A few of us are headed to the West Indies. Want to come?

Alexander read the message that arrived right after Isobel’s. There had been a time when he would have said yes immediately, and already been on the way to new thrills. But now it just felt stupidly uninteresting. The only conclusion was that he had changed, remarkably, quickly, and completely against his will. Because this wasn’t something he had wanted. Nothing he’d chosen. He was still unsure whether he liked the change—so far, it had caused pain more than anything. He was used to his lifestyle, had told himself he enjoyed no-strings-attached sex and expensive pleasures, that they were more than enough for him, that he didn’t need anything else. And at some point during his childhood, he had stopped believing that love was for him. Maybe not consciously, but it was true all the same.

At first he hadn’t realized what had happened. What was wrong with him? Like some creeping illness.

But it was love. He loved Isobel. He was laughably unfamiliar with the sensation. Unfamiliar with feeling so much. Joy, confusion. Anger. Alternating between them.

He wanted to talk to Romeo about it. Ask for advice. But Romeo had met someone, was newly infatuated and quite insufferable at the moment.

Alexander rubbed his face. He hadn’t gotten any more messages from Isobel. Where had she gone? And where the hell had she landed?

He scrolled through their messages. Saw their relationship grow. Should have smiled, but instead felt a weight on his chest. He brought up her number. Wanted to hear her voice, not sit and wait for a text. Almost hoped that she did want things to end. Could barely cope with all these feelings.

Her phone rang. No one answered.

He called again.

He kept trying all day.

But no one answered. And no more messages arrived.

After a night of tossing and turning, Alexander called Leila. It had struck him, sometime around midnight, that she might know where Isobel was. As the phone rang, he started to pull on his jacket, search for his keys and wallet. He was going crazy indoors, needed to get out.

“Leila here,” she answered, her voice tense.

“Where’s Isobel?” he asked, not bothering to say hello.

“She should be in Massakory now.”

Alexander stopped, his keys midair.

“Chad? She was just there. You pulled her out because it was too dangerous.”

“Things have cooled down. And this was an emergency. Idris is sick, so they had no doctor, and she chose to go. She knows what she’s doing, and I never would have sent her if it was dangerous. Chad is relatively stable.”

He ignored the fact that Isobel obviously had been eager to go. “Have you been in touch? Did you hear from her?”

Leila sighed. “No, not yet.”

Alexander heard her tapping away at a keyboard and she practically disappeared, the way people tended to do when they lost their focus and became preoccupied by the screen in front of them.

“What’s this about, Alexander? I have a lot to do,” she said, sounding faraway.

“Who might know more?” Alexander asked, irritated. He really didn’t give a rat’s ass about how much she had to do.

“About what?” she asked, but he could hear that her thoughts were elsewhere.

Alexander paused. Then he spoke crisply into the receiver, using the voice he had been born with, and taught to use—his upper-class voice, the one that made people snap to attention.

“Listen to me, Leila. Who can I talk to that might have a fucking clue about where Isobel is? Now?”

Ten minutes later Alexander had the man from the security company on the line.

They instantaneously ended up at each other’s throats. No, the security guy couldn’t give him any information. No, there were no reports of conflict in N’Djamena or Massakory. No, he wasn’t interested in hearing his opinions, and no, he wouldn’t get back to Alexander with more information.

Alexander heard a click on the other end of the line.

As he headed toward the center of town, he called Leila again.

“I hear you called the security company,” she said frostily. “They weren’t happy. You should really stop annoying them.”

“They’re idiots. There has to be someone I can talk to.”

“Alexander, I say this with the greatest respect, but lay off. Nothing has happened. She’s in Chad. She’s working.” Leila was silent for a moment. Tap, tap on the keyboard. “Did you consider the possibility that maybe Isobel doesn’t want to talk to you? She told me things were over between you.”

“Maybe not,” he said, and hung up. He didn’t want to waste time talking to Leila.

Was the psychologist right? Was he wrong? He could be, of course. He couldn’t think clearly when it came to Isobel.

What the hell should he do?

He had ended up by Stureplan, stopped dead, and people had to swerve to avoid running into him.

He sat down on a bench and scrolled through his contact list. How could one person have so many useless contacts? Models, bloggers, nightclub kings, chefs. Financiers, actresses, and …

Financiers.

He scrolled back to the number. Waited impatiently.

“David Hammar,” his brother-in-law answered, his voice curt and effective.

“It’s Alexander De la Grip. I need help. Where are you?”

“The office.”

He got up. “I’m coming over; I’ll explain on the way.”

Hurriedly Alexander walked to Nybroplan, past the inlet and on to Blasieholmen, where Hammar Capital was based in a white building that looked out over the waters of Saltsjön Bay. By the time he was buzzed in, David already knew everything.

Not that there was much to know.

“I sent a message to Tom Lexington as we spoke,” David greeted him. “He’s on the way.”

Aha, the huge security guy. Couldn’t hurt, anyway.

“Jesus, I don’t know if it’s just my imagination,” Alexander said, giving voice to his doubts as he shook his head at the offer of coffee. “Maybe she simply doesn’t want to talk to me.”

