The Power Couple

by Alex Berenson

  “Yes.”

  “So no hotel key, no way of knowing where she’s staying. Could be they’re waiting for her to wake up.”

  The thought of Kira alone, anonymous, in a hospital bed didn’t make Rebecca happy. Though it was better than the alternatives.

  “You called anyone in D.C. yet?”

  “I wanted to go local first. It’s four a.m. there anyway, not much they can do at this point.”

  “Okay, I’ll call the Mossos. The headquarters is in Sabadell, that’s a suburb. I’d rather not start there anyway, it’s Sunday, nobody’s around. Stay local. After the Rambla attack I got to know the Mossos supe for the Old City. Christiano Camps, everyone calls him CC. He can be prickly, we got into it a month ago, but his guys know every building in the Quarter. I’ll see if we can meet him at the station house, it’s on Carrer Nou, I’ll send you the time, the exact address—”

  Wilkerson was protecting her without saying so, she saw. By keeping the request local rather than going to Mossos headquarters, he would save her from embarrassment if Kira turned up safe. Plus, the first step would be checking hospitals and drunk tanks and talking to the manager at The Mansion. They didn’t need high-level cooperation for that.

  “Rob? Thanks.”

  “Like the shark said to the lawyer, professional courtesy.”

  * * *

  She showered, dressed decently. Neither Wilkerson nor the cops would take her seriously if she looked like she hadn’t slept.

  Then she and Brian and Tony walked down Passeig de Gràcia, the handsome, well-manicured boulevard that ran through the heart of Eixample. She hadn’t realized until they came here that Barcelona was as rich as London or Paris. Luxury brands filled the storefronts. The air was fresh, a sea breeze cooling the city.

  Around them clumps of tourists consulted guidebooks, debated which Gaudí mansion to see first, checked ticket availability for La Sagrada Família, the cathedral that had been rising for a hundred years. Their casual happiness infuriated Rebecca. My daughter’s missing, and you’re snapping selfies.

  “We need to print fliers, tape them up,” she said.

  “Let’s talk to the cops first.”

  Another forty-five minutes gone. They were meeting Wilkerson at 11:15 outside the Gran Teatre del Liceu, a famous opera house on La Rambla. From there they’d meet Camps at eleven thirty. With every minute the search radius widened, the trail grew colder.

  She needed to forget that fact or she would go insane.

  * * *

  Wilkerson stood out from the tourists and the grifters on La Rambla in his lightweight gray suit. He was tall and black, about her age, his only surprise feature was hair that was not quite an Afro but was certainly higher and more styled than he might have tried for at headquarters.

  “Mrs. Unsworth. Mr. Unsworth.”

  “Call me Rebecca. This is Brian. And Tony, our son.”

  “Thanks so much for this,” Brian said.

  “Not a problem.” He looked at Tony. “What do you think? Any chance your sister is still, you know, out with the guy?”

  Tony shook his head gravely, a wordless answer that seemed to satisfy Wilkerson more than anything Rebecca had said.

  “Let’s go talk to CC.”

  * * *

  The Mossos station in El Raval was a tall concrete box that loomed over a narrow street a few blocks from the harbor, the most run-down section of the district. A small, trim man waited for them in the lobby. He wore a white guayabera and linen pants that didn’t match the holstered pistol on his hip. He shook hands with all of them, including Tony. He looked Rebecca over carefully. Cop eyes were the same everywhere, not exactly unfriendly, but quiet and wary.

  “Sorry to do this to you on a Sunday, CC.”

  “Yes, I missed church.” Camps laughed. The Spanish apparently didn’t take religion any more seriously than anyone else in Europe. “Please, this way.”

  The bookshelf in his office included a dozen stuffed donkeys.

  “Why all the donkeys?” Tony said.

  Rebecca was secretly glad he’d asked.

  “For Catalonians the donkey has a special meaning,” Camps said. “In Madrid they say the national animal is the bull. We prefer the donkey. The bull sticks out its horns and gets killed. The donkey is smart and stubborn and does only what it likes. Tony, I think it’s better if you wait outside, is that okay?”

