“A radiologist?”
“Perhaps.”
“Ahmadinejad is being treated for cancer?”
“Who said anything about Ahmadinejad?”
“Since when do bodyguards and agents follow a doctor around if—”
She brings a file up on the screen that hides him for a moment, though the video connection remains active in a window beneath.
“Mashe Melemet is a PhD, not an MD. He may design medical radiation equipment, but he does not practice on it.” Grace blames Knox for this cat-and-mouse gameplay. Prior to her working with John Knox, Grace was all facts and figures. She bowed at the altar of numbers. Knox has trained her by example to tease with information. She has come to enjoy the game. Immensely.
“What have you done?”
“I placed a call requesting his university transcripts, which were e-mailed to me.”
“This is why you are calling. You’re calling to crow.”
“Mashe Melemet took his doctorate at the Physics Institute’s LHEP — the Laboratory for High Energy Physics at Universität Bern. His early research and published material, highly regarded.” She gives him the best smug look she can conjure. “He studied abroad eleven years. Returned to Iran. He teaches for eight months and then goes off the grid.”
“Mashe Okle surfaces,” Knox says, speculating while emphasizing the change in family name. Nuclear physics. This is the Middle East.
“I love puzzles.” It’s true. Grace’s attraction to accounting, forensic accounting in particular, is the precision of the numbers always needing to agree. She loves a world where everything balances. Harmony. It’s the polar opposite of the family discord that drove her to seek independence.
“Jesus,” Knox says.
Grace gloats. She wants so badly to see his face. Is about to minimize the file in order to see the video window when the door to her apartment breaks open behind her.
Two men come at her, closing the distance before she fully swivels in her chair. Sitting is a position of vulnerability. She knows it. They know it. As she flexes to stand, one of them stiff-arms her back into the chair. Grace swings her foot, aiming for the outside of the other’s knee, but it’s a powerless blow and he barely reacts. Grace could try to fight, but reason gets the better of her.
The men reach for her, clearly expecting resistance. But Grace uses their tactics against them, allowing them to turn her back to the keyboard. One pins her arms as the other struggles to get a cloth bag over her head. This gesture triggers the floodgates of terror: confinement, torture, rape. She screams, bucking and writhing and straining to be free. A hand clamps over the bag, muffling her, hits her hard enough that her lips swell and she tastes blood. This, in turn, causes another instinctive struggle to be free.
Rutherford Risk deals with kidnapping on nearly a daily basis. Negotiation. Dead drops. The tracking and freeing of hostages accounts for over half of Rutherford Risk’s revenue. In this matter, Grace is far too well informed.
She is overpowered — itself a dreadful feeling. Her left hand stretches blindly for the keyboard. It’s a three key combination. Her first try misses. She fights to pull her right arm from the man’s containing grasp. He’s now bear-hugging from the side. She snaps her head decisively, knowing that the crown of the forehead can deliver a head butt with surprising strength and sustainability.
But that’s unavailable. Taking the blow just above her ear sends sparks shooting across her vision. Her opponent didn’t see it coming, though. He loosens his hold. It’s not much, more a reflex relaxation as the nervous system is stunned, but it’s enough for a final blind try at the keyboard.
Grace slides the index finger of her left hand across the keys, feeling for the raised bump on the F. Her middle and ring fingers form an isosceles triangle and she pushes down, with no way of determining if she has succeeded.
She hears the lid of the machine smack closed. Her hands are secured with a plastic tie. She’s gagged with duct tape; then the hood is lowered a second time. Stuff flies noisily off the desk. She imagines them taking both the laptop and iPhone power cords. In her mind’s eye: a face similar to one of the men guarding Mashe Okle. The same man?
Hears something dragging across the floor as she’s moved toward the door. Each man has her under an armpit. She makes herself dead weight, letting her bound ankles drag.
They bump her down the fire exit stairs, indifferent to her pain. She’s shoved into a car; a minivan based on the sound of its sliding door.
“Her phone?”
“Yes.”
“Turn it off. Pull the SIM.”
Some noise indicating effort. “Yes.”
“Battery from the laptop.”
“Done.”
The discussion between them is in Persian and surprisingly level-voiced. She retires any thought of overpowering them — it’s impossible with her wrists and ankles secured. The poison of fear has overcome her. She attempts to see through it and focus on the story. Story is everything. Story is the key to her survival.
23
Because of his brother Tommy’s often unstable and unpredictable condition, Knox uses a phone app to automatically record their video conversations. The same app records Grace’s abduction.
The video is jumpy, contributing to its surreal look. The first nail of panic spikes his chest; he works to remove it, strains to emotionally distance himself from Grace, knowing the importance of his response to her recovery.
His voice is deliberately, eerily calm, though his fingers tremble slightly as he dials Rutherford Risk’s emergency response number.
A fax tone. He keys in his ID. Three pronounced clicks.
“Case number?” A man’s voice.
Knox doesn’t recall being given one. “Unknown.” He recites his contract ID.
“ID comes back ‘on leave.’”
“Leave? I’m on an op, you idiot! My partner’s a two-oh-seven! Do your job. I need a track-and-trace ASAP. Give me Digital Services!” Two-oh-seven is the police code used for a kidnapping.
“Stand by.”
He connects with Kamat, Xin’s boss. Again, Knox uses the police code 207. Kamat’s reaction is professional and immediate.
“GPS tracks two blocks south-southeast and goes off-grid.”
“That’s all?”
“I will prioritize her signal with the lat/longs to be transmitted to you. Text number, please.” He sounds like he’s asking for a prescription.
Knox recites the phone number for the SIM chip currently in his phone. He repeats, “South-southeast?”
“Affirmative.”
“CCTV?”
“For Istanbul? They are not web available. Is it possible for us to hack the system? Likely. Probable, even. Six to ten hours.”
“You’ve got operatives in theater here!”
“You’re shown as on leave. I see no case number. Admin error, I suppose. But we are currently blind to you and the op.”
“Well, how about we change that?”
“Yes. Agreed.”
“And I need traffic cams! Now!”
“Copy.”
Hearing his own tone of voice, Knox apologizes. No sense in taking this out on Kamat. Sarge or some bean counter has screwed up the paperwork. Murphy’s Law.
He puts himself in Grace’s shoes.
“Set alerts for traffic incidents or accidents,” he tells Kamat. “Alarms. Police, fire and ambulance deployments. Traffic violations. Erratic driving.”
“Copy,” Kamat says.
“I’m sending over a low-rez vid of the abduction. Request face recognition. Clothing. Voice. Tats. Anything you can give me on these two.”
“Understood.”
Knox e-mails the video in three parts. Wants to do more. Now! The “rapture of capture” that he typically experiences — the palpable excitement brought on by his being hired for an extraction — is absent. Instead, he cares, cares deeply about the outcome, though he knows such emotion is more of a liability than an asset. The mantra that reverberates through his mind is this: Grace can take care of herself; I know her; her captors have no clue what they’ve taken on.