He had come to the country for the wrong reasons and stayed for worse ones. He’d volunteered to open new opportunities for Pepsi while operating out of Karachi, a city he would have had trouble placing in Pakistan before he’d volunteered, or rather insisted that he go, using the relatively light weight of his executive position to make the move for no more than six months. Gregory, his boss, and younger than he was by ten years, but with more international experience, had said, “Six months will seem like an eternity. Pakistan’s a young country. But you’ll feel something ancient there, and every now and then it doesn’t feel good. Not saying you won’t meet some wonderful people, even walking around in the markets. Hell, you can buy a Big Mac if you’re homesick. I don’t mean to be unnecessarily grim, Marc, but you watch the news. Educate yourself and be careful.” He’d done neither adequately.
The first times she’d come in, she had mostly asked for names of people in the States who would ransom him. Though she loosely accused him of being a spy, he had been kidnapped in order to exact a sum of money that would either finance her cause or that of the people she represented. He had been wandering where he shouldn’t have, out toward the slums of what he was told was Lyari Town, hoping to soothe his heart with images of greater poverty, when a cabdriver who spoke some English warned him of the danger and offered a ride back to his hotel. Because it was toward evening, he’d accepted the ride, and two blocks later the driver had slammed to a stop, and a man toting a machine gun emerged from a small shack and aimed the gun at his head while the driver climbed into the backseat and blindfolded him. They’d driven for hours; whether it was in circles or all the way out to Waziristan he had no way of knowing, though they weren’t in the mountains. When Azhar or Saabir, each afternoon, walked him for exercise around the perimeter of a house near the one where he was held, the air still seemed damp with the occasional salt-scent of the sea.
“You look no worse for the wear,” she said to him. “I see you have a change of clothes. Eating well?” He’d been given simple but generous meals of grains and peas and bread. “It would be an affront for a Pakistani not to act hospitably,” she added without irony. She said something to Azhar in what he believed he recognized as Urdu, and he heard the door open and close. She pulled the chair across the floor to the point she was only a couple of feet away. When she sat down, some damp fragrance briefly invaded his nostrils.
“Mr. Laurent,” she said. “May I call you Marc, now that we know each other a little better?”
“May I call you Jo?” he said to her, the first undercurrent of sarcasm he’d managed since his capture, because even in his state he’d bristled at her use of the word hospitably.
He expected she would leave the room, or call a man back in to slam his chair to the ground, or to slap him—something for this first expression of impertinence—but instead she said, “When I’m in the room alone with you, you’re certainly welcome.
“Mr. Laurent,” she continued. “Marc. We called some of the numbers you gave to us. Business associates. More business associates. Mr. Gregory McGuire expressed grave concern for you. But not one family member. None among that list of numbers.”
“No one in my family has the kind of money you’re looking for.”
She laughed lightly at this, a few high, musical notes that gradually deepened.
“You’re not talking to Saabir, who thinks all Americans are wealthy. I know what kind of money your family doesn’t have. And I don’t think for a minute the Pepsi corporation is going to hand over ten million dollars for a mid-level executive. Easier to promote someone else than sell that many cans of soda.”
“Thank you.”
“No offense intended. But a corporation being what it is, they’ll work harder to keep your capture a secret than to ransom you. Which is why we need the numbers of family members. We can find them ourselves in good time, but that’s only likely to extend your stay.”
“Are you American?”
“That you will never know for sure. Regardless of what happens, you’ll never see my face.”
“They must pay you well.”
She shifted in her chair at this and resettled herself.
“We won’t be talking about my motives. Or how I became radicalized, as they say.”
“I can’t believe you’re a woman,” he said.
“Can’t believe it or don’t believe it?”
“Either. A fundamentalist Muslim group would not hire a woman as its interrogator.”
“Is that what this is? An interrogation? Does it feel that way to you? And as I said, you have no idea who I am, who we are, and what our motives may be.”
He strained to loosen the rope around his wrists, not because he hoped to escape, but because sitting in the chair with his arms behind his back made his shoulders ache. He’d held no thought of escaping from the moment of his capture; the despair and fear that most would feel were numbed by the presence of all the days of these past two months, and even the weeks before them that had followed him onto his flight. He used to be terrified of flying, but midway over the Atlantic, when out the window he watched the unvariegated water meet in a distant haze the indifferent blue of the sky, he thought if the plane nose-dived at that point, he would feel no terror because of despair. And then he’d felt his face warm with a different kind of panic: that this move at age forty-seven, after his wife had left him, was an anguished effort to reignite a life that had never burned with a particular fervor in the first place.
“I’m sorry about the bound hands, but it’s the only way.”
“You think if you untied them that the first thing I’d do is snatch the blindfold from my eyes? I don’t care all that much what you look like.”