A Thin Disguise by Catherine Bybee
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The after-school programs at the youth centers meant working late. Fitz was driving him back to the office when Neil called.
“Hey,” Leo answered. Adrenaline zipped up his back anytime Neil reached out.
“Are you in a position to talk?”
Leo glanced at Fitz. “Not really.”
“Call me when you can.”
Oh, no, no, no. “Wait. Tell me.”
Neil paused. “She’s alive. We have a lead.”
That adrenaline swelled and washed over him in relief. “Happy hour sounds great. I’ll call you when I’m on my way.” He ended the call and tried not to smile as brightly as he felt.
“I like happy hour. Where are we going?” Fitz asked.
“Uhm . . .” Leo cleared his throat. “That was Neil. He’s having trouble with the wife. I’m not sure he’ll want to talk about it if there’s a woman around.”
“That’s unfortunate. I have zero social life lately.”
“Next time,” Leo offered.
“Yeah, yeah . . . I don’t want your pity invites.”
“I thought you were having luck on that dating site.”
She pulled off the freeway and onto the congestion of Melrose Avenue. “You know what a woman really finds on dating sites?”
“No. But I think I’m about to get a lesson.”
She lifted her right hand off the steering wheel to count. “Catfishers, cheating husbands, old men that want to date women half their age, or men my age that want me to have an IQ of twelve and big tits.”
That sucked.
“Happy hour next week, then,” he offered.
“You’re on.”
Leo pulled through the gates of Neil’s home and parked in the circular drive.
He’d never been to the man’s home before, and was thoroughly impressed by the grounds alone. Gated estate, long, tree-lined cobblestone drive to a Mediterranean-style home. The sun had already set, but the house was completely illuminated by lighting in the trees and from the eaves.
Leo looked at the camera facing out from the door and rang the bell.
He heard running footsteps before the door opened.
“Hi.”
Leo stared at Neil’s daughter and realized just how stressed the man must be with his little girl dating. She was as beautiful as her mother, only with dark brown hair. “You must be Emma.”
“That’s me.” She opened the door wider. “You’re Leo.”
“I am.”
“Come in.” Emma turned away from the door. “Dad?” she yelled.
Gwen stepped into view. “Really, Emma? Must you?” she asked. Her British accent added an air of elegance to her words. She smiled at Leo as she approached.
“Sorry.” Emma found her inner lady and cleared her throat. “Oh, Father . . . your guest has arrived.”
Gwen chuckled and reached for Leo’s hand. “Lovely to see you again.”
“Sorry for the last-minute call.”
“At Neil’s request. No need to be sorry.” She walked him through the foyer and past a massive great room with twenty-foot ceilings.
“Your home is beautiful.”
“Thank you.” She walked by a pair of forgotten Reeboks and kicked them out of the way. “Kids,” she said.
“Those aren’t mine,” Emma said as she flopped onto the couch.
“Go tell your brother to come down here and clean up his mess.”
Leo walked past what looked like forgotten homework spread all over the kitchen table.
Emma started yelling again. “Hey, doofus . . . Mum said—”
“Emma Louise!”
Even Leo snapped his shoulders back when the girl’s middle name came out.
Gwen continued through the kitchen and down another hall. “Do you have children, Leo?”
“No.”
“They really are a joy.” She stopped at a closed door. “Except when they’re not.”
Leo laughed.
Gwen opened the door to Neil’s home office.
Leo was pretty sure the room was supposed to be another living room, or maybe media room. It was at least a thousand square feet. A desk you would expect in the Oval Office sat center stage. Several large chairs sat in various places in the room with coordinating tables. Two oversized sofas faced each other, with a large coffee table separating them.
Neil was on the phone when they walked in. He lifted a hand as if asking them to wait. “We’ll make that work. Thank you. I’ll do that.” He set the phone down and walked over to Leo’s side, hand extended.
“Did you run every light on your way here?” Neil asked.
“Only two,” Leo said, shaking the man’s hand.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Gwen asked.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Neil smiled at his wife. “Blake asked that you call Sam and coordinate dinner next week.”
“Lovely.”
Gwen excused herself and closed the door behind her.
Leo let out a breath. “You have an exceptional place here, Neil.”
He shook his head. “It’s all her.”
Leo stared at a piece of art on the wall.
It looked expensive.
“Do I have to ask, or are you going to tell me?”
Neil indicated the sofa and Leo made himself comfortable.
“Olivia is in Germany. Or was. She showed up at Richter searching for information about a former student.”
“The person who shot her.”
“So it appears.”
“There’s a list of recruits on campus?”
He shook his head. “Potential recruits, though I doubt it’s still there.”
Leo’s hopes dropped. “So . . . ?”
“We procured a copy, of course.”
Leo lifted a palm up. “Let’s see it.”
Neil gave a short shake of the head. “No. There are a lot of innocent names on the list. I have Sasha and Jax going through them now to try and narrow it down.”
Sometimes Leo forgot he and Neil weren’t exactly on the same team. “We could speed up the search if I plug them into the FBI database.” And stop the shooter from getting another chance at Olivia.
“Olivia’s name is on there. When Pohl died . . . how many Olivias did what she did and disappeared when the man who hired them was dead? The list is irrelevant to Olivia. She knows the name of the shooter . . . What she is looking for is bigger.”
Leo huffed. “Bigger than a list of assassins?” He had a hard time picturing what that could be.
“Secrets. Throughout the years, the board members of the school were responsible for the hiring and firing of the administrative staff. People like Pohl and Lodovica, the headmistress, recruited the board by learning the dirty secrets of parents who placed their children in the school and then blackmailing them.”
