Chevy Chase, Maryland
The cliché was true. Three inches of snow and D.C. shut down. Like no one had ever driven on a wet road. Waze almost made matters worse; it sent everyone skidding down the same side streets through Columbia Heights. Seven a.m. and Brian had already left, trying to beat the traffic to Fort Meade.
Rebecca was in the kitchen, making coffee and thinking about working from home, when her phone trilled behind her. Kira.
“Kira. You okay?” Why are you calling so early?
“Mom.” Her daughter’s tone was almost aggressively blasé. “Fine. It’s five degrees up here. Who thought Boston was a good idea?”
“Global warming.”
“Funny, Mom. We’re the ones who have to live with it.”
“Yeah, I’ll be dead. Thanks for the reminder.”
“And—” Kira broke off. “Ayla’s in trouble.” Ayla, the girl with leukemia at Boston Children’s. Kira had been visiting her for more than a year. “Like going-to-die-this-week trouble.”
Rebecca exhaled. She hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath. Just a dying eight-year-old. Nothing. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, but it’s connected to the you know what somehow.” Kira had the habit of calling her kidnapping the you know what. As well as not talking about the you know what at all.
A fact that made this call a teachable moment, Rebecca figured. If she could teach Kira anything. She wasn’t the one who had fought her way out.
“She’s trapped, helpless. Only unlike you she can’t win.”
More silence.
“Guess,” Kira finally said. “All right, gotta go.”
“Kira—”
“Yes Mom—”
“I love you.”
“Love you too bye.”
Six months since the worst vacation ever, and Rebecca still found herself close to panic whenever Kira called. Or didn’t. She was supposed to check in twice a day, 11 a.m. and 11 p.m., one of the compromises they’d made for allowing her to stay at Tufts and not transfer somewhere in D.C. Kira had desperately wanted to go back, resume her life, no bodyguard, no special treatment, not even telling the university or campus police.
Rebecca had tried to persuade her to take the fall off. Jacques and Lilly were still in the wind. Despite massive help from the FBI and NSA, the Spanish cops had struck out on figuring out who they were or if they were working for someone and who that someone might be. Much less finding them.
Of course, the cops didn’t have much to work with. The kidnap house had burned to the foundation, obliterating whatever forensic evidence there might have been. Clothes? Gone. DNA? Gone. Photos, computers, phones? Gone, gone, gone.
The housing development itself had been financed in part by a Russian bank called ZAM Muscovy, which was rumored to have connections to the SVR. Interesting, but hardly proof of anything. ZAM Muscovy had lost money on lots of other Spanish developments too. The Zaragoza contractor who built the units had gone broke four years before. The security company that watched the houses was based in Madrid and looked clean, no known ties to organized crime. Looters had ransacked many ghost developments, especially in southern Spain. This one had survived untouched, maybe because it was among the last to be finished, maybe because the houses were far enough from the highway to be basically invisible.
In any case, no one could figure out if Jacques had a connection to the development or if he’d just found it and realized it would be a perfect place to hide someone.
The white van never turned up. But cops did find the Toyota, legally parked on a busy residential street north of Zaragoza’s city center. Clean of prints and DNA. Reported stolen from Madrid four years before. An entirely anonymous car. No one who lived on the street remembered who had left it. None of the nearby houses had security cameras. Whether Jacques had planned to tell the Unsworths to leave the ransom money in it or drive it somewhere else was anyone’s guess.
Kira had given police artists detailed descriptions of Jacques, Lilly, and Rodrigo. The police matched the sketches to surveillance photos from The Mansion and Helado. But though the Mossos showed the photos to every bouncer and hotel clerk in Barcelona, no one admitted to recognizing them.
