He went back to his burger and shrugged. “You know I trade in antiquities. Cairo wasn’t the only place I went looking for a deal.”
“In Afghanistan? I thought the Taliban cracked down on foreign trade after the war on terror heated up.”
“They did. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t get in.”
He knew he was giving her the bare bones and that she was growing increasingly frustrated, and out of some strange sense of guilt he heard himself adding, “Look, there was nothing shady about it. I had a contact there who told me of a collector who wanted to sell a few of his pieces. I went to meet with him. It was all on the up and up.”
Which it had been. That time, at least.
“So why wouldn’t they let you leave?”
He lifted his water and took a long swallow. Oh, maybe it was because he had dealt with some pretty slimy characters in the past who had traded on the black market. Or maybe it was because he had turned a blind eye a few times when he’d known the provenance on a piece had been faked. Obviously INTERPOL knew that as well, or else he wouldn’t have been stuck in that Afghani armpit to begin with. Or it could have been because this time—though he’d done it all the right way—he hadn’t been quite as careful about who he told he was headed to Afghanistan in the first place.
A thought suddenly occurred to him. “Halloway knew about the blue notice.”
She looked up, brow creasing because he’d changed the subject so abruptly. “What’s a blue notice?”
“It’s a color-coded lookout INTERPOL sends to its member countries to assist law enforcement in their investigations. A green notice means they’re looking for some kind of dangerous career criminal, a yellow notice is sent out when they want to locate missing persons, red’s issued when they’re seeking the arrest of fugitives, and blue goes out on the wire when they want to locate people in certain criminal investigations.”
“You seem to know a lot about how INTERPOL works.”
“When you run with some of the people I have, you keep your ear to the ground and pay attention.”
Her brow lowered, and she studied him as if looking at a stranger. Then her eyes grew wide, and she held up her hand as she made obvious connections. “Wait. You were involved in a criminal investigation with the International Crime Police?”
He grimaced at the suspicion he heard in her voice and told himself it didn’t matter, though it stung to know she now thought her original assumptions of him in Cairo hadn’t been too far off the mark. Stung a lot. But what mattered most here was the fact Halloway knew about the notice.
“No,” he said emphatically. “The blue notice was a watch. It meant the Afghan government could keep me in one place while they checked me out. It meant I couldn’t leave and the U.S. couldn’t do anything to get me out until the notice went down.” He eyed her. “And it did go down, Kat, obviously, because I’m here now. I’ll admit in the past I’ve worked with some people I probably shouldn’t have, but on that trip I didn’t do anything wrong. They knew it, which is why they finally had to let me go.”
She touched the medal again, and he saw the flash of doubt in her eyes as she thought about what he’d said, coupled with questions she wasn’t sure she should ask. “So why are you surprised Halloway knew that? If he worked for the FBI, wouldn’t he be privy to blue and green notices or whatever you called them? The U.S. has to be a part of INTERPOL, right?”
“Yeah, they are. There are something like one hundred eighty-six member countries, and the U.S. is definitely a part of that. And if this guy really worked for the FBI, then yes, he’d know. But he said he worked for the Art Theft Crime Team and that they were watching me then.”
“So? Isn’t that part of the FBI?”
“Yeah, but the Art Crime Team wasn’t established until after I was in Kabul.”
Kat glanced around the empty restaurant while she ingested that information. “So he definitely wasn’t FBI.”
“I’m thinking not. He could have been at one point, but my gut says no. He’d have known when that division was established.”
“So who was he then? CIA? Why would he play like he wasn’t?”
“It’s possible he could have worked for Uncle Sam.