Kidnap (The Billionaire Series) (5 page)

The list of attendees for the birthday party included the British
Prime Minister’s son, the daughter of the American Ambassador to the UK, the
Saudi Ambassador’s son and the children of a number of
high
ranking
UK government officials. The corporate jets had been despatched
to pick them up that morning and all were due to touch down in Glasgow at 3.30
p.m. They would then board Donald’s helicopter and arrive on the estate at 4.00
p.m. The return journey was planned for each of them the next morning.

“Anything exciting planned?” asked Saki. “Not really, thought
we’d just watch a movie and chill out, unless Lela’s thought of anything else.
Have you?” asked Tom.

“Nope, sounds good to me. Although what movie are we going to
see?” she asked.

“You know, the one just out, we got our copy yesterday.”

“I was worried you’d say that. Last night I tried to read the
cover but we’ve got the version. It’s in German.”

Tom stopped himself from looking at his father. He was in enough
trouble with his mother.

“No problem, we’ll just go to the cinema down the road,”
suggested Saki, also realising that the blame would lead to Donald.

“Excellent! We can go bowling as well then,” added Lela.

Tom winced. Lela was unbelievably good at
ten
pin
bowling. In fact, she was good at
anything which
involved hand-to-eye coordination, a by-product of her intensive martial arts
training.

The rest
of the meal passed without incident and Donald quickly excused himself to make
the
call which
would answer Rachel’s questions. Just
what he needed, he thought to himself as he walked to his study. He was in the
final stages of completing the largest corporate deal ever. Alba was bidding to
buy IBC Ltd and would, if accepted, result in Alba becoming the largest
corporation in the world and making Donald the richest man alive. Donald would
employ more people than the Chinese Army and Wal-Mart combined. The deadline
for bids to purchase IBC was Friday 12
^th
August, less than 36 hours away.

Chapter
12

Conor
finalised the details of the
plan. He had spent the morning and early afternoon going over and over the
results of their painstaking research of the Estate. If the answer were there,
he couldn’t see it. The only option was to trigger the alarm and go for it, the
police reaction would be minimal, they certainly would not be expecting nine
heavily armed and experienced Irish Nationalists.

Conors
crew had spent the last two
weeks spending the millions they would receive from ransoming the two kids.
Giving up was not an option and they all agreed to go ahead with the plan, except
for one person, Sinead. Sinead was
Conor’s
number two
and didn’t like it. She couldn’t help think that a
man
who spent that amount of money on visible security, probably spent at least the
same amount on stuff they hadn’t seen. She voiced her concerns but they were
ignored even though she was brighter, tougher and a damn site more ruthless
than
Conor
. Had she not been a woman, she would most
certainly have been the leader of the crew. Mercenaries in Ireland had still
not caught up with equal rights. She couldn’t help think that they were making
a huge mistake.

The plan was simple. That night, just after dark, they would use
long ramps to get four
high powered
motorcycles into
the grounds. Within 3 minutes, they would be at the house, grab the kids and
use one of the Kennedys’
high powered
boats to cross
the Loch to two cars waiting on the other side. They would then drive the cars
under tree cover to avoid detection by helicopter to the safe house 30 miles
away. They would then issue their demands and either give the kids back or kill
them, whichever proved easiest.

They began to prepare themselves for that night’s operation. Two
of the team went back to the main gates to monitor all comings and goings. Two
other members of the team set about constructing the ramps required to scale
the walls, while the others prepared the weapons and vehicles.

Chapter
13

Tom and Lela had also excused themselves from the table,
explaining they needed to get ready for their friends’ arrival However, instead
of going their separate ways, they both went straight to Tom’s room.

“OK,” Tom said closing his door. “What do you think about this
new school?” he asked.

“I don’t know, I mean, we don’t even know where it is and I can
see why your mum is angry. By the sounds of it, your dad had accepted,” replied
Lela as she sat on her favourite
bean bag
.

“I know, he forgets he’s not the boss sometimes, at least when it
comes to home.”

“So what about you?” asked Lela.

“I thought it sounded really cool but I want to see if we can
find where it is.”

“How??”

“My dad mentioned a couple of clues, remember he said it was on
one of two islands cloaked in secrecy and it must have been built within the
last five years because that’s when that bankruptcy happened, yeah?”

“Yes but…” Lela stopped, she knew Tom better than anybody. She
was
an ‘A’
student but Tom was in a different league
entirely. His father’s genius genes had definitely rubbed off on him although,
thankfully, with a good helping of his mother’s common sense.

Tom was much taller than his ‘big’ sister despite being a year
younger. Lela had inherited her mother’s petite frame, while Tom seemed
destined to at least equal his father’s almost six
foot
.
For the last thirteen years, they had been inseparable. When Lela had started
school a year before Tom, all hell had broken loose. Lela had screamed all day
at school, while Tom had done the same at home. There were two options, either
Tom started school early or Lela started school a year later. A family meeting
resolved the situation, holding Lela back was
unfair,
the only option therefore was for young Tom to start school early. The dynamic
duo were
back together and peace renewed.

It had not taken long for Tom to fall under his ‘big’ sister’s
protection. Being the youngest and the smallest in his class, Tom was easy prey
for the class bully. However, Lela, even aged five, was a force to be reckoned
with. Following Lela’s retribution for picking on her ‘little brother’, the
bully had been rushed to hospital. The message was well and truly made, nobody
messed with Lela’s brother, nobody.

Ever since, the two had never been apart, what one did the other
followed, usually closely watched by the
ever present
Saki.

