by Linda Stasi
I had no choice but to at least let him think that I trusted him. Trust no one.
We hopped aboard and drove back onto the now-deserted highway. I demanded that he stop at a local rest stop and give me his phone.
“Please. I have to check on my son.”
“But keep it very, very short,” he said, handing me the phone. My father picked up before it had even finished ringing once.
“Hey, Dad. How’s everything? Terry back?” He hesitated. “Dad?”
“Ali, I don’t understand, but the Norwegian embassy said there was no function there today. They don’t know who the Judsons even are!”
“What? There’s some mistake. Did you call their cell phone?”
“Of course. Several times. So I came home, knocked on their door, and even asked the doorman. I don’t want you to get panicked, but he said he wasn’t on duty when they left, and he came on at six this morning.”
“And?” I was panicking now. “And the police?”
“They’re on their way … Oh wait. There’s the intercom.” The intercom was attached to the doorman station in the lobby.
I heard my mother pick it up and then scream.
31
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
“Dad!” I demanded, “What is it? What’s going on there?”
“Honey, wait, I’m getting it from Mom.”
“No. Put her on the phone! Now!”
“Ali, oh Ali,” my mother cried. “The overnight doorman told Anthony that they left sometime in the middle of the night. They had a lot of baggage with them.”
“Was Terry with them? Did they take him? Is he—God forbid—in their apartment alone?”
Pantera was by my side in a flash. I was shaking so hard, I put my cell on speaker so he could hear.
“Dad’s calling nine-one-one right now. The maintenance men are coming up to unlock their door.” Hysteria gripped me. I heard a low animal sound in the distance but didn’t realize it was coming from me.
The cell went dead in my hands. I demanded that Pantera put the chip back into mine. “They need to contact me, goddamn it! We’ve lost precious time!”
He did so and handed me back the phone. It immediately began to ding. It was a text without identification.
The message on the screen was as simple as it was horrific:
Baby Terry is a very bad boy.
I immediately texted back:
Where is my baby? Show me my son!
Good luck with that one. Since those on the other end of the text had probably an even more secure line than Pantera’s satellite phone, my text came back as “not delivered.”
Then another text:
Calling the authorities in will only make it worse.
In the meantime, Pantera was busy on his own phone. I fell to my knees, pounding the ground, and Pantera bent down and scooped me up into his arms.
“I … I … don’t know what they want!” I screamed. “They must want Terry to replace their own dead son.”
“No. They want the pages.”
“What? Are you serious? They’ve got my son!”
I jumped up when my phone dinged again: “Unknown caller.” It was just a link.
I hit the link with my finger shaking and the screen filled with the image of a crib with a baby inside. His face was turned away from the screen, but I saw that the baby was swaddled in a black, rough-looking blanket, screaming.
Next, Raylene leaned into the crib as the camera zoomed in and panned around to show the baby’s face. It was my Terry with tears streaked all down his face as he struggled to break free of the coarse swaddle.
Is that a bruise on his little cheek? Oh dear God!
I couldn’t tell, because the camera then turned to focus back on Raylene. She had a black scarf covering part of her face. It wasn’t a disguise. It was a costume.
“Alessandra,” she began, her Caribbean accent surfacing for the first time since I’d known her. “Bring us what we need or the baby dies,” she said. “Tell anyone about this video and the baby dies. Fail us and the baby dies.” Pantera, with his own phone, had been recording it.
The camera then panned back down to the crib. There was a gun resting at Terry’s swaddled feet. As his screams increased, the camera cut to Dane, who was dressed not unlike the followers of Acevedo. “We want the pages. We want the keys to the kingdom.” The screen went dark. I stared down at it and mumbled, “They’re hurting Terry! I’ll give them whatever they want! Roy will understand.”
I went to read the original text again but it was no longer available.
Pantera said nothing, just stood up and punched something into his phone.
