might seem impossibly cruel. But men tortured and raped and killed. Men were impossibly cruel. Not always, but often enough.
And for the wealthy psychopath who had everything, the chance to buy a pretty teenager might be tough to turn down. An American teenager. Not some poor Russian girl selling herself because she had no other options. An American who couldn’t imagine being treated this way, who would truly fight and truly break.
Use Kira until she had nothing left. Drug her and dump her in the middle of Istanbul, some giant city, no memory of how’d she’d gotten there, no idea where she’d been.
Or just kill her.
Another reason Rebecca thought this scenario made sense was that Kira said Jacques’s group had been relatively small. She had seen and heard Jacques, Lilly, Rodrigo, and the two drivers, the one who’d picked them up from Helado and the one waiting at the van when they’d transferred her. Never anyone else. Throughout, Jacques had relied more on speed, stealth, and cleverness than money. An intelligence service, if one had been crazy enough to be involved, would have put Kira on a plane and flown her to parts unknown—extraordinary rendition, as the CIA liked to say.
So.
So.
* * *
If the kidnapping had been random, Kira was safe.
No matter what, Kira would never forget those two days. But the sooner she could return to classes and friends, parties and volunteering, the better. Her first goal is normal, the FBI shrink had told Rebecca.
And in one important way, Kira had been supremely lucky. The Spanish media hadn’t picked up on the kidnapping. A travel blogger raised questions about the “Missing” posters on La Rambla, but the Mossos brushed him aside, saying the woman in them had been found unharmed. The fire had received little attention even in Zaragoza. Even the fact that Jacques and Lilly hadn’t been identified paradoxically worked for Kira on the publicity front. With no one to hunt for, there was no hunt, no Wanted posters.
Thus Kira could choose what to tell her friends. She didn’t tell them much. She insisted she wanted to go back to school as soon as she could.
Brian took her side.
“Let her live,” he told Rebecca in early August, weeks before sophomore year was set to begin. Kira and Tony had gone to a movie, the first time she’d left the house without Rebecca or Brian since they’d come back to the United States. Brian had plowed through a six-pack of the eight percent alcohol IPAs he favored. Which made a six-pack more like ten beers. Though he insisted he wasn’t rattled.
“Have you forgotten what happened?”
“That what you think?”
She shook her head.
“Then don’t say it. They’re not coming after her here. It’s over, Becks. Whether they wanted her for some reason we’ll never know or they just went after her randomly, it’s over.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“Who is she? Who are we?”
Probably the best argument in favor of a random kidnapping. None of them mattered enough to be worthy of targeting. “Say you’re right—”
“I’m right.”
“Don’t you want to make sure they don’t do this to someone else?”
“I want our daughter to be happy and I don’t think locking her in our house helps. Nor you chasing this, reminding her of it every time she sees you.”
So Rebecca gave in. Tufts it would be. On three conditions. Kira had to agree to wear an alarm that the FBI and the Unsworths would monitor 24/7/365. She had to call twice a day. And she had to let them know if she dated anyone who wasn’t a student.
Kira agreed to all three rules. And stuck to them.
Even so Rebecca woke up two, three, four times a night throughout the fall. Her days were fine. The Russians were more active than ever. The rumors that they had a new source high in either the NSA or CIA were only picking up.
But the nights were no fun at all, usually starting around midnight, no coincidence. Her dreams sent her to bus stations and airports. Blurred faces on rainy afternoons. Eighteen-wheelers pulling out with license plates she couldn’t see. She woke up certain each time that she’d just missed Kira.
She woke desperate to call Kira, sure something was wrong. Brian talked her down every time. As the days grew shorter and the fall wore on she felt closer to him. Like for the first time in their marriage they were truly partners. Like she could depend on him.
He was good with Tony, too. Sometimes she focused so