by Thomas Perry
Remi drew in a shallow breath and prepared to scream, but the woman held a towel over her face. The sound began as a muffled yell but quickly died in a fight for breath. By then, Remi had begun to feel weak and helpless from the drug, and in a moment she lost consciousness.
Sam sat in his seat in the waiting area. He had been watching people go by for some time and now he picked up the book Remi had been reading about Kazakhstan, read a few pages but couldn’t keep his mind on it. He went back to watching passersby. Moscow’s airport was an open place, where any number of travelers from every continent were always visible. He picked up her book again, but after a time he realized he had been posing as a reader rather than reading. His book was merely a mute explanation of how he was passing his time and an assurance to others that he was harmless. Where was Remi? Too much time had passed. He pulled out his cell phone and called her, but her phone was turned off, probably since they’d boarded the plane in Budapest.
Sam knew that women’s restrooms in public places often required waiting, but this felt wrong. Sam got up and, shouldering Remi’s bag along with his, walked in the direction he’d seen her go. Down the concourse were restrooms. He walked directly there, but kept scanning the nearby shops and crowds for Remi.
He saw a large, heavy woman, dressed like a cleaning lady, come out of the restroom, pushing a wheeled cart with a couple of large barrels on it. She picked up the sign on the cone that had been blocking the door. Another woman in a janitorial dress came out and helped her push the cart. They went off down the concourse and turned into an alcove that, he supposed, led to some of the innumerable doorways where passengers couldn’t go.
The fact that the cleaning ladies had closed the restroom for a few minutes reassured Sam, but not entirely. He stood across from the door and waited but kept looking up and down to see if Remi might have chosen another restroom and would be returning.
He had a memory of a restroom at O’Hare Airport in Chicago that had two sets of doors, one opening onto the concourse, where he’d entered, and the other, on the opposite wall, opening onto a different concourse. Could this ladies’ room have two entrances? He saw a woman coming out, speaking on a cell phone. He said, “Excuse me.”
She stopped walking, the phone still to her ear.
He said, “Does that restroom have two exits?”
The woman looked back at it and then at him, as though she were wondering what he could possibly mean.
He answered for her. “I guess not.” He hurried on. He had wasted too much time. He called Remi’s cell phone again, but it was still off. He listened to part of the message and hung up. He came to a gate where there were two women in airline uniforms, talking in Russian as they stood at a counter.
“Hello,” he said. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes, sir,” said one. “How can I help you?”
“My wife went to a restroom but didn’t return. And it’s not like her. She would call me on her cell phone if she went anywhere else. I’ve been calling her, but her phone is turned off. I’m very worried about her. She would never do this.”
“Is she . . . perhaps ill?”
“She wasn’t a while ago when we arrived from Budapest. Can you get in touch with airport police?”
The two women looked at each other uncomfortably. “Yes, I can,” said one. “How long has she been gone?”
He glanced at his watch. “About a half hour. I know it doesn’t sound long, but, I swear to you, she would never do this without telling me.”
“It’s a big airport. Could she be lost?”
“Anyone could get lost. But if she were, she would be even more likely to call me.”
“Let me page her.”
“Sure. But please call the police too.”
The woman picked up a telephone, pressed a button, then held the receiver against her arm. “What’s her name?”
“Remi Fargo.”
“Would Mrs. Remi Fargo please pick up a white courtesy telephone or go to any Aeroflot desk. Mrs. Remi Fargo, please pick up a white courtesy telephone.” She hung up the phone and smiled reassuringly. “She should be calling us in a moment.”
“Please call the police.”
“We should wait a few minutes to give her time to call.”
“She’s had plenty of time to use her own cell phone to call,” Sam said, getting agitated. “Please call the police.” He spotted two uniformed police officers walking along the concourse. “Excuse me.” He turned and ran after them.
As he came up on the two cops, he saw them look quickly over their shoulders at him, their bodies tensed for an attack. He smiled as well as he could. “Do you speak English?”
They looked confused, so he began to walk back toward the airline desk, beckoning them to follow. When they arrived, he said to the airline woman, “Please, tell them my problem.”
The woman spoke to them in rapid Russian, a quick exchange during which she gestured at Sam, at the telephone, and at the concourse and which included shrugs, head shaking, and apologies. Both cops spoke with the monotone formality of cops all over the world.
The woman said to Sam, “Do you have a picture of Mrs. Fargo?”
Sam brought one up on his cell phone and held it up for the others to study. The cop who did most of the talking used the radio on his belt, then put it back. Through the airline woman he said, “We’d like you to come with us. We’ll try to help.”
Sam thanked the women and hurried off with the police officers. They went into another of the nondescript, unmarked doors off the concourse. They took Sam into an office with several police officers at desks and others watching television monitors. One of the cops, a young man with blond hair and a scholarly demeanor, said, “Sir? Please sit here and I’ll take your report.”
Sam was relieved to see a police officer who spoke English. “I’m not filing an insurance claim or something. My wife has disappeared and that means something has happened to her.”
“We have to start with the report and then the help.” The next ten minutes were taken up by Sam recounting what had happened, describing Remi and then showing the cop and others the picture on his phone.