I attacked. “You? Is this your doing? Do you want to live forever? Is that it? Did you set me up? Did you arrange for those people to move into my building? Or are you in this for your own good?”
He grabbed me. “No! I want what you want. Safety for Terry and the goddamned destruction of these pages that have the power to destroy all that is good left on Earth.”
“They have Terry,” I screamed. “I’ll give them everything I have! The pages, the keys, the fucking Voynich Manuscript!”
“I believe the Judsons are still in New York,” he said.
“Bullshit. How do you know?”
He didn’t answer me but only said, “We’ll be back in New York in a few hours.”
“How? I can’t imagine there’s even a flight until tomorrow!”
“Let’s go.”
“How can you be so freaking calm? Our son”—there, I’d said it. If he was out for the pages, maybe I could touch a part of whatever soul he might have left. “Our son,” I repeated, “has been kidnapped!”
I called my parents back. “We’re in the Judsons’ apartment,” Dad said. “The police had the building manager open it … Terry’s not here.”
“Daddy! They stole him! The Judsons kidnapped Terry!”
He gasped. “But honey, you don’t know that. Not for sure.”
“Dad! Listen to me. They called. They sent a video. They’ve got him!”
Just then I heard a cop in the background say, “What the hell?”
Dad handed the phone to my mother and apparently went to where the officers were. I heard screams, and men yelling.
“Holy shit!”
“What the eff is that thing?”
“Get out, get out!”
“¡Es el Diablo!”
“What?” I screamed. “What is it?”
Someone grabbed the phone from my father. “This is Detective Barracato,” a man said.
“They stole my baby! They stole my baby!”
“Please, Mrs. Russo. Give me as much information as you can.”
“What did they find? Is it my son?” I screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming despite the detective urging me to calm down.
“No, no, Mrs. Russo. There was a false wall. Jesus Christ, but there’s a life-sized wax figure of a teenage boy in there! Fully clothed from the 1960s or something. There’s a transistor radio in there and a box full of stuff…”
Her son! She’d had Makenson recreated in wax. I felt like I was going to faint. She’d had a full-sized voodoo doll made of the boy. Pantera took the phone from me. He calmly gave them information I didn’t know he had about Terry and me. I looked at him. Why does he know all this? He’s in on the whole thing.
Instead of explaining how he knew what he knew, he got back on the motorcycle and indicated for me to do the same.
“We need to go to the hotel right now and get the pages.”
“I want to go home!”
“We’re almost there. Almost there.”
He dialed up someone and I heard him say a bunch of numbers, then another bunch but with dots and slashes thrown in.
“Good, good, thanks.” Then, as calmly as if he were giving me the weather forecast for the weekend, he said, “We’ve got a flight.”
“There’s no flight out tonight anymore! Where the hell are you trying t
o take me?”
“Home. I know a guy.”
“You know a lotta guys. Which guy?” I said, refusing to get back on the back of the bike.
“A guy. I know you don’t trust me, but I’m all you’ve got now. I’ve come through before—we’ve come through for each other. You have to trust me.”
And my choices were…? Exactly. I got on the bike and we drove back to the hotel. A man—a Pantera kind of man—was waiting outside and handed me a leather bag with the contents from my safe and we got into his car and he sped us to Ben Gurion Airport. We bypassed the commercial areas and went directly to Laufer Aviation, which services private jets.
A VIP check through customs and we were aboard a plane, no name on the outside, the likes of which I’d never seen. The plane was outfitted with tables, chairs, computer terminals, and plush cream-colored leather seats that we strapped into for takeoff.
Once airborne, I was shaking and crying. Excoriating myself for leaving Terry with my “beloved” neighbors. The flight attendant came by and offered food and drinks, of which I was having none. “Sleep is what you need,” Pantera said.
I put my head in my hands and began to moan. “I should have known there was something wrong with them. Why didn’t I guess it when Dane got freaked out at the rare book shop? I just thought…”
“How could you know?”
