Time Sensitive Target

Part 44 - Invitation for Trouble

"You look so well," Lorres sauntered around the table and rested a glass of sparkling water on a coaster. "Are you okay for water?"

"I'm good, thank you," I cleared my throat. Lorres was five minutes early, I'd arrived ten minutes before her.

"Okay," Lorres took her seat opposite me, opening a thin folder and flicking through several pages. "So really, there are two people I'm interested in finding and I wondered if any of this looks familiar to you."

She pushed a few documents towards me and tilted the screen of an iPad to show four grainy photographs. There were two blurry headshots and two blurry full profiles for each of the men of interest, but neither of them jerked anything in my mind. I scanned through the documents obligingly, glaringly obvious discrepancies leaping from the paper.

"You suspect they were in cohorts with al-Raheem?" I frowned as I re-scanned the information.

"Contacts of his, or the other way around potentially, yes. I'll talk plainly," Lorres sat straighter than she had been, which I hadn't realised was possible. She was always so poised and elegant. "The hard drive al-Raheem had, went to somebody. Whether it was sold, or it was a dead switch... we don't know. But we do believe these two men were in touch with al-Raheem, and the one on the left has a background in data and IT."

"It says here they're Wahhabis?"

"Identified as, yes. They believe in only the purest, most orthodox form of Islam."

"No I know what Wahhabism is, it doesn't say they're jihadi though. I don't recognise either of them, or the links on here. But..." I hesitated, wondering if I was overstepping the mark by picking Lorres' loose theory apart.

"Go on," Lorres encouraged impatiently.

"Al-Raheem didn't pray. There were times others in the room would leave for prayers, but he didn't. I think he would say to them he would do it in the basement, but he never did. And he used non-Muslims to smuggle us from Greece, the Bulgarians weren't Muslim. The Turks were when we crossed, but... I can't even confidently say al-Raheem was a jihadi. He didn't seem to care about the religious side of Islam all that much, he was just a militant without a cause. I can't see two devout Wahhabi Saudis entertaining his calls."

"Interesting analysis," Lorres said eventually after pulling the documents back and reading over them again. "We have a link between them but it's weak." She sighed suddenly, clearly frustrated with the lack of progress. "Do you miss using your skills?"

I swallowed hard in alarm. I'd been so careful even at work to not let my memory talents show.

"My skills?" Breathe.

"Well you were doing a masters in Psychology, weren't you?" Lorres took a dainty sip of her bubbling water.

"Oh, yes. Yes I do, I suppose."

"Are you good at it?" She questioned blankly, raising her pointed chin with a direct gaze.

"I was... I suppose. I enjoyed it, it came naturally to me," I did miss it. The natural knack of reading people hadn't entirely left me, but the depth of hidden knowledge I could grab from an unwitting person, sometimes just by watching them, had faded a great deal.

"What if I..." she drew a laptop from her bag and tapped on it furiously before standing and walking towards a printer, scores of pages falling onto the tray. "...Showed you these," she divided the documents into three thin piles, transcribed notes from an interview with a brief bio on three different people. I read through them deftly, absorbing the information and forming loose assessments.