Agent with a History

"There must be nearly a hundred books here! These are all yours Rafferty?"

"Eighty six to be exact, and yes they are!" He finished testily, still wounded over my rejection of his favorite genre and author it would appear.

"What do any of these books have to do with our case?"

Sal picked up a book and I read the cover title, "Flint!"

"Got us to thinking about our mystery man a little more. He seems to be something of an international fix it man. While a lot of what we know doesn't appear to be illegal depending on your perspective, some of it most definitely appears to be. Stranger than that he seems to have no connection with any governing body here or elsewhere in the world, but rather seems to act independently. Which got us to thinking, maybe he's not alone. We took all of the main character names from the books by this author, both male and female, and this is what we got."

Sal slid his chair to the side so I could see his computer screen. It was a rough summary of thirty seven names. "As far as we can tell characters started popping up in the international scene in the mid 1970's and have continued on to the present. Some of the names don't have any recent activity, while others appear to still be active."

I nodded "Somebody was a fan. You think this is some kind of international firm specializing in problem fixing?"

They both nodded. "Good work you two, now what about our three killers?"

They both grimaced and Rafferty said, "Nothing on them. They entered the country two days ago with forged passports from France, but they had paperwork on them, which favors an origin of West Africa. That's all we got. We were able to dig up a good bit on Philippe though. Three years ago he acted as a guide for an archaeological expedition into the Congo area of East Africa. Something happened and only two managed to escape the expedition alive. One was Philippe Valo and the other as you might have expected was Ahmed Sazzar. Philippe seem to have disappeared for a while and Ahmed packed up his antiquities shop and moved to New York and starting working for the museum."

"A thief as a guide and an antiquities dealer along on an archeological expedition?" I scoffed.

"I know it sounds more like a tomb raiding posse doesn't it?" Rafferty added.

The lights in the building abruptly went out and Sal cursed loudly, "Why do they always time these black outs in the hottest part of the day!"