The Collected (A Jonathan Quinn Novel) (29 page)

The best play was the old standby—act like you belong.

Before turning the corner, he clipped the guard’s badge high up on his jacket so it would be clearly visible at a distance. Next he examined the man’s keys, identified the three he thought would be most likely to let him into the IT room, and proceeded.

At first the nurses gave no reaction, but as he neared the door to IT, first one looked over at him, then the other. He smiled and gave them a friendly wave. Once they saw where he was going, they smiled back and returned to their conversation.

Quinn gave the doorknob a quick twist, checking to see if it was locked. It was, so he slipped one of the three keys into the slot. No go. Number two, though, worked just fine.

As he opened the door, he glanced back at the nurses, but neither seemed to even realize he was still there. He stepped inside and was enveloped by the hum of servers and routers. The room was about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide. There was one row of machine racks along the back wall, and two more down the middle. Against the wall that ran adjacent to the hallway was a long workbench.

At first Quinn thought maybe he was alone. The workbench and the area he could see around the racks were empty. He walked farther in, looking between the rows, and finally spotted a young guy with a mass of curly hair sitting at a computer station in the back corner. He was wearing headphones, and his body rocked forward and back as it kept time with whatever music he was listening to.

Moving in behind him was a piece of cake. The kid didn’t even know he wasn’t alone until Quinn’s arm wrapped around his neck.

As soon as he passed out, Quinn laid him on the floor, then picked up the phone and dialed 4-2-5.

__________

“W
HOA, WHOA, WHOA,”
Orlando said.

Quinn was standing several feet away, in a spot where he could keep an eye on the IT room door. “What is it?”

“A flag.”

He hurried over. “What kind of flag?”

“One that’s going to let someone know if I set it off.”

“Hospital security?”

“No. This is third-party stuff, outside.” She glanced down at the guy on the floor. “Don’t think Mr. IT there or any of his colleagues know anything about it.”

“Attached to Romero’s files?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “There
are
no Romero files. Everything must have been removed. There’s nothing even in the backups.”

“Then a flag on what?”

“Thought I’d give the hospital’s normal search function a try, just in case my program missed something. I checked the code first so I’d know how effective it might be. That’s when I found it. It’s set to go off if anyone searches the name Javier Romero.”

“Can you tell who gets notified?”

“A Gmail account. Probably a dummy address that forwards it on.”

“What does it tell them?”

“The parameters of the search and the IP location of the computer used.”

Quinn thought for a moment. “Can you manipulate what information it sends?”

She looked at him with distain. “Of course.”

He grinned. “How about you try this. Grab an IP address from a room in a nearby hotel, then do the search using ‘Javier Romero’ and ‘current location.’ That should get a response.”

Orlando stared thoughtfully at the screen for a moment. “If we want to guarantee a response, we should add
your
name to the search.”

“Great idea,” he said. “Do it.”

CHAPTER 46

J
ANUS SMILED AS
he walked down the hallway. Though he wasn’t fond of rising before daybreak, he did love waking up the prisoners. And since there weren’t going to be very many more opportunities, he wanted to relish each.

He let one of Romero’s security force open the door to the hallway they’d transformed into a cellblock, and then he stepped through. All was satisfyingly dark and quiet.

“Turn on lights,” he said.

Another soldier flipped the switches that illumined the corridor, and turned on the bulbs inside each cell.

“Wakie, wakie!” Janus yelled.

He moved down to the room that held the squat bald guy who’d upset Mr. Romero the night before, and pounded his fist against the door. “Get up! Time for more fun.”

He pulled up on the handle, releasing the bars that held the door in place, and gave it a yank.

“Up, up, up!” he ordered as he walked in.

The guy was already standing up, his face impassive.

“Hood and cuffs,” Janus told the guard who’d entered with him.

Once the prisoner’s head was cloaked and his hands were bound, he was led out of the room. Janus and another guard visited Berkeley’s cell. After that, it was Lanier, then on to the last two, Quinn and Curson.