“I took that picture only a few hours ago, before we got on the plane in Budapest.”
The young man asked Sam to e-mail him the picture, then downloaded it. He explained what he was doing as he sent it to various police substations in the airport, then to the cell phones of patrolmen and plainclothes officers around it.
Sam felt his hopes rise. They knew what they were doing. They knew how to find someone. They had a good chance of spotting her. He felt a little foolish for feeling so pessimistic about them at first.
The cop asked more questions—about his flight to Moscow, what gate he and Remi had used to deplane, and when exactly she had gone off to the restroom. He was transmitting this information to someone. He seemed to read Sam’s mind. “There are investigators looking at the surveillance tapes of those areas to pick out your wife and see where she went.”
For the next half hour Sam sat in the office, waiting. The cops came in and out, answered phones, and conferred with one another. Nobody spoke to him, but he occasionally caught one of them looking at him surreptitiously. He was painfully, fearfully aware that in this kind of emergency, seconds counted. He didn’t want conversation, he wanted them to find Remi, so he remained silent and watched. Then the half hour was an hour, then two hours. He called the house in La Jolla and left a message, explaining what was happening.
When two and a half hours had passed, several cops came in who had different uniforms—outdoor uniforms. The fabric, boots, belts, and hats were black. These men were also more heavily armed than the airport police.
When Sam had first come in, officers had smiled at him. “Don’t worry. This is the most important Russian airport. It’s like a bank vault. Nobody can steal a woman from here.” Later on, another had said, “This place is more heavily guarded than anything in your country. Even if a woman w
ere kidnapped, they’d never get her out of the building.” Still later, it became, “They could never get her past the airport gates.”
When it was time for the Fargos’ plane for Kazakhstan to board, Sam and two of the new police officers went to the gate and scanned the waiting area, showed the airline personnel pictures of Remi but were greeted with head shaking and pursed lips. They stayed until the door to the jetway was locked, the jetway was retracted from the plane, and the plane was pushed out onto the tarmac.
Sam looked in every direction, hoping to see the slender, graceful form of a woman far off in the distance, running to catch the plane. He just saw thousands of busy, preoccupied passengers, trying to keep track of their belongings and their children, as they made their way toward other boarding gates.
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA
REMI FARGO WAS HALF AWARE, NOT AWAKE BUT STRUGGLING toward consciousness, as a free diver struggles upward toward the light, striving to burst through the surface to gasp that first breath of air.
She was in a dark place that was so soft that she couldn’t feel her muscles push against anything solid, and she seemed to have sunk into it. After a huge mental effort, she realized that she was inside a big cardboard barrel, on top of some rags or cloths, and that more had been dumped on top of her and then the barrel closed. There must be airholes, she thought, but she saw none, and her few minutes of effort made her lose consciousness again.
An unknowable number of hours passed before Remi approached consciousness again. This time when she tried to open her eyes, they opened. She now knew she was in the big barrel of hand towels the woman had been handing out at the airport restroom. She righted herself with gravity so she was kneeling on a layer of towels, pushed up with her hands, and felt the top of the barrel give a little, but it wouldn’t budge at the rim. She ran her hands along the rim and pushed, but the top was tightly secured.
“Hello?” she called out.
There was no response.
“Hello? You out there. Open up.” She thought about what had happened to her. She had been kidnapped from a ladies’ room in the Moscow airport. The audacity of that was breathtaking, but her mind had no interest in the details. The two big women had drugged her and put her in this barrel, taken the barrel out of the airport, loaded it into what was likely a linen supply truck, and driven off with her.
She had probably been on the road before Sam had started wondering about her. Poor Sam. He must be absolutely insane with worry by now. She could picture him pacing in that waiting area, watching people boarding their plane for Kazakhstan, wondering what had happened to her. He would be driving the authorities mad by now too, and that was a good thing. He wouldn’t let them forget about her—some unknown foreign woman who had gotten herself into trouble and had no powerful connections to make their lives really uncomfortable.
Remi considered calling out again but decided to wait. The time to yell would be when she heard people or felt them moving the barrel. There would be some chance of making an outsider hear her if they were in some kind of depot. An hour later, the truck turned off the smooth surface it had been on and bounced a little as it went over another surface, this one still smooth but feeling like something with a rougher texture, maybe gravel or dirt.
As she sat in the dark, she began to face the possibilities. Most likely, someone had seen her and Sam showing American passports and decided an American hostage was a good thing to have.
The truck stopped. She heard a set of double doors squeak open. Her mind took a second to follow several paths to their ends. She was much more athletic than they would suspect, and a highly ranked fencer and pistol shot. She might be able to pop out and—what?—get them to shoot her? She could pretend to be unconscious, listening to what they said in a language she didn’t understand. She decided to be rational, open, and try to appear unafraid. Appearing unafraid might be difficult, but not beyond her acting ability.
She heard a clasp being undone and then an aluminum hoop being sprung open and lifted off the lip of her barrel. Hands popped the top off and then lifted the layer of loose towels on top of her. Remi stood up.
