Set Free (6 page)

I am alive.

In what circumstances does someone use those three words? I can think of only three. One: in times of personal triumph—successfully scaling Mount Everest; landing a dream job. Two: exclaiming physical exaltation—having sex with a beautiful woman; completing your first full marathon. Three: in moments of survival—when you’ve escaped, barely, the threat of certain death. Regardless of the circumstance—even if you’re struggling for air atop a mountain, admitting to yourself that the woman you just slept with is not your wife, or realizing just how precarious your existence really is—whenever you can say those three words—I AM ALIVE—it feels damn good.

With my blindfold now repositioned so that I couldn’t see a thing, two hands dragged me from the back of the van. Being outside had never felt so good. Fresh air. Gentle breeze. Pleasant, earthy smells.

I’d become a bit of a sleuth during my incarceration, specializing in using senses that I normally took for granted to provide me with clues. Changes in the sound the tires made suggested we’d eventually left paved road for gravel and maybe even dirt. Popping in my ears told me our elevation had changed. Given the time it took to reach our destination, my best guess was that we’d ascended into the Atlas Mountains—probably Toubkal, the country’s highest peak, in southwestern Morocco, only two hours from Marrakech.

I was alive, but I didn’t expect that status to last long. Soon, I suspected, I would be hurtling down the side of that same mountain. The plot, unpleasant as it was for me, made sense. The chance of my bloodied and broken body ever being found in such a desolate area was probably pretty low.

As the men silently led me to my fate, I sucked in fresh drafts of air, deeply, exuberantly, as if they were my last, for surely they were. I began to think of Mikki, and Jenn, and various family and friends. Just as quickly, I pushed them out of my mind. The images simply hurt too much.

The distance between what I’d become and what I was about to be—dead—was not such a lengthy one. Physically, there wasn’t much left to save. It was my mind and soul that needed protecting.

In those final moments, as I was being steered toward my end, I suddenly realized something important. Incredible things lived in my mind and soul: memories of loving and being loved, laughing, being cared for and taking care of others, friendships, kindnesses, moments of amazement and awe. There was nothing these men could do to destroy them. They were greater than any of this. They existed in a place I was sadly deficient to describe, a kind of “me” cloud. They would survive beyond whatever happened to me here today.

Whoa. Deep.

Apparently I’d suddenly become a man of spirituality. Of faith. Be it the influence of a guardian angel, or even God, or maybe nothing more than body chemicals run amok in my body doing strange things to my brain—whatever it was, I believed. As much as I’d believed anything in my entire life. I believed in the survival of something greater than my physical being.

I was being propelled forward, my feet tripping across rough, uneven surfaces, the men’s fingers clawing my armpits as they urged me along. Just like when I’d been beaten, I felt myself floating above it all. I gazed down on the ghastly scene, the three of us proceeding at death march speed, to the edge of the precipice from which I would be tossed. I felt weightless, free, at peace.

Except I’d written the wrong ending.

There was no precipice. There was no end-over-end tumble down Toubklal mountain.

Instead, I heard a door opening, its bottom edge scraping harshly against hardened earth. The rope binding my hands was loosened. With one final thrust forward, I was set free.

The door closed.

Silence.

Were they gone?

Was I alone?

Unencumbered, my trembling hands rose to the blindfold. Slowly, slowly, I lowered it.

I was ready for anything. Anything but what I saw.

Hand in hand, Jenn and I approached the dead fountain. Just as the ransom note instructed us to. In my left hand, I carried a briefcase. Inside, astonishingly, was ten million dollars. None of it ours. The money had been supplied by the FBI. On the off chance the kidnappers actually got their hands on it—an eventuality that was nowhere in the plan—each bill was marked and traceable.

We’d had two notes. Both identically prepared with letters and words cut from magazines and newspapers. Both appeared in our post office box with the regular delivery. Both were effectively devoid of clues as to who sent them. The first note told us they had Mikki. The second asked for the money, with instructions on when and where to deliver it.

The investigators were frustrated. Other than through the media—to which there was no guarantee the kidnappers even paid attention—there’d been no opportunity for them to communicate directly with the hostage takers and, consequently, no opportunity for negotiations. “Highly irregular,” they called it. Highly effective, as far as I could see. At least so far.

Along with the cash, the briefcase also contained a message. It said everything the officials would have said to the hostage takers, if they could have. Most pointedly that they would never get their hands on the money without proof that Mikki was still alive and well. Although the ten million was in the case, the case itself was constructed of blast-proof titanium, and could only be opened by a complex alphanumeric code entered into a keypad. The agents figured the kidnappers assumed they’d be safe to retrieve the case without interference as long as they still held onto Mikki. Which was true. But the FBI rarely play on the side of any game where the foregone conclusion is their own defeat.

