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yourself into this.”
    Erik felt the jaws of a vise tightening on his throat. “Matt, I just, I just want to tell you, I hope to God you guys really will get on this. We need the U.S. government behind us. How am I supposed to rely on the local authorities to rescue her? I know the ways of this region. They can’t even keep order in the streets. We both know the local authorities could be involved, themselves! How can you ask me to do nothing?”
    “Okay, here’s how I can ask: What you do is, ask yourself how it would be for Jessica—out there alone and surrounded by hostiles—if she heard you attempted a rescue and got yourselfkilled? What is she supposed to do then? Can you even imagine her despair?”
    The question sucked all the air out of the room. The call was quickly over.
    Within hours, the couple’s immediate family members began a series of calls back and forth among their own group, burning up the long-distance lines to help pull each other back from panic. They asked the same questions of one another without arriving at any answers. They learned hardly anything, but gained some measure of relief in being able to speak among themselves.
    Erik was especially grateful for the company of the other family members, even if just by phone, to keep him from buckling under the combination of primal fear and forced paralysis. He felt certain he couldn’t have kept the secret alone. So he got to work at closing down her social media sites. If they forced her to turn over the passwords, they could get all sorts of information and then use it to somehow strengthen their position. He knew of instances in which family members had been individually contacted by kidnappers and played off against one another to jack up the price.
    Erik greatly regretted in those hours that he knew so much about the sorts of medieval torments the male criminals of that broken culture might inflict upon his wife. Against that toxic knowledge he could only apply his own insights. In addition to avoiding the media, he also determined to keep it secret in their home region and avoid discussing anything in the presence of his Somali staff. The strength of the fabled gossip lines in that country was not to be doubted, and even the most innocent-sounding information about Jessica might fan the flames in unpredictable ways.
    Unfortunately his efforts didn’t do much to slow down the flow of information. Within hours, a number of his colleagues from the local population began stopping by to express their concern over Jess’s disappearance. He was touched by their show of sympathy,but it was a jolt to see how efforts to restrict information did nothing. He smiled and thanked them on auto-pilot, eager to regain his privacy.
    A new fear hit—the telephone. Had he already managed to make things worse for Jess simply by using the phone? For all he knew, the kidnappers might have tapped his line to track the family’s strategy and siphon the same information he’d been pulling down from the internet. When desperation is everywhere, great profits can be made by eavesdropping. In Somalia, freelance spying is a cash-and-carry business.
    He had to wonder—how much of a bribe would you have to pay somebody at their phone carrier’s office to pull that off? Maybe twelve hundred dollars? Two years’ wages. After all, how many people who work at a phone company in a developed country would refuse to grant unauthorized access to a single phone line in return for two years’ wages?
    Just take a break for a coffee and let us put a tap on this line, then forget you ever saw us.
    If they’d already hacked his phone, then he had been helping them just by talking to their families or the FBI. He resolved to make it a point to deal with the authorities in person whenever it involved sensitive information.
    So he was left with the long wait for a ransom call and the knowledge that if Jessica was carried too far south of the Green Line, she was unlikely to return