By seven thirty the next morning, Josh was off to the courthouse and Eliza to school. I walked Lulu, but when I got back, all I could do was amble from room to room pointlessly, like an uninterested real estate broker before an open house. Sit? Read? Make a spreadsheet of all the books I’d read for work, with a column for those I’d recommended—oh, and another for those that had actually been translated and published? Impossible. I was total energy, no thought.
Outside the temperature was heading toward sweltering, in the high eighties, one of those mid-June days that jogged my memory of New York City summers when breathing became an aerobic activity. I went downstairs and emptied the dishwasher, but after that I felt so jumpy I couldn’t even concentrate long enough to put the Rice Chex back into the pantry.
I changed into one of those allegedly sweat-wicking T-shirts, slipped my driver’s license and car key into the back pockets of my shorts. My phone went into what little cleavage my sports bra allowed. In spite of the dog’s glare of betrayal, I drove unaccompanied to a beach about a mile and a half away.
It was low tide, and a hard run on compacted sand might exhaust me into serenity. Occasionally a breeze floated off the tops of the lazy ripples of Long Island Sound, offering unnecessary cooling to the beachfront homes whose mammoth air-conditioning units drowned out gulls’ cries. I passed new, shingled megahouses (one with a birdhouse replica of itself) and white midcentury multilevels with walls of darkly tinted glass. A few of the old stone or brick Gold Coast manors had survived the twenties and now gazed away from the new neighbors, toward Westchester. One of them might once have had a green light at the end of its dock.
My legs were aching after almost an hour’s run on the sand, but at least the roiling energy that had been getting me nowhere had dissipated. I walked up the splintered stairs that led from the beach to a small parking area and leaned against the fender of my car near the driver’s door, emptying the sand out of my sneakers. I still had that runner’s high. Since there was no mirror around, I was glorying in thinking of myself as a sweaty, glistening goddess (golden with the tan I’d developed in the last fifty minutes) making my eyes shine sky blue.
Damn. I felt a sharp insect bite right at the small fleshy spot where my arm met my back—right near my bra strap—a potentially dangerous area because it could randomly pop out as a fat blob when I was wearing a sleeveless dress. I slapped right where the bee or bug had stung, hoping for instant retribution.
Except even before I could pull away my hand to check for a squished insect, I was smashed with a wave of dizziness. Bee sting? I never knew I was … My brain instructed my body to bend knees, had me crumple to the ground rather than allowing me to crash. I was reaching under the neckline of my shirt to pull my cell phone out of my bra, but then darkness came. I think I welcomed it because it was so much better than terror.
Such an uncomfortable position, I thought. Not exactly “thought”: it was a physical realization, like during sleep, when you rise to consciousness just enough to switch from some contorted position back to repose. So I shifted. Except I couldn’t shift. The dread I felt in that instant was so profound I dismissed it as a neural glitch. Again, I tried to move. Oh God.
I was so drugged that it took me too long to figure out that I’d be better off opening my eyes. That wasn’t much of a help because, wherever I was, there seemed to be no light. For a crazy minute, it was a relief; because I had the worst headache ever, as if my brain had been inflated and was too big for my head. The pressure felt strong enough to crack my skull. Each breath brought a tidal wave of nausea. There was nothing I could see, though I definitely understood this was no longer a day at the beach. I sensed I was indoors, but I was still so dizzy and mentally mushy that I couldn’t have testified to it under oath.
At that point I realized I was sitting up. Yes, hard floor, indoors. For a second the pressure in my head got even more painful and I thought I’d just lie down, close my eyes again. There was nothing to see anyway. That must have been the point when I comprehended I was tied up. My legs stretched out straight in front of me bound at the ankles and mid-shins. Pulling them apart was useless because they were tied with …
I was able to think a little. They were tied with something that had not even a millimeter of extra space, like handcuffs. When I tried to reach out and feel what was on my legs, I realized my wrists were joined behind my back behind some kind of a post. My palms were positioned facing each other, touching. Even though the post wasn’t wide, my position put an awful strain on my shoulders and neck, my arms pulling back and forcing me into an unnaturally upright posture.
I had to fight whatever drug was in my system, try to be alert to what was going on. Unfortunately, my eyes—unable to make out anything in the darkness—wanted to close. Because what was the point of looking into blackness?
I stared and rotated my head. It couldn’t move much because it was pressed against the post. A post, not a column, because I felt definite edges. I can’t say the realization exhilarated me, but it clarified my mind because I realized I was capable of processing information. Still, moving my head made the pressure against my skull such torment. Surveillance was agonizing. I could force myself to move, but it brought any thinking to a screeching stop.
