I got up and paced back and forth across our cell, which took exactly six steps in either direction. “Can we go outside? Is there a roof deck or anywhere we can breathe for a second?”
John raised an eyebrow. “Yes, welcome to the St. Regis Hotel. Please take the far elevator bank to the Rooftop Lounge, where our host will meet you to freshen up your drink and slit your throat . . .”
I stopped pacing and my hand darted up to my neck. John softened a bit. “Hey, Farrah, I’m sorry, but this is serious. We’re not on a sleepover here. The guys who are looking for us have hunted and killed a lot of people.”
I sat back down in my chair, silent. Neither of us was sure if I was going to cry, but we both knew that he hadn’t needed to bring that up again.
Who knew the threat of tears could terrify a guy? John got up and grabbed our sleeping bags in one hand and fresh Cokes in the other. “There must be a fire escape off the exterior room there. Let’s sneak out for a second, then we’ll come in and get some sleep.” We walked through the only door in our cell into a huge exterior space with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a view of another warehouse. I wondered how many people the FBI had holed up in these buildings; if we’d see another fugitive sneaking out for a little sanity.
John pulled up the rusty window and climbed through first. He held his hand out to me to help me through. The sun was setting, and it was getting cooler as we leaned back against the metal bars, pulling our knees up to our chins. John wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and I half thought he might keep his arm around me. It was a weird moment of noisy internal panic: Is he making a pass at me? Gross, he’s like an adult. Am I even safe here? Who does this guy think he is? Oh no!! He’s taking his arm away! Please put your arm around me, pleeeeeease.
“Are you excited about MIT?” John was making casual conversation, but it took me off-guard to hear it said out loud.
“I guess. It’s a long way from Santa Monica, in every possible way. So, I guess so.”
“You’ll love it.” John was looking out into the alley below us, scanning for I don’t know what.
“How’d you finish college so fast?”
He took a long sip of his Coke and smiled at me. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not just a pretty face either.”
I smiled, a little embarrassed, and started scanning the alley for nothing too, while I thought about my new favorite word: either. He could have just said, “I’m not just a pretty face.” But he added either. Either can be an adjective (I could lean over and kiss either his neck or his lips), a pronoun (His neck or his lips? Either will do), or, like here, an adverb following a negative subordinate clause (I’m not just a pretty face either). I wondered if it could be a name. We could have a daughter and call her Either.
I could feel him watching me and hoped I’d kept my mouth shut during that last bit of craziness. I turned to him quickly to check. “What!?”
“Nothing.” A cold wind blew between the buildings, and he pulled the sleeping bag tighter and shivered a little.
“Are you picking up Steven’s shoulder shudder there?” I said, laughing.
He was trying not to smile. “Ouch, that’s harsh. The guy’s been through a lot.”
“Like what? Schoolyard bullying?” Is it possible to have a really attractive neck? I’d never noticed anyone’s neck in my life, and now I could not stop staring at this one.
The head on top of the neck was talking. “No, seriously, that thing he does is some sort of a post-traumatic tic. It’s a really bad story. You sure you want to hear it?”
I knew I was going to feel either really bad or really terrified. So, no. “Okay.”
“His first job at the FBI was on a task force to build weapons testing centers in the Southwest. He found a desert location where he figured they could do a little weapons testing without bothering anyone, not realizing that the desert is its own ecosystem and that Jonas Furnis was watching. The story goes that after the first day of testing, he was kidnapped from his bed and was kept prisoner for eighteen months. He was tortured brutally. They voluntarily freed him in the end, but not before they’d put him through months of electroshock therapy and cut off all of his fingers on his left hand. When he came back, he was doing that shudder thing all the time.”
“All his fingers? Why?”
“I don’t know really. Consensus around the FBI was always that it was to remind him not to identify them. Almost poetic, like we’ll make sure you can’t point the finger at us.”
“Did you make that up?”
He laughed. “No, I couldn’t make up something that dumb and live with myself.” He was quiet for a second and drained the last sip of his Coke. “But really, seriously, Steven is a nice guy and I guess a hero.”
We sat in silence for a while. I played through my initial hilarity at Steven’s weird tic, mentally kicking myself for the tenth time that week. Who did I think I was busting on a former terror hostage when chances were pretty good that I was next? I tried to imagine what Steven had been through, the kidnapping, the torture, and the likelihood of it happening to me. At least until I got completely distracted by John’s right forearm. It was strong but not veiny in a Mr. Universe kind of way. And had just the right amount of hair to suggest he has fully completed puberty but not enough to suggest a square yard of carpet on his back.
John broke the silence. “I guess Steven was never able to finger his captors.”
“Ha-ha.”
“He could never point them out.”
“Cute.”
“He wasn’t playing with a full hand.”
“Stop, please.”
“The whole thing’s hard to grasp, right?”
“Well, now I know how he felt. Held captive by the corniest person in the world.”
