“Fuck.” But he laughed.
“I’m an idiot.”
“Sí. Idiot.” Though he seemed weirdly cool about the coke. Maybe he had a pound in the sugar jar downstairs. Maybe they paid him in coke.
“I’m scared, Rodrigo.” That much was true, at least. “Of everything.” I want you to keep me safe? No, too much, too soon. “I can’t trust anyone.”
For a moment she thought maybe she’d reached him.
Then his eyes turned hard and covetous. He nodded to himself as though he’d decided something. He raised his hands to his mouth and blew on his fingertips, puff, puff, cleaning them somehow before he reached for her.
He grabbed her shoulder. He was strong, not gym strong, the casual strength of a guy who’d spent his life lifting boxes, digging ditches. Fighting.
“Rodrigo.” That stupid, inescapable song from a few years back filled her mind, I’m only one call away, I’ll be there to save the day—
Nobody was one call away. Not Superman or anybody else.
He didn’t say anything, just pulled her toward him.
In the distance the garage door clicked up, the sound unmistakable.
He groaned. Kira understood. She’d made the same sound herself when she’d put a perfect ball on the net, a certain goal, only to have the goalie sweep it away at the last moment. No way. That was mine. I was gonna score.
He dug his fingers into her shoulder. “You don’t say anything.”
He grabbed the vial from the floor, stepped out, slammed the door, slapped the deadbolt in place. A moment later the light went out.
* * *
The chalk taste of fear in her mouth. She swallowed it. Now that she’d escaped, saved by the bell, she could try to laugh. Afraid to get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, Rodrigo? Her cookie jar, as it happened.
He was dangerous. But she could already see the chance he offered. He had come to her when the others were away.
He would come again. She needed to be ready.
She heard voices downstairs. Faintly. A man, a woman, another man. Jacques, Lilly, Rodrigo. Was it really just the three musketeers? She couldn’t decide if she would be safer with someone else in charge.
She listened as hard as she could, but couldn’t distinguish anything, not even the language. She decided to use the conversation as cover to check the room once more. Start with the shelf.
She stood on tiptoes, ran her hands along the top of the shelf. Nothing. The wood smooth, finished. Then, down in the corner, where the shelf met the front wall.
Metal. Ridged. A screw and then a smooth-finished nail. Maybe two and a half, three inches long. She imagined a carpenter finishing the doorframe, leaving these pieces behind. They’d rolled into the corner.
She poked it into her palm. It was sharp. Sharp enough to pierce skin, explode an eye. Good.
She left it where she’d found it. They hadn’t noticed it yet. No reason they would now.
She checked the shelf once more, slowly. Touching every inch, especially where the wood met the wall.
In the back corner her fingers grazed what felt like a roll of electrical tape, a smooth tube a couple inches around. She could barely reach it; it was in the most awkward spot in the entire closet. She stood en pointe, silently thanking Becks for making her take ballet, got her fingers on the tape. Heard as much as felt something in the center of the roll.
She pulled the tape to the edge of the shelf, and the thing in the middle fell out. It thumped against the floor and she panicked. She had to find it. Whatever it was. She went on hands and knees like an oxy addict chasing her last pill.
There.
Smooth plastic, no larger than her thumb, a serrated metal wheel at the top—
A lighter. She flicked the wheel, pushed down the handle. A yellow flame spouted up. No more than two inches high.
A nail was dangerous. A flaming-hot nail was a weapon.
She let go. No reason to waste the butane—
She heard someone walking down the hall. Not Rodrigo, different steps. Lighter, surer. Jacques.
Shit.
She stood on tiptoe, pushed the lighter and the electrical tape back into the corner where she’d found them. Jacques reached for the door.
She sat, realizing Rodrigo had left the orange peel and the extra bottle of water. His problem, not hers.
The deadbolt snapped back. She willed her breathing to slow—
The light flicked on. Jacques stood in the doorway.
Don’t look on the shelf, don’t look in the corner. Don’t.
“Kira. Been busy, I see.”
