Shadow of Betrayal - Brett Battles

Quinn didn’t want to take a chance driving around with a van full of dead men more than he had to, so they started with the cars first. They each took a sedan and drove south for twenty minutes before turning down a narrow back road.

After another ten minutes, Quinn spotted an opening between the trees. Not another road, nor even a cart path. Just a break in the vegetation wide enough for the sedan to navigate through. He was able to work his way almost a hundred feet into the brush before he could go no farther. It was enough. There was no way the car could be seen from the road. With any luck, it might be days or even weeks before someone stumbled upon it. By then, it wouldn’t matter.

He retraced his steps to the road, where Nate waited in the other car, and soon they were heading back north.

“Kind of fitting, I guess,” Nate said after a while. “Dying in a church.”

“Dying in church is a common thing, is it?” Quinn asked.

“Not the dying so much,” Nate said. “But being dead in church. You know, funerals. Memorials.”

Quinn looked at Nate, all but rolling his eyes. He then pulled out his cell phone and located a number in his contact list. The line rang twice.

“Hello?”

“We’re on,” Quinn said.

“When should we expect you?” the voice asked.

“Before dawn.”

“We’ll be ready.”

Quinn and Nate separated again at the church, Nate staying in the sedan while Quinn got behind the wheel in the van. This time they headed north toward Dublin. They kept their speed steady, not too fast, not too slow, so as not to draw undue attention. But they needn’t have worried. There were few other vehicles on the road. When they reached the Irish capital, they skirted around the south edge, and made their way to Dun Laoghaire Harbour.

The boat was ready and waiting. It was a private yacht, a forty-six footer that could be run by one person if necessary. A Meridian 411 Sedan. Luxurious yet practical.

The name painted near the bow read The Princess Anne.

The crew of two was waiting just inside the access gate to the private dock where The Princess Anne was moored. The men, David Baulder and Steven Howard, were people Quinn had worked with in the past and had come to trust. He had hired them and rented the yacht as a safety precaution just in case the need arose. That was part of being a cleaner, always being ready for any contingency, but not always having to activate your plans.

Dawn would arrive in less than two hours, so at best they had thirty minutes before activity at the marina picked up. The dock they were using had been chosen with care. Security in this part of the marina was lax. No cameras, no guard station, and only two motion-activated lights in the vicinity—one at the gate and a second on the dock. Both had been disabled.

Not wasting a second, they moved the plastic-wrapped bodies out of the van and onto the boat. There was no blaring of sirens in the distance, no sudden arrival of the police.

Fifteen minutes later, they motored through the marina and out into the Irish Sea.

Quinn helped Nate and Howard remove the bodies from the plastic, while Baulder piloted the boat. Once free of the wrapping, each of the dead men’s torsos was bound with a steel cable attached to a set of metal weights. The pieces of plastic that had enclosed the corpses were then folded and piled in the corner. Once all the bodies had been removed, the pile of plastic was wrapped with its own cable and weights.

After they were finished, Quinn went inside the cabin and pulled out his phone.

“Hello?” a female voice said. It was Misty, Peter’s assistant.

“It’s Quinn for Peter.” Though it was the middle of the night in Washington, D.C., Quinn was pretty sure Peter would still be there.

“Quinn,” Misty said, her voice mellowing. “We were wondering when you’d call. Hold on, he’s expecting you.”

There was a short pause, then Peter came on the line.

“Well?” he asked.

“The church is taken care of,” Quinn said. “The bodies are about to disappear, too.”

“No blowback?”

“Not from my end,” Quinn said, annoyed. He was good at his job, and blowback from anything he was responsible for never happened.

“Good.”

“The shooter?” Quinn asked.

Peter hesitated. He was notorious for not wanting to share more information than he had to. But then he said, “He’s on a plane. Should be here in a few hours.” Another pause. “You did great. Catching him, I mean. That’s bonus worthy.”

“You’re right. It is.”

The ship’s engines suddenly died down to a low rumble. Quinn stepped out of the cabin and onto the rear deck. The sky was a mixture of dark blue and faded orange. In the east, over the sea and toward the U.K., the sun would soon peer above the horizon.

Baulder called down from the bridge. “I’ve got nothing on the radar for miles.”