I called out: “Is anybody here?” No answer. Then I realized how stupid it was to have let my captor know I was awake. Maybe now he was lifting a weapon with an infrared sight or silently gathering whatever tools he was going to torture me with. I waited. My heart was pounding to the point where I thought, Oh, I’m having a heart attack. For a minute I panicked, but then I calmed down by telling myself: Better than having my fingers cut off. All right, not calmed down. But at least I grasped two things: I’d made a major mistake in calling out. On the other hand, tied up and surrounded by darkness and silence, I was pretty sure I was alone.
Not that I’d bet a pile on the latter, but it was that same instinct that made some protohuman ancestor deep in a cave at night reach for a club—or not: There’s a threatening animal in here. There’s not a threatening animal in here.
What I would have bet on was that the threatening animal was Pete Delaney. Though not impossible, it would be incredibly hard for a random assassin, a.k.a. Frank, to trace the woman who’d been asking questions on Galveston Island back to me. He (or possibly she) would need to have incredible investigative skills and a database equal to that of the bureau.
Why would he leave me alone in this place, assuming it was Pete? To let me die of thirst or hunger? Because as my thinking improved, I was able to escape the excruciating pain in my head and check outside myself. It was horribly hot. When I’d gone running that morning, assuming it was still the same day, it was so hot and humid that my shirt and shorts fused with my skin. It was so much hotter here, and still humid, though I was so dehydrated my tongue glued itself to the roof of my mouth. I figured it had to be over one hundred degrees.
Logic, whatever good that was, told me that Pete wouldn’t let me die without learning what I knew. There was the possibility that I’d told all under the influence of sodium pentothal or some other blab-inducing drug, though I doubted it. If he wasn’t here, there would be a purpose behind it. For all I knew, Pete could be putting in an appearance at the soup kitchen, ladling out lentils.
But what if my being here had nothing to do with Pete and whatever weaponry or equipment was in that super-secure garage of his? What if that sharp Dexter-like sting I felt as I emptied out my sneaker was some date-rape drug administered by a serial killer? Ironic, they would say at my funeral—or memorial service if they never found the body—that she’d faced so many dodgy situations in her life but succumbed to that flesh-eating monster of a man.
Stop it! Now! Just as we learned mindfulness in training, we also learned diversion, that most useful skill. Think of something that itself commands your attention, demands concentration. Instead of inhaling for its own sake, I sniffed the hot air. I knew that with each breath, the sense of smell diminishes, so I breathed through my mouth for a minute. Then I tried again, and it was what I’d smelled the first time. Wood, sawed wood. Not a powerful odor, like a lumberyard’s. Not old, finished wood, like the scent surrounding you when you sit in the main reading room of the New York Public Library. It was similar to some apartment that Wynne’s carpenters were remodeling, where a day or two before, a round power saw had sliced through strips of ceiling molding.
Okay, one more time: I inhaled again and noticed that the air, while blisteringly hot, was not thick with sawdust. But as I was sniffing away, I was also trying to figure out what I was tied with. My wrists being bound tightly together with my hands palm to palm, I wasn’t able to touch anything. But I pulled my elbows outward, and it seemed to me the binding was narrow. So, small chance of duct tape. Better chance of zip ties, because the binding felt like plastic against my skin.
However, they weren’t those skinny little strips that thread through a kind of buckle made of the same material. If Pete (or Frank) went into a hardware store, he wouldn’t say: Oh give me that cheap bunch of zip ties that I can use for fastening some electric wires together. No, he would find stronger, wider zip ties that could keep two weighty things tight together—including ankles, shins, wrists—and wouldn’t give even under strain. Law enforcement often uses handcuffs and leg restraints made from zip ties because they’re disposable, no worries about DNA or blood contamination like with metal handcuffs.
My eyes were getting used to the darkness. Not that I could see much at all, but it seemed I was in a big space. I looked down to see if I could verify my conclusion about zip ties from the binding on my ankles or shins, but it was darker near the floor, plus looking down gave me a nice combo of fierce pain in my forehead and gagging from a wave of nausea. And when I looked straight out I didn’t see anything resembling another human being in the space. Had he just left me here to weaken? Would he come back in and try to get me to talk by waving an iced tea and a Mallomar in front of me when I was on the verge of madness?
I realized then that he wouldn’t come back in: no, he would come up. It hit me that I had to be in an attic. What I could feel of the post behind me was that it was wood, one of those plywood floor-to-ceiling two-by-fours you see all the time on home reno shows after they say, “We’ve got to blow out these walls.” And then they reconfigure part of the huge space as a downstairs bathroom. But then they put up drywall, paint it, and it’s a room. Here, they’d left the wood beams alone. He must have secured my hands behind the two-by-four and then, separately, zip-tied my wrists together.
