by Fiona Quinn
Her sobs rose up, forming a cloud over our heads.
A storm of grief and pain.
We sat in silence as we waited for Melody Foley to return to the conversation.
I dropped my head, thinking.
I didn’t mind being thrown off the deep end to see if I could stay afloat, but a briefing would have been helpful to my understanding this scene. A missing Kaylie, dead “others,” a family in mourning. Nigeria. The northern border near Niger. Syria. The event had to have taken place over seven years ago, or a judge wouldn’t have been involved in declaring the missing person as deceased.
I sought back, trying to remember what it was that Damian Prescott had done for the FBI that long ago. I believed he had worked on an FBI team overseas.
In Africa? Possibly.
The cases that had put me in the same room with Prescott before mostly had connections with former USSR countries.
Africa and the FBI…
The only time the FBI got involved with helping US citizens overseas was in cases of hostage-taking, kidnapping, and terrorist acts.
And yes, now that I thought about it, Damian Prescott did have that kind of background. If I remembered correctly, he had been a Green Beret for the US Army. When he didn’t re-up, he’d joined the FBI, where he’d put his specialized training to work in CIRG, their Critical Incidence Response Group. CIRG was sent in to negotiate and do hostage rescue of American citizens across the globe. But Prescott was in his mid-thirties now. He’d probably aged out of that group.
Or not…what did I know?
His new role as special agent in charge of a joint task force might all be part and parcel with CIRG.
I’d bet Prescott got the image from NSA because he had led the case, or he was the highest-ranking person left from the case after so many years.
One piece confused me. I’d never heard of a missing Kaylie before. Or even a scientist that had gone missing from her research trip. Eaten? That would have made the news.
There was that terrible event last year. A young woman, twenty-two years old, was on safari in South Africa. Lowering her window to take pictures, a female lion attacked her through the small opening. The guides fought off the lion. Medical help arrived immediately—minutes. But that woman succumbed to her wounds while the rescue workers tried to save her.
My skin tightened with goose flesh. Can you imagine?
Mrs. Foley’s horror-energy swirled around me. The images she painted danced vividly. My imagination was solidly on that story of the young woman and the lion’s jaw—the teeth sinking deep into flesh and bone.
The blood and screams.
Melody Foley had said there were other bodies. Wouldn’t that have made the news?
Not necessarily.
Three years ago, a serial killer, Travis Wilson, had me in his crosshairs. I survived while other women did not. I could have been a better help in getting Wilson caught sooner had there been even a single file available for the police to find. But no, the powers that be had decided it was safer to seal the files and hide the data. That’s why I didn’t know the crazy guy stalking me was a killer.
The reason the files were hidden on Wilson was to prevent copycats from hurting other women and muddying the evidence. And as it turned out, there were political and self-serving reasons thrown into that mix.
If an American woman was taken hostage in a foreign country, there must be a reason for it not being played out in the media. It could be something shitty, like someone’s political agenda, or it could be lifesaving to keep it under wraps. Perhaps that story would have increased the dangers of others in the area or put her neck under her captor’s sword.
Prescott dragged a second manila envelope from his briefcase. He stretched that photograph toward me.
The second photo pictured a serious young woman. Her curly honey brown hair was pulled into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a pair of khaki shorts and an over-sized T-shirt, crouching down in the dirt next to a small boy. She looked like an athlete, someone who enjoyed the outdoors. She looked intelligent; there was depth in her blue-green eyes, Concern, yes. But the picture was happy. Whatever this child was doing tugged at her in a maternal way. This child wasn’t a stranger who walked into the photo.
I turned the photo over and read the printed sticker: Kaylie Elizabeth Street, Ph.D.
I turned it back and looked into the woman’s eyes. Kaylie, are you alive?
Chapter Three
A knock sounded at the door, and Leanne stepped in.
Inside the top drawer of Leanne’s desk in the anteroom was a small screen that allowed her to watch what was going on inside of the conference room. Leanne wore an earbud in one ear so she could keep track of what was happening inside and respond when something was needed while allowing her to field office calls and tend to anyone who came into the anteroom.
If information was passed within the conference room that required a security clearance, then a signal was given, and the feeds were scrambled with the push of a button. We’d know it was okay to continue the confidential exchange when the overhead lights flashed. Once our topics were back on safer grounds, someone would dial Leanne, and she’d be back to monitoring the room.
One of the commanders must have signaled because Leanne walked through the door, right over to Mrs. Foley, and placed a hand around her shoulder.
“This has been a difficult morning, Mrs. Foley,” Leanne said, warmly. “I have a room set up for you where you can freshen up and rest.” Leanne trapped Mrs. Foley in a little side hug, reaching for the photograph Mrs. Foley clutched to her chest and placed it on the credenza as she turned Mrs. Foley toward the exit.
Mrs. Foley nodded, relief visibly washing over her. She didn’t acknowledge anyone or say good-bye as she walked back out.
