65. The Fortress
We decided to stay up. From the first pay phone we came across, I called Rick. He had good news: His friend hated the FPA and offered us a generous discount. We were only to pay 75,000 dollars, wired via Western Union from three different locations. Rick asked if we were able to find this much money. I told him that we already had it and more than enough to keep us going for a few weeks.
“You didn’t do anything illegal, Nick, right?”
“No, Rick, don’t worry. We won it fair and square.”
“You gambled?”
“Yes, I mean, not exactly. We played blackjack, used basic strategy and counted cards.”
“Be careful, Nick! Please. Everyone is really worried about you and Martin.”
I chose to withhold the information that we had Rachel and Pearl with us.
“Tell them, tell everybody … well, I don’t know what to tell them. We’re in danger. Jeremy has been kidnapped. Right now, I only have a vague idea how to solve this and I have no time to think about it because we have to find our friend.”
“If there’s anything, anything at all, Nick, anything I can do to help, let me know!”
The worries about the safety of the people I loved and that I put in danger with my quest for a proof overwhelmed me once again and I started shaking.
“I’ve put enough people in danger. You’re married, you have Jake to think of and your business.”
An awkward silence crackled in the line across the Atlantic.
“Let me give you my friend’s details for the wire transfer.”
“Thank you, Rick,” I said.
“Please don’t worry, Nick,” Rick said after a long pause. “Sometimes people have to do things that seemingly put others in harm’s way. This doesn’t mean that they should waiver or worry or doubt themselves.”
“I don’t know how to stop.”
“You just do.”
Rick hung up.
We walked around all night and sent the money as soon as the Western Union agents opened.
Was it that easy? Just stop?
We indulged in a large breakfast at another coffeehouse and fell asleep in the Burggarten on the lawn waiting for the message on Jeremy’s location. Every hour, one of us went to an internet café nearby and checked a messaging service. At 4:00 in the afternoon, we received the coordinates of the location the FPA was holding Jeremy, along with a short description that made it clear we would need a car to rescue him: He was being held in an old farmhouse in the woods of Tuscany, Italy.
I felt a wave of worrying coming up and decided against it. Just stop, I reminded myself. My hands got wet and my chest started shaking, but I stood by my decision. If Rick said one could just stop, then I could do it. The shaking subsided and my hands dried again. A lightness came upon me and I suddenly felt the appropriateness of my decision to find the proof. I also knew that it was right for me to publish my proof – no matter what was going to happen after that.
We thought it would be easy to get a car because Pearl and Rachel had a driver’s license and because there were many rental stations in Vienna, but the rental car companies wouldn’t let them rent a car because they weren’t twenty-one years old.
We could always take the train, but we would need a car once we arrived in Italy. The rental companies assured us their policies in Italy would be the same. With 35,000 euros in our pockets, we decided to buy a car. We went to a car dealer on the outskirts of Vienna and bought a second-hand car from a dealer who didn’t seem to care much about our paperwork.
Twenty-four hours after I had asked Rick for help to find Jeremy, we rode a Japanese four-wheel drive to Italy.
Despite the perilous nature of our mission, a feeling of dolce vita filled the air once we had crossed the border to Italy. The rest areas on the highway served the best coffee we had ever had and, for a few hours, we enjoyed ourselves and sang along to the songs on the radio.
It was getting dark when we came to the woods where they were holding Jeremy. We had our first argument. Martin and I wanted to check out the location and Rachel and Pearl said we should avoid the night and wait for the next day. It grew darker by the minute and we kept on fighting. We discussed splitting, but nobody wanted to leave the others or be on their own.
We settled on driving on until we found either the house or outposts of Butler’s men. We saw the house at the end of a dead end deep in the woods. We stopped the car and walked the last yards in the shadow of trees lining the dirt road. From afar, it looked like a harmless stone farmhouse in slow decay, but a closer look revealed brand-new wooden doors at the front and a heavy metal door in the back. Two snipers watched the woods from the roof. Each of the three doors was locked with an electronic keypad and was guarded by at least one armed man.
The house was a fortress. There was no way we could storm it. We lacked everything: training, weapons, and physical strength – not to mention the codes to the keypads.
“Why do you think the American government has a house in this remote area in Italy?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I doubt it is for humanitarian reasons.”
The men talked loudly in a language that none of us knew. They made dirty jokes as we could tell from their laughs. They were not paying attention to the woods or us.
Copyright by Ines Strohschein, Berlin 2023