Chapter 76

I’M SEEING BLACK SKY when I open my eyes. Black sky filled with brilliant stars. I wonder if I have died and this is what it looks like to be travelling to heaven. It’s precisely the way I imagined it as a child. Leaving my earthly body and becoming an angel who soars through the time and space on a pair of wings made of white feathers.

But I am not travelling through space and I am not dead.

I am instead lying flat on my back, all one hundred eighty pounds of my body pressed against the flat bottom of this wood boat. Wrists duct taped together. Ankles duct taped in the same manner. A duct tape gag covering my mouth.

I am the newest hostage of the man who is driving this boat. I am looking up at him. I see him plain enough in the dim, bow-mounted red and white lights. He is tall and bearded. His black hair is cut close to the scalp. He wears a long overcoat which has become his signature trademark. Wears it in direct defiance of the police who, by now, must have memorized his physical description.

He is the overcoat man.

His name is Hakeemullah.

I bombed his village.

He took my Grace.

Now, he has taken me.