As soon as the door shut, Mr. Spencer and Col. Grant stood.
“Lynx, glad to have you involved,” Mr. Spencer said with a nod. He pulled his phone from his pocket as he left the room.
The nod seemed to say that he knew I’d handle this.
A missing person case that started over seven years ago in Nigeria with a possible move to Syria? A single NSA picture with a slightly better than even probability that this was even the right woman to solve a case? Yeah, I thought I was good at my job, but unless they had other crumbs on the trail, maybe he should tamper down any optimism.
“Prescott will get you up to speed,” Col. Grant said, and with a nod to Prescott, then me, he followed Mr. Spencer out.
The door shut, leaving Prescott and me facing each other.
I sent him a flat lipped smile.
“I asked for you.” He stood, moving over to the credenza with long strides. He came back with the photograph in hand, reached it out to me, and took a seat to my right.
The image was a closeup of a woman whose face was mostly obscured by her khimar—a long cape-like veil worn in parts of the Middle East.
“I don’t have a lot to tell you to get you up to speed. We’re trying to determine if Dr. Street is alive and in need of rescue. The FBI never closes a case until the crime is solved. But it is believed, as Melody said, that Kaylie Street died with her colleagues under suspicious circumstances.”
“You knew Kaylie before the event.” I lifted my gaze from the photograph to lock eyes with Prescott.
Prescott patted his hands on his lap and tipped his head back. “Leanne, scramble the room, please.”
I thought that Leanne didn’t have an earbud in because she was escorting Mrs. Foley to another room. But the lights flashed three times.
“Kaylie and I grew up in the same neighborhood. When CIRG was inserted, I had no idea that Kaylie was in the group that my team was looking for.”
“How are you doing in all this? What do you think about this photo?”
“I think Melody hit it on the head.” He sniffed a deep breath. “I don’t know if I’m seeing things through an unadulterated lens. Wishful thinking can cloud reasoning.”
“And what do you wish?”
“Now that’s the real question.” He reached up and scratched the back of his neck. The exact spot where I’d been tingling ever since I’d imagined the lion’s fangs sinking into skin.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Nigeria to Syria that’s a bad route with serious possibilities attached. That she was the single person who survived from her group? That’s hard to fathom. In my roles with the Army and with CIRG, I’ve pulled some people out of their situations whom I thought were broken beyond repair. I almost believed that some of them would have been better off not surviving. I’m not sure what to hope for in this circumstance. I’m putting the personal on a shelf and doing my duty. Trying to.”
I nodded. He let me peek at the Damian part of him and then shut that door with a solid thud. He was back to Special Agent in Charge Prescott. And I’d been warned; I was not to make this personal for him.
“I got this photo,” he tapped it with his middle finger, “and a heads up from NSA last night. The background—seven years ago, Dr. Kaylie Street was an environmental researcher whose focus was on land preservation and rehabilitation to counter desertification and global warming. She was doing her post-doc research as part of an international team at Cornell. The group was in Nigeria as one leg of a year-long research grant, gathering baseline data for a study on the effects of a project called the Great Green Wall. This research started in Tanzania.” He stopped and pulled out a map from the same folder he’d pulled Kaylie’s photograph, pointing to Tanzania on the east coast. “And she, and her team, progressed along the beltline of the experiment.” He drew his finger across the widest part of Africa and stopped in northern Nigeria. “Her team disappeared from here.”
“Everyone?”
“The camp cook had been hired from the village two kilometers from their site. She had gone home that night to buy fresh eggs and produce. The cook speaks one of the myriad dialects found in Nigeria. As the researchers were busy around the campfire, talking and looking at equipment, the cook couldn’t understand what they were saying. She couldn’t tell us what their plans had been. She went back in the morning to cook their breakfast. No one was up and around. When it was mid-morning, she checked the tents. None of the cots were made. None of their backpacks were gone. Their boots were there. Their solar shower bags full. The wind was high, but she discovered some barefooted tracks in the dirt. She said that the scientists always had something on their feet—boots, or if they were showering, bathing suits and flipflops.”
“And what did she do with this information about the state of the camp?”
“She walked back to the village and told her tribal leader, who knew how to drive. He hiked back to the camp with her and looked around, then drove one of the research Jeeps to the nearest town several hours away, to notify the authorities there. Things moved quickly from that point. They contacted the US Embassy. The embassy contacted the university and the FBI. The university put the pedal down. From the time when the insurance company contacted Iniquus, and Iniquus was boots on the ground on location, was twelve hours.”
“Twelve hours. I’d imagine that meant that whatever had happened had happened at least twenty-four hours prior. The cook, then the tribal leader, had looked around the site. Animals. Weather. It wouldn’t have been a pristine crime scene to investigate and gather clues. What was the original hypothesis?”
“At the time, we thought this might be associated with Boko Haram and was perhaps a terror attack, or possibly a kidnapping for ransom event.”
“I’m going to ask more about your conclusions about that, but I’d like to stay on the Iniquus timeline. Body parts were found and identified.”