“Point taken.”
Ugh.
So, When’s the Wizard Going to Get Back to You About That Brain?
A reporter was talking in voice-over as the camera panned the front entrance to my high school. “Local Santa Monica High School senior Farrah Higgins, seventeen, has now been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Experts say that the first twenty-four hours of an abduction are critical and that the likelihood of recovering the victim alive declines significantly after that time.”
Switch to smiling reporter. “Cliff Townsend here at school with several of Farrah’s classmates.” Olive, Veronica, Tish, and Kat are standing (or is posing a better word?) next to the school entrance. “Girls, what can you tell me about Farrah? Did you suspect that she was being followed? Did she have any new acquaintances?”
“Acquaintances?” Veronica was stumped.
“Friends,” clarified the reporter.
“Oh, well, not that we knew. She hung out with us a lot. She was a little brainy but normal,” said Kat.
“Did you notice any erratic behavior?” Veronica’s face went blank again, so the reporter went on. “Anything different from normal?”
“Well yeah, there was that weird thing in Schulte’s class, where Mr. Schulte was upset and she ran out of class.” The proverbial light bulb, though dim in this group, lit up over Olive’s head.
Veronica caught on. “That was really strange, or erotic as you say. Plus I heard he called her at home after that.”
Kat finally got it. “And she missed school for the rest of the week. Has anyone like even questioned him?”
Cliff looked back into the camera, looking like he’d cracked the case. “You heard it here. Potential foul play in the disappearance of the Higgins girl. Leaves parents wondering how safe their children are at even the toniest of public schools. Back to you, Allison.”
Don’t Ya Think Hard Work Must Have Killed Someone?
On our second full day of captivity, the first set of documents arrived with cold toast and warm yogurt. We had two cups of gas station coffee with powdered milk and Sweet ’n Low. While the food was disgusting, the documents gave us a renewed sense of purpose—in short, something to do.
I gulped down a bit of yucky coffee and boldly announced, “I’ll start.” But as I began with the first page and then flipped through the rest, I was shocked to see gibberish. They were all in some sort, or several sorts, of European, Middle Eastern, and Slavic languages. “What are we supposed to do with this stuff?”
“I think the plan is that I translate and you decode.” John reached across our uneaten breakfast and took the pile from my hands.
“How are you going to do that? Did they send an FBI language decoder ring?”
“I speak most of these languages. I traveled a lot as a kid.” He didn’t look up. I recognized in him that spark of diving into something you love. It was as if I were no longer there. Which of course made him all the more attractive.
“Why?”
“It’s a long story. Let me get a few of these translated. These are mostly in Portuguese, Czech, and Farsi, and then you can do your thing.” All business.
“But how could you . . . ?” I gave up. I didn’t want to disturb him by turning on the TV, so I decided to try for a little personal hygiene. I crammed myself into the tiny bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth. I undressed and washed myself as well as I could with a sink full of lukewarm water and a small washcloth. We seemed to be sharing a bar of soap that had both an industrial fragrance and a prior owner. Could the FBI have coughed up a new bar of soap for our efforts?
When I was done, I got dressed and lay back on my sleeping bag, watching John work and playing math games in my head. I wondered how many cubic inches of air it took to fill a room that was twelve by six feet, adding in the two-by-three-foot bathroom and subtracting for the three pieces of furniture and the masses of our bodies.
Just as I was close to the answer, my back pocket started to vibrate. I nearly jumped, hoping that John hadn’t heard that faint zzzzz sound. Who in the world would be calling a kidnapped girl? I got up and went back into the bathroom to check it out.
“Olive Grossman Text.” I stared at my phone for a few seconds like it was going to bite me. Was this an old text coming in, or was she seriously texting me to crack the kidnapping case? I opened the text and read, I think this is bullshit. Where are u? I started to write back, No. No. The kidnapping is legit. Promise. But I couldn’t be texting her if I was really bound and gagged somewhere. So I just turned off my phone and hoped she’d lose interest.
John looked up as I came out of the bathroom. “You’re good to go.”
“Can’t the FBI get a computer program to do the translating?” I was looking through the sheets of handwritten translations he’d given me and noticed his odd but highly regular printing. Everything about it was so uniform that it almost looked as if it could be its own font. I could imagine it on the big list of fonts on my laptop: John Bennett Bold.
“They can and they do. But conversations like these are really hard to translate that way. They are so conversational and the people speak so heavily in idioms that you really need a translator who has spent time in the specific area.”
“Like what?” I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he knew all these languages. I felt like quizzing him, but he wasn’t in the mood to be made a show of.
“I can’t think of one. You get started, and I’ll translate the next batch.” I decided to stay on my “bed” to read. John had commandeered the food crate for his feet, and I had no other place to recline.
The documents were transcripts from intercepted cell phone conversations. I expected to read this:
Bad Guy 1: So we’re all set. I’ve got the dynamite, and you bring the matches.
