Chapter 16 #3
“Madame,” the man at the workbench said.
Pleasantly. “I told you on the telephone what would happen if any condition was not met.
You have met all of the conditions. I commend you.
You have been a model of compliance. This — “ he gestured, lightly, at Wendell, at the chair, at the small careful red on the concrete, “— this was always going to happen. He had seen our faces. I am sorry that you misunderstood. It was not for sale.”
I was looking at Wendell.
I could not look anywhere else.
His face was turned a quarter toward me. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. The expression on his face was the expression of a man who had been about to say something and had not been given time.
A hand came across my eyes from behind.
A cloth came across the hand.
The cloth smelled chemical and sweet and immediately wrong, the kind of wrong that the body recognized before the mind did, and I felt my legs go before I felt the room go, and I felt the room go before I felt my mouth go, and the last thing in my eyes before the dark came down was Wendell.
Icame up.
I came up the way a person comes up out of deep water—not all at once, in stages, the body remembering it had a body before the mind remembered it had a mind.
My cheek was on something. Vinyl. Cold against the skin.
A bench seat. The bench was moving. The bench was moving because the bench was inside a vehicle and the vehicle was on a road and the road had seams in it that came up through the chassis at regular intervals—thump-thump, thump-thump—the way the seams of a highway came up through a car at sixty miles an hour.
There was a bag over my head.
My wrists were tied behind my back. The ties were not zip ties. They were softer than that. Cloth, maybe. The professionals did not leave marks on the wrists of women they intended to deliver alive.
I tried to move my legs and my legs moved. Slowly. The drug was still in them. The drug was still in my mouth, in the back of my throat, sweet and chemical and wrong.
There were two voices. French. Front of the vehicle.
They were not speaking to me. They were speaking to each other, the way men spoke to each other on a long drive — bored, intermittent, the small flat exchanges of professionals who had done this many times before and would do it again.
I caught a word. Aéroport. I caught another. Météo.
I went under again.
—
I came up.
The road had changed. The surface under the vehicle was smoother now, the smoothness of a private road or a service road or the long flat asphalt of a parking apron, and the engine sound had changed too—the vehicle was slowing, the gears coming down, the men in the front going quiet the way men went quiet when they were near the end of a job.
Outside, somewhere, I heard a sound.
It was a sound I knew. I had heard it once in my life that I could remember—when I was nineteen and my grandmother had paid for me to fly to Rome to see the city she had left when she was eight.
I had walked across an apron at JFK in the dark and the sound had been everywhere, that particular dry mechanical whine, the spool-up of a small engine somewhere ahead.
A jet.
Not a commercial jet. Commercial jets were a different sound. This was smaller. This was the whine of a turbine being brought up to taxi speed on an open field.
A private airfield.
A private airfield meant a private jet. A private jet meant no customs queue and no boarding gate and no manifest that anyone outside this operation would ever see.
If I got on the plane, I was gone.
If I got on the plane, the family would not find me. Not for weeks. Not for months. Maybe not at all.
The vehicle stopped.
The engine went off. I heard a door open. Cold air came in. The cold air had a particular quality to it, the quality of cold air on an open field—wider than street cold, drier, a wind without buildings in the way.
A hand closed on my arm above the elbow. Not roughly. Professionally.
“Madame,” the voice said. The voice from the phone.
The voice from the workbench. “We are going to walk a short distance. I am going to remove the hood when you are inside the aircraft. If you would prefer to walk on your own feet, you may. If you would prefer to be carried, my colleague will carry you. Either is acceptable to us. Please decide.”
I did not answer.
He waited the count of three and then he said something in French to the man behind him and the hand on my arm tightened a fraction.
“Walk,” I said. The word came out thick. “I’ll walk.”
“Good. Thank you.”
They lifted me up by the elbow and stood me on my feet and the world wobbled and steadied.
The bag was still on my head. The cold came up through the soles of my boots from the apron.
I could hear the jet now without question, the spool of the engine somewhere ahead of us at maybe forty meters, the small high whine that meant it was almost ready.
I walked. I tried to hold onto Pietro.
The hand on my elbow guided me up.
Three steps. Metal. The clang of an aircraft stair under a boot.
I went up the three steps.
The wind shifted. The whine grew louder. Somewhere behind me, very far behind me, a city I had been safe in for nine hours was still going on, and nobody in it, not one single person, knew where I was.
The door closed behind me.
The dark held.