Janus was surprised Curson had lived as long as he had. The shooter had put up a big fight when he arrived on the island, and had tried to escape when he was escorted to dinner with Harris. It had been Janus’s job to remind the man he had no say in anything anymore. One more beating and he was sure Curson would never get up again. Or, perhaps, this morning’s planned whipping would do the trick. That was, if he hadn’t already died in his sleep.

But first—Quinn.

“Wakie, wakie!” he yelled at the door to the cleaner’s cell.

As he did each previous time, he slammed his fist against it, then turned the handle and pulled the door open.

“Up, up, up!”

__________

T
HERE WAS A
loud knock on Harris’s door. He pulled it open and found Janus standing there, panting like he’d been running.

“A prisoner is gone,” Janus blurted out.

“What do you mean, gone? Dead?” Harris asked, knowing Janus’s English wasn’t always the best.

“No. Gone. Not in cell!”

A gentle poke, like someone in the back of his mind tapping a finger against a wall.
One small error.
“How the hell did that happen?”

“The vent, I think,” Janus said.

 “The vent? What vent?”

“In the door.”

The vents in the doors weren’t even wide enough for a child to crawl through. “Impossible.”

“Come. You see.”

Harris moved into the hallway and pulled his door closed. “Which one is missing?”

“Quinn.”

Harris paused between steps.
Quinn? Jesus.

He picked up his pace. “Show me!”

They ran through the old colonial fort, their footsteps echoing loudly off the stone. The door to the cellblock was open, a guard standing beside it. In the makeshift prison, four more guards were stationed in front of each of the occupied cells.

“I was getting them up for morning session,” Janus explained, now that they were no longer running. “Already had three out when found his cell empty. Put all back in and come get you.”

The door to Quinn’s cell was closed. Harris examined it. The vent cover was in place and nothing seemed out of order. There was, however, an odd scratch along the side of the door handle, thin but fresh. Had it been caused by one of the guards, or Quinn in his escape? Or had someone come in and let him out?

When he opened the door, the first thing he noticed was the rectangular metal frame lying on the floor. He looked at the back of the door and saw that it had been part of the vent. Kneeling, he put his hand through the hole and pushed on the slatted front half. With very little effort, the frame and slats popped out.

All right, but it still didn’t make any sense. Quinn couldn’t have crawled through it. And there had been nothing in his cell he could have used to reach the handle.

“Who’s looking for him? Please tell me someone is looking for him!” Harris demanded as he stood back up.

“Not yet,” Janus said nervously. “I came for you right away.”

“Check the fort first. If he’s not here, send everyone we can spare out onto the island! There’s no place for him to go, so he’ll be close. Find him!”

“Yes, sir.” Janus hesitated. “What about the others? And this morning? Mr. Romero will be—”

“Find Quinn first,” Harris ordered. “The rest can wait.”

__________

T
HE CHAOS LASTED
nearly half an hour before the noise in the corridor finally died down. None of the prisoners said anything for another ten minutes, each wondering if there was a guard standing just outside.

It was Lanier who broke the silence. “How did he get out?”

“Screw that,” Berkeley said. “Why didn’t he take us with him?”

“They said he went through the door vent,” Curson offered from farther down the hall.

“How could he do that?” Lanier asked. There was a thud and a bang. “If it’s the same size as mine, no way he could get through it.”

“I don’t know. I just know he’s gone,” Berkeley said.

“What if this is another trick?” Lanier said. “What if they took Quinn out last night and shot him? What if this is just them messing with our minds again?”

“Why would they need to do that?” Curson asked. “They whipped us. They electrocuted us. Don’t know about you, but my mind’s pretty messed up already.”

“I think they’re trying to give us false hope,” Lanier said.

No one responded to that.

“Hey, Jonathan,” Lanier said. “What do you think?”

Peter was stretched out on his bed, trying not to listen.

“Jonathan. You there?”

