Something happened off-screen. The attackers flattened against a wall, all three grabbing Ms. Lopez. Security? Some sort of first responder?
Riley clenched his hands. She could still get away...
A moment later, the three men dragged Ms. Lopez out the side door.
The video went dark.
For several seconds no one spoke.
Riley tried to swallow the lump lodged in his throat. A feeling of wrongness settling in his stomach. He glanced up at Melody, who continued to frown at the square of light cast by the projector.
“So, she was grabbed because she was all they could get to? That’s the story they’re giving us?” Riley asked.
Grant turned to face the table.
There was no way Ms. Lopez was anything but a target. No wonder everyone wanted to keep this quiet. An attack in Kurdistan was one thing, a kidnapping by terrorists another. This was more complicated than a simple snatch and grab.
FRIDAY. UNKNOWN, IRAQ.
Erin Lopez balanced her weight on the ball of her right foot, doing her best Olympic gymnast impression. The crate had to be at least a decade old and wasn’t structurally sound. She pressed her ear to the side of the building and listened to the vibrations transmitted by the stone. She willed them to tell her something, impart her captor’s secrets, but all she got was a very cold ear for her trouble.
When she’d first been dumped down here, she’d told herself that someone was coming to get her. As poorly organized as this group was, NexGen’s security would find her.
She’d held fast to that idea for all of twenty-four hours.
The last day hadn’t provided her with any reason to believe someone was coming for her, and that meant her chances of getting out of here were getting fewer by the second.
The reality of her situation was that to these people she was a foreigner working for a foreign company taking what should belong to the local people. If NexGen was going to save her, they’d have shown up by now. Which meant one of three things: they weren’t sending anyone, which would result in a sob story campaign and her parents getting some money, the US military was involved, and anything they did would take months of planning, or there was a third party, and she had no idea what their true goal could be.
Erin didn’t like any of those options. What she wanted was to talk to her kidnappers. Understand them. If she could hear them out, get to the heart of why they’d kidnapped her, maybe she could help them. So far, her attempts to communicate had been met with hostility. These were going to kill her, it was just a matter of when and how.
Voices reverberated through the stone walls.
Erin pressed closer, the chill seeping into her skin and bones, robbing her of all warmth. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the tone was enough of an indication for her to feel as though her assumptions were justified. She stepped down off the crate before she broke it and paced the three steps across her prison.
No one was coming to save her.
If she was going to survive, she had to be smart. She couldn’t let the darkness rob her of her senses. There was a way out of this. Everyone wanted something.
What did she know about them? Could she guess at what they wanted?
A team of seven men and one woman had abducted her from NexGen’s newly acquired site. They’d had explosives, guns, and a getaway vehicle. Erin hadn’t seen their faces, but they’d spoken Arabic. Not that they’d said much around her except for the yelling at each other.
Even that told a story.
Whoever these people were, they weren’t unified, and they didn’t speak Kurdish.
When Erin had first taken the job and moved to Kurdistan she’d struggled with the language barrier. Though the region was part of Iraq, most of the people her age and younger didn’t speak Arabic. Since the ‘70s, when the Kurds were banished to this corner of the country, one of the ways the people had fought back was by holding onto their culture. They spoke Kurdish to the point that anyone thirty and younger couldn’t communicate in Arabic. Her kidnappers were in their twenties, at most. Which meant her kidnappers weren’t Kurds, they were Iraqi, and they knew her name.
Her stomach clenched.
There was only one connection that made sense, and if she was right... Erin was in some deep shit.
When NexGen hired her, they’d sent her to the Iraq-Kurdistan border where they’d been developing new oil fields and the tensions between the two people groups was tense. If she’d known what would happen, would she have turned the job down? It was hard to say.
There weren’t many reasons for a group of unfamiliar people to know her name, though.
Shit. Fuck. And damn it.
Erin paced three strides, turned and paced again. She was in what was little more than a cellar of some kind, dug directly into the rock. At night she shivered and lost feeling in her fingers and toes. During the day she’d sweat until her clothes were soaked through.
She was a bargaining chip. That was the best answer to why she was here. She was something to use to get what they wanted. It wouldn’t be comfortable for her and she’d probably be here a while, but it was the least dangerous option.
The best option after that was to be sold to one of the insurgent groups—ISIS, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, it didn’t matter—who would then use her to try to get something in return. Prisoners, resources, it didn’t matter. It still wouldn’t be a comfortable stay, but at least her value was in being alive.
The worst option was if this was personal, and she knew for a few poor souls out there, this could be. She’d done the right thing.
