“What was that noise?” Curtis asked, perturbed.
“That is your Navy making trouble for us,” the pirate replied. “If you want to do business, then make the Navy go away.”
Curtis hesitated. “How am I supposed to do that?”
Afyareh shrugged, as if his request was elementary. “Contact your government. Tell them to fly somewhere else. I will call you back in twenty minutes.”
The pirate cut off the call and picked up his binoculars again. He spoke a handful of sentences in Somali, and his men crowded around the windows, watching the sky. While the pirates were distracted, Daniel leaned toward Quentin and whispered, “How are you?”
Quentin glanced around furtively. “I’m worried about Ariadne,” he said in an undertone. “The last message I sent her was three days ago.”
Daniel almost smiled.
Only a teenage boy would be thinking about a girl when his life is on the line.
“Where’s your phone?” he asked. “They haven’t disabled the uplink.”
“You mean now?” Quentin replied, retrieving the phone from his pocket. “What do I say?”
Daniel looked into his son’s eyes and saw a reflection of himself as a young man—all the wonder and confusion and feeling dashed upon the canvas of his heart like a Jackson Pollock painting. He asked the only question that mattered. “Do you love her?”
Quentin blinked, then blushed scarlet.
“Tell her that,” Daniel said under his breath. “And tell her to get in touch with your mother.”
He caught Liban staring at them and motioned to Afyareh. “My son needs to use the head.”
“Yes, fine,” the pirate replied, and Liban looked out the window again.
While Quentin went to the bathroom, Daniel sat back against the bench and closed his eyes, focusing all of his attention on listening. He could hear the whistle of the jets streaking through the sky and the muted
whump-whump-whump
of the helicopters as they moved around like bumblebees. Curtis had enormous clout in the government, but he wasn’t omnipotent. Daniel pictured him on the phone, pulling favors, as he had so many times at the firm. Would the Navy brass defer to him, realizing they had little to gain from provoking the pirates, or would they persist with their shock and awe campaign?
He heard the sucking sound of the toilet flushing, and then Quentin rejoined him.
“Did it go out?” Daniel whispered. When his son nodded, he felt strangely jubilant.
Take that, you sons of bitches!
It was a small victory over the pirates’ tyranny, but for the moment it felt like a coup.
“There was something else,” Quentin said quietly. “An email from Grandpa. He asked how many rotten apples we took with us.”
Daniel felt a chill, but didn’t change his expression. “What did you say?”
Quentin met his eyes. “I told him seven.”
After a while, Afyareh threw the binoculars on the bench and picked up the sat phone. “They’re not going away,” he spat at Daniel, fury in his eyes. “Your father is playing games with us.”
Daniel put his hands out, palms up. “My father is a businessman. He’s being straight with you. But he can’t just wave a wand and make the U.S. government obey. They do what they want.”
Afyareh thrust the phone into Daniel’s hands. “That is not
good enough
! Tell Curtis that if he wants us to trust him, he needs to prove that the Navy will not interfere. If the jets are still in the air in—” He glanced at the clock. “—thirty minutes, then there will be
no deal
.”
Daniel punched the redial button on the sat phone, a knot of dread in his gut. “Dad,” he began when Curtis picked up, “the Navy isn’t complying, and the pirates are getting angry.” He conveyed Afyareh’s message and the deadline. “Whatever they think they’re doing by sticking to their guns, it’s having the opposite effect. They need to back off now.”
“I let them know that,” Curtis said, allowing his frustration to show. “Sit tight.”
Daniel spent the next half-hour in a state of hyper-alertness. He watched the Somalis as they stared out the windows, cataloguing every change in expression and body language and assigning it a value—positive or negative—like some psychoanalytic binary code. For a long time, all of his notations went on the adverse side of the ledger. Frowns and grimaces, tensing muscles, tapping feet, facial ticks, muttered denunciations, all were indications of raw nerves and suppressed rage. Then something happened with a suddenness that seemed almost miraculous. Their eyes widened and their shoulders relaxed. Their jaws slackened and their vocalizations took on a lighter tone.