And though the Interior Ministry and FBI ran the photos against driver’s license and border-crossing databases in Europe and the United States, they never came up with a match. The dirty secret of facial recognition programs was that they were very good at finding known fugitives, not as good at putting names to faces. Maybe Jacques and Lilly had spent their lives in Europe and avoided airports. Maybe they’d come from somewhere else and crossed into the European Union illegally. Maybe they’d subtly changed their features. Regardless, they didn’t show up.
Rodrigo was gone too. Without going into details, Kira had made it clear that he would have needed a hospital for his wounds. But no one matching Rodrigo’s injuries had been treated at any Spanish hospital in the days following the kidnapping. The Spanish even checked with the Portuguese, French, and Italians, came up blank.
She’d told them about Rodrigo’s screams and the shot that ended them, too. But the cops never found a corpse matching his description. Of course, Jacques could have weighed the body down and dumped it in the Atlantic for the sharks. The house was barely a two-hour drive from the coast.
So many unknowns.
Rebecca had detected a slight skepticism from some of the detectives who talked to her: Maybe this guy Rodrigo isn’t dead. Maybe the escape didn’t exactly go the way your daughter says. Underneath that, a question: If Jacques was such a pro, could she have gotten away if he didn’t want her to?
Which in turn maybe led to two other questions: Did he let her go? And if he did, why?
Questions that ended with the ultimate taboo thought: Was she working with them all along?
But the Spanish cops were too polite to say any of that out loud, or even hint at it. The Interior Ministry had its two million euros back. The Queen—the old lady who lived across the back alley from Helado—confirmed Kira hadn’t been conscious when she left the bar. And Kira had clearly endured two days of something. Under the circumstances, pushing too hard on Kira made no sense.
The Spanish had been wise not to ask, Rebecca knew. Because on the nine-hour plane ride from Madrid to D.C., Kira had told Becks more about how she’d escaped Rodrigo. Not much but enough. Rebecca had encouraged her to “talk to someone.”
But Kira just shook her head in a way that suggested she didn’t plan to talk to anyone at all, and Rebecca decided not to press.
The NSA’s tricks had failed too. The phones the kidnappers had used were dead. Their metadata chains went nowhere. The ransom recording revealed nothing more on its hundredth play than its first. And Jacques and Lilly had both been smart enough to make sure their voices hadn’t been caught anywhere. They must have known the NSA was even better at matching voices than faces.
Rebecca had even taken advantage of the thin possibility that the case was terror-related to push the CIA and European agencies to look at their raw intel on kidnappings, the semi-legal or illegal stuff the police never heard. But no one came up with anything that looked remotely similar to this case.
So.
Nobody knew nothing. Nobody had answers.
Especially to the question that gnawed the most, the one that wouldn’t go away: Why Kira?
Until they knew whether Jacques had taken Kira at random or targeted her, they couldn’t know if she was safe. If she’d been specifically chosen, then Rebecca had to know why, what message Jacques had meant to send, whether he or his bosses were satisfied with what had happened.
Because money didn’t make sense as a motive. Anyone who had researched Kira would have known she didn’t have enough to matter. Even the two million that Jacques had demanded was far more than the Unsworths could have raised. If the Spanish hadn’t come through they would have had no way to pay.
But other parents could have. Every summer, plenty of American college students whose families had ten or twenty million dollars visited Paris. They would have been no harder to target than Kira. They didn’t have bodyguards. Only billionaires had personal security for their children, certainly on trips somewhere as safe as France.
If Jacques had taken Kira specifically, he’d done so for some other reason. Try as she might, Rebecca couldn’t see what it might be. Nothing in the ransom demand had been political. And Kira insisted Jacques had seemed genuinely surprised to learn of Rebecca’s FBI connection.
What then? If Jacques hadn’t targeted Kira, he’d just happened on her, and—what? Meticulously orchestrated the cross-border kidnapping of an American citizen without knowing if the American’s family had millions of euros to pay him off?
One other possibility lurked.
