without getting caught. Makes me wonder if that’s what they’re planning to do at all.”
She was right.
Her phone and the Kira phone buzzed at the same time. She handed hers to Brian. A 410 number, the NSA trunk line.
“Jake.”
“Brian. Okay, we got that phone. Tower’s about fifty kilometers northwest of Zaragoza, rural area so it’s a wide coverage zone, maybe thirty-five square KM.”
“Big.”
“Yeah. I’m sending the map with the tower location to this phone. The number moves, I’ll let you know. I’ll send the map to your phone and Rob Wilkerson and the Spanish Special Ops guy and the Mossos too.”
“Thanks, Jake.” He hung up. “What’d the text say?”
She showed him: No questions no Kira
“Jake says they have the mobile already,” Brian said. “Northwest of Zaragoza. He’s letting everyone know.”
“Everyone except the cops here, the ones we need,” Rebecca said. “Barraza will call them but it’s an extra minute, two, five. Try to pretend this jurisdictional stuff doesn’t matter and then this happens. Guys like Fernandes—”
She broke off.
Both their phones buzzed again, the map from Jake.
“It looks like there’s a big highway that runs from Zaragoza northwest to Pamplona in that coverage area,” Rebecca said. “Good place to keep her, rural but easy to get away.”
“You think she’s up there?”
Rebecca hesitated. “It’s possible.”
“Then we should go up there.”
“I’m not being cute, but where? Probably they’re moving her right now. They going north or south? North, they can go to France, San Sebastián, Bilbao, wherever. South, Madrid. Nobody’s putting up roadblocks. It’s eleven at night, what are we looking for? A car with a sign that says, KIDNAPPED AMERICAN GIRL INSIDE THIS TRUNK? We don’t know what kind of vehicle they might be using—”
“A Toyota.”
“Bri, the only thing we know is that it’s not a Toyota.” She held up the key. “Why give us this? Here, take the key to our getaway car, we’ll just walk.”
She was right. And cutting and dismissive. Couldn’t help herself. Even here. Even now.
“So we just sit with our thumbs in our asses, wait for this guy to give us orders?”
She exhaled heavily. “You think I like this? But if we get up there and they text us again and tell us the car’s parked around the station and we need to be there in five minutes and we tell them we can’t, who knows what they’ll do? Waiting is our only real option.”
Maybe the most infuriating thing about arguing with Becks, she was usually right.
“I’ll kill him,” Brian said. “If we don’t get her back I’ll kill him. Hunt him down and kill him myself.”
“You’ll have to beat me to it.”
She didn’t know he was talking about Irlov.
32
Northwest of Zaragoza
Kira skidded down the stairs, bare feet slipping on the slick wood steps. She couldn’t turn her head. She felt Rodrigo behind her, his fingers grasping, the reek of his burnt flesh filling her nose.
Halfway down she heard low Spanish voices in the living room. Waiting. Her heart beat so fast it seemed about to explode. They were waiting for her. Then the voices turned to a jingle, happy women singing—
A commercial.
She reached the bottom step, grabbed the handrail to stay upright. Breathe. Panic wouldn’t save her. She looked up the stairs. Which were empty. Of course. Rodrigo wasn’t a shape-shifter from Tony’s first-person shooters. She’d locked him away and he wouldn’t be getting out. She heard him now, pounding the door, as if sheer fury could free him.
But she’d learned for herself, the deadbolt didn’t care about the desperation of the person it held.
She put a hand to her cheek, felt her own ragged breath. Made her heartbeat slow. She listened for dogs barking, horns honking. Nothing. The car in the distance had turned around. Or turned off. Or maybe she hadn’t heard it at all, maybe it had been part of her freak-out.
She feared what might be waiting outside. But the house was a trap disguised as safety.
She made a deal with herself. She would look for a pistol. Quickly. If Jacques and Lilly weren’t close, she had a little time. And if they were, a gun was her only chance. A gun or a phone. Rodrigo had probably had his stuffed in his jeans, she realized now. Maybe he had already blindly thumbed in his password and called Jacques to come for him.
A few seconds. A minute. No more. She ran to the kitchen, putting aside the nightmare thought of Jacques and Lilly sipping sangria, Come, Kira, have a drink, join us, we