During training the bureau had us watch a video on how to break out of duct tape, handcuffs, and zip ties. Then we had to run through it all. Our instructor and two assistants walked around the room watching us as we taped our wrists with duct tape so they wouldn’t get horribly abraded during the practice. I couldn’t think of the exact technique, which involved slamming your wrists against—I thought—your lower back. There was something also with hips, but I realized I was still drugged and none of my recollections were distinct. The only thing that actually came through clearly was a phrase from another lecture, about anesthetics and soporifics—“loss of mental acuity.”
That was it for a while; I have no idea how long. But I realized I’d fallen asleep only when my own snore/snort woke me. The sound startled me so much that I panicked, pulling at my wrists, trying to lift up my butt and get my legs to bend at the knees. If anything, the attic seemed darker than before. There was no longer a way I could survey the room and recognize I was in a large area.
I tried to deduce why I believed there was less light and then had a brilliant aha! moment when I realized it had gotten dark. Whatever sunlight had penetrated the attic (if that’s what it really had been) was gone. Assuming I hadn’t been drugged for months and it was still June, a few days before the summer solstice, it was now after nine at night.
Having made that calculation, my mind was detoxed enough to realize I was in a universe populated by more than me and Pete Delaney. How had I not thought immediately about Josh, Eliza? What were they doing? Okay, Eliza would text me one time or maybe two when I didn’t show to pick her up at tennis clinic. Or was it her volunteer day at the animal shelter? When a text didn’t get a response, she’d call my cell, but it would go to voicemail. Unless—God forbid, God forbid—Pete answered and said something horrifying to her. Or just answered with “Hello,” and the idea of a man having my phone … Stop! Josh and I both encouraged her to think. So what would she do? She’d get a ride home with someone she knew or she’d call the local taxi service; she knew to do that. Maybe on the way home she’d call Josh. Court would probably be in session so she’d leave a message. Fine, good, then she’d call my parents. Oh no!
But maybe not the worst thing in the world because not only was her grandfather of three years a retired detective, but he was also a detective who knew what I was up to. By seven o’clock, they’d all be gathering at the house. Josh would have called Wynne by this time, and she would tell him that truly she hadn’t a clue to where I was. Knowing her, I imagined she’d mull for an hour and come to realize that something was truly wrong. By eight she would call him and tell all about our time in Galveston. But by then, my father, for whom trouble was an old, familiar adversary, would have filled Josh in on Corie’s electrifying adventure that everyone except you seemed to know about, Josh.
So before it got as dark as it was now, Josh—ex-assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, former chief of its Criminal Division—would have called someone in the FBI and by now would have been connected with Carlos Ruiz. Josh would be rational and effective. Frightened, too. He loved me. Not just that: he found me challenging, exciting. But was there something deep in his soul that was already agonizing: Oh shit, am I going to have to find a new wife again?
Except for the couple of seconds when I wondered if Josh would marry anyone we knew, I was also thinking about death, real death, and whether it was like instant nothingness. Or was it going down a long corridor into a white light, like in Six Feet Under, and would there be a welcoming committee: Jane Austen, Zaynab Fawwaz, Gene Roddenberry, my aunt Gussie, and my dad’s partner Mickey Soong. I’d want to get acclimated to being dead before I went over to Shakespeare and told him how much his work meant to me.
Then I felt guilty that I’d left out God (whose existence I sometimes doubted), except then I realized I was making a list of greeters because most of all I was terrified of the opposite of instant nothingness: of being dead and conscious in a box. I could deal with bugs, but the horror of worms and slugs actually on me—in me—was a different story. I never thought I could scream with my mouth closed, but I did.
Change the subject! I would never again see Sami. An old song, but not one of mine, came into my head. I remembered my mom playing a cassette of her favorites in the car, so I must have been pretty young. But there was a lyric: “But I always thought that I’d see you again.” I was—what?—seven or eight. I’d sobbed.
Even as an eight-year-old I understood too soon and finality.
I had a brief, fervent thought of Bayezid II, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who sent his navy to evacuate imperiled Jews from Spain in 1492. This was definitely not the kind of thinking the lecturer at Quantico had drawled about. “Focus on one thang: solving the problem.” Maybe I was stereotyping and he was really from Oregon.
The standard way of getting out of zip ties, when your hands were tied behind your back, was to lift your arms way back so your wrists were about at hip level and then slam them into your lower back. This could put about fifty pounds of pressure on the ties and presumably be enough to snap the ratchet, the belt-buckle-looking thing that held the gears that went up the center of the strap, like a ladder. However, the gears were angled so that they could be pulled only one way: made tighter, not looser. Clever if you didn’t break your coccyx and had enough strength in your arms, but my bound wrists were tied against the wooden two-by-four, so I couldn’t raise them up.
