A thought hit me. “Are her school shoes there?” I asked. “Or her school trainers?”
Jenny switched to FaceTime as she approached our front door. The shoe rack came into sight. Bibi’s black school shoes and blue school trainers were both there. Her pink trainers were missing.
“Fuck! He took the one pair that didn’t have a tracker in.” Hewasn’t just prepared, he was immaculately prepared. I slumped back in the passenger seat.
Fox looked at me. “If The Chameleon took Bibi for leverage, why hasn’t he contacted us with his demands?”
It was the same question I’d been wrestling with.
The Chameleon had tried to kill us once and failed. And now he’d taken our child. If he wanted to do something worse than killing us, then that would be hurting our child. Did he know that? Was that his plan? Did he know that hurting us was nothing compared to how crushed we’d be if he hurt Bibi?
“The call will come. Maybe he’s waiting until you’re back home.” Jenny tried to sound reassuring.
None of us wanted to think about what it would mean if the call didn’t come. None of us could entertain the idea that taking Bibi and hurting her was the end plan.
I shook my head to myself.
He was a professional. This wasn’t vindictive. He didn’t have an issue with us; his bosses did.
Then it all became horribly clear.
I spoke calmly. “I know what he’s going to say. He’ll want us to surrender ourselves to him, in exchange for Bibi. He wants to hand us over to The Corporation.”
We were his final hurrah. His last job. This was his grand finish—the two of us delivered to the gang who wanted us dead.
No fuss, no mess, no bloody shootout that would capture the attention of the authorities. The Corporation were discreet. That was their reputation. They didn’t want the drama, the news headlines. The Chameleon had planned to take us quietly in Ivrea. If I hadn’t escaped, if I hadn’t come for Fox, he would’ve succeeded.
The Chameleon had planned this to perfection.
We would go quietly. We would do anything he asked. Because he had our child.
It was our fault.
We’d been too distracted. If we’d come closer together after Ivrea, and not spent the last year disagreeing over how best tohandle Fox’s trauma, we could’ve protected our children. We should’ve seen this coming.
Fox reached over and squeezed my hand as Jenny spoke again.
“I’ve been looking at the traffic cams and CCTV of the street, and I’ve got a car leaving your street two minutes after the dog barking got me out of eyeline of the front door. The timing fits to be our guy.”
“What kind of car?” asked Fox.
“Just zooming in, I think I can…Got it. A gray Ford Fiesta.” Jenny groaned.
“What? Why’s that bad?”
“The gray Ford Fiesta is one of the most popular cars in the UK. I won’t find one—I’ll find ten. And then we’ll need to work out which one is right.”
Our child was out there alone. We didn’t know where and we didn’t know with who. We had failed her.
“Do we know it’s definitely The Chameleon?” Fox said.
I turned to look at him. “Who else would it be? Who else would take our child to spite us?”
“I just mean, do we have anything directly linking him to this?” Fox was clearly in shock and not thinking properly.
“You mean, apart from a convoluted plan to make sure we attended an event over an hour away from our children, enabling him to take one of them?”
“Yes, it has to be him.” Jenny sounded as confused as I was. “Mum is on her way to come get Reggie. We thought it’d be safest for him to be at theirs?”
