“This is the man I told you about, Bahjat,” Mila said. “Sam Capra.” I was surprised she used my name but I didn’t let the shock show. A woman like Mila had a reason.
Bahjat Zaid shook my hand, measuring me with his eyes. He had a firm grip and a firmer stare. He looked at me like a boss looks at an employee who might be about to give him bad news.
We sat; Mila asked if I wanted coffee. I said no.
Bahjat Zaid had a narrow face, worn with anguish, and he spoke his English with the faintest of Beirut accents. His navy silk tie was perfectly knotted at a collar of snow-white cotton. A cup of coffee, grown cold, sat untouched at his elbow. He was immaculate and enraged, all at once.
“Tell me about your daughter, Mr. Zaid,” I said.
“Yasmin. She is my pride. My only child. Last year she completed advanced degrees in both chemistry and physics. She is twenty-five. She is about one point seven meters tall. Her…” He stopped suddenly, as though embarrassed by the spill of words.
“Yes,” I said, “but Mila can tell me all that. Tell me about her .”
He blinked, and opened a manila folder next to him. He seemed to gather himself.
“This is Yasmin,” Bahjat Zaid said, pushing a photo toward me.
I studied it. The young woman was lovely. A spill of dark hair, eyes alive with joy and intelligence, a narrow smile. She wore a pretty blue sweater and jeans, and the sky behind her was gray, pregnant with rain. She was pushing a windblown hank of hair from her eyes. Behind her a large estate stood, trees swaying in the wind.
“That’s a nice house.”
He swelled with pride.
“My estate in Kent. It is historically important. It was to serve as a redoubt for the government should England be invaded. It has underground offices, a bunker, that would have housed Churchill in the event of a Nazi occupation. The house has been in my wife’s family for many years. We have a town house in London, but we love living in Kent. So did Yasmin.”
I didn’t say that if England fell to invasion, Kent, being in the southeast corner, would likely go first. “How interesting for you,” I said. There were more photos: Yasmin with her family, Yasmin with the estate staff, Yasmin on horseback, Yasmin graduating from university.
The next photo was Yasmin as a small child, looking up from a book. She was smiling, her two front teeth missing. “She indicated from an early age she wished to be a scientist. You see? She is reading a picture book about Madame Curie. Given my business interests, I felt a position in one of my companies would suit her, and I began to prepare her for such a career.”
I thought, You decided her future when she was still missing her front teeth? “Your companies?”
“Mr. Zaid is one of the partners in Militronics. A major firm that does a great deal of business with Western governments,” Mila said. I knew the company; they made a large variety of small-scale military equipment. Digital binoculars, night-vision goggles, bulletproof vests, and specialized military software and hardware. Their technology was considered among the best in the world; the Company was a client.
“Yes. Yasmin works in a research facility near Budapest. Mostly on defensive technologies: building better armor, more efficient weaponry and equipment. Her research centers on using nanotechnology.”
“And how long has she been missing?”
“Twenty-five days.”
“Has she ever gone missing before?”
“No. Never. She was always a most obedient daughter.”
Obedient. Not a word you heard every day. It was up there with nanotechnology on the rare-word scale, and my own words telling Howell about the Money Czar thundered in my ears.
“You haven’t reported her disappearance to the police,” I said.
“No. I was told not to.”
“A ransom call?”
“Not exactly. Yasmin left work at our Budapest research facility on a Friday evening. As usual, she worked late-she is a devoted employee.” He pushed a printout toward me; it was from a calendar application. Nearly every hour was blocked out, for research or work or, in some cases, self-improvement projects. Learn Chinese. Read up on Puccini operas. Study macro-economics. “You see, her days are highly structured. She works best that way, so I have cultivated this fine habit in her and she agrees.”
“You keep her organized,” I said.
The dryness of my comment went past him. “I didn’t hear from her on the weekend, but that is not unusual. Then on Sunday evening I received this message.” Bahjat Zaid tapped on the laptop and a video unfurled on the screen. Yasmin, fiddling with a key at her apartment building’s entrance. The angle of the camera suggested the video had been shot from across the street, zooming in for detail on the young woman. The doorstep light gave off a feeble glow; there was little ambient street noise, no traffic cutting between lens and woman. Late night. Yasmin dropped her keys, and as she knelt to recover them, two men moved into the picture, seizing her arms, stuffing a cloth over her face. The camera caught her gaze, wide with terror. She struggled and the men rushed her away from the door, into the back of a waiting van. The van peeled away. No license plate in the shot. The cameraman had been very careful.
But not careful enough.
“Could you play that again for me?” I asked. My throat dried and I felt the ache of my near-strangulation in the apartment in Brooklyn. He nodded and did so. I watched it carefully. “Again, please.” He replayed the clip. But this time I studied Bahjat Zaid. His mouth worked as he watched his daughter’s abduction.
“Do you recognize those men?” he asked me. “You look as though you do.”
One of the kidnappers, I felt sure, was the man who’d tried to kill me in my apartment, with the Novem Soles tattoo. “Yes, I do. He’s dead now.”
His gaze met mine.
“My Yasmin, being manhandled by those animals. It makes me sick.” He pinched the tip of his nose with his fingertips. “They have no right. My daughter belongs to me.”
I didn’t like that last comment at all. “What happened next, Mr. Zaid?”
“There was a phone number included with the e-mailed video. I phoned it immediately. A man spoke to me. He had a slight Dutch accent. I was instructed not to call the police or report her kidnapping, otherwise they would kill Yasmin.”
“Was there a ransom demand?”
“Yes. I was asked to transfer five hundred thousand euros to an account in the Caymans. I did so immediately.”
“And all they asked for was money?”
“Yes. I complied and they did not return her.” Pain flashed in his eyes.
“And then. The next e-mail. Another video.” He moused over a window on his laptop; another video began to play. The Centraal train station in Amsterdam; I recognized it from the photos that Mila had shown me. A dark-haired woman entered the train station, a knapsack on her back. The video jumped to her walking out the doors. Without the knapsack, the scarf concealing the bottom half of her face. The scarred man walked four feet or so behind her now.
The clip stopped.
“The train station explosion hit ten minutes later,” Mila said. “Five dead.”
“They have made Yasmin look like a monster.” Exhaustion framed Zaid’s face. He got up and paced the floor, pale with worry. “Her face-it is so blank. Like it has been wiped clean and a nothingness put behind her eyes.”
“You haven’t heard from her or the kidnappers again?”
“No.” Zaid shook his head. “I have heard nothing.” Ice coated his words. “They don’t need to ask me for anything. They have destroyed her, and if this video gets out, they will have destroyed my family, my company, as well.”
27
You think she’s still alive,” I said.
“I have to hope-if they wanted her dead, they would have exploded the bomb while she carried it. This video is leverage against me.”