Javier’s boots pounded the floor, and as the sound faded at the end of the hallway, one thought consumed Patrick. Javier clearly didn’t know her whereabouts. Inkface had lied about not seeing her.

  Where the hell was Olga?

  Chapter 33

  Kate walked to the National Mall and called Noah on a burner phone.

  Buying a “burner” had been Noah’s final instruction at their meeting in Dumbarton Oaks Park. As any drug dealer would attest, the only thing safer than talking face-to-face was a conversation—no texting—on a prepaid cell purchased for cash with no long-term carrier contract. Prosecutors were of the same opinion.

  “Meet me at the Fun House,” said Kate.

  “Be there in five,” said Noah.

  The call lasted all of five seconds, and Kate switched off the power. Even though Kate had disabled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the burner, she powered it on only when away from home or other locations that could link her to the phone via GPS tracking, and it remained on only when in use.

  The Fun House exhibit was inside the National Building Museum, located in the historic Pension Building, one of the most spectacular interior spaces in the city. The soaring Great Hall, adorned with eight colossal Corinthian columns, was home to Grover Cleveland’s Inaugural Ball before the building was even finished, and many others followed. Kate entered from Judiciary Square and took a seat on the large bench shaped like the letter F. It was part of a popular temporary exhibit, and seven other benches completed Kate and Noah’s code name: fun house.

  Noah sat on the letter U, facing her.

  “I’m feeling manipulated,” said Kate.

  A five-year-old girl was doing a handstand on the H. A frantic mother rushed over and turned her right-side-up.

  “Manipulated by me?” asked Noah.

  “Yes. You told me Project Naïveté morphed into something bigger than personal data on citizenship. You led me to believe that’s the reason Patrick is in danger.”

  “All that’s true.”

  “But you didn’t even begin to tell me what I needed to know going into my meeting with Sandra Levy.”

  “Exactly what do you think I’m holding back?”

  “I want to know: Did she steal secrets from Buck Technologies, or didn’t she?”

  The little gymnast was back, using her body as a bridge between letters, her hands on the N of the word “fun” and her outstretched toes on the H of “house.” Kate wanted to sign up for her planking class.

  “We have proof she did,” said Noah.

  “Then why wasn’t she charged and convicted with espionage?”

  “The FBI moved in and arrested her too soon. My section chief thinks they would have caught her red-handed if they’d waited. The bottom line is we don’t have proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  “What did she steal—or what do you think she stole?”

  “I can’t tell you. That technology isn’t just proprietary to Buck. It’s classified as a matter of national security.”

  “Throw me a bone, Noah.”

  “All I can tell you is that the technology Buck developed for Project Naïveté is a dangerous tool in the wrong hands.”

  “But you’re not going to tell me what it is, are you?”

  “No. And my advice to you is that you don’t ask your father, because if he tells you, he could go to jail. You don’t have clearance.”

  Kate could see only one way around the wall he was hiding behind. “How do I get clearance?”

  “Are you asking me to get it for you?”

  “Yes. I’m tired of being a pawn in a game of chess where I can’t even see the board.”

  Noah stared back at her, silent. Kate couldn’t tell if the accusation had wounded him more on the professional or personal level.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “Bring me something. Something big. If you do, I’ll see if I can get you clearance to tell you what Sandra stole.”

  “What do you mean by ‘something big’?”

  “I want to know who Sandra was stealing for.”

  “She wouldn’t even give me a straight answer when I asked if she accessed company secrets. How am I supposed to find out who she was stealing for?”

  “Help us find a motive. If we can find her motive, we can figure out who she was working for.”

  “So, you’re asking me to meet with Sandra again?”

  “Yes. Obviously, you can’t just come right out and ask her, but I want the focus of your visit to be on one thing—why she did it.”

  I did it for Megan. The words replayed so loudly in Kate’s mind that she feared Noah might hear them.

  “Can you do that, Kate?” he asked.

