“I don’t know who they are, either. I’m sorry.”

He takes his hand away from her smooth forehead, and she scrunches her face, like she’s trying not to cry.

“Dad?” she asks.

“Yes, hon?”

“Will Mom and her friends rescue us?”

Tom says, “I’m sure.”

“The Army. I bet those bad guys kidnapped us because of Mom and her job.”

“Maybe,” Tom says. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can’t rescue ourselves.”

“Huh?”

He rubs the side of her face. “We’re smart. We’re tough. Maybe we can figure out a way of escaping. What do you think?”

She nods, barely smiling. “That sounds good. I’ll start thinking, okay? And when we get out, maybe you can call Mrs. Millett. About Mister Banjo.”

He now rubs her belly. “Sure. That sounds great.”

Now she’s smiling and he turns away, because he’s afraid he’s going to choke up in front of his daughter, who is relying on Daddy to save her. And who believes—and makes a good case—that this kidnapping is due to Amy’s work in the Army.

But Tom knows better, and the guilt is threatening to consume him.

For he has secrets, secrets he’s been keeping from Amy.

And he’s terrified they will end up killing him and Denise.

CHAPTER 9

IN THE kidnap note that I’ve left behind at the house, I was warned not to contact any military or law enforcement personnel.

But they didn’t say anything about public libraries.

I’m at a computer terminal in the corner of the Kingstowne Library, which on the outside looks like an outlet mall—no doubt because it was built in the Landsdowne Centre shopping complex—and on the inside has lots of bright colors and white ceilings and open shelves. I grew up in a small town in Maine, and our library was one of those places donated by Andrew Carnegie, a dark, Victorian-style building with lots of brick and turrets. Sometimes, when the librarian dozed, I’d play hide-and-go-seek with my gal pals.

Back then, there were no computers, but this library has a nice little section for public use, and I’m hard at work, believe it or not. A few years ago the president and the secretary of defense made a big deal of transferring millions of dollars from our DoD budget to help upgrade computer systems in libraries across the country. Yay, everyone said. But there might have been a few nays if folks realized that in all this upgrading a back door was installed in the software for the use of nosy intelligence officers like myself who were stuck somewhere in flyover country or on the run.

Call it defense in depth, or increasing the stability of vital DoD intelligence services, or another few bricks in the wall-to-wall surveillance of everything we do in the States, but all I know is that it works, and I need it.

I go to an obscure federal government website about protecting rare flowers and click on a tiny gray box in the lower right-hand corner, which brings up a log-in box. I gain access by using my name, Army service number, and password.