“Hold on,” Quinn said into the phone. He looked west first, toward the lights of the distant Irish coast, then did a sweep of the horizon. There were no other boats within sight. “Works for me.”

Nate and Howard took that as their cue. They lifted the first body off the deck and heaved it over the stern and into the water.

As they reached down for the next one, Quinn brought the phone back up.

“Consider the job done,” Quinn said. “That’s one.”

“One what?”

“Our deal. You’ve got two more jobs, then we’re clean. Goodbye, Peter.”

“Wait,” Peter said.

“What?”

“Was there … anything on the bodies?” Peter asked.

Quinn hesitated. He could still throw the tiny package he’d found into the ocean with everything else, and claim there was nothing. “I found an envelope,” Quinn said. “I assume that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Yes,” Peter said, relief in his voice. “Yes, definitely. That’s got to be it.”

“I’ll mail it to you when I get back.”

“I can’t wait that long. I need it now.”

“Well, you can’t have it now.”

“Where are you headed after this?” Peter asked. “Back to Los Angeles?”

Quinn remained silent.

“Okay, don’t tell me,” Peter said. “But wherever you’re going, can you at least make a connection close to me?”

Though Quinn wasn’t opposed to making life difficult for Peter, the envelope was obviously important enough for people to get killed over. The sooner he got rid of it, the better. “Atlanta work for you?”

“When?”

“I’ll email you,” Quinn said, then paused for a moment. “If your contact in Atlanta doesn’t show up on time, I’m not waiting around.”

He hung up.

The wind was beginning to pick up. It was brisk, bone chilling. As Quinn watched Nate and Howard toss the last of the bodies into the sea, he slipped his hands into his jacket pockets. The fingers of his right hand brushed up against the all-important manila envelope.

Whatever was inside had resulted in the deaths of four men. Quinn would be happy when it was no longer in his possession. But there was something that tickled at the back of his mind, that little internal warning signal he’d had since birth. This time it was telling him that getting rid of the package might not be the end of things.

He hated that feeling.

CHAPTER

5

ONE WEEK LATER

ROOM 531 OF THE GEIST HOTEL IN WASHINGTON, D.C. The only light was the blue-white glow emanating from ten wide-screen monitors. But for the three men standing together in front of the displays, that was more than enough. Peter, head of the Office, was more or less the host. It was his assistant who had arranged for the room, his techs who’d set up the equipment, and his agent standing guard near the suite’s exit. But it was really the other two men who were running the show. They were his clients, after all.

His two guests stood together, separating themselves from Peter as much as possible in the small space available. Except for their age difference, and the fact that the younger one appeared to be of Asian descent, they were almost like twins. Dark tailored suits, white shirts, and expensive Italian shoes. Even their hair was cut the same, close cropped with hardly enough left on top to run a comb through. The man closest to Peter was named Robert Chercover. Older than his associate by at least three decades, he was the one ultimately in charge. His title was purposely vague: Special Assistant to the Director of National Intelligence. But Peter knew very well what it meant. Chercover was in charge of handling problems no one else could be trusted with.

The man with him had been introduced as Kevin Furuta. Peter had never dealt with the man before, but he immediately knew he didn’t like him. At most, he was in his mid-thirties, yet he carried himself like he was Peter’s superior. The son of a bitch probably didn’t even have a quarter of the experience Peter had amassed. But Peter had to admit Furuta was in better shape, something the asshole didn’t seem to have a problem emphasizing. Any time he would talk, he would turn with his whole body toward Peter with his chest puffed out, and his arms held out to the side like his muscles were too big for his limbs to lie flat against his body. He appeared to enjoy the fact that at about six feet tall, he towered a good half foot over Peter. Peter took comfort in the knowledge that despite Furuta’s larger size, he would have no problem taking the bigger man in a fight. No problem at all.

In essence, the hotel room had been set up as a mobile strategic operations center. The furniture had been pushed to the side, making way for several long, portable tables. These had been arranged in a loose U shape. The ten monitors were set up on two sides of the U. On the third side were several pieces of equipment: receivers and computer-controlled hard drives both feeding and recording the images being shown.