“What’s going on?” Daniel asked Afyareh, detecting no change in the noise outside.
The pirate gave him a triumphant look. “The jets are returning to the aircraft carrier.”
Daniel put his arm around Quentin. “Thank God,” he exhaled, feeling the relief like a cleansing flood. Somehow Curtis had accomplished the impossible. He had convinced the Navy to pull a punch.
Over time, the mechanical serenade of warplanes and helicopters fell to nothing. The pirates raised their fists and celebrated Afyareh—even Mas, though his contribution was less emphatic.
At last, Afyareh collected the sat phone and called Annapolis. When Curtis answered, the pirate held up the phone to the nearest window. “Do you hear it?” he asked jubilantly.
“Hear what?” Curtis replied.
“The sound of an empty sky.” Afyareh allowed the silence to linger, clearly enjoying himself. Then he said: “The Captain told me you were a man of your word. Now I believe him. We will accept three and a half million dollars. I will call again at sunset.”
Then he hung up the phone.
Vanessa
Washington, D.C.
November 12, 2011
Vanessa took long strides up the concourse, pulling her roll-aboard suitcase and looking for her gate. The Ethiopian Airlines flight from Washington Dulles to Addis Ababa was scheduled to depart in thirty-five minutes. She felt an undercurrent of dread, as she always did when she was about to board an airplane. She knew the feeling was irrational. The statistics were overwhelmingly in her favor, as Daniel had often repeated whenever they had traveled. But the fact was that some airplanes crashed. Occasionally, one fell out of the sky. She couldn’t imagine a worse way to die.
She glanced at Mary Patterson walking beside her. The FBI agent looked serene, as if the prospect of flying halfway around the world to arrange a ransom drop was something she did all the time. Vanessa was grateful to have company on the journey, but she was equally thankful they wouldn’t be sitting together on the plane. She had offered to upgrade Mary’s Bureau-sponsored ticket from economy to business, but the FBI agent had declined. It was a blessing. The flight to Africa was thirteen and a half hours, and Vanessa wanted nothing more than to sleep.
The trip had come together at the last minute. Just after four o’clock the previous afternoon, Mary had gotten confirmation from her boss that the government wouldn’t interfere if the family negotiated with Ibrahim. With that promise in hand, Curtis had spent all evening crunching numbers and confirming liquidity with his bankers and brokers. As Vanessa suspected, most of his money was tied up in real estate and retirement accounts. But he was not without access to cash. He had extensive lines of credit on his properties, and he had a substantial reserve of dollars and euros stashed in the Cayman Islands that could be wired on a moment’s notice to any bank in the world.
Vanessa had contributed what she could—the remainder of the money in Daniel’s sailing account and the rest of their depleted savings. When Curtis looked at the amount in surprise, she had confessed, with embarrassment, how much the circumnavigation had impacted their finances. She had offered to draw on her home equity line, but Curtis had refused, leaving Vanessa feeling humiliated. In contrast to Daniel, who had always been a spendthrift, she was a saver. Financial stability was a point of honor. And right now she was anything but stable.
The late-evening hours had been fraught with tension. Curtis had amassed a respectable sum, but they needed Ibrahim to come to the bargaining table. As the phone sat in silence, the minutes ticking away, Vanessa had tried everything to ward off her anxiety. The Bissolotti was so close, but the privacy she needed to play was not. She had turned on music, but it did little to relax her. So she paced in the living room, and took walks with Skipper, and wrote an update to Ariadne, spinning a web of hope to buoy both of them, and listened to Duke Strong’s tutorial about ransom delivery, wondering all the while how her blissfully ordinary life had turned into a movie script.
Finally, just after midnight, Ibrahim had called again, but not with a counteroffer. He demanded that the Navy ground its planes. It was an outlandish request, like asking the weatherman to stop the rain. Mary called her boss and Curtis reached out to his friends at the Pentagon. The government’s response was blunt—allowing the family to negotiate didn’t mean taking pressure off the pirates. But Curtis persisted, and Frank Overstreet, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, came through, getting Gordon Tully out of bed and putting him on the line with Curtis. After listening carefully, the National Security Advisor promised to intervene.
