*
It’s the dogs who notice first, their ears perked up, noses twitching, tails down, a low grumble from the depths of Mallomar’s throat. The dogs’ behavior is unusual but not unprecedented. Foxes sometimes wander through the yard, raccoons and possums waddle, deer jump fences, moles and voles and rabbits—plenty of natural causes for the dogs to be alarmed.
But Ariel feels it in her gut: This isn’t one of those. She turns out the dining room light.
“George,” she says, “turn that off.”
He’s sitting on the living room floor, playing a video game, wearing a headset that makes him look like a helicopter pilot.
“Come on,” she says, “now.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it!” Ariel switches off one table lamp, then another. This old house has almost no overhead lights, she’s constantly turning lamps on and off.
After the TV light dies, there’s nothing else: complete dark.
“Upstairs,” she hisses, “come on!”
Both dogs are barking loudly now.
“What’s going on?” George is already crying. He doesn’t know what this is, but he can tell that it’s bad, and Ariel is dialing her phone as they run up the stairs, despite every parent’s rule of no running on stairs. In the dark!
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
The dogs are going nuts. Even non–guard dogs are, at heart, guard dogs.
“My home is being invaded right now! I’m at—”
And that’s when all hell breaks loose.
CHAPTER 51
DAY 5. 9:09 P.M.
George is sprinting up the staircase in front of her, and he arrives at the top just as the bright lights pierce the windows and the men start yelling and heavy footfalls and dogs barking and the thump-thump-thump of joints or limbs or whole bodies falling onto the wooden porch while Ariel keeps racing up the stairs, pushing her child down the hall, into her bedroom, locking the door, crossing to the window that’s wide open to admit the breeze, punching out the screen and folding herself through, pulling George after her onto the cedar shakes over the low-pitched roof of the dining room extension that juts away from the original house toward the corn glowing silver in the moonlight, kneeling at the roof’s edge and climbing over and hanging for a three-foot drop to the dewy grass, just a few steps to the potting shed filled with sports equipment, into which Ariel closes both of them.
“Ms. Pryce! All clear!”
She doesn’t know who this man is, yelling at her from the far side of her house, claiming that she’s out of danger.
“You’re safe now!” Exactly what men say when the truth is the opposite.
She picks up a baseball bat. Beside her, George is shaking.
“Wait here,” she whispers.
“Don’t leave! Please.”
“I need to check. I’m not going far. I promise.”
Ariel crosses the small patch of lawn that separates the residential area from the farm out back. She kneels at the boxwood, peers through waxy leaves. She can see a man lying facedown on the porch; a second man clad in black is cinching this guy’s wrists behind his back with a plastic tie; a third man, also in black, is surveying the scene. He calls out, “It’s just paparazzi!”
Yes, Ariel can see it now, the camera with the telephoto, the lens bag. Yes, she can understand it. She can believe it.
Ariel has been many types of women in her life. Now she has apparently become the type who gets stalked by paparazzi who get taken down by CIA security guards on her front porch.
She didn’t see that coming. But it’s not, in the end, that big of a surprise. None of this is.
CHAPTER 52
DAY 6. 10:08 A.M.
The following morning Ariel is sitting in front of the television, waiting for the hearings to start, when the talking heads are interrupted by a reporter standing in front of the Capitol. Ariel turns up the volume.
“Committee chair Senator Alan Brown has just issued the following statement: Due to unexpected complications, the confirmation hearings for vice president of the United States, due to start this morning at ten A.M., have been suspended until further notice, pending additional investigations.”
“Do we know what those unexpected complications are?”
“A wild series of recent events that began earlier this week in Lisbon, where an American woman named Ariel Pryce was traveling with her husband John Wright when he was kidnapped. Ms. Pryce contacted Secretary Wolfe, who is apparently the only person she knows with sufficient liquid resources to pay the ransom, and threatened to reveal a damaging secret unless he helped. Due to the sensitive and complex nature of this situation—an overseas kidnapping of an American citizen, and the involvement of a high-ranking member of the administration who was being extorted—the matter was investigated in real time by US and foreign law enforcement as well as intelligence operatives.”
“It was a journalist who exposed this intrigue?”
“That’s right. A Lisbon-based newspaper reporter named Pete Wagstaff is the one who put all the pieces together with an article published last night, laying out the case that the long-buried secret is that Mr. Wolfe assaulted Ms. Pryce fourteen years ago. News of this disclosure emboldened two other women to come forward with their own allegations of sexual assault.”
“And Ms. Pryce? What does she have to say about all this?”
“She refuses to comment.”
“Do we know why this silence?”
“It is almost certainly due to a nondisclosure agreement that she signed as part of an out-of-court settlement with Mr. Wolfe, which included her dropping the charges against him, in exchange for money. Ms. Pryce has been resolute that she cannot and will not comment on any of this.”
*
Within hours the press descends en masse, with a dozen vans’ antennas piercing the blue sky, towering above the flat fields, plus the rental cars whose floors are littered with sandwich wrappers and coffee cups, disheveled men and women hanging out together on this otherwise quiet rural road, waiting for Ariel to emerge for a picture, waiting for her to comment.
She doesn’t.
After lurking around for a day and getting no satisfaction, the reporters start to pack up their toys and move on. But even without any compelling on-scene footage of either the victim or the assailant—Charlie Wolfe has made himself scarce—coverage has been pretty much nonstop on TV, radio, and the internet.
When the story first broke, Ariel realized that she needed to limit her consumption. She couldn’t listen to the same thing over and over during all her waking hours, she’d go insane. But now she turns on the radio, hoping to hear something new:
“—bringing the total to four women who have accused the secretary of sexual misconduct, painting a decades-long pattern of criminal behavior that Charlie Wolfe and his family repeatedly squelched using payoffs and nondisclosure agreements to coerce women into lifetimes of silence. Support for the accusers has poured forth on social media and op-ed pages.”