streets through Columbia Heights. Seven a.m. and Brian had already left, trying to beat the traffic to Fort Meade.
Rebecca was in the kitchen, making coffee and thinking about working from home, when her phone trilled behind her. Kira.
“Kira. You okay?” Why are you calling so early?
“Mom.” Her daughter’s tone was almost aggressively blasé. “Fine. It’s five degrees up here. Who thought Boston was a good idea?”
“Global warming.”
“Funny, Mom. We’re the ones who have to live with it.”
“Yeah, I’ll be dead. Thanks for the reminder.”
“And—” Kira broke off. “Ayla’s in trouble.” Ayla, the girl with leukemia at Boston Children’s. Kira had been visiting her for more than a year. “Like going-to-die-this-week trouble.”
Rebecca exhaled. She hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath. Just a dying eight-year-old. Nothing. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, but it’s connected to the you know what somehow.” Kira had the habit of calling her kidnapping the you know what. As well as not talking about the you know what at all.
A fact that made this call a teachable moment, Rebecca figured. If she could teach Kira anything. She wasn’t the one who had fought her way out.
“She’s trapped, helpless. Only unlike you she can’t win.”
More silence.
“Guess,” Kira finally said. “All right, gotta go.”
“Kira—”
“Yes Mom—”
“I love you.”
“Love you too bye.”
* * *
Six months since the worst vacation ever, and Rebecca still found herself close to panic whenever Kira called. Or didn’t. She was supposed to check in twice a day, 11 a.m. and 11 p.m., one of the compromises they’d made for allowing her to stay at Tufts and not transfer somewhere in D.C. Kira had desperately wanted to go back, resume her life, no bodyguard, no special treatment, not even telling the university or campus police.
Rebecca had tried to persuade her to take the fall off. Jacques and Lilly were still in the wind. Despite massive help from the FBI and NSA, the Spanish cops had struck out on figuring out who they were or if they were working for someone and who that someone might be. Much less finding them.
Of course, the cops didn’t have much to work with. The kidnap house had burned to the foundation, obliterating whatever forensic evidence there might have been. Clothes? Gone. DNA? Gone. Photos, computers, phones? Gone, gone, gone.
The housing development itself had been financed in part by a Russian bank called ZAM Muscovy, which was rumored to have connections to the SVR. Interesting, but hardly proof of anything. ZAM Muscovy had lost money on lots of other Spanish developments too. The Zaragoza contractor who built the units had gone broke four years before. The security company that watched the houses was based in Madrid and looked clean, no known ties to organized crime. Looters had ransacked many ghost developments, especially in southern Spain. This one had survived untouched, maybe because it was among the last to be finished, maybe because the houses were far enough from the highway to be basically invisible.
In any case, no one could figure out if Jacques had a connection to the development or if he’d just found it and realized it would be a perfect place to hide someone.
The white van never turned up. But cops did find the Toyota, legally parked on a busy residential street north of Zaragoza’s city center. Clean of prints and DNA. Reported stolen from Madrid four years before. An entirely anonymous car. No one who lived on the street remembered who had left it. None of the nearby houses had security cameras. Whether Jacques had planned to tell the Unsworths to leave the ransom money in it or drive it somewhere else was anyone’s guess.
Kira had given police artists detailed descriptions of Jacques, Lilly, and Rodrigo. The police matched the sketches to surveillance photos from The Mansion and Helado. But though the Mossos showed the photos to every bouncer and hotel clerk in Barcelona, no one admitted to recognizing them.
And though the Interior Ministry and FBI ran the photos against driver’s license and border-crossing databases in Europe and the United States, they never came up with a match. The dirty secret of facial recognition programs was that they were very good at finding known fugitives, not as good at putting names to faces. Maybe Jacques and Lilly had spent their lives in Europe and avoided airports. Maybe they’d come from somewhere else and crossed into the European Union illegally. Maybe they’d subtly changed their features. Regardless, they didn’t show up.
Rodrigo was gone too. Without going into details, Kira had made it