The search for the three remaining kidnappers was intense. One of them, the injured one, was picked up three days after the incident, on the Belgian border. He said he was going to visit a friend, and had been injured in a hunting accident. His fingerprints were a match and the DGSE brought him back to Paris for interrogation, which was carried on day and night until he broke down out of sheer exhaustion and confessed. As the murderer of two victims a year before, they had no inclination to go easy on him, especially since one of the victims had been a child. All he was willing to divulge was that they had been hired by a businessman in Moscow who had a score to settle. He didn’t know what it was or the man’s name. They were hired through an intermediary whose identity he claimed not to know either. They had been promised ten thousand dollars each to do the job, only received five thousand of it last time and were being paid another five thousand now to finish it. The ransom for Theo was going to be fifty million. It all matched up to the facts the DGSE had from their informants. Guy Thomas knew that the French government would never be able to touch the angry billionaire who had hired them. He was safely in Moscow, and too well connected with crooked friends in government who were protecting him, and who were probably getting a cut of the ransom too, if there had been one.

They didn’t allow the two men in custody to speak to each other and the search for the two other men continued. They contacted every source they had who might know something about the plan, and their whereabouts now. The trail went cold for two days and then Robert Richmond heard a whisper of information in London. It wasn’t much but led them to believe that the trail wasn’t entirely cold. There was a rumor that one of the kidnappers was at a safehouse just outside London. Agents from MI6 raided it within hours of the tip, and there was evidence that someone had been there, but he was gone when they arrived. But now that they knew one of them was in England, Robert continued to shake the trees as hard as he could, and hoped something would fall out.

Mike hadn’t been in contact with him since the day of the attempted kidnapping. He had his own problems to deal with, although he called Theo whenever he could to see how she was.