“This note was folded up inside,” Burns pressed on. “It’s totally clean of prints as well. We’ve already taken a sample of the ink. We could get something there. I want to assure you we’re putting every resource onto this.”

“What do they want, Ron?”

Unlike his wife, the president was stone-faced. During the campaign, he’d been equally praised and criticized for his stoicism — or robotic quality, depending on whose story you were reading. He had been a law professor at one time and it showed. Burns admired the man’s strength, in any case. He knew he couldn’t have held up nearly as well under similar circumstances. His two daughters, and his wife, were his life, at least his life away from work.

“This is going to come as a shock,” he told the First Couple. “But again, let me stress that we can’t assume anything about this, true or false.”

Even now, Burns realized, he was stalling the president of the United States. Finally, there was nothing left to do but lay the note flat on the table in front of them. It was only a few sentences, and they were brutally succinct.

“There is no ransom. There will be no demands. The price, Mr. President, is knowing that you will never see your children again.”

HALA AL DOSSARI POPPED OPEN her eyes and looked with alarm around the room. For the fourth straight morning, it took a moment, maybe five seconds, to remember exactly where she was.

Wayfarer Hotel.

Washington.

America.

It was strange, waking to silence, in such an uncomfortable, foreign environment. At home, they woke to the adhan every morning, ringing out from two dozen mosques in the neighborhood. Back in their coral house. With their two beloved children.

That all seemed like somebody else’s life now — finishing up her residency, worrying about what to make for dinner, eating alone with Fahd and Aamina most nights while Tariq worked late at his accounting firm.

That was before he started coming home from the mosque talking about American devils, and the inevitable war — any number of things Hala knew in her heart to be true. He rambled nightly about how the United States was a cancer, one that would spread and infect the entire globe if it was left unchecked.

And now here they were. The Wayfarer Hotel. Washington. The previous night she had nearly killed a man on the street. A petty thief.

The clock on the nightstand said four fifty. Hala slipped out from under the cheap hotel comforter and took the television remote to the foot of the bed. She sat there in her nightgown, flipping channels with the sound off so as not to wake Tariq.

It was the same story everywhere — CNN, Fox News, MSNBC. The Coyle kidnapping had become a national obsession, while the suicides at Dulles had already disappeared into the background. It seemed so incredibly apt to her. Systematic. What were two dead Arabs worth here, as compared to two white, wealthy American children? Everything had a price in this country. Everything. And these self-obsessed fools wondered why the rest of the world hated them?