BoneMan's Daughters (7 page)

“My, my.” Burt’s eyes were bright with interest, and she thought his grin was more one of fascination than embarrassment.
“You’re quite intelligent.”

“For what? A bimbo on a cover? I think you may have made my point.”

“No, for a sixteen-year-old.”

“Too smart for her own britches, if you ask me,” Mother said.

Bethany decided to take it one step further, aware that she might be purposefully throwing a few stones into their perfect
little love affair.

“I love you, Mother, and I will learn whatever you have to teach me. But don’t expect me to live the same life you live, hopping
around from party to party, man to man, looking to fill the hole in your soul with social fluff.”

Both Celine and the DA sat frozen in place. She might as well have dropped a stun grenade. But her mother recovered quickly;
it was a skill she’d long ago perfected.

She uttered a short chuckle and lifted her glass. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Bethany. But don’t take your own search for
significance out on me. I wasn’t the one who left.”

Touché. She hated it when Mother played the father card. Bethany wasn’t sure how to respond.

“She’s never forgiven him,” Celine said to Burt. “Sorry you have to hear all of this, I had no idea—”

“Don’t be sorry, I think this is entirely appropriate,” Burt said, folding his fingers together in front of his chin. “We
all have a cross to bear. So tell me, Bethany, what’s it like having a Naval Intelligence officer as a father?”

She resented the question and considered telling him that she wasn’t in the market for a counselor, particularly one who was
sleeping with her mother. She wasn’t looking for a father, either, just in case he was getting any ideas.

On second thought, maybe she should clear a few things up.

“I’m not looking for a father, if that’s what you mean.”

“No. No, that’s not what I meant. I meant exactly what I said. What’s it like to have a Naval Intelligence officer as a father?”

“What is this, cross-examination?”

He laughed and Mother joined him, relieved by the break in tension. “It’s what I do, I suppose. You’re right, you should drop
the modeling thing like I did and pursue a career in law or politics.” He lifted his water glass. “Here’s to you, kid.”

After a moment, Mother pushed the point. “So tell him, Bethany. What’s it like?”

“I wouldn’t know, actually. I don’t remember having a father who was a Naval Intelligence officer. I used to think I should
feel bad about that, but I really don’t know what it’s like to have a father. Ryan’s never been home. He feels more like a
statue in my life. An ATM in the corner of our house.”

“Well, that’s an interesting way of putting it,” Mother said.

“You don’t feel any loyalty to him?”

“Maybe I’m not being clear. I don’t like Ryan. I might even hate him. Like I said, I used to feel guilty about that, but I’ve
come to realize that my father left us long ago for another wife. The worst part is that he’s too stupid to see that. I’m
sure that he’s a good enough person in his own way, but I can’t think of him as my father, and I don’t blame my mother for
looking for another husband.”

There. Was that what you wanted to hear?
They weren’t laughing.

The waiter stepped in and placed hot butter and crab forks next to each plate.

“Everything to your satisfaction, sir?”

“It’s fine, Robert. Thank you.”

He dipped his head. “Your food will be right up.”

The waiter left.

“Aren’t you a little concerned about what people will think, seeing you in public like this?” Bethany asked.

“Doing what? Having dinner with a mother and her daughter?”

“Please. Half the waiters in the joint probably know you’re sleeping together. You can see it a mile away.”

“Bethany,” her mother scolded, flushing red.

“You don’t think so?”

“You may be right,” Burt said. “Did I say you should consider a career in law?”

“Too many charlatans.”

“Present company excluded, I hope.”

Bethany didn’t respond to the unspoken request. But as long as she was clearing the air, she might as well clear it all.

“I don’t know you that well, Mr. Welsh, but if my mother loves you, that’s fine by me. Not that you need my permission.”

“No. But I appreciate both your candor and approval.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Are you sure you’re only sixteen?”

Bethany arched her eyebrow. “You never know, in this happy little family of ours. For all I know I’m really fourteen or eighteen
and adopted.”

