Held (2 page)

To top it off, Angie had an asthma attack and I got my period.

And when we returned to our
katikies
we found that all our things had been moved to another room so the place could be cleaned, and several items were missing. We began to fight.

I started it. “This is all your fault,” I said angrily. “We could have had a great time if you’d let me plan the day. Why do you think they invented guidebooks?”

Angie’s cheeks, usually pale as porcelain, turned bright red. Poor Angie, her face has always revealed exactly what she’s feeling. She used to joke about it, calling herself the living emoticon.

“Just because I’m not a control freak like you,” she struck back. “I like to take risks, okay? I don’t want to live my life like an automaton. At least I’ll have a life.”

I should have apologized, but I was too stubborn and grouchy. “Well, I want to see the Nemesis Temple tomorrow,” I announced. “It means waking up on time and following a schedule. If you’d rather sleep in, I can go on my own.”

“Fine, go on your own,” Angie snapped. She slid into the narrow bed and turned her back on me.

In ten years of being friends, we could have counted our fights on one hand. Neither of us liked conflict, and we agreed on almost everything. We liked the same music, the same movies, the same people. Angie has an older brother and sister, but they were already in high school when she was born, and they’d both moved out by the time she was in first grade. And I’m an only child; my father died when I was six and Mom never remarried. Angie became my surrogate sister and I became hers.

But we were tired and disappointed that night, and we let it out by sniping at each other. I blame myself. I started the fight, and I kept it going. I could have said I was sorry or joked about my obsessive personality, but I didn’t.

If we hadn’t fought, I’d still be the same person I was then. None of this would have happened. Because of our fight, my life was going to change forever.

CHAPTER 2

Angie was still asleep when I woke up. I didn’t want to go out while we were still fighting, but I knew she might sleep for another two or three hours, and the
katikies
weren’t the kind of place you wanted to hang around in. The small rooms smelled of wax beans, and flies buzzed around garbage pails at the end of the hallway.

I could have waited at the café around the corner, but it would be boring on my own, and besides, I wasn’t ready to deal with the over-friendliness of the Mediterranean male without backup.

I decided to set out for the temple myself and then hopefully meet Angie at a beach near Marathon, which my guidebook recommended.

I got dressed, packed my knapsack, left Angie a note, and stepped outside. I was full of energy, the kind you feel when you crave a new experience, a new setting. Luckily, there was a bus to Marathon every half hour.

At first it felt strange, even a little scary, being completely on my own in a foreign country. But there were plenty of other tourists at the station, and I smiled at the kids of an Asian couple who were standing next to me in line. They smiled back and asked me where I was from.

The bus ride was long and hot and boring. I didn’t even have music to listen to—my MP3 was one of the items that had gone missing the day before.

I wished Angie was with me. It wasn’t much fun without her—there was no one to talk to, no one to laugh with, no one jumping up and exclaiming when a vast herd of goats suddenly appeared against the horizon.

The bus finally came to a stop and we clambered out. The Nemesis Temple was off the beaten track, according to my guidebook—that was one of the reasons I wanted to go there: it wouldn’t be packed with tourists. When we’d visited the Temple of Poseidon the previous week we felt we were at a football stadium.

The only way to get to the site, which was nine miles from the station, was either to hitch a ride with another tourist or take a taxi. No one else seemed to be going to the temple, and a toothless taxi driver who looked about a hundred years old called out to me, “Where you want? I go, I go.”

I accepted the offer and fifteen minutes later I was at the temple. The driver was ready to wait for me, but I didn’t want to feel rushed. There were a few other tourists there, and I was sure one of them would be able to give me a lift back.

The site was breathtaking. I wished I’d waited for Angie; she would have loved it. The temple stones were surrounded by dense layers of olive-green trees that seemed golden in the sunlight, and beyond the temple lay the ruins of the town of Rhamnous, a maze of low stone walls. In the distance, the sapphire sea and a ribbon of misty mountains merged with a cloudless sky.

I gazed at the ancient blocks of stone in the midst of the still landscape and tried to imagine what the temple had looked like two thousand years ago. The remains were as mysterious now as the temple itself must have been to its first worshippers. Nemesis—goddess of divine justice and vengeance.

I decided to look up bus schedules for Angie and text her; maybe she could meet me here instead of at the beach. I’d explore the city ruins in the meantime, or else wait for her at Marathon.

I was also hungry; luckily I’d brought some bread and cheese with me. I wandered down the road, looking for somewhere to sit down. I found a boulder near some bushes, settled myself on it, and began entering bus times on my phone.

I was facing away from the road and didn’t hear a car stop beside me, or if I did, I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was absorbed in texting Angie.

All at once an arm grabbed my waist and the phone fell from my hands. It was so sudden that I cried out before I knew what I was feeling. Instinctively I resisted. Someone was trying to pull me, and I tried to pull back. I didn’t succeed. I was dragged into a car and the car began to move.

It took me a few seconds to sort out my basic physical situation: I was sitting on a car seat and I’d been blindfolded, though not very efficiently. Someone had removed my watch and was holding my wrists behind me.

I was sure there had been a mistake. I’ve heard that denial is the first response to any frightening situation. I told myself that this was a practical joke, or a game, or something harmless and meaningless.

I said, “Hey, what’s going on!”

A man’s voice said, “If you cooperate, you won’t come to any harm.” He spoke casually, as if he were discussing the weather. I continued thinking,
This is a mistake, I’ll be released
any minute.

