Shadow of Betrayal (6 page)

Quinn glanced at Nate, then looked back into the car. “You all right?” he asked.

Nate’s face was sweaty, and even in the low light Quinn thought he could see red splotches on his apprentice’s neck.

“I’m fine,” Nate said.

Quinn looked over again, this time his gaze moving momentarily down toward Nate’s legs.

“It’s fine,” Nate said, noticing Quinn’s line of sight. “No problems. I just ran over a mile to get back here, for God’s sake. You’d be sweating, too.”

Maybe
, Quinn thought. But he said nothing. He’d only allowed Nate to accompany him this time because he was tired of saying no. That, and Orlando had argued it was time.

“If you keep putting it off,” she had said, “you’ll never know what he can do. And after a while, you’re going to start hurting his confidence.”

A cleaner without confidence was either working in some other field or more likely dead. So Quinn had reluctantly agreed to let Nate come along, all the time wondering if his missing lower leg, replaced now by a man-made prosthesis—albeit state-of-the-art—would be a hindrance or just an annoyance. So far, much to Quinn’s surprise, it had been neither.

“Clear his weapons,” Quinn said, nodding toward the bleeding man in the car.

Nate nodded, then walked around to the other side of the vehicle. Within a few seconds, he’d removed both the man’s pistol and the sniper rifle, and had patted the man down in case he was carrying anything else.

“Clear,” Nate said. He then pulled himself out of the car and brought the weapons back around, setting them against a tree ten feet away.

“You should let me go,” the assassin said. They were the first words he had spoken. His accent was American. Midwest. Not Chicago, more like Kansas. Of course, it could have been just a put-on. “My client won’t be pleased.”

“I don’t really care,” Quinn said.

“You should.”

“But I don’t.”

The man grew quiet.

“You bring your phone?” Quinn asked Nate.

“Yes.”

“Call in. Get an ETA.”

“My employer’s men will be here before yours,” the assassin said.

Quinn ignored him. That, he knew, was a bluff. There was no reason for anyone to come after the assassin. He either did his job or he didn’t. There would be no backup or cleanup team. In this case, leaving the bodies would have been desired. They’d be a message.
Don’t mess with us.

Nate pulled out his phone and walked toward the road beyond the rear of the car.

The assassin shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I did what I was hired to do. So whatever operation you’re running is screwed.”

“The only operation I’m running is catching you. And right now I’m trying to decide if you died as you tried to get away or you shot yourself to keep from being taken.”

“My employer wouldn’t like that.”

“I don’t give a damn what your employer likes or doesn’t like,” Quinn said.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “That would be a mistake.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Quinn said.

The transfer went smoothly. Peter had sent three men. Two left in the SUV they’d arrived in with the assassin restrained in the back, while the third drove the gunman’s sedan away.

“Let’s get to it,” Quinn said to Nate once the others were gone.

They started walking back up the road toward the church. Even though there was a lot of night left, they still had a considerable amount of work to do before the sun came up.

The bodies were first on the list. Not surprisingly, pocket checks of the dead men revealed very little. Peter’s men each carried forged IDs on the off chance they got pulled over by the police. The other two men had none. The only thing the guy outside the church was carrying was a spare mag for his gun. But his partner, the one who had been inside doing the talking, was carrying a little something extra.

It was a tiny manila envelope, an inch wide by about an inch and a half long, and bulging a bit in the center. Whatever was inside, Quinn
guessed it must contain the information that was supposed to have been passed on. Peter’s precious haul, no doubt. The reason he’d been so adamant about keeping the assassin away from the bodies.

Quinn was tempted to leave it in the man’s pocket and tell Peter he hadn’t found anything. But as satisfying as that was to consider, Quinn didn’t operate that way. He slipped the envelope into his own pocket, then looked at Nate. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” his apprentice said.

One by one, they placed the bodies on top of a large piece of plastic sheeting with whatever weapons they had been carrying, then wrapped them individually, securing them with a healthy amount of duct tape. They then stacked them in the back of the van where Quinn’s and Nate’s chairs had been.

While Nate searched for casings beneath the tree where the assassin had been positioned, Quinn worked the blood-soaked ground, covering it with mud and loose bushes. By the time night came again, no one would notice the stains on the soil.

The body removal was the easy part. It was dealing with the vehicles that was trickier. There were three of them for only two people— the van, and the two sedans the meeting’s participants had arrived in.

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.

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.