With a visible shake to my hand, I dropped the briefcase into the dried-out bowl of the fountain, which had long ago stopped spewing water. For a moment we stood there, our eyes traveling the circumference of the clearing, hoping beyond reasonable hope that suddenly—miraculously, jubilantly, mercifully—our daughter would appear and rush into our arms.

That did not happen.

Just the typical, casual activity of any urban park on a sunny weekday morning.

“Jaspar, suppose this doesn’t work?” Jenn whispered.

I squeezed her hand. It felt cold, clammy, nearly lifeless. We’d placed all of our faith in the expertise of people we’d met only a week ago. Under normal circumstances, such an action would be foolhardy, unwise. But nothing about this was normal or logical.

“It has to work, baby,” I said. “There’s no other way. Mikki will come back to us. Very soon.”

We turned, marched back to our car, and drove away.

Two days later, the case was still in the fountain.

Two days after that, a third note arrived in the mail.

The kidnappers claimed to have spotted police and FBI surveillance teams in the park. They were unhappy about that. In the same bizarre, cut-out-letter fashion, they threatened to give us only one more chance. We were to deliver the money to a different location. If they were allowed to retrieve it unseen, Mikki would appear on our doorstep that same evening. Again, negotiation was not an option.

“We have to do it their way!” Jenn’s voice was stern as she addressed the lead FBI agent in our front room, standing as tall and motionless as a slab of granite. “I want my daughter back now!”

I could read the look in the man’s eyes. Silently, he was saying: “Do you have ten million dollars to make that happen?” Instead, he said, “If we give them the money without proof that your daughter is still alive, I promise you, Mrs. Wills, the chances of Mikki showing up on your doorstep are less than zero.”

“How do you know that? It’s not your daughter! It’s easy for you to take risks with someone’s life when it’s not someone you love!”

“Jenn,” I reached for her hand. I agreed with everything she was saying, but I knew emotional responses weren’t going to help save Mikki. She knew it too. “They want Mikki back as much as we do. They really do. We just have to figure out the best way to make that happen.”

“Your husband is right,” the agent said. Although there was no visible sign of it, he should have been grateful for my intervention. It may have just saved him a bruised cheek. “I know this isn’t easy. I know how horrible this feels. We—all of us here—want what you want.”

“No!” She wasn’t done yet. “I know you want to get Mikki back. But you want to catch the bad guys too. If you don’t, that means you’ve failed. I don’t care about that. I don’t care if these people take the money and live happily ever after in Aruba. All I care about is having my baby back. She’s only thirteen, for God’s sake! She’s a child!” Jenn began to sob. I knew her well enough to know she hated how she sounded, hated that she was crying. “Goddammit, you have to help us!”

“We will,” he promised.

“How?” I asked, increasing my pressure on Jenn’s hand. “You need to tell us exactly what we’re going to do next.”

Exchanging uneasy glances with his second-in-command, he said, “We do it your way.”

“Really?”

Jenn perked up. “We give them the money? No extra demands? No bomb-proof briefcase?”

He hesitated, then added, “With one proviso.”

“Tell us,” I said.

“We need to be there. Watching. We’ll be absolutely invisible this time, but we need to be there.”

Jenn began to balk. I squeezed her hand even harder, a silent signal to hold off.

“It’s the only insurance you’ll have,” he continued. “If Mikki isn’t sent home as promised, we’ll have a next step. Otherwise, it’s over. For us. For you. For Mikki.”

Slowly, as if her neck were made of metal rods, Jenn nodded her assent.

Two days later, we made the drop.

The briefcase was never picked up. Mikki never came home.

The enclosure was rectangular, with mud-colored cement walls and a metal grate roof. Having been shoved inside—the door locked, bindings released, blindfold down around my neck—I got the first look at what would become my new home.

My knees buckled. Suddenly I was face-up on the ground, spread-eagled, looking up through the grate at a vista of impenetrable darkness. The ground beneath me was rough but warm from a long day baking in the sun. Its heat began to soak into my skin. The night air was thick with the scent of freshly foraged hay and aged manure. I knew I would not move again until the next day.

It might have been mid-morning by the time the sun rose far enough to breach the top of the enclosure, beaming fingers working their way across my forehead and swollen eyes, urging me awake. The first thing I saw was the pattern of the metal grate that covered the entire structure, as effective at allowing the light in as keeping me from getting out. I wondered how long before the crisscross design would burn itself into my skin.

