Impossible Odds

With a man as volatile as this, I had no doubt it would be suicidal to add public humiliation to the rejection of his poisonously childish advances.
    On the night we recorded our first video message, he paused in his drunken frat boy behavior while he frowned and got to hisfeet. Our people, he said, were not cooperating, and their offers were much too small: less than three hundred thousand dollars. An insult. He sniffed at me when he said it, leaving me to wonder which insult he had in mind.
    I understood the delicate situation, but I was just as perplexed by all the protracted negotiations as any of these kidnappers. I also couldn’t help but wonder— What is going on with the negotiators back home? As with so much else about the experience, there was only silence for an answer.
    Before long, we were rousted and thrust back into the kidnap cars and driven for hours out into the desert. The striking thing about each of these trips was that they were so long, apparently aimless, but determined in their length. We rolled out into the desert and pulled far off the track into the low brush to another anonymous location that looked like any other to me. Nevertheless, more men were waiting there, with Jabreel among them.
    As soon as I saw him I asked what was going on. He responded, “Not good. They are fighting me because your people are not cooperating.”
    He then explained that we were going to make a video to see if that would speed up negotiations. Before showtime, Jabreel decided to play the happy salesman and brought us each a can of soda, a rare treat—warming us up for the camera, I guess. He walked us over to a nearby tree where several other men joined us. Jabreel pointed in their direction while they approached.
    “Journalists!” he announced. The “journalists” brought one tiny video camera that they proceeded to mount on a huge tripod, creating a contraption that looked as if it belonged in an animated cartoon. There was no time to find any humor in it.
    Jabreel told me in a grim voice, “You say this message. Say what I tell you.”
    They focused the camera against the brush in the background. Two guards, the “Colonel” and Mohammed (another Mohammed),wrapped their sleeping sheets around their heads and faces. The pastel sheet around one guy’s head might have looked like a ridiculous excuse for a scary mask, if not for the belt of ammunition over his shoulders and the assault rifle pointed at me.
    They took up menacing positions behind us, holding their weapons at the ready. All the elements of a viral death video.
    My brain spun out desperate optimism: At least this is only a video message. They’re not going to kill us. Even if they put the words in our mouths, it’s just a message. It’s a proof-of-life type of thing—that’s all.
    On the bright side this could have been, but apparently was not, our night to star in an execution video. Plenty of others already had. According to Abdi, we had yet one week before it came to that.
    At first it seemed as if only Poul would be allowed to speak on camera. They put him on, and he began the speech they required of him, telling the camera we were “both okay,” and stressing “there must be no attack by American military forces or any other forces acting on their behalf.”
    I expected that much, I guess, but then Poul went on to add a part I hadn’t heard them tell him to say, imploring our families to get more directly involved and tap their own personal wealth on the ransom efforts. That gave me a real shock, though I was confident our families would see the video and realize we were being coached; there wasn’t any “wealth” for them to tap, and they knew that I knew it. My head immediately filled with the pictures of Erik and of my family seeing this in the international media, whether that meant the internet, Al Jazeera, or the BBC. The desired effect was obviously to scare the hell out of them, and I doubted the Chairman understood how well that was going to work.
    I certainly didn’t want them to resort to mortgaging their homes, since it seemed to me that the people at my company needed to be the ones to make this work. Otherwise any moneythey came up with had to be from whatever my personal insurance policy would cover. There wasn’t any vast reserve being held back out of sight. I knew the amount they offered had to be at the ceiling of what they could raise, and even that much would financially destroy them. It really