CHAPTER 8
After driving for about five hours, the Bridge-Meadows family arrived at the lakeside cabin where Karyn lived with her husband Dan and four children. “Cabin” was a misleading description. Their home was impressive – large and rambling with many levels. There was a family room, living room, sitting area, large open kitchen, and enough space to sleep about a dozen people. Serena thought the cabin looked like a bed and breakfast hotel, generously roomy for a single family home.
“Wow, this is really nice,” said Carrie. She squinted at the fully lit front entrance. Even the landscaping was illuminated, with soft solar lighting along the pathway to the door.
Serena glanced at her three children, who all looked a little rough around the edges after their harrowing exit from the restaurant the day before, traveling into the wee hours of the night, and sleeping on and off with their heads mashed against whatever they could find to lean on. Well, this wasn’t a reunion, and besides, Karyn was not a pretentious person, or at least not the Karyn she remembered.
Serena reached out to ring the doorbell, but before she could press the button, Karyn flung the door open wide. “Serena! You made it!” She ushered the family in.
“Is that coffee I smell?” asked Tom.
“Karyn, you do realize we’ve imposed upon you at 2:30 in the morning?” Serena laughed. She couldn’t believe the feast she saw for them on the table. Artfully arranged on a country checked tablecloth was a bowl of fruit containing perfectly ripened bananas, deep purple grapes, and red apples worthy of Snow White’s temptation, a basket of assorted breads with a side dish of butter pats and jellies, a tier of three different varieties of breakfast muffins, a pitcher of what appeared to be fresh-squeezed orange juice in a bucket of ice, serving dishes, cloth napkins, and elegant long stemmed glassware – all waiting for Serena and her family to consume it.
“I’ll take you any time, day or night. It’s been too long, dear friend!” Karyn threw her arms around Serena for a quick power hug, a tight squeeze that projected puppy-like affection. “Sit, sit,” she said to the rag-tag group. “Dig in, whatever you want. Tom, you wanted coffee? I did make some. How about you, Serena?”
“Yes, I’ll take a coffee, thanks,” she said. Tom and Serena chose to remain standing, after having been cramped in the car for too many hours. The three kids sat and shyly helped themselves to the buffet. The adults stood quietly for several minutes, content to bask in the relief of having reached their destination.
“Hey, you made it!” Dan’s booming voice preceded his appearance in the kitchen. “So, what’s going on? Why are you here at two-something in the middle of the night?”
“Dan!” Karyn admonished him as she returned from getting the coffee, but she waited expectantly for an answer.
“Well, it’s about you, actually,” said Serena, as she received a mug of hot coffee from Karyn.
“About me? But it’s been forever since I was your partner, and your cases weren’t anything that would come back to haunt me.”
“No, it’s not about our private detective work.”
“Then what is it about?” asked Dan, without waiting for an answer. “I made a fire in the living room. We can talk in there.” He looked at the three kids sitting at his table, as if it was the first he noticed their presence. “Kids, there’s a TV if you want to find something to watch. We have a game system too. Whatever you want.”
“Dan, it’s the middle of the night. I made up beds for them. They probably want to sleep,” said Karyn.
“Thank you. They’ll be fine, we can talk in the other room,” said Serena. “But we can’t stay long, they’ll be looking for us.”
“What?” Dan was startled. “Who’s looking for you?”
The four adults left the kids to their buffet and sank their bodies into the pair of matching overstuffed suede sofas facing the fire. “We don’t know for sure that they’ll come here,” said Tom.
“Yes we do. They know who you are,” said Serena. She stirred her coffee to mix the sugar and cream, and took a few sips.
“Start at the beginning, how is this about me?” asked Karyn.
“It’s about your adventure in Kish,” Serena said.
“Oh no, why?” said Karyn. She avoided looking at Dan.
“Kish, the gorgeous island in Iran, where the snorkeling is the best in the world? And you went there because Kish doesn’t require a visa, right?” asked Serena.
