DAY 2. 6:22 P.M.
Ariel watches the rapidly approaching figure, a woman wearing all the hippie regalia—a handwoven blouse and baggy linen pants, Birkenstocks and a nose ring, white-girl dreadlocks and big round sunglasses à la John Lennon. She’s shedding the straps of her dirty, battered backpack, which is no book-bag type of thing but a big complex piece of serious outdoor gear, with a sleeping bag clipped to the bottom, even one of those splatterware enamel bowls.
When she’s just a few feet away, the woman swings this pack in front of her, lowers it to the ground, and kneels behind it. She points at the duffel on Ariel’s shoulder.
“When do—”
“Shh,” the woman hisses, shaking her head.
The man in her ear says, “Open your duffel, remove the empty bag. Put the empty bag on the ground. Quickly.”
Ariel does this. The woman reaches into her big pack to remove a small pile of newspaper, which she places into Ariel’s empty duffel, then another pile of newspaper. She zips closed the newspaper-filled duffel, and points again at the bag that still contains the two million euros.
“Put the cash into my colleague’s backpack.”
“Listen,” Ariel whispers, “I have to tell you: I don’t have all of it.”
“What?” Pause. “What do you mean?”
“I have two million here, not three.”
“Fuck. Fuck.”
“I tried, I really did. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry? Who gives a shit about sorry?”
“I know. I know.”
“We were very clear. Very clear.”
“You were,” Ariel says quietly. “And I tried my hardest. But I just couldn’t get all three. It’s so much money, and such a short amount of time.”
“So maybe we will return only two-thirds of your husband.”
“Please. It’s not his fault.” She can hear breathing on the phone. She presses on, “But here we are. So wouldn’t you rather have two million euros right now, and walk away safe, than have no money, nothing except a hostage, with the police and the CIA and Lord knows who else hunting for you?”
Ariel glances at the woman, her eyes narrowed behind the round shades, with her own earbuds plugged in. She too is listening to both sides of this conversation.
“Fuck,” the man says again. “Fuck,” less explosively. Then, “Okay.”
The hippie woman gets back to work quickly, zipping closed her backpack with the cash inside. She wants to get this over with.
“When do I get my husband back?”
“Very soon,” the man answers in her ear.
“Very soon. What does that mean?”
“It means: very soon.”
The woman still has not said a word. She hoists her backpack.
“Take that duffel filled with newspaper, and walk to the end of the alley, and out to the street, and turn right. Then walk straight.”
The woman is now wearing her backpack again, and puts one hand on the bar’s back door—
“Hey, wait a—”
She ignores Ariel, steps inside, closes the door behind her. Ariel is all alone in the alley.
“What the hell is going on?”
“When we have verified that your payment is as promised, and that our messenger is safe, then your husband will be released. Remember: Turn right at the end of the alley, then straight.”
“Then what?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Then what?”
*
Kayla realizes that she’s been staring at her screen for pretty much ten straight hours; it hasn’t felt that long. This is a big part of what attracted her to the CIA in the first place: the research, the detective work, the chipping away at impermeable-looking shells, finding cracks that can be widened, exploited. Kayla never wanted to be an analyst, sitting around Langley, doing nothing except research. She loves being here in Lisbon, out in the field, hunting for human intelligence; she relishes the opportunity to recruit assets. But that doesn’t mean she dislikes this part. She likes all of it.
For the past half-hour she has been opening up one file after another of security-camera footage from Washington, DC, and so far it’s only this one clip that has yielded anything useful. Maybe one is all she’ll need. She wishes she could have gotten further with this piece of evidence, but she has come to a dead end, at least for now, and it’s time to loop in the boss.
Griffiths answers on the first ring. “Tell me you have good news, Jefferson.”
“Sort of. A coffee shop has an exterior camera that faces the general direction of the convenience store. It’s too far away, plus at a bad angle, to give a useful view of anyone coming in and out. But it has a good view of the street itself. And in the minute before the purchase of the burner, a car pulled up and discharged a passenger, then the car waited, and a couple minutes later someone got back into the car, which then drove away.”
“Tell me you got the plate. Please tell me that.”
“Yes ma’am. It’s a ride-share.”
“Okay then! We’re in business. This should be a piece of cake.”
“It should be. But I’ve butted up against a privacy policy. They’re saying they need a warrant. And, y’know, it’s July Fourth.”
“Fuckers.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
Kayla doesn’t want to wade into the quagmire of debating the founding principles, on Independence Day itself, with her boss. But Kayla’s reverence for civil liberties is rigid. This occasionally puts her at odds with her work in intelligence, a field that’s largely premised upon intrusions into privacy and the suspension of civil liberties, or at least a willful disregard for them. She suspects that this paradox is going to be a challenge throughout her career.
“What in God’s name do you want to do that for?” This is what her father had asked when Kayla said she’d applied to work at the CIA. Shawn Jefferson put no trust whatsoever in any organization that gave white men guns and permission to use them. You also wouldn’t catch him waving any flags, singing any anthems, reciting any pledge of allegiance. Shawn didn’t know where in hell his daughter came by her patriotism.
Griffiths doesn’t argue with her, not this time. Instead she asks, “Why don’t you have a chat with the driver himself?”
“Will do,” Kayla says. This is where patriotism gets trickiest, isn’t it? When the patriotic impulse crashes against the very ideals that America is supposed to represent.
*
“I have located Pryce again,” Officer Tomas announces. “She just emerged from an alley and is now walking west. She is still carrying the money.”
“How long was she out of sight?” Santos asks.
“Ninety seconds, perhaps two minutes.”
That’s certainly long enough. “But she still has the money? You can see the bag?”
“Definitely.”
“Which means that hailing the taxi, and boarding the tram, and jumping off it, and running through this quarter, and ducking into and out of this alley: That was all an evasive maneuver that in the end failed to evade you?”
“It looks that way.”