  Tony looked to Brian and then Rebecca. She didn’t like the way this guy had made a parenting decision. But he was probably right, and she didn’t want to get sideways with him. She nodded.

  * * *

  As soon as Tony closed the door, Camps’s smile vanished.

  “Your daughter is missing how long?” A distinct emphasis on the last two words.

  “Since last night. It’s not just that she’s not here, it’s that she’s not texting, nothing.”

  “She’s nineteen, yes? Any”—Camps hesitated, seemingly looking for the English word—“disabilities?”

  “No.”

  “A healthy nineteen-year-old woman meets a young man in Paris, he comes to Barcelona to see her, she spends a night with him? You’ll excuse me if I say it sounds almost romantic. Not how I expected to spend my Sunday.”

  “We know our daughter. She wouldn’t disappear this way.”

  “Okay, look, let’s consider this with logic.” Again Camps stressed the last two words. “Two possibilities, yes. First, something bad happened at random to your daughter. I understand, the Gothic Quarter at night, it looks bad. Seedy men. The cannabis clubs. You should understand, tourists don’t get hurt in Barcelona. Maybe you get pickpocketed, lose your phone. Maybe you’re foolish, you want coca, you go into an alley, men with knives take your wallet. But in all of Catalan last year, we didn’t even have one murder a week. The whole province. No one here has guns except the police. The Spanish don’t hurt tourists, and the Africans, they know we’re watching, they know if they touch a foreigner we’ll send them home. They don’t want to go home. Look past the dirt, the graffito, you’ll see women and kids out at 2200, 2300. It’s safe here.”

  Yeah, you’re so good that you let a terrorist drive a truck down La Rambla in 2017. But then Manhattan had experienced a similar attack not long afterward. Those were unstoppable. And arguing the point would hardly help her with Camps.

  “Robert, am I telling the truth?” Camps said.

  Wilkerson sighed, not wanting to be in the middle of this mess. “Lots of petty crime in the Quarter, CC. But I’d agree, violence is rare.”

  “I’m not saying my daughter was a random victim—”

  “The other choice, that she was targeted. By a gang that steals pretty American girls from bars? To sell? You’re a professional, Mrs. Unsworth, so I speak openly to you. This is a fantasy of the cinema. If this happens anywhere in Europe, one time, the whole world knows.”

  “This man came from Paris for her.”

  “Yes. And maybe she feels like she wants to turn off her phone. She’s at university, yes? Doesn’t live at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she text you every day?”

  Rebecca shook her head.

  “Maybe for one night on this trip she wanted to be by herself without her mother watching her. You leave here when?”

  “Tuesday,” she said.

  “So she knows she has time.”

  “Awfully sure of yourself,” Brian said.

  “Because all the time, tourists come in, tell us someone has disappeared, tell us we have to look for them. A day later, we follow up, they say, oh, he was just lost, drunk. Maybe in the hospital.”

  Rebecca felt her heart hammering. She hadn’t expected Camps to promise he would drop everything and set all his cops after Kira. But she hadn’t expected this open skepticism. She very rarely played the gender card. But she wondered if Camps would have treated her differently if she were a man.

  “Here’s what we know,” she said. “We don’t have this guy’s name, phone,
email, any contact info. He met her barely thirty-six hours ago. Now she’s gone. Maybe you don’t have enough kidnappings, murders, to know what those look like, superintendent, but in the good ol’ USA we do, so I’ll tell you. They look like this.”

  “Come back tomorrow,” Camps said. “Tomorrow morning.” He nodded at the door, dismissed.

  “That’s your answer?”

  Rob Wilkerson clapped his hands on the legs of his suit. “CC. No one’s asking you to shut the Quarter. Just give her picture to your guys, call the hospitals for anyone who matches her description. Check the arrest logs. If the girl’s really gone you know the blowback’s gonna be huge. Americans think this city is safe. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “Did you forget last month, Roberto—”

  “Your beef with the Guardia has nothing to do with this.”

  “You remember next time, you talk to me first.”

  Wilkerson nodded.

