The Collected (A Jonathan Quinn Novel) (25 page)

“Everything I’ve done is only because I love you,” he whispered.

“I know.”

She squeezed his hand.

He had told himself that his hope for Liz and Nate’s relationship to eventually fade away was for her protection, to keep her from getting emotionally—and maybe even physically—hurt. And while that was true, he now saw that desire for what it really was—his own selfish need to control the world around his sister and keep her from harm.

“If I tell you that you can’t do something or come with us somewhere, you have to listen to me,” he said.

“I can’t guarantee I’m always going to be happy about it.”

“And I can’t guarantee I’ll always be nice about it.”

She pulled her hand from his, turned it sideways, and held it across the table. “Deal.”

He took her hand and they shook.

__________

Q
UINN PUT AN
arm around Liz as they walked back to the hotel. She returned the gesture, even resting her head on his shoulder for a moment.

The smell of the food they were carrying preceded them through the doorway as they reentered the hotel room. It’d been a while since their last meal, so Quinn was sure Orlando and Daeng would hurry over to grab what they wanted. But they both remained by Orlando’s computer, looking at the screen.

“You’ll want to see this,” Orlando said.

Quinn immediately set the bags down and joined them, Liz only a step behind him.

“What’ve you got?” he asked.

“Nate’s beacon went active again for a few seconds.”

“What?” Liz said. “You know where he is?”

Orlando shook her head. “No. There seems to be some sort of interference. Only bits and pieces got through. There was enough, though, for me to narrow it down some more.”

“How much more?” Quinn asked.

Orlando didn’t look as hopeful as he would have liked. “Pretty much the whole Caribbean, with the tip of Florida and a bit of Colombia thrown in.”

“You said you only had it for a few seconds?”

“Yeah.”

“Like last time,” Quinn said, disappointed.

“Actually, not quite like last time. Before, it kind of faded out. This time it was just there, then gone. No fade. Like he turned it off.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Could be anything.”

As Quinn straightened up, a whiff of the empanadas drifted by, but the hunger he’d been feeling moments before was gone.

“There’s more,” Orlando said. “Before Nate’s signal went active again, I dug into the radar database for this area. Given the time our security guard friend told us the plane took off, I was able to isolate the cargo plane’s flight path. The database only saves snapshot readings once a minute, and it’s from only the first thirty minutes of the flight before the plane moved out of range, but it gives us direction.”

She brought up a map showing Tampico and the rest of eastern Mexico. A line of unconnected blue circles started at approximately the location of the private airstrip, then headed almost due east over the Gulf of Mexico. After eleven circles—or minutes—the plane adjusted its path into a more southeasterly direction. After nineteen more, it was gone.

“I did a projection,” she said, and hit a few more keys. The map zoomed out to include the entirety of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Where the blue circles stopped, a straight, red line took over. “If they didn’t make any other course corrections, their flight path would have taken them over the northern tip of the Yucatan, between Cuba and Jamaica, over part of Haiti, south of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and finally over Dominica before moving out into the Atlantic.”

“
If
they didn’t change their flight path,” Quinn said. “If they did, they could be on any of those islands.”

“I didn’t say the info was perfect, but I think there’s better than an even chance that I’m right.”

Even if she were right, the area Nate might be in was still huge.

“Anything else?” he asked.

She scowled at him. “You weren’t gone
that
long. I was just finishing up programming a worm that I’ll send out to search for radar data along that path. Hopefully, we’ll pick up the plane again. It’s a long shot, but it’s automated so worth trying.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

Letting her get back to work, he helped Liz unpack the food. He then took a tentative bite of a
torta
, but set the sandwich back down.

Once more he was waiting, and once more he didn’t like it.

He pulled out his phone, needing to do something, and moved toward the window. Misty’s line rang five times, and he was kicked again into her voice mail.

“It’s Quinn. Really hoping you found something. Call me back.”

CHAPTER 39

WASHINGTON DC

T
HE EVER-PARANOID
Peter had chosen his hiding spot for the Office’s archives well, storing them digitally in servers belonging to the Library of Congress. Each file was encrypted within an existing text, meaning that if anyone accessed the file, they would only see a book or collection of documents that had nothing to do with the world of secrets.

To actually view the Office’s information, one had to know where in the document to click. This would take the user to a command program that looked like a computer error. But if the correct twelve-character password were input, the hidden information would appear.

For extra security, there were two additional steps needed if one were trying to access the files remotely. Unfortunately, Peter had kept those steps to himself, so Misty was forced to visit the John Adams Building of the library in person.

There, she had to wait until one of the public workstations freed up. When one finally did, she located the manuscript that hid the Office’s main index and began her search. Cross-referencing and matching up the names Quinn had given her with particular assignments was slow going. If the Office had still been in business, with all its data living on its own servers, she could have finished the search in no time. The method she had to use now meant going back and forth between dozens of documents, opening the secret information, and, more times than not, closing the file again when she realized the job she was looking at was unrelated to what Quinn requested.

So far she had amassed a list of twenty-three projects that met at least part of his criteria. None, however, was a homerun. She returned to the index, found the next potential match, and opened the appropriate file.

As she read through it, she unconsciously leaned closer to the monitor, the skin on her arms beginning to tingle. The ops crew was nearly a complete match. It wasn’t until she read the second page, where the cleaner was mentioned, that she leaned back, disappointed.

Close, but not close enough.

Still, she jotted down the project number and list of participants, then read through the summary in case Quinn asked her any questions about it.

That’s when the tingle returned.

