Ransom Beach (Stephanie Chalice Thrillers Book 2) (29 page)

"Just do it," I insisted.

He must have seen that I was dead serious because the grin he had sported for the entire flight disappeared. "What's going on?"

I wanted to give him a quick heads up but circumstances didn't permit it. Thorne was on her way back to her seat. "We're cleared for landing," she said. "We'll touch down in a few minutes." She sat down and belted herself in. "You are going to have such a good time, just wait." She was absolutely aloft on high spirits. It was a shame that her champagne bubble was about to burst.

Douglas came out of the cockpit. His beard had grown in over the Atlantic. He looked tired, perhaps bored with the routine of sprinting back and forth from the states to Europe. He whispered something in Thorne's ear and then approached Gus and I. "They're reporting strong winds at the airport so it may be a little bumpy on the way down." He checked to make sure our seatbacks were vertical. "Don't sweat it. You'll be on the ground in no time."

Douglas
made
me
feel safe, with his self confident manner and his flyboy good looks, but the jet began to bounce the second he turned toward the cockpit. I glanced over at Lido and tightened my seatbelt. He did the same and then the jet dropped like a stone. It leveled off in a second but not before my heart had traveled to my throat and back.

Thorne glanced back at us. "There are always winds at
de
Gaulle. We're fine." She seemed unaffected by the turbulence, turning toward Manny with a reassuring face. Manny was in character. He was so convincing that for the moment I began to doubt myself. He knew I was on to him. He was either very cool or completely genuine. I'd know for sure very soon.

White knuckles on the armrest as Douglas fought the winds on our approach to the airport, the jet rolling and pitching all the way down.

It was a tremendous relief when the jet's wheels screeched on the tarmac and we rumbled to a stop. The winds were still strong as the jet taxied off the runway. I could feel it pushing the jet from side to side. It was just a few minutes until we arrived in the parking field and the jet's engines died to a whisper.

The copilot came out of the cockpit and helped put Manny into his wheelchair, leaving Douglas at the helm. Thorne buttoned his coat.

"We'll keep the plane sealed up until our limousine arrives," Thorne said. "It's brutal outside and it takes a few minutes to get Manny down the stairs."

I could feel fierce wind buffet the small jet the whole time, rocking it up and down. The black Mercedes pulled up outside almost immediately. The copilot cracked the hatch. I could hear the harsh winds immediately and a chill filled the cabin.

The jet pitched, forcing me to grab a seatback to steady myself. I felt like I was on a mechanical bull ride.

"Fifty mile per hour ground winds," the copilot said as he reached out to steady me. "Brutal."

Thorne cinched the belt on her coat. "Here we go." She stepped off the jet first and then the copilot began rolling Manny toward the hatch.

Without warning, Manny sprang from his wheelchair. There was a makeshift knife in his hand. He caught Thorne on the steps and pressed the knife against her throat. I expected him to rant and rave, to warn us to stay away or else, but he said nothing. Instead he glared fiercely as all watched in amazement. I don't know how Thorne kept herself up. I could see the horror and befuddlement on her face as Manny held her by the throat. The wind was fierce, strong enough to push the stairs from side to side.

Lido seemed to be stunned momentarily. He looked at me in amazement as if I was an extraterrestrial and then he stepped up, past the copilot and yanked the empty wheelchair out of the way. "Take it easy," he said to Manny. "Put the knife down and no one will get hurt."

I was way beyond negotiation, whipped up into a frenzy from thinking about the scheme this animal had executed. This thing, whoever he was, was desperate and I knew that a hostage was his only way out—I wasn't going to let him have one.

Douglas was on his way out of the cockpit. I cut him off, pushing him back inside. It took just seconds to give him instructions and then I was back out, moving straight to the hatch.
Celia
Thorne looked desperate. Her eyes reached out to me. We connected. She read my gestures and knew exactly what to do.

"Hey, moron," I screamed. "You're not getting away. You'll be in a cell within the—" On cue, the jet's engine's kicked and roared. The jet surged against its blocks. Thorne grabbed hold of the handrail. Taken off guard, Manny tumbled down the stairs. Lido leaped toward him but missed, rolling on the tarmac and away from the jet. The wind surged at that moment, lifting the jet. Before Douglas could kill the engines, it rolled over its blocks.

