Acknowledgments

Thanks above all to my mother, Marlis Saunders, and the FBI agents who supported her during the long and frustrating negotiations to get me out.

Thanks to Lou Saunders, her husband, who suffered through everything, too.

Thanks to Mathias Müller von Blumencron, Georg Mascolo, Holger Stark, Matthias Gebauer, and Wolfgang Büchner at Der Spiegel magazine, as well as Daryl Lindsey and Charles Hawley at Spiegel Online, for both moral and practical help.

Thanks to Jon Sawyer and Tom Hundley at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for their engagement throughout the ordeal, especially supporting my mother in California.

Thanks to Sara Miller-McCune at what is now Pacific Standard, to David Bradley at Atlantic Media, to Mel Leshowitz and Ellen Beaumel, and to John Keenan of Keenan & Associates.

Thanks to Ashwin Raman, Derek Seton, Bob Klamser, John Steed in Nairobi, and of course to Joe for excellent logistical help.

Thanks to David Rohde for all kinds of help.

Thanks to Olivia Judson for introducing me to “Courage Under Fire,” James Stockdale’s fine essay about his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Stockdale’s ideas about Epictetus have informed mine, and I think it’s remarkable that we arrived at similar conclusions in captivity by very different paths.

Thanks to Susanna Forrest in Berlin, and thanks to the rest of the cleaning crew—John and Aimee and Desmond—and to all my friends, in Berlin and elsewhere, who agonized while I was a hostage.

Thanks to Nicole Busse, and thank you to Blanche Schwappach.

Thanks to the circle of FBI and BKA agents who supported me just after my release, and for the memorable meal of Königsberger Klöpse in Nairobi.

Work on this book was aided by grants from the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, based at the Carey Institute for the Global Good in upstate New York, as well as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, D.C.

Thanks to my readers: Susanna Forrest, Stig Jarle Hansen, Rasha Elass, Taran Khan, Mark Kramer, and everyone in the winter 2017 class of the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship.

Thanks to my wonderful surfing editor, Karen Rinaldi, and my fabulous agent, Kathy Robbins.

Thanks to Hannah Robinson and Nate Knaebel for their close attention to the manuscript.

Thanks to Abdi Warsame’s entire family in Wiesbaden and Berlin for their moral support, and for Abdi’s Somali-language translations.

Thanks also to H., a Somali who worked on my behalf and corroborated some of the stories in this book.

And, of course, thanks to Anna Noryskiewicz for help with Chinese translations and pinyin spellings.