“We didn’t have time for visas, it was a spur of the moment thing,” said Karyn. “If I’d known how dangerous it was to go there, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“And if I’d known that Karyn wasn’t going to be allowed at the beach, I wouldn’t have gone snorkeling. I had no idea she was going to be shuttled off to the ‘women’s beach’. I shouldn’t have gone off without her, especially after they gave her a scarf to cover her head. I should have known better than to leave her there.” said Dan.
“I was the one who wanted to linger in the shops. It wasn’t your fault,” said Karyn. “The women’s beach was lovely. There was nothing about it that sounded off any alarm bells.”
“I’m not blaming either of you for what happened,” said Serena. “I’m just giving a recap: Karyn ended up taken to Tehran, to a safe house. How she got there is not your fault. Kish is a hotbed of smuggling and terrorist activity. You didn’t expect her to be taken, but she was.”
“Nothing was ever done about it. They released her, brought her back to Kish, dropped her off at the hotel we were registered with, and we never knew why they took her, or who they were. Our government made some empty promises to look into it, and that was it,” said Dan.
“But I was safe, and that’s all that really matters. Why is this coming up?” asked Karyn, still avoiding looking directly at her husband.
“Yes, I know, not your fault. But, you might remember that when Karyn got back to the island, she went to the Kish Cyber Café at Shayan Hotel, where she sent me several e-mails,” Serena continued. “These e-mails were apparently read by more people than just me.”
“They probably read everything in that Café,” said Tom.
“Who’s ‘they’?” asked Dan.
“I don’t know. Our government is involved, either directly or indirectly,” said Serena.
“Which one? The Williams camp or the Kinji camp?” asked Dan.
“My guess would be the Williams camp, but I don’t know,” said Serena.
“I don’t understand any of this. The only person I e-mailed was you. I don’t remember my exact words, do you?” asked Karyn. “Why are they interested in this now? That was over ten years ago.”
“They think I knew something about Iran before the bombings,” said Serena. She locked into Karyn’s eyes and held steady eye contact for a few long seconds until Karyn squirmed and looked away.
“Oh.” Karyn’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“Honey? What is this about?” asked Dan. “Karyn? Is there something you want to tell me?”
“Should we leave the room while you two talk about this?” asked Serena, hoping to escape the awkwardness that was sure to follow.
“No, no, you can stay,” said Karyn. “Dan, I didn’t want to say anything because you felt bad enough about me being abducted.”
“What happened?” asked Dan.
“The head scarf they gave me at the island was slipping and getting in my face, so while I was at the safe house I took it off,” said Karyn. “That made the guards mad. One of them yanked my head back by grabbing the hair on the back of my head, and the other one spit in my face. That’s all that –“
“He spit in your face! When were you going to tell me this?” Dan yelled. He was up now, pacing the room.
“Uh, never. I didn’t think you ever needed to know,” said Karyn.
“Tell me the rest of it,” said Dan in a normal tone of voice, sitting back down.
“The guards must have been feeling cocky because they started running off at the mouth. One of them said
, ‘Americans will not be so bold when so many die.’ And the other said, ‘We bomb them their Holy Day and they will cover heads.’ And then they laughed,” said Karyn. “It was all in English, so they wanted me to hear them.”
“And you wrote this in an e-mail?” asked Dan. “And this was nothing important? Don’t you think ‘bomb’ and ‘Americans die” could be the keywords that triggered you as a terrorist? Come on, Karyn!” Dan jumped off the couch again to pace the floor space between the sofas and the fireplace, which had dwindled down to ashes but no one noticed or cared.
“Wait, wait! I don’t think Karyn is on a terrorist watch list. They’d have come to her before now if she was,” said Serena.
“Then what’s going on? What else don’t I know?” Dan asked.
“I’m going to go check on the kids,” mumbled Tom. He made a hasty retreat out of the uncomfortable room.
Serena looked at the two of them. “I’ll go see if Tom needs any help with the kids.” She hadn’t made it out of the room yet before she heard Dan bellow, “You did WHAT?”
