“Yes sir.”
Ariel is now ten feet away from the desk, and she can feel the Marine at her back. She’s squeezed between the two. The desk officer puts down the phone, and looks at Ariel again. She wills herself to keep walking toward him, toward the door, toward freedom, even though with each step she becomes more sure that something else is going to happen, she has a vision of this right before it occurs: He holds up his left hand, leaving his right at his side, next to his holster.
“Ma’am?”
Her stomach does a flip, reminiscent of the days when her toddler always seemed to be about to knock over a glass, or a vase, and her body would have this gut response to the impending calamity. She’d tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter, a broken mug, spilled milk, but she never really succeeded. There’s no talking yourself out of some fears, no matter how petty, how irrational. This fear, though, is neither.
Ariel doesn’t trust her voice. Instead she raises her eyebrows at the guard.
“Please wait,” he says, with his hand still up in the halt position. “A car has been arranged to take you to your hotel.”
Oh God, what a relief. Or is this a relief? Maybe not. No.
“Oh that’s okay,” she says. “I’ll get a taxi myself.”
“It’s late, ma’am. The car will be here in a few minutes.”
Yes, of course: This is how it would happen, isn’t it? Now that Ariel thinks about it, no one is going to kill her in the embassy, and it wouldn’t be Marines who did it.
No, it would be a freelancer—a foreigner—who arrives in an untraceable car in the middle of the night. How long would it take to launch this plan? The man she called knew from that first contact that something undesirable was coming, he knew exactly where Ariel would be, he had more than enough time to initiate a strategy after that first call, when was that? An hour and a half ago? Is that enough time for a rich, powerful American to hire a contract killer in Lisbon?
“You can sit here.” The Marine indicates a trio of chairs.
“No, thanks, I’m happy to get a taxi myself.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to insist. Orders, ma’am.”
“Orders? From?”
He motions again toward the chairs. “Please.”
Please. It can mean so many different things, can’t it? Ariel knows she doesn’t have a choice; it’s not like she can bust out of here.
But once the car arrives, there’s no way in hell she’ll get into it.
*
So many of this man’s problems would be solved if Ariel’s life ended tonight. Not just the immediate problem of her phone calls and her attempted extortion, but the long-term threat of her very existence. A problem that has probably been on his mind for a long time, and increasingly so recently, as various people scratch at the surfaces of his life, looking for what’s underneath.
Ariel: She’s what’s underneath.
If she simply disappears tonight in Portugal, that’s something that would definitely be investigated. What would be found? Evidence scattered all over town that Ariel’s husband had fallen into trouble, that she went looking for him and predictably fell into the same trouble, got herself killed. The policemen, the embassy, the hotel staff: all witnesses. Evidence might be unearthed, or perhaps manufactured; it’s possible that at this very moment drugs are being planted in their suite, bags of heroin, or maybe piles of cash, or dirty handguns, or all of these together, an overwhelming volume of incontrovertible evidence that this American couple came to Lisbon to engage in criminal activities, and what did they get? What they deserved.
*
RINGGGGGG.
The landline seems even louder this time, closer, like an attack. Ariel is holding her own cell; the burner is in her pocket. She expects that both devices were tampered with while she was in the secure room, and that everything she does from now on will be monitored. Every email, every text message, every word she utters, whether on an open line or not, even when the phones appear to be powered off.
“Yes?” the Marine answers.
Another thing to worry about, and there are already so many. She feels all this worry pressing down on her again. How long ago was it when she stood on the sidewalk and sobbed? Just a few hours. She feels like she’s on the edge of losing it again. She takes a deep, deep breath.
The Marine hangs up the phone, turns to Ariel. “Your car is here.”
For the past minutes she has been studying the map on her screen, plotting routes, alternatives, contingencies. Maybe someone, somewhere, has been able to see that the map on her phone was active. But they wouldn’t have been able to follow her eyes, to see why she was using the app.
She strides past the guard with a terse “Thanks,” and then she’s through the door, out to the quiet late-night street, where there’s an Audi sedan idling in front of the gatehouse, parked in the single-carriage roadway that’s separated from the wide avenue by a meridian with paving stones and benches and bollards and trees. That’s a lot of buffering between the embassy and the traffic, a lot of separation from motorcyclists wielding handguns, from pickup-truck passengers with assault rifles, from eighteen-wheelers packed with explosives. US embassies everywhere are targets, maybe.
The driver pops out, hustles around to open a rear door for Ariel. He’s big, not slender but also not fat; he looks solid, strong. He’s wearing tight jeans that ride very low on his hips, denim decorated with extravagant stitching. His polo is garishly decorated with an oversize logo, with violent slashes of color and type on the sleeves and back, plus stripes on the collar, which he wears popped. His athletic shoes are an unfamiliar brand, small and tight and multicolored.
Definitely not an American.
With women it’s harder to tell; women all the world over follow similar fashions, haircuts, makeup, styles that are copied from one celebrity or another, actresses, singers, influencers, whatever the hell Kardashians are. Global trends, recognizable everywhere, interchangeable. Men’s style is more local, more specific. More identifiable. And no American man would be caught dead wearing this ensemble.
Is this a good sign? Or bad? Either way, it’s a positive that the driver emerged to get the door. That makes him farther away from the steering wheel, from the gas pedal.
Ariel’s attention is caught by a small car that blurs by on the far side of the meridian, in the main roadway; this wide stretch of avenue is practically a highway. She glances down the avenue to the left, then the right. There are no pedestrians here; this is not a pedestrian area. Also no cars parked anywhere that she can see. There’s no sign of anyone in either direction. No one to witness, no one to intervene. It’s just Ariel and this driver out here, and the Marines inside.
Okay, she tells herself, when she’s just a few steps from the car’s open door: now.