Five Dates with the Billionaire - Alyssa J. Montgomery Page 0,53
they tensed around the phone.
‘By sheer coincidence I had to investigate an insurance claim and had a passenger manifest on file for the very flight Mia Simms’ parents were supposed to have been on when they died.’
Supposed to have been on. Connor’s stomach hollowed out. ‘They weren’t listed?’
‘Get this!’ Tony made a sound of disbelief. ‘They weren’t listed on the original manifest I had on file. But, when I got an updated manifest, their names were there.’
‘There was a mistake on the first list?’
‘Unlikely.’ He paused. ‘Listen Connor, I don’t know what your interest is in your employee but it may be you’ve got me digging into something I’m not supposed to unearth.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Someone doctored the passenger list. It’s the only explanation.’
Adrenalin raced through Connor’s bloodstream kicking up his heartbeat. ‘Why would someone do that? How is it even possible?’
‘It shouldn’t be possible, so I double checked. I went back through a news source that named all the crash victims. The configuration of the aircraft meant it could carry 215 passengers. It was reported to be a full flight.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, the names on the original manifest I had on file matched those listed by the news source and added up to 215 but on the manifest I pulled up for this investigation—which listed Mr and Mrs Simms—there were 217 passengers which was—’
‘Impossible.’ Connor finished for him.
‘Yep.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘You got that right. Who is this woman, Connor, and why am I investigating her?’
Tony’s question struck right through his heart.
Who was Mia Simms?
‘She’s my employee and a friend of my grandmother’s.’ She’s the woman I’ve made love to. The woman who’s consumed my every waking thought since I met her properly only days ago. That was as much as he knew. ‘What I want to know is, what’s she mixed up in?’
‘It has to be a government agency, Connor.’
‘I’m not following you.’
‘If my suspicions are correct, Mia Simms wasn’t born Mia Simms and we’re looking at a falsified identity.’
His blood ran cold. ‘You’re telling me she’s someone else?’
‘I suspect so. Attending a school that burned down is a convenient way of explaining that all student records have been erased. Add in the doctored passenger manifest and there being no emergency contact person listed in her personnel file and she strikes me very much as a person who has no concrete links to the past. A secretive person who doesn’t want to be identified.’
It rang true yet Connor speared his fingers through his hair as he tried to make sense of it. ‘I forgot to mention that she dresses herself right down and says it’s because she’s more comfortable in the shadows. She wears glasses that only have plain glass and dyes her hair.’
‘As though she’s trying to disguise her appearance?’
‘Yes.’ He didn’t want to accept it, but all the facts were staring him in the face.
‘We’ve got far more we can look into, but from what we’ve unearthed in this couple of hours, I’m leaning towards the conclusion that the government’s issued her with a new identity.’
‘Why would they do that?’
Why? Why? Why?
‘She’s either a spy—’
Could that be it? His mind raced. If Mia was a spy, was she using her friendship with Violet … not to get to Connor as he’d first thought, but to get to Violet’s lifelong friend, Stanley?
Hell!
When he’d been head of MI5, Stanley had top security clearance and even now was acting for MI5 on some information sharing arrangement with the French. Who knew how many secrets he was carrying around in his head that could still be damaging if they fell into the wrong hands.
But how was Mia tied to Correlli?
Tony was speaking and Connor had missed some of what he’d said—something about it being unlikely Mia was a spy because of her age?
Tuning in again, he heard his friend say, ‘My most likely guess—and a guess is all it is—is that she’s in some kind of witness protection program.’
Witness protection.
Connor swore. He didn’t know what to think or which was most likely. Either possibility could be the reason for Mia’s evasiveness, but witness protection would make sense of her response to Correlli.
If he lived in New York, though, how would she have ever come into contact with him?
Memory of her bunged on upper crust British accent made his eyes widen. ‘Tony, is it possible she’s not British?’
‘That’s impossible to find out unless we had another name to investigate. There’s nothing we’ve located on Deed Poll about a change in name, but if