The Macau Terms

Someone has put a price on Luca Brandt.

Twenty-five million euros, to be exact. A kidnap-and-ransom policy, paid for by a Macau holding company, with the payee line left blank.

The world's most trusted hostage negotiator has spent his career bringing people home. Now a photograph of his fifteen-year-old daughter outside her Hamburg school lands on his phone, and a calm voice on the Hong Kong-Macau ferry offers to "discuss your terms." Brandt knows that voice. He trusted it for ten years.

The terms are simple. Take the next kidnapping as the family's consultant. Concede on cue. Make every ransom match the policy limit. Refuse, and the blank line gets a name.

When a young marine biologist is taken from a dive boat in the Sulu Sea, her father asks for Brandt by name. Brandt says yes, and starts building a trap inside the job.

From a VIP salon in Cotai to the gold markets of Dubai, from a Philippine jungle to a Macau under Typhoon Signal No. 8, five lives collide in a race where every call is a bargain and every bargain is a lie.

What is a negotiator worth when the other side has already priced him? And who gets to write the name on the last line?