Page 22 of Thorn

“Play time’s over,” he said.

“All right.” She sat up, pulling the sheet across her lap and crisscrossing her legs in front of her. “Omega? No. We work for ourselves and, in this case, our goals and Omega’s are antithetical.”

“What are Omega’s goals?”

“Omega’s client planned a father-daughter reunion on foreign soil. They have been monitoring Juliette DuBois as have we.”

“Juliette DuBois and not David DuBois?”

“Both but for different reasons. Juliette started reaching out to people here in France for information about her family. And then she made a plane reservation just yesterday, a one-way ticket.”

“Because?”

“She wants answers.”

“Okay. What are her questions? Do you have the answers she’s looking for?”

Brigitte shuffled around.

“Do you know who kidnapped her and her child?”

“She doesn’t have a child,” Brigitte said, sweeping her hair behind her ears and looking him in the eye.

“A witness said there was a child.”

She shrugged.

“You said a father-daughter reunion. I saw three sets of players − you and your team, Omega’s team, our team.” He paused to watch her reaction. Her face didn’t change so he pushed on. “Our team just wanted to watch Dr. DuBois get safely on his plane back to the States. No contact. He wasn’t even supposed to know we were there. Obviously, things didn’t pan out that way. What did you want with him?”

“Dr. David DuBois and Juliette DuBois both find themselves in difficult situations.”

Thorn thought this was an odd statement since it was abundantly apparent in both instances. Juliette was a picture on a computer screen. He was to keep an eye out, intervene if he spotted her. His goal was David Dubois, Brigitte hadn’t illuminated her role.Interesting.Thorn had assumed that the daughter was taken to use for some goal as it pertained to David Dubois, but Brigitte, through her phrasing, seemed to be insinuating that wasn’t the case. Was Juliette a goal in and of herself?

“Do you know the time frame of these circumstances?” Brigitte asked.

Thorn sat still. He didn’t want to reveal just how in-the-dark he was here.

“Juliette Dubois got on a plane yesterday in Washington DC, flying to Paris, and then south to Toulouse, where she got a hotel room for the night. She took a taxi to her grandmother’s house this morning.”

Thorn nodded. He needed to turn on his app so Nutsbe could hear this. That move might break the warm post-coital bubble and might end the information gathering. Thorn started to mind-map the details, so he could recall them clearly later.

“David Dubois got to Toulouse this morning. One-way ticket. When David arrived at his mother’s house, the neighbor, who had videotaped Juliette’s abduction and called the police, met him outside and told him Juliette was kidnapped. David jumped back into his taxi and left before the police arrived. David made his reservations as he drove to the airport, first flight out of France was Brussels. The first opportunity to get back to America is tomorrow morning.”

It sounded like the timeline Titus gave them at their briefing was on target.

What kind of father would act that way? That wasn’t what DuBois said to them after they’d yanked him out of the airport. Thorn’s focus was razor sharp.

“You’ve got physical possession of David. You need to get him home immediately and safely where your intelligence community needs to sit on him. Hard.”

“We’re working on that.” Thorn liked to listen to Brigitte’s accent, the way she said David –Dah-veed. Though that pronunciation went with a poetic man, not the grizzly old guy in the rumpled suit Honey threw into the back of their car. “Who’s got Juliette?”

“We believe it’s Omega,” she said on an exhale.

“Why?”

“Thewhyis classified.”

Thorn understood classified. He wouldn’t be able to wrangle that information from Brigitte. But maybe she could tell him… “Who contracted Omega?”

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