Storm Front

Virgil said. “They’re spies. Of course they wiped it.”
    Golden said, “Spies. I haven’t actually dealt with spies before.”
    “They’re all around us,” Anderson said. “Spies.” Then he looked up at the already hazy sky: “Gonna be another hot one,” he said.

17
    V irgil took a call from Hall, at the Law Enforcement Center: “We’ve got a small problem here. Case has decided to cancel your TV show.”
    “What?”
    “She says she spent two days in a gunnysack, and she looks like it, and she’s not going on TV looking like she does.”
    “I’ll be there in five minutes,” Virgil said.
    —
    T HE FIVE MINUTES eventually cost him four hundred dollars at Macy’s, but he did give her credit for haste: she had no purse, ID, or credit cards, and promised to pay him back. She settled for a couple of cosmetic products and a green summer dress, on sale, and a pair of low heels; and at the last minute went for some underwear, hair spray, and a comb.
    On the way back to the Hilton, Virgil said, “Tell me what you
think
about the kidnappers. Was it the woman I introduced to you? Do you think they’re still around? How organized were they? What’d they talk about? Did they give you any idea of where they were from?”
    She said that the female kidnapper was the one in charge. She was tough, and seemed organized, but a little overcooked. Ellen wasn’t sure that it was Tal Zahavi, but thought it might be. “That same kind of executive attitude—if you won’t do it, I will.”
    The man, on the other hand, lived in a state of panic: “He seemed more frightened than I was. Looking back, I don’t think they ever planned to hurt me. The guy . . . he kept asking me if I had to go to the bathroom or needed a glass of water. He was an American, I think, but he used Yiddish slang a couple of times. I think he might have been an American Jew that they called on for help.”
    She had no idea of where either of them was from. Whenever the man began to ramble, the woman shut him up, and Ellen had the feeling that she was being pointed at—as in, “Shut up or she’ll hear you.”
    The two kidnappers wound up watching a lot of TV, and the woman would go outside to make phone calls. At some point, they contacted her father, and then moved her back to the van and drove around for a while, apparently to exchange her for the stone, but the trade fell through when they saw an airplane tracking her father.
    “That was me,” Virgil said. “If I hadn’t been up there, you might’ve gotten loose a day sooner.”
    “No way for you to know that,” Ellen said, patting him on the shoulder. “I don’t know how you would have seen them, either—they were hiding in cornfields when Dad went by. They were looking for cars or planes following him, and they saw the plane.”
    That evening, after the failure to make the trade, they’d seen Virgil on television, and they’d panicked.
    “The woman was raving, she kept saying, ‘What is this? What is this fool doing to me?’ Then the man would say, ‘Looks to me like he’s fucking you, right there on TV.’”
    “Then it must have been Tal Zahavi,” Virgil said.
    “Well . . . yeah, I guess it must have been.”
    They decided to release her near dawn, because the woman told the man that was when the fewest police officers would be around. When they’d kidnapped her, she’d been wearing a light gardening jacket, with her cell phone in her pocket. They took it away from her, but returned it when they left her in the ditch.
    “That was nice,” Virgil said.
    “Not so much nice, as scared,” Ellen said. “At that point, they didn’t want anything to happen to me. They wanted me to call the police to come get me. The way they were talking, I’m pretty sure that they’re not around anymore. The guy was saying he was going home, and the woman wasn’t arguing with him. I don’t know for sure if she took off, but I think he did.”
    —
    A T THE H ILTON , Virgil bullshitted the manager into giving them a free room for a couple hours, and left Ellen there to clean up.
    When she emerged, fifteen minutes before the scheduled press conference, she smiled weakly and said, “At least I feel semi-human again.”
    “You look terrific,” Virgil said. She did look okay, although behind the new clothes and makeup, her eyes looked haggard. If it had been Zahavi who’d done the kidnapping, and Virgil was virtually certain that it was, she owed Ellen something