Impossible Odds

of my work, I must—”
    “Yes, yes,” Erik cut him off. “Very good. Mohammed will call you back in ten minutes. So I’ll say good-bye now. I love you, Jessica, if you can hear this. Take care, both you and Poul.”
    “Okay, I am listen to you. See? You love her, I must take care of her. Yes? Thank you very much.”
    Jabreel hung up and it was done. Erik knew Abdi had been listening in the background and had heard the confirmation. Most important, Erik had been assured by Jessica herself, not some third party, that she wasn’t being harmed.
    But to make their efforts effective and keep things from getting worse, he had to lie to her at a time when he knew without a doubt it would have given her real comfort to think of her sister, her brother, and her dad keeping the vigil for her, from right there in Nairobi. If something happened to her and this was the last conversation they had, he couldn’t see how he could live with the knowledge that he lied about something so important to her. Evenif they got her back without a hitch, he had to hope she would understand when he tried to explain the deceit.
    She sounded good to him, though. He could live another day on the sound of her voice alone. It nearly made him laugh out loud to think of the stern tone she took with her kidnappers, demanding they go wake up their leader to listen over the speaker phone while Jessica made sure Mohammed got verified and negotiations reopened.
    And as strange and unexpected as it was for Poul to jump on the line with his reassurances about Jessica, Erik was grateful to hear she wasn’t being harmed. Nobody had touched her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
    Jessica:
    I was getting better at turning off my instinct to scream. There’s nothing subtle to the technique. You know how to squeeze a tight fist? Just do it with your whole body.
    When I stood there and listened to Poul on the phone assuring Erik “she hasn’t been touched,” the sensation was like being half encased in ice with the other half covered in flames. Because it was true I wanted Erik to hear that. I wanted to give him the mental picture of me in a reasonable state of safety. At the same time, it wasn’t completely true, and my abuser was standing right there beside me, nodding along: no, no, she hasn’t been touched . . .
    Even someone who lives a nonviolent life, as I have always done, has to practice the art of remaining both passive and silent in moments like this. I must restrain the urge to claw at someone’s eyes. I must ignore the desire to let him go right ahead and kill me, if he chooses, so long as I can take his eyeballs, first—and his other balls, second.
    I didn’t need to stand there and smile, but I knew to keep my face neutral. These kidnappers made it plain how they hated the tears. Crying caused them to poke at me with the barrels of theirloaded guns. The first time one of them surprised me by shooting into the air a few inches from my head it practically knocked me out of my skin while it drilled home the ease with which any one of those things would spew death. And with the possibility of accidental discharge, it was a massive risk to do anything that would cause one of these goons to turn toward you with his weapon.
    I had to learn to repress even the most basic of human urges, which would be to run from these brutal men, from their weapons, from their contaminated bare hands, from their shit-stained food bowls. My leg muscles were perpetually tight, as if waiting for me to fall asleep so they could propel me out of there before I realized what they were doing.
    I hadn’t been raped yet, but I could see it was now a matter of limited time. It was like the sound of a large incoming wave rolling toward a beach at night. But in the dark there would be no way of telling when the wave would break. Even so, it was coming, as evidenced by a noticeable decay of Jabreel’s respect for my personal space. I had to avoid alienating the only English-speaking communicator here. He knew that, too. He traded on it. His unwanted attentions were more insistent every day, creating that old feeling of being slowly squeezed in the giant vise of someone else’s sexual pressure. I think this is something a lot of women understand.
    After that one call with Erik, they chose to punish us by separating Poul and me completely. That went on for two weeks, and during that time I saw no sign of anyone besides the khat zombies. But Abdi, it turned out, was also circling