring client dinner party at J Sheekey in Covent Garden.
    Vadim asked for my card. I told him I didn’t have one, but I gave him my e-mail. A few weeks later he sent me a desperate message that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Svetlana, had been kidnapped in Barcelona. I called him for more details. He was frantic. He never should have let her travel on her own, he said. She was far too young. He’d heard about a big kidnapping case in Boston I’d been involved in, and he offered me a lot of money to get her back, far more than I would have asked for.
    “How much is the ransom demand?” I asked.
    “I wish this was ransom,” Vadim said, his voice cracking. “Money I can pay.”
    “Then what is it?” I asked.
    “My intelligence network tells me she’s being held prisoner by José María Soler.”
    “I’m sorry to hear this.” José María Soler was one of the wealthiest men in Spain, a billionaire who’d made his fortune in telecommunications. He also owned one of Spain’s most successful football clubs. He was immensely powerful, a man used to getting his own way. A man who probably had half the police in Barcelona on his