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4
“Iceland?”Ronan asked, leaning back in his chair at the head of the conferencetable.
“Iceland,” Clayconfirmed.
Declan and Nick had ushered Clay upstairs as soon as he’d delivered the news. They’d gone over some of the details while they waited for Ronan to arrive, then Clay started all over again, his demeanor only mildly less excited the second timearound.
“How sure are you?” Ronanasked.
“Well… not very,” Clay admitted. “We haven’t actually seen Curran, but it’s the closest we’ve come to alead.”
“If you haven’t seen him, how do you know he’s in Iceland?” Ronan asked. “Don’t tell me he’s been stupid enough to use his credit cards after going dark for sixmonths.”
Clay tapped some keys on his computer and a list of names appeared on the screen at the front of the room, each of them highlighted in green, yellow, orred.
“This is a list of Curran’s known associates.” He scrolled for nearly a minute before he came to the end. “As you can see, it’s an exhaustive list. Took my people two months to put it together, but we’ve been using it to comb cameras and databases and everything else you can imagine. Some of the people have been easy to eliminate as an ally to Neil. Those are the names in green. Most of them are casual acquaintances, people he knows through his work at WMG, higher profile people who are pretty visible and easy to track, people who don’t seem to have any personal connection to Curran that would make them willing to go out on a limb. We’ve been tracking them anyway to be safe, but most of our focus has been on the otherones.”
“What do the other colors mean?” Nickasked.
It was a question they hadn’t been able to ask when Clay gave them the initial rundown, before he’d plugged his laptop into the conference room’sprojector.
“The names in yellow indicate personal connections, old friends, distant relatives, people he might trust to get him out of a bind. These are the people we’re watching with the most interest. Anyone in trouble is most likely to turn to an old friend, especially when they’re trying to stay out of sight of thelaw.”
“And red?” Ronanasked.
Declan could see the annoyance on his brother’s face. Ronan didn’t want to decipher a color-coded spreadsheet. His time as a SEAL had accustomed him to reading battle plans — GPS and geographical terrain and securitycountermeasures.
Spreadsheets were Nick’sterritory.
“Red is why we think we found him,” Clay said. Declan looked at the names in red on the spreadsheet. There weren’t as many of them as there were yellow and green. “They’re the people who have shady backgrounds and only casual contact with Curran — maybe they were on the same philanthropic committee or maybe they belong to the same business association,” Clay explained. “In other words, a connection capable of helping Neil hide but not necessarily willing to help himhide.”
“And this is how you found Neil?” Declanasked.
Clay tapped the keys on his computer. “This is how we think we foundhim.”
The screen filled with the image of an older man, probably in his seventies. His hair was silver over a lean, craggy face that would have been as at home hiking rugged terrain as it was in the custom suit he was wearing in the photo. His eyes stared like chips of blue ice from theimage.
“That’s Gunnar Ármannsson,” Declansaid.
Clay nodded. “That’sright.”
Ronan looked at Declan. “How the fuck do you knowthat?”
Declan shrugged. He had no idea how he knew a lot of the things he knew. It was a source of endless frustration to his brothers, who’d tagged him for years as lazy and undisciplined while grudgingly admitting that Declan was always prepared. He might have been late. He might have been unkept and hungover. But his brain remained able to roll out facts and figures, to propose new ideas, even when his body was barelyfunctioning.
“Who is he?” Nick asked, his eyes trained on thephoto.
“On the surface?” Clay continued without waiting for an answer. “A finance guy. He used to be chairman of the board at one of Iceland’s biggest banks. That landed him on Forbes’ list of richest people in the world, far enough down not to draw too much attention but still well over a billion dollars. He was indicted for embezzlement, spent a year in prison, then retired to a life of supposedphilanthropy.”
Ronan looked at him. “Supposed?”
“He’s got some shady connections — organized crime, arms dealing, trafficking rumors. You name it, someone on the internet has accused him of doing it. No proof though, and I’m guessing he’s smart enough after getting caught once to stay pretty low to the ground on anything illegal,” Claysaid.
“And this is the guy that led you to Curran?” Nickasked.
“Indirectly. Like I said, we weren’t watching him super close. We just sent a spider in to troll data related to the red names. We didn’t get anything useful after the first month, so someone on my team had the idea of expanding the parameters to include the inner circle of the original targets.” Clay looked at them. “It was a good idea. It’s pretty on brand for the rich to hire out their dirtywork.”
A spider was a web crawler designed to find certain key words, phrases, or images. It had started as a way for big companies to index their data but had morphed into a favorite tool for hackers looking for somethingspecific.
