Guilty Wives (6 page)

I GAVE MY ARMS
a long stretch and smiled at the ceiling. I was lying naked on a bed in a small bedroom. The pillows and comforter were all over the floor. A chair lay overturned.

I got up, feeling the full effects of last night. Every muscle was sore, every movement painful. My head was pounding.

And I felt great.

I found a cotton robe in an adjoining bathroom and threw it on. I walked into the large main room, where everything had started last night with Damon. No sign of him. I sighed. He was a man of his word. “Just one night,” he’d said.

Just one night, but everything was different. The dose of fantasy had really been a dose of reality. I couldn’t go back to Jeffrey. Whatever I’d tasted last night, not love but
something
—I had to have that something. I wouldn’t become Serena, dabbling in occasional affairs to keep life interesting. I wouldn’t be Winnie, living with a mysterious, distant man she no longer knew.

Richie and Elena. It would be hard. But it wasn’t like they lived with us much, anyway. I’d move back to the States. I’d move somewhere close to their boarding school in Connecticut. Hey, I’d ask them if they even wanted to
stay
in boarding school. Jeffrey hadn’t given them much choice. But screw him. Let him stay in Switzerland and fuck the ambassador to his heart’s content. I wasn’t living a charade anymore. Not for another day. I was done.

No—I was just beginning. I hadn’t been playing someone else this weekend. I’d
become
someone else.

Winnie stumbled into the main room. She looked like someone else, too, but not in a good way. Her hair was flat and her eyes dull and bloodshot. She had on a large T-shirt and her legs were bare.

“Top of the morning,” I said. “Was it fun?”

“They’re gone,” she said, retrieving a bottle of water from the refrigerator.

“Devo, Luc, and François?”

She nodded and sunk into a chair.

“And that disappoints you?” I asked. “You expected a whirlwind romance from those characters?”

She started to answer but then we both heard it, the commotion outside. Something chaotic, people shouting, the noise of urgent footsteps rattling on the dock.

And then I remembered something, something tickling me from the recesses of my memory last night.
A noise, a pop—

“Wonder what the ruckus is,” Winnie said.

—a burst, muted and distant, several in succession—

“The bloody hell?” she said.

—a gunshot? Had I heard gunshots?

And then the unmistakable sound of the yacht’s door swinging open, the pounding of footsteps entering the yacht, men’s voices shouting something in French. Winnie and I jumped to our feet.

Just as three commandos, in full combat gear, rushed into the cabin and trained assault weapons on us.

THREE OF THEM
initially, then three more spilling in behind them, dressed in blue, combat helmets with face shields, dark masks covering everything from their necks to their noses, bulletproof vests, weapons galore on their belts, thick gloves, and heavy combat boots.

“
Allongez-vous face contre terre! Face contre terre!
Down!” Their assault weapons swept across the room. One of them motioned to the floor, lest we misunderstand, while others fanned out throughout the yacht.

“Face contre terre!”
One of the soldiers moved toward me and I crouched down. He pushed me flat to the floor and I lay still. Winnie had done the same thing.

Shouting, from other parts of the yacht. Bursting through a door—the bedroom door. Serena’s inquisitive voice. More shouting. I caught Winnie’s eye. She was staring forward intently, perfectly still and perfectly terrified.

Chaos all around us. Serena and Bryah, pushed into the room at gunpoint and forced to the floor beside us, Serena in a T-shirt and panties, Bryah stark naked.

“What’s going on?” Serena shouted. The soldier behind her put a foot on her back.

“Silence!”
he ordered.

I said, “Just do what they say—”

“Silence!”

That soldier stood sentry over us, training his gun on our backs, while the others stormed the various rooms of the yacht.

“Qui est-ce qui est dans le yacht? Comment?”

Comment?
How many? I thought he was asking how many people were on the yacht. I didn’t know, other than the four of us. Devo, Luc, François, and Damon were gone. The fat American?

“Quatre ou cinq,”
I answered. Four or five.

The soldiers called out to each other, announcing each room clear, I assumed, but I really didn’t know. I didn’t know much of anything. I was in a foreign country where an armed militia was overtaking our yacht. What in the world had happened?

The fat American, in a T-shirt and boxers, his hair standing on end, was pushed into the main cabin and forced to the carpet as well. The soldiers gathered and seemed satisfied that they’d rounded us all up. They went to each of us and grabbed our hands and fastened them behind our backs, some kind of a hard rubber restraint. Handcuffs, but not like the police used. At least not in America. But this wasn’t America.