  “Fine,” Camps finally said. “As a courtesy. The hospitals, the other stations, the morgue.” He looked at Rebecca as he said the last word. “But if you hear from her, when you hear from her—”

  “You’ll be our first call.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” Wilkerson said to her afterward, outside the station. Tony and Brian were on their way to a print shop to make fliers. Rebecca was headed to the clubs she hadn’t hit the night before. “Last month I briefed the Spanish cops on some guys. One was hooked up with the independence movement, which I didn’t know. That made him a friend of the Mossos. They thought they deserved the first call. Camps and I talked about it, I thought it was done but obviously he didn’t agree.”

  Rebecca didn’t know what to say. She hated this jurisdictional nonsense. She hated it even more now that it might be messing up a search for her own daughter.

  “This gonna be a problem, Rob?”

  “I don’t think so. Now that he’s taught me my lesson he’ll do what he said. He’s good. He’ll have answers from the hospitals and everywhere else by this afternoon.”

  Rebecca wasn’t as confident.

  “We’ll find her,” Wilkerson said. “She’s out there, Rebecca. Someone saw her. Someone remembers her. We’ll trace her phone.”

  Yeah, right. Neither the Spanish cops nor the NSA would do anything to find her phone for at least another day. Then Rebecca realized what she should have hours before. Maybe they couldn’t trace the phone yet, but they could at least track Kira’s calls and texts. They didn’t need any technological tricks, either. All they had to do was log into their AT&T account.

  For the first time in her life she was glad she was stuck paying her daughter’s phone bill.

  17

  Somewhere in Spain

  Good news. Kira still had one bottle of water.

  Bad news. They’d forgotten to feed her.

  Good news. She wasn’t hungry. Fear was a great appetite suppressant.

  So maybe good news all around, har-har. The Kidnap Diet. Get locked in a closet, watch those pounds vanish.

  She figured it had to be afternoon. A line of sunlight leaked white through the narrow crease where the plywood was nailed to the window frame. Plus, the room had gotten hot. Uncomfortably hot. Sweat dripped down her back. Now, faintly, she heard the garage door wind open, chk-chk-chk. A minute later, maybe, the van rolled off. Had they left her alone? She waited. Counted up to two hundred, slowly, by twos. Then down to one hundred. Had to be at least five minutes.

  The house was silent.

  Her chance. If not to escape, at least to feel her way around her new home. Maybe she’d find a trapdoor back to Barcelona.

  First the door. Just in case they were setting her up. She went to it. Slowly. On the balls of her feet. Listening. Hearing nothing but the occasional faint rush of traffic. Unless it was the wind. How could she know? Nobody had ever told her she’d need to learn to track noises. She was a city girl. Okay, suburban but—

  Focus.

  She found the doorknob. Turned it. It moved freely under her hand. But when she pulled and pushed the deadbolt gripped it firmly in place.

  Okay, no surprise. An unlocked door would have been a Powerball long shot. She paced her fingers around the edge of the doorframe, didn’t find a weakness. Wasn’t like she knew how to pick a lock anyway. She thought about trying to kick her way out. But Jacques had taken her shoes and the door felt sturdy. No give. Breaking her toes wouldn’t do her much good.

  She turned, let her eyes adjust to the ribbon of light beneath the plywood. Because of Brian’s preference for a nightlight-free house, she was used to moving in the dark.

  She went to the back wall, ran her fingers along the plywood, reached under its bottom lip and tugged—

  A flare of pain exploded up her right index finger. A splinter lodged deep under the nail. She tugged out the shard of wood, bit her finger to stanch the bleeding. And keep from yelling. Screaming her lungs out felt like a last resort, and unlikely to do much good. Jacques had taken such care in setting this up. She couldn’t believe he’d brought her anyplace where someone might be close enough to hear.

  The pain tamped down. Breathe. One step at a time. Tugging at plywood wasn’t the answer.

  She ran her hands along the right-side wall. Hoping for an air vent, even a coat hook. Nope. But she did touch a wooden shelf above her head. For sweaters or whatever. She hadn’t noticed it before. Of course, she hadn’t had much time in here with the light on.

