Set Free (5 page)

I was surprised when a third man entered the room. Other than the two Huns, I hadn’t seen another human being since I’d been taken. By the look on the new guy’s face, he was surprised to see me too.

With only a single narrow opening—I’d come to think of it as an air hole—at the top of the room, I’d had no reliable measure of passing time, but I estimated that by this point I’d been in captivity for over a week. In all that time I’d had no way to see my face—no mirror, no reflective surfaces. But I could guess at the vision this newcomer was staring at. A man who’d been severely beaten, bloodied and bruised, covered in cuts and scrapes, hair and clothes in filthy disarray. The water I’d been given was by the cupful. I could use it to clean myself or drink. I drank it. The picture could not have been a pretty one. The look in his eyes confirmed it.

The two older men—Hun and the newcomer—began to argue. Young Hun stood back as usual, silent, near the door where he would stay unless called upon. My mind began to wander. I’d been having an increasingly difficult time focusing on anything. I’m not sure whether I was sleeping more or simply losing consciousness with some regularity—often I’d find myself startled awake by some small sound when I hadn’t even been aware of falling asleep. The heat, the murkiness, the odious smell of my prison, the wracking pain in most parts of my body—from injuries, from hunger—all once intolerable, now meant little to me.

A year ago, I would have claimed that nothing in my privileged life could have prepared me for this. I’d been your typical American who had more than he could ever need, and took most of it for granted. Then Mikki was taken. Lying on this floor, my skin caked with blood and filth, preparing for death, listening to these men argue over how to end my life, was nothing compared to what came after losing my daughter. I’d prayed to every god I could think of for that ordeal to be over. For my daughter to be found and brought safely back to us. Now I prayed for the same thing: I wanted this to be over. But this time, I had no expectations of a safe return home.

As the staccato ping pong of voices played in the background—two strangers determining my fate—all I could think about was how Mikki must have felt when the kidnapper took her. Evidence suggested she’d never even made it home that afternoon—which meant he’d grabbed her off the street, or maybe lured her somewhere. Either way, she would have immediately known something very bad was happening to her. She’d have been frightened from the start. Just the thought of it brought a weight to my chest that threatened my every breath—a feeling once distressingly alien, but now all too familiar. The only difference today was that I simply didn’t have enough moisture left in my body for the tears that normally accompanied the attack.

It was a beautiful spring day when we’d splurged on a big party to celebrate Mikki’s seventh birthday. She was a fairy princess: beautiful, with hair of woven gold, cheeks perpetually pink, eyes an astoundingly rich cobalt blue, and a smile that could turn barren tundra into a botanical wonderland. The spitting image of her mother. My heart exploded with love each and every time I laid eyes on either one of them.

Having been at school for a year and having already developed her reputation as a social animal, Mikki had many friends and wanted to invite them all. We’d just moved into the new house, complete with a wide open backyard and small above-ground swimming pool. It was the perfect setting in which to create a seven-year-old’s dreamland. Jenn went overboard with decorations, attempting to make up for the store-bought cake. We all knew any confection she’d bake would be an unmitigated disaster.

I was in charge of entertainment. I couldn’t swing a pony—more my dream than Mikki’s, anyway—but instead hired a company specializing in children’s birthday parties to provide a magician, a balloon artist, and—the pièce de résistance—a clown named Beeper.

The cake was quickly demolished by hungry little mouths, the gifts ripped open. Forty kids and thirteen parents were seated throughout the yard, finishing off ice cream floats, when Beeper made a noisy entrance in all his multi-colored, polka-dotted, oversized-shoe, red-nosed grandiosity. Mikki—who’d been strategically placed to be the first to greet the surprise guest—took one look, threw back her head, and let loose a blood-curdling scream heard in Fenway Park. 

With her princess tiara flying to the ground and fat tears spurting from her eyes, Mikki found me in the crowd and ran toward me as if her life depended on it. I fell to my knees and held open my arms just in time for her to crash into them. Within seconds, my shirt was sodden with baby princess tears. Jenn was leaning over my shoulder saying logical things in a sweet, calming voice, attempting to convince our daughter that the clown was not actually there to eat her. All I did was hold my little girl, one hand gently rubbing her shuddering back, the other cradling her golden head. In that moment, the clown was my enemy too. I would have done anything to protect my child from dangers real or imagined. I pledged to play that role for the rest of my life.

I failed.

I wasn’t there to protect my daughter when she needed me most. Instead, I was busy feeding my ego, inviting some sycophant to tell me how great I was, spouting bon mots about my newest writing project as if that was the most important thing in the world. No one was there to rub her back or cradle her head. She’d been alone. Frightened. Confused by what was happening to her and why. Wondering when mommy and daddy would save her. Not yet knowing they never would.

