A House in the Sky (20 page)

I hated the words, but that’s what came out of me.

He ordered me not to cry. He marched me back to the other room. Seeing Nigel on the foam mat in the gritty dark, exactly as I’d left him, I felt the tears start to flow again. I squelched a sob. I could see the devastation on Nigel’s face, a clear reaction to what he was reading on mine.

Before leaving us, Ali jabbed a finger menacingly in my direction. “You are a problem,” he said.

*

Nigel and I were pretty sure there was a school right behind our building. We could hear children’s voices floating in the air, lots of them. It sounded as if they were playing in a yard, laughing. The Korans
piled on the shelves made us wonder if the compound was part of a madrasa, a Koranic school. But the fact that the floor of every room we’d been in was littered with fuses, old batteries, and bits of wire offered an alternative idea—that this was a place where mujahideen fighters built their bombs.

The truth was, we had no idea where we were. Somewhere west of Mogadishu, we figured. We’d driven a long time at high speed. We’d passed nothing but a few camel herders and that one single truck full of soldiers. Early on, I’d caught glimpses of the bright tarps that made up the IDP camps toward which we’d originally been heading, but then we’d veered off again into the scrub. We could hear no sounds of cars driving by, no planes flying overhead, only the occasional ping and crackle of the building’s tin roof, expanding noisily under the pour of hot sun. It felt like we were in a box inside another box, sealed away from everything we knew.

Ali delivered us lunch—a flask of sweet dark tea, some bottled water, and two flimsy blue plastic bags, each containing a glop of cold spaghetti. He also gave us a tin of oily tuna fish. I took a few bites but couldn’t eat more. The day’s fear had accumulated into an acidic brew that sloshed in my stomach.

For a while in the late afternoon, we were allowed outside. Beneath the boughs of the acacia tree, Nigel and I played a few listless games of tic-tac-toe, drawing crosses and circles in the dust, watching the soldier boys out of the corners of our eyes. They were sprawled in the dirt with their guns, boredom seeming to have set in. Blooming white clouds drifted across a blue sky.

I was looking for diversion. “When you were a kid,” I asked Nigel, “did you ever play the game where you called out the shapes you saw in the clouds?”

He looked at me like I was insane.

Back inside our room, he began to cry. I was too afraid to put my arms around him or even to move off my foam mattress and over to where he sat. Earlier, Ahmed had asked if we were married, and after giving myself a split second to make a choice, I’d told him that we weren’t. This had been a tactical move, since I’d just finished encouraging
him to Google us to prove that we were journalists and not spies. I didn’t want to get caught in any sort of lie. Now, though, I couldn’t comfort Nigel, for fear of igniting the mercurial Ali. I was already worried that he’d separate us for good. In Islamic tradition, an unmarried woman should not be alone with an unmarried man, let alone touch him. I didn’t want to take any risks.

Instead, I spoke softly to Nigel from a distance, saying all the things that I myself wanted to hear. It would be all right, I told him. We’d get out of this place. We had each other. At one point, we’d spotted Abdi and the two other Somali guys being walked at gunpoint across the courtyard. Nigel and I had been wondering whether they’d been in on the kidnapping—whether one or all of them had sold us out—but it looked as if they were being installed in one of the other two rooms in our building, captives like us.

I tried to get Nigel to meditate with me, running through the phrases about freedom and peace that I’d listened to a couple of days earlier on the plane from Nairobi, this time saying them aloud. He whispered the words along with me.

At some point, we both nodded off in the heat. I slept hard—for how long, I have no idea. Waking up, I enjoyed a quick instant of unknowingness before my surroundings reintroduced themselves. The grubby walls. The tattered mat. Nigel staring at the ceiling from his own mat about ten feet away. The sound of men speaking a foreign language outside our door. As my mind locked in on the scene, I felt something internal start to plummet. Now what?

Our door flew open. Ahmed was back, dressed in the clothes he’d worn earlier, accompanied by Ali and two other men. One was tall, wearing Ben Franklin glasses and an orange-striped polo shirt. He held a notepad and pen. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, thin and serene-faced, but unable to mask how pleased he was to see us, two trophy animals in a cage. He introduced himself as Adam.