Rebecca didn’t like to think about it, but it did fit the facts. Even the strangely messy way the kidnappers had handled the ransom demand. Maybe Jacques hadn’t cared about the ransom. He had considered it a diversion. Let the Unsworths bring the money somewhere and the Spanish police watch the pickup site for a day or a week. Meanwhile, he’d go with his original plan: selling Kira. The act might seem impossibly cruel. But men tortured and raped and killed. Men were impossibly cruel. Not always, but often enough.
And for the wealthy psychopath who had everything, the chance to buy a pretty teenager might be tough to turn down. An American teenager. Not some poor Russian girl selling herself because she had no other options. An American who couldn’t imagine being treated this way, who would truly fight and truly break.
Use Kira until she had nothing left. Drug her and dump her in the middle of Istanbul, some giant city, no memory of how’d she’d gotten there, no idea where she’d been.
Or just kill her.
Another reason Rebecca thought this scenario made sense was that Kira said Jacques’s group had been relatively small. She had seen and heard Jacques, Lilly, Rodrigo, and the two drivers, the one who’d picked them up from Helado and the one waiting at the van when they’d transferred her. Never anyone else. Throughout, Jacques had relied more on speed, stealth, and cleverness than money. An intelligence service, if one had been crazy enough to be involved, would have put Kira on a plane and flown her to parts unknown—extraordinary rendition, as the CIA liked to say.
So.
So.
If the kidnapping had been random, Kira was safe.
No matter what, Kira would never forget those two days. But the sooner she could return to classes and friends, parties and volunteering, the better. Her first goal is normal, the FBI shrink had told Rebecca.
And in one important way, Kira had been supremely lucky. The Spanish media hadn’t picked up on the kidnapping. A travel blogger raised questions about the “Missing” posters on La Rambla, but the Mossos brushed him aside, saying the woman in them had been found unharmed. The fire had received little attention even in Zaragoza. Even the fact that Jacques and Lilly hadn’t been identified paradoxically worked for Kira on the publicity front. With no one to hunt for, there was no hunt, no Wanted posters.
Thus Kira could choose what to tell her friends. She didn’t tell them much. She insisted she wanted to go back to school as soon as she could.
Brian took her side.
“Let her live,” he told Rebecca in early August, weeks before sophomore year was set to begin. Kira and Tony had gone to a movie, the first time she’d left the house without Rebecca or Brian since they’d come back to the United States. Brian had plowed through a six-pack of the eight percent alcohol IPAs he favored. Which made a six-pack more like ten beers. Though he insisted he wasn’t rattled.
“Have you forgotten what happened?”
“That what you think?”
She shook her head.
“Then don’t say it. They’re not coming after her here. It’s over, Becks. Whether they wanted her for some reason we’ll never know or they just went after her randomly, it’s over.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“Who is she? Who are we?”
Probably the best argument in favor of a random kidnapping. None of them mattered enough to be worthy of targeting. “Say you’re right—”
“I’m right.”
“Don’t you want to make sure they don’t do this to someone else?”
“I want our daughter to be happy and I don’t think locking her in our house helps. Nor you chasing this, reminding her of it every time she sees you.”
So Rebecca gave in. Tufts it would be. On three conditions. Kira had to agree to wear an alarm that the FBI and the Unsworths would monitor 24/7/365. She had to call twice a day. And she had to let them know if she dated anyone who wasn’t a student.
Kira agreed to all three rules. And stuck to them.
Even so Rebecca woke up two, three, four times a night throughout the fall. Her days were fine. The Russians were more active than ever. The rumors that they had a new source high in either the NSA or CIA were only picking up.
But the nights were no fun at all, usually starting around midnight, no coincidence. Her dreams sent her to bus stations and airports. Blurred faces on rainy afternoons. Eighteen-wheelers pulling out with license plates she couldn’t see. She woke up certain each time that she’d just missed Kira.
She woke desperate to call Kira, sure something was wrong. Brian talked her down every time. As the days grew shorter and the fall wore on she felt closer to him. Like for the first time in their marriage they were truly partners. Like she could depend on him.
