“And then what? You still have nothing.”
“We have a string to pull. Eventually the ball of yarn will unravel—one way or another.”
Bo watched him bound up the stairs to get his burner cell phone to call Axel, almost afraid to consider what that “one way or another” would entail. No, she was definitely afraid because the only clear way she could think of to draw them out and force them to commit some act that would get them arrested was to stick with some version of the original plan, which was to use Morgan as bait.
Morgan pulled out the burner cell—not a smartphone, just a simple phone that didn’t have GPS—and called Axel. When he heard the familiar voice, he said, “I got it. Call when you can.” Meaning use a burner on that end too, or get to a phone away from any agency network that could be hacked. However he made contact was up to Axel, depending on how paranoid he was feeling that day. Morgan didn’t bother leaving his name because not only had they been making phone calls to each other for years, on the off chance Axel hadn’t recognized his voice, he would still recognize the burner number. The bastard was crazy good at things like that.
Axel must have been either in a meeting or feeling very paranoid because it was over half an hour before he called back. By then Morgan and Bo were sitting on the couch watching TV, waiting for the sun to get farther down in the sky before they took Tricks for a walk.
“Who was it?” Axel asked in his usual brusque tone.
“Congresswoman Kingsley. There was someone else on the boat with them, a man. When they saw me coming toward them, he went below and when Dexter Kingsley came up, he was buttoning up the other guy’s shirt.”
“And you’re just remembering this now because—?”
Fuck you, Morgan thought without heat. If he took offense at everything Axel said, he’d have beat the shit out of him a long time ago. Because it amused him, he looked at Bo and said, “Axel wants to know why I’m just now remembering this.”
As he’d halfway expected her to, she snatched the phone out of his hand. “Because I had the sense to ask questions about the details when he wasn’t fighting for his life and loopy on painkillers,” she snarled.
Good girl. He couldn’t think of anything he could have said that would have gotten Axel’s goat the way he knew Bo just had. He gave her a thumbs-up and took the phone back.
Axel was still sputtering curses, then he broke them off to say, “If you’re so smart, why did you wait two damn months to start asking those questions, huh?”
“I’m back,” Morgan said, grinning because he’d never before seen Axel knocked off balance.
“Was that Bo? It had better be Bo. You wouldn’t have told anyone else. What did you tell her?”
“Everything.”
“Everything everything, or a sanitized version?”
Knowing what he was asking, Morgan said, “Everything everything. God, Mac, when did you turn into a teenage girl?”
“Fuck you too. Listen, are you certain?”
“Absolutely. Start a database search. The guy could be domestic, but I think the shooter is a link. He was Russian, so I’d start looking at Russian operatives first. They’d have the contacts with the Russian mob to find the guy. Who was in the country at that time? Who has gray hair? Weight—” He thought back, measuring his memory of that figure heading below with that of Dexter Kingsley as he came up on deck—“one eighty-five to two hundred, height five eight to five ten. If you can come up with some possibles, we might be able to find a withdrawal for twenty K if it came from a domestic bank.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Axel growled. “Okay, got it. What else?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
Morgan ended the call and tossed the phone onto the couch.
“How long will it take him to get some photos for you to look at?” Bo asked.
He shrugged to indicate there was no way to tell. “Could be an hour or so, could be days. There’ll be a lot of gray-haired Russian guys, but he can neck it down by the height and weight, then he’ll have to start pinpointing their known locations for the time frame. For that he’ll have to check records, human intelligence, cell phone grids, traffic cameras—and that’s just off the top of my head. The ones who are left, the ones he can’t definitely say were somewhere else that day, are the possibilities. And there’s no way I can make a positive ID, just a probable one that will help him narrow his focus even more.”
“And unless they do something else, such as hack the agency files again, you have nothing on them,” she pointed out—again. And she was just as correct this time as she had been the first time she said it. He leaned back and hooked his hands behind his head, smiling as he studied her.
“What’s so funny?” she asked, looking down to see if she had spilled something on herself.
“Nothing’s funny. I like looking at you.” And he did. He liked her sense of humor, but he also liked the seriousness that was such an important part of her makeup. Those big dark eyes were so solemn when she was concentrating on something, such as when she’d been asking every question she could think of to prod more details out of his memory—and son of a bitch if it hadn’t worked.
He was relieved that he’d finally pinpointed the detail that really mattered, relieved to the point that he felt like laughing. A burden had been lifted, and a new purpose had been born. Not knowing why had eaten at him, knowing there was an enemy out there but not knowing who. He couldn’t defend against someone he didn’t know was coming after him. But now at least he knew who, though the why of it still had to be discovered.