Then I thought,
Someone must have seen what happened—
one of the tourists will call the police. In the meantime, just do
everything they say and you’ll be fine.
I was still in denial, though I was aware that my heart was beating very fast.

Then the man said, “Take off your jeans. Leave your underwear on.” He seemed to have a British accent along with his foreign one.

It’s a mugging
, I thought.
Just some poor locals who want my
jeans and my watch and my money.

At the same time, the car seemed to be very spacious—I couldn’t feel the seat in front of me. The smell of the car and its size made me think it was a limo. Well, maybe it was a stolen limo, and the thieves had decided to add mugging to their crime spree.

The man let go of my wrists and I began to fumble with my jeans. My fingers felt clumsy and I was afraid that I wasn’t removing them fast enough. It was at that moment—when I realized that I had to do exactly as I was told—that my denial turned to terror. I understood very suddenly that I was in trouble, and I began to tremble.

All the same, I clung to the thought that they were mugging me. Maybe now that they had my jeans and watch and knapsack, they’d let me go. They’d throw me out of the car, and I’d be safe. They had told me to keep my underwear on. That was a good sign.

“Put on this skirt,” the man said in the same casual voice.

I felt something landing on my knees, and I instinctively recoiled with fear of the unknown. Through the bottom of the blindfold I saw a heap of black fabric. I was relieved that it really was a skirt and not a snake or a rat. I found the elastic waist, and pulled it on. It was ankle-length.

Why a skirt? I wondered. Why didn’t they just throw me out of the car, once they had my jeans?

A sickening answer came to me: they were taking me to be a sex slave somewhere, and they were disguising me, or dressing me up. Maybe they were taking me to some Middle Eastern country, where women had to wear long dresses.

Then I remembered that terrorists sometimes dressed their victims in certain colors before executing them. I let out a cry, and my trembling intensified. Years of dance and gymnastics made me think of myself as having good control over my body, but I was shaking so violently that my leg knocked against the leg of the man sitting next to me.

I felt something being pulled over my head, and I thought at first that it was a sack of some sort and that I was going to be shot on the spot. But a second later it fell past my head, onto my shoulders. It seemed to be a kind of poncho. My running shoes and socks were pulled off and I realized I was whimpering, in spite of myself. My shoes were replaced by sandals.

Now that he’d finished dressing me, the man tied my hands behind my back. My whimpers turned to sobbing. I wasn’t being mugged, I was being given a new identity. And that meant that they had plans for me. “Please, please,” I begged between sobs.

The man said, “Don’t panic. Just do as we say and you won’t be harmed.”

“Please let me go,” I pleaded. I knew no one was ever released by criminals because they asked to be let go, but it was almost an instinct, to plead.

I tried to force myself to calm down. I needed to focus on a plan of escape, I needed to be alert and calm so that I could free myself. The blindfold was loosely tied; if I rubbed the side of my head against my shoulder, it would slip off altogether. I’d have to find a way to make a run for it. I reminded myself that I was a fast runner.

On the other hand, it would be hard running in sandals, especially loose ones like these. Maybe that was the reason they’d taken away my running shoes.

But no matter where we stopped, there were bound to be people not too far away. Greece was not the Nevada Desert, after all. If I ran, someone would see me, someone would help me.

I tried not to think about what might happen to me if I didn’t get away. The important thing was to find a way to escape. I told myself that if they were planning to drug me or shoot me, they would have done it by now.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“You’ve been taken hostage for a prisoner release,” the man said.

It was as if he was talking about someone else—partly because his voice was so calm and partly because I couldn’t make sense of the words.

Prisoner release—he must mean a prisoner in the U.S. They were terrorists, and they wanted one of their friends to be freed.

I began to cry. “I can give you money,” I said. Not that Mom and I had any money to spare, but Angie’s parents would help out, and our beautiful old house could be mortgaged …

But it was hopeless: this wasn’t a kidnapping for ransom. That’s not what they were after, and my offer was met by silence.

I wondered how many people were in the car, apart from the man and the driver. There was no way of telling.

“Is this a limo?” I asked, not expecting a reply.

“Yes,” the man said.

I thought of organized crime, international power. Who knew if they were telling me the truth about the prisoner exchange? It might only be a way of hiding their real purpose. Maybe they were planning to sell me as a sex slave to some lunatic billionaire, and this was his car. Maybe he was driving. I had to escape somehow.

“Do you have any medical conditions?” the man asked. In spite of his accent, his English seemed to be good. But the formal language, and the question itself, gave my imagination more horrors to feed on, and I thought—
Oh God, they want to
experiment on me, or kill me for my organs.

This was my chance, and I had to think fast. But I couldn’t think fast enough. “I’m diabetic,” I blurted out stupidly. As soon as I said it, I knew they’d see through that lie, and they did.

“I don’t see any insulin in your bag,” the man said, sounding almost amused. “No one wants to hurt you or do anything to you,” he added, reading my mind. “Try to relax. I want to give you some Valium, and I need to know if you’re on anything else.”

At least his voice wasn’t aggressive. But was it really Valium he wanted to give me, or something more deadly? Heroin, maybe—so he could turn me into an addict …

“Don’t imagine the worst,” he said, reading my mind again. “So I take it you’re in good health—aside from the diabetes?” He was teasing me, and that might have reassured me a little, but I was too terrified.

At least they didn’t want me to die. Not yet, anyhow.

I nodded miserably. For the first time I understood the word
terrorist.
Before I knew what was happening, I felt a needle in my arm. I began to scream, then my screams faded into a blurry daze. The drug was working; I felt sleepy and confused. I leaned my head back on the seat and shut my eyes.