The Wonders (29 page)

“I can't stand it,” Minh said, sodden with tears. “I can't stand thinking about what's happening to her.”

Christos called his family in Greece every few hours. His grandmother, in particular, had fallen for Kathryn's charm. He told them Kathryn hadn't been found yet, without giving any details. “I asked them to pray,” he said. “Pray harder. Pray every minute of the day.”

Hap was in control of finding Kathryn and getting her home. He wouldn't allow Rhona to call in the police or the FBI. “If it's religious, if it's ideology, if it's some lunatics with an agenda, then the FBI is already useless because they didn't see it coming. If it's money, we'll pay. That's the right thing to do because it will be a clean transaction. Kidnapping's an international business run by professional criminals. We need to adhere to the process. All we have to do is pay the money and she'll be released. It happens all the time. But if someone has a point to make, if they're going to use her in some campaign . . .” He looked at the floor.

Rhona touched his arm, and he laid his square cheek on the top of her head.

Minh turned to Leon. Hap and Rhona an item? They'd had no idea.

L
EON'S FIRST GUESS
was the disability rights people, the ones who had been wheeling and limping and trudging around the boundary of the grounds for so long, appearing on random days, scrawling their accusations on the footpath in chalk or spray-painting them on the hedges so that the words appeared as speckled artworks that faded as the leaves died and fell to the ground.

Hap said no. “What would a kidnap do except give them bad press? Think again. What else have you heard? Who are you afraid of?” He punched the room with his questions, and the air gave way. “Could it be the husband? He's greedy and stupid. Lethal combination. Or a madman on a mission? You might have seen him in a crowd or from a car. Think. Anything unusual? Anyone?”

Kyle,
Leon realized,
that's who I used to be wary of.
Kyle sat on the couch beside Rhona. He was pale and uncharacteristically mute. He looked old. As old as his age. And Leon began to wonder whether he had been harsh, whether he had taken a set
against Kyle only because of his confidence and charm and all the other traits Leon lacked. Perhaps Kyle was simply a hopeless man, another of the many besotted men who loved beyond reason the uncanny bewitching human who was Kathryn.

After Hap left to get his team together, they talked for hours, hysterical and babbling, trying to find solutions, posing ludicrous rescue scenarios. They subsided into silence, hollowed the building with despair. Started up again with the what-ifs. Hated themselves for it.

Christos was nursing a brooding rage at Hap. Even though it wasn't Hap's men who had failed Kathryn but hired security from the complex, Christos still blamed him. He tried out different accusations: “Hap hired those men—it's his fault.” “He didn't hire enough men.” “He was doing nothing at home while Kathryn was being taken.” The others wouldn't agree.

Time jerked along in unpredictable increments as the residents of Overington wound down with tiredness and anguish. Leon, Minh, Christos, Yuri, even Kyle: they had become clockwork people whose mechanisms hadn't been wound. Their movements were torpid, their speech semicoherent. By the next morning they could barely form words.

Except for Rhona. Rhona blew a tornado through room after room, shouting on the phone to insurance agents, banks, Hap, her old friends. Even though there was no news, she still burst from hugging Christos to kissing Leon or Yuri or Minh, clasping hands, taking faces in her hands and speaking so close that her breath warmed them. “She will be all right,” she told Leon. “She will be all right. I know she will.”

Hap was running teams searching all possible worlds. One team churned through computers and databases looking for anomalies in Kathryn's online following, in the patterns of the lives of thousands of potential suspects who wrote about her,
posted information or pictures, set up fan pages. Others were in the field, sniffing along the concrete of the underground passage where she was taken, grilling bystanders and security guards. One more group worked the electronic routes that the kidnappers' messages had traveled. Hap's day was spent walking around the garden talking into his headset, occasionally pulling a screen from his pocket to see what had been captured on video. Every now and then Hap and Rhona would collide on their pacing routes, and they would embrace wordlessly before moving on, back to work on their communication devices.

“It's those fucking Muslims.” Christos swam out of his apartment every now and then with a new theory. “Remember the letters? Remember the imam who put the death sentence on her? Said she was Satan's ultimate weapon of enticement?”

“I think the Christians have her. No offense, Christos. I mean the crazy ones.” Minh lay limp on a couch in the common room, a damp cloth over her forehead. “I don't know why they haven't arrested that nut who runs the TV station, the one in the South. He funds the abortion clinic bombers. He's the one who called her the Princess of Darkness, got himself on all the talk shows with his ravings about the apocalypse.”

Where was Christos's god now? Some journalists had accused the Wonders of acting as if they were gods, strutting around the world stage, known by almost every person on the planet, celebrities of a higher order than had ever been seen.
Do these false gods believe they are immortal?
one Christian broadsheet demanded on the front page when the Wonders first went global.
We shall soon see
.

Later that night Leon sat in the rickety pavilion in the old monkey enclosure where Rosa had originally been housed. He sipped his whiskey and stared at the shadowy palm trees
clacking their fronds together in the breeze. Minh was inside sleeping. When Hap passed by, Leon caught his attention by waving the whiskey bottle and miming taking a swig. Hap refused the offer with a shake of his head. His headset blinked blue, and he tapped it and moved off, his voice sniping under the whisper of wind.

