A man is suddenly by her side, and Ariel flinches away.
“Excuse me,” he repeats. “I’m sorry to bother you.” It’s the bearded man she saw when she walked through the embassy. “My name is Pete Wagstaff. I’m a reporter. Maybe I can help?”
Ariel squints at him in the blinding sunlight. She can already feel sweat beads surfacing on the back of her neck.
“The embassy, you know, their hands are often tied.” He reaches into his pocket, extends a business card. Ariel recognizes the logo of a news organization, LISBON CORRESPONDENT, phone numbers, email, an office address.
“Thanks,” she says. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I can’t talk to you. I’m sorry.”
This man is not as old as he seemed from across the room. Better looking too, with a reassuring softness to his eyes.
“Did someone tell you not to?”
Ariel shakes her head. “I just … can’t. Don’t take it personally.”
He smiles. “Okay. But if you think of a way I can help, whatever the problem is, please do be in touch. I know my way around this town, and I’m always available.”
“You’re sweet,” she says, bestowing in turn her sweetest smile. Ariel knows she can’t reach out to talk to a reporter; that’s out of the question. But that doesn’t mean that a reporter won’t be useful somehow, at some point. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
*
Ariel checks the time: yes, now is good. Or if not good, at least an acceptable time to send this text: YOU DOING OKAY TODAY? She can’t help herself when they’re apart, even when she knows she should.
Her phone dings almost immediately, and her heart flutters as she grabs the device.
YEAH MOM, ALL GOOD.
Well at least there’s that. But that’s not enough, she realizes. She places the international call.
“Hi,” her son answers. “How’s Lisbon?”
“Hot.” She doesn’t want to tell her kid what’s happening. All she really wants is to hear his voice. “How are things there?”
“Fine.”
These days that’s how George answers almost every question: fine. Or sometimes: good. Tweenaged-boy taciturnity, to go with his tweenaged-boy beanpole shape. But every few weeks he says something that reminds her that he’s still a kid, despite the body. “Are dogs citizens?” This was just last week, they were driving, the radio tuned to a news story about undocumented immigrants.
“No, Sweetheart,” she said, careful not to laugh at him. It was hard. “Dogs are not citizens.”
Ariel couldn’t imagine what rights and privileges and responsibilities George’s imaginary dog citizens might have. Would they vote? Pay taxes?
“How are the dogs?” she asks now, knowing that this is the only subject he’s reliably willing to discuss.
“Well. They’re eating brebberties,” which means breakfast in the private language that they pretend the dogs speak. Dinner is dibberties. Teeth are tibberties. There’s a theme. “Mallomar is taking one kibble and running out of the room to chew it. Scotch is ignoring him.”
“Mallomar is crazy.”
“Very. But listen, Mom, I have to go? The camp bus is about to arrive. Love you.”
That’s it, she realizes: That’s all she wanted from this call. He’s still willing to say “love you,” albeit only in private, and maybe just to end a call. She takes what she can get.
*
Chief of Station Nicole Griffiths senses a presence in her doorway. She places the tip of her pen on the page so she doesn’t lose her place, then looks up to see Saxby Barnes standing there, a piece of paper in his left hand, his right raised.
“Knock knock,” he says, while knocking on air. He thinks this is clever. “May I come in?”
Barnes regularly shows up here thinking that he has just unearthed intelligence, which always turns out to be not. Nicole hopes this is because he’s seduced by the idea of the CIA, not by her.
“If you must.”
Barnes shuts the door behind him. “An American tourist just reported that her businessman husband has disappeared. She woke up this morning and he was gone, not answering his phone.”
“Interesting,” Nicole says, in a tone of voice that suggests it’s not. There are people in consular whom Nicole trusts, but Barnes is not among them. He is intelligence-adjacent, in more ways than one. “You sent her to the police?”
“She’d already been. Said the police wouldn’t do anything, it’s too soon.”
This is normal. Nicole doesn’t respond.
“She seems like an upstanding citizen,” Barnes continues. “On paper, the husband too. Except for one little thing: They both changed their names, separately, years before they ever met.”
Nicole’s nib is still aimed at the page in front of her, a ludicrously dense report about a surge in illegal crossings from Tangier via the Strait of Gibraltar, a mere nine miles of rough water that separates Africa from Europe. The author of this report must think he’s being paid by the word. Like Dickens, with whom Nicole never had any patience. Get to the point already.
“Him, just a few years ago; her, more than a decade. I ran a quick check on both of them while she was waiting.” Barnes looks proud of this routine inquiry. “And get this,” he continues. “The wife doesn’t know about the husband’s name change.”
For once, Barnes is possibly here on legitimate intelligence business. This is one of the reasons that the chief of station’s office is in the embassy, along with a staff of Agency operatives. Also why the COS’s identity is not secret.
“So, Mr. Barnes, what can the Agency do for you?”
He places the sheet of paper in front of Nicole, already signed by his boss in consular. “Can you please find this gentleman’s phone?”
“Sure thing.”
“And could I ask that you please keep me in the loop?”
“Of course,” Nicole says, although she has no intention whatsoever of doing this. Barnes is neither clever nor discreet, which in her world is a dangerous combination.
*
Ariel walks through the Alfama neighborhood, which looks like a completely different city, a labyrinth of narrow cobbled lanes and steep staircases and ancient whitewashed buildings with red-tile roofs, the only section of Lisbon left unscathed by the 1755 earthquake and tsunami-and-fire aftermath that destroyed eighty-five percent of the city’s buildings and killed perhaps a fifth of the population. There’s a small-town feel here, neighbors chatting on narrow streets, kids kicking balls against walls, the smell of fish stews and steamed clams and roast pork, cats slinking along windowsills and dogs trotting with impunity on the pedestrian-only streets.
This looks like a happy sort of place, a safe place where nothing bad happens. But Ariel knows there’s no such thing.
*
There are three hospitals in downtown Lisbon, and these are the ones she calls first. None has a record of John Wright, nor of any unidentified American. She tries a few farther afield, up the river, down the river, inland. No, no, no. He’s not in a hospital.
*
“Come on, old man,” Kayla Jefferson says. “Orders from the boss: We need to go find a phone.”
“A phone?”