“I am the commander,” he said. He shook Nigel’s hand but made no move to shake mine. When he spoke, it was with only a slight accent. “What is your country?” When Nigel answered “Australia,” Adam wrote it down in the notepad. “What is your village?” he said next.

The other man was introduced as Yahya. He was older than the others, with a short white beard, and seemed gruff, entirely detached. Something in the way he squared his shoulders made me think he had a military background. I recognized him as the guy who’d driven our car away from the spot where we’d been taken earlier. He was looking with scorn at Nigel’s pink paisley shirt.

Adam took down our names and professions and addresses. I gave him my father’s phone number in Sylvan Lake, wishing that I had my mother’s number in British Columbia. She would hold up better in a crisis, I knew. Nigel gave a number for his sister, Nicky. Adam smiled and closed his notebook. “
Inshallah,
this will be over quickly,” he said. “You are my brother and my sister.”

A while later, he returned to the room, offering some good news. “We no longer believe you are spies,” he said. Before anyone could get too excited, he tacked on another announcement: “Allah,” he said, “has put it into my heart to ask for a ransom.”

I imagined the calls going through, Adam’s voice on my dad’s line. I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine what he would say. What words got used? How did arrangements get made? My father had chronic health issues and lived on disability checks. My mother made minimum wage. My bank account was just about empty. My friends in Calgary were mostly waitresses, none of them wealthy. I’m not sure anybody I knew back home could even find Somalia on a map. In Iraq, kidnapping was enough of a worry that it had been a topic of conversation at the Hamra Hotel. The big-time journalists generally had kidnapping insurance through their news organizations. Usually, it would pay for a crisis response company to help negotiate for a hostage’s release. Freelancers most often had none. And it was common knowledge that you couldn’t rely on your government to get you out. As a rule, governments won’t pay off hostage-takers. It’s too expensive and too loaded. No government wants to be found handing money over to terrorists.

It was evening when Nigel and I were allowed out of the room again, to use the bathroom and to get some air. Ali ushered us to a straw mat laid out alongside one of the compound’s walls. He handed
us two more tins of tuna fish and another flask of tea. It seemed clear we’d be spending the night. Calmly, I let go of the idea that this would be a one-day ordeal. It was like putting down one stone and picking up another. This would be a two-day ordeal, I told myself. I could live with that. As darkness fell, the air cooled off somewhat. The sky became a screen, shot through with pinpricked stars. Beneath it, I felt small and lost.

Over near the lean-to, I could see the soldier boys lolling around. Some sat on the ground; a few had laid themselves out flat. They were listening to a silver battery-operated boom box, having tuned in to the BBC Somali Service. A male newscaster’s voice blared in Somali, delivering what I assumed was news of the war. Then, with bizarre clarity, I heard him say the words “Shamo Hotel.”

In the lean-to area, the words caused a stir. The soldiers were sitting up and beginning to talk. Ali got to his feet and started waving at us excitedly, pointing toward the radio. The newscaster said “Canadeeeean” and then “Australeeeean.” My eyes met Nigel’s. The news story was about us, for sure. The feeling was crushing. It was confirmation that our troubles were both real and deep.

I
know now that kidnappings for ransom happen more frequently than most of us would think.

They happen in Mexico, Nigeria, and Iraq. They happen in India, Pakistan, China, Colombia, and plenty of places in between. Sometimes the motivation is political or personal, but most often it’s about money, plain and simple. Hostage-taking is a business, a speculative one, fed by people like me—the wandering targets, the fish found out of water, the comparatively rich moving against a backdrop of poor. Oil workers in far-off countries, traveling businesspeople, journalists, and tourists get swiped out of cars, or from meetings, or are deftly escorted at gunpoint from a restaurant. Back home, you wouldn’t know how often it happened if you didn’t pay attention to it. The news stories pop up and then disappear: An American traveler gets grabbed in Benin. A Dutch consultant gets held for ransom in Johannesburg. A British tourist is dragged from a bus in Turkey.

