“I will make absolutely certain that you serve your time in a very, very hard place.”
“Okay, but you know what? I’d be happy to go to jail. I’ll be a hero in jail. But you? Your career will be over. And not just your career. Your marriage too, your whole life. You will lose everything. So yeah, you go ahead, seek legal remedy. I’ll take my chances with a jury, and however many months, and whatever damages—”
Ariel realizes that she has gotten too agitated; she takes a deep breath.
“You will be a pariah,” she resumes, much more quietly. Much more menacing. “And you will not recover. Not ever.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“Are you really willing to risk everything that I won’t?”
“Then why haven’t you?”
“This is not a recreational situation I’m in right now; I’m not voluntarily doing this. And I’ll reiterate: I’m not going to do this if you help me get my husband back.”
He takes a moment to digest this, and she lets him. The ball is now in his court. But the clock is ticking. And he knows it.
“You said forty-eight hours?”
“A little less.”
“I don’t have that type of cash on hand. No one does. Except maybe drug lords.”
Ariel nearly cries in relief, but gathers herself to say, “You can get it.” She knows that a man like him has liquid assets all over the globe that he can convert into cash when business opens in tomorrow’s European morning. He’d barely even notice the three million.
“I can’t do this,” he says. “Not now.”
“Of course you can,” she counters. “Because now.”
He pauses again. He hates this, she can taste it through the phone. It’s delicious.
“It’s impossible. With the holiday, and banks closed, the markets too. This whole thing is impossible. I don’t think I can come up with that amount of money, not this fast.”
“Okay then, just rescue my husband. Get someone to call in the Marines, the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, I don’t give a damn, any US boots on the ground. It’s one man, in Lisbon. This is a problem that someone like you should be able to solve.”
“I can’t intercede like—”
“Are you kidding? People intercede all the time! For the wife of one of your best friends?”
“Ex-wife.”
“Listen, you have three options: get me the cash; or get me my husband back; or lose everything.”
He’s silent. He must be asking himself which of these options is least bad. It’s hard to argue that she’s right about juries, about jail, about that whole scenario. He has no real choice, and he knows that she knows it.
“Okay,” he finally says.
Ariel is worried that her body is going to explode from nervous release. “Okay what?”
“Okay you’ll hear from someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I have to figure that out.”
“When?”
“When? How do I know? Have I done this before?”
“Time is of the essence.”
“Fuck you. Time is of the essence. Fuck you.”
He sighs deeply. This is the last thing he expected to be dealing with tonight. But he has known for years that he’d probably need to deal with her again someday, in some way. Now may not be the ideal moment—now is in fact the worst possible moment—but that’s probably why now is the inevitable one.
“No one can know about this,” he says.
“Do you really think you need to tell me this?”
“No one. Not the Lisbon police, not the kidnappers, not your husband, not—I don’t know—not anyone. Ever.” Ariel can hear him breathing; she knows that he’s thinking through the steps, the additional risks down the line, the ways to mitigate them. “You’ll need to sign an NDA, obviously. Before anything else happens.”
“Of course.”
He’s fuming, he must be trying hard not to blow his stack. She wonders if he eventually learned to control his temper. She doubts it.
“Jesus,” he says, “this is fucked-up.”
“Fucked-up for you? Get over yourself. My husband has been kidnapped.”
“Why? Who is your husband anyway?”
“Just a regular Joe who looks like a rich American businessman.”
“Is he?”
“Not really. Not like you. He doesn’t have three million extra euros.”
“Fuck.”
Ariel doesn’t want to be conciliatory with this man, but she needs to appease him at least a little. She needs him to do this. “I’ll pay you back,” she offers.
“Damn straight.”
“I have money. You know I do.”
“I don’t know any such thing.”
“Yes, you do. But that money is in trust.”
She waits for him to ask a follow-up, but he doesn’t. He knows what the trust is for, and why, but he probably doesn’t want to let her divert this conversation to that narrative. And she’s not going to antagonize him by trying.
“Do not contact me again.”
“Yeah, got it. But listen? If you don’t actually get me this money? If my husband is killed because of it? Then I’m going to gather all the microphones and megaphones of the world, and I’m going to release everything.”
CHAPTER 20
DAY 1. 11:41 P.M.
Ariel looks around at the bland furniture, the unadorned walls, the locked door, on the other side of which is a very secure building guarded by armed Marines. Those soldiers are not here for the purpose of helping her; if anything, the Marines would be on his side. It hadn’t occurred to her until just now that this might be a dangerous moment, but it is. She’s threatening a powerful man while simultaneously giving him the opportunity to silence her. Did she walk herself into mortal jeopardy?
There’s no one else here. No reporters waiting for appointments, no assistants watching sideways, no janitors pushing buckets, no diplomats hunched over computers.
No visitors. No guests. No witnesses.
Just a couple of soldiers, with their orders. With their loyalties. With their weapons—
With each passing second Ariel is becoming more and more convinced that she’s going to be detained here. She feels her heartbeat accelerating as she approaches the door, and by the time she presses the red button her imagination is dashing toward escape possibilities—out a window, picking a lock, beating down a door with a broken-off table leg—and while she waits for a response she works herself up into a full-fledged panic, completely expecting to be a prisoner—
The lock clicks, the door swings open, and there’s the guard, his expression unreadable. “Ma’am?”
“I’m finished here.”
He doesn’t respond immediately, and Ariel’s spirit plummets. Is this the moment when he’ll lead her down the hall to a different sort of windowless room?
“After you.”
He directs her toward the front, where the other Marine is at the far side of the security checkpoint. Another armed man watching her, guarding another locked door. This one doesn’t move as she approaches; he keeps his eyes trained on her.
The building is completely silent, the street sounds buffered by bulletproof glass, double vestibules, hardened walls.
RING!
It’s the landline at the security station, light blinking, sound blaring. The guard picks up, returns his eyes to Ariel, who’s now twenty feet away. “Yes sir, she’s still here.”
She slows her pace involuntarily.