Tom later said, “He called you a whore in Farsi. I told him he shouldn’t have said that. You saw what happened.”

“I didn’t know you knew boxing.”

“For a while, I did.”

“Why did you stop?” I said.

“Every time I got hit in the face, I cried,” he said.

So I knew Tom would do his best to keep Denise and himself alive.

But it was up to me to get them safely free.

Near the Wrangler is a pump island for diesel, and four tractor-trailer trucks are lined up, refueling. I tug out the burner phone. This is my connection to the kidnappers, the ones who have upended my life, have stolen my husband and child, and who’ve put them in danger.

I go to a nearby tractor-trailer truck, belonging to Walmart. I shove the phone in a crack under the doors and go back to my Wrangler.

Earlier the kidnapper thought he had sent me on a mission.

He has.

Mine.

Not his.

CHAPTER 7

IN HIS years as a journalist, Tom Cornwall has been in some tight places: under artillery bombardment in a Kurdish peshmerga outpost in Syria, accidentally separated from a Filipino army patrol while they were hunting Abu Sayyaf terrorists in the jungles of Jolo Island, and in an armored-up Humvee convoy in Afghanistan when the lead vehicle did a flaming backflip after it ran over an IED.

In all of these close calls, Tom had one sustaining mantra: his circus, his monkey. He was in danger because that was his choice, his life, and if things went to shit, well, he’d be the only one bloodied out.

Sitting on the edge of a cot in a concrete cube somewhere, he sighs, rubs his head. Now he is in danger again, but now it is so terribly different.

He lifts his head. His daughter, Denise, is curled up on an identical cot, on the other side of the room. She’s barefoot, wearing black tights and an oversized sweatshirt from Epcot Center. She’s clutching a stuffed Tigger in her arms, and it’s been ten minutes since she last let out a sob.

Progress, of a sort.

She looks up and says, “What about Mister Banjo?”

Tom gets up and examines their quarters. A square room, made of light-green cinder blocks. Concrete ceiling with a small air vent. Concrete floor with a drain in the center. One metal door, leading out. No handle or doorknob on this side. Four lightbulbs dangling from black cords. A dial that can lower the lights but not turn them off. In the corner of the room, a metal sink and metal toilet.

That’s it.

“Daddy, what about Mister Banjo?”

He walks back and forth, back and forth, working out the kinks in his legs and arms. The events of the past hours keep on running back and forth in his mind, like a defective DVD that skips and repeats the same scene.

A regular day at home. Denise in the kitchen, running the blender, making a fruit smoothie, having just changed and dumped her soccer clothes in the bathroom, with a promise that she’ll pick them up, real-soon-now. He in his office, supposedly doing research on his book, but going down a YouTube rabbit hole showing black-and-white science-fiction movie clips from the 1950s. Looking out the window, seeing a red van make a turn in a driveway two homes down.