18
Barcelona
Rebecca didn’t like scrolling through Kira’s phone records. She felt a little like she was reading a diary. But she had no choice. Back at the apartment, she logged into the Unsworth family account. Naturally she knew the password, didn’t need to fumble for it. Naturally she’d brought her FBI-issued laptop on the trip, vacation or no. She could hear her daughter: Always prepared, Mom, nothing ever gets past you, somehow making the words sound like an accusation.
No surprise, Kira spent more time texting than calling. Like everyone else, she received a lot of robocalls—the IRS has blocked your credit card, we can help. Those all went to voice mail. Her outgoing calls were limited mainly to Rebecca, Brian, and other family members, fewer than a dozen numbers.
Her texting circle was far larger. Rebecca counted more than sixty recipients. A handful of numbers received most of the action. Rebecca knew three on sight; Kira’s best friends from high school. She could guess at others. The 802 and 412 numbers probably belonged to Kira’s first-year roommates, from Vermont and Pittsburgh. A 510 number showed up for a month, then abruptly vanished after a flurry of 3 a.m. texts. Kira had mentioned a boy from Oakland. A trust-fund artist, she’d said.
Others were mysteries. Brian and especially Tony might know some, but they were putting up posters on La Rambla. Without much discussion, she and Brian had decided that keeping Tony busy would be good for his mental health. And theirs. She hadn’t heard anything yet from Rob Wilkerson, but she had to assume that CC had kept his word and was having Mossos officers check hospitals.
At the moment these records were her best lead. And by “best” she meant only.
Metadata, the NSA called these lists. Even without knowing exactly what the texts said, the pattern revealed plenty. They were spokes radiating from the hub that was Kira, thickening and thinning as friendships and romances came and went. If communication was life, metadata was its DNA.
The FBI and NSA used database software to comb these records for numbers known to belong to criminals or terrorists. Even then Rebecca liked to scan them herself to see if anything popped: A three-minute, 2 a.m. phone call to a number that otherwise only appeared in texts. A desperate attempt to reach a lover before an attack, maybe. A flurry of texts at the same time every day for a week, as a plan took shape.
Rebecca hoped to spot a similar anomaly in Kira’s records. If nothing else, she wondered if Kira had been in contact with someone in Europe before the trip. If the kidnappers had targeted her, maybe they had laid the groundwork before she landed.
But Kira hadn’t talked or texted with anyone in Europe before she’d arrived here. Not on her phone, anyway. Maybe she’d used another channel. An instant-messaging service like Kik or WhatsApp. Her Instagram account—Kira7SUns. Possibly Facebook, though she was more active on Instagram. Facebook was the choice of parents and other dinosaurs.
So the lack of texts didn’t absolutely prove anything. But Rebecca had learned over the years that only the most careful perps avoided texting. It was the simplest, fastest way to communicate. And Kira wasn’t a perp. She was a teenage girl with a thumbprint-locked phone her parents didn’t touch. She had no reason to get fancy. The fact that she hadn’t texted anyone in Europe strongly suggested she hadn’t been in contact with anyone.
Until yesterday. When Kira had traded a half dozen texts with a Fre
nch number, the 33 country code jumping out. The first came just after midnight. Rebecca didn’t need to see it to know that it was the This is me initial connection from Jacques. Two more in the morning—presumably along the lines of We still on? Another in the afternoon: Let’s meet at 2300, 11 p.m. for you ’mericans. And one final hit as the magic hour approached—Can’t wait! Wear your best kidnapping dress!
Since then, nothing. Kira’s phone had gone silent. The records showed dozens of incoming calls and texts from Rebecca, Brian, and Tony. Stray texts from friends back home. Nothing outbound. More proof Kira was gone. In the unlikely event that CC was right and Kira had decided to disappear, she would have told her friends. She would have told someone.
The 33 number had vanished, too. No incoming texts or calls from it today.
Still, Rebecca had a lead now, a French number to chase. And, lucky her, she and Brian had the juice at the National Security Agency to check it out immediately, especially since the number wasn’t from the United States. The agency could move more aggressively against foreign targets. The Bill of Rights only protected Americans.