“The conclusion discussion is a quick one. We have no idea what happened. All we have is speculation. Partial remains. And one missing American, Kaylie Street. Iniquus deployed with both live-search, and human remains detection K-9s. The K-9 team tracked the remains. The FBI did the identifications.”
“You said it was an international team?”
“Kaylie was the only one on the research team that was an American citizen, though the others lived in the US with green cards or had student visas. The insurance, though, was contracted through the university and covered all of the participants equally.”
Insurance contracts were tricky things.
Insurance companies kept kidnapping contracts secret from the very people they were insuring. Kaylie wouldn’t have known if she was covered or not, unless and until she’d been captured, and a demand was made. Or she disappeared, and it looked like there was foul play. The reasoning behind this was simple. If you knew you had a policy that would pay the bad guys a million bucks to get you home safely, you could affect your own kidnapping and cash in. That was if you yourself were a bad guy at heart.
On the other hand, if someone knew that you had a million dollars available to pay out when you were captured, wouldn’t that make you more of a target than, say, your average Joe-sightseer?
And those contracts didn’t just cover kidnapping. Strike Force had been sent out many times to pull a group of students to safety when they happened to be studying abroad in a country that was experiencing a coup or a natural disaster. We had several teams over in Japan after the tsunami, digging in the rubble for Americans, finding them in shelters and up in the mountains, camping under the trees. And Haiti after the earthquake…
Sometimes our operators used shovels for their job, sometimes rifles.
Just the other day, I read about a Swedish-Iraqi student who had returned to Iraq a few days earlier because he was afraid for his wife and his two kids as ISIS had approached their home in the north. He found himself and his family in a life-or-death situation. The student sent a text message to his professor saying that if he wasn’t back in the next week, she should remove him from his doctoral program. Obviously, the professor called to see what was up. She found that the family was in terror. All seemed hopeless. ISIS was attacking northern Iraq and massacring and enslaving thousands of Yazidis, this student’s religious minority group.
The borders had been closed.
The family couldn’t get to the airport.
ISIS was advancing.
While the student was planning how to escape into the mountains with his wife and kids, his professor was trying to figure out how to rescue them. It was when the professor went to their university’s security chief that she discovered that their students were covered by the secret insurance. The insurance paid people like us at Iniquus to get the student and his family out. Sometimes getting folks to safety meant negotiation and ransom. And sometimes, like in this student’s case, it meant six armed men driving two four-wheel-drive vehicles to the student’s house, collecting the family, driving them to an airport, and popping them onto a private plane.
It wasn’t Iniquus. It was one of our allied counterparts.
Still, impressive.
But did Prescott think that Iniquus would do something similar? Saddle up the four-wheelers and head into ISIS-held territory on a sixty-seven percent chance that maybe Kaylie had been at a certain GPS coordinate twenty-four plus hours in the past?
“Obviously, the FBI is still working the case,” I said. “You’re here. What about Iniquus? What role are we playing?”
Prescott leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest, his brows drew in. “Iniquus Command says they’ll follow any lead to find Kaylie, but without actionable information, their hands are tied. I was able to get you assigned to this case. If this is Kaylie…” He tapped the photo again, then shook his head. “Here’s the thing I need you to hear. We don’t have time to mess around. The clock is ticking.” He leaned forward, so we were eye to eye and inches apart. “If this is Kaylie, her continued survival is tenuous at best.”
I didn’t like him in my space, and he seemed to realize it because he eased back.
“Why the time pressure?” I asked with a tip of my head.
“Syria is
volatile. From field reports, women in the area are specifically in great danger. I’d say we have days to find her to keep her alive.”
I pulled the photo in front of me and stared down. “You can say that from this picture?”
“This image was captured via satellite on a road moving toward a northern refugee camp yesterday evening. If this group followed on their trajectory, it was about an eight-day walk to the camp. If she gets to that camp, and she’s identified as American, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for her survival.”
“Syria. Don’t we have any contacts who can just go and talk with this woman? CIA?”
“Not in this region, no. Right now, she’s in a hot zone.”
“Iniquus won’t put boots on the ground unless we can produce solid information that this is indeed Kaylie.”
“Exactly.”
Send a team into a hot zone? Yeah, I was going to feel pretty darned sure of any intel I could raise before I put an Iniquus team in danger’s way, especially for a fool’s errand.
Chapter Four
Leanne knocked then stuck her head around the door. “Mrs. Foley is going to go home now. I’m just checking in. Do either of you have anything to ask before she goes?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “Would you take her to the infirmary and get a blood draw first?”
“I… She’s going to ask why.”
“Yes, she is.” I wrinkled my nose. “You can’t lie to her. Just tell her that there are new ways that investigators are using familial DNA.”
The door pushed a little wider, and Leanne stepped into the room, closing it softly behind her. “Mrs. Foley’s file says that there’s a sample of Kaylie’s DNA in CODIS.”
