“There you go again with wild conjecture.”
“All of a sudden this beautiful young woman ditches her entire life—her husband, her Park Avenue lifestyle, her home—while at the same time signing an NDA with someone who’s hiding behind an LLC. This happens at the exact moment when she becomes pregnant. Then when the child is born, she declines to name the father on the birth certificate.”
“Yes, fine, I can see what you’re saying, and that’s a plausible scenario. But I don’t think that I of all people should have to warn you that it’s all conjecture.”
“And then fifteen years later—”
“It’s fourteen years, Pete.”
“—when this woman finds herself in emergency need of a tremendous amount of cash, she signs another agreement with the same entity. Come on, Myron. You and I both know what went on here: This woman had a kid with someone who wasn’t her husband, and signed an NDA to keep the paternity a secret, in exchange for money.”
“We don’t know that. And even if we did, what’s the crime? Where’s the story?”
“I don’t know. But now she has come back to this unnamed father for more money, and not only does he have it—which means he’s rich—but he also agrees to provide it, which I think means one of two things. Either she still has a relationship with him, which seems highly unlikely, right? A decade and a half later, new husband, a lot of water under whatever bridge they crossed together.”
“Or?”
“Or she’s blackmailing him.”
Myron doesn’t answer for a moment, then says, “Okay: Prove it.”
“Okay,” Wagstaff says. “Help me.”
*
“You’re positive?”
“Me? Uh-uh, hell no.” Kayla Jefferson shakes her head. “I’m just relaying what the analyst in Langley told me. He said he was positive.”
“And just to be clear, the thing he’s positive of is the ownership of this LLC in the Caymans that paid Ariel Pryce three million dollars, fourteen years ago?”
“That’s correct.”
“Jesus,” Griffiths says. “Jesus.”
Jefferson just stands there, looking like a private who has arrived to tell the general that the missiles are already in the air. “What do we do about this?”
“I don’t know. I have to think.”
“Should I leave you?”
“Yes please. And Jefferson? Not a word of this to anyone. Not even Guido. I’ll tell him, if he needs to know. You understand?”
“Yes ma’am,” the young woman says, and pulls the door closed behind her.
Nicole Griffiths’s eyes drift back to the computer screen, the map, the bright red pin. But all her focus is elsewhere, gaming out the situation, running conversations up the chain of command, then sideways from Langley to Foggy Bottom and back to Lisbon. She needs to consider this very carefully, from every angle. But she also needs to do this quickly; she’s suddenly sure that she has very little time.
She starts jotting a list of names, putting asterisks next to the political appointees as opposed to the career diplomats, trying to chart a path of communication that has the best chance of keeping this investigation as clean as possible for as long as possible, while at the same time covering her own ass as much as possible.
It’s a challenge. She tries to convince herself that she doesn’t have a dog in this fight. It’s not a matter of politics, nor policy, nor preference. It’s a matter of national security, which is the basis for her job, her career, her entire fucking life.
Griffiths has arrived, unexpectedly, at a life-defining crossroads. In this line of work, you never know when it’s going to happen: You go into work for a normal day and find yourself in the midst of a full-blown crisis. For most people in the CIA, this never happens. Until today, Nicole Griffiths had been one of those people.
After ten minutes of debate, she feeds her sheet of notepaper into the shredder. Then she places the first call; there will be a few. And this has to happen on July Fourth, of all days? People are at barbecues, at beaches, on sailboats in the Chesapeake, day-drinking in poolside chaises. They’re not expecting a call like this, certainly not from Lisbon. From Riyadh, Baghdad, Jakarta, Khartoum? Maybe. But Lisbon? They’re going to laugh her off. At first.
“Okay,” she tells herself as the first ring sounds of the first call. It’s not just the reporting that Griffiths is worried about, nor the impartiality of the investigation, nor the orders that she’s going to be given, by whom, to do what. She also has an indistinct suspicion that she—that everyone—is somehow being played.
“Hello sir,” she says. “I’m sorry to inform you that we have a situation here.”
*
The big metal sliding door is unlocked. Ariel pushes hard, and the door rolls with a squeak on thick rubber casters, and her eye is drawn across the small parking lot—
There he is, seated in a folding chair under a leafy tree that shields him from the apartments above. His wrists are bound with rope; his ankles are tied to the chair’s legs. He isn’t moving.
Ariel starts rushing through even as the door is still rolling open.
He’s wearing a hood made of thick burlap, like a potato sack. Even from thirty yards away, Ariel can see the dark blotch at the temple, and knows immediately that it’s a bloodstain.
CHAPTER 32
DAY 2. 7:51 P.M.
Ariel has no awareness of moving her legs but she can see that she’s closing in quickly on the slumped figure, just a few steps now, then none, she’s reaching out for the hood, and she pulls, yanking harder through a snag of his thick hair, revealing his face from the bottom up, so the first thing she notices is that his mouth is gagged, and the second is that his cheek is bloody, and now the hood is up over his eyes, so the third thing she registers is that his eyes are open, blinking in the light.
He’s alive, thank God. He’s safe.
*
“I’m glad I caught you.”
The ambassador is pulling on his jacket. “What can I do for you, Ms. Griffiths?”
They don’t have a good relationship. Nicole Griffiths thinks of Tanner Snell as an incompetent, aggressively stupid business crony of an illegitimate president; the ambassador probably thinks of his CIA station chief as a hypersensitive uppity pain in the motherfucking ass.
“I need to give you a heads-up about something.”
The ambassador’s personal aide turns a page on his pad, ready to take notes.
“Off the record,” Griffiths adds. “And in private.”
“Landry, give us a minute,” Snell says, without thanks or apology or any show of politeness. It must be a real treat to work for this guy. “I’m due at a dinner,” he says to Griffiths. “So?”
She waits for the door to close completely, then says, “There might be a thing.”
“Oh yeah?” Snell’s resting-douchebag face is almost a work of art. “What sort of thing?”
“It might be big, and it might involve Langley.”