I turned on Pantera in a flash. “Don’t frigging placate me. Don’t! I don’t even know what you’re in this for. I don’t trust you, and I shouldn’t have trusted them.”
“I wasn’t placating you. I was merely telling you that—”
“You know nothing about me or Terry, so you can’t tell me anything.”
“I know more than, well, than you think. You think I haven’t kept an eye on you and Terry?”
“I don’t care. I just don’t want any harm to come to Terry.”
“One step at a time. These things are never easy.”
“These things? Is kidnapping part of your everyday things?”
“Whoa, I’m not the bad guy here.”
I looked at him. I didn’t need to spell it out. My disgust spoke for me.
He put his hand on top of mine, and I pulled it away. So he gripped both of my hands in his and said, “I know you don’t understand why I didn’t come to you, why I let you think I was dead.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“I do understand. But you don’t.”
“No? How’s this? You let me think you were dead. You understand that? You understand there was—I meant, God forbid, is—a baby boy named Terry? Please give me a break. You don’t understand shit. I also understand that you want to get your hands on the ten-million-dollar pages. For yourself or this Headquarters place you work for.”
“Not true,” he shot back, standing up.
“Siddown, mister! Here’s what else I understand: You spent God knows how many years raising Demiel ben Yusef, because it was all part of the quote ‘great experiment’ unquote, but you never came when you had your own boy? That’s what I understand. Do you?”
I didn’t give him a second to answer, rushing right on. “And now I don’t even have my son. You understand, you say? Maybe all of this is somehow connected to you.”
He simply got up and looked out the window. Then he looked at the monitor on the wall that tracked every second of our flight.
“I killed Maureen in Manoppello to save your life, and then you played dead, you bastard!”
He turned back toward me. “Goddammit, Russo, we saved each other’s lives! Listen, I don’t know if I could have prevented the kidnapping from happening, so I won’t play ‘what if?’ with you again. Won’t happen. But what I do know is that since I first laid eyes on you outside the U.N.—when you and Dona charmed your way into Demiel’s trial after the doors were shut…” He trailed off.
I didn’t ask him to continue. I didn’t want to hear it.
After a breath, he went on, nonetheless. “All I wanted to do was…” He walked back and stood one millimeter from me—most of him almost touching most of me.
He grabbed my face in his hands, forced me to look into his eyes, and whispered, “All I ever wanted to do from the first second I laid eyes on you, was to grab you and never let you go. Maybe that’s just another thing you’ll never understand.”
Don’t let him get to you … don’t!
“Just accept this fact,” he went on as I fought back tears—I so needed somebody, anybody to lean on right then—but I remained stoic against his words. “I can never and will never tell you why I couldn’t come to you. I need you to believe that it wasn’t because I didn’t want you, didn’t ache for you with every single cell in my body, didn’t—don’t—long to see my son, hold my own flesh and blood.”
I pulled away. “You need? You need?” I said, trying to convince myself that what was coming out of my mouth was genuine, after what we had shared together, and what we had done together.
“What are you? A desperado, attached to some bullshit thing called ‘Headquarters’ or whatever you call that espionage–slash–terrorist group these days?”
“Clearly you don’t know,” he snapped back, “what I am or what we do, so don’t go off half-cocked about things you know nothing about, Alessandra.”
Using his first name back at him, I seethed, “Yusef. I know you’ve done things I never want to know about, and I mean that, but what I do know is this—this thing that’s happened with my boy? That’s my life, that’s Terry’s life.” I was running out of breath, I was so angry. “He’s my little baby, my tiny, helpless boy! My child is the one you rejected, you son of a bitch!” I stood and turned my back to him.
He grabbed me and spun me around, and instead of the fury I expected, he threw his arms around me and tried to rock me back and forth, tried to wipe away the tears of anger and fear running down my face. I struggled against his strong grip, but he had the strength of a twenty-year-old boxer.
