"I dunno, it was pretty uniform."

"New idea, maybe it's mind control." He is 60% joking.

"I'm still willing to check it out if we think there's something important going on there. Not actually sure that it's related to the core nectar operation, though."

Araari sits down, back straight, pressed against the wall of the hotel room. “...Do we have any better of an idea what we can do for the children? Especially if Tereza isn’t even sick...”

"Well, we could try kidnapping 'em, but that's a bit complicated from a hospital. And of course you'd have the cops on you right away, high-profile target and all. Easier for us to get out of Malta than it would be for someone else, with the private jet and all. But you probably would have to leave right away once you did it."

"Lela's a high profile case. Tereza might only be if Donovan makes it one. ...Which she might."

"You should also consider that if you think Lela's sick, and you don't know what with, kidnapping her could just as easily kill her as make her better."

“I suppose. I just... Don’t like leaving them there.”

"What I did for Lev was convince the person paying for his treatment to stop doing that but I am not optimistic about that strategy here. Could plausibly just leave with Tereza, the guards didn't seem to care what we did as regards her, but like Anita said I am not sure it's a good idea to do anything about Lela."

"I really don't think we should kidnap Lela. She's dying and Nectar might be keeping her alive and she has a family."

When Araari and Oswald take a look at Mordred's notes on Lela's treatment, it's fairly obvious that her current treatment regime is not helping. They're floundering.

...Ah.

"The Nectar... doesn't seem to be helping," he tells the others. "We might want to kidnap Lela. ...Or actually we'd want to convince Montgomery Donovan of that, all other considerations still apply and I do think she loves her daughter."

"Isn't she, you know, an extremely rich cultist allied with the people who tried to kill you and who we suspect did in fact kill her own lover for the sake of expanding her nectar empire?"

"I wasn't thinking about doing it under our own names! She's in with the cultists who think we're other cultists."

Oh, they think Portia was her lover? Araari had not actually caught that.

“At least today, she didn’t go anywhere without her guards. I don’t know how reasonable to expect them to be—I know how to behave with the Italian army, not with whatever this is.”

"I'm not sure how much avoiding using your own names helps you, once there are armed guards and crazed cultists involved. I guess you could try... sending her a letter?"

"Or I could ask Inaaya and Louise."

"Tipping your hand a bit far though, isn't it."

"I just think that -- I don't know, Mordred could talk to Inaaya who could talk to -- yes, that -- well it's better than the kidnapping plan--"

"Not that I think the kidnapping plot is much better, but - do consider that these may be sort of mutually exclusive plans.

Which, you know, is fine, as long as you're going to shrug and get on with something else when Donovan predictably ignores you."

“...I’m not willing to shrug and get on with something else, not if Tereza at least might be helped.”

"I'm just saying that I don't want to organize a kidnapping of someone who knows I'm coming. Not with the death toll you guys have racked up at this point. Liable to get half the group killed and leave nobody to clean up the rest of the mess."

"Kidnapping works better if it's just Tereza and we leave it till our last day here," he volunteers, refusing to engage with that.

"Sure."

"Donovan has been so miserable that random baristas remark on it for the last year and the hospital records said she was frantic about Lela. I don't actually think it's predictable that she'll ignore me, and I do think it's a better shot than the kidnapping plan."