He led her into the garage and placed his laptop on the hood of her SUV. Then he opened the door, affixed one of the phones to a cup-holder attachment on the console, and aimed the phone’s camera at the driver’s seat.

“Get in.”

“Please don’t hurt my son.”

“I said get in.” He half shoved her into the driver’s seat. “If you do as I say, you’ll be back before your son even knows that you’ve left.” The man dialed a number and the phone in the console buzzed. “Answer it,” he said.

She followed his instruction, her finger trembling slightly. He showed her his phone which had a face-to-face app set up so that he could see her but she could not see him. “I’ll be watching everything you do,” he said.

Then he pulled an earpiece from the bag and handed it to her. “Put it in.” She did, and he put an identical piece into his ear, connected to the phone via Bluetooth. He said, “I’ll also hear everything you say. When you go in the bank, I want you to take the phone from the holder and carry it in your hand. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Point the camera up at your face, but do it casually—don’t make a scene. You cannot draw attention to yourself in any way. That would be a mistake.”

He took the laptop off the hood and showed her the screen, which held a map of her neighborhood, a tiny blue dot hovering over her house. “I’ll be tracking you, so don’t get any ideas. Do you understand?”

She seemed out of breath as she answered, “Yes.”

He didn’t want her to be any more freaked out than she already was, but he also needed her to obey him without question, so he gave her the warning he’d prepared. “You’ll find yourself trying to come up with a way to stop me. You’ll want to be a hero. When you have that thought, ask yourself this one question: How much is my son’s life worth? It’s simple math, really. If I were to ask you how much you would give me to save your son’s life, what would you say? Is thirty thousand a fair price?”

Her breath came in stuttered puffs, a Morse code tapping out the depth of her fear.

“I’ll see and hear everything. If you deviate from my plan in any way, I will kill your son and disappear. Do you understand?”

The tremble in her fingertips grew, and she gave the steering wheel a tight squeeze. “I understand,” she said.

“Oh, and just in case you have any notions about passing a note to the teller, you should know that I have an accomplice. That person might be the woman filling out a deposit slip, or that bald security guard who sits at the desk just inside the door. Or… it could be the teller. They are waiting for you now. Don’t do anything stupid. All you have to do is bring me thirty thousand dollars and I’ll let you and Pip go. Do we have a deal?”