The light under the windowsill turned pink. Sunset. Night was coming.
Steps in the hall. She wondered if she should grab the acetone, but the person was moving too fast—
The deadbolt popped back. The light flipped on. Lilly.
“Up.”
“Missed you too, Lil.” Come and get me. Even without the nail or the acetone she was looking forward to getting in a couple of licks. Let them beat her afterward.
But Lilly was ready too. She reached behind her back, pulled out a little pistol with yellow tips. A Taser. No point in arguing. Lilly could brutalize her without even leaving marks. Kira stood.
“Good girl. Now take your clothes off.”
Kira raised her twin middle fingers. The gesture reminded her of her father somehow, he’d always liked Eminem, Put one of those fingers on each hand up…
“I’ll count three.” Lilly raised the Taser. “Take them off.”
“You flirting with me too? It’s getting old. And you’re not my type.”
“What an ego you have. Even now.” Lilly stuffed the Taser in the back of her waistband. “You’re taking a shower, you dumb bitch. You stink.”
* * *
You don’t want a shower, Rodrigo had said.
Because a shower meant they would be giving her to someone who wanted her clean.
Don’t fight. Don’t give her any excuse to come any closer. While the other two were busy flirting or mock-flirting with her, Lilly was canny enough to check the shelf, find Kira’s treasures.
Kira stepped out of her skirt and panties, pulled off her blouse and bra. Folded them neatly and piled them in the corner.
“Why do Americans hate your pubic hair so much? Like a child.”
Lilly led her into the bathroom, turned on the shower.
“Quick quick.” She pointed to a new pink disposable razor still in its package. “And shave your legs.”
They were almost insulting her, Kira thought. Did they think she wouldn’t understand the reason they wanted her to pretty up?
“If you don’t mind, I’ll watch. We wouldn’t want to lose the razor.”
Kira wondered if she could go for the Taser. But Lilly probably had combat training, too.
She showered. The water trickled out, but it was hot. Kira quickly scrubbed herself clean with the pale pink soap. Gave herself a coat of the generic shampoo and a dollop of conditioner. Shaved her legs and her pits. The purity of the hatred she felt surprised her. If someone had given her the chance to toss Lilly into a vat of acid, she would have taken it without a second thought.
“No more.”
Lilly wrenched Kira out. She barked her leg against the tub, sending a flare of pain down her shin.
Lilly shoved her into the hallway, water dripping off her, no towel. “Back in the cage, get dressed before you piss me off.”
Kira bit back her fury. Don’t give her any excuse to look around the closet.
* * *
The heat in the closet dried her quickly. Her leg ached and when she touched it she felt a bruise rising. Lilly would get in trouble for leaving a mark on the merchandise.
She heard the motorcycle rumble back. Voices downstairs, faint, then louder, then abruptly stopping. After another minute, a car engine, fading into the night. Had Jacques left? Lilly? Both of them?
She had to assume the recording for her parents had been a lie, a way to distract her. Jacques was selling her to the highest bidder. Maybe tonight, maybe in the morning. But soon. Either her parents hadn’t raised the money or Jacques planned to take it and sell her anyway. To a sheikh, an oligarch, who knew? She wouldn’t have believed such a man existed. But then she wouldn’t have believed she could be snatched out of a crowded club and made to vanish.
She remembered something Becks had said, years before. Act like prey, you’re prey.
Time to be a predator.
She reached up to the shelf.
She couldn’t find the bag where she’d hidden the nail, the lighter, and the bottle. She bit back her panic, tried again. There.
She brought them down, tucked the nail into the back of her panties. It dug at her. It felt good.
Time for a test. She had to be sure. She flicked the lighter. The flame glowed. She flicked it off, uncapped the bottle, poured a few drops of the precious clear liquid inside into the cap.
She waited. Listened. Heard a voice downstairs. Spanish. Maybe Rodrigo. Maybe the television. No one on the stairs, no one in the hall.