He was good with Tony, too. Sometimes she focused so much on Kira that she almost forgot Tony. She knew he blamed himself for not telling them about Jacques right away. But trying to make him talk only upset him, and Brian was far better than Rebecca at distracting him. They went to Capitals games, or sat in the basement playing Fortnite, while Rebecca stared at her laptop trying to make sense of the case.
She didn’t tell Brian how much time she spent on it. She talked to Barraza and Rob Wilkerson, tracked every kidnapping of a woman anywhere in Western Europe. She’d even fallen into the rathole that was the Russian financial system as she looked at ZAM Muscovy.
Fall turned into the winter. Kira took her finals, came home. Her grades were fine. In fact, they were better. Not going out much, she said. Figure I got my partying in over the summer. They stayed close to home for New Year’s. Kira went back to school.
Now she was trying to be good to a little girl who was dying. In the middle of a Boston winter. Maybe it was all too much. Maybe Becks ought to go see her.
Yes.
She’d find a flight to Logan, surprise Kira. They’d visit Ayla together. Have dinner at one of those overpriced Italian places on the North End. If Kira told her she was making a big deal, she’d insist, no, she just wanted to hang out for a day, she’d missed the misery of single-digit weather.
By 1 p.m. she stood in front of her daughter’s dorm, Harleston Hall, brick and four stories. Like a lot of Tufts, it looked not-quite Harvard. God. What a snob she was deep down. Anyway, she hadn’t told Kira she was coming. Now she wasn’t so sure of what she’d done. What if Kira wanted to spend the afternoon hanging out with her roommate? Or studying? Or—
Too late for regrets. And too cold. She reached for her phone.
“Kira. I’m downstairs.”
“You’re where?”
“You weren’t kidding. It’s freezing.”
The day went fine. Kira seemed excited she’d come up, a chance to play hooky in a city that somehow belonged to them both, neutral ground. As they finished up dinner at Carmelina’s—a no-white-tablecloths North End place that hadn’t been here when she was growing up—Rebecca felt relaxed in a way she hadn’t since that first night in Barcelona. The bottle of wine they’d shared had helped.
“Let’s check out the Encore,” Kira said.
“What’s that?”
“Casino.”
“Boston has a casino? Along with modern Italian food and the Patriots being great? Ohh Tom Brady—” Maybe they hadn’t exactly shared the bottle.
“Please don’t, Mom.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t slobber over Tom Brady like every other middle-aged woman.”
“Middle-aged.”
“Sorry.”
“No it’s true. So. Encore. Casino.”
“Yeah, it opened like last year.”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve been spending lots of time there, K.”
“Never been. It’s close though. Like up by Logan. Not sure exactly where.”
“Hold on. I’ll check—”
Rebecca pulled up Bri’s app.
But she couldn’t find the Encore. Weird.
“You sure about this?”
“No, I just made it up.”
She checked again. Nothing. As far as the app was concerned, the Encore didn’t exist. In fact, nothing on Twenty-One seemed to have been updated in a while.
Rebecca had the feeling she sometimes did when her phone wouldn’t do what she wanted, I’m so old. She tapped at it a little more. Nope.
What was wrong with her husband’s two-million-dollar app?
“The Encore, right?”
“I think so, yeah.”
Rebecca went to Google: Encore Boston Harbor is a luxury resort and casino located in Everett, Massachusetts…
A hundred pieces that hadn’t fit suddenly locked together.
She had the strange sensation she was falling down a well, or maybe more accurately falling up, falling away from the darkness that she hadn’t even realized was all around her—
“Mom,” Kira said. “You okay?”
Not a word to her, not a breath.
Not now. Not ever.
“Never better.” She turned the phone to Kira. “It’s in Everett, super-close.”
“Can we?”
“Girls’ night.” Rebecca made herself smile. “I think we both deserve it.”