Manny was trapped at the base of the stairs, his coat caught under the wheels as the jet rolled out of control. Vicious inhuman sounds shot from his mouth but no words. He struggled to free himself as the jet dragged him along the ground, its wings rocking in the fierce wind.

Lido was back on his feet. He wanted to go back after Manny but the jet was rocking in the wind, making it dangerous to approach. Thorne was still huddled on the base of the stairs, her grip locked around the railing. Aboard the jet, the rest of us pitched back and forth as the wind tossed us around.

"Stay clear, Gus," I yelled, hoping he could hear me above the howling winds.

Leaning out of the hatch and holding on for dear life I could see that Manny still had his knife and was cutting himself free. The wind died and Manny took off.

I jumped down the stairs. Lido and I gave chase.

Manny was hell bent on escape, running blindly away from the terminal toward the runway. He didn't see the jet on final approach headed straight for him, split seconds away from touch down.

The pilot must have somehow seen him. The jet veered right at the last second. It missed Manny but was half on the runway and half off, its right landing gear off the tarmac. Manny dove for the ground as the jet rumbled and pitched past him, fighting for control. The right landing gear leg snapped off as the pilot forced the jet back on the runway. Manny was back on his feet. We were almost on him when the jet spun a one-eighty and came back at us like a crippled behemoth. Gus and I made eye contact and without saying a word we dove, hitting Manny and taking him down. The three of us were sprawled on the ground. The jet was still coming toward us. I took one last glance at Lido, perhaps my last. The jet was coming straight for us, too fast to avoid. It looked like the end when the wheels on the jet's front landing gear turned. It was going to be close. I closed my eyes...

I was still alive when I opened them. The jet was a few hundred feet past us, finally at rest. I could hear the sound of emergency equipment trucks racing toward us.

Gus had Manny pinned to the ground. He was still moaning and grunting inhuman sounds that I was sure I'd remember forever. Joe Douglas and the copilot were racing toward us.

I looked around for Thorne. She was by the jet, still huddled at the base of the stairs, clinging to it for dear life. Her jet had been stabilized but
Celia
Thorne, pillar of strength, captain of industry, and woman of the world was weeping like a baby. I raced over and threw my arms around her. "Shush," I said. "It's going to be all right."

Madness reigned for the next few hours. Seeing Manny led away by the French authorities proved too much for
Celia
Thorne to bear. She required sedation and spent the afternoon sleeping under the watchful eyes of Alicia and the house physician at the George V. She'd been in no condition to hear the details...why the most important person in her life was not who she believed him to be or how he had hidden a fabricated shiv within the armrest of his wheelchair and had used it to threaten her life.

Matters only worsened from there. The grizzly truth about Manny's impostor and the elaborate scheme he had masterminded to bilk
Celia
Thorne of her money, her pride, and her heart.

Details poured in from the NYC crime lab and from Interpol. Using facial identification technology developed to identify terrorists passing through international airports, Interpol was able to match the photo of Manny's impostor to that of a young French confidence man by the name of Daniel Fauchon.

Born mute, Fauchon had lived with his gypsy family in Paris and had reluctantly moved to an orphanage at age twelve when his mother died. His birth records did not list the name of his father. He was, of course, incapable of speech but he was certainly capable of writing in French and no, he was not in any way autistic. He was, however, a very able faker, a confidence man supreme, who'd been taught to pick pockets before he was six. He'd honed his skills by playing on the sympathies of American tourists. Wearing a sign around his neck that read, Dumb Mute, the young Fauchon would detain tourists along the Champs Elysees, breaking their hearts while his mother bumped them on the crowded street and lifted their wallets.

The
records
at the orphanage chronicled his transgressions over the three and a half year term he had lived there until disappearing soon before turning sixteen. His transcript listed several petty thefts and stated that he had fought with many of the other boys. Academic records were spotty but one notation in particular caught my attention. It read Bright but without interest. It was written in French of course but I'm not going to bore you with the translation.