David looked at him. “That’s the best-case scenario.”

“I guess so.”

David’s gaze was assessing and deadly serious.

“If it was Natalia we were talking about, I’d do exactly the same. If that’s any comfort.”

“You said you argued?” Tom Lexington asked a quarter of an hour later.

Alexander met his dark eyes. Could he see suspicion in them, or was it his imagination? It was like being on a gangplank; nothing was stable.

“Yes. But then we both apologized. By text. And she said she would call.”

It sounded pretty weak, even to his own ears.

“When?”

“She was meant to call last night.”

He felt like an idiot. David was by the window, his arms crossed, watching them without saying a word, without showing an emotion.

“Is she the kind of person who keeps her promises?” Tom’s voice sounded like rumbling war and brutal violence, and for some reason that was reassuring.

“Yes.”

“It could be you’re having a communication problem?”

Alexander nodded reluctantly. Maybe he was overreacting after all.

“It’s probably nothing,” said Tom.

“I get that. But if it is something, what could it be?”

“Most often in this kind of situation, it turns out the missing person has been in a car accident. That’s the biggest risk in those countries. She could be in the hospital with no way to get in touch.”

Alexander clenched his jaw. That sounded bad enough to his ears.

“At this point, I need to know exactly what it is you are after,” Tom said. He exchanged a look Alexander couldn’t interpret with David.

“I want to know what’s happened, of course,” Alexander replied bluntly. Wasn’t that obvious? He wondered if the enormous man wasn’t a little dumb.

“My question is about what you want to pay for, nothing else,” said Tom.

Alexander shook his head, didn’t need to think, knew they were just wasting time. “I want to know where she is,” he said coolly. “If something’s happened to her. I’ll pay whatever it costs. Money is no problem.”

“Give me half an hour.”

Tom disappeared into an adjoining room, was gone for fifteen minutes, and then returned.

“I just spoke with a guy in the vicinity. He’s going to go to N’Djamena and ask around a little.” He wrote down an account number and a figure, then passed the note to Alexander. “Get a Western Union account. Transfer the money here. Let’s start like this. My man will start to check the hospitals and clinics as soon as he gets there. Stretchers and rooms—health care isn’t exactly modern in those parts. Do you know for sure she’s in N’Djamena?”

Alexander tried to forget the image of an injured Isobel, unconscious on some filthy stretcher. Dirty needles and local medicine men.

“No. She just said she’d landed. She had a stopover in Istanbul, according to Medpax.”

Was he wrong? Had she disappeared in Istanbul? Would that be better? Worse?

“Okay,” said Tom. “Now we wait.”

“For what?”

“To see if she gets in touch first. That’s still the most likely outcome. It’s Africa, so her silence could mean anything—a stolen cell, a dead battery, bad coverage. If we haven’t heard from her by tomorrow morning, we’ll see what my guy has found out.”

“Tomorrow? But what if she’s been kidnapped? Shouldn’t we do something?”

He surely didn’t need an expert just to sit still and wait. Alexander couldn’t help but glance at David. Did Tom really know what he was doing?

“If—and I mean if—she’s being held captive, we won’t hear anything for days,” Tom said gravely. “If that’s the case, the wait will be part of the kidnappers’ tactics.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it’s the worst thing possible,” said Tom, and if Alexander hadn’t known that Tom most likely lacked all normal, human feelings, he might have thought he could see compassion deep in his dark eyes. “To break the victim’s friends and family with the wait.”

David took a step toward them and spoke.

“Tom knows what he’s talking about,” he said quietly.

Alexander nodded. It was becoming obvious that Tom was an expert in this.

“Can you get me a photo of her? Preferably black-and-white.”

“Yes.”

Alexander rubbed his face. Arrange a photo and transfer money. It felt so goddamn insufficient.

Alexander still hadn’t heard a word by the next morning. It was less than twenty-four hours since he had started to be seriously worried, but Alexander was already exhausted. Breaking the friends and family by making them wait. How the hell were you meant to survive this?

He called Leila again. “Did you hear anything?”

“No. She should be at the hospital by now. But it’s chaotic there now that Idris is sick; it’s hard to get hold of anyone at all, and there is no Wi-Fi to speak of. I can’t get hold of our man Hugo, either. He was meant to pick her up from the airport. But maybe she missed the plane in Istanbul, or the plane might’ve been delayed, or Hugo might’ve forgotten. Things happen, but Isobel is used to it. She’s trained to cope with all kinds of unforeseen events.”

“But don’t you think she would have been in touch?”

Leila hesitated. “We have routines for this kind of thing. We’ll have to wait and see awhile longer,” she eventually said.

Alexander ended the call. If another person told him to wait and see, he would break something.

“My guy, Lutz, has arrived in N’Djamena. He was in the vicinity.”

Alexander stirred the coffee they had ordered and wondered what someone was doing in the “vicinity” of N’Djamena, but he refrained from asking.

Tom Lexington sat with his back to the wall, watching the other people in the café. He looked like the kind of man who knew people in the worst places on earth and who was just waiting to be hired to find missing field doctors in Africa.

