Jacques must have targeted her. Planned to kidnap her soon as he saw her in Paris. Or even before. Maybe he’d known she was going to Barcelona the next day. Hard to believe. Yet he and his buddies had taken her here, not in Paris. He’d led her away from safety. He’d made her phone disappear. He’d taken her from The Mansion to Helado.
She could see now how carefully they had set her up. Lilly was the key. He’s with his sister, yeah she’s a jerk but it’s more proof he’s safe. Then Lilly picked up Rodrigo. Suddenly Kira was with three strangers, not just one. Lilly even did the so-called cocaine first and hit herself with the antidote to reverse its effects. Then she made sure Kira took the right amount, didn’t overdose.
Everything made sense now, right down to Lilly’s wig. So no one would know what she really looked like.
They must have a place to hide her, too. Whoever was driving this car hadn’t asked Jacques where to go. He’d steered them straight out of Barcelona. Kira was pretty sure they were moving into the center of Spain. She’d seen a sign for Madrid. Barcelona on the beach, Madrid in the middle, Tony had said on the train down from Paris. Don’t you know anything about Spain?
Okay.
Go with the idea Jacques had targeted her. Why her? Okay, he said for the money. Maybe so. But if not… she was nobody. Tony was nobody. Her dad was a coder for the National Security Agency along with about a thousand other guys. But her mom… her mom wasn’t nobody. Rebecca Unsworth ran the Russia counterintelligence desk at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
At least in Washington, D.C., Rebecca was the real deal. Especially these days.
How big? Kira wasn’t totally sure. Becks talked to the FBI director. She’d even briefed the president. Would spies target Kira to get to her mother? Could they think Kira knew something important, some password? Could they be that crazy?
The other possibility was that Jacques had picked her at random. Say he cruised around Paris, looking for young female tourists. Kira had been with Tony last night. But she had gotten rid of him fast. Jacques would figure she would be by herself when she met him again.
But how had he pulled off the kidnapping in Barcelona when they’d met in Paris? Okay, maybe he went back and forth. Two huge party cities, American tourists on their Rick Steves trips. Maybe this was Jacques’s game: Find a girl in one city, kidnap her somewhere else. The police wouldn’t connect anything.
So was he part of a gang? Maybe. Did Europe even have big gangs? The mafia, right? But she was pretty sure Jacques wasn’t Italian. Maybe he freelanced. Called his buddies if he found a target. In fact… maybe she was wrong about what he had in mind. He hadn’t said anything about selling her. Maybe he just wanted to ransom her back to her parents.
Or maybe not. They’d gone to a lot of trouble already. Maybe Jacques already had a buyer, someone who’d pay for a tall American—
That fear snapped her eyes open. Beside her Jacques stared out his window. She wondered if she should just reach between the front seats, grab at the steering wheel with her cuffed hands, try to take them off the highway before they could take her wherever they were taking her.
Lilly turned, looked at Kira. Like she could read Kira’s mind.
Kira sat back. Waited. Think. Thinking keeps the fear away. Should she say something about her mom, try to convince Jacques he’d screwed up? Everybody makes mistakes. The whole FBI is going to be up your ass in about twelve hours.
But she had a feeling Jacques wouldn’t care.
* * *
The driver stayed in the right lane, drove steady, not too fast. The countryside was mostly bare, scattered houses in the darkness. Not the Utah desert, but emptier than she’d expected. She thought of Europe as all cities. Obviously not.
She felt Jacques tense beside her, and in the rearview mirror she saw blue flashing lights that could only be police.
Even faster than she’d thought.
Jacques reached up, put painful hollows in her cheeks with his thumb and forefinger. “They stop us, you say nothing.”
He tucked the stun gun under the driver’s seat, came out with a pistol. “Understand, Kira?”
“I understand.” She didn’t pray much, but she was praying now, Please God, let them pull us over. She’d take her chances.