agencies. But it shouldn’t matter. The Legat here will know everyone.” She hoped. She looked at her phone. Nine fifty-eight. She’d wasted ten minutes. “Let me call him.”
* * *
“Rob Wilkerson here.”
Brisk and efficient. She liked him immediately.
“Rob. I don’t think we’ve met, my name’s Rebecca Unsworth, I work out of D.C., I’m in counterintel…” She explained the situation, including the man and woman she’d seen in Paris.
“I have to ask,” he said, when she was done. She knew what was coming. “You’re sure there’s no way she just went home with this guy Jacques?”
“You have kids, Rob?”
“Two. Fourteen and sixteen.”
“Good kids?”
“Pretty good.”
“Then you know. I’m not saying it’s impossible she would have spent the night with him. Not her style, but we’re on vacation, maybe she decided to go for it. But she would have called or texted one of us. Her brother for sure. One hundred percent. If she lost her phone she would have borrowed his to let us know. If he said it was dead or wouldn’t give it to her she wouldn’t have liked that, she might have walked away right then and either way she would have found another phone before she went anywhere.”
Rob went silent.
“It’s how they are, Rob.”
“True.”
“She wasn’t mad at us when she left, not trying to make a point—”
Rebecca stopped herself. She’d mostly beaten her old habit of arguing after she’d already won, but it came back sometimes when she was nervous.
“Maybe she’s in a hospital, got hit by a car or something,” Wilkerson said.
“She had her driver’s license.”
“She could have lost it. That case, if she’s unconscious, they won’t know who she is. And even if they have her name—Are you in an Airbnb?”
“Yes.”
“So no hotel key, no way of knowing where she’s staying. Could be they’re waiting for her to wake up.”
The thought of Kira alone, anonymous, in a hospital bed didn’t make Rebecca happy. Though it was better than the alternatives.
“You called anyone in D.C. yet?”
“I wanted to go local first. It’s four a.m. there anyway, not much they can do at this point.”
“Okay, I’ll call the Mossos. The headquarters is in Sabadell, that’s a suburb. I’d rather not start there anyway, it’s Sunday, nobody’s around. Stay local. After the Rambla attack I got to know the Mossos supe for the Old City. Christiano Camps, everyone calls him CC. He can be prickly, we got into it a month ago, but his guys know every building in the Quarter. I’ll see if we can meet him at the station house, it’s on Carrer Nou, I’ll send you the time, the exact address—”
Wilkerson was protecting her without saying so, she saw. By keeping the request local rather than going to Mossos headquarters, he would save her from embarrassment if Kira turned up safe. Plus, the first step would be checking hospitals and drunk tanks and talking to the manager at The Mansion. They didn’t need high-level cooperation for that.
“Rob? Thanks.”
“Like the shark said to the lawyer, professional courtesy.”
* * *
She showered, dressed decently. Neither Wilkerson nor the cops would take her seriously if she looked like she hadn’t slept.
Then she and Brian and Tony walked down Passeig de Gràcia, the handsome, well-manicured boulevard that ran through the heart of Eixample. She hadn’t realized until they came here that Barcelona was as rich as London or Paris. Luxury brands filled the storefronts. The air was fresh, a sea breeze cooling the city.
Around them clumps of tourists consulted guidebooks, debated which Gaudí mansion to see first, checked ticket availability for La Sagrada Família, the cathedral that had been rising for a hundred years. Their casual happiness infuriated Rebecca. My daughter’s missing, and you’re snapping selfies.
“We need to print fliers, tape them up,” she said.
“Let’s talk to the cops first.”
Another forty-five minutes gone. They were meeting Wilkerson at 11:15 outside the Gran Teatre del Liceu, a famous opera house on La Rambla. From there they’d meet Camps at eleven thirty. With every minute the search radius widened, the trail grew colder.
She needed to forget that fact or she would go insane.
* * *
Wilkerson stood out from the tourists and the grifters on La Rambla in his lightweight gray suit. He was tall and black, about her age, his only surprise feature was hair that was not quite an Afro but was certainly higher and more styled than he might have tried for at headquarters.
“Mrs. Unsworth. Mr. Unsworth.”
“Call me Rebecca. This is Brian. And Tony, our son.”