With a sigh, Peter said, “I’m here.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t think anything.”

“Come on. You must have some ideas.”

“Sure, I have one,” Peter said. “Looks like we just got a few hours off.”

__________

H
ARRIS’S CELL PHONE
rang as he was heading to Romero’s room to deliver the news. He looked at the screen. It was Ryan Porter, Romero’s point man on Isla de Cervantes.

“What?” Harris said.

“Mr. Harris,” Porter said. “Sorry to bother you, but just a little while ago someone used the database at Cristo de los Milagros
Hospital to look for info on Señor Romero.”

Harris slowed his pace, surprised. “Who?”

“I don’t have a name, sir. They used the IT department’s log-in, but the IP is from a hotel a few miles away.” There was a pause. “Sir, one of the terms they used for their search is on the hot list.”

“What term?”

“‘Current location,’” Porter said.

Son of a bitch
, Harris thought. Crap was piling up on crap now. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He needed to concentrate on finding the cleaner. That was the most immediate problem. “Just see if you can find out who—”

“Sir, they also included a second name in the search.”

A second name
? He was almost afraid to ask. “What was it?”

“Jonathan Quinn. Does that mean anything to you?”

Harris froze where he stood.

“Sir?” Porter asked.

“Send the men to that hotel, find out who made that search, and eliminate them. Call me as soon as you know who they were.”

CHAPTER 47

T
HE MARGUERITE HOTEL
was located a block from the beach in the touristy west side of Córdoba. It had been an easy hack for Orlando to insert into the hotel’s records that room 317 was occupied by a Mr. and Mrs. J. Quinn. That was also the room where the IP address she used in the search was assigned. In addition to room 317, she had claimed room 316 across the hall, and room 323 near the elevators.

Since they would need more than just the two of them to cover everything, they’d called Daeng and had him and, with some reluctance on Quinn’s part, Liz join them. They stationed Daeng in 323 and put Liz down in the lobby with a newspaper. Quinn and Orlando took room 316.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Quinn told Liz over the phone. She was their early warning system, tasked only with noting hotel arrivals.

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” she said. “I’m just reading the paper. If anyone asks, I’m an early riser who didn’t want to wake up her husband.”

“All right. Just…be careful, okay?”

“I will.”

After he hung up, he went over to the bed and sat next to Orlando. She was reading something on her computer.

“If no one shows up,” he said, “we’ll have to find another way to locate this son of a bitch.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She shut her computer. “A few minutes ago someone hacked into the hotel system, and checked on the occupants of room 317. I say they’ll be here in fifteen minutes or less. How about you?”

__________

T
HE TEXT FROM
Liz came seventeen minutes later.

4 MEN IN SUITS W/BRIEFCASES. NOT TALKING. LOOK SERIOUS. HEADING FOR ELEVATOR
.

“I should have taken the bet,” Quinn said as he forwarded the info to Daeng, then moved toward the door.

“Did I not mention the plus-or-minus-three-minutes factor? I’m sure I did,” Orlando said, walking up beside him and turning off the light.

Via the microcam mounted just above the frame of their door outside, they were able to monitor the door to room 317 on Quinn’s phone. No one was there yet.

Quinn’s phone buzzed with a message from Daeng that momentarily flashed over the video image.

DING!

Daeng’s proximity to the elevator meant he could hear when a car arrived. Apparently one just had.

Ten seconds went by before two men in suits walked past the room. Five more seconds and they came back, stopping this time at the door to 317, where the other two joined them.

They all set their briefcases on the floor and opened them. There was no question now why they’d come. Each removed a suppressor-equipped pistol.

Quinn shot Daeng a quick text telling him to be ready. He checked that his own sound suppressor was firmly attached to the end of his gun.

Veronique had supplied them with a variety of weapons. Quinn was holding his favorite SIG P226, while Orlando was carrying a GLOCK and had a vaccination gun full of sleep juice in her pocket. Daeng, too, was armed with a GLOCK.