She flicked the lighter again, touched flame to the cap.
Watched as a fireball, tiny and perfect, flared up.
Come on, Rodrigo. You horny bastard. Come to me.
29
Barcelona
At exactly 9:23 p.m., the express to Madrid pulled smoothly away from the platform at Barcelona Sants. It accelerated through a trainyard, swung left, passed through a tunnel whose concrete walls were covered in swoops of red and orange graffiti. Beyond the tunnel, chain-link fences gave a glimpse of busy highways and apartment buildings glowing against the final rays of the sunset. Minute by minute the city fell away.
“She deserves her chance,” Rebecca said. She sat by the aisle, Brian on the window, the bag at their feet. Every so often she or he would pat it, their friend and companion. “I’d trade for her.”
The only silver lining in this horror, she felt strangely warm toward Brian. He was as torn up as she was. She’d never doubted he wanted the best for the kids. He had taken care of them all those nights when she’d been working late. But over the years she’d wondered if his own broken childhood stopped him from loving anyone properly.
Then again their own relationship had been so messed up for so long. Maybe she hadn’t judged him fairly. Maybe she couldn’t.
“She’s coming back.”
He couldn’t know. But she didn’t argue. She’d always been logical, unafraid to look at the truth. Men liked to think those traits were stereotypically male, as if they had a monopoly on truth. A lie. Women could never forget the core truth that they were physically weaker, that even an average man could kill them with his hands.
Still, right now she wanted nothing more than Brian’s unearned male confidence. She leaned against him.
“They won, they’ll get the money, that’s all they want.”
“Two million. Too bad you couldn’t just write them an app instead.”
“Huh?”
She was surprised he hadn’t seen the coincidence too.
“You know, two million, what you got for your app.”
He kissed her forehead. “Oh yeah, I guess so.”
* * *
CC had sent a plainclothes team along with the officers to the Font de Canaletes. But on summer evenings La Rambla was as crowded as Times Square. Running counter-surveillance was impossible. No one saw anything.
Meanwhile, Rebecca, Brian, and Tony waited in his office, hoping for something from Barraza or the NSA or the FBI. Or anyone.
But despite parsing the recording to the millisecond, the NSA found nothing more. The Mossos didn’t find much either. They pulled fingerprints from the Helado fire door, but the prints didn’t match anyone in the Spanish or Interpol databases. Still, they could be useful. If an informant led the Mossos to an empty safe house, matching prints could prove that the kidnappers had been there.
Even so, by around eight thirty Rebecca knew they had no choice but to leave the Mossos and take the express to Madrid. But when Brian picked up the bag of money, Tony lost his cool.
“You can’t.” He stood in front of CC’s office door. “Mom please—”
Rebecca tried to hug him. He lifted his arms, shook her off. He was awkward but strong.
“They didn’t give us a choice, Tony.”
“They just want the money,” Brian said.
“They’ll take it, they’ll kill you—”
“Tony. Listen.” The iron in Brian’s voice seemed to be what Tony needed. “We have to do this. If it was you we’d
do the same.”
“Let me come too. Please.”
“We will get her, we’ll be back, go to Ibiza and party like rock stars. Like it’s 1999.”
Tony crumpled to the floor, and Rebecca knew the fight was over. “I wasn’t even born in 1999.”
Brian picked Tony up off the floor, sat him on the couch. “These guys will take care of you. Just let us do this, okay?”
* * *
Downstairs, an unmarked Mossos sedan. Outside the station, El Raval was the usual tourist carnival. A white kid with Rasta hair drummed on bongos as backpackers danced down the street. Heedless and happy. Rebecca tried not to hate them.
“No plainclothes on the train,” she said to CC.
“I promise.”
Assuming he was telling the truth—and Rebecca hoped he was—if something happened on the train, they were on their own. But Rebecca didn’t see how the kidnappers could make the train work for them. She didn’t plan on giving them the money without seeing Kira. Or at least talking to Kira, hearing exactly how the handoff was going to happen. But the kidnappers couldn’t have Kira on the train, which meant if they planned to take the bag there they’d have to do it by force.
