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you can imagine.”
    She erupted in loud cackles.
    “I have the best girls here. But old is gold. Maybe nes time you try Mamasan pussy?” She reached out to fondle his crotch and he let her.
    He sat in his running car in front of the brothel and dialed a number.
    “We ’ ve got three minutes. Be quick, the old lady checks in with her offsite security every fifteen.”
    Like the recurring dream that had started his day, all he could hear was a ticking sound. In front of him, the San Fernando Valley sun was setting in a glorious explosion of purple and blood orange against a lacquered blue sky. A great day for freedom.
    A police car drove by and he avoided eye contact with the officer driving it. The ticking in his head was getting louder.
    The closed door of the Eternal Bliss massage parlor looked peaceful. There was no way from the external façade to discern all the human misery it took to keep a place like this in business.
    He closed his eyes and heard his heart beating in his mouth in sync with the ticking sound in his head.
    Even though the gun he had given Orapan was silenced, he felt the vibration of the three bullets exiting the muzzle and ripping through the air.
    The door flew open and Orapan ran out with his Beretta in one hand and Mamasan’s iPad in the other. Her pearl-white robe was splattered with brain and blood and skull splinters.
    She jumped into the passenger seat, and he drove away with her to somewhere safe in North Hollywood. There he would remove the GPS tracking device on her ankle so they would never find her again.
    Right behind them, two men in a white van had less than five minutes to rescue the other twelve girls in the brothel, before the blood-curdling wrath of the Moldovan mafia rained on them.

FIVE
    Saturday, November 5, 2011—12:56 p.m.
Somewhere over the Caribbean Sea
    B lackwell gazed down from the Seahawk at the cobalt-blue canvas of the Caribbean Sea. As far as his eyes could perceive, the water was speckled with white strokes of surf trails painted by speed boats and yachts crisscrossing one another. This was the first time in four years he was leaving Anguilla for anything other than his kids.
    The magic potion disguised as a power drink one of the marines had handed him nipped his migraine in the bud. He was feeling energized now and his concentration level had rebounded. Blackwell was as ready as he could be for Carter ’ s briefing.
    The first order of business was Julia Price ’ s proof-of-life video. Watching it stirred something in Blackwell. Regardless of how corrupt her father and uncle may have been, Julia didn ’ t deserve this. No one did.
    She was naked and tied to a chair as she pleaded for whoever was listening to save her. Her lips were bleeding, her face bruised, and her neck and body riddled with unsubtle signs of what her captors were doing to her.
    He thought of the hostages in Manhattan and the perpetrator ’ s ambiguous threat to “kill children”—whatever that meant. Carter had only given him enough bait to drag him into the Seahawk, but he was knee-deep now and needed to know more.
    Blackwell couldn ’ t get his mind off the architect behind these events. How large do your balls have to be to hold the staff of a defense and security company hostage, armed with nothing more than the promise of violence?
    In his shimmering career as a hostage negotiator, he had come across all shades of criminals and terrorist masterminds, but there was one type that fazed him the most—the sort who thought and planned big, and accounted for every possible outcome, methodically, even scientifically.
    This guy had asked for him by name, and made all the right threats to ensure that not only would the FBI deliver Blackwell to him, but that Blackwell himself would agree to come. He ’ d been handpicked by the perpetrator for a reason. Why? And who the hell is this guy?
    Blackwell had signed up for the FBI right out of college when he was twenty-three. He had studied