The kidnapping attempt was a disaster . No matter who you were, or in what way you were involved, it was an unmitigated horror .

The idea was to extort knowledge rather than money . Because knowledge was money, at least when it came to knowing how to jack right into Chag's transaction system .

William never planned to siphon money that way . Way too dangerous, and probably impossible . What he did plan was to always be the first who saw the shopping patterns for Chag on-line .

Advertis.e.m.e.ntFor that he had hired thugs to grab Sophia Hansson, star programmer in TAP with a speciality in datlayer manipulation . Thugs usually came with a lot of muscle and a certain deficiency in the brain department . These were no exceptions .

They mistook the barely thirty year old, d.a.m.ned cute, and rather short programmer for TAP's forty year old CEO . He wasn't cute . He wasn't short, and he sure as h.e.l.l wasn't without bodyguards . Chag's bodyguards . He probably didn't even know he was watched over .

One thug had an unfortunate date with an SUV and one of the trams Gothenburg was so famous for . All forty tons of it . He would make the evening news, but his sudden lack of legs and a.s.sociated intestinal damage made certain he never made the morning .

The other thug didn't even make the evening news . As in he was made to disappear . Chag was a roaring dragon . A fas.h.i.+on monster, and make no mistake, monster was the key word here . In just a bit over ten years it had grown from nothing to an empire spanning the globe . Its empress gladly let control of her company slip slowly through her fingers as long as Chag grew sufficiently fast as a result .

TAP wasn't important . TAP delivering what could best be called a f.u.c.k-up was . And Chag had decided that no one was about to grab their corporate management when they had decided to make good on their mistakes .

But the car only held their CEO, and his three children .

William swore when he thought of his bad luck . What idiot CEO takes the day off just because his brats have taken ill?

William swore once more . How was he to know that the system TAP delivered was so riddled with security holes that he could actually have planted a Trojan inside it and diverted money wherever he wanted?

How could he have known that the missing thug had brought a handgun?

The news said that a daughter of the Hammargren family was badly hurt . Life-threatening even . And that the CEO, Ulf Hammargren, was unconscious, but otherwise in no danger .

How could he have known? He couldn't . He could just as well have guessed that vengeance had found him .

"Good morning William . "

"What?"

"This is the gun your hired muscle used . "

A 9 mm parabellum bullet made morning into night in an instant .