I tried to pull at my ankles but recognized that if Pete/Frank/serial-killer-whom-I-wasn’t-going-to-think-about came in, he would immediately see I’d somehow smashed open the ratchet. I did know a few good leg grabs, but unless he strolled over and offered me his upper body so I could grab his neck between my thighs—blech!—and sever his spinal cord, that wasn’t the way to go. I shook at the image of not being able break his neck or choke him to death and getting stuck with his head poking out from just above my knees, his eyes bulging with hate.
My nausea was a little better, but the headache wasn’t, though that could have been because I was dehydrated. In addition to having run for almost an hour early in what I assumed was the same day, I’d had nothing to drink, and I was sweating. Rivulets (which is how sweat was always described) were streaming down just about every part of my body. I knew I could manage without food or water for twenty-five hours, since I’d been fasting on Yom Kippur every year since I was twelve. But I’d lost so much fluid. I had no idea how much of my weakness was due to that, along with whatever drug I’d been injected with, plus bottled-up hysteria (impersonating grace under pressure).
Only half aware, I had begun sawing the edge of the zip tie on the corner of the post to get through the smooth, hard edge and get to the gears. I knew my chances of success were close to zero, but there was no other way to slip out of the ties that went around my wrists. If I could saw them off, I had a decent shot of working my way out of the zip tie that was holding both hands behind the post.
I didn’t have much room to move them up and down because they were trussed up so tightly. The plastic was incredibly hard—so I’d practically have to saw each individual molecule. Moving my wrists up and down faster didn’t do much because my energy was so sapped that in under a minute I got breathless. I stopped and counted slowly to ten, which at least gave me rapid rest.
That’s when I felt something weird on my finger. Ring finger, left hand. My wedding ring and engagement ring were gone. Motherfucker! I thought. I was so angry that I started sawing against the post harder than ever in my two inches of maneuverability. Like a crazy person. It was one thing for Pete or Frank to be a professional killer and a sociopath. But to be a thief? Fucking outrageous! When I came home with the ring, my dad said, “Holy shit!” And my mom said, “Utterly magnificent!” She placed her hand on her chest in wonderment. Then she asked, “You do know to turn it around when you’re on the subway, right?”
It was so silent in that space that if Pete were there he’d have to be aware of the sawing. But I sensed he wasn’t, because he would respond in some way to that sound, even if it was only to assure himself that nothing I was doing was helping me. Then the fear of his being behind me returned, of him watching me either with night vision glasses—though there wasn’t enough light for them to function properly—or with infrared goggles that relied on thermal imaging. But even if he was in front of me, behind me, somewhere else watching on an infrared detecting camera, I wasn’t being stopped. So I kept doing it.
I’d no idea where I was. I doubted it was Shorehaven because it was beyond too close to home. It was home. On the other hand, even if Pete made a hundred thousand dollars per hit, he wouldn’t have enough money to fly me someplace, because it would have to end with him killing the pilot and … No, because there’d still be a plane and maybe even a flight plan; this wasn’t a CIA rendition. More likely Pete had dumped me in the trunk of his car and driven me … wherever. Somewhere isolated, obviously, since he’d have to get me out of the trunk and schlep me up one or two flights of stairs into an attic, drag me through the room, and do the zip tie business.
Not that I needed confirmation, but I strained my neck to lower my head to the general area of my bra, and of course my cell phone wasn’t there. Because otherwise, even with it turned off, I could be geolocated.
Meanwhile I kept sawing against the post. Twenty seconds on, ten off, because if someone came into the place or climbed stairs—assuming I actually was in an attic and not in some unfinished, near-windowless space—I wanted to be able to hear.
Was I making any progress? I tried turning my wrists and squeezing them even tighter together, hoping to feel a rough spot on the zip tie, but I wasn’t able to feel anything. Still, after listening for signs of life during each ten-second pause and then going back to sawing, I thought I felt a tiny section where the top edge of the plastic strip fit more easily against the right angle of the wood post. Was I imagining an infinitesimal slit? Even if it wasn’t imaginary, I recognized that at this rate, I could abrade the plastic by the time I was forty.
Call it foxhole faith, but I remembered reading an article years earlier about the “choose life” command in the Bible. When God said, “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse, therefore choose life!”—it wasn’t “No abortion, no suicide”—though those were possible interpretations. It was that every choice we make needed to be life affirming, since every choice had reverberations in the world.
It was right after 9/11 that I decided to join the bureau. My thinking may have been that for me, choosing life meant fighting those who would deny it. I had the language skills, the street and people smarts, and the combative nature to be part of the battle.
Now I had to save myself—not just to choose life for myself but also to rid the world of this scourge. Hopefully not as Terminator, but as agent for justice.
I sawed even harder, then stopped and listened more intently. I began sawing again but at six seconds I froze. Someone had entered the space.