Set Free

by Anthony Bidulka

  “How do you know that? It’s not your daughter! It’s easy for you to take risks with someone’s life when it’s not someone you love!”

  “Jenn,” I reached for her hand. I agreed with everything she was saying, but I knew emotional responses weren’t going to help save Mikki. She knew it too. “They want Mikki back as much as we do. They really do. We just have to figure out the best way to make that happen.”

  “Your husband is right,” the agent said. Although there was no visible sign of it, he should have been grateful for my intervention. It may have just saved him a bruised cheek. “I know this isn’t easy. I know how horrible this feels. We—all of us here—want what you want.”

  “No!” She wasn’t done yet. “I know you want to get Mikki back. But you want to catch the bad guys too. If you don’t, that means you’ve failed. I don’t care about that. I don’t care if these people take the money and live happily ever after in Aruba. All I care about is having my baby back. She’s only thirteen, for God’s sake! She’s a child!” Jenn began to sob. I knew her well enough to know she hated how she sounded, hated that she was crying. “Goddammit, you have to help us!”

  “We will,” he promised.

  “How?” I asked, increasing my pressure on Jenn’s hand. “You need to tell us exactly what we’re going to do next.”

  Exchanging uneasy glances with his second-in-command, he said, “We do it your way.”

  “Really?”

  Jenn perked up. “We give them the money? No extra demands? No bomb-proof briefcase?”

  He hesitated, then added, “With one proviso.”

  “Tell us,” I said.

  “We need to be there. Watching. We’ll be absolutely invisible this time, but we need to be there.”

  Jenn began to balk. I squeezed her hand even harder, a silent signal to hold off.

  “It’s the only insurance you’ll have,” he continued. “If Mikki isn’t sent home as promised, we’ll have a next step. Otherwise, it’s over. For us. For you. For Mikki.”

  Slowly, as if her neck were made of metal rods, Jenn nodded her assent.

  Two days later, we made the drop.

  The briefcase was never picked up. Mikki never came home.

  Chapter 15

  The enclosure was rectangular, with mud-colored cement walls and a metal grate roof. Having been shoved inside—the door locked, bindings released, blindfold down around my neck—I got the first look at what would become my new home.

  My knees buckled. Suddenly I was face-up on the ground, spread-eagled, looking up through the grate at a vista of impenetrable darkness. The ground beneath me was rough but warm from a long day baking in the sun. Its heat began to soak into my skin. The night air was thick with the scent of freshly foraged hay and aged manure. I knew I would not move again until the next day.

  It might have been mid-morning by the time the sun rose far enough to breach the top of the enclosure, beaming fingers working their way across my forehead and swollen eyes, urging me awake. The first thing I saw was the pattern of the metal grate that covered the entire structure, as effective at allowing the light in as keeping me from getting out. I wondered how long before the crisscross design would burn itself into my skin.

  Having survived the night into a day I had been convinced I’d never see, it occurred to me that, at that very moment—the same moment I began to believe I might live—my loved ones, thirty-five hundred miles away, would begin to believe I was dead.

  What else could they think? A gambit had been played. Tit offered for tat. All players had lost. Via photographs and multiple beatings, the Huns had issued their threat and demonstrated their willingness to cause my demise. Whatever they’d asked for, they didn’t get. What choice was left?

  Instead, I’d been spared. Why? Maybe the threat had always been an empty one. Maybe they’d never really intended to kill me. Maybe they simply didn’t have the guts. So, instead, they dumped me here. Who knew what was coming next. Only one thing was clear: I wasn’t dead yet. But for my family, for Jenn, for our friends, the writing on the wall would tell an entirely different story.

  Our story came to a bitter end on the third Monday after the second failed attempt to deliver Mikki’s ransom money. As had become our habit, we were sitting together on the living room sofa, from where we had an unobstructed view of the front yard. We’d know the precise moment the mailman made his daily delivery.

