‘One thing I still don’t understand,’ George says. ‘You had the card under your skin until some shady doctor took it out. But you still have it, even though they imprisoned you in a fucking cellar? How did that work?’

Jacob looks out the window into the rainy darkness. ‘There are several ways to smuggle things inside the body,’ he says quietly.

‘What do you mean?’ George asks. ‘Did you stick it up your arse?’

Jacob turns and looks at him evenly. ‘It was Alexa’s idea. She thought I should take control of my situation. She’s smart.’ He falls silent, stares out the window again. As if he’s still caught inside what’s happened to him over the past weeks and is finding it hard to speak.

‘She didn’t know Yassim,’ he continues quietly. ‘She didn’t know who he was, what we had. I guess she thought he was using me. So she arranged everything with the doctor. We got out the card and found a reader, Alexa has some friend who works with IT stuff. But the card was password protected, of course. The IT guy tried to break into it, but he couldn’t. The encryption was too sophisticated.’

‘So you still don’t know what’s on the card?’ George says, rolling his eyes.

But Jacob barely hears him. ‘Afterwards, Alexa said she could keep it for me. But I promised Yassim to bring it. How could I betray him? So she gave me a condom.’

‘She gave you a condom?’ Klara says, looking curiously at him in the rear-view mirror.

‘I put the card in it before I left for the airport. Then I swallowed it.’

‘Like a drug mule,’ George said.

‘Basically,’ Jacob says. ‘And I was able to get out of the cellar before, well… you know.’

They stop for gas at a rest stop outside Duisburg. The rain is falling heavily now, but Klara needs air and a cigarette. She pulls her jacket tight around her and makes her way between parked semis to the edge of the parking lot.

The traffic on the autobahn whizzes by, and even if she can’t see much in the darkness she knows the landscape here is flat, just asphalt and boggy fields, typical northern Europe.

She lights a cigarette and takes her phone out of her pocket, weighs it in her hand. She and George agreed to keep them off. Who knows who might be listening or following their movements via phone? She’s been through too much in recent years to leave anything to chance. But it’s almost been eight hours since she checked it last, and she just has to see if someone tried to reach her.

Gabriella’s detention hearing was today. The first thing Klara plans to do tomorrow is to call around and find out where they’re holding her and on what grounds.