The telephone is torture. It doesn't ring, and his stomach grows holes. It does ring, and he can't dare get his hopes up.
It's ringing now, and the maid is saying, "Shah residence," and there's something in her voice, a here-we-go-again aria, as she tells 58-year-old Bipin Shah he'd better take this one.
Britain. Italy. France. Australia. The whole of the U.S. The call could be from anywhere. Bipin Shah's bounty hunters, chasing a $2 million reward, are scattered around the world. The multimillionaire Philadelphia banker, who helped develop automated-teller systems, has 100 Sherlocks sniffing trails, rummaging through trash and cashing in chits with official sources. Each one scrabbling to find Shah's abducted daughters--Sarah is 8, and Genevieve 6--and claim the prize.
Shah takes the call in the living room of his three-story, seven-bedroom manse near Philadelphia, surrounded by those daughters. Photos of them are on every desk, every table, every single available flat surface, a gallery of big bright eyes and little-girl smiles.
This call is from France. One of the bounty hunters checking in. He has found the home of someone who might have been in contact with Shah's ex-wife, and the detective is sitting on the house now, waiting it out. He and Shah share notes and plot strategy.
Could this be it? Could this be the lead Bipin Shah has been waiting for since last June, when his ex-wife snatched the kids and ran?
Shah has burned $1 million so far on detectives, lawyers, plane tickets, even a press agent, and his wallet is still open. Yet that money, all that time, and the one thing he has learned--aside from the fact that Ellen Shah had half a million when she ran and transferred money through accounts in England, the Isle of Man and Switzerland--merely deepens the sting.
Seven hundred miles south of Shah's war room is Faye Yager, a legendary, sharp-tongued Atlanta belle on a holy crusade, who proudly admits to hiding Shah's ex-wife and daughters in her sprawling international underground for alleged victims of abuse. To hear her tell it, Shah's sorrowful tale of a father's love isn't even close to the real story, which, Yager claims, is a docudrama of sex and lies, money and madness, violence and revenge.
There is no dysfunction like the dysfunction of the rich.
You're damn right ole Faye Yager has got a dog in this fight, honey. If she hadn't helped Ellen Dever Shah disappear, Yager twangs, Ellen would have gone the way of Nicole Brown Simpson.
"He threatened to kill her, and she feared for her life," Yager says.
Bipin Shah has sued Yager for $100 million. He denies her every rant and threatens to crush her network--one that doesn't just skirt the law but defies it, taunts it, bedevils it. Children of the Underground, which Yager basically runs out of a Dunkin' Donuts shop, is her answer to courts that don't work. And it has turned hundreds of mothers into fugitives and nabbed children from fathers who don't get two minutes in their own defense.
"I will destroy her operation!" promises Shah.
Come and get me, Yager drawls. She has faced down Satan himself and won, she says, and "I'm not afraid of Mr. ATM."