Bad Guy 2: Terminal Eight, JFK, see you there at ten a.m.
Bad Guy 1: Bye-bye.
Bad Guy 2: Later.
Not exactly. I started reading through the most mundane conversations ever. “Honey, will you pick up my dry cleaning?” (Evil dry cleaning?) “Basketball practice was changed to Wednesday night.” (Explosive basketballs?) “They have heirloom tomatoes at the bodega on Seventy-seventh and Lexington.” (Rocket launcher tomatoes?) . . . Seriously.
John was still furiously translating, like this all meant something. After about twenty pages, I had to ask: “What are we doing?”
Not looking up. “It’s a process. We have to get through these and look for some kind of code. These guys know they are being monitored, so they have to speak in code. Isn’t that what you do?” Now he was looking at me, and I started feeling a little defensive.
“What I do? I go to school; I go to parties. Let’s not start saying this is what I do. I didn’t ask for this.”
Half smile. Zing. “Back to work, Buffy. Time to leave the mall and figure out how to stop the vampires.”
Ha-ha. I decided to try. If heirloom tomatoes were bombs and the bodega was a bomb-making place (probably not the technical term), then they were on sale?
Day two went on like this, with me searching for something that wasn’t there. He translated pages and passed them to me. I read them, saw nothing of note, and placed them in an orderly pile. I waited for more pages and monitored the crease between his dark eyebrows, his utter concentration. The brow gave way to his wide dark eyes, which sat on the cheekbones, which led to the jaw, which acted as a frame for his perfect lips. Had I gone mad?
My brain had obviously been compromised. I didn’t know if it was the crappy food, the lack of sleep, the threat to my life, or some narcotic being pumped into our cell. But at the end of the day, I knew I had to regroup. He’d barely looked at me all day, and I was fabricating some kind of mad crush. Enough.
“I’m going to sleep. More tomorrow.” I went to the other side of our tiny room and arranged my air mattress against the wall. I got in my sleeping bag and took mental inventory of the situation. I was sleeping in my clothes; I needed a shower; I was hungry—but not hungry enough to eat another turkey sandwich. And I was having a strangely fun time.
I pulled my sleeping bag over my head and turned on my phone, just to make sure it was still charged.
Olive Grossman Text (4):
1. I went to your house yesterday to see your parents. Danny was by the pool totally relaxed. And I’m supposed to think you’re kidnapped?!
2. Kat thinks you’re in rehab.
3. Danny told me not to worry about you and we swam. I wore your blue bikini, love it!
4. Wore it home, btw. Give it to you when you get back. Ur coming back, right?
Three more days passed as the crack crime-fighting team of Farrah and John got nothing but the giggles. All the documents were translated, and we read them over and over, eventually acting out the conversations like we were in the fifth grade play. A few more days of this and I was sure we’d be in a full-blown musical production of Terror in Terminal 8.
Farrah: No, I didn’t hear about the schedule change.
John: Well, they e-mailed you. . .
Farrah: You can’t expect me to run home and check my e-mail in the middle of the day.
Scintillating theater. We read the transcripts of two old guys talking about how the entrance to the park had been closed off at Seventy-sixth Street that morning. We were a mother and a son talking about the cousin who showed up for Sunday dinner looking a little high. John read his parts with different accents to keep them fresh. So what had started as Czech had turned into a middle-class Brit or an Oklahoma oil baron. In short, we were getting nowhere.
Our favorites were Scarlet and Luke, who were in the throes of a secret romance and speaking Portuguese. There seemed to be someone named Britney (I am not making this up—John translated it into the spelling of the troubled diva herself), who was helping them sneak around. It read like a romance novel, and we were really getting into it.
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Scarlet: Hey. I was hoping you’d call.
Luke: Can you talk?
Scarlet: When can I see you? I really think this is the right thing. I can’t think about anything else.
Luke: So you’ve made up your mind?
Scarlet: Yes. I’ll try to come see you tonight, but if I can’t get there, don’t think it’s because I’m not committed.
On and on this goes. By the seventh transcript, we’d gotten through five weeks of these conversations. They’d met out several times, never saying where. Britney knew all about it, but they seemed a little paranoid about being followed. At the bottom of Scarlet and Luke’s transcripts, there was the tag “UES, NYC,” and the time of day. John clued me in that UES was Upper East Side, pleased that he’d cracked it and I hadn’t. What did I know? I’d never been east of Arizona.
Scarlet: I really need to see you.
Luke: What’s wrong?
Scarlet: There’s something going on with Britney. She’s a cheater. We can’t trust her anymore.
Luke: Of course, she’s a cheater—that’s her whole game. Why are you acting like that’s news?
Scarlet: Because now she’s cheating on us. Britney’s a first-class slut, and I can prove it.
A Girl Named Digit Page 6