  One option was to tell Noah that she did it for her daughter. But Kate was an outsider to Noah’s investigation, and putting that information in his hands might only make it harder to find an answer to the question that really mattered: what had her mother meant by “I did it for Kate.”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” said Kate.

  Chapter 34

  Patrick heard noises coming from the party room.

  He was blindfolded and handcuffed to a bed frame, but the routine trips down the hallway to the bathroom had allowed Patrick to orient himself. The smell of food wafted from one end of the hallway, opposite the bathroom. Halfway between his room and the bathroom was the “fiesta room,” as he called it. The guards gathered there at night, drinking and laughing over the fear they instilled in their prisoners.

  The door creaked open, footfalls crossed the room, and Patrick felt the barrel of a gun pressing up under his chin.

  “Be still,” he said, and the voice belonged to Inkface.

  Patrick felt a moment of comfort as Inkface unchained his wrist from the bed frame, but it was short lived. With a rope, Inkface bound his wrists behind his back. He did a poor job of it, Patrick noted. Much more slack than usual. Definitely drunk.

  “Up,” said Inkface.

  Patrick obeyed and immediately felt the barrel of the gun against the back of his head. With hands behind his back and a drunken Inkface breathing down his neck, Patrick walked down the hallway, as directed. He figured either this was the end or he was the night’s entertainment in the fiesta room. He wasn’t sure which would be worse.

  They stopped halfway down the hallway, and it sounded like a sports bar on the other side of the door—music blasting as men laughed at their own jokes and competed to be the loudest voice in the room. Patrick was beginning to think this was not an “either-or” situation—clearly he was the night’s entertainment—but maybe this was the end, too.

  Patrick heard the door open. Inkface shoved him, and Patrick fell into the room. The men inside cheered the arrival of the guest hostage of honor. Inkface horse-collared him, pulled him up onto his knees, and yanked off the blindfold.

  “Look what you did!” Inkface shouted.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He was surrounded by drunk men laughing like hyenas. They were sharing rum straight from the bottle, one man taking a swig and then passing it to the next. One of them was on the floor, passed out and completely naked. A mattress was on the floor beside him, no bed frame. A woman, naked from the waist up, was kneeling on the mattress, her face bruised and swollen from slapping—or worse. The look of terror in her eyes cut right through Patrick. Pangs of guilt rose up so powerfully inside that he was almost nauseous.

  It was Olga.

  Patrick didn’t know how Inkface had figured out she was there to help him. Most likely, someone had overheard them talking in the bathroom, where Olga had tried to keep the conversation short, and Patrick had gone on and on, questioning her motives and struggling to get his head around the fact that she was a prostitute. He’d turned a ten-second encounter into a five-minute meeting between co-conspirators. He’d blown her cover. This was Patrick’s fault.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, though it was impossible to be heard over the loud music and the shouting.

  Inkface muted the stereo. The room was far from quiet, and only then did Patrick hear the retching sound of the guy in the corner puking his guts out.

  “El Rubio, how do you like what you see?” asked Inkface.

  Patrick glared, saying nothing.

  Inkface seemed to enjoy his anger. “Ah, see?” he said to his men. “I told you. El Rubio’s got a girlfriend!”

  The men laughed, and it was bizarre in so many ways to Patrick, this collective scum who reveled in middle-school jokes for murderers.

  “We know Olga likes to suck all night, right, boys?”

  They howled like cat-calling construction workers on steroids. Inkface leaned closer to Patrick and spoke in a voice that feigned concern. “But poor El Rubio. You want it to stop, no?”

  Patrick did. And then he wanted to kill Inkface.

  “Only you can stop this,” said Inkface. “Do you want to stop it?”

  Patrick didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply, but Inkface grabbed him by the throat.

  “Answer me! Do you want to stop it?”

  Patrick glared into those cold black eyes. There was no doubt that Inkface would strangle him for the slightest reason, or for no reason at all—just for the fun of it, if he so desired. Patrick nodded. Inkface released his grip, and Patrick could breathe again.

