“What else can she do? What else should she do? Nothing?”
Moniz is not convinced, but he knows that it is important to honor—or at least humor—other people’s convictions. Especially your partner’s.
“So what do you think is happening?”
“I would be surprised if it did not have something to do with sex.”
*
Ariel is in the middle of another pastel-painted Lisbon block when she senses something, a shiver seizes her spine, making her slow her pace, and then she notices a noise, indistinct but nevertheless alarming, growing louder, growing nearer, it’s happening fast, and she spins around when the motorcycle is twenty yards behind her, engine whirring through a downshift, the wheels screeching to a halt, and she jumps aside, she can feel both feet actually leave the ground, instinct taking over—
The biker is wearing black jeans and a black jacket and a black helmet with a reflective visor, nothing exposed.
This biker’s gloved hand reaches into a pocket of the leather jacket, and Ariel takes another hop away, and crashes into a wall, banging her elbow into the stone, it hurts like hell, and she lets out a yelp, and her eyes dart around for escape while the biker’s arm extends, and Ariel yells “No!” before she notices that the thing being extended isn’t a gun, isn’t a knife, isn’t a weapon at all, at least not a traditional sort.
Ariel stares at this leather glove holding this thing out to her: It’s a cell phone, just inches from her own hand. These days, the most common weapon of all.
She glances again toward where the biker’s face should be, but all she can see in the broad expanse of visor is a reflection of herself, wide-eyed terrified, forehead crinkled and mouth open and shoulders hunched forward. A cornered animal.
The biker’s hand extends farther, shoving the phone at her, and as Ariel wraps her fingers around it the bike pulls away from the curb with tires screeching and engine roaring, and Ariel forces herself to watch, to identify any distinguishing details before the bike disappears, but there’s no license plate, no markings she can see in the gathering dark, nothing she’ll be able to describe to the cops other than a generic midsize black-clad person on a generic midsize black motorcycle, which after just seconds tears around the corner, and Ariel can hear the gears shift and the bike accelerate after the sharp turn, then the noise begins to recede, and that’s when she notices:
The phone is ringing.
CHAPTER 12
DAY 1. 6:55 P.M.
“Listen carefully.”
“Yes,” Ariel says. She’s trying to wrest some control over her emotions, over her voice, her racing heart, but is failing on all counts. “Go ahead.”
“We have your husband.” The voice on the phone has been doctored; it doesn’t sound human.
“Oh my God. Is he okay?”
“If you want to see him alive again, you will deliver three million euros in cash—”
“Are you crazy, I—”
“—within forty-eight hours.”
“But I—”
“No negotiations. No extensions. No police. No embassy. Keep this device with you at all times.”
“Who are you?”
The caller lets out a burst of mirthless laughter.
“How do I know that John is still alive?”
Ariel hears a scraping sort of noise, then, “Ariel, it’s me—”
“John! My God! Are you okay?”
And then the scraping noise again. “There: he is alive.”
“What do you want from him?”
“I said: three million euros.”
“I don’t have three million euros. Neither does my husband.”
“But you know people who do.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have two days.”
And the line goes dead.
CHAPTER 13
DAY 1. 6:56 P.M.
Now there are no longer any benign possibilities, no far-fetched explanations or devil’s advocacy, no reasonable doubt. Now it’s a fact in evidence: John is not merely missing; he has been taken. Now everything is different.
*
“Jesus Christ,” Guido Antonucci says. “There’s been some crazy shit out here in Chiado.”
Nicole Griffiths has been sitting at her desk, running her eye down an RSVP list, looking for questionable names. Sometimes she wishes she were still a low-level operations officer, out there in the world every day, recruiting agents, slinking around foreign streets, approaching assets in bars and brothels and the hushed hallways of professional conferences, clandestine conversations hidden in plain sight. Management sucks. When you’re young, people tell you this, but it’s hard to accept on faith.
“Tell me.”
“This Pryce woman is walking down the street when all of a sudden a motorcyclist roars up, gives her a phone, then tears away at speed. Pryce immediately gets a call on this phone, which lasts a minute or so. Then she stands there frozen, mouth hanging open, like she just heard her dog died.”
“Or her husband?”
“No, I don’t think so. She’s not wailing, not collapsing, not falling apart. If this woman’s husband just died, she’s one stone-cold killer.”
Griffiths wonders if that too is a possibility, but keeps it to herself. “Then?”
“She snaps to, and I had to get out of there before she made me. I turned the corner, and called you. Jefferson has now picked her up on foot.”
“Okay. Keep me posted.”
Griffiths checks the time. She’s getting the feeling that this is going to ruin her date with Pietro. Their relationship is strictly transactional, and the transaction is strictly sexual. So neither of them will be especially bothered by the cancellation, but still. It’s not going to cheer anyone up.
*
“Yes.” Ariel sighs heavily. “I do understand that it’s an unusual request. Please.”
“It’s very disruptive to the other children, Ms. Pryce. Also to your son.”
A handful of boisterous young people are walking by, laughing loudly, life going on, oblivious to a crisis in their midst.
“Yes, and I’m sorry, but it’s important.” It’s the most important thing, always. Surely this man understands? He runs a day camp, after all. This is where George has spent all his summers, it’s what he knows of the season, the farm animals, the water sports, the poison ivy, the sunburn, the dead-to-the-world sleep of the just. The camp is just a few towns away, a fifteen-minute drive, but it can seem like they’re separated by a continent. By an ocean. And now they are.
“This is a hectic time, Ms. Pryce, we’re finishing lunch, the children—”
“Please, I’m begging you. And I really don’t think I should have to.”
Silence. Ariel has met this sort of reluctance before; she checks on George all the time, too frequently for camp directors, school principals, sports coaches. Maybe they’d frown at her less if she explained why, but she refuses.
“I’m sorry, I’m not going to put your son on the phone just so you can confirm he’s okay. I’ve walked outside, and now I’m on the back porch, and I can see George clearly, he’s sitting on the grass with four other boys. He’s fine. And I’m sorry, but that’s going to have to be good enough.”
It isn’t.
*
“Hi Mom,” Ariel says. She phoned Elaine immediately after hanging up with the camp director.