REMI FARGO WAS HALF AWARE, NOT AWAKE BUT STRUGGLING toward consciousness, as a free diver struggles upward toward the light, striving to burst through the surface to gasp that first breath of air.

She was in a dark place that was so soft that she couldn’t feel her muscles push against anything solid, and she seemed to have sunk into it. After a huge mental effort, she realized that she was inside a big cardboard barrel, on top of some rags or cloths, and that more had been dumped on top of her and then the barrel closed. There must be airholes, she thought, but she saw none, and her few minutes of effort made her lose consciousness again.

An unknowable number of hours passed before Remi approached consciousness again. This time when she tried to open her eyes, they opened. She now knew she was in the big barrel of hand towels the woman had been handing out at the airport restroom. She righted herself with gravity so she was kneeling on a layer of towels, pushed up with her hands, and felt the top of the barrel give a little, but it wouldn’t budge at the rim. She ran her hands along the rim and pushed, but the top was tightly secured.

“Hello?” she called out.

There was no response.

“Hello? You out there. Open up.” She thought about what had happened to her. She had been kidnapped from a ladies’ room in the Moscow airport. The audacity of that was breathtaking, but her mind had no interest in the details. The two big women had drugged her and put her in this barrel, taken the barrel out of the airport, loaded it into what was likely a linen supply truck, and driven off with her.

She had probably been on the road before Sam had started wondering about her. Poor Sam. He must be absolutely insane with worry by now. She could picture him pacing in that waiting area, watching people boarding their plane for Kazakhstan, wondering what had happened to her. He would be driving the authorities mad by now too, and that was a good thing. He wouldn’t let them forget about her—some unknown foreign woman who had gotten herself into trouble and had no powerful connections to make their lives really uncomfortable.

Remi considered calling out again but decided to wait. The time to yell would be when she heard people or felt them moving the barrel. There would be some chance of making an outsider hear her if they were in some kind of depot. An hour later, the truck turned off the smooth surface it had been on and bounced a little as it went over another surface, this one still smooth but feeling like something with a rougher texture, maybe gravel or dirt.