A week or so had gone by since they had first gathered to conspire to bring down Pelant. Once they'd put their genius brains together, they had begun to formulate a plan, one that they felt needed the experience of someone who had been on the opposite side of the law. And so here they were again in Limbo, enlisting the experience of Max Keenan and hoping that he wouldn't stray outside the confines of their conspiracy in their efforts to take down Pelant. The important thing was to take him out without compromising any of them in the process.
"But isn't the idea to stay off the grid as much as possible?" Booth looked at Max skeptically. He still wasn't complete convinced that they should be involving Max in this whole thing. He was a bit of a wild card, but despite his background he'd garnered their trust, most of the time. At least he knew for certain that he wouldn't knowingly do anything to sell them out to Pelant.
Max was quick to answer. "Like it or not, you're already on the grid, and unless you all disappear like Tempe had to last summer, flooding him with plausible misinformation is going to be far more effective. Besides, if you disappear, you'll never find him."
"Max is right." Angela knew that although Pelant was a genius, he was likely using computer algorhythms to be able to keep tabs on them all. And she had a sneaking suspicion, that the primary target of his sick little game was Booth and Brennan, the rest of them were there for dramatic effect and as a result far more expendable. "He thinks he's smart, and he is, but all of us collectively are smarter than he is." It was strange how Pelant had somehow been able to undermine their ability to function as a team, to short circuit their strength of working together to beat the bad guy.
"Not knowing where he is puts us at a decided disadvantage." Cam would have felt far more secure if she knew exactly where their adversary was. Without that important piece of information, they were going to have to find a way to lure him out into the open before they could take him in. As much as she was all for having Pelant arrested, he knew how to manipulate the system way beyond the average suspect and she felt only slightly guilty that she was hoping he'd be taken out in a blaze of glory so they wouldn't have to deal with a trial.
"I don't think he knows where we are all the time the way we think he does. He knows where we are most of the time because he knows where we live and work, and it is logical that he knows where we shop for groceries and do our banking because he's figured out some way to track us, but he can't anticipate what we're going to do if we stray from that predictable routine, and it's going to take a while before he can detect any sort of pattern if we do. We have to do the unexpected all the while feeding him partial truths." Brennan had learned a thing or two from her father while she'd been on the run. And while going completely off the grid was not going to work to their advantage this time, there was no reason why they couldn't turn the tables on Pelant and out maneuver him.
"I don't think you should rule out that you've got someone in your midst that's working with him." Max was sure that his comment wasn't going to be popular, but given the crimes that Pelant had been able to commit, he didn't believe that he'd ben able to do it all on his own.
"Which is exactly why no one outside of this room knows about what we're up to. No one." Booth made a point of looking directly at Cam before directing at the others. "Not any of the squinterns, not Caroline, not any significant others we don't know about, not anyone."
"I'm very good at not telling secrets." Sweets had certainly kept a whopper from everyone here - he was the only one who knew that Zack hadn't actually participated in murder as Gormagon's apprentice. He hadn't even told Daisy when they'd been together, and he'd told her many things he'd never told another person. He was confident that he wasn't going to be the one who might accidentally leak information.
Hodgins rolled his eyes, he was the king of conspiracy theories. Clearly none of them were going to say a damn thing. "Fine. Alright. Lips are sealed." He might not say anything to anyone outside of Angie, but if he had a chance to take down Pelant by himself, he didn't think he'd pass it up this time.
"I'm serious." Max continued. "Sure this Pelant guy is smart, he might have even had some martial arts training, but trust me, no one accomplishes the kinds of stuff he's been pulling without some help. And when I say help, I don't really mean squinterns." He looked at Booth. "I'm thinking more along the lines of someone inside law enforcement."
All eyes were on Booth.
Booth's jaw was set as he considered Max's words for a moment and then glanced around the room at the rest of the team. "You don't think I haven't thought about that?" He'd thought about it everyday when Bones was on the run. But he really had no solid idea of who around him at the Bureau would be dirty, especially among those he had to trust everyday.
Angela interjected. "Given Pelant's tech savvy abilities, someone could unwittingly help him." He'd used sophisticated low tech means to infiltrate networks through the bar codes in library books and he'd managed to infect the Jeffersonian network by encrypting computer coding in bone knowing it was going to be scanned.
"The guy is scrawny. Don't tell me that you think he has the ability to overpower someone, dissect them and then string them up in some sort of freaky poses." Hodgins knew that a small guy could be strong, but he had nearly choked the man to death. If he was such a mastermind of super strength, super smarts, and super stealth, he would never have let himself be in that sort of position. He was convinced that Max was right and that Pelant had spun his own conspiracy.
"Well then we need to compile of list of people who potentially could be his accomplice, unwitting or not." Brennan liked lists. They could either rule someone out or someone in based on criteria that they felt was pertinent.
"His Achilles heel is his ego." It occurred to Sweets that someone as prideful in his supposed achievements as Pelant was would need to continue to feed his ego through more displays of his genius. He wanted the Squints and Booth to think that he was superior to all of them and as long as he felt they were buying it, he was in the game. If he sensed they were on to him, the game would get extremely dangerous. It was imperative that they be successful in neutralizing him because to entertain the possibility of the other option meant that not everyone standing her right now might be here at the end.
"Maybe we're going after this all wrong." Booth deflected the quizzical looks and continued. "We've assume that Pelant is in this because we exposed him the first time, that he chose to go after us because we just happened to be the team assigned to the case. We're not giving ourselves enough credit. As smart as he is, he's just another bad guy and what's the one thing we do better than anyone else? We catch bad guys."
"We know all that, Seeley, what's your point?" Cam wasn't really sure where he was going with this since he hadn't really made it clear.
"My point is that what if he's connected to some other case we all worked on? What if the reason he's tracking us and trying to make our lives miserable is because in some way he holds us responsible for creating that for someone else?" Booth looked determined. "We need to go back and try and look through as many old case files as possible and see if we can find a connection."
"Booth, that is going to take weeks; maybe even months." Brennan didn't think they had that kind of time before Pelant caught on to what they were doing and found a way to thwart them.
Angela seemed to have an idea of her own as a conspiratorial smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. "I think Booth's on to something, but I don't think we need months to look through all of the old case files, I think we just need to focus on any of those files that were involved when Pelant first hacked into the FBI computer system. I think that's where we're going to find our answer."