Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,76
across his expression. “He has two daughters, both under the age of seven. Why won’t he break? None of it makes sense.”
Drumming his fingers on the desk, Guy says, “You can’t discount him being a radical.”
“Normally that’d be my first assumption. But the two of you haven’t been here—I have.” The screen showing my brother’s face shimmers, then blacks out before cutting to a clip of Alfie Barker huddled on the floor, his wrists cuffed, his eyes livid with pain. “He cries every day. Begs to go home.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.” I ease my gaze away from Barker’s defeated posture. “He’s torn between saving his family and confessing to his boss that he failed the mission. Tough choice.”
“That’s the thing,” Damien says, switching the monitor so he’s back on camera again, “I looked at his phone records. Tore it all to shreds.” Another smooth drag of the cig, before blowing out an air ring of smoke. “All random numbers. Burner mobiles, no doubt. He’s been receiving instructions from what seems like everyone under the sun.”
“What are you getting at?” Guy growls from beside me, his hand a curled fist on his knee. “Get to the bloody point already.”
“I think he’s been talking to one person, and he just doesn’t know it.”
My eyes narrow. “How would he not know?”
“Because,” Damien says, stamping out his second cigarette in the course of ten minutes, “he’s being worked over by a pro. In almost every text conversation, Barker asks where they’re located, in case he needs to get himself and his girls out of the City. Glasgow. Chelmsford. Devon. The answer changes every time.”
I don’t blink. I’m not at all sure that I even breathe. “Damien, where do the mobiles trace back to?”
“London,” he answers evenly, “it’s always London.”
“Fuck.” Guy spears his fingers through his short hair. “Fuck!”
I concur.
Sinking back, I slouch in my chair. Not wanting to know the answer, but knowing that I need it anyway, I ask, “How many numbers are we talking? Five? Ten?”
“Over twenty that I’ve counted.”
“Christ,” I breathe, scrubbing a hand over my jaw. “And Barker doesn’t realize any of this?”
My brother shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
Guy drops his hand to the desk, his palm open and flat. “What I want to know is how they—him, her, whoever—picked Barker in the first place. What makes him special? He roped his brother and the brother’s friend into this mess, but it seems that it all starts and ends with Barker. Which, as we know—”
“Isn’t common,” Damien finishes. “I know, and that’s our problem. I can’t find a damned thing on the man prior to a year ago. It’s like he appeared out of thin air. I haven’t found so much as a birth certificate, let alone mention of a wedding announcement in the papers, and we all know that he was married.”
That explains the cigarettes and unkempt look, then.
Boy genius at his finest. There’s never been a puzzle Damien couldn’t solve, and it must be driving him insane to know that the truth is just out of reach. The Mad Priest in his natural habitat. The irony, really.
It’s Guy who speaks up first: “We’re working with someone who knows what they’re doing.”
I dip my head. “Security Service, maybe.”
“If not that, then someone with a lot of money to grease some palms.” Elbows planted on the desk, Damien props his chin atop his clasped hands. A frown tugs at his mouth. “I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to piece together a paper trail but it all leads to—”
“Nowhere.”
Damien nods at me, his face solemn. “Nowhere. It leads nowhere. We can keep Barker here, maybe bribe him with the possibility of seeing his girls. But with him thinking he’s been following orders from an entire network, when it’s only been one person, I doubt he’ll tell us anything worthwhile. The bastard’s in the dark about this as much as we are.”
It’s not a realization that sits well with me.
Running my finger along the scar, behind my ear, I feel the raised flesh. 502. Loyalty. Trust. Brotherhood.
“The king,” I mutter roughly, dropping my hand to my thigh.
Guy shifts in his chair, aiming it so he can look directly at me. “You’re thinking the assassination and this attempt are related?”
“I think that if we can discover who killed John, it might lead directly to the ghost who’s working Barker like a puppet on a string. Coincidences don’t exist. No one knows that better than us.”