  We were out the front door and at the box before he had time to close the lid. I saw the look of sympathy on his kindly face as he silently moved off, knowing full well what had been happening at this address for the past month. The media attention had been so intense, he’d have to have been living under a rock not to.

  I reached in and pulled out the slight pile of mail.

  If Jenn’s eyes had been hands, they would have been ripping through the collection of letters, flyers, and magazines with lightning speed.

  We both knew it at the same time.

  The insensitive words of an “abduction specialist” on some late-night talk show echoed in our heads: “…with each day that goes by without hearing from the kidnappers, it’s with greater and greater certainty that we, and the police, must presume that Mikki Wills is dead.”

  Dead.

  How could such a small, insignificant-looking word carry such weight? It made me gasp for breath every time I heard it.

  “That’s it, then,” Jenn’s hollowed-out voice slipped past pale lips, a final declaration made more to herself than to me.

  I knew what she meant. Whether we wanted to or not, we’d unconsciously put a time limit on optimism. A little bit of sand drained from our hourglass of hope each day without the money being picked up, without Mikki coming home—as the FBI and police vacated our house, as calls from media outlets dwindled, as well-meaning relatives and neighbors stopped dropping by. When the looks of caring strangers at the grocery store turned from reassuring to sympathetic. We were no longer parents with a chance at recovering their daughter; we were a lost cause to be pitied. We became angry, bad-tempered, dismissive of others and their useless words of faint comfort—because, deep down, we agreed with them.

  “Not yet, Jenn,” I implored, reaching out for her. I felt exceptionally exposed, standing out there in our front yard, certain that every eye in the neighborhood, the city, the world, was on us—watching us, wondering what we would do. Would we fall apart? Or would we rally one more time?

  Jenn pulled back, staring at me as if I’d just missed the main point of a story she’d been telling. “Yes, Jaspar. It’s over. Our daughter is gone. Mikki is gone.”

  It scared me how calm and dispassionate she sounded. We’d played an unfair game over the past weeks, one that neither of us had a hope of winning. When either of us showed an excessive flash of emotion or passion, whether positive or negative, the other immediately, in an almost Pavlovian fashion, reacted with the opposite sentiment.

  I don’t think we did it to hurt each other. Instinctively, we must have known it was the only chance we had to keep it together. We were each other’s stopgap, personal pressure valves. If one of us became too sad, the other said something happy. If one of us expressed hope, the other played devil’s advocate. We knew that if both of us were feeling the same thing, the power of it would be too much. The fall—for we would inevitably fall—from whatever extreme we were experiencing, good or bad, would be catastrophic.

  Here and now, in this moment, standing in the front yard next to our mailbox, for Jenn our game had officially been called off. Her statement, announcing her belief that our daughter was gone, dead, finished, was a simple proclamation of fact.

  Steady hands reached out for me, cupping my face. Her head moved up, then down, up, then down, as if to punctuate her certainty and influence my own.

  The mail fluttered to the ground.

  “No,” I whispered.

  She continued to nod, her beautiful eyes pulling me close, comforting me, caressing me with love, as
they so often had in our marriage.

  “No.” I tried again, knowing deep down that I was only fooling myself, hoping to prolong my time in a world where I believed my daughter still lived.

  How ironic, I thought, as I lay unmoving on the ground of my rectangle, blazing sun beating down on me. How ironic that it was in this place—this miserable, awful place—that I would find what I’d needed so badly on that black day by the mailbox. I found hope. Hope for Mikki. Hope that my baby had not just disappeared from our lives, never to be seen again. Hope born of the belief that, since I had been spared, she might have been too.

  For the first time since I’d been taken, my cracked, bruised lips spread into a painful smile.

  Chapter 16

  At that time of year, temperatures in the Atlas Mountains can regularly reach the low nineties—higher when magnified within the confines of my sun-soaked prison. Only a small portion of the area, beneath a lean-to type of construction—maybe one-sixth of the rectangle—was shaded from the brutal intensity of the Moroccan sun. It was there that I spent most of my daylight hours. I only dared venture out to drink water from the dribbling spigot of a pump at the opposite end of the enclosure, or to collect the plate of bread and sometimes olives that was shoved through the door twice a day by a faceless entity—man, woman, Hun, camel, goat; I didn’t know.

