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Like a faucet being switched off, the noise ended abruptly.
“Sorry,” he said, “didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Hello?” The voice was tentative, most definitely female, and painfully hoarse. From the hacking cough he’d heard earlier, he imagined she’d been ill for a while.
“Are you okay?” Stupid question. Of course she wasn’t okay, but for the first time in years, he was stumped for the right words.
“No.” Another harsh cough, and then she continued, “Not really.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. A few days…maybe a week?”
“Have they given you any medical treatment?”
“No.” She sighed and then coughed again. “I don’t think making me well is in their plan.”
“You’re American?”
“Yes.”
“You were abducted?”
“Yes. One minute I was in the market looking at a scarf, and the next minute I had a hood over my head, and I was in some kind of vehicle.”
“Have they hurt you?”
There was a long pause, much too long for the answer to be favorable. “Yes,” she finally said softly.
There was no need for her to elaborate. And since she wasn’t dead, they weren’t through with her yet. The chances of her getting out of this hellhole without being hurt again, or killed, were almost zero.
“Were you with friends, relatives?”
“No. I came to Paris to do some research for—”
“Paris?”
“Yes.”
Telling her that she was no longer in Paris without freaking her out was probably not going to happen. But she deserved to know.
“You’re not in Paris. You’re in Syria.”
There was a long pause and then the shocked words, “That’s not possible.”
“I wish it wasn’t, but it is.”
“But how…why?”
“Were you knocked out?”
“Yes…wait…no. Not knocked out. I think maybe they gave me an injection of something. My brain was all fuzzy for a while.”
Being drugged would account for the confusion. What was less apparent was why she’d been taken in the first place. He knew almost nothing about their captors, but kidnapping a woman in Paris and bringing her here to brutalize her seemed like an awful lot of trouble. There had to be something they wanted from her.
“You were in Paris alone?”
“Yes. My cousin was supposed to come, too, but she got sick at the last minute. I decided to come alone. I’m up for a part in a play. My character is French. I can read and understand French, but I can’t speak it as well as I need to. I