The Power Couple Read online

  “Please.” She had never been so afraid. She hadn’t imagined she could be so afraid. “I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t even know what she was apologizing for. Being alive.

  On her other side, Rodrigo stirred. “Jacques—”

  Jacques leaned forward.

  The two men stared at each other and then Kira felt Jacques pull the pistol away.

  “I think he likes you,” Jacques said. He grinned as he decocked the pistol and shoved it away.

  * * *

  Grab it. Just grab it. Her hands were cuffed in front of her, not behind. She had a chance. She might be able to reach it. She couldn’t shoot all four of them. But she should be able to get at least one shot off. Maybe through the back of the driver’s seat. Or toward Jacques. What then? Maybe they’d freak out and let her go. Maybe the Walther was the only gun in the car.

  Jacques cocked his head, smirked at her. She had the eerie feeling he’d shown her the pistol hoping to tempt her into going for it.

  Anyway, she wasn’t sure she had the guts to do anything if she did get it.

  She’d better be sure.

  Still. It was so close.

  The driver turned on the radio. Kira had the mad fantasy she’d hear a bulletin, If anyone has seen an American girl. Instead, the car filled with crappy Spanish pop she never would have put up with if she’d had her own songs. Oh the irony, ha ha. She’d had an iPhone since she was twelve. She’d never had to listen to music she didn’t like, never had to wait for the next day’s paper for news.

  She was never out of touch, either. Her friends expected they could reach her whenever they wanted, and vice versa. Not replying when a friend texted was just rude. At least a K or a busy hit you l8r.

  Her parents, too. They might not expect her to text in two seconds. But if they called she’d better pick up or they’d freak pretty soon. Not just Becks. Her friends’ parents, too. They’d all bought into the same fantasy, grown-ups and kids, We’re safe as long as we’re in touch.

  She’d learned better tonight. The phone wasn’t safety. It was the illusion of safety.

  “Five minutes,” Jacques said to Kira.

  To what? She saw the mystery was part of the game for him, another way to play with her, wind her up.

  * * *

  Ahead, an exit. They pulled off down a short ramp that ended at a stop sign: ALTO. Turned left, beneath the overpass that supported the highway. A tall white van waited, pulled over, hazard lights blinking. The cargo compartment windowless.

  A man stood beside it, his cigarette flaring in the dark. He flung it away, pulled open the back doors.

  NFW. Not a van with no windows. They might as well make her wear a sign that said I AM GOING TO BE MURDERED.

  The pistol. She leaned forward, tried to see how far down Jacques might have put it, how she could reach it. Jacques was big, his legs were in the way. But he’d have to get out before she did.

  “Sit up.” Jacques pushed her against the seat.

  Distract him, say something, anything.

  “The cuffs. They’re hurting.”

  Lilly handed Jacques a black bag, thick mesh.

  Jacques eyed Kira as he opened the bag. His face was eager. He wanted her to reach up with her cuffed hands and grab for it. He wanted her desperation.

  A terrible thought came to her. What if Jacques had no plans to ransom her? What if he was just playing with her? What if he’d taken her for himself and would use her until there was nothing left?

  “Don’t scream.”

  Then she could think of nothing else but her voice tearing through the night—

  But she said nothing, nothing at all.

  And then the bag came down and the darkness with it.

  8

  Barcelona

  Three forty-nine a.m. Rebecca’s mood was as dark as the Gothic Quarter’s grimy streets.

  The Barri Gòtic, as locals call it, is a rectangle-shaped district that angles northeast from Barcelona’s waterfront. The famous pedestrian street La Rambla divides it from the seedy but gentrifying neighborhood of El Raval to the west. Together the Quarter and El Raval are only about a half-mile wide, a mile long, but they hold hundreds of places to eat and drink.

  After she and Brian split, Rebecca worked her way south to the waterfront. Then she doubled back to the Plaça Reial, an open square just off La Rambla. The plaza was the center of Barcelona’s tourist nightlife, a block from The Mansion. The walking sobered her up. She noted every stop she’d made on her phone.

