Free Kidnapped by the Taliban by Dilip Joseph Page A

she entered the room and absorbed who was present. Lord, help me. I want this to be as clean and crisp as I can make it.
    “What are you doing here?” Cilicia asked, her eyes wide. Her coworker gently guided Cilicia to an open seat at the table.
    Daniel took a deep breath. “Cilicia, I got a call from Kabul this morning. Dilip, Rafiq, and Farzad were supposed to be at dinner with Roy a few hours ago. They didn’t call in and never showed up. Roy has been trying to reach them by phone for several hours and hasn’t been able to make contact. We don’t know where they are.”
    As Daniel and Lars had agreed before the meeting, Daniel made no mention of the visit and report from Rafiq’s cousin. The last thing they wanted was to further distress Cilicia with what could turn out to be false information.
    Cilicia kept her composure. “What does this really mean?” she asked. “What do we do?”
    She is so strong , Daniel thought. “Does it mean that they’re just out of cell phone range,” he said, “or that they broke down somewhere, or that they’ve been kidnapped? We don’t know yet. But I can tell you this. Number one, we want this contained. We don’t want you to talk about this with anyone until we find out more. Number two, we’ll give you information as soon as we get it. We want you to know that you and your family will get every bit of the support you need through this.”
    Daniel could see Cilicia’s mind working through the scenarios and coming to the awful but most likely conclusion. Finally, the moment caught up with her. Her eyes filled with tears.
    He didn’t want to prolong her agony. “That’s pretty much all we have right now,” he said quietly. He stood, as did everyone else, and stepped around the table to give Cilicia a hug.
    “We’ll be here with you all the way through this,” he whispered. “Whatever this is.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    DEMANDS
    5:45 A.M ., T HURSDAY , D ECEMBER 6
    M OUNTAIN R ANGE E AST OF K ABUL , A FGHANISTAN
    THE FIRE INSIDE OUR SHACK WAS PETERING OUT. THE CURRENT leader of our Taliban captors ignored it. Haqqani was still bent on intimidating us. He sat less than three feet away from me. Though he didn’t raise his voice, his eyes communicated an intensity that demanded attention.
    “Why are you here? What do you guys do? Where is your NGO working?” Haqqani spit out the questions faster than Rafiq could translate them. He didn’t wait for our answers.
    “Here are our demands.”
    Here it comes , I thought. We were finally about to learn the objective of our kidnapping.
    The answer, not surprisingly, was money. Millions. I had trouble understanding exactly how much, but it was clearly beyond any realistic possibility.
    This wasn’t good.
    Then Rafiq said they were talking about a prisoner exchange—the three of us for an unknown number of Taliban being held in thenotorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison east of Kabul. This also wasn’t good. The prison, constructed in the 1970s, was infamous for the torture and executions of inmates after the 1978 Saur revolution and the war with the Soviets that followed. Though the United States had recently helped expand the prison and transferred people there from the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, living conditions for its two thousand or so inmates were still being criticized by human rights groups. The reputation of Pul-e-Charkhi had changed little over the years—those who went in rarely got out.
    The mention of a second demand definitely troubled me. Why even bring up two demands? Was it possible that if someone somehow produced money for our release, we would still be sent to prison—or worse?
    I didn’t even want to think about that.
    Haqqani continued his monologue, glaring at me as he explained that we would soon make a phone call to our NGO office. If we did not make quick progress toward meeting their demands, he said, the Taliban in Pakistan would come and take us. If we did not immediately follow his