To get your daughter back… it begins.
And it isn’t money. It isn’t a ransom.
It’s instructions. Simone is to complete a task.
CHAPTER 10
What three words location: Mechanism. Ill. Familial.
Simone stares at this jumbled sentence, hoping that they are evidence she is dreaming. She pinches her arm and feels it. She blinks down at the phone, thinking, and it’s exactly then that she realizes the meaning of the message.
What Three Words is an app. She knows this because Dishes uses it to show its location on their website. Every three-metre square of the world has been logged using three-word combinations, giving much more accurate whereabouts than maps.
The kidnappers want her to go to a precise location. Something begins to rumble in the distant depths of Simone’s mind.
Next message:Collect bag from storage unit.
She scrolls hastily on the new flip phone, and sees the What Three Words app is already installed.
She types the words in and lets it load.
Mechanism. Ill. Familial. Familial. Simone lets out a dark huff of ironic displeasure. It is a remote location in Nueva Rosita, Mexico, several hours over the border.
There is a hot, torrid current in Simone’s blood. Her daughter isn’t kidnapped: she’s bait.
Simone has to go to Mexico. And in Mexico, she has to do something. A bag sits somewhere several hundred miles away, waiting for her. She stands there, alone on a dusty roadside, as she puts the pieces together.
It will have something illegal in it. They want her to do a run across the Mexican border, concealing something, to get her daughter back. Simone can barely breathe. What’s in the bag? Drugs? Arms? Worse? She can’t imagine.
Simone gets back into her car and looks down at the flip phone, hoping the instructions might have changed, but the texts stay there, blinking up at her. This flip phone has apps, but otherwise is only functional. It reminds Simone of a time right before smart phones, electronic khaki green screens, the text blocky and grey, the keypad numbers only, pressing multiple times for letters. She and Damien had these phones. They fell in love over these phones, love letters in text-speak for economy, 160-character limit. Simone could still type a muscle-memory text out on those numberpads, she’s sure of it. Damien called her Sim1. (Unlike some men, he communicated easily and directly on text; he told her after their second date that he wanted children and ‘no messing around’.)
She places the phone now on the passenger seat, next to her own phone, which is still switched off.
What is she going to do? She can’t do this. Her car … Her number plate. Does she even have a visa to get into Mexico? How would she conceal the …? Get them across …?
The impossibilities cloud in her mind, and Simone thinks she might just call the police, call anyone except sit here and face this choice alone.
Guns. Diamonds. What could it be?
Drugs, drugs, drugs, the evil of drugs.
Borders.
Sniffer dogs.
Customs.
Passport control.
Simone has no idea how to do this, none at all. She is not cutout for this. She is barely cut out for what she’s already done; she feels she has taken ten years off her life just to get here.
But then the second video on the second flip phone arrives.
The room is the same, but now the light’s changed. It’s darker around her daughter, but the bulb glows brighter in contrast, a halo upon her blonde hair. Her neck is rigid, with fear or perhaps instruction, Simone isn’t sure. She looks slimmer, though this isn’t possible and Simone knows it.
Lucy speaks: ‘I know what you’ve been asked to do. And I’m safe. I’m OK. But … please just do it. Please do whatever they say in order to free me. It’s the only way. Please don’t tell the police. Please don’t tell anyone, Mum.’
The video cuts there, a complete stop.
