Sharp Needles in the Haystack
Chapter 21
Pet, Jimmy and I conducted a thorough grid search of Vlad’s house for the slimmest hint of a clue as to his current location. It was a tedious exercise in futility until we located a loose floorboard in his bedroom.
Prying up the board, we discovered a hidden compartment where Vlad had secreted a few personal items. There was a Canadian passport in the name of Robert M. Blake of Toronto and odds and ends that supported the phony identity. I guess Vlad didn’t need the fake ID and didn’t worry about anyone finding the documents left behind. None of us saw any value in the documentation. Next we found a newspaper article in Russian that was torn in pieces. Lastly, we discovered an innocuous email from someone in Kenya. It seemed to be a bill or invoice or quote for services for a transportation company in Nairobi. They were slim pickings, but we were willing to grasp at the slightest straw if it helped us in finding Vlad.
It took Pet two hours to reconstruct the newspaper story. A few small bits of paper were missing which made the exercise more difficult. It was like trying to solve a picture puzzle with several key pieces missing. It turned out to be a rather mundane story about oil production that had appeared in Pravda some time ago. The essence of the piece centered on oil production in Saudi Arabia and gave details of the locations of wellheads and pipelines in the country. We logically surmised that these might represent Vlad’s future targets in the region. We were pretty astute investigators when it came to deducing obvious leads. I wondered why Vlad didn’t simply Google the information and download it to his computer. Maybe he had and later found the story held no value for him and left it behind. As seasoned detectives, none of us had a clue.
I had serious doubts about our findings and shared my concerns with Pet. We agreed not to report our discovery to our respective masters since there was a mole on the loose who would immediately report the fact to Vlad. We saw no point in making our situation any more difficult or dangerous than it already was.
I also harbored suspicions about the leftovers we examined. They all could be red herrings to throw us off his scent. I wasn’t ready to swallow my chum whole just yet. However, he could be playing head games by taunting us and had actually included a clue to his whereabouts. As Boris rhetorically asked at the outset of the case: who knows what goes through the mind of a sociopath?
Pet turned-in early complaining about her aching bones, specifically her ribs which had been badly bruised, but not broken. She’d heal in a couple of weeks with no lingering effects of the gunshot wound to her midsection.
I stayed up longer, pondering where the case might take us. I tried searching the net for transport or transportation companies in Nairobi. I couldn’t make a connection and came up empty handed and headed. But it was now our only viable lead, so we’d go with it and hoped it didn’t lead to another dead end. I stubbed out my last cigarette and went to sleep. Dozing off, my troubled mind seized on the final line in Gone with the Wind: After all, tomorrow is another day. And so it was.