Rebecca doubted Jacques would still be carrying the phone he’d used with Kira. Hanging on to it would be an amateur mistake. But once it had the number, the NSA could track everyone he’d called and texted before the kidnapping. The best part of tracing metadata was that the threads never ended. The agency could widen the net until it had linked every phone number in the world to the original hit. A flow chart as big as Niagara Falls.
Of course, after three degrees of separation the importance of the connections diminished, but it didn’t disappear. If Jacques turned out to be “only” four phone calls from a known Islamic State recruiter, the NSA and even the CIA would pay far more attention. And no matter how careful he was, Jacques had to have left clues. Even if the phone was registered to someone else, he couldn’t use it without connecting to a network and giving up his location. The NSA could always trace those details. The reason the Secret Service tried to keep presidents off cell phones was that using one without giving up compromising information was impossible.
* * *
Rebecca liked the NSA much better than the CIA.
Working with Langley meant constant turf battles. But the NSA was its own empire and had enough to do without pretending to be the FBI too. It was happy to help the bureau, especially on investigations that targeted foreigners and wouldn’t run into legal problems. Since her promotion, Rebecca had grown particularly tight with Jake Broadnik. He ran the NSA’s efforts to stop espionage in the D.C. area. The job covered everything from old-school countermeasures like sweeping for bugs near the White House to attacking the encrypted messaging apps Russian intelligence officers used.
The technical details sailed past Rebecca, but she knew Broadnik was good at his job. She talked to him at least once a month, and they had coffee every so often. He was vegan, maybe 5’2” and 110 pounds soaking wet, with a shaved head and a wardrobe that consisted exclusively of chinos, white T-shirts, and blue Chuck Taylor sneakers. But underestimating him was a major mistake.
The NSA guys fell into two broad categories, Rebecca had learned. There were geek-cool coders who liked being able to hack on the government’s dime. Brian fell in that camp, though he wasn’t as into the actual coding as a lot of those guys.
Then there were the patriots who believed—not without reason—they were defending the United States on the front lines of twenty-first-century warfare. They took their jobs seriously. And no one was more serious than Broadnik. He had come to the agency a decade before straight out of Caltech. He wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, and worked nonstop. Rebecca had once sent him an email at 1 a.m. on a Saturday morning just to see how long he would take to respond. The answer came at 5:45 a.m. and began Sorry it took me so long.
She trusted Broadnik, too. He wouldn’t break the rules for her, but he’d bend them. And if Kira did turn up in a hospital bed or a jail, he would never tell anyone she’d asked for help. Why she’d rather call him than ask Brian to go to the Tailored Access guys. Hard-core coders saw everything as a game. If and when they did decide to help, they’d never let Brian forget it.
Broadnik it was. Just picking up her phone to call him made her feel better.
* * *
He picked up straightaway. “Rebecca Unsworth. Aren’t you on vacation? Europe, right?”
“Europe, wrong.” She didn’t have the time or energy to sugarcoat. And Broadnik wouldn’t care. “I need help.” She walked him through what had happened.
“You believe he’s non-US?” he said when she was done. “To a reasonable certainty.”
The magic words, the ones that gave the NSA the authority it needed, no warrant required. “Yes. I’ll put it in writing if you want.”
“No need. So she went missing Friday night?”
“Last night.”
“Not even a day.”
Not you too. “I may not have a PhD, but I can count, Jake.”
“You telling me everything?”
“Like what?” More sharply than she’d intended, proof how raw she was.
“I don’t know, drugs?”
Drugs. She realized CC and even Rob Wilkerson must have wondered the same, Maybe your little girl is just too high to pick up the phone. The implication that Kira was on a bender—or, worse, that she was whoring herself to a skeezy French drug dealer—infuriated Rebecca.
“Guess again.”
A pause, mercifully brief.
“I’ll open a ticket. I’m gonna do it from campus to watch it myself.” His way of protecting her. “Give me maybe half an hour, forty minutes.”