I was lifted off my feet and pushed forward. Each of us was forced up the stairs and onto the dock. Outside, the air was clammy and the sun was low in the east. What would ordinarily be a sleepy dawn was a frenetic scramble of people and vehicles.

It was as if France had declared war on tiny Monaco. Gray helicopters hovered low overhead. A couple of planes that looked like fighter jets circled the sky. Official-looking cars swamped the harbor. The same military group, wearing combat gear and brandishing assault weapons, was pulling people out of all the other yachts moored in the harbor. The entire dock was lined with people lying flat on their stomachs in handcuffs.

We soon joined them—and this time, we didn’t require an order. We fell to our knees and then lay face down. Soldiers moved us with their feet until they had arranged us on the diagonal, clearing a lane on the dock for foot traffic.

“What in the world is going on?” I said, my head turned toward Winnie, each of us lying prone on the cold, dingy dock.

“Oh, God,” Winnie said. “Oh, God, no.”

“What?” I asked.

“Silence!”
one of them barked at me.

Winnie closed her eyes, and the chaos escalated around us. She complied with the wishes of the French soldier, not speaking but simply mouthing the words.

Oh, no.

TEN, TWENTY MINUTES
passed. I was lying flat, my head turned toward Winnie and beyond her, to the harbor. A French soldier stood only a few feet away. Soldiers and people in civilian clothes ran back and forth. I heard several splashes, telling me that people were diving into the water. Some of the soldiers entered our yacht again. Troopers were boarding yachts with dogs, German shepherds, who wore large blue vests that covered their torsos.

What had happened?

“Talk to me, Winnie,” I said, but a boot came down between our faces.

“Une arme!”
The shout came from someone standing at the door of our yacht.

“Qui est le propriétaire du yacht? Celui-ci?”
shouted a man whose boots were inches from my face.
“Qui est le—”

“I am,” the fat American said. “It’s my yacht.”

“Levez-vous!”
A soldier grabbed me by the wrist restraints and lifted me to my feet.
“Allez-vous! Allez, allez!”
All of us, the four of us ladies and the fat American, started marching toward the harbor.

“What’s going on?” Serena said in a hushed tone.

“Don’t worry, sweetie, this is some kind of mistake,” I called back with no conviction whatsoever.

Commandos had raided every boat. The parking lot was swarming with officials, mostly in plain clothes, not in uniform. An area around one particular car, a black convertible, was cordoned off with barricades.

Soldiers were lifting everyone to their feet and lining them up single file on the dock. But we were getting the royal treatment. We were marching ahead of them, all by ourselves.

We were being singled out.

THE DIN IN
the parking lot had reached near-deafening levels—everyone was shouting over each other and barking orders, sirens were blaring, helicopters were hovering. The four of us were each placed into a separate unmarked black SUV. Slowly, the vehicles started to move in a caravan. A helicopter flew overhead, trailing us. Soldiers jogged alongside the procession, holding their machine guns in ready position. A series of large vans passed us going the other way on a narrow road, heading back toward the dock, presumably to transport the occupants of the other yachts. Why, I had no idea.

“I’m an American citizen and I have rights,” I said to the driver and the soldier seated next to him in the front seat. “I demand to know what’s going on.”

They didn’t respond. They didn’t even look back at me.

We pulled into the same airport in Nice where we landed only two short days ago, the Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur. But this time it was lined with military vehicles and armed soldiers. I was led into a small plane, where I was placed in a seat and my handcuffs were fastened to something else, locking me into the chair. Then a blindfold was placed over my eyes.

“Is that really necessary? For God’s sake, I’m handcuffed and—”

“Silence!”
someone yelled in my face.

I heard others board the plane. My friends. I heard sobbing. I thought it was Winnie but I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t even be sure that the sobs weren’t my own.

I couldn’t be sure of anything right now.

We sat in stunned silence. I could hear the rapid breathing of my friends, all of us bound and blindfolded and clueless.

Then some more men jumped onto the plane and said something that I missed. The plane soon moved down the runway. And then it lifted in the air. Less than forty-eight hours after arriving in Monte Carlo, brimming with anticipation, we were leaving in handcuffs and blindfolds, with absolutely no idea where we were going or what was happening.

“Ladies, you have rights,” I called out. “Demand a lawyer. Demand someone from the emb—”

A blow to my chest, a flat palm whisking the wind from me. My head slammed against the wall. I was woozy for a moment but I had to think, to focus. But focus on
what?
Nothing made sense.

