Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(84)

“It’s funny you should say that, actually,” Gabby said. “Because I’ve been bored out of my mind, waiting for you guys to get around to actually calling me.”

She let that hang for a moment, just to make sure that the guilt trip stuck, and I rolled my eyes.

“And since I didn’t have anything else to do, I’ve been doing research wherever I could,” she finished. “Robin had already asked me to find out anything I could on Nathan, and I doubt I have to tell you how difficult that is when I don’t know his last name—and don’t even know if Nathan is his real first name.”

“Granted,” Nelson said. “So what search parameters have you been using?”

“Millionaires,” Gabby answered without hesitation.

“What?” I asked, surprised. “Why would you jump to that conclusion?”

She huffed. “Think about it, Robin. Who else would have had the money and the guts to start something like this? It’s not like he could have gone out and applied for a loan at the local bank. ‘Hello, sir, yes, I’m hoping to start a few online portals where some of my friends and I can discuss taking down the government, but I’m a little short on funds when it comes to all the tech and weapons we’re going to need. I mean, we might need airships, special suits, guns, all the computers… military contacts.’ It just makes sense that he was rich to start with.”

I blinked once, my mind reshuffling all the things I thought I knew about Nathan. Could it have been that he was some rich guy right from the start, and that was how he got all his toys? But that didn’t ring true. I already knew that he relied on donations for a lot of things. Heck, it’s what Jace and I were doing during those first few weeks of my joining OH+—recruiting people who could not only help with future missions, but also bring resources to the table.

Nathan might have been a millionaire, yeah… but he might also have just been great at networking, rather than spending a bunch of his own money all the time.

“It could be,” Jace cut in. “I mean, I haven’t known him for long, but I’ve never known Nathan to be short on funds, and there’s always more tech to be had.”

“And more convenient contacts in the military,” I said slowly, running through all the things Zion and Alexy had in their apartments, and the rapid acquisition of the second-skin suits. “His access to that stuff doesn’t mean that he had the money himself, though. Nathan’s proven that he’s a networking genius. Plus, we know that Alexy came from the military—she said as much. Couldn’t he also have just networked his way into all the stuff? It seems more his style, really.”

“Anyway, none of that matters, because it doesn’t tell us who he is,” Nelson said practically. “We need to know who he is if we’re going to track him and figure out where we’re supposed to go. It’s a good idea, Gabby, but you know the first rule of research.”

“Did it get me anywhere,” she said. “No, searching for random millionaires didn’t get me a damn thing. But then I thought if I reduced the parameters a bit…”

“Good girl,” Nelson murmured, nodding in approval, and I had to stop myself from smiling. It was like watching a professor teach a promising student.

“And I started searching for millionaires who went off the grid completely,” Gabby finished. “I mean, I don’t know for a fact that Nathan just disappeared from public life, or even that he was a millionaire. Maybe he wasn’t rich at all, or maybe he was and never disappeared, or maybe he did in fact start an underground organization to fight the government, kept making public appearances just to keep anyone from getting suspicious. But I was bored and waiting, with nothing else to do, and those guesses made just as much sense as anything else. I wasn’t getting any hits just by searching his name, but I figured if I could search what he was rather than his name…”

“And?” I asked breathlessly.

I could almost see Gabby shrugging. “I didn’t find anything concrete,” she said. “There are lots and lots of rich people who disappeared around the same time, fifteen to twenty years ago. I mean, lots of rich people who just mysteriously stopped appearing in public. And when I tried to look for them, there was nothing interesting. Random notes here and there, questioning what might have happened to so and so.” She paused for a moment, as if she was thinking, and then continued slowly. “But there was one guy. A guy who seemed… I don’t know, different.”

“How so?” I asked. “Less bragging, more explaining, please, Gabby. We’re on a deadline here, remember.”

“Right, sorry,” she said, her voice immediately faster. “So, as I was saying, I did some quick searches on a lot of these guys, and I didn’t get any useful hits, but the results were just that: a lack of useful hits. But this one guy was different. Disappeared from public life twenty years ago, just up and vanished. And when I searched him, there were hits. But when I followed them, they led to nothing. Just black holes in the web. Like there were firewalls that were reflecting my own image back at me—walls like I’ve never seen before.”

I exchanged frowns with Jackie, and then with Jace, but when I looked at Nelson, I saw that she seemed to understand exactly what Gabby was talking about.

“Next-gen firewalls?” she said shortly.