Criss Cross

Chapter 108

Diane Jenkins said that on the day she disappeared, there had been a man hidden in the back of her car. He clamped a gloved hand across her mouth, and the last thing she remembered clearly was being terrified and getting jabbed in the neck with a needle.

She remembered being in multiple places before the anthill but had trouble recalling much about any of them or saying how much time had passed, though she did have recollections of a vehicle he used to transport her from one place to the next.

Mrs. Jenkins woke up for good in the workroom in Rivers’s bunker, her hands zip-tied in front of her, and the doors locked from the outside. There was water, food, and no way out. Her wedding and engagement rings were missing.

She said she’d screamed for a while, but no one came. Sometime later, a day, maybe two, but well after the effects of whatever she’d been knocked out with had finally worn off, she awoke to find M bringing in Ali, who was drugged, bound, and unconscious. She’d begged M to let them go, but he’d ignored her and locked them both inside.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “But Ali did.”

Ali said that he thought he was meeting Captain Abrahamsen after school, but M had pulled up in a Suburban. He was wearing U.S. Armed Forces biking gear and said he rode for the team with Abrahamsen and that the captain had had an emergency meeting and sent him.

“I know it was stupid, but he was wearing the same uniform as Captain Abrahamsen, so I got in. I was looking out the window for my friends, and he stuck a needle in my leg. That’s the last thing I remember until that room he kept us in.”

Ali said he was initially frightened and then confused and angry when he realized he’d been duped by the texts. “But after that, I was only thinking of a way to escape.”

“It’s true,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “He became... obsessed.”

“Sounds familiar,” I said, and I winked at Ali, who went on. Even with his wrists bound, Ali had managed to go through every cabinet and drawer in the workshop, and he found all sorts of things, including a hammer, a chisel, a portable drill with bits, three headlamps and two extra batteries, a hacksaw with two replacement blades, an old watch that was still running, and a new acetylene torch still in its box, along with a small tank of the gas.

Ali had wanted to use the torch immediately to cut their way out. The instructions were in the box. How hard could it be? But Mrs. Jenkins had pointed out how small the gas tank was and wondered whether it would be enough to take down the steel door.

They decided instead to first weaken the hinges and the handle mechanism with the other tools and then finish the job with the torch. Using the watch, Ali kept track of M’s comings and goings and found their captor was checking on them roughly every twenty-four hours or so, consistently between two and three thirty a.m.

With the tools hidden, Ali had asked M if they could have their wrist restraints cut because their skin was getting rubbed raw. M had done it without comment, then he gave them antibiotic ointments to dress their wounds and left, locking the door to the hallway and interior ladder behind him.

Before Ali and Diane Jenkins could start on the door, they became woozy, which made them believe that M had put drugs in their water. They decided to limit their liquid intake, but nonetheless, their ability to work was slowed.

They began with the middle hinge and the hacksaw, trying to keep the cut as inconspicuous as possible.

“We made sure everything was cleaned up way before M was supposed to come back,” Ali said. “But every time he came, we were scared he was going to see where we’d been weakening the door.”

But M did not discover what they were doing, and two days later, with the middle hinge down to two inches of quarter-inch steel, they turned to the lower bracket.

That took another two days. Cutting the upper hinge to three inches took them a day and a half. They waited for M to arrive at the usual time on the sixth morning, but he did not return until the seventh day around one a.m.

M seemed agitated, distracted; he tossed cans of food and bottles of water to them and left some two hours before he crawled out of my neighbor’s house and across the scaffolding into my attic office.

Ali and Mrs. Jenkins said that in retrospect, they probably could have escaped in that twenty-two extra hours they’d spent waiting for M to return. But they’d wanted to start the final cutting process when they knew they’d have at least a full day to drop the door and get as far away as possible from wherever they were being held.