“It worked.” Phillipa arches a brow as shock floods her face. “A majority of his wealth was amassed in the five years following his father’s death.” Her throat works hard to swallow. “As was his death count.”
What she’s saying is true. I scoured the reports myself. Even with age not on his side, Henry won the war, but his victory came at a cost. “Katarina couldn’t forget what he had done, and neither could Liam. They wanted nothing to do with Henry. Liam’s opinion only changed when Melody was born, but their contact was still sporadic at best. Katarina still hasn’t come around.”
Phillipa stares at me in shock for several long seconds, only speaking when her inquisitiveness gets the better of her. “How did you unearth all of this so quickly? This is a year’s worth of work, Brandon, and you did it in a week.”
She scoffs when I say, “It isn’t hard to unravel an entire outfit when you find a sturdy thread.” I place the invoices onto my dining table before moving toward a third set of timelines. “Do you recall back in 2009 when the government was left reeling from a year-long intelligence failure that compromised its internet-based covert communication system?”
Her face reveals her confusion, but she answers my question, nonetheless. “I was in my third year of college, but I remember my father saying the compromise left CIA informants vulnerable to an attack.”
I nod again, agreeing with her father’s assessment. “Although a lot of effort was put forward to undo their error, intelligence sources revealed the damage was so severe, it would never be wholly undone. The exposure had already occurred. Even with CIA scrambling to secure their informants, they dropped like flies.”
Phillipa’s head slants as her brows join. “Do you think that glitch had something to do with the Greggs’ accident? Although Liam wasn’t an informant, he could have been before he was recruited.”
I halfheartedly shrug before shaking my head, still uneased by my objective today. I’m usually the guy who coerces people off the ledge. I don’t tiptoe them toward it. “I had considered that, but I couldn’t work out why there was a stretch in timelines between his home invasion and their murders. So instead, I focused my efforts on the CIA’s compromised system. I discovered this.”
When I hand Phillipa Melody’s birth certificate that undoubtedly proves her parents were named Liam and Wren, her eyes bulge out of her head. It isn’t confirmation that Melody isn’t Henry’s daughter that has her shocked, it’s the fact Liam used the last name of Gottle on Melody’s birth certificate.
“Unlike me, Liam didn’t change his name when he was recruited. He wasn’t ashamed of it and had no issues discouraging people who believed he should have been. In some ways, it worked in his favor—”
“The Gottle name would have opened previously closed doors,” Phillipa interrupts, smiling.
I lift my chin. “But regrettably, it also kept his family under the spotlight Henry tried to shelter them from almost a decade earlier.” I exhale out a big breath before laying all my cards on the table. “I don’t believe the donation Col made to the Popovs was out of the goodness of his heart. I believe it was his cut to fund the second attempted Gottle takedown.” Phillipa looks shocked but remains as quiet as a church mouse. “The exact amount Col donated was transferred into a Russian operative’s account precisely one month before the Greggs’ home invasion. It was forwarded with two identical payment amounts… the Castros and Popovs share of the fee.”
“If this is true, how are they still in operation? Henry’s track record proves he doesn’t sit on his hands when threatened. If he had an inkling to any of this, the FBI’s wish list would have been sliced in half two decades ago.”
“That’s the issue. Henry doesn’t know about anything I’ve unearthed.” I stop before correcting myself. “Well, he didn’t.” Realizing I need to finish flipping one stone before moving onto a new one, I say, “When the takeover bid failed, the individual groups who orchestrated it folded rather quickly by pretending the Russian group they’d hired to do the hits had acted alone. Henry then responded with the notoriety he’s famous for. He steamrolled them.”
A vein in Phillipa’s neck works overtime when I backhand two oddly familiar faces on a makeshift perp board. “The Russian entity hired to do the hit on the Gottles was the Bobrovs?” When I nod, she