She hadn’t known Broadnik lived so close to Fort Meade. In fact, she had no idea where he lived. Their friendship was defined by work, she realized. It would evaporate if either of them switched jobs. It was a stereotypically male relationship, which didn’t bother her in the least. One reason she’d succeeded in law enforcement, such a male-dominated field.
“Thanks, Jake.”
She hung up.
Now what? Probably she should hit the big clubs next. Sunday or no, backpackers and tourists would be going out tonight. The clubs didn’t fill up until late, but many had restaurants that served lunch and dinner. Their managers would be around by midafternoon to check guest lists, plan for the night.
But Rebecca wasn’t counting on getting many answers from them, not unless she had the Mossos to help press them.
In the movies, the world was black and white. When detectives showed up and flashed their badges, everyone except the baddies answered their questions quickly and truthfully. In the real world most people looked out for themselves. They might not want innocent people to get hurt. But they wouldn’t go out of their way to help, not when their paychecks were at risk. Nightlife was big business in Barcelona. At twenty euros a head just to get inside, plus drinks, food, and bottle service, a big club like Opium could gross millions of euros during the summer months. Employees would be told to refer questions to managers, who would know that they’d best tell the owners about anything tricky. And the owners had lawyers.
The indifference suddenly overwhelmed her. Nobody cares. My girl is gone and nobody cares. Rebecca leaned back against the perfect sofa, the perfect accessory for this perfect living room for their perfect vacation. The room was hot. Airless. She should open the windows. But she couldn’t take the city’s happy sounds.
She thought of Kira, the images flipping by like photos in an album, the first time she’d slept in her crib, her first day of school, the first time she’d ridden a bike, outside their house in Houston, Rebecca running alongside to protect her—
Though now she remembered it wasn’t Kira’s first time on a bike; she’d found out later that Kira had actually learned in a Kroger’s parking lot with Brian.
How many other firsts had she missed? How many clues?
If she’d been a better mother, maybe Kira wouldn’t have gone to this bar in secret. May
be she could have been honest. Every night at the office, every weekend, they’d added up to this.
Some part of her knew she was punishing herself unfairly. Kira hadn’t told Brian either. Anyway she was a teenager, every teenager kept secrets, it was practically a requirement. But the cold logic failed to comfort her—
The apartment door opened. She hadn’t even heard the steps in the hall outside. Another failure. She stood quickly, as if her grief itself were illicit and needed hiding.
“Becks? You okay?”
Brian must have seen something in her face. She nodded. She didn’t want to talk about her feelings. She was glad when he didn’t press.
“Anything on the records?”
“Just the guy’s number. It’s French. The texts start early yesterday morning.”
“Surprised he didn’t block it.”
“Kira would have thought that was weird. Maybe a deal breaker. Anyway, I just got off the phone with Jake Broadnik. He’s running the number, says he’ll have something soon.”
Brian nodded. He knew Broadnik too, though they weren’t close. The Tailored Access Operations guys kept to themselves.
“We put up like a hundred posters,” Tony said. He pulled one from the plastic bag he was holding to show her. MISSING: KIRA UNSWORTH, 19, AMERICAN. REWARD FOR INFORMATION.
Two pictures: a face shot from high school graduation, Kira grinning, the sun shining from her eyes, and a full-body picture guaranteed to get noticed.
Rebecca’s phone number and email address below. At the bottom, again: MISSING. REWARD IF FOUND.
“They’re good,” Rebecca said. “Did anything else strike you from Friday night, Tony? Anything weird, anything that didn’t fit?”
“One thing—” Tony stopped. “I remember it hitting me on the Métro home. Maybe it’s ridiculous.”
“Nothing’s ridiculous.”
“Like his French was too perfect somehow. Like he was acting and wasn’t French at all. If that even makes sense. I almost said something to Kira. He was too perfect. Then I figured she’d just tell me I was jealous, that’s how you pick up girls if you’re not a loser, Tony.”
The Power Couple Page 16
