This is what Gomez and Jack were talking about, she realized, dizzy with pain. The implants in her left arm stung at the unaccustomed pressure of lying on metal. Shit. The car jolted, then stopped backing up and began to move forward, turning toward the parking lot exit. How did the DHS know? Words came back to her: They don’t tell us everything: we might unintentionally give something away when we talk.
She fumbled around the interior of the trunk. She could feel the hole in the side of the trunk lid where the emergency release handle normally hung down: they’d cut it away while she was on the ground. Her eyes watered with frustration as the car angled down the exit ramp, then slowed, bounced over a speed bump, and came to a halt. Noises from outside were muffled, but she heard the whine of a barrier rising. The car began to move again, then turned into the street and accelerated, rolling her toward the rear of the trunk.
“Don’t panic,” she muttered aloud, scared out of her wits. Whoever her kidnappers were, they wanted her alive. If I had my phone I could call the cops, she thought. Then, No, wait. The DHS or whoever they are want me to call them. But they’re not my friends. This is a setup. I’m bait. They’re probably tracking my phone. If her kidnappers were world-walkers, then the feds would be much more interested in catching them than in rescuing her. But if her kidnappers were world-walkers, they’d probably ditched her phone before they left the parking lot.
Icy sweat drenched her, gumming her shirt to the small of her back. What am I supposed to do in this kind of situation? She’d once earned a Girl Scout merit badge for a course that covered surviving kidnapping attempts and hostage taking, among other unusual topics. Observe, orient, act. Her thoughts spun. What if it’s a different kind of setup? World-walkers could just grab me, couldn’t they? I’d wake up in another world. But why would they take my car? What if they’re ordinary carjackers? (But who? And why me?) Got to get out and run away.
She had to change the parameters on them. Just like they taught in the (How Not to) Die Hard adventure course she’d taken all those years ago.
They’d moved all her normal crap out of the trunk to make room for an unwilling passenger, but did they know about her emergency kit? Gramps had insisted she stash it in the spare wheel well, under the carpet. Inchworming her way back into the trunk, she freed up enough space to grab the plastic handle in the floor. Predictably, she was lying across the hinge. By raising herself on her shoulder and bracing her feet against the opposite side of the trunk, she managed to lift herself off the panel. It rose, and she fumbled inside. Her fingers barked painfully on metal: the case of a socket set. Seconds passed as she frantically felt around it for the catch, popped it, and groped inside for the milled metal handle of the wheel nut wrench.
Fumbling around in the dark, knife-edged recesses of the swaying car, Rita wedged the end of the wrench between the trunk lid’s catch and the back of the trunk itself, then yanked at the handle as hard as she could, bracing her feet. Metal gave, very slightly: but the lock was made of stern stuff, built to withstand casual thieves. Swearing quietly, she closed her eyes and thought for a moment. What else?
There were other items in the emergency kit, and she thanked Gramps silently for making her add it. Fumbling seconds passed as she navigated the contents of the small padded bag by touch. Finally her fingers closed around her target: the dumb emergency phone. It didn’t do Internet or record video, but it had a standby life measured in months, a built-in flashlight, and GPS. She fired it up and waited for it to get a location fix through the aluminum trunk lid, and saw that open countryside was still a few miles away.
She flipped on the flashlight and shone it around the interior of the trunk. There was a compartment in the carpet-covered side, near her head, and big flat-headed screws held it closed. She vaguely remembered it holding electrical stuff: fuses, maybe. A minute’s fumbling and she retrieved a flat-head screwdriver from the emergency kit. Behind the panel, the light from her phone shone on fuses and a couple of switches. The labels were hard to read in the dim light, but she puzzled them out eventually. BATTERY ISOLATION BREAKER.
The plan came together in a moment. Here goes nothing, she thought, and pulled up the phone’s GPS again. It finally had a fix. The car was heading out of town, making almost thirty miles per hour. But she could see the blue line of a freeway up ahead on the screen, maybe a mile or two down the road. I can’t let them get there, she thought, and shook the phone to call up the keypad. Thumbs on a fat screen dialed 911.
“Help,” she said as soon as she heard a human voice pick up: “I’m being kidnapped. Two perps tased me and shoved me in the trunk of my own car. It’s a silver ’14 Acura hybrid, plates read, uh,” and she rattled off her number. “They’re driving me south through Dorchester toward Route 1.”
“Please hold,” the dispatcher crackled in her ear.
“Can’t,” she said quietly. “I’m bailing.” She hung up, shoved the phone into her jeans pocket—it would have to take its chances—and reached for the battery isolation breaker by touch.
The car, her car, coughed and died. She brought her legs up as the car began to slow, then took the knurled grip of the socket wrench in both hands and waited.
BALTIMORE, DECEMBER 2019
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
COL. SMITH: I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but what if she doesn’t respond the way you expect?
AGENT GOMEZ: What? What do you mean?
COL. SMITH: You’re playing her like she’s a nice polite young Indian-American woman, deferential to authority, painfully clean and law-abiding. But what if—
AGENT GOMEZ: I’m not wrong—
COL. SMITH:—she takes after her mother?
AGENT O’NEILL: What?
DR. SCRANTON: Her birth mother, I assume you mean.
COL. SMITH: Yes.
DR. SCRANTON: Well, that would be … interesting.
AGENT O’NEILL: In what way?
COL. SMITH: Her mother looked like a nice middle-class tech beat reporter. Right up until she killed a lot of people.
AGENT GOMEZ: But she was a terrorist! Rita has no connection to her. She doesn’t have any training—
DR. SCRANTON: How would we know? Deep-cover agents don’t tell their children what they are. Any training is carefully disguised as childhood games. And what about her adoptives? Do you think her birth mother saddled her with a paranoid East German granddad who had run-ins with the Stasi by accident? What about all the Girl Scout wilderness adventure camp stuff they put her through? The self-defense courses?
COL. SMITH: It’s almost like Miriam and Iris Beckstein chose her adoptive family to give her that type of upbringing. Perfect for a covert ops agent—or someone who’d keep a low profile because there’s a seven-digit reward for her birth mother’s head, dead or alive.
DR. SCRANTON: Until you crank up the pressure there’s no way of knowing what Rita will do: whether she’ll break down in tears or turn into a rabid grizzly bear with a hangover.
AGENT O’NEILL: Who were the Stasi? What do they have to do with this?