Chapter 9 - The Hostage Party
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Back up on the sunlit marble terrace of Whitaker Hall, terror reigned among the fifty trapped guests.
Four additional armed contractors in tactical vests—men hired by Arthur Pendelton from a disgraced private security firm out of Newark—stood stationed along the stone parapet with assault rifles slung across their chests, keeping the Greenwich billionaires, judges, and society reporters corralled near the center fountain. All fifty guests’ cell phones and smartwatches had been dumped into a silver punch bowl filled with ice water.
At the top of the patio steps stood Arthur Pendelton, impeccable in a three-piece charcoal Savile Row suit, holding a wireless megaphone while Vanessa stood beside him with an ice pack pressed against her bruised ego and a fresh pair of heels on her feet.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated and calm!" Arthur called out smoothly, projecting the exact tone of tragic authority he used during shareholder crises. "I am Arthur Pendelton, Chief Financial Officer of Whitaker Pharmaceuticals. What you just witnessed was the tragic culmination of a mental breakdown that Evan’s doctors and I have been trying to manage privately in London for the past two weeks."
Margaret Vance, sitting on the flagstones beside her husband, the State Attorney General, stared up at Arthur in disbelief.
"A mental breakdown?!" the Attorney General barked, getting to his feet. "Arthur, we just watched Vanessa slap a housekeeper across the face after trying to hit Evan’s seven-year-old daughter! And why are your guards pointing rifles at us?!"
"Because the woman posing as a housekeeper is an armed corporate saboteur who kidnapped Evan from his London clinic and brought him here to extort the family trust!" Vanessa cried out, dabbing nonexistent tears from her eyelashes for the crowd. "She just attacked our security chief with a firearm and abducted Sophie and Caleb into the woods! The house went into automatic lockdown to protect all of you until our tactical team secures the children!"
A murmur of confusion and fear rippled through the crowd. Half the guests had seen Evan tear off the beard and hold his crying children; the other half had only seen Grace pull a gun and vanish into the bushes amid gunfire.
Arthur lowered the megaphone and stepped back into the shadowed portico behind the steel shutters, where a side security door remained propped open by a biometric wedge. He grabbed Vanessa harshly by the elbow, his public mask vanishing into furious panic.
"You psychotic idiot!" Arthur hissed into Vanessa’s ear, shaking her arm. "All you had to do was smile and pour champagne for two more hours until the noon vault window opened! Why the hell couldn't you keep your hands off the kid for ten minutes?!"
"The little brat ruined my shoes in front of Margaret Vance, and that maid was spying on us!" Vanessa snapped back, yanking her elbow free. "Stop whining, Arthur! Evan doesn't have his master token in those filthy gardener clothes—it’s upstairs in his bedroom safe. He has to come inside the house before noon if he wants to lock us out of Clara’s vault, and Julian is already upstairs waiting by the study door with six guards!"
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Arthur checked his Patek Philippe watch: 11:46 AM.
"If Evan isn't dead or thumb-scanned onto that vault plate in fourteen minutes," Arthur snarled, "our buyer in Zurich pulls the four-hundred-million-dollar wire, and we all go to federal prison for the rest of our lives. Get upstairs!"
