“Sure.”
“So you understand that there are no exceptions, right? Just because the CIA is asking, or the FBI, or the police. None of that is any different from a reporter asking, or a sister, or a friend. Nondisclosure is nondisclosure. Even if I were, say, being interrogated by the CIA in an undisclosed location in Europe, without the benefit of legal representation or due process.”
“We can protect you.”
“Come on,” Ariel scoffs. “You don’t really believe that. With the people who are involved?”
“I promise.”
“Promise? Pffft. Get me that promise in the form of a letter signed by the attorney general of the United States.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Absolutely not. You don’t agree that this hypothetical situation would rise to the level of the AG? Of course it would. So if you think you have the ability to protect a person like me, that’s what you need to do. That’s the price here.”
Griffiths responds with an exasperated sigh.
“You haven’t even told me who you work for,” Ariel says, “or what you do. I don’t even know your real name, do I? And you want me to trust you? With my life? Are you insane?” She leans forward. “Listen, we’re not enemies, you and me. I don’t want to be antagonistic. But I have to ask, with all due respect: What the hell do you want from me?”
“You know what I want: the truth.”
“The truth?” Ariel snorts. “The truth has a steep price.”
*
“There!” Kayla Jefferson finally sees it. “Wearing the red cap. Look at the pants, the shoes: That’s him.”
The Spanish cop nods, and says something to the airport-security technician, who starts loading feeds from other cameras—the concourse, escalator, baggage claim, exit door, sidewalk—
Jefferson is getting ready to call her boss again—“We got him!”—but then gives it a second thought. She asks the cop to call in the license plate, then continues to review the footage with the tech, following the white car to another camera, another, then into the garage.
Then from the first camera within the structure: no little white car.
The second camera: none.
The third and fourth and fifth: no, no, no.
“Where the hell?” Another, another, another. “Can you pull up the past ten minutes from all the garage exits?”
Now the tech is fast-forwarding through this footage, evidence of dozens of cars leaving the structure, maybe a hundred, but none is that little white Ford with the license plate beginning with M.
“What the fuck happened?” This question is rhetorical. Kayla knows that either John Wright is still in the same car hidden somewhere inside the garage, or he has exited a different way. Probably in a different car. “What time was the last visual?”
The tech rechecks the footage, says, “The car entered since twenty-seven minutes.”
A lot can be accomplished in twenty-seven minutes.
“Se?orita,” says the Spanish cop, hanging up the phone, “this vehicle was reported stolen last night.”
Damn it.
Kayla leans back, away from the screens. She realizes what has happened: John Wright and the driver abandoned the stolen Ford in the garage, then climbed into a different vehicle, one of the hundred-plus that have exited the building in the past twenty-seven minutes. Exit cameras aren’t going to help, because Wright will now be hidden in the backseat, or he and the driver will have switched clothes and switched places, fake beard and a bald cap, she’ll have become a nun, whatever.
Yes, it might still be possible to identify whatever car they got into, but it will be a lot harder. And it will take a lot longer, by which point they might have switched vehicles again, or boarded a train, or a plane, or simply disappeared into a crowd …
Instead of the triumphant We got him, Jefferson makes the opposite call.
“Sorry,” she says to her boss, “we lost him.”
*
Griffiths returns to Ariel carrying a single sheet of freshly printed paper, folded in half. She takes a seat again at the small table.
“So where do you think your husband is now?”
“Probably in the airport, waiting for a flight.”
Griffiths taps the piece of paper, but doesn’t unfold it, doesn’t show it to Ariel.
“He was at the airport. Where he seems to have purchased a change of clothes, got into disguise in a bathroom, hustled out of the terminal, and climbed into a waiting car.”
Griffiths unfolds the piece of paper, slides it in front of Pryce.
“This waiting car. With this woman at the wheel. Do you recognize her?”
Griffiths sees Ariel’s mouth open just the slightest, her head twitch a few degrees. That sure looks like genuine surprise.
The image’s quality is awful, taken at a bad angle, through a dirty windshield, of a woman who’s wearing large sunglasses and what appears to be a silk scarf tied snugly against her head. It would be hard to identify this person even if she were your best friend. Facial-recognition software can’t possibly help. Even on the chance that this woman is in some database somewhere, this image is simply not good enough. Hell, it might not even be a woman.
“No,” Pryce says. “I don’t recognize her. But based on this, how could I?”
*
Griffiths takes a few minutes in the other room, gazing through the mirror at Ariel Pryce while picturing the sequence of the next conversations that will happen. First it will be her call to the director of ops, who will have no choice but to inform the DCI, who in turn will be obliged to wake the president, who is not exactly known for making calm, rational decisions in the middle of the night.
She’s lying. The president is blindly loyal to all his old cronies, until he isn’t. It’s a hoax. Another hoax.
The CIA director would be reluctant to argue with the president; everyone who has access to the president is reluctant to argue with him, which is how they maintain their access, QED.
This nasty lying woman is in Spain right now?
Yes sir.
She should stay in Spain, the president would say. In fact she should probably die in Spain.
And there it would be: a lethal finding by the commander in chief to assassinate an American citizen on foreign soil to keep a secret that would damage his administration.
Would the DCI argue with the president? No. Griffiths has heard rumors that this director is operationally aggressive, aka trigger-happy, as long as it’s someone else who’s pulling the actual trigger. Which is what amateurs in his position tend to be, thinking that the solution to every problem is a bullet in someone’s head.
So the DCI would pass this order down the chain to Farragut, who’d point-blank refuse this illegal directive, and promptly be fired. The director would then give the direct order to Griffiths. She too would refuse, and her career would be summarily terminated. Could Griffiths herself be prosecuted somehow? Yes, of course she could. The president and the director of central intelligence could fabricate anything, on anyone.