“Know him?”
Pinnacle One’s gaze rose above the phone to where the man was standing. It wasn’t hard to see, due to the background, that the photo had been taken in the last few minutes.
“I guess denying it at this point would do no good.”
“Well, you could,” Bridge said. “Be pretty foolish, though.”
“So? He’s one of my guards.”
“He also happens to be the man we ran into at Bevell’s house the other day. Dressed in black, mask, also a pretty good fighter. I got first-hand experience with that. And a few bruises to go along with it.”
“Was he at Bevell’s? I’ll have to speak with him about that.”
Bridge laughed. “Don’t go there.”
“Where?”
“Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending he was somewhere without your knowledge and approval. Everything he does, from his morning trip to the bathroom to his lunch eating a Happy Meal, to his nine o’clock bedtime holding his teddy bear… it’s all approved by you. Every second of his day has to be accounted for. Don’t forget who you’re talking to. I know it all. I know what it means.”
Pinnacle One rubbed his cheek and his chin as he deliberated on whether he should reveal anything.
Bridge was getting a little frustrated with the runaround. “Dammit, Joe, I’m trying to help you. Stop giving me the brush-off and tell me what’s going on here. I can help you if you let me, but if I’m left to freelance on this, then we both know I’m gonna step on some toes eventually, whether unintentionally or not. Help me sidestep that. I’m not some run-of-the-mill schmuck goofing off here. You know me. You know what I can do. I’ve never betrayed this agency and I still won’t. But if you shut me out, my options will be limited.”
Pinnacle One sighed. As much as he was trying to keep everything in-house, he knew Bridge could be trusted. Bridge had worked for him for a few years before he got assigned elsewhere.
“Yes. We were aware of Bevell’s possible involvement in all of this.”
“How was he involved?” Bridge asked.
Pinnacle One waived his hand in the air. “We don’t know. As far as we could tell, he was just brought on a week or two ago. We were observing from a distance.”
Bridge shook his phone slightly to bring attention back to the picture. “And this guy?”
“When I was told that Bevell had gone missing for a couple of days, I sent one of my men over to his house to see what he could find. I wanted to know if he had uncovered anything that would lead back to us.”
“And that included killing us?”
“No.” Pinnacle One put his finger in the air. “No. That was not him. After his encounter with you and Nicole, he fled the house and left the scene. Whoever shot at you afterwards was not him. It was not us. I would not have sanctioned that. Not yet, at least.”
“Who was it then?”
“That I don’t know. We’ve done some checking, but we’ve yet to come up with anything concrete.”
“What’s going on here?” Bridge asked.
Pinnacle One looked around again, making sure nobody was close enough to listen in. He took a couple of breaths before answering. “Gary Abbott was one of our assets. Due to his occupation of a traveling salesman, he was able to penetrate places that would have been tough for one of our known agents.”
“I figured as much.”
“We’ve used him often over the past few years. He was good. He provided us with a lot of information that we would not have known otherwise.”
“And his death?”
“Shocking. We were as surprised as anybody. And it happening here was… unfathomable.”
“His death or that it happened here?”
“Both.”
“What was he working on?”
Pinnacle One sighed, not wanting to say. It was still top-secret information, and even though Bridge was friendly to the agency, and trustworthy, he was still now an outsider.
“Did it have anything to do with Greg Kenny or Stash?”
Pinnacle One snapped his head to the side and stared at Bridge.
“That look pretty much tells me that it does.”
“Where have you heard those names?” Pinnacle One asked.
“I told you. I’m good at what I do.”
“You’ve worked faster than even I had anticipated. I assumed that you would eventually come upon them, but I didn’t think you would get those names for a few more weeks.”
“Now, my intel says that Greg Kenny is a former CIA agent who left the agency two weeks before Abbott went missing. That’s interesting in its own right, but the fact the agency now has an alert out on him, I don’t think I’m too out of line thinking that the two are somehow connected.”
Pinnacle One looked at him and sighed. “You sure you wouldn’t like to come back to the agency and work for us?”
“I’m good where I’m at. I’ve also heard that Stash is a wanted fugitive with a sheet a mile long. How’s it all tie together?”
“You’ve pretty much got it.” Pinnacle One didn’t see the use in trying to pretend or hide things anymore. Bridge probably had everything figured out now, anyway. “During the course of one of Abbott’s trips overseas, he became privy to some information that suggested we had a mole on the inside.”
“Kenny.”
“Well, we didn’t know who at the time. This was roughly two years ago. Stash has been on our radar for about three years now. We don’t know much about him other than the name and what he does.”
“Illegal arms?”
“Among other things. We suspect that he’s got his hand in a variety of pots, including Iran, North Korea, Russia, pretty much everyone we’ve been at odds with.”
“No real name?”
“No. We’ve used surveillance, informants, contacts, set up deals, everything you can think of; it’s all been useless. He’s evaded us at every turn.”
“And Kenny? Where does he fit in?”
“We’re not sure. We think he
