Simone was delighted to serve us eggs and bacon after that, and to keep it coming with more coffee. I didn’t speak much while we ate but noticed that Nazari wasn’t in uniform.

“Not going to work?”

“I called in sick. Today we do leg work on the vehicles.”

Nazari fixed up her laptop computer with the internet connection at Brumaire. She said that we would start by doing research on the companies that had registered the cleaner’s Ford van and the Chinese refrigerated meat truck.

Then we’d move on to the blue Opel Corsa, and the company it had been rented from. Then we’d see.

We setup Nazari’s laptop on the big table in the drawing room. She tapped on the keys for a while and then we both leaned over the screen and read the results. After that we did the same thing again. In the French system, basic corporate information is available to anyone on the internet. So we were able to see that both Argo Enterprises, and Gilbert and Sons were corporations registered in Paris. And that the Paris address for both was the same.

Nazari said, “It’s going to be a post office box.”

“Can we find out who owns the companies?”

“I’d have to go to Paris and look through the public records. They haven’t made everything available online.”

“I thought the whole world had been scanned and printed back onto the internet, or whatever they do.”

“Not yet, at least I don’t think so.”

“Anyone you can call?”

She leaned back. “You know they’re both going to be owned by another shell company registered in Lichtenstein or Panama.”

“And?”

“More leg work. They design shell company structures so that it takes years to track down the basic information.”

“They buy time by buying financial advisors.”

“Something like that. They hire experts to obscure the traces. The experts use computers and the internet to bury the companies in a bunch of other companies, with different owners and cutouts all over the world, in jurisdictions that don’t talk to each other. Across borders. In the end it’s all one person, or one group of people that own everything. If we had a team of computer guys we could do it. As it stands, we don’t.”

Nazari was right. We might find that information from another direction, but at the moment the vehicles were a dead end.

“What about the car rental in Lille? We could track down the Opel instead.”

Nazari tapped some keys. The rental agency in Lille wasn’t a large global franchise like Avis or Hertz, it was a local company, Pegasus Auto Leasing. She said, “They’re not going to tell us who rented the car over the phone. That’s confidential information.”