Then they’d be stuck, too. What would they do with the bag? Toss it out a window and hope it didn’t get sucked under the wheels? They’d have an even harder problem getting off the train themselves between stations. The AVE wasn’t a freight train where a hobo could jump off and survive with a bruise or two. It ran at two hundred miles an hour.
The Spanish police would be waiting for them in Zaragoza and Madrid. Barraza had talked directly to the police chief in Zaragoza and explained what was happening and why they thought Zaragoza might be their real stop. The chief had promised to have officers on the platform. In Madrid, both the police and Garza’s anti-terror units would be on alert.
They had followed the instructions. No trackers in the bag, no dye bombs. But they were each wearing GPS-equipped ankle monitors that provided real-time tracking. The recording hadn’t said anything about those.
More than anything Rebecca wished for a pistol. But the recording had said no, and she knew CC wouldn’t give her one, and she had no way to get one on her own quickly in this foreign city. She hated losing the initiative this way, waiting for a call that might not come, with instructions that she might not be able to follow.
They’d given her no choice.
CC closed the door of the unmarked. “Vaya con Dios.” They rolled toward Barcelona Sants.
* * *
“Thank you for figuring Tony out,” she said now, as the train sped west, the dusk outside turning to darkness. “In CC’s office.”
“He just needed to vent.”
She heard a helicopter’s distant thrum. East and north. She waited for it to fade but it seemed to be pacing the train. She wondered if the Mossos had put up a copter without telling them.
A man walked down the aisle. Middle-aged, a long-sleeved shirt and jeans. Gray-tan skin and almond eyes. North African. His eyes scanning the cabin. “Buenos noches.”
“Buenos noches.”
The man looked at her. She wondered if he’d noticed the bag. She wondered if he was looking for it. But he didn’t seem like a kidnapper. He seemed sunbaked and slow. Maybe.
“Do you know which way is the bathroom?”
Rebecca raised a thumb behind her, realizing as she did that she’d let slip she understood English. She waited for him to pass a note, drop a phone in her lap, lean over and whisper, You will leave the train at the next stop—
“Gracias.” He walked on.
Rebecca craned her neck to watch him go. He didn’t look back or acknowledge her.
“What was that,” Brian said.
“Maybe he just needed to go.”
Brian didn’t say anything.
“You have no idea how much I hate this, Bri. Being at their mercy.”
They were silent for a while. Rebecca checked her watch. They were a little more than a half hour from Zaragoza. Assuming the Dropbox clue was right, the kidnappers should be contacting them soon.
She sighed. Almost groaned.
“What, Becks? Beyond the obvious.”
“I wish we knew whether this is about my job. I mean, Europe has some powerful gangs, the ’Ndrangheta especially—”
“What’s that?”
“Sorry. Fancy name for the Mafia. Basically run southern Italy. But why grab an American in Barcelona, what’s the point? They make billions of euros a year on drugs, graft. This is more trouble than it’s worth. And the care these people have taken, the resources, this feels like a government-level operation. But they haven’t asked me for anything.”
“Maybe some Eastern European is getting into high-end trafficking.”
She squeezed his arm. “I wondered, maybe it’s you they want.”
“An NSA drone? I doubt it.” Brian shook his head as if he hadn’t even considered the idea.
He was probably right, she thought. How would the Russians even know who he was?
“Becks?”
“Yeah?”
“Think there’s any chance she gets out on her own?”
Oddly enough she’d barely considered the possibility. These people had proven how good they were. The only mistakes they’d made—Dropbox and a couple of fingerprints—were too small to count.
Kira was smart and reasonably well-disciplined. But Becks had never seen any evidence she had a killer instinct. Why would she? She was a nice girl from a nice middle-class family. It wasn’t like they’d been teaching her to pick locks or shuck handcuffs.