Shortly afterward, the house was awake. Dan and Karyn’s children seemed to pour in from all corners of the house, scrambling toward their parents. Tom and Serena stayed out of the fray, tucking their own kids in for the night and quickly joining them. They lay in the guest bed, trying to shut out the noise from the other room, but it was impossible. First there was a flurry of parental duty as Dan and Karyn divided the children and escorted them back to their rooms, next came the conversation that Serena and Tom were hoping to miss.
“Okay, back up. So you are saying that not only did you hear that the Iranians were going to bomb us, but you’ve been talking to them for all these years?” asked Dan, forgetting to keep his voice down.
“I’ve not been talking to them! I said I met a nice lady there. I gave her my e-mail address. She started writing to me,” said Karyn.
“While you were in the safe house, being tortured, you made a friend.”
“I was not tortured. The hair pulling and spitting was the only thing that ever happened. I would have told you if anything really bad happened.”
“Really? You would have?” scoffed Dan.
“Look, I know you’re mad. I should have told you, but you already felt so responsible that I was taken in the first place. I thought it would make things worse if you knew about the spitting.”
“And the bombing, you couldn’t mention that?”
“Not without telling you about the spitting.”
“And your Iranian mole friend? You couldn’t work that in either?”
“Not without the spitting. I’m sorry, Dan. I should have told you. And she’s not a mole. She’s an ordinary citizen.”
“Everything makes sense now. That’s how Serena knew that something bad was going to happen, why she burned her house down and went into hiding. I knew she wasn’t psychic! I’ve been such an idiot.”
“I forwarded the e-mails Farideh sent me to Serena. And you’re right, that’s why she went into hiding. She encouraged me to do the same, which is why I wanted to stay here, and pull back from society. I figured we were pretty safe in such a remote location by the lake.”
“And you never filled me in, all because you lied about being manhandled in Iran? Or as you call it, the spitting.”
“Yes. One lie led to another, and then I didn’t know how to tell you. I knew you’d be mad.”
“You’re right. I’m mad.”
The two sat in silence for so long that Tom fell asleep. Serena stayed alert, even though she was resting. Time was of the essence. She was giving the couple a few more moments alone only because she felt guilty for her part in keeping secrets. She had advised Karyn to tell Dan at the very start, but when Karyn was too insecure to do it, Serena had played along. She regretted that, but it was all in the past now.
Just when she thought she would need to help things along, the couple resumed talking. “How long will you stay mad at me?” Karyn asked, her voice choked up with tears.
“Come here,” Dan pulled Karyn closer to him. “I can’t stay mad at you, you know that. That’s why you should have told me. What did your friend say that convinced you that the Iranians were going to do this?”
“Farideh said that everyone was talking about it. There was a date – the right one, by the way. Everyone knew, and there was no doubt it was true, that these bombings were going to happen. They were saying ‘Death to America’ in the streets,” said Karyn.
“But they’ve always said things like that, how did you know it was the real deal?”
“I’ll show you the e-mail that Farideh sent me, the one that I forwarded to Serena. It is long, and it is convincing.”
“You saved it? And you didn’t send it to the FBI or at least the police?”
“Dan, I did send it to the FBI! I got a confirmation e-mail back. They said they sent the information to Homeland Security.”
“You have that e-mail saved too?” asked Serena. Her presence startled both of them and they jumped.
“Yes, I still have the e-mail. I save everything.”
“That’s exactly what they’re afraid of – they wonder what you have. They’ll be here soon. Back up your computer files, now.”
“Who’s they?” asked Dan for the second time.
“I don’t know. Really, Dan, there are no more secrets. You are all caught up to where we are. Well, you will be after you read Farideh’s e-mail. But no time for that now. Grab a flash drive and get your files. I have my own flash drive in my purse. I need a copy of the files too. Then – wipe your computer clean.”
“I don’t know how to do that,” said Karyn.
“Don’t look at me,” said Dan.
“For that, I’ll wake up my son. He can do it. The main thing is that we get those files. Now.”