The sandwich sat beside me, aging. I didn’t touch it, and though I did relent about food in general—evidently—to this day the sight of an egg-salad sandwich makes me queasy.
Someone got my laptop and at their request I managed to click through a number of frames, I clicked here and there, tears running down my face, until I was able to bring up a photograph of Ned. Don emailed it to himself, then went back into the motel office and printed it out, though everyone present remembered what Ned looked like.
A new text: No police.
“He’s got to be kidding,” said Will.
We were still in the lobby. I think guests must have been coming and going by then, no longer crowding near. Will and Don and I sat on the couches while Main Linda kept busy making tea in the café. The yellow-beige sandwich had gone away—good riddance to it, unappetizing forever. Instead a coffee cup sat next to me on an end table, the surface of its cold, weak coffee as still as stone.
“. . . are there people outside action movies who’d actually agree to that condition?” Will was asking.
“Where are the cops? I’m going to call them again,” said Don.
Another text came in.
If you call the cops again [end of text bubble] I’ll call my FBI friends [end of text bubble] and make a counterclaim of kidnapping.
“He can hear us,” said Don, and stood up hastily. “Still listening, aren’t you?”
Big ears to hear you with.
We gazed at each other, Will and Don and I. They looked round-eyed. I don’t think I did. I wasn’t surprised. I was on a plateau, the final plane of hell, I thought, a flat, dry place.
“He does know someone in the FBI,” I said.
There’d been this asshole from the Anchorage field office. A couple of times he and Ned had driven to a rifle range called Rabbit Creek—I remembered because I thought of small rabbits running scared as the two men fired their weapons. They went for drinks afterward at some sports bar, where Ned stayed sober and the FBI guy got sloppy drunk. I hadn’t understood what Ned wanted with him, some kind of “ASAC,” Ned had said, assistant special agent—a sullen man with pitted cheeks, a spare tire and a comb-over.
I’d expected him to look like Mulder from The X-Files, I realized when they stopped by the house once, Mulder had been my main teenage exposure to an FBI idea and it lingered.
But he didn’t look like Mulder at all. Sadly unlike Mulder.
And surely they’d had precisely nothing in common, I thought now, nothing but the FBI guy’s future utility. Ned was a bet hedger, a fortifier and consolidator, effective at building networks and circuits. They met at a boxing gym and the FBI guy had apparently been drawn to Ned, as so many people were—as I had been.
Considering this I started to feel a spur of practicality again, my ruined center cauterized for a time so that it stopped infecting the rest of me. I could keep it together as long as I didn’t think of Lena being alone or afraid. It was her emotions I feared for when I let myself fear, her trust of the world being damaged, eroded bitterly as I sat there with my hands tied, unable to reach her.
I didn’t even consider physical harm. I couldn’t stand to: that possibility was walled off in me.
Quickly all of us stood up and started searching for the microphone. There sat the laptop and my cell phone, which seemed the most likely, so Don called in the angry young mogul to inspect my devices. Apparently Navid knew about electronics. He came in, scruffy in his mountain-man beard and plaid shirt, and took my computer apart piece by piece. He seemed attentive, not angry at all, and I felt grateful and guilty for not liking him before; I would like him from now on, I would like anyone who helped me get Lena back, more than that I would love them abjectly, I’d be abject, I thought.
At some point I noticed I was digging my fingernails too deep into the heel of one hand. They were too short to draw blood, but the bruises would be there for weeks.
Navid took apart my phone, making me agitated—it was my only link to Lena, and what if it got broken?—but he put it back together again without finding anything.
Was the mike on my person? I didn’t wear jewelry and I had no buttons, even, except for the one on my jeans. Don and Navid inspected my shoes—by this time a pair had been brought to me, along with a pile of clothes, and I’d dragged myself to the bathroom beside the café and put them on, the jeans and woolen socks and a pair of worn sneakers—but they found nothing there either. I didn’t have my purse in the lobby so the bug, we figured, had to be elsewhere. We switched to inspecting the furniture.