She recognized the two large women from the airport. They both wore coveralls now instead of the loose work dresses and their hair was pulled back and knotted. Behind them were two men. They might have been the ones driving the getaway truck and possibly helped lift the barrel on and off vehicles. But now one of them held a short, nasty-looking Stechkin APS machine pistol like those made for Spetsnaz units of the old Soviet army. She knew they were still used by police because they fired cheap, readily available ammunition and had low recoil. She could see these two were fitted with silencers. They hadn’t been manufactured with tournament accuracy, but, at six hundred rounds a minute, they could certainly hit a girl in a cardboard barrel.
There were two other men in blue jeans and windbreakers. They both carried short-barreled Czech Škorpion machine pistols. A few feet beyond all of these men was another man, this one wearing a light gray tailored suit that fit him perfectly. He was clearly the man to watch. He nodded and smiled at the four people in coveralls, then said something in Russian to the whole group. They moved quickly, first to help Remi out of the barrel and off the truck, then to put a pair of plastic restraints around her wrists to bind her hands behind her.
The man in the suit maintained a cheerful smile through these proceedings and an easy manner that belied the military obedience and discipline of his underlings. He looked to Remi like a prerevolutionary aristocratic gentleman spending the summer on his country estate. He wore a crisp white shirt and a blue silk tie, and, while she watched, he lit a cigarette and turned his attention to her. “You looked like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus being lifted out of your scallop shell, Mrs. Fargo.”
He waited a moment, then said, “You’re not speaking to me?”
“I don’t want to prompt you to say anything that will make you think you have to kill me.”
He nodded. “Very wise, in general. But kidnapping in Russia is about the same as it is in the United States—if I’m caught, I’m dead. I’ll tell you what you need to know. You will be treated well and respectfully, but locked in your room. Every day someone will come, have you hold up that day’s newspaper, and take your picture. We will be in touch with your husband. When he meets my demands, you will be freed.”
“What are your demands?”
“Ah,” he said. “So you are interested.”
“Of course I am.”
“I know about the search for Attila the Hun’s five treasures. You and your husband found the one near Mantua, Italy. You stole the one at Châlons-en-Champagne, France. You got Arpad Bako arrested for finding Bleda’s tomb goods. You stole the treasure buried along the Danube. You were on your way to find the final treasure when I stopped you.” He watched her. “Aren’t you going to deny any of this?”
“Would you believe me?”
“So you and your husband now have control of at least three very large hoards of ancient riches—ones from Italy, France, and Hungary. All came after prolonged campaigns of conquest and looting by the Huns. I’ve been told that each of them had to be moved by trucks.” He was studying her reactions closely. “I believe your husband will trade those three treasures for you. It’s a simple exchange.”
“We don’t have possession of any treasures now,” she said. “We have made finds before. You can look them up. We always follow the international treaties and the national laws of the countries where we find things. Most of the time, the rules prohibit exporting any archaeological treasures from the country. In instances where the governments approve sale of any artifacts, we donate our percentages to our foundations. We don’t keep any of it. The three finds that you mentioned have all been taken into custody by the Italian, French, and Hungarian governments. It could be years before we know what the disposition of the artifacts will be.”
“Then your husband will have to enlist officials in those governments to help him,
I suppose.” He smiled. “This is an interesting chance for you both to see how much gratitude your generosity to governments over the years has bought you.”
“What happens when my husband can’t give you all those precious bits of those countries’ histories? Are you going to kill me?”
“Am I? Of course not. I have people who do that kind of work for me. And I can tell you, I’m not a lunatic or a fool. If your husband delivers enough of these hoards so I know he’s sincerely done his best, I’ll release you.”
Remi said, “You don’t strike me as a man who cares about museum pieces. What about asking my husband for a simple ransom instead? He would certainly pay a million dollars for me.” She saw his look of derision. “Say five million, then. And it would be so much less trouble and risk for you. He could transfer the money into your account electronically and you could transfer it instantly to another account in a country that won’t allow it to be traced. No trucks, no border searches, no risk, no selling stolen antiquities for a hundredth of their value.”
“Thank you, but I’ve heard enough,” the man said. “My friends will show you to your quarters. Regardless of how things go, you and I probably won’t see each other again. But I’ll be hoping for your husband to come through for you.” He turned and walked away. She could see he was heading toward a large garden a few hundred feet from a large mansion.
One of the men with the Škorpion machine pistols led the way. The two women guided Remi by the arms, and the other men walked a few paces behind, their Stechkin pistols ready. They took her through the opulent house, which looked as though it had been built between 1850 and 1870. There were old, dark paintings on the walls—some dramatic, stormy seascapes, some battles, and portraits of bearded men and bejeweled women.
The furniture was graceful and most certainly French, with silk upholstery and highly polished wood. They entered a large kitchen, then passed a butler’s pantry. She assumed they were conducting her to a dungeon-like basement, but instead they led her, single file, up a set of narrow back stairs past several landings to the top, fourth floor. This was a route that had been designed and built for servants and led to a hallway of tiny rooms that had probably housed chambermaids and kitchen help.