  In two hours she showed Kira’s picture to forty-three people, mostly bartenders. Bouncers were a better bet. They were paid to stop trouble before it started, so they had to keep their eyes open. But many bars in the Quarter were too small to have bouncers.

  In any case, Rebecca came up empty forty-two-and-a-half times. At a bar called Ginger, on the eastern edge of the Quarter, a bouncer said maybe he’d seen Kira walk by. Maybe. With someone? Two people, a man and a woman. Two? Yes, two.

  Didn’t totally make sense but he seemed sincere. Rebecca offered him twenty euros. He waved the money off, a fact that made her think he was telling the truth, he wasn’t in it for the money. He took her number and promised to call her if he remembered more.

  Of course, many of the people she’d tried to ask had simply ignored her. No doubt they saw her as an overprotective American chasing a teenager who hadn’t even been missing a whole night.

  After a while Rebecca hated them all. Had she ever been this besotted with herself, immune to everything but her own pleasure? The answer had to be yes, but that didn’t make seeing these golden children any easier. The streets blurred, and Rebecca began to wonder whether she was in purgatory, condemned to chase her missing daughter endlessly.

  Though that wouldn’t be purgatory, would it?

  After three, slightly earlier than she’d expected, the streets calmed. Smaller bars shut their doors. The partiers still out split into two main categories.

  The drunks hung out in groups of six or eight, mostly guys, loud and sloppy. They slap-fought as they drifted toward La Rambla. Lots of yelling in English. Kill you brah, how can you say Durant is better than Kawhi.

  Rebecca worried about the women with them. But they weren’t her problem tonight. And she couldn’t imagine her daughter with them. Kira had a weakness for frat boys, sure. But her type was more Ralph Lauren than Animal House. She wasn’t a huge drinker, either. She’d seen Tony’s awful nights.

  The cokeheads were still up, too. Though they were less of a nuisance. They hung in groups of two or three, sniffling and blinking under the weak streetlights. They were Spanish and French and Italian, divided almost evenly between men and women. Rebecca could see how their Eurotrash glamour might have seduced Kira. Under normal circumstances, she would have been less than happy to see her daughter with them. Tonight, she wouldn’t have minded. We’ll talk about this later, ’kay?

  But what Rebecca wanted was irrelevant. Kira was nowhere. Not with the drunks, not with the cocaine cowboys, not with the Irish bachelorette party Rebecca had seen marching down the sidewalk wearing foot-long rubber penises for necklaces.

  She must still be with Jacques. If she’d left him, she would have called or texted. Even if she’d lost her phone, she could have borrowed someone else’s. Maybe she was too busy with Jacques to give them a heads-up. But why wouldn’t she at least tell Tony where she was?

  The other scenarios ranged from bad to worse. Kira was drunk and lost, despite the map Rebecca insisted she carry. She was stumbling around the less pleasant parts of El Raval, near the harbor. She’d been hit by a car, taken to a hospital. She’d been mugged, robbed, left unconscious.

  Worst of all, she was with Jacques, but not voluntarily.

  The bureau rarely involved itself in standard crimes-against-persons cases. The FBI doesn’t get its hands dirty, local cops said. They weren’t entirely wrong. So Rebecca had never faced the raw moments of victim notification, telling family m
embers their loved ones had been killed.

  But in Texas, years before, she’d gotten into a serial killer case. The Border Bandit. Some deaths had initially been classified as accidental, undocumented immigrants who’d died from exposure or animal attacks. But the Texas Rangers ultimately linked the killer to almost two dozen victims, maybe more; evidence showed the perp had worked the Mexican side of the border too. Rebecca interviewed their parents and siblings. Sometimes they turned tight-lipped. She wondered if she was too hard-edged, too northeastern, for them. Now, even with Kira not really gone, no police department in the world would take a report at this point, Rebecca understood as she never had before why those mothers and fathers had hated talking.

  Her phone buzzed, and she reached for it, Kira—

  Nope. Brian, At Mansion. You close? She wanted to scream. After three hours. How would she feel after three days, three weeks?

