“Well, we’re looking for the person whose phone it is.”
Guido Antonucci grabs his aviators, hangs them from the neck of his blue polo, and rises gingerly. His feet have really been killing him; probably needs new prescription insoles. Antonucci has been working here in Lisbon for more than two years, but he hasn’t yet faced the challenge of finding a local orthopedist. Fucking pain in the ass.
“The device apparently hasn’t moved in like six hours,” Kayla says. “So chances are we’re not going to find the actual person. Unless he’s dead.”
Kayla is a young athletic woman, just a few years past varsity track at Howard. She makes fun of Antonucci with old-man jokes, bald-spot jokes, orthopedic-footwear jokes. She’s at a point in life when her best friends are still her sorority sisters, but she’ll learn, soon enough. Life in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations takes a physical toll quicker than you’d think, no matter where you start on the physical-fitness continuum. Antonucci was once a college athlete himself, but that was too long ago to mention anymore. He can’t remember the last time he spoke to a fraternity brother.
“This is where we’re going.” Kayla extends her phone, a map of the city, a red dot that’s about five miles from the embassy. “There’s nothing there, far as I can tell. The nearest address is an unoccupied warehouse.”
Antonucci unlocks his bottom drawer, pulls out his gun, tucks it into his ankle holster. Empty warehouses are practically custom-tailored for illegal activities, and he’s always happy to bring along his weapon.
“Dead seems not impossible,” he says, heaving himself out of his chair.
“Nice grunt,” Kayla says.
Antonucci knows he’s old-school, and Jefferson is decidedly not, and that’s why they’re often assigned to work as a team. He likes the young woman, and doesn’t mind her old-man jokes, not usually. When Antonucci joined the CIA, there were practically no women; there were barely any Italian-Americans. But these days his partner is a woman, his boss is a woman too, and sometimes he misses the easier camaraderie of working with men. Now he needs to be so careful all the time. Another type of exhausting.
Even his name is a relic of the past. Will there ever be another American kid named Guido? Doubtful, and good riddance. He hates his name, such a caricature, so easy to ridicule. Then again, these things have a way of recycling, freshened up with a sheen of irony.
“Whose phone is it?” he asks.
“American businessman.”
“He lost his phone?” They head for the garage. “So what are we now, the Genius Bar?”
“No, his wife lost him. But don’t worry, Guido. If we hustle, we can be back in time for your afternoon nap.”
CHAPTER 6
DAY 1. 12:48 P.M.
Ariel looks around the swarming square at the banks, the shops, the cafés, the flashing green neon of a pharmacy. This square is a busy place all day long and late into the night, it’s a spot that seems like it could be both incredibly safe but also sometimes dangerous, it’s a location that would—
Of course.
Yes, she identifies one over there. And another there, and—yes—one right in front of her own hotel, which she’s now rushing toward, and into, taking the smooth stairs two at a time, bursting into reception where Duarte looks up in alarm at the American wife, sweaty and panting and more than a little crazed-looking—
“Can I see your security footage?”
*
Detective Carolina Santos hangs up the phone, finishes writing her notes, then turns to her junior partner. António Moniz is a few years older, but he joined the force much later, after spending his twenties doing things he does not talk about. Over the years, Santos has come to suspect that Moniz spent this decade on drugs and travel, maybe the hippie tour of Southeast Asia and Latin America, or maybe just cruising around Europe, Berlin or Prague or Bucharest, the places where people fritter away their youth, before they realize that youth is not something to fritter away. Now Moniz is just another middle-aged man with a picture of a kid on the desk at his respectable government job. Everybody becomes respectable, sooner or later. Unless they go to jail. Or die.
“That was Erico?” Moniz asks.
Visitors assume, of course, that the kid is Moniz’s daughter. That is why the photo is there.
“Yes. He has been following the American woman since she left us. She spent more than an hour at the US embassy. When she emerged, she was accosted by that American reporter who is always hanging around. Erico cannot remember his name, me either. You?”
Moniz shakes his head.
“She had a brief conversation with the reporter, accepted his business card, walked around for a while, then took a taxi back to her hotel. Before she entered, she spent a minute standing on the sidewalk, looking around, spinning slowly, examining the whole square. Looking for clues, maybe.”
That would certainly be the obvious explanation. Moniz is not so sure, but he holds his tongue. Santos is going to develop her own theories, based on her experiences and attitude. Moniz will develop his. Hopefully their theories will match; those are the easy cases. But Moniz has the suspicion that this will not be one of those.
*
How should you feel when you realize you’re on the cusp of a mortal crisis? When it becomes clear that any second the wildfire is going to engulf your car, the hurricane is going to rip the roof off your house, the bar fight is going to evolve into manslaughter? Something that looks at first like nothing much, just a hiccup, but then you’re choking to death, and you have only seconds to save yourself.
Is this how Ariel should be behaving, right now?
Last winter, if she hadn’t called Sarah and gone to the ER in the middle of the night, she might have died from the pneumonia. Sometimes what looks like panic is really rational self-preservation.
*
“Jesus,” Guido Antonucci says. “What the fuck are we doing?”
“We’re looking for a phone, Guido. Did you forget already? Is it the Alzheimer’s?”
Antonucci continues sifting through the garbage. “I know what we’re literally doing.”
“So you’re asking, what, figuratively?”
“Is this why you joined the Agency, Jefferson? To root around through Portuguese garbage, looking for cell phones? Like a rookie beat cop?”
“Specifically? No, I’ll admit that this was not precisely what I had in mind.”
“We should have brought gloves.”
“Here. Look.”
“Don’t touch it.”
“You think I’m a dimwit, don’t you? Maybe you wonder who ties my shoes in the morning?”
Antonucci steps aside, takes out his phone, uses a secure app to call his boss.
“We found the device in a garbage can in front of an abandoned warehouse.”
“No sign of the owner?” Nicole Griffiths asks.
“No sign of anything. We’re near the river, other side of the tracks.”