Families get called; governments are contacted. A certain machinery quietly goes into gear. Nobody would ever call these situations common, but they happen frequently enough that there are procedures in place, a way things go, at least on the home front.

In my case, it was not the kidnappers who alerted my family but a radio producer in Vancouver who had noticed a thinly reported wire story coming out of Somalia not twelve hours after we’d been taken. What it said was that two journalists, one Canadian, one Australian,
had gone missing outside of Mogadishu. Only our first names were included, but I’d done some work for that producer earlier in the year, giving live radio updates from Iraq, and I’d let him know I was headed to Somalia. Searching for contact information on the Internet, the producer had called my uncle in Red Deer, who then rang my father. He and Perry had been sitting, until that moment, in the sun on their back porch.

My father called my mother. My mother called my brothers. Nobody was clear on what to do. The radio producer in Vancouver had passed on a number for the government office of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. When my father called it, a staffer explained that while they were aware of what the news said, nothing was confirmed. She then gave a different number for my family to call if they heard anything. She told my father to sit tight.

One news report begat another. My father’s phone rang and rang with calls from reporters, dozens of them. A couple of TV trucks had parked in the street outside the house. Neighbors gathered on the sidewalk. The phone rang, but my father, feeling overwhelmed, stopped answering. Perry opened the door only to close friends and relatives. Otherwise, they stayed locked up, waiting for something to happen.

The first phone call from Somalia came the next morning, a rubbly voice on my father’s voicemail, the man who called himself Adam saying, “Hello, we have your daughter.” He said he’d call again to talk about money, and then hung up. The call made it official. I hadn’t gotten lost or run away. I’d been taken. I had captors, and those captors had demands.

I think now of my mother leaving the small house she’d rented in British Columbia. Too rattled to drive, she enlisted a friend to help her make the ten-hour trip through the Rockies to my father’s place in Alberta. I imagine the car climbing the crooked road, surrounded by pine forest, my mother perched stiffly in the passenger seat. It was August. The lupine would have been blooming in the dirt along the road’s shoulder. The mountains would have carried white veins of snow. Probably there were hawks in the sky. My mother, I would guess, saw none of it.

By nightfall, three agents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had arrived in Sylvan Lake and were sitting around the dining room table at my dad and Perry’s house, along with my mother. The agents asked questions and took notes. They listened several times to Adam’s voice message. They requested permission to tap my parents’ phone lines. They offered talking points for what to say when Adam called again. The idea was to try and have Adam put me on the phone—to prove I was alive, to get a sense of how I was being treated, to listen for clues. When it came to money, they were to tell the truth: They had none, and the government wouldn’t pay a ransom, either.

My belongings—my journal, my toothbrush, all my odds and ends left in the Mogadishu hotel room—would soon be shipped to the Canadian embassy in Nairobi. My parents would receive a typed bullet-pointed list of everything I’d been traveling with: one green shawl, one brown T-shirt, one bathing suit, one Apple MacBook laptop, two pairs of black trousers, one head scarf, one bottle Nivea sunscreen, assorted pens and notebooks, assorted airline itineraries and electronic ticket records, assorted currency from Thailand, India, and Pakistan. My mother would later tell me she pored over the list, examining what was left of me, as if it would explain something about why any of this had happened.

When it came to the reporters camped on my father’s front lawn, my parents were instructed to say little—not just to the media but to friends and neighbors as well. The hope was that, starved of fresh information, the news story about my kidnapping would die out quickly. It was better, the agents explained, to be a low-profile captive than a high-profile one. Hostage-takers, in general, are plenty savvy. They know how to Google. They read the news. They, too, would be scanning for clues during those early days, trying to assess the value of their catch. Did my family have money? Did I work for a big, wealthy company? Was I important to my government? A simple stressed-out comment from my mother in the news about how desperately she wanted me back could lead to an immediate hike in ransom.

The message from the investigators to my parents was that they were not alone. Teams of trained negotiators would rotate in and out
of Sylvan Lake, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, monitoring the phones and coaching my parents twenty-four/seven, until it was done. Together, they would work to wrangle, coddle, apply pressure, and offer vague assurances to our captors—to hit whatever levers it might take to get me sprung from Somalia.