“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
Ariel was a pregnant woman with no money and no assets and no skills and no job, leaving her coward of a husband. It had taken her a couple of weeks to muster the courage to tell her therapist about the assault, and since then it’s all they’d worked on, extra sessions, extra emotion. Now that too was finished. Ariel could no longer afford her Park Avenue psychiatrist; she’d no longer even live in this city.
“Of course,” Mustafah said. “Would you like us to arrange a car?”
*
“Hola. Me llamo António Moniz. Hablas portugués?”
“No. Inglés?”
“Yes, good. So: I am returning your call about the American.”
“Thank you. We have detained Se?ora Pryce here at the airport. She came here with no bags, no ticket, and a story about her husband being kidnapped in Lisbon. Did this truly happen?”
“Yes.”
“The American John Wright was kidnapped?”
“Correct.”
“And his wife paid the ransom and secured his release?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And, well, what else can I tell you?”
“Perhaps why did they travel all through the night to Sevilla?”
“That I do not know. But I imagine they do not feel completely safe here in Lisboa.”
“Why?”
“Well, he was kidnapped here. What does Se?or Wright say?”
“We have not spoken to him. He was not with his wife when she was detained. Se?ora Pryce says they agreed it would be safer to travel separately. We have been unable to locate him.”
This just became much more interesting. But it is no longer Moniz’s concern.
“Detective Moniz, can you think of any reason that we should not let Se?ora Pryce go freely?”
Moniz regrets that he will probably never know what has gone on. He is suddenly sure that it was not what he had imagined.
“I cannot,” he says. “Please give her my goodbye and best wishes.”
*
Her name is being announced over the PA—“Se?ora Ah-ree-elle Preece. Ah-ree-elle Preece, por favor”—and she doesn’t need to translate to understand the message: last call, get to your goddamned gate, which is of course at the very end of the terminal, and as she’s running she can see that there’s no one left in the queue, and the airline agent is at the podium, the doors about to close—
“I’m here! Ariel Pryce!” she calls out her own name, waving her boarding pass, and the agent nods, and then Ariel is gliding through the stuffy gangway, making her way down the center aisle of the plane, plopping down in her middle seat next to an old woman who peers disapprovingly over the rim of her reading glasses, then a flight attendant is announcing, “Se?ors y se?oras, bienvenidos,” the cabin door closing, then Ariel finally allows herself to take a deep breath, to let her tense shoulders fall, because she has made it, and this grueling trip is, at last, over—
But what’s this?
*
The cabin door opens for a very Spanish-looking man in a very Spanish-looking preppy-Euro outfit. He speaks closely to the flight attendant, who nods while she listens, then looks down the aisle slowly until she finds Ariel, and meets her eye, while in the same instant another person boards the plane, this is a woman, and Ariel recognizes her, but it takes a split second of denial to admit it.
They have come for her.
*
“Pete? What the hell?”
“I waited till a reasonable hour.”
“In what universe is seven A.M. reasonable?”
Wagstaff has been up all night, his mind blown by his discovery, and he’s increasingly positive that he’s going to win a Pulitzer. Maybe his editor in London has a point: He doesn’t know what reasonable is.
“I know who it is,” he says.
“Who who is?”
“The man who provided the ransom, who also fathered her child.”
He’d given Judy a few updates over the past day as the parameters of the story had grown. He knows it’s never a good idea to ambush your boss.
“Okay then: who?”
“Charlie Wolfe.”
Silence.
“Judy? You there?”
“Yeah.” Wagstaff can hear her breathing. “How certain are you?”
“Ninety-nine percent.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Pete. This isn’t a game. Are you really that confident?”
“I am.”
Wagstaff knows he’s going to need more than confidence and circumstantial evidence. He also knows that hard proof is probably going to be elusive for a decades-old affair that resulted in an illegitimate child and a divorce and an NDA. What possible evidence could even exist?
An affair would definitely be very hard to prove. But Wagstaff suspects that it wasn’t an affair.
“This woman just extorted the next president of the United States.”
CHAPTER 45
DAY 3. 8:22 A.M.
“Where are we going?” Ariel asks.
“Someplace safe,” Griffiths answers. Then no one speaks for five, ten, fifteen minutes. Ariel watches Seville fly by, red-tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, church towers, while the big vehicle turns onto progressively smaller streets, the way you penetrate a European city, from highways down to alleyways. “Get on the floor,” Griffiths says.
“What?”
“Lie down.” She indicates the backseat floor of the SUV. “On the floor.”
“Are you serious?”
Griffiths doesn’t even deign to answer.
“Where is my husband?”
“Didn’t I already make it clear that I’m not going to answer that question? Antonucci, you heard me, right? I believe I said, I’m not going to answer that question, so stop asking.”
Antonucci certainly looks a lot worse for the pummeling that Ariel gave him on the Lisbon street. She hopes he’s not planning on seeking any retribution.
“Yup,” Antonucci agrees, “that’s exactly what you said.”
“I thought so.” Griffiths turns back to Ariel. “Now get the fuck on the floor.”
*
John walks through the airport terminal again, taking a more careful look at the clothing boutiques, the gift shops, the duty-free. He already knows which men’s rooms are the biggest and busiest, which are smallest and quietest. He knows where the police congregate. He knows where the security checkpoints are. He knows where the exits are.
He also knows that Ariel was dragged off her airplane, then hustled out of the terminal through an emergency-exit door. He watched this happen from behind a tabloid-sized newspaper, hidden in the middle of a large crowd that was waiting to board a commuter flight to Barcelona, which was the cheapest ticket he could find, purchased using a fake passport and a credit card in someone else’s name. John never planned on boarding this flight. He just needed to get into the secure area, to see if Ariel boarded hers.
The secure area is also where all the shops are. The first thing he buys is a prepaid cell.
*