  In the center of the space, rising seven feet off the ground, was a stone pedestal, the approximate length and width of a double bed. I had no way to know what it might have once been used for, but my distressed mind imagined it as some sort of sacrificial altar. For some inexplicable reason, I was unusually drawn to it. On the third night I found myself attempting to hoist my pitifully weakened body atop it. It wasn’t until the eighth night that I succeeded.

  The top surface was unlike the rest of the rough-hewn plinth. Here the stone was worn smooth, and felt surprisingly cool against the skin. At its center was a slight but noticeable indentation, as if some great weight had lain there for centuries, wearing down the rock face, by happenstance molding it perfectly to fit my body. I didn’t know when I awoke the next morning, comfortably nestled into the depression, that I would sleep there every night thereafter, even when it rained. I didn’t know that I’d found the center of my existence, the one place in hell that I would love.

  There were many things to recommend my spot atop the pedestal. First, it was the rectangle’s highest point. Every king, ruler, lord of every land seeks high ground—preferable for defense and safety from all manner of foe, be it mankind or animal, natural or unnatural. Second, because of its height and nearness to the sky, it gave me the sensation of almost being outside the box. The grate, securely fastened to the top of the structure, ensured the impossibility of freedom, but even being a few feet closer to it was exhilarating. Finally, and most importantly, it was in this magical, mystical spot that, every night, I visited with my daughter.

  Lowering my body into the soft embrace of the welcoming stone, I would close my eyes and Mikki would be there, cuddling up next to me as she often had as a small child. Jenn believed, for everyone’s good, that children should stay out of their parents’ bed. I understood and agreed. I also believed that some rules are meant to be broken when only one of the parents is around.

  On those nights, our routine was unvarying. Mikki would ask what I had written about that day. It was her way of requesting story time. Clever girl. And as it just so happens, telling stories is my specialty. We had our staple favorites that I’d recite if I was tired or not feeling particularly creative, but often I’d just start talking, making things up as I went along. Some of these tall tales were markedly better than others. But her favorite kind, and mine, was when I’d hit on a particularly outrageous, outlandish saga, and just keep chugging along like a stubborn locomotive, any hope of a coherent storyline or rational ending fading further with every passing word. We’d hold out as long as we could, pretending to follow the plot, until one of us could stand it no longer and broke, both of us descending into fits of uncontrollable laughter at the ridiculousness of what had come out of my mouth. None of this helped with adhering to bedtime schedules, but these moments with my daughter are among my most cherished.

  And so, night after night, as the sun fell below the roofline of my rectangle and heat began to seep from the day, I would strain fading muscles to hoist my deteriorated body into my spot. I would close my eyes and await my daughter’s arrival. When she appeared, settling in next to me, I would retell those old stories as I remembered them. Her petite, delicate body would relax in my arms, where she felt safe and protected. I was comforted by the gentle up and down of her shoulders and chest as she breathed easily, without a care in the world. I delighted in the sniggers that burbled up in her whenever I said something especially silly, usually for that express purpose. I smelled the fresh fragrance of berry-scented shampoo in her flaxen hair. I ran my hand over exuberant curls, held back from her face by her favorite pink barrettes.

  Those fucking barrettes.

  Chapter 17

  I couldn’t decide if these things were what I wanted, needed, or simply missed. But as the days of my captivity multiplied, their overwhelming desirability grew and took root inside my brain, refusing to budge. Clean clothing. A close shave. Red licorice. Wine. The smell of Jenn’s perfume. Just about anything on a computer screen. The sound of voices. The sound of someone laughing at something I said or wrote. Traffic. Reading. Someone touching me. Hot water. Coffee. A ringing cell phone. A mirror. Happiness.

