Page 36 of Sigma

Now?

Motherfuckers, you better watch me real close, because you’re complicit in the kidnapping of my daughter, and I’m not taking any prisoners until I have my daughter back.

And I’ve been taught by the best.

The takeoff is smooth, and the flight long and boring. There’s nothing to do, no books, no inflight magazines or movies or refreshments—this isn’t a vacation, I’m a prisoner. So, I rehearse in my head the movements I’ve learned for disarming a bigger, stronger male opponent—how to wrestle his gun away from him and kill him with it. I go over room-clearing techniques. Unarmed takedowns. How to get out of a chokehold. How to escape from zip-ties.

I go over the basic advice Duke drilled into our heads, at the last training session a few months ago: “Ladies, if you’re in a position where you’re captive, where you’re outnumbered and the bad guys have guns and you don’t, you have two options at your disposal. One, just do what you’re told and hope for the best. Or, bide your time and cooperate as far as is necessary to survive, and wait for your moment. It will come. There’ll be one guard, and he’ll be distracted. They’ll leave you unbound, assuming because you’ve cooperated thus far that you’re not a threat. When you see your opportunity, you fucking take it. When the moment comes, you have to be ready, mentally, to do whatever the fuck it takes. It’s you, or them. It’s kill or be killed. That’s it. You’ve got to harden your mind. You take the civilian in you, the wife, the mother, the soft kind tender lady, and you lock her up deep inside you, inside a box. She’s still there, but she’s out of the way, where she can’t see or feel or hear what you’re about to do in the name of survival.

“She doesn’t come back out until it’s all over. The part that’s left, the part that’s operating you, she’s a badass. She’s unstoppable. She’s a killer. You have to accept that, if you find yourself in that position. I know you’ve both been there, and I sincerely hope you never have to do it again. But if you do, you have to prepare yourself mentally. You’ve kept up with your training, and trust me when I say that if you commit to taking the necessary actions, your trainingwilltake over. It’s the mental game you have to focus on.”

So, while the jet flies over the ocean—east, over the Atlantic—I prepare myself mentally for what’s about to happen.

* * *

Hours of boredomfinally end when the jet lands, not at a major airport this time, but a small private airfield. I didn’t recognize anything we flew over, so I have no way of knowing where we are. I continue my act of cooperation, descending the stairs and sliding into the waiting car, a Mercedes, this one a new S-class. The driver is different, but essentially the same type of individual, a hard, capable man who’s as much of a guard as a driver.

I ask no questions, merely sit in the back seat, buckled, silent, watching out the window for any landmarks or features to tell me where we are. The car winds through a forest of pine, emerging to turn onto a two-lane highway. Hours of featureless highway, the road winding and curving gently but rarely veering from a general southerly direction, judging by the position of the sun. Finally, I see a sign on the side of the highway—I can’t read it, but I get enough of a look to see it’s in German. So, we’re in Germany. Logical enough, I suppose, since Germany is a convenient location, since you can get by car, train, or plane anywhere in Europe quickly and easily. Certainly this is not my final destination.

What I have to decide is whether taking an opportunity to escape will further endanger my daughter. I could go along and miss my opportunity, only to discover there was never any chance of me surviving this.

It’s not about Rinna, I know that much. It’s about Valentine and me.

I just have to figure out who, and why.

Hours more of highway, occasionally passing an exit or a small town. Then, gradually, forest gives way to farmland and then rural suburbia, and then there’s a city rising up from the horizon. Berlin, maybe? I don’t know, I’ve never been there and honestly couldn’t identify it by any major landmarks. An embarrassingly American lack of world geographical knowledge, I suppose.

There are apartment blocks and tenements, shops and restaurants and parks. Signs in German. Then, high rises, skyscrapers, a bustling business center of the city. Buses, cabs, private cars, and a whole hell of a lot of pedestrians on foot or bicycle. I spot a few signs near stairways going underground, indicating a subway—the signs call it the U-Bahn. I feel confident I’m in Berlin. Useful knowledge, actually—I have a handful of phone numbers memorized: my husband’s, Anselm’s, and Harris’s. Anselm and Selah are here in Europe somewhere, last I knew, and if I’m going to get any help from my friends in anything like a reasonable time frame, it’ll be Anslem. So my first order of business is to obtain a means of contacting Anselm.

Which means escaping my captors and staying free long enough to beg, borrow, or steal a phone long enough to call him.

I have a goal, then. Step one. That’s always step one—what’s the first thing I have to do to get to safety?

Call Anselm.

How do I get money, for a cab or the U-Bahn? I have access to international bank accounts, of course, but I don’t have my purse or any of those cards. So I’d have to find a bank that would allow me to make a withdrawal without identification. Also of note, I’m here illegally. So I can’t get detained by the authorities—I have to assume my enemy will have a way of getting to me if I’m detained.

The car wends its way into the city, and I don’t bother trying to keep track of the turns. Finally, age thirty minutes of driving through the city, we approach an underground parking structure beneath a ten- or twelve-story office building on the outskirts of the city. Not quite in what I would call a bad area, judging by appearances, but certainly not downtown, either.

The underground garage is sparsely populated by parked cars, mostly middle-class sedans and compacts. The car pulls to a stop next to the elevator and stairs—two men emerge from the stairwell. Both wear the same black suits as the men at the airport, and these two are similarly armed as well. One of them opens the door, and I step out. The other has called the elevator, which opens and I’m ushered on, flanked by both men.

My heart hammers now, and my hands shake, palms sweating. I resist the urge to rub them on my jeans—I refuse to give away any impression of fear or nerves.

I’m Kyrie Roth. I’m in control.

Neither man so much as looks at me. I can smell marijuana on one or both of them, faintly. A good sign. Means a more lax approach to discipline. If they’re high, they’re probably bored. They’ve probably been waiting for me for hours, if not days.

Not two-on-one, in an elevator, though. I’m not Duke.

Keep waiting.

The elevator rides four floors up, stops, and opens onto a generic office hallway. Muted wallpaper, thin carpet. Fluorescent lights in a drop-tile ceiling. One of the men leads the way, the other following behind—this floor, at least, is empty, the maze of cubicles vacant and unlit. We walk along darkened hallways at the perimeter, passing closed and darkened offices, a break room, and a room full of printers and copiers before coming to the only lit room, a conference room.

A long rectangular table with mid-range black leather desk chairs. A conference line phone, a projector, a coffee station; I smell coffee, actually.

There’s one man in the conference room, sitting at the head of the table, facing away from me, sipping from a small white Styrofoam cup. He’s tall and well-muscled, which is evident even through the pale gray suit he’s wearing. His hair is blond, thinning, and swept back. A handgun rests on the table near his left hand.

I’m ushered in, and then the two men retreat from the room and close the door—assuming positions just outside, I imagine. I wait with my back to the door.