Little trap

By the time Noah and the shadow had arrived back at Olivia's second home, Noah had managed to get an update from both the bodyguard as well as Max. He had called both of them on speakerphone to let the shadow listen in as well as they were all in this together. The first person they talked to was the bodyguard, who had quite an interesting story to tell and he was happy to tell it.

He had been tasked with finding the henchman who had placed the bombs inside Noah and Steve's cars. Before he went out on his search, he had narrowed down the man's potential locations with the pictures they had found of him. Using the pictures to find landmarks, recognizable buildings, places, whatnot. Everything that he could get his hands on to narrow down the location of the henchman. This had resulted in him finding the two most likely locations for him to be at, from the half a dozen addresses that were in the system for him.

Once he arrived at the first address, he first sat there for a bit in café across the street. He was trying to see if he could spot any signs of someone being there. After an hour of nothing, he paid his bill and entered the building after woman who exited the building to walk her dog. He stopped the door from locking in such a swift way, entered so fast, that the woman didn't even notice she had been used. He quickly made his way up the stairs to the apartment number that was in the system. He knocked on the door and rang the doorbell while pretending to have a package for him. When there was still no sign of anyone being there, he looked around for a bit before he used one of the gadgets he had brought to enter the apartment.

When he walked through the rooms and looked in the fridge, the cabinets and touched the flat surfaces for dust, it became clear to him that no one had been there in days if not weeks. Yielding no results there, he glanced around both corners once more, before he left the apartment and made his way back to the busy street. Although there had been no signs of anyone being there for many days, the bodyguard couldn't shake this feeling he had and decided to follow through with it. Instead of getting back into the car and heading to the second address in his list, he grabbed the pictures from his pocket and he began to enter the buildings that seemed to be in the background of the pictures that were taken in the general area. He would ask the people if they had seen the man lately. Pretending to be an associate of some kind.

Of course he knew that people who actually knew the henchman would find his actions and questions suspicious. But since he currently had no idea where the henchman could be hiding and there were people watching the second location until he would get there, the bodyguard felt like he had nothing to lose by potentially spooking some of the henchman's fellow crooks.

If people who weren't directly associated with the henchman recognized him and said that he had been here in the last few days, the bodyguard would know that he should continue looking in this area instead of wasting his time at the other location. If the people the henchman did know recognized him and deemed the bodyguard suspicious, they would be sure to call their friend and let him know that there had been someone asking question. This would probably cause the henchman to flee from his current hiding spot and hopefully make him easier to find. It was almost like playing whack-a-mole. By smoking him out of what was a hard location to find, they would get a chance to catch him during his running attempt. This was because a person in a high stress situation will usually not make the wisest decisions. They act on impulse and a need to escape the fate they are facing. So, much like how a drowning man will clutch at a straw, they will run before thinking and expose themselves in the stupidest way possible.

With this idea in mind, the bodyguard had begun asking around and it didn't take long for him to find someone who glared at him the moment he mentioned the henchman's name. He denied having seen the henchman and glared the bodyguard down until he thought he had left or was at least out of earshot. But as a trained secret service agent, the bodyguard had quite a few tricks and gadgets up his sleeve. One of them being an earpiece that functioned as a listening device.

When the man behind the bar glared at him and started becoming angry, the bodyguard had pressed down a microphone just underneath the inner edge of the long bar table, before raising up his hands in a surrendering position. He backed away and turned around before revealing a little smirk as he made his way to a booth in a far corner of the bar. Shielded away by the high raised leather benches, he listened to the conversation of the bartender from a safe distance, while the other was still blissfully unaware that they were falling right into his little trap.