  “Negotiations are not going well,” said Inkface. “We know you work at a rich American company. They know we have you. But you must be a pain in the ass to your boss. Nobody gives a shit if you come back alive or not.”

  A “pain in the ass” was an understatement, and Buck’s refusal to pay only underscored Patrick’s fears that his trip to Colombia was designed to deal with an employee seen as dangerous, a plan with a darker corporate purpose that he’d been pondering since Javier threw him off the cliff at the order of el jefe del jefe. But he kept his poker face.

  “That can’t be,” said Patrick.

  Inkface grabbed Patrick by the jaw and jerked his gaze upward, forcing him to look into his captor’s eyes, those two burning embers. “Are you calling me a liar, El Rubio?”

  Patrick shook his head.

  “I’m giving you one last chance,” said Inkface. “I’m going to untie your hands and give you a phone. You get one phone call. You call the one person in this world who will pay a ransom. A big ransom. If you do that for me, you live. And your whore of a girlfriend gets the rest of the night off.”

  Inkface let go of Patrick’s jaw, untied his wrists, and offered the phone for Patrick’s taking.

  “Your move,” said Inkface.

  Patrick stared at the phone before his eyes. The thought of paying a ransom to this band of thieves, rapists, and murderers was enough to make him sick. Had he been alone in the room, he would never have taken it. But he glanced in Olga’s direction, and for the first time in his life he cared less about living than about stopping someone else’s suffering.

  Patrick’s mind was a trap for numbers of any sort, and he recalled the ten important digits from the text messages she’d sent him.

  He took the phone from Inkface’s hand. And he dialed Kate’s number.

  Chapter 35

  Kate was at a Mexican restaurant, having dinner with a couple of friends from law school, when her cell rang. Her real cell, not her burner. The display read unknown caller, which was reason to ignore it, but with Patrick missing, any phone call could be important. She picked up. The voice on the line was not a woman’s. It was a boy’s, or rather, the voice of the man she still thought of as a boy.

  “Kate, it’s Patrick.”

  “Patrick!” she shouted, and the exclamation drew immediate reaction from her girlfriends.

  “Who’s Patrick?”

  “Can I meet him?”

  Kate shushed them and pressed the phone to her ear.

  “I need your help,” said Patrick.

  Trumpets blasted from two tables away. The five-piece mariachi band was starting up again. Kate jumped up from her chair and ran to the restroom, where she could hear.

  “Patrick, where are you?”

  “Patrick is in deep shit.” The reply was in English, but the accent was Hispanic.

  “Who is this? Where’s Patrick?”

  “You’ve heard enough from Patrick. Now you know he’s alive. The question for you is, do you want to keep him alive?”

  Kate’s conversation with Noah was proving prophetic. The Colombian government’s crumbling peace treaty with Marxist guerrillas was no longer an abstraction, the revival of kidnappings for ransom no longer theoretical.

  “What do you want?”

  “Two million dollars.”

  Kate hesitated, but only because she didn’t know how the game was played. She wondered if she was expected to negotiate.

  “It’s not negotiable,” the man said, as if reading her mind.

  “I’ll need time,” said Kate. She wasn’t sure where those words had come from. Probably a movie or a TV drama she’d watched. Kate had no idea what to say or do, no conception of how much time she needed. It was almost incomprehensible, the fact that she was in a restaurant bathroom, talking on her cellphone to a Colombian kidnapper, trying to ransom the boy who used to haggle with her over eating his vegetables, as a Mexican mariachi band played on the other side of the door.

  “You have forty-eight hours,” the man said. “I will call you. And if you want to see Patrick again, the only acceptable answer is that you have the money. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “And don’t bother calling the Colombian police, the American police, the U.S. embassy, the FBI, or anyone else you might be thinking of calling. That is the quickest and surest way to end up with the dead hostage. This is a private transaction. Understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, and the line went dead.