  By any standards, the conditions of my habitation were deplorable. I relieved myself through a hole in a wooden bench. There might have been an access point outside the rectangle through which someone could clean out the refuse, but to my knowledge that never happened. After my first full week, I stopped noticing the permanent stench permeating the area. My hair grew; my face itched from an unruly beard. Growing a beard was something I’d never done in real life. I was vaguely curious to see what I looked like—until I remembered that no reflection in any mirror could show Jaspar Wills. He was gone. My teeth felt spongy from weeks of going unbrushed; my nails grew long and unkempt, my skin tight and dry. I was in dire need of a change in wardrobe. Not only were my clothes—the same jeans and shirt I’d set off in from Boston—filthy and torn, but the pants only stayed around my shrinking waist if I held them there. My kingdom for a belt.

  With patience, and sustained up and down motion, the water pump would provide enough trickles of water to keep me reasonably hydrated and clean. But without so much as a pail or basin, the process was often painstaking—and on bad days, of which there were many, exhaustion easily won out over a full bath.

  I worried about my health. As a tourist in Morocco, I would never drink water from a tap. As a prisoner, I was forced to. In the early days I constantly experienced diarrhea, which contributed to my already feeble state, but not so much any longer. I don’t know if my system eventually adjusted, or if there was just too little of anything left in reserve for my body to expel.

  Prolonged near-starvation is never a good thing. I could tell from my decreasing levels of energy and my sustained lethargy that its frightening effects were overtaking me. Although generally a person who enjoyed robust health, in the real world I reinforced it with a daily intake of vitamins, various supplements, and medication to control a genetically-induced cholesterol problem. Without those pills, who knew what was happening to my body. Wouldn’t that be a farce? If, despite everything else, I ended up being taken out by a coronary attack caused by unchecked low-density lipoproteins.

  The only aspect of my situation that could be judged as improving was the state of the injuries I’d suffered at the hands of Hun. Despite the conditions I was forced to endure, with no beatings to perpetuate or aggravate my legion of cuts and bruises, they were slowly beginning to heal.

  Physically, I was holding on. My greatest concern was for my mental health. In the real world, I was bombarded by mental stimuli. If I wasn’t
writing, I was researching. If I wasn’t interviewing someone, I was planning a book tour or outlining a new idea or communicating with readers, booksellers, agents. I enjoyed challenging conversations and the odd feisty squabble with my wife. I watched movies and TV, read books and magazines, listened to news radio and a wide variety of music. I thrived on travel. Sure, on occasion I enjoyed a rainy Sunday afternoon catnap or a mindless walk in the park, but generally I was the kind of guy in a perpetual dance with the world around me—the more stimulation, the better.

  Now my dance partner was monotony. The same rectangle. The same shitter. The same begrudging water pump. The same stone pedestal. The same metal grate. The same dry bread. I spent every day huddled in my lean-to, hiding from the harsh rays and blistering heat of an unrelenting sun, and every night on top of a rock, curled into a fetal position, reciting stories to a ghost, tortured by my own mind.

  Why didn’t Mikki’s captors pick up the money?

  It was a question asked millions of times. By me. By Jenn. People who knew us asked the question. People who only knew us by our story asked the question. The unspoken answer haunted all of us. Only one seemed likely: somehow, Mikki had died. Perhaps from injuries sustained during the initial abduction; perhaps by accident during her incarceration; even, perhaps, by her own hand. With nothing left to trade, the kidnappers had disappeared. Gone to find another payday with another victim.

  Now, I knew better. For reasons I’d probably never know, the kidnappers had decided that picking up the money was too risky. They were right. They’d spotted the police and FBI on the first attempt, and maybe the second. They knew that they would have been caught, eventually. Maybe this had been their first time. Kidnappers have to start somewhere, and no library or bookstore I know of stocks a copy of Kidnapping for Dummies. They realized they were on the losing side of the game and needed to cut their losses and run.