“Thanks, I’d rather keep these with me.”
“I’m sorry,” the guard says, “but that wasn’t an offer.”
“Listen,” she says, trying to sound calm, measured, “I’m dealing with a really tremendous emergency. And it’s possible that I’ll get an important call. Extremely important. Can’t I just …”
She trails off; the guard is shaking his head.
“Please, they’re just phones. And this is so important.”
“My apologies, but regulations forbid it. Electronic devices can be anything. Triggering devices for explosives. Eavesdropping equipment. Virus hosts. They can be actual viruses.”
“Please. I’m begging.”
She’s done a lot of begging today.
“I’ll tell you what we can do,” he says. “I’ll keep your devices out here, on this table. If one of them rings, I’ll get you out here to answer it.”
Ariel doesn’t have a choice. She hands over her things.
“This way.”
She walks through a metal detector under the watchful eye of the Marine, into the waiting supervision of another. They walk a few steps down a short hall, then he uses a passkey to unlock a door to a windowless room that’s just feet from security, secluded from the rest of the building. Maybe to keep visitors to this room from seeing the embassy staff. Or the other way around. Or both.
“Please have a seat,” the guard says. “Your call will come through here. I’ll be right outside. If you need anything, press this.” He indicates a red button in the wall next to the acoustic-tiled door, which has a rubber seal running all around it. He closes the door behind him with a whoosh.
Ariel doesn’t need to check the handle to know she’s locked in here. She sits in one of the plastic chairs that surround a round laminate-top table, with a substantial-looking communications console affixed to the middle. The phone’s wiring disappears into the table’s pedestal, down into the floor, with no way for a visitor to access the wires, nor the jack.
She’s surprised that this room doesn’t have a two-way mirror, but then realizes that no, of course not. This isn’t an interrogation room; there must be other rooms in this building for questioning, of both the friendly and unfriendly sorts. This room’s purpose is to put people at ease. This is a very secure room, with a very secure phone line. That’s why she’s here.
Ariel wonders if making her wait is purposeful. Or if there’s some reason on the other end that accounts for the delay. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Either way she’s waiting, her anxiety mounting, unable to think of anything other than: Will this work?
*
“You’re telling me that at this very moment she’s in the embassy.” Nicole Griffiths had been lying in bed with a stack of reports in her lap, on her way to drifting off to a deep, sound sleep. Now she’s wide awake. This American woman had not only forced Griffiths to cancel her date with Pietro, she’s also going to ruin her full-night-of-sleep consolation.
“That’s right,” Antonucci says. “I followed her back to the hotel, then twenty minutes ago she emerged and got in a taxi, so I followed that. Imagine my surprise when the taxi dropped her at the embassy. So I waited a couple of minutes, then came inside. The duty guard tells me that he received orders to deliver Pryce to the secure-comms room.”
“Orders? From?”
“The Marine won’t tell me. Which is understandable.”
Her mind is racing around the corner, trying to guess what it could mean that this seemingly random American woman has been directed into a secure location that exists so sensitive communications can be passed among agents, assets, and officers without worrying about intercepts.
“Christ.”
It wouldn’t be anyone in Lisbon who gave this order, nor Langley, not without Griffiths’s knowledge. So this order must have come from Foggy Bottom. Which means that this woman must be more important than she’s letting on. Or her husband is. Not just random Americans, apparently.
“We obviously can’t eavesdrop on her conversation in there,” Antonucci says, “but we can listen to the recordings of any other calls she made. We’ve been up on her phones for more than three hours now.”
“Okay, good. You stay on her, do not let her out of your sight. I’ll come in and listen to the recordings. And listen, Guido?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful. I get the feeling that this is a real thing.”
*
The ring is shrill in the dead silence of this little room, and Ariel’s hand instinctually shoots out to grab the handset, like the instinct to calm a crying baby. But just as she once forced herself to pause before comforting little George, she now forces herself to take a breath before picking up and saying, “Hello.”
He doesn’t waste any time. “What the fuck do you want from me?”
“I told you: three million euros for my husband’s ransom.”
“Three million,” he says. “Gee, that’s a familiar number.”
“Give me a break. It’s not a number I conjured out of nowhere. My husband has been kidnapped, and that’s the ransom price.”
“Again, that’s too bad, and I’m sorry that you find yourself in this terrible position. But why is that my problem?”
“You know why.”
“No, I really do not.”
Here it goes, she thinks, no turning back now: “Because I recorded our final conversation.”
He’s silent for a second, then says, “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
“That conversation happened before I signed anything. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I didn’t consent to any recording of any conversation.”
“Consent? How dare you use that word.”
“I specifically took measures to prevent a recording. So any evidence would be inadmissible.”
“First of all,” she says, “one-party consent.” In New York, only one party to a conversation needs to give permission for a recording. Ariel was the one who consented.
“Second of all: Who gives a damn about admissible? I’ll send the tape to everyone in the world except the lawyers. Every news outlet, every hacking collective, every foreign government, every social-media bigmouth.”
“This is extortion you’re committing right now. A serious criminal offense—”
“Really? In what jurisdiction? I’m in Lisbon. At this moment I could not care less about US law or its enforcement.”
“—compounded by using the threat of committing another serious crime as the leverage. You will be prosecuted, I can promise you that. You will go to prison. And not just for thirty or sixty days of wrist-slapping.”
“If—big if, by the way—I’m convicted. Unanimously. By a jury of my peers.”
“You will serve hard time.”
“You know what a jury of my peers will include? Half women. Plus a couple of men who are fathers of girls. You remember how many jurors it takes to acquit, right? Of course you do. You went to law school.”