  Kate fell back against the wall, emotionally spent. Her legs wobbled, no longer able to support her weight. Her cashmere sweater against a tiled wall was like butter on a griddle, and she slid all the way down, slowly, until she was sitting on the floor. Tears were about to flow, but Kate fought them off. Her first instinct was to call Noah, her best law enforcement connection, but the kidnapper’s clear warning—“This is a private transaction”—was not to be ignored.

  She gathered herself and dialed her father’s cell.

  Patrick looked on with contempt, still on his knees, as his captors hooted, hollered, and slapped each other on the back as if they were all heroes.

  “Dos millónes!” Inkface shouted. “Kiss my ass, Javier. El Rubio is ours!”

  “Olga, too!” said another.

  Patrick’s gaze swept the room. They were all smiles and laughter, except for the naked pig on the floor, who was still out cold, and the youngest one in the group—probably still a teenager—who was throwing up in the corner. Another, who looked like the teenager’s older brother, was so drunk he couldn’t even slap a high-five without staggering to the floor. He was down on one knee and unable to stand, which struck him as hysterically funny. Two others, the least drunk in the group, had left before the phone call to deal with the other hostages. That left just Inkface, a shirtless muscleman, and a third guy with gold teeth to guard Patrick and Olga. They weren’t totally incapacitated like the others, but the rum had robbed them of the alertness needed to guard hostages. It seemed they’d forgotten that Patrick’s hands were still free, Inkface having untied them for the phone call. Patrick kept them behind his back to keep the illusion alive and discreetly looked in Olga’s direction. She cut her eyes toward the chair beside the bed, where the naked blob of blubber on the floor had left his clothes. Patrick spotted the pistol beside the fat man’s dirty underwear, and at that moment he and Olga reached their silent agreement to escape.

  Inkface stepped toward the mattress.

  “You think you’re better than us, don’t you, Olga?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Javier made you his high-class whore for his American clients. That doesn’t make you high-class. That makes you a whore.”

  The muscleman laughed and cranked up the stereo. Inkface cracked open another liter of rum.

  “Take those pants off, Olga. Let’s have a look at the jewels that fetch Javier such a high price.”

  “Leave her alone,” said Patrick.

  Inkface chuckled. “Stupid boy. Did you think I meant it when I said your girlfriend could have the night off?”

  Patrick couldn’t say if this was the end of the line for Olga, but it was debatable whether death would have been worse than what Inkface had in store for her. It was time to act, and Patrick had to seize the first opening.

  Inkface raised the bottle to his lips and belted back more rum. As he swallowed his third gulp, Patrick leapt to action. In a blur, he sprang from the floor, grabbed the bottle, and smashed it against the tattooed side of his head. Patrick was acting on instinct, not according to any well-conceived plan, and the neck of the broken bottle became his weapon. He lunged toward Inkface and burrowed the jagged glass into his neck, pushing down hard, twisting and turning the razor-sharp edges, gouging directly at the carotid artery, until his hand was covered in gushing crimson. Inkface fell to the floor, screaming as blood spouted from his neck like a fountain.

  Olga dived toward the chair, grabbed the pistol, and started squeezing off one round after another. The muscleman by the stereo went down first, followed by the guy with the gold teeth—definitely a kill shot, the second slug taking out those golden chiclets before exiting through the back of his skull.

  “The blood, stop the blood!” shouted Inkface. He was rolling on the floor and grabbing his throat. But the bleeding was unstoppable, and Olga didn’t waste a bullet by putting him out of his misery. She let him writhe and, instead, delivered a swift kick to the nuts of the naked pig on the floor, which roused him from his unconscious state just long enough to see her deliver a bullet between his eyes—and told Patrick all he needed to know about what had happened in this room before Fat Boy had passed out.

  Inkface groaned, and one last gurgle emerged from the hole in his throat before his body was suddenly still.