She redials, and hands the cell to Joao, who listens, then returns it to Ariel.
“I am sorry,” he says, “but it is nothing, just the factory setting, which says that the voicemailbox of this number has not been activated.”
Ariel feels her shoulders slump, her face fall. She closes her eyes, shakes her head. Now what?
*
“Hey Pete, how you doin’.”
Pete recognizes the voice immediately. And he knows that Myron Baizerman’s question is purely rhetorical; Myron doesn’t even intone it as a question.
“What do you have for me, Myron?”
“Callin’ you back about Ariel Pryce. You ready?”
“Yup.”
“Okay, here we go: Ariel Pryce, née Laurel Winston to mother Elaine Winston and father, if you can believe it, Winston Winston the Third. He goes by Bobby, apparently. Anyways, Laurel grows up in Baltimore, private schools, theater-arts major, ’95. Looks like she moves immediately after college to New York City, patchy records for the next decade. Best I can tell, she’s one of those actress-slash-model-slash-waitress-slash-whatever’s, a few commercials, tiny parts in TV shows. You know the drill.”
“Yup.”
“So then Laurel marries a hotshot finance bro named Buckingham Turner. This guy has all the pedigree you’d expect from a finance bro named Buckingham Turner. Can you imagine what sort of schmuck you have to be to name your kid Buckingham? What’s with these people and their names? Winston Winston the Third. Jesus H. Christ.”
Myron has worked in the newspaper’s research department for a half-century. It’s possible that at some point in the past he was more objective, but in Pete’s experience the old coot has always been surprisingly and arbitrarily and vocally judgmental.
“Then Laurel Winston becomes Laurel Turner, Upper East Side socialite, doing the standard Junior League shit. Do you care about all this?”
“Sure. Keep going.”
“We even have her pic a couple times in our own society pages. A real looker. During these married years, she earns some token income as a nonemployee from a literary agent named Isabel Reed. For consulting work, which according to the employer meant reading manuscripts.”
“A strange career pivot.”
“She apparently got this job as a favor from a friend of a friend of her husband. Anyways, fourteen years ago, all of a sudden Laurel Turner ditches everything. Moves a hundred miles to a little village, changes her name, divorces old Buckingham. Buys a farm, gives birth to a boy, names him George. A few years later she buys a bookstore out of bankruptcy, joins the Rotary, becomes a small-town small-business owner. Ariel Pryce has zero social-media presence, zero pics online except old society-page things that got digitized, zero visibility.”
“And the new husband?”
“Yeah. A few months ago she marries a business consultant named John Wright. She doesn’t take his name, sticks with Ariel Pryce. Not for nothin’: This new husband is quite a bit younger.”
“And what do you know about him?”
“Him? Zilch. I was assigned to look into her. Not him.”
“Okay, can you do a full workup on him too?”
“Pffft. I dunno.”
“Please?”
“Sorry Pete, I’m gonna need approval first. I got other responsibilities, y’know.”
“Come on, Myron. Please?”
“This is not a begging situation, Pete. It’s an approval one. I’ll have to get back to you.”
“Okay thanks. So Ariel Pryce: You say she gave birth to a son after she ditched her life?”
“Yeah.”
“And this kid is born how long after she leaves the city?”
“Looks like, um … six months.”
“Which means she was pregnant when she left her husband, her job, her whole life.”
“Yeah, looks like it.”
“That’s a pretty strange decision, isn’t it?”
“I’m not a psychotherapist.”
“You find the kid’s birth certificate?”
“Nah.”
“Could you?”
“You got it. And I’m guessin’ that the piece of info you want is the father’s name?”
*
The burner is ringing, vibrating, blinking, everything all at once, like a manic child having a tantrum.
“Hello?”
“You called. Do you have the money?” The distorted voice is difficult to make out.
“No,” Ariel admits. “Not yet. But soon, I hope.”
And the line clicks dead.
CHAPTER 26
DAY 2. 11:02 A.M.
“Ms. Pryce? Nigel James again. We have prepared a draft of the agreement. May we forward to your counsel?”
“My counsel? I don’t have counsel.”
“Well that’s irregular.”
“It’s July Fourth. I can’t imagine how I would …” Ariel sighs. “Listen, Mr. James: I’m all alone here in Lisbon, my husband has been kidnapped, I need to sign these papers immediately to prevent him from possibly being executed, and I’m simply not going to be able to find a lawyer.”
James sighs dramatically. “I’m obliged to advise you that it is highly inadvisable to not have representation to review such a matter.” He delivers this warning by rote, and with condescension. As if reading rights from a Miranda card to a known career criminal.
“I don’t have a choice here.”
Ariel knows that the lawyer doesn’t truly give a damn; he just needed to fulfill his ethical responsibility, to stave off future complaint.
“Very well. Shall I forward this agreement directly to you?”
*
Nicole Griffiths walks into the young woman’s cluttered cubicle, filled with hardware and peripherals, cords and keyboards, screens of different sizes. It’s like a repair shop in here.
“Hey Jefferson, what do you have?”
Kayla Jefferson pushes her headphones down around her neck, and Griffiths catches a few bars of the music before it’s clicked off from the keyboard. She’s pretty sure it’s Bach.
“So that call that was placed to Pryce’s cell?” Jefferson points to her screen, a window filled with phone numbers. “The caller used a prepaid phone that was purchased just twenty minutes before the call was made.”
“This guy bought it specifically to make this call?”
“Looks like it. That’s interesting fact number one. But far more interesting fact number two is where that purchase was made. Look.”
Jefferson clicks a different window to bring a map to the front, a familiar grid of right angles intercut with parallel diagonal slashes—
Griffiths realizes that her mouth has fallen open.
“That red pin there,” Jefferson says, “is the convenience store.”
This changes everything. Griffiths has been suspecting that there was something off about Ariel Pryce’s story, her presentation, her husband. But at heart Griffiths didn’t truly believe that John Wright’s misadventure here in Portugal had anything to do with national security or intelligence. Until now. Now she’s almost one hundred percent that it does.
“Do we have security footage of the transaction?”
“Possibly. I’m still working on that. We do know that the call itself was placed from somewhere near the Penn Quarter neighborhood. In this vector here.”
Griffiths leans over to look more closely. Half of the federal government is within or just outside those lines, including the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the White House.