“Oh, boyo, I might have done worse than that.” It felt so fucking good to just be himself. Maybe he should have kept up the pretense, but it didn’t seem to matter. If they knew who he was, the op was blown and Ian was going to have his ass, so whether or not he spoke in his mother accent didn’t matter a good goddamn.
Why hadn’t he called Ian? Weston was right. Not once had the MI6 agent tried to wrest his phone away. As far as Liam could tell, there wasn’t anybody else in the small house. He wouldn’t bet his life on it, but he’d also gotten caught without his piece. There were too many checkpoints in London while doing the tourist crap with Avery, and then there had been the fact that he’d always intended to get naked with her. Finding his SIG nestled at the small of his back might have blown his cover.
But he’d still had his phone, and he hadn’t even thought about calling in his friend.
Because Weston had a temptation to dangle in front of him. Information. “You said you had information on my boss. My boss is Ian Taggart. I don’t work for the bloody CIA.”
A little light hit the Englishman’s eyes. “You don’t, but the question is who does Taggart work for? You know what they say about the Agency. Once an Agency man, always an Agency man.”
Liam didn’t buy it. Ian had worked for the CIA the same way Liam had worked for intelligence. They were soldiers who got called in from time to time. That was all. Except he’d heard about what Eli Nelson had told Sean just before he’d gotten away, just before he’d nearly killed both Sean and Grace. Sean had told Liam that the rogue CIA agent told him lies about his brother and his Agency status. He’d said Ian did wet work for the CIA. He’d claimed Ian was an assassin. “He got out a long time ago.”
Weston waved him away. “We can get back to that in a moment. For now I want to talk about our mutual interests.”
And this was the main reason he’d gotten his ass into Weston’s non-descript Benz. Weston was working Avery, and Liam needed to know what MI6 knew and whether or not they were going to close him down. “Avery. I take it there’s something going on at United One Fund.”
Weston frowned. “Yes. Obviously.” He studied Liam for a moment. “You aren’t here for Molina. You’re here for someone else. Who? What do you know that I don’t?”
Liam sat back, firmly in the driver’s seat now. And he wasn’t an idiot. “Tell me what’s going on at UOF first. How long have you been undercover there?”
“I suspect you already know, but I’ll confirm your intel. I got myself hired on at UOF about a year ago when we started tracking some suspicious shipments going into Africa and traced them back to the same planes that had brought over the UOF relief packages.”
Liam’s gut took a dive. Suspicious packages going into Africa usually meant one thing. “He’s running guns?”
Weston sighed. “Someone is. There’s been a surge in high-grade, low-cost weapons showing up in some of the most war-torn parts of Africa. And we tracked some shipments to Pakistan that have us a little concerned.”
“If they’re in Pakistan, they’re going to the Taliban and they can be used against Allied troops,” Liam surmised. “But there are hundreds of arms dealers. Is this one particularly big?”
“He’s single-handedly armed both sides of a recent bloody civil war in a small African country. If this is all the work of the same person or organization, they are having a significant effect on the continent, and MI6 doesn’t like the idea that the same thing could happen in the Middle East.”
He didn’t like the idea either. And he really didn’t like the idea that Avery was involved in it. “How have you connected Molina to the arms shipments?”
Weston’s face told the tale. “I haven’t exactly. Don’t get me wrong. I can tie the relief shipments to the same transports, but you know as well as I do that Molina can claim ignorance and hide his tracks.”
“What the hell is Molina doing in the arms business?” Liam asked, knowing damn well he’d just put a piece together, but he wasn’t exactly pleased with the fit. Eli Nelson would be interested in the arms deals. The arms industry would be very tempting for a man with Nelson’s connections. His problem was with where Molina fit in.
“I don’t know,” Weston admitted. “Look, the guy was a recluse for years. He founded UOF with family money, but he ran it out of his house for many years. Then about three years ago, he showed up at a board meeting with his lawyers and his brother in tow, fired everyone, and started over. He claimed it was because of mismanagement of funds.”
That was in line with what Liam had read. Thomas Molina and his brother had taken back real control of the Fund, and a few years after that Brian Molina had died of a drug overdose. “How far back do the deals seem to go?”
“I’ve traced shipments up to three years ago, but again, I don’t have the financials to back it up. Without those, it’s meaningless. I’ve been collecting all the data I can, but I haven’t cracked it yet. There are some files I can’t get into. I need Avery for those.”