by Fiona Quinn
“I know for a fact you’re listed on Randy’s paperwork as his emergency contact, next of kin. I know he has biological family in El Salvador, but I guess he thought you’d be a better avenue for his biological family to hear any news from. As far as Iniquus is concerned, you’re family.”
“That makes me feel better, I guess. What ever happened to Lynx? Suddenly Randy was back in communication, but he never answered my questions about it.”
“Yeah, that was complicated. Don’t feel bad, no one at Iniquus knew what was going on either, only Mr. Spencer in Command knew, and of course Strike Force.”
“She was found alive then?”
Rooster chose his words carefully. “She is alive. She had a very rough go of it. We don’t know the whole story, and I’d never pry.”
Screams erupted from outside and Meg hoisted herself up and searched for the source. She saw nothing. But from her position, she could tell the screaming was coming from the other building. Her stomach knotted into a tight ball. Every follicle of hair on her body stood at full attention.
She scrambled back to her place. “Rooster, what are they doing?”
“I’d imagine they’re making videos. Remember what I said to you. You will resist intelligently. You will swallow your panic. You will outthink them. And you will work at not getting hurt—even a little.”
The screaming stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Meg took out the half-filled water bottle and took a swig, then passed it to Rooster. “The guard said he’d bring me some water, but he hasn’t done it yet.”
“They’ll make the first few days extra hard. Right now, you’ve lost a comfortable bed, good food, and freedom. In a few days that will fade and the simple things—food and water, for example—will seem of much greater value. They mean to break your will to fight back.”
“How do they learn how to do these things?”
“Sometimes they’re trained by the government, their military. Sometimes they experienced these things themselves. It comes as easy as breathing to certain people. There are all kinds of ways to get there, but don’t be surprised by the deprivations that you begin with. We’re better off than the rest as long as your food and water aren’t discovered. How many bars do you have?”
“Eight left.”
“Good. I want you to get as comfortable as possible. I’m going to teach you a technique that might help you.”
Meg looked around. She had no idea how to make herself comfortable in here. “Okay, ready,” she said without moving from her curled-up position.
“When bad things happen, I want you to keep your focus squarely on the positive. Unless you’re analyzing a situation for data that can help you, you are not to revisit a bad scene. Not to relive it. Not to question your actions or non-actions.”
“That’s easier said than done.”
“Right. I understand that. What I need for you to do is create a box. To do that we’re going to go for a walk. Are your eyes closed?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You’re walking down a garden path beside cool water. You’re comfortable here. It’s your place. Up ahead is a figure. As you get closer you can make out the face, the clothes. This is your helper. She is here to give you a gift. Go up and say hello.” Rooster paused for a moment. “Your helper is reaching behind her and pulling out a box. Can you see the box? Can you take it into your hands?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to take some time to hold it in your hands and look it over. Change anything you want. How big is your box? What is it made from? What color is it? How does it close? Does it have hinges? Does the lid come off? It has a lock. Examine the lock. Is it secure? Do you want to change anything about it?”
“No. I like it the way it is.”
Rooster coughed, and she could hear him take another swig of the water. “Good. You know how to unlock the box and how to get the lid off. That’s the way the thoughts get out. How do you put them in? Is it porous? Can it absorb the thoughts?”
“There’s a lever with a slit—the thoughts can go in but not out.”
“Good. And what form will your thoughts be? Are they written on a piece of paper?”
“They’re smoke. A light gray smoke.”
“Good. Let’s test out your box. I want you to think of a beach ball. Hold it in your hands. Now take that thought and turn it into smoke and put it in your box.”
“It won’t go.”
“All right, let’s get you a helper. We’ll set the ball on fire, and then the smoke will go into your box. Who could help you? It’s good if you can make your helper funny or cute or kind.”
“It’s a tiny pink elephant with purple spots.”
“And what does it do?”
“He’s running on the scene with a match wrapped in his trunk.”
Rooster chuckled. “Okay. Good. Then what?”
“He’s scratching the match on the rock. It’s ablaze. The beach ball catches on fire and turns to smoke.”
“Good. Press the lever and vacuum the smoke into your box. Let me know when it’s done.”
“Done.”
“Great. Any smoke? Any smell left? Any residue from the fire?”
“No.”
Rooster waited a beat. “You know, the brain can’t tell the difference between make-believe and reality. It processes both in the same way. People who are in elite sports, people who are in elite operations, they go through scenarios in their minds time and again, over and over. They think through each movement—where they place their head, what their right hand is doing, where their left hand is going. They move through the same scene with various changes in scenario, and it trains the brain what to do with the body in real life. The helpers you create are real in the sense that your brain believes they are real, yeah?” Rooster waited for her response, but Meg didn’t answer him. “Your brain can also believe that all the scary things you conjure up are real too. It’s training your body to respond with fear. It keeps you in a state of constant fight or flight. And we talked about why that would be bad.”
