11. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
The forty-eight-hour window was closing and once Nineah was officially declared missing by MPD I’d have been labeled suspect number one, brought in for questioning, and subsequently ordered not to leave the DMV.
From there, my odds at finding my wife would decrease at rapid fucking speed, so I’d taken a gamble based on the small amount of information I’d been able to extract from Halstead.
It’d been hours since Silver’s last check-in, but I wasn’t on assignment and she wasn’t my fucking handler, so I wasn’t waiting for shit.
According to the documents, sometime in the last sixteen months, Nineah had hired the forger to make Austrian, German, and Italian passports as well as corresponding national ID cards.
There’d been two versions of everything.
Different first names beginning with the initials N and G, but the same initial L for the surname.
The photos on the passports and IDs were similar, half consisting of actual photos of Nineah, but the others had a computer generated feel.
Almost too perfect to be real, but only noticeable if you looked too closely.
The woman resembled Nineah so strikingly, they could’ve been twins, but in her rendering, her skin was darker and hair lighter.
I didn’t breathe life into speculation, but I also couldn’t ignore this gradually sinking gut feeling.
Up to this point, the facts were immutable—somehow, Nineah had obtained a substantial amount of money, through legal or illegal means.
She’d either left on her own accord or had at least been planning to when she was taken against her will, and all signs were pointing to the latter.
There was an ambiguous voicemail with a nervous delivery sitting in my inbox that rang every alarm from North America to Europe. And lastly, she was fucking missing.
I wanted to believe whatever she’d dropped into was for a reason.
She was impulsive, sure. But I’d never known her to be reckless.
Even still, the part I didn’t want to admit or couldn’t, was that I didn’t know.
The woman I’d only seen glimpses of over the last year and a half had gradually become a shell of herself—granted, a polished, well-kept shell, but a shell, nonetheless.
Withdrawn, sullen, and perpetually wearing either blank gazes or red rimmed ones, she’d been so miserable those final months up until she moved out and no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise, I knew why.
Putting the images out of mind, at least temporarily, I drew a map out of my pack and powered up the burner.
No missed calls.
Dialing the local Taxi service, I ordered a ride to the address I’d memorized from the Austrian passport, then swiped over to the photos I’d taken of the identification.
I studied the first that contained my wife’s picture and the name Nadya Lowe.
Then the second with the artificially constructed woman, alias Gwen Lowe.
However, it wasn’t the matching Vienna address on either I was interested in—my intel had panned out nothing more than a vacant plot of land in that regard—but rather the airstrip behind the property.
Working on a hunch, I’d found that the addresses on the other two sets of passports had also been attached to a vacated or abandoned property with nearby airstrips, but only one of them was landlocked and accessible via a single road.
Taking a chance, I’d told myself I’d start there and work my way south, then north again if I had to.
Five minutes later, a gray and yellow taxi pulled up to the curb. I was rattling off the address to the driver when the phone in my hand buzzed.
Signaling to the driver to wait, I immediately answered the unknown caller with Silver’s code. “Shiloh.”
“Hey—”
“I found something I want you to look into,” I interrupted her.
“Yeah, maybe hold onto that thought. Lithuanian coast guard picked up a Jane Doe matching your missing person’s description just off the shore of Palanga and brought her into the University of Klaipedos hospital four hours ago.
No positive ID. Patient described as concussed, but stable.
Disoriented, and speaking English in small intervals of consciousness. ”
I stiffened. “Lithuania. You’re sure?”
“The only reason this even came up on my radar is because I’ve been tracking the phone lines from the cell you gave me and a single international call was made to an out of service number that used to belong to one of the owners of those lines.”
I was already out of the cab and moving.