She was angry at him and at herself. Her mind raced. She felt sick. It took about a minute for her to run through her options and realize what she had to do. She ran back inside and down the stairs to the outside door, ran out into the street calling, “Police! Police! Come back here! Come back!”
And then they were back, hustling to her fast and staring at her curiously. She told them that she had had to lie to them to keep all three of them from being shot by the man who had been with her. He had seized her in the street, held her at gunpoint; he was gone now, having left while she was talking to them. All true, though ever so incomplete. She realized as she spoke to them that she would never be able to tell anyone what had really happened. Things like that hour were not tellable.
They were on their radios, alerting their colleagues. They led her upstairs, guns drawn. She sat back down on her kitchen chair, took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking. It was going to be a long night.
26
You can hide but you can’t run.
There were cameras everywhere, of course. On the public transport systems, in the stores, on the streets. If he went out to get food, he would pass by surveillance cameras several times no matter where he went. If he tried to leave the country, there would be passport control. Not so much within Europe, but still, a check could happen; if he traveled, he would eventually get checked. He had a fake passport, but he didn’t trust it would work in situations like that. He was stuck here, in one of the most surveiled countries on Earth.
But he had already learned where and how to hide. He had a place to live; high on the side of the Zuriberg, overlooking the city, were several blocks of community gardens. These plots of terraced and cultivated land were studded by little wooden garden sheds, storage containers for tools and fertilizers and pesticides and the like. One of them had a side wall panel he had pried off in a way he could glue back into position, and once inside the shed he could replace the panel and lie on the floor in his down sleeping bag, and be gone by dawn, leaving no sign of his incursion. This shed he could use as his base. He could hide in Zurich itself.
His fake passport had been the passport of a man back in the States who had died and never had a death certificate filed. Frank’s photo had been inserted into it, and to that extent he was this other man, Jacob Salzman. It would stay good for another three years. And he had created a credit card in that name, with some money in the account; and he had converted most of his remaining money to fifty-euro bills. He had a visa for his fake ID that allowed him to stay in Switzerland for most of the coming year, and a supposed job back in America, and an apartment rented in that name down in the city. All that had gone well, over a year ago. There were cameras at the entrance to that apartment building, of course, but the back door that led to the trash compactor didn’t have a camera, so he could come and go by that back way sometimes, and use the apartment’s bathroom. As Salzman he was a member of one of the lake swim clubs, and could use those facilities too.
And all day he could walk. He could wander without revealing his presence in any obtrusive way. He ate from food stalls that didn’t have cameras, and bought other food from Migros, and spent his days in parks where the cameras were few. Thus he lived a life that was not much registering in the system, but was not flagrantly off-grid either. Just low profile. No doubt after kidnapping a UN ministry head and forcibly entering her apartment and spending a night haranguing her, he was the subject of a big police search. Not to mention what had happened down at Lake Maggiore. Salzman might have to be abandoned. But for a good while, at least, he could hide just a kilometer or two from the minister’s apartment. And so, for the time being, he did.
27
Now Mary had a new problem: twenty-four-hour police protection.
Of course there were worse problems to have, but it was surprising how upsetting it was to Mary, until she considered it: she had lost her life. Or at least her habits, her privacy. Sad to consider that these were much of what her life had come to.
After the police were done with their questions and investigations that night, she went to bed and tried to get some sleep, and failed. Police officers were still in her kitchen, and downstairs outside the front door. That was likely to remain true for the foreseeable future. She damned her kidnapper with a million damns; she was hating him more and more, the more she thought about it.
Even though what he had said nagged at her. Even though the memory of his face troubled her. His wild-eyed conviction that he was right. Usually she disliked and distrusted people like that, but he had been different, she had to admit. A terrible conviction had been forced into him. His brush with death had made him mad. Although in the end he had only shouted at her. Kidnapped her to argue with her— then also, her bathroom door swinging shut on her— in some ways he had fought hard to hold it together, to do nothing more than persuade her. Words like fists to the face. Paper bullets of the brain. It was enough to make her heart hammer all over again. Her face burned with the memory.
So she went