“Yes, okay.”
“Instead, you’re going to act like an elite warrior. As soon as you notice some thought, some feeling bubbling up that is not serving you, you take the time to bring in your pink elephant to burn those thoughts and put the smoke into your box. Your box will hold all the smoke you can possibly make. Yeah?”
“Yes, all right.” She wasn’t all right.
“I don’t want you to miss an opportunity. You must fight for your own survival. If you are given a chance at any point in time, you are to escape and not try to bring anyone with you.”
“But you. We’ve already been through this.”
“You will use any opportunity to save yourself and then lead help back here to me and the others.”
“You would never do that. You’d never leave the others.”
“Yes, I would. I plan to. Getting all of these people out of here is going to take resources. I’d leave them, but I wouldn’t leave you. I promise. I won’t leave you. Will you accept my promise?
“Yes.”
“Do you believe my promise?”
“Yes.”
“Do you promise me in return that you will leave me, be brave and get out on your own if you see an opening?”
Meg went numb. How could he ask her such a thing? The very thought of running through the bush, leaving Rooster in harm’s way, having his fingers cut off for her chance at freedom. No. No. No, she would not make that promise.
“Meg, I need you to promise me. Right now.”
She crossed her fingers. “All right.”
“Not good enough. Say the words.”
She crossed the fingers on her other hand too. “I promise that if I see the light and can escape, I will go on my own and get help for everyone else.”
“Now I need you to practice that in your mind until you can own it as your strategy.”
Meg didn’t try. She wouldn’t practice leaving Rooster.
“You’re hesitating. You’re thinking about how cowardly and wrong it would be.”
“Yes.”
“Now’s the time to call in your elephant. You need to blow up all the limiting thoughts you might be conjuring. Surviving this will take limitless thoughts and limitless action. You will do whatever is necessary to carry this story to the world and get help, if it’s at all possible.”
“If.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rooster
Prison
“Rooster?”
“Mmm-hmm?”
“I’ve been thinking about what I know about being taken prisoner. And my mind keeps landing on Stockholm syndrome. Can you tell me about that?”
“It’s more of a side effect than a syndrome. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s when someone is in a life-threatening situation. The captive bonds with the captors, and sometimes vice versa. Psychologists can’t figure out why some people respond this way and others don’t. But they do know that some conditions increase the potential for having this reaction.”
“Yes. That’s what I want to know. I want to be on guard.”
Rooster thought that Meg being on guard was probably a good idea. Knowing just a little bit about her childhood, but reading even more between the lines when he saw her face after he’d suffocated the goat, she was at risk. “It depends on how long we’re here, how emotionally charged things stay. If we live under the same circumstances as the hostage takers—for example, if they have the same poor diet that they give us, or live in the same physical discomfort. If they were to threaten our lives and not carry it out.”
“Mock executions? Like in Iran?”
“Yes. Also, the more dependent we are on them for our basic needs matters. They gave us buckets to use as toilets, so we aren’t in a position of having full and painful bladders and begging them for relief. That’s good.”
“We’ve had no water given to us. We don’t need to pee.”
“Not yet, anyway. If that comes regularly, water and food, that will ease some of the dependency issues—though not all of them. As long as we’re locked up, there’s a level of dependence. No denying that. Another component is dehumanization. They haven’t done that. They didn’t, for example, put hoods on us as we left the hotel.”
“We’ve seen their faces. Is that bad?”
“I don’t know. We won’t know until we’re out of this circumstance.”
“Don’t say circumstance. It’s too benign. Why not call it what it is? This nightmare. This horror show.”
“Does that serve you, Meg? Or does using the word nightmare make you emotional? Remember, we need to stay observers, remove ourselves from the focus as much as possible so we can see the big picture. Using words that have heat and emotion don’t help you to do that.”
“Fine. Then, tell me how that plays out. Did you ever try to save anyone who had Stockholm syndrome?”
“Once.” It was one of Rooster’s great disappointments.
“What ended up happening to that person? What did you do?”
“I left her there.”
“Left her? Just…left her? She was mentally ill if she had Stockholm syndrome.”
“Things get complicated sometimes. Let me tell you the story and then you might see how limited my options were. Her family was from a small town in Ohio. They decided to take a year and give it to the Lord. They packed up and moved to Mexico to be missionaries, helping the village to build better housing. It was parents and their fifteen-year-old daughter.”
“Oh dear.”
“Exactly. One of the men in the village, a forty-year-old man, worked in the city, and he talked the girl up—told her how beautiful her drawings were. That he had contacts in the city who would love to see her artwork to put in a gallery that the tourists frequented. He thought she could make some good money. Her mother said the man was flattering Rebecca, and telling her she was pretty. Her family believes that physical looks are a distraction, that real beauty comes from the soul, so they had Rebecca dress in very plain clothes. She wore her hair in a braid down her back. No makeup. No boys until they returned home, then she’d be allowed to court.”