It seemed like we were in the air for about an hour and a half. That was three times the time it took to fly from Bern to Nice two days ago. But Bern felt very far away right now.

Paris, I assumed. After our landing, we were released from our seats and marched down a flight of stairs. I was wearing nothing more than a robe, nothing underneath and nothing on my feet.

A mistake, I told myself. A misunderstanding.

I walked in blindfolded darkness, a strong hand clutching my arm, into another car. The car was blaring a siren, which echoed similar sirens from the other cars in our caravan. I thought of so many things—Richie and Elena, even Jeffrey, what in the world could have possibly happened—and lost track of time. The only thing I noticed was that the car never stopped, hardly even slowed, during the entire trip.

Then we stopped. A door opened, a blast of warm air, and I was being handled again, forced out of the car, stubbing my bare toes on asphalt. A soldier on each side of me kept me from falling. They were carrying me as much as I was walking.

From asphalt to tile, the inside of a building. From tile to an elevator. We climbed three stories, by my count. Nothing but darkness through the blindfold. My wrists were abraded and one of my shoulders was cramping from my hands being held behind my back for so long.

Then more tile, then a room, a very cold room. I was put into a chair, my cuffed hands placed behind the back of it, and locked down.

I smelled aftershave, body odor, sweat. I sensed the presence of others in the room. One or two, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. A door opened and closed several times. People entered and exited. They whispered and they conferred. Someone lit a cigarette. I thought the French had banned indoor smoking, but I wasn’t entirely sure I was even
in
France and I doubted I would score any points raising an objection, in any event.

My head was pounding and my heart was racing. The silence was worse than the chaos on the dock.

And then the blindfold was ripped off my face.

I BLINKED INTO
the glare of a brightly lit room. The walls were shiny white and bare, and there were blinding fluorescent lights overhead. The ceiling had a pitch to it, sufficient to allow the can lights on the angled surfaces to shoot directly into my eyes. A modern version of the spotlight shining in the face. What with the frigid temperature in here, it felt like sunshine in the middle of winter.

Two men stood across from me. One of them was young and wiry with a ruddy complexion and a square jaw and hair cropped in military fashion. The other was probably fifty; he wore a suit and a civilian hairstyle.

“Comment vous appelez-vous?”
asked the older man. French. Did that mean I was in France? It made the most sense.

“
Je m’appelle
Abbie Elliot,” I said, struggling for a calm, firm demeanor. “
Je suis une citoyenne américaine. Je veux
—I’m an American citizen,” I said in English, flustered, “and I want to speak with a lawyer or someone from the embassy.”

“Who do you work for?” The younger one, the square jaw, was talking now. He seemed like the one who would play the heavy hand. And he seemed to relish it.

“Work for? I don’t work for anyone,” I said.

Square Jaw approached my chair and bent down, as if to get a better look at me. “You are lying,” he said. His English was as good as his older colleague’s, but his accent was thicker. “How many of you are there?” He wasn’t letting me break eye contact, moving his face to keep my eyes focused on him. “Hmm? How many?”

“You’ve made a big mistake,” I said. “The only group I’m a part of is a group of ladies on vacation. Whatever happ—”

“Tell me!” he hissed, gripping the back of my hair, his hot breath on my face. “
Comment?
How many?”

“I’m in Monte Carlo with three friends,” I said, trying to project some measure of confidence, but it wasn’t easy. Cold sweat was running down my armpits and along my ribs. My hands were shackled behind me, locking me to the chair, rendering me immobile. “Serena Schofield, Winnie Brookes, and Bryah Gordon.”

“Who do you work for?” he asked me again. “Le Groupe Islamique Armé?”

Islamique?
“I’m not Islamic,” I said. “I’m the daughter of a Methodist—”

“ETA?” he went on. “Mujahideen-e Khalq? FLNC? Al-Qaeda?”

Al-Qaeda?

I drew back, in the limited space I had before my head touched the high back of the wooden chair to which I was tied. I looked alternately at Square Jaw and the older guy, as though I were waiting for a punch line. Or for someone to pop out from behind a curtain and tell me this whole thing was a prank, like on
Candid Camera
or the MTV version of it my son watches.

But there were no curtains, nor were the facial expressions of my inquisitors anything but deadly serious.

I laughed, but no one joined me.

“You think I’m a
terrorist?
” I asked.