She remembered this job. How could she forget? Jobs that went well were soon distant memories, but the ones that went badly stuck in her mind for a long, long time. This was one of those jobs.

There was something else about it, she remembered. Something unusual.
What was it?

She looked beyond the summary pages to the meat of the report, and found her answer on page seventeen.

After first making sure no one was watching her, she used her phone’s camera to photograph each page of the report. She then closed out of all the Office-related documents, packed away her things, and left.

There was no reason to look for anything else.

She had Quinn’s answer.

CHAPTER 40

S
LUNG BETWEEN THE
guards’
arms, the prisoners were returned to their cells one by one and dumped on their mattresses.

As the third one shocked, Nate was the third to be brought back. His body didn’t know if it should scream from the welts on his back, or the near electrocution the rest of his system had just received.

He lay on his side, wanting nothing more than for sleep to overtake him, but there was something he had to check first, something he was afraid he already knew the answer to.

He worked the pant leg over his right calf, and opened the seam so he could get into his prosthetic. He slipped his finger into the empty storage space, and immediately knew he’d been right to be concerned. The walls of the container, usually smooth, felt gritty. He pulled his hand out and examined his fingertip.

Black.

Dammit
.

He stuck his finger into the compartment again, and hooked it up toward the previously damaged emergency beacon button. Not only was there more grit, but what was left of the button was now deformed, melted. He tried pushing it, but the button was frozen in place.

No! Dammit!

Though most of his carbon-fiber prosthetic was purely mechanical and undamaged by the electroshock, the excess electricity had gotten to the emergency beacon and destroyed it.

For the first time, Nate began to despair. Though he’d known there was a chance the beacon had already stopped working because of the bolt, he’d still been hopeful. Now he knew whatever help it might have brought wasn’t coming, and if he was going to get out of his situation alive, it would be up to him alone.

Given his current physical condition, he wasn’t a big fan of his odds.

CHAPTER 41

Q
UINN STOOD ON
the balcony at the back of their room and looked out at the city. While the sun was still hovering above the western horizon, lights had begun to flicker on here and there. He heard the sound of a jet engine not far away as a plane roared down the airport runway, and from below the sound of cars moving toward home or work or who knew where.

The sliding door opened behind him, and Orlando stepped out.

“Anything?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Some of the storage systems the radar data’s on leave a lot to be desired, so that’s slowed things down.”

He nodded, returning his gaze to the city.

“What did you say to Liz?” Orlando asked, coming up beside him.

He looked at her, concerned. “Why?”

“It’s just, well, she said something nice about you.”

“Oh, she did, did she? And what was that?”

Before Orlando could answer, Quinn’s phone vibrated. He pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the display. It was a video call.

“It’s Misty,” he said.

As they headed back inside, he pushed
ACCEPT
. Misty appeared on the screen.

“Hi,” he said. “Was beginning to worry about you.”

“Sorry. It, uh, took me a bit longer than I’d thought it would,” she said.

“Did you find anything?”

“Yes.”

Not
maybe
. Not even
I think so
. But
yes
.

The others crowded around him as he said, “Tell me.”

“First I checked on jobs you and Berkeley shared. There were six.”

Exactly the number Quinn remembered.

“You and Curson were on seven,” she went on. “And Curson and Berkeley had ten in common.”

Twenty-three jobs. That was a lot to sift through, but better than it could have been. “Maybe if we go through them one at a time, something will stand out.”

“Wait. I’m not through. At first there didn’t seem to be any jobs the three of you were on together.”

“That’s because there weren’t any jobs the three of us worked on together.”

“You wouldn’t have known.”

He hesitated a moment. “A blind job?” Blind jobs were the kind where most of the players didn’t come in contact with each other. Quinn had tried to avoid those as much as possible.

“Not a blind job.”

“Then I’m not following you, because we were never on the same job. I would remember that.”

“You don’t remember because
you
didn’t actually work the job.”

He frowned. “Now you’ve lost me completely.”

“This particular job, you were originally assigned to it, but the date was pushed and ended up conflicting with something else Peter needed you for.”

That made more sense. Though it didn’t happen often, Peter had moved his schedule around sometimes. “So what job are we talking about?”

“Does Isla de Cervantes ring a bell?”

He thought for a moment, then nodded.

Four years earlier, Peter had called him with an assignment. The only thing he told Quinn at the time was the location: Isla de Cervantes. “Straightforward,” Peter had said. “You’ll get the details next week.” Only the details never came. A few days later, Peter called back, reassigning him to a job in Oslo.

But the memory wasn’t why the nape of Quinn’s neck was tingling. It was because Isla de Cervantes was in the same zone Nate’s beacon was in.

“I remember,” he said. “So if I hadn’t been removed, all three of us would have been on this job?”

“Yes. It’s the only time your names overlap on anything Peter was running.”

“Who else was on it?”

 “Three others. Four, if you count the man who replaced you. Geoffrey Saban was team leader, and Oren Karper and Zach Lanier were ops.”

“And the new me?”

“Michael Stallard.”

A competent cleaner, not quite Quinn’s level, but…

He looked over at Orlando. While Stallard and the first two names Misty had mentioned weren’t on their potential-missing list, Lanier’s was.

Orlando immediately understood what he wanted her to do. She walked several feet away, pulling out her phone.

“What was the job?” Quinn asked Misty.

“Termination of a man named Javier Romero.”

Romero?
Quinn ran the name through his mind a few times, but came up blank.

“Any mention of why he was important?”

“No. The file only contains what was necessary for the job. There
are
a few notes at the end in Peter’s personal code. They indicate that there was some kind of problem. No mention of what that might have been, though.”