“Court? As in the old-fashioned term for finding a spouse?”
“In their culture, it’s normal for a boy to be her friend and hang out with the family, no alone time. Her mother said that most girls in their church began a courtship around sixteen, and they married on or around their eighteenth birthday. Their first kiss was at the altar after they had taken their vows.”
“But how would you know if you had the spark? I’ve gone out with guys that had me all in a flutter, but it’s that first kiss that tells it. If I don’t get that zing, then I know to just let things go.”
“I zinged you?” Rooster smiled at the thought. She’d zapped him but good.
“All the way down to my toes. It’s never felt that way before—I thought the phenomenon warranted further investigation. I was just about to draw my conclusion too,” she said with a note of regret.
Rooster’s mind was back in her hotel room. Her eyes closed, the drape of her long hair painting over his chest. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” That word was heavy with meaning. He thought she’d probably travelled back to the scene too. After a long pause, she asked, “What were you saying about Rebecca?”
“Rebecca had never been told she was pretty before. She ate up all the compliments like a starving child. And one day this guy enticed her onto the back of his scooter, and off they went to meet with the gallery people with her sketch pad under her arm. Her parents never saw her again.”
“But they hired you.”
“Eventually. At first they worked with the local police. But the men were macho—from a different culture. They thought it was the right of a man to woo a girl. And in that area, fifteen would mean she’d had her Quinceañera. She was considered a woman. Nothing was done on the part of the Mexican authorities to bring her back. The church back in Ohio gathered enough money to send a private investigator down, but he got nowhere.”
“How did you get involved? Iniquus doesn’t come cheap.”
“The parents visited a mega church in Columbus. They told their tale and asked for help. That church hired us. Panther Force got the job. I went down to see what I could see.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“I can get from point A to point B, but my languages are from Africa and the Middle East. I had a cultural interpreter from the region who could not only speak the local dialects, but he also helped me understand the psychology of the region. At any rate, I tracked her down, and she was about eight or nine months pregnant with this guy’s kid. She said she loved him and wasn’t leaving.”
“How old was she by then? How much time had elapsed?”
“At that point, she had been gone for a little over two years, but she was eighteen. A legal adult in the US. If I took her it would be kidnapping.”
“But a judge could determine she wasn’t in her right mind, couldn’t they?”
“She was on foreign soil, getting ready to have a Mexican baby, married to a Mexican man, eighteen years old. No. No judge would get involved with that. My one and only case of Stockholm syndrome.”
She said nothing.
“Are you disappointed in me?”
“I’m thinking.” She sounded like she was in her rational mind, not a touch of emotion. Certainly not disappointment. “We just met. I don’t know you very well. But that outcome seems antithetical to the image I have of you. You didn’t just leave. You tried other things.”
“When I was on that case, I talked extensively with Iniquus psychologists. You’re right, we didn’t just pack our bags and head on home. I was hoping there was something I could say that might change the outcome. She was living in extreme poverty in a cardboard shack with a village latrine and a common water spigot in the center of the dwellings. I didn’t want to leave her there, knowing she’d give birth without proper medica
l attention. The psychologist told me that some studies suggest that Stockholm syndrome is an evolution that is developed from unequal power. That theory helps to explain boy soldiers, and in some cases abused children and their parents. And if you take a group with strong patriarchal backgrounds, like the home she grew up in, then girls have already learned the coping mechanisms required to stay alive.”
“My biological father abused our family, and I survived. Do you believe I’m at risk for using this coping mechanism to marry some kidnapper and have his baby in the Tanzanian bush?”
“I honestly hadn’t thought it through to that point. You’re actually the one who brought it up.” Rooster let the silence hang between them. He was listening to the guards bring Jared back into the jail. He sounded like his footsteps were in a normal rhythm. It sounded like was upright and walking under his own power. That helped convince Rooster that they were taking videos. When his turn came, Rooster would know if they were being held for terror or for money by the messages they wanted him to send out. A door slammed, and another shrieked open on its rusty hinges. Another man was asking. Where am I going? What do you want with me? And pleading sincerely not to hurt him, he’d cooperate. What the scientist didn’t understand was that in these videos the terrorists would want to show him being hurt and crying out in order to accomplish their goal. The scream was inevitable.
Rooster didn’t want Meg to be thinking about that. He stretched out his hand toward her. “Meghan, my hand is out. Will you reach for me, please?” After her fingers entwined with his, he asked, “Are you still thinking about Stockholm syndrome?”
“When I was little, my father used to proudly tell everyone I was a daddy’s girl. I aligned with him against my mother. I was horrible to my mother. It’s my greatest shame to this day, though mom always tells me it wasn’t my fault, and she always understood. She blames herself for keeping us in that situation. I blame myself. Steve blames himself, and the only person who doesn’t blame herself is Kelly, because she was a toddler when the police came and dragged Paul away.”