Her mother chuckled.

“Well, for the record, your honor, I think I like this happy little family. Very much.”

A cart loaded with cracked Alaskan king crab legs and three large lobsters rolled up to their table.

Bethany still wasn’t sure how much she liked Mr. DA Burton Welsh, but she liked him more now than she had ten minutes earlier.

THE BOY SAT in a chair opposite Ryan, staring at the wall with round eyes that had long ago stopped crying. Their captors
had tied his hands behind his back and his ankles were strapped to the chair legs with nylon fishing line. Sweat had washed
away the long lines that tears had etched down his cheeks.

The camera winked red. Kahlid’s pictures peered at Ryan over the boy’s shoulder.

This was the situation.

But this didn’t even modestly describe the situation, because the real situation resided in their minds. In Kahlid’s mind,
in the youth’s mind, in Ryan’s mind.

Above all else, Ryan knew that he could not allow his mind to break. If Kahlid managed to shape his responses, Ryan knew he
would do whatever the man wanted, which in this case would likely mean the death of his wife and daughter.

The manner with which Kahlid meant to break his mind was clear enough. What kind of man could stand by and watch innocent
victims being killed on his account without suffering terrible anguish? The pressure of such horror would eventually break
him.

But the only way to save Ahmed was to offer up his own wife and child.

The similarity between this particular situation and war was inescapable. Kahlid was right, innocent victims were allowed
to die in war for the greater good of the campaign. To slay the dragon you had to kill a few bunnies who got in the way. Collateral
damage. You could try to say the innocents weren’t truly innocent, but in the end they were daughters and sons and wives and
they
were
innocent.

Innocent like Ahmed.

The only difference between the quivering Arab strapped to the chair before Ryan and the innocents who’d been killed by shrapnel
from a bomb dropped on a building was that one was face-to-face, and one was distant.

Kahlid meant to make it all personal to Ryan and through his camera to the world.

It was an impossible conundrum. But Ryan had long ago learned that every code could be broken. Every game could be beaten.
Even the impossible ones. He’d given his life to this one objective. He’d saved a thousand lives by doing what very few could
do or were willing to do. This was what he knew.

And he knew that the only hope he had of beating this game was to shut down his emotions entirely so that he could focus on
the challenge at hand. Doing so with Ahmed weeping in the chair had been a monumental hurdle, but Ryan had managed for the
most part.

The fact that Kahlid had left a clock on the table this time didn’t help. The ticking was a constant reminder that they were
in a time lock.

He glanced at the small white alarm clock and saw that three hours had passed. Three to go.

“What’s going to happen?” the boy asked in Arabic for the hundredth time.

Ryan looked at him without expression. If the boy learned that he could speak his language, he would continue as he had for
the first half hour, begging for some explanation, asking for his mother, explaining that he was only going out to get wood
as his father had asked him to.

None of this was useful information and only weakened Ryan’s resolve to guard his mind.

He closed his eyes and centered his thoughts once again, stepping through the facets of this challenge as he had so many times
already.

One:
Kahlid’s entire game was built upon the belief that if presented with an edited video of an American officer begging that
his wife and daughter die to save the lives of Iraqi children, some of whom were seen broken on the floor, the American public
would cry out in outrage and demand that such senseless killing of children be stopped, regardless of whose side it was on.
And Ryan thought he had a point. Especially if the video included images of his wife and child being killed. They would be
furious at the terrorist, but his point would be made in spades.

Two:
To accomplish his mission, Kahlid must coerce an American soldier into the position of making such a plea by presenting him
with precisely the kind of threat he’d chosen.

Three:
The game assumed that Ryan actually cared whether or not the children died as much as he cared whether his wife or child
died.

Four:
The game required him to play. If he was incapacitated or killed, he would do Kahlid no good. A dead man could not make a
plea on videotape.

Five:
The game depended on a camera. The one now eyeing them.