I was ruined that day.

There was no reason to go on.

“Kill me.” I calmly said the words aloud.

The two men stopped arguing and stared at me. I prayed they understood. I prayed they’d grant my wish.

Once again I was tied up and gagged. This time lying contorted on the floor of a van, which was not as bad as you’d expect. Not that I’ve ever had much call to think about such a thing. If I was an author of thrillers or murder mysteries, maybe then. But I don’t write those kinds of books—or even read them much. They don’t appeal to me. I write about travel; I write about my observations of people coping with life’s normal challenges—often with humorous undertone.

This was not normal.

This was not humorous.

I could think of only one reason for my kidnappers to be moving me: their plan had failed. Whoever was meant to exchange something in return for my freedom had either refused or somehow played their cards wrong. It was time to make good on their threat. It was time to kill me. But, for some reason, they couldn’t do it where I was being held.

Based on the fact that the van was packed with several thick rolls of carpet, beside which I was now lying, I began to suspect that the day I’d been abducted from the Marrakech airport, I’d ended up not far from where I’d been planning to go anyway. What better place to stash a hostage than the crowded, famously-bewildering
medina
,
where everything and everyone could get lost—and often did? It was a place choked from daybreak to nightfall with merchants, customers, suppliers, tourists, voyeurs, and cadres of enterprising thieves—the air hoarse with the ceaseless chatter of commerce. It was a place where almost nothing would seem out of the ordinary.

Over the past days, I’d frequently heard muffled voices rising through the floorboards from somewhere below me. I’d guessed the voices belonged to my kidnappers. But what if they didn't? What if all this time I was on the second floor of a carpet vendor’s shop—one amongst countless others, each a carbon copy of its neighbors, buried deep amidst the endless, crisscrossing streets of the ancient marketplace?

Now the game had changed. It was one thing to keep someone captive in a room above your place of business, another to kill him there.

I was content in the back of the van—comfortable, even. It was nice to finally be out of the cell-like space that had been my jail for the past several days. It smelled immeasurably better, and the fresh air washing over me from a slit of open window felt like cool silk as it brushed my fevered skin.

After interminable stops and starts as the van wove its way out of the
medina
then through busy city traffic, we eventually reached a cruising speed that told me we were on a highway. We’d left Marrakech. Disturbing but not surprising.

Time passed in a foggy blur, the steady hum of the tires lulling me into fits of sleep. There was no use wondering or caring about where I was going, or what would happen when we got there. I already knew.

The agent in charge of Mikki’s case told us her abductors likely hadn’t taken her far. Maybe somewhere on the outskirts of the city, where they’d be less likely to be spotted by nosy neighbors but still close to the scene of the crime. Maybe not even that far. He was concerned about why they were using the postal system rather than a faster delivery method for their communications with us. The general consensus was that the kidnappers believed that mailing the ransom notes made it easier for them to keep their identities hidden, or—worse from our perspective—they didn’t really care how fast this played out.

By the time the second note arrived in our mailbox, Mikki had been gone for five days. Attention from the media had grown exponentially with each passing hour. The resultant frenzy was quickly becoming unbearable to deal with.

Watching Jenn step out of the bathroom that night, my mouth dropped. I was already in bed, under a heavy layer of blankets. Even though we’d been experiencing summer-like temperatures all week, Jenn was always cold. Now I saw why. In only five days, the woman looked as if she’d lost ten pounds. She was wearing a nightshirt I used to love seeing her in. It hugged each curve in the right place, was sexily threadbare, and when she sat down the hem rode up high. But today the garment might have been made for a woman twice her size. It hung off her frame like an oversized bed sheet.

The sight took me by surprise, and I could feel my throat choke up as I jumped out of bed to embrace her. “Oh, Jenn.”

I wrapped my arms around her and hoped I could somehow infuse her with my own warmth. She didn’t seem surprised or question the sudden show of affection. She was aware of the toll the last few days had taken on her physically. Her head fell into the crook of my neck and I felt pinpricks of ice on my naked back; I realized they were her fingers.

We stood that way for several minutes. Just breathing. Just finding a way to keep on surviving.

“Come on,” I finally said, releasing her but holding on to the frozen mitt of her hand. “Get into bed. I’ll make you some tea. That’ll warm you up.”

“No, don’t,” she quickly said, pulling me under the covers with her. “I’ve had enough tea to sail a ship. Just stay with me. Talk to me. Tell me everything is going to be…” She stopped, as if frozen, then: “AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!” she cried out.