  She pushed the shelf up. Tentatively at first, biting her lip against the pain in her finger. Then harder. It gave. A little. Like maybe she could tear the shelf off. A long wooden shelf wasn’t exactly the ideal weapon, but it was something. Especially if she could hide in the corner and bash Jacques over the head with it. A pleasant thought.

  But she didn’t try to break it off yet. She didn’t have a plan. She didn’t want them to know she was probing for weaknesses. And maybe some part of her didn’t want to move too fast. She needed hope. The more slowly she explored the longer the hope would last. She reached up, slid her hand along the top of the shelf. Maybe they’d left something up there—

  Footsteps.

  In the hallway. Soft and swift.

  Had she been so focused on the shelf that she’d missed the van coming back?

  Or had someone been here all along, setting her up?

  She scrabbled against the back wall as the deadbolt slid back.

  Rodrigo stood in the doorway. He flicked on the light and she was blinded. She put her hands up, an involuntary gesture, submission. Luckily her finger had stopped bleeding.

  “Buenos días, Cara.”

  Kira, you prick.

  He held a bottle of water in one hand, a ball in the other. He tossed her the ball and she grabbed at it.

  An orange.

  “Hungry.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Where are the others?”

  “You miss them?”

  “I’m a people person.” She looked at the orange. He was right. Now that she had food, hunger flooded her. She peeled it slowly, piled the rind neatly on the floor, made herself eat one slice at a time, the sweetest fruit she’d ever tasted.

  She had the insane idea of offering him a piece. He’s not your friend.

  He seemed annoyed that she hadn’t, though. He sat down across from her, almost touching her. He hadn’t showered in a while. A sour scent came off his skin. His face was shiny with sweat. His eyes were twitchy. She thought maybe he was high. Coke? Adderall? Did people in Spain snort Adderall? Probably, why would they be different from anyone else?

  “Did you like it?”

  Mind your manners. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I mean in the club. The drug. You looked like you liked it. Wanted more.” He leered.

  “Is that what you thought?” She couldn’t help herself.

  He seemed disappointed. Like she was the criminal and he was the innocent.

  He leaned close and raked her cheek with his grubby black-p
olished fingers, hard enough to hurt. No warning.

  She was almost glad for the pain because it flipped reality right-side up.

  He reached behind his back—

  Came out with a hood.

  “You want it.”

  She shook her head, No.

  “You do.” He looked at it like it was precious, a gold mask. Then he seemed to lose interest in it, tucked it behind his back again.

  The closet door was open. She could see the hallway. Beyond it, the stairs, the front door. Freedom. Maybe she could jump him, overpower him long enough to run. But even if she landed a punch or kick, she wouldn’t keep him down. He was strong. Without a weapon she would need to put a thumb in his eyes or land a perfect shot on his neck, close to impossible.

  A last resort.

  She had lots of last resorts right now. Not so many good ones.

  “What do you think of, Kira? I see in your eyes you’ve gone somewhere.”

  She could give him this much. Keep him happy. “The beach.”

  He reached into his pocket, came out with a vial, held it up.

  “I learned my lesson.”

  “No, this is the real one. Coca.”

  Yeah, I’ll just get high and sit in this closet for a while. “Thanks, but no.”

  He shrugged: Your loss. He unscrewed the cap, tipped a tiny pile of while powder onto the back of his hand, leaned over and hoovered it up. Then blinked, rubbed his nose.

  “Cocaine, you know what it’s good for?”

  She had a crawling fear of what he’d say next.

  She made the mistake of looking at him. His eyes were feral now. The coke had lit them somehow. He wasn’t joking. She needed to figure out exactly what to say.

  Or he was going to rape her.

  He reached for her—

  “The stuff, what’s it like?” Distract him.

  He stopped. “It makes everything, I don’t know—bright. You want some?”

  What a sales pitch. “A little, sure.”

  He handed her the vial.

  Her hand shook and she dropped it, sending the coke spilling on the floor. Not an accident, what she’d planned. She knew she risked angering him but she hoped she’d slow him down.