Free Diplomatic Immunity by Grant Sutherland Page B

do a quick search of the files on the loaded disk. Again nothing stands out, so I pop the disk and pocket it, thinking I might have time to go through it more thoroughly later. But I’m not hopeful. Not hopeful at all.
    On my way to the living room I pause by the dining table and touch its shiny waxed surface with my fingertips. Mike is wandering around the far end of the room. When I catch the faint smell of wax, the memories rise: memories of this place, where I have spent some of the worst moments of my life.
    It was at this table that Rachel and I heard from Toshio the details of Sarah’s capture. We sat side by side, sick with fear, and listened as he talked us through what had happened to my wife, Rachel’s mother. The whole medical team at the camp in Abatan had been taken, Toshio told us, all six of the UN volunteers who had flown out there just a week before. He mentioned the names of several warring tribes in the area, assured us that he had dealt with the local warlords on other occasions, that he was hopeful of a speedy resolution. We asked him what the Afghan tribesmen wanted. He did not know. He told us that it might be days before any demand was made—probably money—but that he would call us from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border when he arrived there the following night. He promised us that the word he was getting from Kabul was that Sarah and the rest of the medical team had not been harmed. After an hour of this, we rose from the table, numbed; Rachel gripped my arm like a limpet as we walked down to the car.
    Then we waited. Endured the silent torture of not knowing, two weeks of it, irrational soaring hopes plunging into moments of total despair, both of us hovering by the phone each evening, waiting for Toshio’s regular nightly call. I wanted to fly out there. Toshio said that it would not help Sarah, that he was doing everything that could be done, that I should stay in New York and look after Rachel. I complied with some reluctance.
    The end, when it came, came suddenly. And I knew it was the end, the very worst, the moment the Secretary-General himself appeared for the first time in my career at my office door. I remained in the chair. I have a hazy recollection of a hand on my shoulder, of totally inadequate but well-meaning words.
    When Toshio returned to New York, he asked Rachel and me up to his apartment. He rested his elbows on this same waxed table, hung his grief-roughened face over his notes, and tried to explain to us the unexplainable. How the life of the woman we loved had been extinguished for no fathomable reason, how his every effort to save her had failed.
    Three years ago. Swaying forward now, I press my fingertips hard against the shiny waxed surface. At this same damn table.
    “Sam?”
    Stepping back from the table and moving across the room, I find Mike with his finger poised over the answering machine. Two messages, he tells me, then he hits the play button.
    “Toshio” is the first and only word we understand of message number one. It’s in Japanese, a woman’s voice, not young.
    “The sister?” Mike asks.
    I shrug. It could be Moriko, but who knows? There is a beep, then message two begins.
    “Hello? Mr. Hatanaka? Lucy Frayn jus’ callin’, let you all know I done that freezer, be right you usin’ it now. But I be needin’ that bucket like I tol’ you.”
Mike grunts. Toshio’s cleaning lady rambles on, outlining her requirements. When she’s done, there’s a double beep and the machine resets. On the display panel there is a number, presumably Lucy Frayn’s.
    I suggest that it might be worth our while calling her, but when I reach for the phone, Mike’s hand suddenly shoots out to block me. He turns his head, studying the machine. Then he hits rewind, leans over, and waits for it to finish, then hits play. The message in Japanese begins again. He hits the stop button immediately. Then rewind again.
    “What’s up?”
    “Shh,” he says. Pressing an ear