I didn't buy the doctor's explanation, which had proposed that Manny had stopped penning quatrains because he had been traumatized. Two new quatrains had purportedly come from him during his abduction, the one found in the abandoned truck and the one delivered with the ransom requests—so much for the medical experts.

I had noticed that there was a computer in Manny's room back at Thorne's penthouse. It was loaded with infantile programs designed to illicit Manny's curiosity. We hadn't thought to check an autistic child's hard drive before, but now...the computer had Internet access and the hard drive had on it, among other things, music videos, porn, and a complete list of Nostradamus' quatrains, along with their English translations.

I'd continually wondered how the ransom money had disappeared at the catering hall. Reading between the lines, Fauchon must have sprung from the kitchen and grabbed the bag during the few seconds that I'd been distracted when the two-ton van came crashing through the cinderblock wall. Manny, or rather Fauchon, had been in the kitchen at the time of the drop but there was no sign of him when I finally arrived in the kitchen and the only plausible way to explain his quick escape was that he folded up his wheelchair, picked it up, and had hightailed it across the field behind the catering hall to a waiting car.

Interpol had identified the girl as well. Her name was
Moira
Ryan, an Irish citizen. Connecting the dots would take time but I theorized that she had met Fauchon in France, somewhere in the vicinity of Manny's village and had heard from locals about his adopted mother's death and that
Celia
Thorne, an American billionaire was coming to take him back to the states.

Aside from being very, very dead,
Moira
had been found naked. A postmortem rape kit revealed that
Moira
had culminated some successful ransom sex not long before being murdered. At my request, Tully had gone back to Moira's apartment to perform a Luminol test and to dust for fingerprints. Semen found on the bed sheets and on some of
Celia
Thorne's ransom money had been typed. It matched Fauchon's. There were only two sets of recent fingerprints in the apartment, again, Moira's and Fauchon's.

Davis Mack was not an accessory. As I surmised, Mack had been, well...Mack, a man with a dedicated heart, working outside the law to recover the child he'd felt responsible for losing. He was a man of pride who had risked it all to complete his obligation. I hoped that wherever he was now, he knew that justice had been served and that it had only been through his assistance that all had been set right.

Perhaps most amazing of all was the phone call I received from Nigel Twain. My stouthearted friend was calling, not from London, but from
la
Ferté
Milon
, a small village outside Paris. Acting on my instructions, Twain had ventured across the English Channel to do a little research on my behalf and what he discovered was most revealing.

It was early evening by the time we were able to get Thorne mobile and drive into the countryside. Gracious to a fault, Twain met us outside the orphanage but refused to venture inside and intrude on what was about to be a very special moment for
Celia
Thorne.

They'd just finished dinner at the orphanage when we arrived and the small home smelled from cinnamon and freshly baked dessert. Three autistic children sat around a table playing a card game of their own creation. I knew the real Manny the second I saw him. He was grinning and jabbering away in French, some of his words were intelligible, most were not, but he was happy with his little family and in his expression I could see the warmth and vibrancy Thorne had spoken of the first time she'd told me the way her sister had described him. Thorne saw it too and burst into tears.

I had wondered about how Fauchon and
Moira
had pulled it off, the switch that is. I wondered no more. As I said, there was something about this Manny that was genuine, a warmth and sensitivity the other Manny did not possess. Fauchon was in many respects Manny's double, perhaps close enough in appearance to be his fraternal twin. There was still a bit I didn't understand but figuring out the rest was guaranteed. Fauchon had yet to admit guilt and as we know,
Moira
Ryan had been silenced forever. It was just a matter of time until all was revealed.

Thorne walked slowly toward him, her eyes wide with astonishment. Manny looked up at the stranger, grinned and began to giggle. A sister rushed over to Thorne, offering her tissues to dry the fresh torrent of tears running down her face. Manny giggled with greater intensity as the strange woman hugged him and smothered him with kisses. She looked up at me for a moment. "This is my Manny," she sobbed, “my sister's child." Thorne continued to cry. When she was finally done, the sister handed her a small piece of notepaper. "What's this?" Thorne asked.