T
HE RANSOM DEMAND
came at eight the next morning through Kathryn's fan site. The money was to be delivered to a designated spot in the highlands of Colombia in twenty-four hours' time.

An hour later Rhona called the house together for an update. “It's ready. The insurance company had already prepared cash in case it was going to be ransom.”

Minh laid her head on Leon's shoulder. “She's coming home.”

Hap was in his usual stance next to Rhona. He had become her suit of protective armor. She was tiny beside him. “This is good news. Great news. If it's simple K and R, Kathryn will be home safe in no time.”

“Kidnap and ransom,” Rhona said slowly, as if the words were exotic foods she was tasting for the first time. “It sounds like a TV show. Not real. None of this seems real.”

“So now we should call the police?” Christos had been arguing for the police all along.

“Now would be the worst time. They want to catch the kidnappers. We want Kathryn back. Two different and opposing objectives.” Hap muscled across the room to Christos, who was glowering in the corner. “Don't try to be a hero and call the police. You'll cause chaos and Kathryn will die. Is that clear?”

“But they can find out where she is!” He wore a T-shirt and jeans but when Christos stood at his full height, Leon half believed he could see the shadow of wrathful angel wings arched above him.

“Sure, and shoot everything that moves while they try to rescue her. Don't make me lock you up till it's over, Christos. My objective is to keep Kathryn alive. If you threaten that in any way, I'll shut you down until she's safe. We've hired a professional K and R negotiator. They've done this in Colombia plenty of times. This is the first take of an international celebrity by one of the gangs but it's the same deal. We pay, they release her. Now butt out and pray some more.”

Hap asked what the proof-of-life question should be. What piece of information did anyone know about Kathryn that only she could answer?

“Can't we just give them the money?” Rhona said. “They can have it now, whenever, however much they want.”

Hap said no. “We have to demand proof of life or they'll think we're up to something, some trick to avoid paying. We have to follow the procedure. They're professionals who expect us to play this a certain way. Now, please, try to think of questions only Kathryn could answer. We have a live video link in half an hour.”

Minh suggested the question. “What was your nickname for your brother when you were little?”

She told them how, weeks before, Kathryn had charmed her with this story. Kathryn used to call her brother, the seasoned
criminal at fourteen, Wolf. Kathryn was the lamb and he was the wolf. And then she grew into a sheep. Minh's voice wavered. “She was making those jokes about herself, feeling safe enough with us to do that.”

“She is the Lamb of God.” Christos's belief in god seemed to have been reinforced by this nightmare. Leon had watched him crossing himself and praying under his breath the way his yiayia had when she visited Overington. When the footage of Kathryn in chains played at Overington, Christos told Rhona to have faith. She smiled sadly at him as though he was a child full of hope that the fairies were living at the bottom of the garden.

An hour later, Hap came back to confirm that Kathryn had come on-screen and answered the question.

“How was she?” Rhona grabbed Hap's arm with both hands. “Did she say anything to us? I wish you'd let me see her.”

“It went smoothly. No heroics on her part, which is the best outcome possible. I asked the question, she answered, they shut off the camera. All good. It's all good.”

After that Hap stopped reporting in because each time he walked into the room where they waited, all of them surged forward, their terror so palpable the room itself seemed to swell and subside like a panicking heart. Half an hour later they scattered to their apartments.

“I've never worried much about it, Leon, but now I feel I need to know,” Minh said as they huddled on their bed, too anxious to do anything but wait, try to drink tea or water, try to get something into their aching stomachs. It was eleven o'clock, twenty-one hours till the deadline.

“What is it? Can I help?” He spoke through gritted teeth, using all his energy to suppress the desire to pick at his skin. When he had sat outside drinking whiskey the night before while Minh slept for a few hours, the mosquitoes had sucked at
him, and today he was covered in swollen bites. Minh had given him an antihistamine that was supposed to take away the itch, yet as he sat on the bed, spine pressed against the headboard and arms hugging his knees to his chest, he was giddy with the raging urge to scratch the skin off his body. It was almost, but not quite, enough to shift his attention momentarily from Kathryn.

“Is there a god?” Minh asked. Her parents were Catholic in name but had never had any time to do the rituals of church or make offerings with the community of the parish. Minh grew up with a couple of books about Jesus and her dead grandmother's ugly wooden rosary that she kept tucked at the bottom of her jewelry box. She was thirteen before she found out it wasn't a necklace.

“The day I asked my mother about god, she went quite red,” Leon said. He was nine. A boy at school had been telling him how god made everyone and would punish people forever in damnation if they sinned. “Of course there's a god, darling,” Leon's mother answered, still with those high pink spots on her cheeks as if she had been caught out neglecting an elderly relative. “He loves us all and”—her eyes rolled briefly skyward as she wiped her hands up and down the thighs of her tight blue tracksuit pants—“and he lives in heaven. Do you want to learn more about him? I could enroll you in Sunday school.”

Leon didn't need to say it. God was irrelevant. Kathryn's kidnap wasn't about a god. It was about money. Everything was about money now. There were people who tried to make out that the value of human life was about god or justice or truth. But they relied on money to propagate their message. In the end, it was as though this medium of exchange had become a true organism: purposeful, amoral, determined to reproduce itself at any cost. And because humans made it, the cost rebounded on its maker. Leon could see it now. The cost of money was humanity.