That call had ended only fifteen minutes before Ibrahim’s deadline. Vanessa watched the time wind down in a state of panic. Her breathing became labored, and her heart thundered in her chest. She went twice to the bathroom, feeling like she might vomit. Then the phone rang again and Ibrahim delivered the news that the Navy had backed down. Vanessa was so relieved that she felt, for a fleeting instant, a sense of gratitude to the pirate. He might be heartless, but at least he was rational.
As soon as Ibrahim reduced his demand, Strong had set the wheels in motion for the drop, on the assumption that they would reach an agreement. While the negotiation continued in Annapolis, the delivery would be coordinated in Nairobi. Tony Flint, an erstwhile Force Recon marine and chief of East African operations for Sagittarius, would handle the logistics, but he needed a representative from the family on the ground to assist. Vanessa had volunteered to go, more than anything to get out of the house, and Mary had obtained permission from the Bureau to accompany her.
When they reached the gate, the flight was already boarding. Vanessa walked down the jetway with Mary, and they parted ways inside the aircraft. She found her seat near the front and collapsed into it, leaning her head against the headrest. She had gotten only ten hours of sleep in the past four nights. Even during her residency, her rest had been more consistent. She had Ambien in her purse, but she hated the thought of using it. As a teenager, she had watched her mother deal with stress with Vicodin, and she had vowed never to resolve her issues through medication. That she now prescribed the same drugs to her patients she found both ironic and irrelevant.
She closed her eyes and dozed for a few minutes, tuning out the sounds of the flight attendants scurrying around the cabin handing out newspapers and beverages. Suddenly, her iPhone rang. She searched for it in her purse. The caller was Ted Collins—her stepfather.
Of all the moments
, she thought. She almost let him leave a voicemail but decided it would only delay the inevitable.
“Hello?” she said, looking out the window at the plane beside them.
“Vanessa, it’s Ted,” he said with the papery rasp of an inveterate smoker. “I saw the news. Why didn’t you call?”
She thought of a number of excuses, but none of them fit. “There’s a lot happening right now. I’m not in a place where I can talk.”
He didn’t take the hint. “Where are you? Are Daniel and Quentin all right?”
The questions made her bristle.
Since when have you cared about my family? You call twice a year, on my birthday and Christmas. Otherwise, you just send us checks on holidays.
She wasn’t really being fair. Ted had taken her in and given her a world-class education, an enviable wedding, and the Bissolotti. But gifts were no substitute for emotional support. He had never been there when she needed a shoulder to cry on. Like Trish, he had left her to navigate the minefield of adolescence on her own.
“I’m on a plane,” she said simply. “Daniel and Quentin are okay, for the moment anyway. There’s a limit to what I can say. Give me a few days, and I’ll tell you more.”
It was a promise she didn’t intend to keep, but she was desperate to end the call.
Ted, however, blithely ignored her cues. “The media attention is wild. The story is all over the networks. They’re saying the Navy is negotiating with the pirates. How are you holding up?”
“I’m hanging in there,” she replied, a bit testily. “Look, I really have to go.”
He cleared his throat. “Let me know if you need anything. If they want money, I can help. You know that, don’t you? Your mother may be gone, but I’m still here.”
She heard an odd note in his voice, a hitch of genuine concern, but she didn’t know what to think about it. Providence had dealt her a bizarre hand. Born to a dirt-poor beauty queen turned exotic dancer from southwest Virginia, she had lived in squalor for the first decade of her life, never knowing if the power company was going to turn off the lights or the landlord was going to evict them because Trish had spent all her earnings on partying and neglected to pay the bills. Then Ted came along and after him Daniel and Curtis—men who threw money around like life was a giant Monopoly game but who were as stingy as Scrooge when it came to her emotional needs. She had learned to live with them by expecting little from them. She didn’t know what to do when they started caring.