Anyone who would kidnap you and threaten to kill you in public wouldn’t be much nicer once he had you to himself. Take any chance that came your way. But for most people, the natural instinct was to wait, appeal to the kidnapper’s humanity. Until too late.
“Anything’s possible.” She wondered if she sounded as discouraged about the prospect as she felt.
Then their phones vibrated.
30
Somewhere in Spain
Thump. Thump.
The footsteps came up the stairs, a heavy male tread. Rodrigo.
Kira pushed herself up against the wall. The tip of the nail dug into her waist. The bag with the acetone and lighter waited beside her hip. Not much of an arsenal, but it would have to do.
At the top of the stairs the steps stopped—
Turned around. Halfway down, a heavier thump as he stumbled. A muffled Spanish curse.
No. Kira could read Rodrigo’s drug-addled mind. Torn between his idiot lust and Jacques’s warnings.
A few minutes later she heard him on the steps again. More slowly this time. Again he stopped at the top.
Was she ready? If she failed he’d kill her. Even if she succeeded… if the others came home too soon… if they hadn’t left a car… if she couldn’t start it…
No.
She had to try. No excuses.
“Rodrigo! That you?”
“Sí.” The door muffled his voice.
“Come on then.”
The steps turned down the hall. Toward the closet. Toward her.
She reached for the lighter, flicked the little metal wheel—
Nothing. No. She tried again. This time the flame came up, bright and strong.
She slipped the lighter back in the plastic bag, next to the nail polish remover. The bottle cap was loose but still on. She didn’t think he’d notice the smell if she uncapped it, but she couldn’t risk it.
The deadbolt clapped back. Rodrigo stood in the doorway.
She had to stay in control. Make him listen. If he just jumped her, she’d lose both ways.
“Lilly made me take a shower. They’re selling me.”
He shrugged. She didn’t have to fake her shiver. “Do you have any coke?”
He nodded.
“Then come on, let’s do it. Time to party.”
He looked less enthusiastic than she’d expected. She feared he mig
ht leave. He ran his tongue over his upper lip nervously, came to her, offered her the bag of white powder. He’d showered too at some point but still stank of sweat. Was he so terrified of Jacques?
But then Jacques was terrifying.
“You first.”
He reached in with a dirty fingernail, snorted a bump, a big one. She followed. She kept the hit small. Still, she felt the drug’s power. Her heart chopped into another gear. A dry metal taste filled her mouth. Her blood sparkled. The world was brighter. Clearer. Even in here.
“That’s good.”
He did another hit. The coke seemed to give him courage. He leaned in to kiss her. No. She put a finger to his lips.
“Stand.”
Am I really doing this?
“Sí?”
“Stand.”
He stood. She pulled off the belt, unbuttoned his jeans, pushed them down halfway. His penis was half-hard. And uncircumcised. And thick but not very big. And smelled terrible. God no. She’d have to take antibiotics like her dumb suitemate Janice who’d gotten frisky in New Orleans—
Focus.
She took him in her mouth. His erection was fading. He was more flaccid than hard now and stank of stale sweat and something worse. She wanted to gag. But if she couldn’t make this happen—
“Coke dick,” he said.
Coke dick? Was that a thing? She spat on her hand, tugged at him. Looked up and gave him big good-girl doe eyes, I love giving head, being on my knees in front of a stranger, it’s soooo great, I wish I could do it 24/7, and she felt him respond immediately. Men. She used every trick she knew or had seen on YouPorn—
And finally got him as close to fully erect as he was going to get.
He wound his fingers into her hair and groaned. “Madre de Dios.” He tugged her hair, trying to get her into the rhythm that would send him to orgasm.
She pulled her head away. Wiped the back of her mouth with her hand. Retched a little. He didn’t notice.
He was still reaching for her head. She grabbed his hands, pulled him down.
“Lie down. On your back. I want to see you. I want to see your face when you come.”
The Power Couple Page 29