He leaned in and kissed me hard, whispering through his open mouth. “Don’t do this now. We…”
I violently turned my face away from him, and slapped him hard. “Stop it. Just stop it!”
He turned and walked down the aisle, and opened a door. I saw a small bed made up and beyond that another door. “The bathroom’s in there,” he said, as though nothing had happened. “You can clean up and then rest. You need to rest.”
“You need to stop telling me what you think I need to do,” I said, walking past him and slamming the door.
32
Too exhausted to even think about showering—despite the guano—I stripped off my filthy clothes, washed my face, and brushed my teeth with the amenities provided. I slipped on an Egyptian cotton robe hanging on the door, which I figured probably belonged to some mogul’s mistress. I flopped onto the bed looking more like that mogul’s hard-living drunken mother than anybody’s pampered mistress. Pantera was nowhere to be seen, and I tossed and turned, occasionally dropping off for a second, only to jump back awake, my heart pounding.
Then I saw the photo attached to the bedside table: Mossad and Gisele! The two impossibly good-looking people on the flight into Israel. Pantera had been guiding this expedition since before I’d left New York!
After many more restless hours, Pantera came in and stood by the bed. “We’re landing in less than forty-five minutes,” he said. “Maybe you want to get a shower and something to eat.”
I pointed to the photo. “Friends of yours?”
“For your safety.”
“A supermodel and a rich guy who looks like an Israeli secret agent?”
“Hardly. Just friends. It’s their plane.”
“Right. Kind of them to fly commercial on the way in.”
“You need to eat,” he simply said.
“A shower, yes, but no, I can’t eat.”
“Yes to both,” he said, leaving me in bed and closing the door behind him.
A quick look at the clock told me it was 12:45 A.M.
I climbed into the small shower and turned the hot water on and tried to let the scalding water soak the pain out of me. It didn’t work. I washed all of the bat shit out of my hair. I felt cleaner, but not better. I climbed out and put on the robe and wrapped a towel around my head and sat back down on the bed.
We were almost home. Would I be able to trade what I had—the tube, both keys, the pages, and that old book—for Terry? Was it too late? In the whole mess I’d actually completely forgotten about Roy. If it hadn’t been for his father, Morris, both his son—and mine—would be safe right now. I hoped Morris Golden was rotting in some awful hell even Dante couldn’t have conjured up.
And what if those pages really did contain Jesus’ secret teachings about resurrection, as they surely seemed to?
What if, in exchange for the life of my little boy, I was giving these monsters all the power in the world, and worse, the power to kill every little boy, girl, adult, and elder who didn’t bow to their rule? The power to destroy, ironically enough, Christianity itself?
My mind was spinning so violently that I felt dizzy. I tried to clear my brain to think it through.
Why would only these pages be stolen if they weren’t the ones that contained Jesus’ ultimate secrets? Didn’t Acevedo go from guttersnipe son-of-a-whore to a religious cult leader living like an Egyptian pharaoh complete with ancient Egyptian-style sister-wife once he met Morris Golden? Isn’t he now a self-appointed god, worshipped by people worldwide? And this with just a glimpse into the pages of Judas and the very words of Jesus. How could he have done that alone—without at least part of some secret knowledge?
What if we really are in fact about to hand over to the worst subhumans on earth the secrets of life and death as imparted by the most evolved being ever to walk the earth? Those secrets at the disposal of terrorists could start the beginning of the end of life on earth as we know it … Armageddon.
On the other hand, if I didn’t hand over the pages, my Terry, my miracle baby, would be the one destroyed. He’d be tortured and killed because his mother was worried she might give away hypothetical secrets to people with whom she’d been so stupid as to entrust his well-being in the first place. I began to picture his little body being brutalized, burned, punched, battered, and maybe even ritually sacrificed. I couldn’t get the picture of Acevedo’s little dog out of my mind.