Lela watched Tom flick from one of his three monitors to another,
scanning through page after page of information on the
internet
.
Lela only wished Tom’s physical dexterity matched his mental ability. He had
pestered her for years to give him some basic
training which
,
although strictly forbidden for non
Penarajans
, she
had agreed to. Lela fundamentally disagreed with the ancient rule of forbidding
non islanders
from mastering their art. As far as she
was concerned, if she was a
fully fledged
Kennedy
(which she was), by default, Tom was a fully fledged islander. He spent as much
time as she did with her family, aunts and cousins and the two families really
had become one, despite their very different genes. People even joked that if
it
was
not for Lela’s Asian looks, the two would look
the same. They both had olive skin, brown eyes and dark hair and were obviously
destined to profit from their parents’ good looks.

His training, however, was an unmitigated disaster. Lessons were
a nightmare,
It
wasn’t that Tom couldn’t do the moves,
it was just that he couldn’t do them quickly. By the time he had blocked a
punch, it could have hit him five times. Lela had therefore focussed on
defensive measures, if nothing else, she thought it may give her a little extra
time to come and kick whosever arse was messing with her brother.

Tom carried on flicking from screen to screen as he searched for
the elusive new school which he and Lela may be sent to. His email pinged. He
flicked across to his inbox, his whatjet.com website was proving a phenomenal
success. Two new enquiries were awaiting his response.

It had all started over a year earlier when his father had
brought home a proposal for his company’s new jet. Tom had always been
fanatical about flying and knew everything there was to know about aircraft. He
took a keen interest in the proposal and spotted a number of flaws made by his
father’s procurement team. His father was baffled by most of the technical
detail and was glad to hand it over to Tom. He had thought nothing more of it
until Tom produced a detailed reasoning the following morning as to why each of
the options was flawed and why an entirely different plane was more
appropriate.

Donald, armed with the new proposal, presented it to his
procurement team who could not disagree with the new choice of aircraft. Donald
did not have the heart to tell his Procurement Director that he had been beaten
by an eleven year old. However, from that day forward, he always
pit
the might of his Procurement Division against Tom and
Tom had never been beaten. Whenever a new aircraft request came in, the Alba
team would drop everything as they tried, in vain, to better ‘Donald’s’
proposal.

It hadn’t taken Tom long to see the commercial viability of his
services and so he launched WhatJet.com, the home of a truly independent advice
service for those wanting to buy the best fit-for-purpose aircraft they could.
When people were spending tens of millions of dollars on something, they tended
to want to make sure that they were buying the right thing at the right price.
Tom had also built an enviable list of ‘actual’ cost rather than ’list’ price
and in general, saved his customers around 5% on the purchase price. His fee
was 0.5% of the purchase
price which
was minimal
compared to the savings made, so nobody had ever complained. In his first year
of business, Tom had made over $2 million profit and his company was valued at
double that amount.

Only
Lela knew about Tom’s little ‘
sideline
’. His father
was famous for having started Alba at the age of 14 and keeping it a secret
until his 16
^th
birthday when he
announced to his bewildered parents that he was leaving school and going to run
his multi-million pound business. Tom was planning to trump that, although he
perhaps would forget the leaving school part, not many people left school at 16
any more.

Tom flicked back to his search. He would deal with the new
enquiries the next day, after his friends had left. Thirty minutes later, he
hit the print button and the page shot out of the printer.

“Done it, got it,” announced Tom grabbing the sheet of paper.

“Got what?” asked Lela, pausing MTV.

“The school’s location, of course!”

Lela looked at her watch, they had only been there 45 minutes.

“What, you’ve just found the secret school on the internet in
less than an hour?”

“Yep and I’ll tell you something, if you thought my mum was
pissed off earlier, just wait ‘til she hears this,” said Tom as he led the way
to the study. He thought it was only fair to warn his father first.
 

Tom knocked and they both entered. His father was on one phone
and had another call sitting off the hook on the desk. He didn’t normally work
from home but had decided he wanted to spend as much time as he could with Tom
on his birthday.

Donald ended his call and retrieved the other handset from his
desk.

“I’m so sorry about that Sam, we’re just finalising the IBC bid,
it’s
all rather hectic. Now where were we?”

Donald looked down at his list and began to run through the list
of questions Rachel had given him.

Tom and Lela waited patiently as Donald talked. They assumed
their favourite seats on the huge sofa in front of the fireplace. They both
jumped when Donald suddenly raised his voice.

“What do you mean you can’t tell me!” he shouted. “Don’t be
ridiculous! How can you expect me to say yes without knowing that
?!
”

Tom walked over to the desk and looked at the sheet of paper in
front of Donald, his pen was doodling next to the world ‘Location’. As Donald
argued, the pen began to bounce up and down. Tom put his hand over his father’s
to stop his tapping and placed his sheet of paper in front of him and directed
his father attention to it.
  

“Hold on Sam, Tom’s just giving me something.”

He looked at the sheet of paper and then at Tom, quizzically. Tom
nodded.

“Sam, I’ll just put you on speaker, Tom and Lela are both here.”

“OK,” replied Sam, his Southern American
drawl
booming across the study.

“Tom just handed me a sheet of paper which has the name of two
islands on it – one’s called
Bassas
da India
and the other Ile Europa. Their geographic locations are 21 30 S 39 50 E and 22
20 S 40 22 E respectively.”

The former president said nothing.

“Sam, are you still there?” asked Donald.

“Yes. Tom, where did you get that information?” he asked,
shocked.