Kate Roberts stepped out of her aerobics studio into the crackling wind and paralyzing cold of a late winter night in Moscow. Her red leotards, thick gray sweater and sneakers seemed flimsy protection against the snow and subfreezing temperature, but she gambled that she could quickly hail a ride.
As she expected, an approaching Lada slowed and the old man driving the cab pulled over to give her a lift. But the trip didn't last long.
Kate Roberts, who once promoted soft drinks and cigarettes to youth, has enlisted pop stars to promote safe sex.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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A large black Mercedes soon pulled alongside the Lada, edging closer and closer and finally forcing it off the street. Two men emerged from the Benz. One took a gun and began banging on the driver's side window, Roberts recalls. The old man rolled down the window, a few words were exchanged. He stepped out and returned with a message:
Get out.
She pleaded with him, saying she would be harmed if he abandoned her, but the old man responded, "It's you or me."
"I could be your daughter," she remembers screaming, as one of the gunmen opened the Lada's door, dragged her out and pushed her into the back seat of the Mercedes. Looking pained but remaining silent, the old man drove away.
Inside the black car, Roberts, then 28, recognized her two abductors. Not long before, the same men had strode into Kate's Aerobics, the exercise studio she owned as a sideline to her job as an advertising executive in the post-Communist Moscow of 1995.
The men, members of the Russian mafia, had demanded protection money. But Roberts refused to pay, calculating that they would leave her alone because many of her customers were women who shared beds with mobsters operating in the area.
"I felt I was invincible," says Roberts.
Now the Mercedes was speeding away from the city, into the wooded suburbs. For 45 minutes, the men taunted her, saying she should have paid up, and that now they had to hurt her.
"I thought I was a goner," she recalls. "I was scared out of my brains."
She tried reasoning with them, then promised to pay, then pleaded and shouted. She realized she was not going to talk her way out of this one.
As the car glided through a heavily wooded area at about 30 mph, she opened the unlocked door and jumped, falling on her side and tumbling into the snow. She sprinted away from the road and began darting between trees, sinking into calf-deep snow at every step.
The men drove slowly along the road, trying to keep her in their sights, and shouting at her to return. Eventually, they drove off, either satisfied with simply sending a scare or expecting her to freeze to death.
The experience left her shaken, but clear-headed: "I thought it wise to dissolve the aerobics business," she says.
Years later, she would move to Washington and start another business, a nonprofit called YouthAIDS, dedicated to slowing the spread of AIDS among young people. She would try to save other people's lives, and in the process, redeem her own.
'Supreme Confidence'
It was almost routine in the Roberts house for young Kate to come home from school in the English town of Southport, near Liverpool, and hear her mother, Jean, say, "Well, we're off to -- "
Her father, Peter, was a captain on cruise liners and cargo ships and often took his family along.