  * * *

  She saw her husband standing, arms folded, outside The Mansion. He was scanning the street as though if he just looked hard enough he’d see Kira. Rebecca tried to ignore the ugly thought, I’d trade you for her. In a second. Traitorous, but no doubt he felt the same. Your spouse rented you. Your kids owned you.

  “I keep thinking I’m going to turn a corner and there she’ll be.”

  “How’s Tony?”

  “Quietly freaking. He wanted to come but I told him no, stay there in case she comes back. He’s blaming himself for not telling us.”

  Yet another reason to find Kira, like they needed one.

  “Becks? We’re gonna find her.”

  She almost snapped at him, something nasty like, Glad we cleared that up. Instead she hugged him, felt his strength. The only person in the world who loved Kira as much as she did. “Come on, let’s see if the manager shows us the video on his own or I have to choke him out.”

  * * *

  The Mansion was mostly empty, three guys finishing beers at the bar. The music was still playing, turned down, a song old enough for Rebecca to remember from two decades before. I know who I want to take me home, take me hoooome… “Closing Time.” Semisonic. The more things changed…

  The bartenders were already sorting glasses for the next night. Despite its end-of-the-world look the place ran smoothly. The professionalism might help them. The manager wouldn’t want them angry.

  They waited as the music stopped and the bouncers shooed the last stumbling kids into the night. A minute later, the door to the stairs swung open. “You didn’t find her? Okay, come up with me. There’s something…”

  The inner office was windowless, with a steel desk, a laptop open. A fifty-inch TV screen played live feeds from four surveillance cameras, one behind the bar, one on each side of the front door, and the last a wide shot of the main room.

  “Good footage,” Rebecca said.

  “We made three million euros last year. A problem, someone stealing, we want to know.” He clicked on his laptop until the big screen on the wall lit up with a color feed from a camera behind the bar. The time stamp indicated 22:18:30. Ten eighteen p.m. Kira sat at the bar, alone, eyeing herself in the mirror, a copper mug in front of her. She looked confident. Happy.

  Rebecca wanted to warn her daughter, Beware, beware—

  “There she is. As you said. You can watch it all, but I tell you, she came her by herself, ordered a sangria from the bartender. She drank it, then a beer. She talked a little to the bartender, no one else. Waiting for someone. You see we weren’t too crowded when she first came, then we fill up.”

  He clicked on the laptop and the screen jumped ahead, one frame for each half minute.

  The manager stopped the fast-forward, went to normal speed.

  22:59:22. A man made his way through the thickening crowd to Kira. Tall, broad-shouldered, mid- to late twenties, wearing a baseball cap with an oversized brim that did a good job hiding his face from the camera. Kira smiled at him. They’d have to check with Tony, get a screen grab, but this guy had to be Jacques.

  The guy kissed her cheek. Then he stepped back and introduced Kira to a woman behind him. The woman was his age, pretty in a big-chinned TV news anchorwoman way. She wore a platinum-blond wig that flopped over her forehead. Kira forced a smile and the three talked.

  A man and a woman. As the bouncer at Ginger had said.

  “You see, this woman was with him,” the manager said unnecessarily.

  Yeah, and why? Jacques had been alone when he met Kira in Paris. To Kira, the woman’s arrival had been annoying but hardly alarming. Now it seemed sinister. As did the fact that both Jacques and the woman both had worn headgear to help hide their features.

  “Sound?” Brian said.

  “Too much background, too loud.” The manager paused the video. “Okay, I tell you, they talk, order sangria. Then to the back of the bar, off this camera. You want to watch regular speed or fast?”

  “Regular,” Rebecca said.

  The manager turned the footage back on and they watched in silence. Kira and the woman held themselves in a way that suggested they had taken an instant dislike to one another. Finally, the bartender brought Jacques a pitcher of sangria. He paid and the three walked off-camera.