“So the board members knew what Pohl was doing?”
“Perhaps . . . some. It’s unlikely they knew the extent, but they would never ask the hard questions or risk their own exposure. AJ, for example, his mother had an affair . . . AJ was the result. Fast-forward several years and her husband is appointed as America’s ambassador to Germany. Things get sticky. Pohl tells the board filled with members like AJ’s mom to keep voting Lodovica in so he can farm in . . . literally . . . young orphans such as Olivia, and prime them to become his henchmen.”
That was some seriously fucked-up shit. “And the board does nothing.”
“Exactly. But for every Olivia there’s a Sasha. Orphans placed at the school to educate and protect them . . . teach them to protect themselves. Sasha’s father murdered her mother, and would have eliminated her, too, had he known where she was. The secret of who Sasha was when she was placed at the school, and who her benefactor was, is interwoven in those files. None of it dirty, unless given to the wrong person. We of course have no way of knowing what information is damaging, so it remains hidden. Only the board members were scrutinized when the entire thing came down seven years ago.”
Leo placed both hands on his knees as if he needed to lean in to digest the information. “And now Olivia is searching for these files.”
Neil nodded. “She knows we have copies, but she went to the source instead of asking us.”
“To not involve you.”
“More proof Olivia has changed from what Pohl had turned her into.”
Leo stood and started to pace. “She has a name and wanted any information she could get on this person to find them.”
“That would be what I’d do.”
“To what . . . kill them?”
Neil shrugged. “Maybe. If the attempt on her was personal.”
Leo closed his eyes, hated the nausea that the thought of her going after this person induced.
“Or maybe she wants to find this person’s Pohl. Who hired them. I’d be more interested in that name if this wasn’t a personal bullet.”
“Do we know if she got to these files?”
“No idea. Doubtful.”
Leo nodded as direction started to form in his head. “How did you know she was at the school?”
Neil leaned over and picked up a remote from the coffee table and pressed it. The back wall of the office started to move until the panels folded onto each other and revealed a series of monitors that ran the length of the room and added another five feet of depth. “Damn, Neil.”
The man actually smiled. “I’m rather fond of that.”
Leo crossed his arms over his chest to see what other James Bond shit Neil had up his sleeve.
Another click of a different remote and it all turned on.
The monitors were a patchwork quilt of camera angles from dozens of homes and businesses. It was a larger-than-life version of what Neil had in his headquarters.
Neil moved to his computer, pressed a few keys, and the majority of the monitors turned off, leaving the center one illuminated. He then expanded the image to fill the surrounding monitors and make the picture close to six feet tall and ten feet wide.
“This is Richter.”
Leo saw three images.
“Satellite, obviously. The front doors and the service entrance.”
“Olivia wouldn’t walk in the front door.”
“No. And she didn’t.” Neil scrolled through several different cameras, giving Leo a snapshot of life at Richter. “She is well aware of where these cameras live and knows how to avoid them. Any kid that grew up there would . . . so for people like Olivia, this is all useless information.” Neil changed the image of a different time of day. He stopped and zeroed in on a man. “This is Charlie. The kids refer to him as Checkpoint Charlie.”
Leo laughed. “Cute.”
“Properly named. He was the proverbial guard at the front door of the school. He is a big reason Sasha and Claire are still alive. This is the man who told me Olivia was there.”
“Is he on your payroll?”
“No. But he knows what’s happening on campus. I’ve checked in with him several times to make sure a new Pohl wasn’t around. He’s always helped out. When Olivia left, I messaged him and asked that he inform me of any visitors. He refused.”
“Why?”
“Maybe to protect Olivia? I don’t know. But she must have said something that convinced him to reach out.”
Leo ran his fingers over the five o’clock shadow he’d started to grow for a woman who was running away. “He wants us to find her.”
“I think he wants to help save every kid they lost. Including the one who shot her.”
Leo could see that angle. “Looks like Checkpoint Charlie needs to be interviewed. We need to know what he told her.”
“He’s not going to tell you,” Neil said.
“That’s not going to stop me from asking. Do we know when Olivia was there?”
Neil stared at him . . . silent.
Leo stared back.
Neil looked away, typed on his computer. “Charlie didn’t say. The campus is pretty tight. When we infiltrated, we went in late, in numbers, and we hacked the then internal system to go undetected.” He stopped the footage from the service entrance to focus on a truck. “If I were solo, I’d blend.”
The words on the truck were in German, and Leo couldn’t read them, but the image of sheets drying on a clothesline told him what it was.
“When was this taken?”
“Twenty hours ago.”
“Just enough time to put Olivia anywhere on the map.”
Leo did not know how he was going to get this one past his boss. Not that it mattered. “I need a plane ticket.” He pulled out his phone.
“Charlie will never talk to you.”
“I can be convincing.”
“They won’t even let you on campus.”
“Then I’ll see him when he goes home.”
“He lives there.”
Leo sat back down and opened a Google search for plane tickets. “If Gwen were missing, would you sit here and do nothing if you knew she was breathing on a different continent?”
“Put your phone away,” Neil grumbled. “Your flight leaves tomorrow at ten in the morning. I’m sending Jax with you. Claire and Sasha were both a part of blowing up the establishment and are scrutinized. Jax walks in unnoticed. Charlie might talk to her.”
Claire’s singsong voice repeating warm and fuzzy sounded in Leo’s head. “You’re a good man.”
“I have a team based just outside of London, they know Jax. If you find information you need to jump on, they are there, and I’ll be on the next flight out. Don’t be a martyr.”