Having survived the night into a day I had been convinced I’d never see, it occurred to me that, at that very moment—the same moment I began to believe I might live—my loved ones, thirty-five hundred miles away, would begin to believe I was dead.

What else could they think? A gambit had been played. Tit offered for tat. All players had lost. Via photographs and multiple beatings, the Huns had issued their threat and demonstrated their willingness to cause my demise. Whatever they’d asked for, they didn’t get. What choice was left?

Instead, I’d been spared. Why? Maybe the threat had always been an empty one. Maybe they’d never really intended to kill me. Maybe they simply didn’t have the guts. So, instead, they dumped me here. Who knew what was coming next. Only one thing was clear: I wasn’t dead yet. But for my family, for Jenn, for our friends, the writing on the wall would tell an entirely different story.

Our story came to a bitter end on the third Monday after the second failed attempt to deliver Mikki’s ransom money. As had become our habit, we were sitting together on the living room sofa, from where we had an unobstructed view of the front yard. We’d know the precise moment the mailman made his daily delivery.

We were out the front door and at the box before he had time to close the lid. I saw the look of sympathy on his kindly face as he silently moved off, knowing full well what had been happening at this address for the past month. The media attention had been so intense, he’d have to have been living under a rock not to.

I reached in and pulled out the slight pile of mail.

If Jenn’s eyes had been hands, they would have been ripping through the collection of letters, flyers, and magazines with lightning speed.

We both knew it at the same time.

The insensitive words of an “abduction specialist” on some late-night talk show echoed in our heads: “…with each day that goes by without hearing from the kidnappers, it’s with greater and greater certainty that we, and the police, must presume that Mikki Wills is dead.”

Dead.

How could such a small, insignificant-looking word carry such weight? It made me gasp for breath every time I heard it.

“That’s it, then,” Jenn’s hollowed-out voice slipped past pale lips, a final declaration made more to herself than to me.

I knew what she meant. Whether we wanted to or not, we’d unconsciously put a time limit on optimism. A little bit of sand drained from our hourglass of hope each day without the money being picked up, without Mikki coming home—as the FBI and police vacated our house, as calls from media outlets dwindled, as well-meaning relatives and neighbors stopped dropping by. When the looks of caring strangers at the grocery store turned from reassuring to sympathetic. We were no longer parents with a chance at recovering their daughter; we were a lost cause to be pitied. We became angry, bad-tempered, dismissive of others and their useless words of faint comfort—because, deep down, we agreed with them.

“Not yet, Jenn,” I implored, reaching out for her. I felt exceptionally exposed, standing out there in our front yard, certain that every eye in the neighborhood, the city, the world, was on us—watching us, wondering what we would do. Would we fall apart? Or would we rally one more time?

Jenn pulled back, staring at me as if I’d just missed the main point of a story she’d been telling. “Yes, Jaspar. It’s over. Our daughter is gone. Mikki is gone.”

It scared me how calm and dispassionate she sounded. We’d played an unfair game over the past weeks, one that neither of us had a hope of winning. When either of us showed an excessive flash of emotion or passion, whether positive or negative, the other immediately, in an almost Pavlovian fashion, reacted with the opposite sentiment.

I don’t think we did it to hurt each other. Instinctively, we must have known it was the only chance we had to keep it together. We were each other’s stopgap, personal pressure valves. If one of us became too sad, the other said something happy. If one of us expressed hope, the other played devil’s advocate. We knew that if both of us were feeling the same thing, the power of it would be too much. The fall—for we would inevitably fall—from whatever extreme we were experiencing, good or bad, would be catastrophic.

Here and now, in this moment, standing in the front yard next to our mailbox, for Jenn our game had officially been called off. Her statement, announcing her belief that our daughter was gone, dead, finished, was a simple proclamation of fact.

Steady hands reached out for me, cupping my face. Her head moved up, then down, up, then down, as if to punctuate her certainty and influence my own.

The mail fluttered to the ground.

“No,” I whispered.

She continued to nod, her beautiful eyes pulling me close, comforting me, caressing me with love, as they so often had in our marriage.

“No.” I tried again, knowing deep down that I was only fooling myself, hoping to prolong my time in a world where I believed my daughter still lived.

How ironic, I thought, as I lay unmoving on the ground of my rectangle, blazing sun beating down on me. How ironic that it was in this place—this miserable, awful place—that I would find what I’d needed so badly on that black day by the mailbox. I found hope. Hope for Mikki. Hope that my baby had not just disappeared from our lives, never to be seen again. Hope born of the belief that, since I had been spared, she might have been too.

For the first time since I’d been taken, my cracked, bruised lips spread into a painful smile.