Six:
The game depended on whether or not he cared that his wife died.

Ryan stopped to consider this matter again, since it had presented itself to his mind twice now. The fact was, he really wasn’t
sure that his loyalty to this one woman was any greater than his loyalty to the American people. Or his loyalty to Ahmed.
Especially if Ahmed was joined by another child. A girl named Miriam.

The six primary concerns he’d laid out in his mind represented a total of twenty-seven independent variables, and he’d dwelt
on each from every conceivable angle already, but he reapplied himself to some of the more obvious solutions to his conundrum
now.

The most obvious solution was to change Kahlid’s mind. Highly unlikely, but in this game of wits, Ryan could play a few cards
of his own and at the very least stall the man. Naturally he would try.

He could try to escape. Again, not likely, but he’d considered a dozen possibilities, all of which depended mostly on luck,
but he wasn’t exactly brimming with optimism.

He could try to remove himself from the equation by either killing himself or by being killed. In an escape attempt perhaps.
It would require some ingenuity and some luck, but he would do it if needed.

He could simply offer up Celine.

Again, the thought stopped him cold.

His mind drifted back to the eighteen years since his marriage to Celine. She’d waltzed into the computer department at Office
Depot, one year out of high school, and accepted his help in choosing a new laptop for a job she was taking with an ad agency.
The job turned out to be a telemarketing scam that she had quit two weeks later.

The spark ignited between them in Office Depot turned into a whirlwind romance and marriage four months later. Admittedly,
the worst mistake he’d ever made.

Within weeks Ryan realized that he’d married an uncommonly needy woman who quickly turned her lack of fulfillment into the
belief that having a baby would satisfy her. Unable to have a child due to a botched abortion when she was eighteen, she insisted
they adopt. Ryan had agreed, perhaps one of the
best
choices he’d made in his eighteen years of marriage.

Bethany had entered their lives one year later, and Ryan had never drawn any distinction between her and a daughter they might
have had through birth.

Bethany he would never jeopardize for any reason. This he knew. This he refused to even consider, regardless of the reasoning
behind it. Maybe it was true that he’d abandoned her when she needed him the most, but he was still her father and he still
loved her as a father loved his child. How could a father give up his daughter?

But Celine…

No. No, he could never live with himself.

Then again, who said he had to live with himself? What if giving up Celine, assuming Kahlid would agree, actually saved Bethany
as well as Ahmed?

But no. He couldn’t.

Then what?

Then he had to stop wasting time considering options that were impossibilities for him and focus on those that might be viable
solutions, however unlikely.

A new thought presented itself to him. What was the true worth of one child?

He opened his eyes and studied Ahmed, who was watching him. His coal black hair was ruffled, and peach fuzz extended down
from his sideburns in the earliest showings of facial hair. He wore stained tan shorts, probably one of only a few he owned.

His green T-shirt had an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger wearing dark glasses, with the word
Terminator
beneath it.

He closed his eyes and shut out the image. Was his life worth more than this one boy’s life? How could you assign worth to
human life?

Kahlid was doing all of this because he’d lost a boy like Ahmed and he believed that the only way to save many more like him
was to sacrifice this one. He believed that this was the will of God.

Now Kahlid wanted Ryan to play God. So then, assuming there was a God who made such choices, what would God do? Sacrifice
one child?

Save Ahmed.

The thoughts began to run together. Dizziness swept over him and his world turned black. What if he couldn’t beat this game?
What if there was no way to win?

His heart rate suddenly increased and his breathing thickened in the telltale sign of a panic attack. Ryan sucked deep through
his nose and blew the air out slowly several times. This was not good. He had to get a grip, clear his mind, and apply himself
to the three options that made the most sense.

Manipulation.

Escape.

Suicide.

THE DOOR SWUNG open four minutes after the six-hour mark and Kahlid walked in with the two men who’d first confronted him
in this prison. They had towels, a dozen or more, rolled up. And a sledgehammer.