“What if he does not show up? What if they run tonight?”
“I will station a team here to keep an eye. And I will have someone monitor the airline records. We will know if they run.”
*
Pete Wagstaff watches the cops drive away, then minutes later the hotel room lights go out. Wagstaff has been standing in this square a long time, waiting for something to happen—an arrest, an escape, another bizarre altercation like when the woman beat the shit out of that CIA operative. But it looks like there will be no further drama tonight.
This stakeout, though, has not been a complete waste of time. Wagstaff has used the opportunity to come up with a plan of attack, to think through the lists he’ll generate, and how. He suspects he’ll end up with thousands of names, so he has also started to figure out which categories he’ll be able to rule out, to narrow down the possibilities. It will be a lot of work, yet he’s excited to do it. He’s confident that it will be worth it, that the payoff will be immense.
He’ll be up all night. He hops on his moped, headed toward home. First he’ll stop at Luisa’s bar to buy a gram of blow.
*
Ariel doesn’t need the midnight alarm; at a quarter to twelve, her eyes pop open. She lies in bed for a minute, listening to the steady rhythm of John’s breathing. Then she gets up.
She doesn’t turn on any lights. She walks to the window again, and shields herself behind the curtain to make another survey. There’s still one other car that has been sitting there all night, parked on the far side of the square. She’s pretty sure that this nondescript little Ford is occupied by one of those CIA men, the one she pummeled. But it’s hard to be certain from this far away.
Ariel walks into the kitchenette, pushes aside the coffeemaker to retrieve the new disposable phone that she bought around the corner with the matching duffels, and hid back here, out of the view of any prying that the cops might do. She pops the SIM card into the never-used phone, holds down the power button.
Her pulse is already beginning to race.
*
Moniz walked in the door only five minutes ago, and already Santos is phoning him. “Sorry,” he mouths to Julio, who rolls his eyes and leaves the room.
Santos doesn’t waste time with any preliminaries: “They were originally ticketed to depart Lisboa on Friday. But a half-hour ago, they changed their reservation to tomorrow’s early-afternoon flight to New York.”
“Do you think they are still intending to come to the station in the morning?”
“Probably not. So I will make sure that there is a patrol car at the hotel at all times.”
“Is that enough?”
“We cannot arrest them now, António.”
“But this is evidence that they intend to flee.”
“No, this is evidence that they intend to shorten their trip.”
“Why are you giving them the benefit of the doubt?”
“I am not. What I am giving is the benefit of protecting ourselves from a career-ending mistake. We cannot go around dragging American citizens out of their hotel beds in the middle of the night, especially on the suspicion of committing an outlandishly complicated—and nonviolent—crime based on nothing except our suspicion that they behaved evasively during stressful questioning. Do you not understand this, António? We do not have any actual evidence. Not yet.”
*
“Hey,” Guido Antonucci says. “Sorry if I woke you. But I thought you’d want to know this immediately. Pryce just stepped out onto her balcony to make a call.”
“To?”
“That’s the thing: We don’t know. The phone she used wasn’t her own, nor was it the kidnappers’ burner. And of course out on the balcony it was beyond the range of our microphones.”
“Fuck.” Griffiths pushes herself up to a sitting position. She was asleep twenty seconds ago, but now her mind is operating at full speed. “Fuck. Are you alone at the hotel?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, call Jefferson, get her to join you down there as soon as humanly possible, on her bike. I’ll be there too.”
*
As Ariel does a quick brush of her teeth, she examines the amber canister with John’s name and address in typescript on the label, the milligrams, the dosage. Do the cops think he drugged her? Slipped her something so she’d sleep through his early-morning departure, so he could participate in his own kidnapping without his wife witnessing it? The police are giving John a lot of credit for cleverness that Ariel knows he doesn’t have.
She takes a seat on the edge of the bed. “Hey,” she says, softly.
“Mmm.”
She places her hand gently on his chest. “Time to get up.” The same thing she has said to her son, in the same tone, hundreds of times.
John’s eyebrows raise but his eyes are still closed, and he yawns, then his eyes blink open.
“Five minutes,” she says.
*
It was very quiet. Ariel couldn’t hear any sign of neighbors, and the street was an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac with no traffic. The birds had settled down for their midmornings. Even the swimming pool’s pump was bunkered way back beyond a thick barricade of boxwood; inaudible. The only sounds Ariel could hear were the occasional glurp of a circulation bubble in the pool, and the thrum of the crashing waves, rolling across the half-mile of potato field between this house and the Atlantic Ocean.
Everything else was still, silent, pristine, perfect. But all this perfection had a cost, of course; nothing was free. What cost was Ariel willing to bear?
Everyone knew that to live this sort of pampered life, it was an absolute imperative to be thin. So Ariel had to diet more or less constantly, she had to exercise every day, she had to abstain from this or that or the other. She hadn’t consumed a full sandwich in years; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten French fries.
These were costs she could accept. She liked kale.
She had to be phonier than she would have preferred; she had to be saccharine-polite to some people she loathed. She could not use profanity. She had to arrange her hair and apply makeup just to step into the elevator, much less out onto the stage of the East Side.
Okay, okay, okay: Ariel accepted all this.
“That’s how life works,” her mother had counseled, again and again, about everything, salad forks, legs crossed at the ankles, bread-and-butter notes. Her father too, young ladies don’t do this, young ladies don’t do that, all these things your parents tell you that you’re supposed to simply accept—religion, politics, manners. What does it even mean to have good manners? It means to do what people expect you to do.