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“What’s up?” Leo asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“I’ve sent you some info on a bunch of companies. I need you to try and trace them, maybe look for some kind of dealings they might have had with Kingsley or the Russians? The delivery van is registered to the ones at the top, but there’s nothing I can really pinpoint about them that I can roll with. I need something—I’ve already tried to run everything against what we have, but—”
“I’ll look into it first thing in the morning.”
“It is the morning, and I need you to look into it now.”
“It’s the middle of the night, and…” Pausing, he lets out a long-suffering sigh before he says, “I heard what happened with Georgina today. Focus on her—I know she’s a tough nut to crack, but she needs someone to look after her right now, and you’re the one she’s chosen so…focus on her.”
My chest fists around my heart so tight that a slash of physical pain stops me in my tracks as I circle the couch one more time. The hallway is dark, but I can make out the stairs outside the lounge door, and it takes everything in me not to run up there and hold her. Squeeze her in my arms so that I can be certain that she’s still here and still alive, untouched and untarnished even if she’s had her first taste of real fear.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“Yeah, we are, and you’re going to get to it tonight.” Taking a deep breath, I lean over the back of the sofa and study the screen of my laptop, staring at it until it all blurs into a jumble of nothing.
“All right, I’ll go through what you sent me and let you know what I find. But chances are that if you can’t follow the trail…”
“That’s what we said about the shit with your granddad, but you found all the links.”
“I had numbers to follow. They were encrypted, but they were there. This—” Leo takes a deep breath as the sound of his Mac switching on filters through the line. “This is normally your thing.”
It normally is, but for once I have nowhere left to go. I’m at a dead end, and I just need another crumb—anything—to continue with.
“Let me see what I can do. I’m still going through Grace’s ledgers—maybe there’s more in there because they’re like a bible for this shit.”
“I think Grace was looking for Lucy.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Right before Francis sedated her yesterday, she kept rambling on about puppets and dolls—Petrushka—and it’s in the ledger. Kit deciphered it. We thought it was wrong or that maybe Grace had mixed up the code, but she didn’t. 10PM isn’t a time—it’s Number 10 and the Prime Minister.”
“Freddie…”
“Don’t fucking tell me I’m reading too much into this. You didn’t hear the way she was saying those things. She was giving me what we need, and I let them take her away.”
“First of all—” He takes a deep breath before he continues. “—Lucy is where she needs to be. She hurt Laura for trying to be nice, and I know that Laura isn’t an angel. We both know that, but Lucy isn’t stable right now, and if she is trying to help us now, the best thing to do is help her the best way we can.”
“Maybe we should lock Harry up too. He has to know something.”
“Like I said, I’m going to keep going through the journals. Don’t do anything stupid or reckless because someone will get hurt. Give me a day or so to go through everything again and to dig some more. In the meantime, we need to tell Casper and Christopher about the addresses. There’s too much for just the two of us to handle.”
“Fine.” I pause in the open doorway and stare at the stairs, pulling myself back every time my feet make a move forward. “What about the records from Fairfax Capital? There has to be something. There’s always a trail.”
“Those records are gone. We signed the last of the legal documents to shut it down yesterday, and everything’s been sealed. You know this.”
“What if I can get into them again? Nothing’s ever gone forever. If it had an online footprint, I can find it and get into it.”
“I’ve been over it all so many times now, and it’s all still a fucking mess. We thought your grandad was smart keeping everything we had in pockets, but these guys…”
“They don’t have pockets, they have layers. So many fucking layers, and every time we manage to peel one away, we get hit harder.”
Today can’t happen again.
“I know what you’re thinking, but today isn’t your fault.”
“I’ve been watching them, scouting the locations, and now, Georgina’s in the fucking firing line.”
“Freddie, we’re all in the firing line, every single one of us, and if you think that you’re the reason Georgie almost got hit today…”
