James Grippando - The Abduction

“That’s really secondary.”

“Is it?” he said, raising a doubt.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “It is.”

He gave her an assessing look. “Do you want to pay the money?”

“I think you and I need to decide that together.”

“I’m asking you. Do you want to pay the money?”

She snagged her lip with her teeth, thinking. “If it were Emily’s life on the line, could we come up with a million dollars by Monday?”

“Absolutely.”

She looked away, then back at him. “Then the answer is yes. If that’s what it’s going to take to get Kristen back safely, we should pay it.”

“If that’s what you want to do.”

“That’s what I want,” she said with conviction.

“I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about the money. You do whatever it is you have to do.”

She embraced him tightly, her eyes welling with emotion. “Thank you, Peter.”

He held her for a moment, then asked, “What are you going to do now?”

She stepped out of his embrace and looked him in the eye. “I think it’s time I had a talk with Tanya Howe.”

The jet engines purred at thirty thousand feet as Allison released her seat belt and reclined in the leather chair. She had stopped flying on the Justice Department’s Sabre Liner Jet almost a year ago, ever since she’d announced her candidacy, out of fear that someone would accuse her of misappropriating federal property for her own political purposes. This morning, however, with Harley Abrams at her side, she made an exception.

Allison sipped her coffee from a paper cup, thinking about what she might say to Tanya Howe. She glanced at the clouds drifting outside her window, well beneath the aircraft. White and fluffy, with a perfect blue sky above. It looked like the ceiling in Emily’s nursery, the way Allison had hand-painted it before she was born. Her baby would always wake to a bright blue sky, another perfect and happy day. Or so she’d planned.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” asked Harley. He was in the seat next to her. A mess of papers covered the tray table in his lap.

Allison stirred from her thoughts. “Only if I can reserve the right not to answer.”

“Deal.” He shifted in his seat so he could look at her as he spoke. “Actually, my question is marginally relevant to the investigation. I was thinking about your case last night-Emily’s abduction. I conjured up this image of a career-minded, unmarried thirty-nine-year-old state attorney. I couldn’t help but wonder, why did she adopt a baby?”

She glanced out the window again, admiring the clouds. Then she looked back and said, “I wish I could tell you I was moved by some noble and selfless agenda, like nurturing a crack baby or rescuing a battered child from abuse. But the truth is, I adopted a baby because I wanted one.”

“But how did you come around to actually going through with the adoption?”

“I was engaged to Mitch when I decided to adopt. We talked about it, and I told him I would never have children of my own. Polycystic kidney disease runs in my family, which we didn’t know until my brother was diagnosed after he was married. His son got it and died from it. There’s no preventive treatment, and it’s usually fatal if it develops during childhood, so I wasn’t going to take the risk of passing it on to my own child. I also knew it could take a long time to adopt a newborn. So I got on a list before we even set a wedding date.”

“And you still adopted, even after you broke off the engagement.”

“By the time I ended it with Mitch, I was psychologically ready to have a baby. I was thirty-nine years old. I had already gone through the hassle and expense of preparing for adoption, and I was excited about becoming a mother. So I figured, Why not just go through with it? My mother raised me and my brother without a father. I could do it, too.”

“Makes sense,” he said, scratching his chin like Sigmund Freud himself. His eyes returned to the notes in his lap.

“My turn,” she said, drawing him back.

“Your turn for what?”

“You think this is a court-ordered deposition or something? You’re the only guy who gets to ask questions?”

He smirked. “What do you want to know?”

“Something I’ve just been curious about. It’s interesting the way you see me as someone too wrapped up in a career to have children. What about you? A guy who makes a career out of chasing child abductors, with no family of his own. Is this the kind of work that makes you never want to have kids? Or did it just kind of work out that way?”

“Some of the profilers back at Quantico get that way. They see too much. But that wasn’t what stopped me.” His eyes drifted off to the middle distance. “I was married once. Long time ago. We tried to have children. It just didn’t happen.”

“Sorry.”

“Thanks. That’s about all you can say. It always rubbed me the wrong way when friends tried to comfort us by rattling off statistics. After my wife’s first miscarriage, they would say things like, ‘Did you know that sixty percent of women experience a miscarriage in their lifetime?’ Great. I figured these must be the same people who walk up to grieving widows at funerals and say, ‘Sorry about your husband, Mrs. Jones, but did you know that a hundred percent of the people on this planet eventually drop dead?’ Like that’s supposed to make you feel better.”

Allison nodded. He had a point. “So you never thought about adoption?”

“We did, but the marriage didn’t work out. I was twenty, she was nineteen when we got married. Her heart wandered while I was up to my waist in Vietnamese rice paddies, and I guess I never really got over that. I’ve been divorced-jeez, forever. More than twenty years now.”

“You never found anyone else?”

“My, this is getting personal.”

She blushed. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that.”

“No, I guess I don’t mind.” He paused, smiling thinly. “I always thought someday I would meet someone. In fact, I was positively sure of it. When my dad got cancer a few years ago, I got depressed thinking that when I eventually did have kids, their grandfather would be gone and they’d never get to know him. So I interviewed him on videotape, for his future grandchildren. I asked him all about the family, his whole life story. Eighty years of memories.”

“That’s a great idea.”

“It was, even though my old man was kind of cranky about the whole filming process. The most interesting part was at the end. We were a little punchy and were getting philosophical, talking about who was the greatest leader of all time, things like that. Off the wall, I asked him one final question: What do you think is the greatest threat to civilized society today? He paused for the longest time. Just dead silence as the videotape kept running. Finally he looks straight into the camera and says, ‘Videotape.’”

Allison laughed lightly, then smiled with her eyes. “I think I would have liked your father.”

Harley returned the smile, then turned a little serious. “I’m actually a lot like him.”

Silence filled the space between them. They locked eyes a little longer than they might have, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Far from it.

Allison slowly turned her head, returning to the clouds.

The plane landed at Nashville International late Friday evening. As previously arranged, Allison rode in an FBI Bucar to Nashville’s upscale Brentwood area. Harley Abrams and two other agents traveled with her in the same unmarked vehicle, but there was no motorcade or police escort that would alert the media to the attorney general’s arrival.

Tanya Howe drove alone to Brentwood in her own car. Harley had personally called to tell her about the demand Allison had received from the kidnappers. She agreed to a meeting, but they both agreed it should be secret, away from the house. No one could say how the kidnappers would react if they knew Tanya was meeting with the attorney general. No one knew what kind of speculation the media might generate about a face-to-face meeting between Allison and Tanya Howe. The media was camped outside Tanya’s home for the long haul, so there was no sure way to bring Allison inside without the world knowing about it. Tanya’s principal concern, however, wasn’t the rest of the world. It was her parents. She feared how they-particularly her father-might react to her meeting with the other candidate. She told her mother she was going to see a friend, just to get out of the house.