I tightened my hold, hoping the agents sitting downstairs in our living room wouldn’t be alarmed and come barging into our bedroom, guns ablaze. But I knew they wouldn’t: they were used to this. Used to dealing with people who’d fallen into a hole of utter misery and, struggle as they might, never managed to crawl out, only getting deeper until…

“It’s a good thing, you know,” I said, swiping a tear from her cheek with my thumb.

“What?” she croaked, a heartbreaking look of hope on her face, as if there could possibly be something positive happening in our lives, some bit of good news that I’d somehow forgotten to share with her.

“The second note,” I said. “It means they’re ready to make a deal. We can find a way to get Mikki home.”

“They want ten million dollars, Jaspar. We don’t have that kind of money. We could give them everything we have—this house, my salary, your royalties, whatever we could beg, borrow and steal—and it still wouldn’t be enough. God, Jaspar, what’s going to happen to our baby when they realize we can’t pay?”

“Jenn, you can’t think like that. We’ll find a way to make this work. These people—whoever they are—they’re finally making a move. They’ve given us a date and a place. It’s only two days from now. In two days we’ll have Mikki back.” I pulled away and patted the area between us, feeling the warmth of the sheets radiate through the palm of my hand. “We’re going to put her right here, between us, and we’re not going to let her leave this bed until she’s thirty-five.”

The area around Jenn’s mouth, where sexy grins once lived, grew less taut. It was the best she could do. How I longed for her to smile—like she did the first night we met in that campus pub, her pouring shooters down my throat. Or like she did beneath her wedding veil as she floated down the aisle towards me. If only she would smile again—just for a moment, a brief moment. Then maybe my heart could stop clenching, and the agony would go away, just for a moment.

“They want us to go on TV,” she said after a minute. “To do one of those things where we plead with the assholes who took her to spare her life and give her back to us.”

“I know.”

“It’s ludicrous. It’s not like the kidnappers are going to be sitting around watching TV, see us and suddenly think, hey, you know what, they’re right. Let’s just call this off and send the little girl back to her mommy and daddy. The media are the only ones who get anything out of that. A perfect photo op of the famous author and his wife bawling their eyes out. Nothing better to sell papers and spike ratings.”

“I know.”

“I can’t do it, Jaspar. I can’t go on TV and beg for Mikki’s life. I would if I believed for even a second that it would help, but it won’t. It never does. These guys want money. Lots of it. They stole a child for Chrissakes! You think they care about what we have to say?”

“I know. You’re right. But we have to give them something. I know how the media works, Jenn. If we do nothing, they’ll only hound us longer and louder until we do. We need to say something.”

“Why? Because you’re worried how we’ll look if we don’t?” She sat up straighter, eyes heating up. I knew the pose. I knew the look. I braced. “If we don’t step in front of the cameras and beg those monsters to give our daughter back, then suddenly
we’re
the monsters? Suddenly we’re suspects in our own daughter’s disappearance? Is that it? You’re worried about how that will make you look? How it’ll ruin the reputation of the oh-so-handsome, ever-so-charming, world-famous Jaspar Wills?” She was a battering ram in desperate need of a door to smash against.

“Jenn, you know I don’t give a shit about any of that. I’m only thinking about the right thing to do. I don’t know the perfect answer. And neither do you. All I know is that we have to do something.”

As quickly as it ignited, her fire extinguished. I got it. We both had unquenchable cauldrons full of hot, boiling anger bubbling up inside of us, with no one to douse—except the kidnappers. But they weren’t around. We’d each had mini-explosions over the past few days, usually directed at each other. When it happened, the best the other could do was ride it out, and then move on. Until now we were unaccustomed to fighting with each other like this, using rage and resentment as weapons. We were on the unfamiliar frontlines of a war we didn’t start or even understand. But we knew that, unless we had each other’s back, we’d never make it out alive.

“What about Katie?” Jenn suddenly said.

“What about Katie?” I asked. She and Jenn had gotten close over the past six months. I didn’t really know the woman, but I encouraged the friendship. Jenn was so busy being the perfect mom and lawyer, she forgot about just being Jenn. She was in desperate need of the kind of relationship that involved two women spending time together doing stuff that girlfriends do, spouses not included.

“She’s a reporter…or a journalist or something like that,” Jenn said. “Out of everyone we know, she’ll know what to do. She’ll know how to handle the media.”

I nodded. Relieved. A problem that actually had a solution. “Sounds good.”

Suddenly energized, Jenn hopped out of bed. “I’ll call her right now.”

“Now?”

“She’s up. She’s always telling me how she does her best work late at night.”

Having arrived at our destination, the back door of the van creaked open. Through a small sliver in the strip of fabric that covered my eyes, I could see it was night. Certain things are best done under the cover of darkness.