41.

Linda had put on the burqa, as she’d been ordered to do. There was no need for a niqab, her face being covered almost completely by the garment’s lace net. But at least the man hadn’t trampled on her dignity by staying in the cell as she’d changed. She remembered that the men had left the room at the makeshift operation theatre where her tracking device had been removed from her arm. Another confirmation that they were Muslims. Something that she’d decided to take advantage of.

Propped up against the stone wall, she clasped her hands. She’d accepted there’d been a chance, albeit a remote chance, that she could be injured or assassinated while performing her public duties. But now the worst had happened, and if her plan didn’t work she’d likely die here. She guessed that being executed in a burqa would be a political statement for the Leopards. But then she remembered that the wearing of the burqa was very rare in Shia countries. Most women opted for and were permitted to wear only the hijab, a simple headscarf. The realization puzzled here. If she was in Pakistan, maybe the Leopards, being Shias, were intent on blaming it on the Sunnis. But what about the words on the tape recorder? Besides, although the generals had passed a law that all women wear the hijab, Pakistani women only wore the burqa in the Tribal Areas and Balochistan. She wondered if she would be taken to one of those regions. Her thoughts made her head ache, that and the dehydration she was suffering from.

She pictured John and her girls. John hadn’t said anything expressly, but she knew he had been unhappy about her visit. It was a dangerous place with no respect for Western women, after all. And she recalled an unfamiliar sense of foreboding as soon as she had arrived in Pakistan. Something that had prompted her to ring home far more than usual.

In her temporary office in Islamabad two hours before she’d been kidnapped, she’d decided to wake John and the girls. After the girls stopped yawning, she told them she loved and missed them, that she would be back on Tuesday and that they would all watch a movie together. She asked them to look after their father and to remember that he was a dear man. The girls had just grumbled at being woken up and had gone back to bed.

John had been confined to a wheelchair two years ago, his spine shattered in a hit and run while out for an early morning jog. He’d done his best to cope with the physical and mental trauma of his disability, but she knew he was struggling. When he’d asked her if she was all right, she’d brushed it off, saying that it was the jet lag and heat getting to her.

She got up and paced about now, finding the garment both restrictive and degrading. For those who chose to wear it, good luck to them, she thought. But she felt genuine sympathy for the millions of women who were forced to live in them daily before being effectively locked away at night behind closed doors. She smiled, despite everything. The burqa would play a part in helping her break free from the men who guarded her.

She said a prayer for her family and then one for herself, as she did every morning and evening, although she had no idea of the time. She’d asked God to give her the strength to carry out what she’d set her mind to.