Abandoned

loved that song. She could sing it too, high and sweet. I stare out through the windshield, remembering her sitting at Dad’s feet, smiling and singing as he played the guitar. It makes me smile too.

It would have been nice if she could have known her grandchildren.

I’m not sure what it is right now that makes me think of her instead of Dad. Maybe it’s because Mom always seemed to find it just a little bit harder to be happy, and when she did find it, she found it in her family.

I continue to whistle as I close the car door.

Something hard touches my lower back, and a voice whispers in my ear:

“Make a wrong move, Special Agent Barrett, and I’ll shoot you right here and walk away. You’ll die, I’ll live. You know who I am, so you know that I’ll do what I say.”

I freeze in place. My heart starts to hammer so hard I think it’s going to punch its way out of my chest. I feel slightly nauseated.

“Dali?” I croak.

How did my throat get so dry so fast?

“We’re going to walk to my car. You’re going to get in the trunk. Fight me and I will not only shoot you, I’ll go to your home and I will kill your adopted daughter and your boyfriend. Do you understand?”

A million thoughts whirl through my head, things to say, bargains to make. The gun nudges me, pushing all that aside. “Yes,” I whisper.

He reaches under my jacket and takes my weapon. He unclips my cell phone from my belt.

“Walk forward.”

We walk no more than ten feet, arriving at a blue Toyota Camry. The trunk is already unlocked. How’d he know I’d be here? He didn’t. He was following me. Why? “Open it,” he orders. I comply.

“How long have you been following me?” It’s a useless question, but as I peer into the darkness of the trunk, I think about Heather Hollister, living for eight years in the dark, and I am overwhelmed by terror, atavistic and instantaneous.

“Get in or you die and your family dies with you.”

His voice is flat, emotionless, almost bored. It’s the boredom that convinces me more than anything else. I scan the parking lot briefly. A man is walking to his own car, bag of groceries in hand. He’s talking on his cell phone and pays us no mind.

I crawl into the trunk and whip around to catch a glimpse of Dali. His face is swathed in gauze. He pauses for a moment, looking down at me.

“People look away from a burn victim,” he says, and then slams the trunk shut.

I hear nothing, and then I hear a muffled voice, followed by two spits that I recognize as silenced gunfire. More nothing, then some scuffling sounds and the car door slams. The engine starts. We’re in motion.

It had to be the cell-phone man. He must have seen a guy with his head covered in bandages stuffing a woman into the trunk of his car. He said something and Dali shot him without hesitation. I have little doubt he’s dead. Dali is a creature of precision and pragmatism, and it’s only practical to become good with a gun.

I pray that someone’s noticed all this, that a patrol car was driving by and saw it go down, something, anything. I put my hand on my belly and I pray to the God I don’t believe in.

I don’t even know if you’re there, but if you are, please, do something. I’m not asking you to part the Red Sea. He shot a man in a public parking lot, you know? Just give me a cop or a concerned citizen with a cell phone. Please.

As time goes by, I understand just how far away we must be from the parking lot by now. I hear no sounds of pursuit. I slump into myself.

I go silent, smell the faint odor of gasoline, and try to get ready for the moment when he opens the trunk.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The car slows down and stops. It idles, waiting. I hear the sound of something moving, something mechanized. A gate?

I’d tried to get some idea of how long we traveled. I was surprised at how difficult that was to do with no watch, in the dark. There’s no sense of distance. I had tried to count the seconds but kept getting lost in my own fear.

The panic is crippling. I don’t know if it’s better or worse for me than it was for Heather Hollister. I have more training. I know what I’m up against. I’ve been under fire and have survived more than a single attack on my life.

None of it seems to be helping. Images of my rape and torture at the hands of Sands, images I thought I’d put to bed long ago, rise in my mind. My heartbeat is out of control and I’m close to hyperventilating.

I attended a conference once for law-enforcement personnel. It had various lectures on a variety of subjects: personnel, firearms, interrogation, etc. I attended one entitled “The Psychology of Fear: Conquering the Flight Urge in Combat Situations.”

The speaker was a man by the name of Barnaby Wallace, an ex-Delta Force operative turned Special Forces instructor turned private consultant.

The problem in most situations where fear takes over is a lack of training on the subject itself, or improper training. We’ve promoted the idea in this society that fear is found only in cowards, men who aren’t worth the title of men. We’ve promoted the concept of being ashamed of fear. In World War Two the Russkies approached it from a more practical angle: You could choose between the guns of the soldiers behind you—which would kill you for sure if you ran—or the guns of the enemy in front of you, which you might still survive.

The history of the military is one of dealing with fear. We train soldiers to “obey orders, no matter what.” Desertion is frequently a capital offense, punished by a firing squad.

What’s it all show, though? He’d leaned forward a little to emphasize his point. Obviously, that fear is a natural response. In fact, in my years of command, it was always the fearless men who gave me the most trouble. They generally had a screw loose.

The audience laughed, and you could sense in that laughter a low relief, as though we were all being given a sudden pass on some hidden shame, a time we’d felt fear and had to hide it.

Fear is probably one of the oldest biological imperatives. It was developed to keep the organism alive. Fear demands flight from the stronger opponent, because, at the animal level, might does tend to make right. The bigger opponent will generally be the winning opponent.

Things have changed. We can think, and because we can think, we can create advantages that nullify the size or superior armament of the enemy. At this level, fear still serves a purpose, but only if we learn to harness it for our own ends. He smiled. Fight or flight, everyone’s heard that one, and it’s true. Fear was designed to encourage us to run, but it had a fail-safe: If running wasn’t an option, it delivered the adrenaline we’d need to put up a good fight. So there’s a flip side to fear. It tells you that you’re in danger, that you need to get your shit together quick, and that you need to either retreat, or fight, or die.

So the first step of conquering your fear is to embrace it. It’s telling you something. Listen. Don’t resist. That’s the first mistake, and it’ll be the one that kills you. You’ll be so distracted trying to push that fear aside that you won’t notice the guy with the gun ’til he’s right up on you. Fear freezes us first, and that’s a problem in a combat situation.

You have to take fear out of the instinctive level. It’s just an indicator, like a speedometer or your blood pressure. Apply your intellect to the indicator. Observe it. What’s it telling you? Is flight the answer? Could be. How about fight? Maybe. Observe it, embrace it, intellectualize it. When you do that, fear becomes a tool, nothing more or less, and you lose no forward motion.

Stop treating fear as a defect or something alien. It’s probably the oldest part of you.

I close my eyes and force myself first to breathe and then to examine my fear. Why am I afraid?

Number one is the visceral answer: because of what Sands did to me. I’ve been in the hands of a madman