“Including Abbott?”
“That’s affirmative.”
“That would indicate that this has been in the works for a while. You can’t just pick up a fake passport anywhere. And someone like Kenny would only use someone he can trust or knows well. That would tell me that he’s on a schedule.”
“Possibly.”
“I’ve been thinking this past week that he took Abbott because of the pressure we were putting on him, but maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe this is what he was planning all along. That’s why he didn’t wait a while before moving. He couldn’t. It’d throw off his plan.”
“Which we still don’t know what that is.”
“How’d you get wind of this?”
“Our partners at MI6 alerted us to them getting a hit on Magareth at the airport in France. They did some digging, wound up getting some pictures of him, Dalton, and Abbott all coming out of the airport together.”
“Not Kenny?”
“Not in the picture, but you can be certain he was there. We’ve done some digging on the flight manifests, and there was a party of three that travelled from North Carolina, to Brazil, then to Paris.”
“Magareth and company.”
“Correct. We also found a solo passenger, male, who also took the same flights at the same times.”
“Kenny.”
“Also correct. We’ve traced that name to a seldom used alias that we believe is him.”
“So they all used fake names. Any hits or connections to those?”
“We are currently running down all possible avenues in relation to that, but so far we haven’t gotten anything.”
“Probably won’t either. I doubt they’d use names that we could trace back to them in another capacity.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
“It was smart of them to split up like they did,” Bridge said. “They know a party of four would come under scrutiny. And the usual split-up of two and two would cause an eyebrow to be raised too.”
“Even if they stayed together, we wouldn’t have found out about it until after they were gone anyway with the names that they used. They just went the extra mile for it.”
“What’s the connection to Paris, do you think?”
“We can’t deduce that there is one. Right now, as it appears, it might have just been a convenient place to fly in to.”
“Where’d they go since then?”
“Unknown. We haven’t been able to pick them up since.”
“Rental car?”
“Negative.”
“Which means they had a car waiting,” Bridge said. “And probably a fourth member of the team.”
“Quite possibly. You said you were thinking about calling. What was your news?”
“Well, wasn’t really news. Just kind of some theories that I’ve been kicking around.”
“Might as well spill them. Can’t be any worse than some of the ones we’ve been sitting on. Maybe you’ll hit on something.”
Bridge then told him everything that he’d come up with. As he talked about it, he became even more convinced that he may have been right. He had no proof of anything yet. But he had that nagging feeling deep in his gut that this went deeper than the current prevailing theory.
“Only one problem with that,” Joe said.
“What’s that?”
“We’ve already cross-referenced Gary Abbott and Kenny to see if their paths had crossed anywhere.”
“I take it that they didn’t?”
“They did not. At least not that we’ve dug up. We haven’t found any evidence that they were ever in the same location at the same time.”
“What about Magareth?”
“Well, we’ve connected him and Kenny to Ukraine, but nothing between him and Abbott either.”
“What about Abbott and Dalton?” Bridge asked.
“You know, that’s one we haven’t checked on yet. Since we found out her identity the other day, we’ve been focused on finding her current location.”
“Understandable. But if we found out where she’s been, we might find out where she’s going.”
15
Bridge and Nicole were led to the elevator by the same man as the last time they’d been there.
“I could kind of get used to this,” Nicole said.
“Don’t.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“I beg to differ,” Bridge said.
Once off the elevator, they went to the same room as they’d been in before. Joe was already in there waiting for them. He shook each of their hands as they came in.
“Looks like we’ve learned some more information,” Joe said.
They all followed him over to a computer, with the same analyst as the last time they’d been there.
“What’d you find out?” Bridge asked.
“First off, it’s a connection we never would have found out about if it hadn’t been for you finding her the other day since she wasn’t on our radar.”
“Werther,” Nicole said. “Or Dalton. Whatever she goes by.”
“From here on out, I’m referring to her as Dalton since that’s her real name.”
“What’d she do?” Bridge asked.
“It’s not as much what she did as much as who she met,” Joe replied.
“Which was?”
“Abbott. Gary.”
“They had a meeting?”
“Well, we cannot confirm they had a meeting as of this moment, but we can confirm they were in the same location at the same time. That definitely makes it suspicious.”
“Where were they?”
“Greece. About two years ago.”
“How do you know Dalton was there?”
“We confirmed it with MI6 just a little while ago. Since this now involves people from both agencies, we both came to the understanding that we would share whatever information we have on this matter. They gave us Dalton’s itinerary for the last three years so we back-checked it against Abbott’s movements.”
“And how long ago was that?” Bridge asked.
“Two years. So over a year before Abbott was killed. Big coincidence, huh?”
“You know I don’t believe in that.”
“Me neither,” Joe said. “But here’s another. In tracing Dalton’s history, we also discovered another crossover.”
“What was that?”
“She was also in Ukraine. For about a month. Two years ago. It was exactly one month after she left Greece.”
“Where Kenny was.”
Joe nodded. “And also Magareth.”
“So whatever they’re doing, they’ve been doing it a while.”
“And under the radar.”
“Wait, let me understand the timeline on this,” Nicole said. “So Abbott and Dalton meet in Greece about two years ago.”
“Right.”
“And then when she left there, she went to Ukraine, where Kenny and Magareth also were