  “So, I warn you, only one camera watches the whole room. Where they were sitting, you barely see them. I looked at it quickly. You can see the girl with the wig get up from the table, come back, get up. Nothing else happens, and then, a bit before midnight, they leave. All three.”

  He pulled up a video from the camera mounted over the front door. 11:56:30. Kira and Jacques and the woman walked out together; both Jacques and the woman had their heads ducked in a way that obscured their faces. Then they disappeared. Into the night.

  “They don’t come back.”

  Rebecca felt as if she’d been in the bar, a ghost, impotent, useless, watching her daughter disappear. “Have you seen either of them before?”

  “Never.” The manager shook his head for emphasis. “You see, he pays cash, no card.”

  Rebecca scribbled down her and Brian’s email addresses. “Can you send us a screen shot from when they met? And from when they walked out?”

  “Of course.”

  “If she’s still not back in the morning we’ll want the whole video. Thank you for all of this.”

  “De nada. I’m sure you’ll find her. Probably she just drank too much, she’s passed out.”

  * * *

  They hurried in silence up La Rambla and the broad boulevards of Eixample. Rebecca found herself wondering if they would return to an empty apartment, if someone had grabbed Tony while they were looking for Kira.

  But Tony was just where they’d left him.

  “You didn’t find her?”

  “We have a picture from the bar.” She handed him her phone, with the screen shot.

  “Yeah, that’s Jacques.”

  “What about the girl? The one with the wig?”

  “What about her?”

  “Was she with Jacques last night?”

  Tony tilted the phone in his hands, squinted at the screen. “I’ve never seen her.”

  “Anywhere in the café?”

  “No. I’d remember.” He pushed her phone back at her, as if holding it might make him an accessory. “You think this is serious.”

  “We don’t know,” Brian said.

  “Then why didn’t she text—” Tony raised his arm and suddenly punched himself in the head, the smack of knuckles on bone echoing under the living room’s high ceiling. He yelped in pain.

  Rebecca sat beside him, hugged him. His body was shaking. He hadn’t laid off the punch, hadn’t pulled it at the end. If Kira was a mature nineteen, Tony was a young seventeen.

  “I knew the guy was messed up somehow.”

  “We’re gonna find her,” Brian said. “Let’s all get a little sleep. If she’s still not back in the morning we’ll talk to the police.”

  “You want to sleep, Dad?”

  “Come on, Tony,” Rebecca said. She wondered
if she’d have to lead him to his bedroom like he was a child. But he pushed himself up, disappeared into the hall.

  * * *

  After they heard the door to Tony’s bedroom slam shut, she flopped on the couch. “You think the NSA can get a facial match?” From the pictures.

  “Possible, but the hat’s a problem.”

  “Twenty-five billion dollars a year well spent.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “I think if we haven’t heard anything by noon, we need to go to the cops.” They’d have an in, an FBI agent who lived here and worked with the local cops, mostly on terror cases. The threat of Islamist terror was very real in Spain. In 2017, a truck attack on La Rambla had killed fifteen people and injured 150 more. The Spanish were generally happy to trade information with the FBI.

  The bureau called its liaison officers “legal attachés,” inevitably shortened to “Legats.” The Legat here was Rob Wilkerson, a twelve-year vet who’d worked on the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York before moving here. Rebecca didn’t doubt Wilkerson would help. The bureau looked after its own.

  “Okay.” Brian reached down, swung his arms under her legs and back, grunted as he picked her up.

  Surprising her with his strength, his raw male stink, sweat, maybe a cigarette. Had he smoked while he was walking the streets? She appreciated what he was trying to do, distract her for a few seconds. It didn’t work, the voice in her head yelled Kira’s missing, but at least he’d tried.

  He carried her into the master bedroom, with its big four-poster bed. When they’d first brought their suitcases into the room, the bed had seemed charming, sexy. She’d imagined making love to Brian in it, biting her lip so Tony wouldn’t hear. Now the idea repelled her.

  Brian lowered her to the bed and she slid away from him, hoping he would understand that she didn’t want to be touched. He flopped down beside her, rested a hand on her shoulder, pulled it away. Good.