“He did some asking around. No injured white woman anywhere. And he went out to the pediatric hospital. The locals say she never turned up. He can’t find anyone who saw her at the hotel. But someone who could be her did check in.”

Tom held up a cell phone photo of a signature. Alexander nodded; he recognized Isobel’s writing. So she had arrived in N’Djamena. A part of him had hoped she was still in Stockholm, that she was just ignoring his calls. But she had been in N’Djamena, written her signature on a slip, and now she had vanished.

“A local fixer, Hugo, was meant to be her chauffeur and to pick her up,” Tom continued. “He’s their contact down there, but he got sick and went to the medicine man, and he took something that knocked him out for a couple days. So, to summarize: She made it from the airport to the hotel, but after that there’s no sign of her. We’re going to try to follow the signal from her cell. Do you have her number?”

Alexander gave it to him.

“Lutz will go to the phone company and try to get some information. He’ll have to bribe them.”

“How much?”

“Send a thousand. Dollars.” Tom got up. “I’ll call as soon as I hear anything else.”

“Thanks.”

As Tom left, Alexander immediately transferred the money using his cell phone. Enter some digits, send money halfway across the world. Wait, wait, wait. His inaction was making him crazy.

Tom called again that evening. “Her cell pinged out in the desert,” he said without bothering with greetings.

“What does that mean?”

“Unfortunately I think we need to assume something’s happened to her.”

“What?”

“I can only speculate. Either someone stole her cell, or she’s been captured. The cell phone is in the desert; we don’t know much more than that. But it’s a long way from the pediatric hospital. Far from the capital. Far from everything.”

Alexander stared out the window. It was a perfectly ordinary Swedish summer evening. People were walking along the waterfront. Holding hands, eating ice cream. What was he expected to say to this?

“I have time,” Tom said on the other end of the line. “If you wanted, I could head down there. Continue the search.”

“Yes,” Alexander immediately replied. More than anything, he wanted Tom Lexington to go to Chad and find Isobel. “I have money,” he continued. “I mean, I really have money. Buy a plane and head down there. Now.”

“I always fly coach. There’s a plane tomorrow.”

Alexander looked at his watch. It wasn’t even six p.m. “Tomorrow? Can’t we go now?”

Tom snorted. “We aren’t going anywhere. And I need to pack.”

“Tom,” Alexander said coolly, “if you think I’m going to stay in Stockholm while my woman has been kidnapped by some desert people in fucking Africa, you’re damned wrong. I’m coming. I’ll book the tickets. I’ll get the money. You can send a list of what I should pack. I’m coming, understood?”

Tom was silent, and Alexander held his breath.

“Well ain’t that fucking fantastic,” Tom said, and hung up.

When they landed in Istanbul late the next day, Tom and Alexander had exchanged fewer than ten words.

At the airport in N’Djamena, they were met by a crop-haired, tanned man who introduced himself, with a thick South African accent, as Lutz. There was something violent about him, as if death were close on his heels. He might as well have had mercenary tattooed on his forehead.

N’Djamena was like nowhere Alexander had been before. He had been to Africa, of course, but for exciting desert trips, reckless surfing, and parties on the most luxurious yachts in the world. Drinks, staff, and beautiful women in rich, lush, and blooming countries.

N’Djamena in contrast consisted of old asphalt, glaring men, and completely insane traffic. Jeeps and rattling pickups, undernourished children, and white plaster buildings with Arabic lettering on the signs.

They followed Lutz, went to a café, and drank sweet tea. Alexander looked at his watch. He had started a timer on his phone, and it kept track of the amount of time Isobel had been missing. The seconds flew by, running away like sand in a digital hourglass.

Lutz spread out a map. All three men leaned in over it.

“Her phone is somewhere in this area,” Tom said, drawing a circle with his finger over blurred lines and numbers. “Until further notice we’ll assume she’s there too. She might have been taken because she’s a doctor. It might be that some clan needs her help. If that’s the case, they’ll treat her relatively well.”

Lutz bared his teeth.

“If she’s been kidnapped, it’ll probably be brutal. They don’t like white people here,” he said with a growl. “They think all Westerners have money, and they want to lay their dirty paws on the gold. Fucking vermin.”

Alexander met Lutz’s pale blue eyes and decided that he hated this South African murderer.

“We can begin to get a team together,” Tom explained. “I’ve started to pull some threads. But if we don’t know where she is, there’s nothing we can do. Still no witnesses?”

Lutz shook his head. “I’ve asked around. Nothing yet.”

“But you said she was here?” Alexander asked, pointing at the map.

“Yes,” said Tom.

“So can’t we just go down there and look?”

Lutz gave a scornful laugh, and Alexander wanted to get up and beat him stupid, work out all his anger and frustration.

“That area is as big as southern Sweden,” Tom said evenly. “All we can do now is wait.”

Alexander’s cell phone rang. Leila. He wanted to refuse the call; it was her fault, her fucking fault, but he answered: “Any news?”

“No. I wanted to see if you’d heard anything. I’m starting to wonder.”

He hung up and looked at the timer again. Again and again.