*
The wheels skid and bounce and skid again, the reverse thrusters roar, the fuselage shudders while everyone ignores all this tremendous violence to reach for their devices, to readjust the settings, stare at the screens, waiting for the connections to be reestablished, impatient to be plugged back into the electronic fabric that binds us together, the giant web that catches everything, and everyone.
Not Ariel. She has now been in a digital blackout for twenty-four hours, the longest she can remember since the advent of smartphones. Since the demise of privacy.
She never thought she’d be so grateful to be trudging through JFK. She stops at a restaurant to pay a dollar for internet access along with five dollars for crappy coffee. The landing page of every news-related website features the same story on an otherwise quiet summer day of a holiday week: Confirmation hearings begin in three days for the nominee for vice president.
Ariel searches the web for herself, and for John, but there’s nothing yet, no article anywhere. Disappointing, but at the same time a relief.
For the moment, she’s still tomorrow’s news.
*
“It’s Nicole Griffiths calling.”
“Thanks,” Jim Farragut says to his assistant. “I’ll take it. Please shut the door.”
The deputy director closes the briefing book on his desk, and minimizes the email window on his screen. He wants to pay complete attention to this phone call from Lisbon, of all goddamned places. Certainly not where he expected a national-security crisis to emerge.
“Griffiths?”
“I’m calling with a preliminary report on the history.”
“Go ahead.”
“After the death of their parents, twelve-year-old John Reitwovski and his fifteen-year-old sister Lucy moved to rural Ohio to live with an uncle, a man who was maybe not cut out for parenting, especially of a nonbiological teenaged daughter. Before long Lucy ran away, and found herself living in a nearby university town. The same year that Charlie Wolfe moved to that same university town to attend law school.”
Farragut lets his exhausted head tilt back on his aching neck. Fuck.
“Lucy used a fake ID to get a job at a bar called Mulligan’s, where she worked as a hostess for a year, then got a waitress job at another bar for a few months, then left town. She and Wolfe overlapped for perhaps eighteen months in a town of about a hundred thousand residents. So far, that’s all we know. But we’ve just begun to investigate this connection.”
Farragut knows that this is not going to turn out to be a coincidence. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Please check your email from me. I just sent something.”
Farragut opens his window, downloads an attachment. “What am I looking at?”
“That’s a Twitter screenshot.”
“Yes I know that.”
“It’s a photo of Ariel Pryce standing in front of the US embassy in Lisbon, taken two days ago, and posted a few hours ago.”
The text reads, IS THIS #CHARLIEWOLFEMISTRESS A #RUSSIANSPY?
“Good Lord. Has this really been retweeted three hundred times already? How is that possible?”
“Good question: The only way is by bots. At this rate, there will be thousands of retweets within a week. Either someone has spent good money to make sure this reaches everyone on Twitter, or they don’t need to spend money to accomplish the same thing, because they already control their own bots.”
“The Russians?”
“That’s where the smart money would be.”
“Is there any way to find out for sure?”
“Probably not. Or, rather, probably not quickly. The post is also trending on Instagram and Facebook in ways that appear to be similarly manipulated. Within two or three days, this rumor will have been put in front of nearly every set of eyeballs in America.”
“Jesus Christ. And is there any truth to it?”
“That she’s his mistress? No. I’m pretty sure the truth is something different. Something much worse.”
“Worse than a mistress?” Farragut has a sinking feeling. “What’s that?”
“I think Wolfe raped her.”
*
Throughout the drive from the airport’s long-term parking lot, Ariel has been unable to stop glancing in her pickup’s rearview. When she notices a state trooper coming up quickly, she double-checks her speedometer: yes, still cruise-controlled at sixty-eight.
The trooper is closing in fast.
There are very few cars on the road. Ariel flips her signal to move from the center lane to the right, ostensibly to get out of the trooper’s way, but really just to reassure herself that no, she’s not speeding at a meaningful level. You don’t get a ticket for sixty-eight on the Long Island Expressway.
The cop turns on his flashing lights.
Her heart is hammering away. She pumps the brakes to release cruise control, preparing to pull over to the shoulder, preparing her arguments, preparing her pleas, preparing to be terrified. If a trooper is pulling her over at sixty-eight, he’s doing it for a reason other than speeding. Her taillights are fine, her registration is current, there are no warrants out on her, no good reason for anyone to pull her over.
She cuts her eyes back to the rearview, and suddenly the car isn’t even there, and then the strobing colored lights are flying by, in pursuit of someone else, and she lets out a sob of relief.
*
The sun has set. Traffic has thinned to nothing. The highway is straight, and Ariel can see for a mile in front: not a single set of taillights. Behind her, one car is a half-mile back. That same car has been the same distance behind her for a while.
She takes the exit, pauses at the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp. And yes, here comes the same set of headlights behind her.
Ariel makes a left-hand turn, and accelerates as fast as the old pickup can manage, past the gas station, then she swings around a curve, over the railroad tracks, out into the familiar rural landscape, the fields, the wind turbines, the farm-equipment lot. She turns onto a smaller route, a narrow straightaway with nothing but wide-open farmland on either side, and the last brilliant streaks of summer sunset lingering on the horizon.
Her tail is still with her, albeit farther back, trying to hide, and failing. Or maybe not trying at all. Maybe the CIA wants her to know that they’re right there, watching.
*
She finally turns onto her road in the deep dark of a moonless night. Ariel’s house is beyond the next rise, on the gentle slope toward the bluffs a mile away, high above the rocky beach. Her kid, her mom, her dogs, her whole life is just over that ridge.
Everything will be different now. During the many hours of today’s travel, Ariel has been trying to picture what her new life will look like, but she’s never been able to see it all clearly, only bits and pieces from odd angles that don’t add up to a cohesive whole. None of it included pulling into her driveway a quarter-mile in front of a CIA escort.