“Okay,” he mutters, “now let’s get rid of some of you fellas.”
He picks up a red pencil, and starts to run lines through one after another after another: too old, too young, too poor, too gay. It’s a lot of names that he crosses off, but there are still a lot left. He switches to blue pencil to run lines through most of the names that remain: men who fifteen years ago were not part of New York society. Congressmen from Texas, CEOs in the Midwest, Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Wagstaff very well may need to walk this back: just because a man didn’t live in New York doesn’t mean Ariel didn’t conceive a child with him. It’s just less likely.
Wagstaff is working quickly, making assumptions that may not hold up later, under scrutiny, or sobriety. But his standard is not reasonable doubt; this is not a court of law. All he wants is to quickly identify the most likely possibilities—the low-hanging fruit—and examine those men closely.
He’s irrationally confident that this is going to work. Probably because of the cocaine. Which is what makes cocaine so damn constructive: It can keep you up all night, doing something that may not be completely rational.
He does another line. He doesn’t kid himself that this one is small.
*
The CIA’s chief of Lisbon station picks up before the first ring is even completed. She’s expecting this call.
“Good evening,” Nicole Griffiths says. It’s the middle of the night in Portugal, but it’s just after dinner on the East Coast. Griffiths is already dressed for tomorrow, showered, fresh clothes, passable makeup. She can’t imagine any scenario that will allow her to get any real sleep tonight. The most she can hope for is a catnap on her office couch.
“So I’ve been briefed,” Jim Farragut says. “Any new developments in the past two hours?”
“No. The woman and her husband are still at large. By this point they could be anywhere in Portugal, or over the border into Spain. They might be headed to a ferry to Tangier, or a flight from Spain.”
“Or hiding somewhere?”
“Maybe. But she has a kid she probably wants to get back to.”
“How old?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen-year-olds aren’t necessarily good company.”
“I wouldn’t know. But surely even an annoying tween is still a priority.”
Griffiths suspects that they’re just beating around the bush. Where Pryce and Wright travel, or hide, or how they’re interrogated, or when, or by whom: None of this really matters compared to the massive clusterfuck of the fundamental problem.
“Are you positive about the identity of the man who supplied the ransom?”
“Not one hundred percent. But have you heard the recording of the call?”
“Yes.”
“Well, in addition to the recognizable voice, there’s the geolocation of that call, made by the hastily purchased burner in DC to the secure line here in Lisbon, in a conversation that was obviously extortion, under threat of revealing a damaging secret. There’s the fact that the burner was purchased by a direct employee of his. That someone provided this Pryce woman with a large amount of cash, on short notice, secretly. That he and Pryce definitely had a personal relationship long ago; that he and the woman’s first husband had a business relationship.”
“That’s a lot of circumstance. But none of that is proof.”
“Correct, we have not found a smoking gun. Not yet. Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Also doesn’t mean that no one else has found it. Remember, we’ve been aware of this situation for only a few hours.”
“How many people are in the loop?”
“Here? My circle is small.” Griffiths doesn’t want to give an exact number. If she tells the director of operations, he might be obliged to tell his boss, who would tell his boss.
“But there’s a lot of evidence out there,” she continues. “And this evidence is not deeply buried intelligence material. The FBI can find all this too, even the DC cops. Or for that matter the media. In fact maybe they already have. There’s at least one journalist on the case, who I believe was leaked some details from one of ours, a half-wit in consular.”
“Oh for the love of God.”
It doesn’t escape Griffiths’s notice that the director hasn’t asked her for the name of the journalist, nor of the half-wit. These are both good signs. She can hear in the silence that Farragut is weighing his unpalatable options. He’s a career intelligence officer, but his boss is a political appointee who has made it clear that his allegiance is not to the CIA that he runs, but to the president who appointed him. If the CIA’s intelligence interests and the president’s political interests diverge, the DCI is unlikely to side with intelligence.
For the president and the director, this intel will be very, very unwelcome. The compulsion might arise to shoot the messenger, as well as anyone who happens to be messenger-adjacent. This is definitely a shoot-the-messenger type of administration.
“Can this be shut down?” Farragut asks.
Even before Griffiths placed the call that led to this one, she’d known that this question was coming. She’d already thought this through.
“Ariel Pryce has made a lot of noise here in Lisbon—local police, consular, reporter, plus who knows how many other stray witnesses, hotel employees, taxi drivers. Some of these people can be controlled; obviously we can gag our own employees. And the local police have a finite mandate; we could probably shut them down if they wandered too far. But the reporter.”
She doesn’t need to say this aloud: The reporter could not be silenced. The CIA could yell “national security!” at reporters all day long, and they’d just yell back “First Amendment!” Even the threat of jail wouldn’t be a sufficient deterrent. The solution to the journalist would need to be less public, more drastic, immediate, illegal, and completely unacceptable to Griffiths. Hopefully to Farragut as well. But not necessarily to the people who can give them both orders.
Griffiths pictures Jim Farragut sitting in some wood-paneled Georgetown study, diagramming how the web of revelations might spin outward—consular to journalist to sources to editor to publisher to producer to on-air news reports, social media, NP-fucking-R: everyone on the planet. It could happen fast, beyond anyone’s control.
“What do you think is the nightmare scenario, Griffiths?”
“That’s a good question,” she says. “That depends: for whom?”
“Touché. I guess for the United States.”
This answer is absolutely clear to Griffiths. It’s why she got on the phone to drag her boss’s boss out of a July Fourth dinner party.
“The nightmare scenario is that we pretend we don’t know what we just learned, and instead quash this intel, or attempt to. But that doesn’t make the underlying facts go away. So instead of this scandal coming out now, before it can do the nation any real harm, we’d instead be opening the door for the Russians or Chinese or North Koreans to exploit the same exact information a few years from now.”
She can hear Farragut sigh.
“If you don’t mind me saying?”