“Finn, you’re scaring me.”
“I’m not intending to, Debbie, I’m sorry. I don’t want to say too much on the phone, but I’ll be back in an hour or so. Just do as I ask until then.”
He ended the call and looked out at the evening streets, wondering whether Gibson’s partner was one of those people heading home, blithely unaware that his world was about to implode almost as comprehensively as it had for the Frost family.
And as it still might for the Portman family. It was a nonsense to kill Hailey Portman, but it wouldn’t be the most ludicrous decision he’d ever been privy to, and without the constraints of government sanction, with only Perry and Karasek as guiding hands, it was all too believable.
Either Gibson had been replaced or, more likely, their plan for Hailey could be carried out solo. An outright murder was unlikely—they’d gone to great lengths to avoid the attention of the police until now, so they were hardly likely to throw the advantage away at this late stage.
He assumed they’d try to engineer an accident, which would probably involve waiting for Hailey to leave the apartment. An explosion within the building was possible, it was true, but he doubted even Perry would go to such extreme lengths to silence a schoolgirl.
His thoughts ran aground again, unable to make sense of the need to silence two teenagers in the first place. He’d thought Jonas’s death had been a response to his continued prying, but if they were targeting Hailey too, it was more fundamental than that. It begged the question of what Perry thought they’d stumbled across on Gibson’s network.
Finn thought back to the memory stick and its contents. The only thing he could think of that might give them reason to be nervous was the mention of Naumenko and those numbered bank accounts, but even Finn had only understood the significance of those numbers because his own account was among them.
More likely, there was something even more sensitive amidst the vast amount of coded material Jonas and Hailey had found, and in their paranoia, Perry and friends had feared the encryption being hacked. But then, from the little Finn had known of Jonas, maybe that hadn’t been such a paranoid notion.
As had often been the case back in the days when this had been his job, the possible explanations were less important than the very real situation he faced in the present. Despite all his assurances, he now had to assume that Hailey’s life was in danger, and keeping her alive took priority over explaining the reasons for that threat. Ironically, all he knew for sure was that she’d have been safer if they’d left her in Uppsala.
When he arrived back in Lausanne, he had the taxi drop him at the end of the street and walked casually toward his building, taking in the cars that were parked here and there. None had an occupant that he could see.
Once inside, he went down to the parking garage beneath the building. There was his own car under its dust sheet—he hadn’t driven it in six months. Nothing else looked out of place. The boiler room was locked, but now that he thought about the position, an explosion there would take out the back of the building, not the front, so he could probably discount the total war option.
He took the elevator back up and called the Portmans’ number from the corridor outside their apartment.
He heard Ethan say, “Hello?” both through the phone and beyond the door.
“Ethan, it’s Finn. I’m outside your front door.”
“Do you want to come in?”
Finn couldn’t help but be amused, hoping it didn’t show in his voice as he said, “Yes, I’m calling because I told Debbie not to answer the door to anyone.”
“Of course.”
A few moments later, he was back in their living room. It was just him and the parents to begin with, but then Hailey came through and sat on the arm of the sofa next to her mother, putting an arm around her, looking for all the world like the protective parent rather than the endangered child.
Finn looked at Hailey as he said, “I’ve told you repeatedly that you’re not in danger. I spoke to someone in Geneva earlier this evening, and I no longer think that’s true.”
He noticed Hailey respond to the mention of his meeting more than to the change in her status, sensing that she wanted to ask who he’d met, whether it had been one of the people who’d killed Jonas, whether that person was himself still alive. Finn continued to meet her gaze but gave nothing away.
“How can you be so sure?”
It was Ethan, and Finn turned to him and said, “One of the people who killed Jonas returned to Lausanne this morning. If it weren’t for the two people behind this whole business I wouldn’t be sure, I’d think it nonsensical, but the people concerned are dangerous and ruthless and they seem to think that Jonas and Hailey, in hacking Gibson’s network, got hold of incredibly sensitive information.”