All the screens were active. Those along the left displayed images from inside the hotel itself: the front and rear entrances, the main lobby, and the hallway on the fifth floor outside room 531. The images on the four monitors along the bottom of the U were murkier, and from a location nowhere near the Geist Hotel. These monitors had been numbered one through four right-to-left, the numbers superimposed in the lower right corner like a television network ID.

Monitor one was an outside shot. It was focused on a neglected apartment building two hundred miles away in New York City. A light rain was falling over the neighborhood, clearing the streets of anyone interested in an evening stroll. Lights were on in a few of the windows in the neighboring buildings, but none shone from the one centered in the shot.

According to the information Peter had received, this particular building was abandoned, a fact reinforced by windows that were either boarded over or broken. A set of concrete steps led up to the front door, where a faded paper notice had been stuck on the surface. It was too far away to read, but he had already been informed that it was an advertisement for a local concert that had long since occurred.

Monitors two through four were shots from inside the abandoned building. Number two showed the small empty lobby and the inside angle of the main entrance. Number three was focused on an equally empty hallway that fell off into darkness after only a dozen feet.

The image on monitor four, though, was different from the rest. While the cameras feeding the other monitors had been stationary, each securely mounted so as to give a fixed, steady image, camera four was anything but motionless. The image was in constant movement, up and down, side to side, and never staying in one position for more than half a second. This camera was mounted in an apparatus worn by their agent on site. It rode just above the agent’s right ear. As if to emphasize that fact, the sound of low, steady breathing came out of the monitor’s speaker.

Peter seemed to be the only one interested in the first three monitors. Since this was a solo incursion, and the only potential backup was several miles away, Peter knew he was all the protection the agent had. It was up to him to raise a warning if he saw anyone else on one of the screens. He had argued that this operation should have waited until an adequate team could have been put in place, but he had been outvoted.

“Agent Douglas knows what she’s doing,” Chercover had said.

“And we want to keep this low profile,” Furuta added.

It wasn’t the way Peter liked to run things, but he didn’t have much of a choice. Perhaps if he had been the one to hire the agent, he could have pulled rank. But she was CIA, and part of the National Intelligence apparatus. That made her Chercover’s responsibility. Peter’s search team had been following another lead that had taken them north into Canada, and Chercover hadn’t wanted to wait until they could return.

The only concessions Peter was able to get were to equip Douglas with the surveillance equipment they were now using to watch her movements, and to delay the incursion long enough so that Peter could send a small strike team up from D.C. to act as backup if necessary.

The image on monitor four stopped in front of a doorway.

“I think this is it,” Agent Douglas said, her voice coming over the speaker. “Someone’s tried to distress it, but it still looks out of place. Don’t know if you noticed, but most of the other doors were wood. This one’s metal.”

Chercover glanced at Peter. “Locked?” he asked.

Peter raised the small microphone he was holding to his lips. “Is it locked?”

A hand shot into the frame and grabbed the knob. Agent Douglas tried to twist it, but it moved less than a quarter inch before stopping.

“Yes, locked,” she said. “I think I should take a look at what’s inside. Am I cleared?”

Peter looked at the two men. Without moving his gaze from the monitor, Chercover nodded once.

“You’re cleared,” Peter said into the mic. Then added unnecessarily, “Be careful.”

Agent Douglas pulled out a lock pick set, then set to work on the keyhole. Peter glanced again to the other monitors, making sure she was still alone. His gaze lingered on the lobby shot displayed on monitor number two. It seemed as though something was different. A shadow perhaps, but everything was dark on darker, so there was no telling for sure.

“If it doesn’t feel right, get the hell out of there,” he said as he returned his attention to monitor four.

“I’m fine,” she said, her tone displaying her displeasure at being interrupted.

After several seconds, she stopped what she was doing, then turned the knob again. This time it moved.

“Got it,” she said. She stood up. “Okay. I’m going in.”

“I’m not liking this,” Peter said, both into the mic and to his two guests. If the door was hiding something important, it shouldn’t have been this easy to open. “Something feels wrong. I’m sending the strike team over.”

“It’s fine,” Agent Douglas said. “A strike team isn’t trained to look for things the same way I am. They might unintentionally mess up something we need.”