Guy Thomas called Mike the day after Christmas to tell him that they had found the fifth kidnapper hiding in the barn of a farm a few miles from the château. They had discovered the abandoned moving truck hidden in a clump of trees and made an intense search of the area, until they located him cold and hungry in the barn, with a horse blanket to keep him warm. The farmer and his wife were away for the holidays and their son was caring for their livestock, but he hadn’t discovered the intruder in the barn. Two local policemen had found him. He had fired a round of shots at them and missed, and no one had been injured. They had overpowered him, and he was in custody now with a DGSE agent and an interpreter interrogating him.

So far, he said that he didn’t know who the employer was, but he admitted to kidnapping Matthieu and her son. It made Theo realize that this investigation wasn’t just about protecting her, it was about finding Matthieu and Axel’s killers and putting them in prison for what they’d done. He confessed to both crimes, and to attempting to kidnap Theo. He admitted that they were going to take her and demand a ransom of fifty million for her since they had gotten shortchanged last time, and the man who had hired them had been very angry about it. He had said that Matthieu owed him the money and refused to pay him, and this was the only way he could get it, by kidnapping him and his son. It seemed to make sense to them in a convoluted, twisted way.

The kidnapper in custody told the Russian translator that the man who had hired them had said the widow would pay, and if they weren’t paid in full this time, they should kill her too. It was her last chance to pay her husband’s debt. It was a sick way of thinking, but it explained the motivation and how the kidnappers expected to resolve it. He didn’t seem too sorry to be in custody, he said that their boss would be very angry at them if they failed again in their mission to recoup his money, and he would kill them. And since it hadn’t gone as planned, he felt safer in jail than at the mercy of the man who had paid them for a job they hadn’t done.

He said he didn’t know where the other kidnapper had gone. He knew he had a friend in England, and was going to try and go there, but this man hadn’t heard from him, and he didn’t know what part of England the friend was in.