The Enraged (A Jonathan Quinn Novel) (20 page)

The seam delineating it was nearly imperceptible—the paint and molding jobs top-notch. He moved his fingers along it, hoping the release would be in the same area, but knowing it wasn’t likely, given the quality of the workmanship. He finally discovered the release several feet away, right below the taillight, disguised as a rubber electrical system cap.

To be sure he was right, he turned it so he could see the backside. Embedded into the rubber was the thick, braided wire he knew from experience would be connected to the latch holding the trap closed. He was about to give it a pull when he spotted something else. Another wire had been braided into the main one, clinging to it like a remora on a shark. Together they disappeared behind one of the metal brackets.

Griffin frowned. There was no reason for them both to go to the latch.

He pulled his mini flashlight out of his pocket, closed the umbrella, and crawled all the way into the trunk. Moving as close as he could to the inside wall, he followed the wires around the corner by the taillights to the sidewall. There they split—the bigger wire continuing toward the trap, the smaller wire heading down into a metal tube that ran along the junction of the wall and the trunk floor. The tube was welded into place and painted to look like it was standard issue. It had even fooled Griffin when he first saw it, but now he was sure it hadn’t been manufacturer installed.

He traced the tube all the way to the back of the trunk, where it disappeared behind a metal plate and didn’t reappear again. Either the wire stopped there, or went through the wall into the back of the car.

With extreme care, he slid two fingers along the tube where it ducked under the plate. He didn’t get far before he hit an obstruction. He pulled his fingers out and tried again from the other sides. He closed his eyes as he traced the shape and drew a mental picture. It was some kind of junction, or relay, or…

Son of a bitch
, he thought as he pulled his fingers out.

A fail-safe switch. If he had pulled the trap’s release cable, it would have triggered some kind of self-destruct system, destroying anything that was hidden inside. Okay, so how would the owner open the compartment without losing the contents? There had to be a bypass somewhere.

He searched around, his fingers hunting in the spaces he couldn’t see into.

It took him twenty minutes to finally locate it. Thank God for the rain. If it had been a clear day, one of the yard employees would have probably wandered by and wondered what he was doing.

The bypass switch was hidden under an inspection sticker along the edge of the trunk’s lid. It was a tiny, two-position switch. He moved it into the opposite position, and crawled out of the trunk, hoping he’d disarmed it instead of arming it. The only way to find out was to pull the release.

Not one to waste time contemplating the unknowable, he grabbed the rubber cap and yanked. At first it resisted, as if it were rooted in place, then there was a
thunk
, and the cap moved away, bringing the wires with it. There was no sudden burst of flames or smell of dissolving chemical, only a second
thunk
as the top of the trap door swung open.

With a satisfied smirk, Griffin lit up the interior with his flashlight. The space was filled side to side by a black nylon bag. He carefully removed it, and looked into the trap again. Held in place by metal clips attached to the wall were a Walther PPX pistol, three preloaded magazines, and a suppressor.

Griffin reached into the compartment and searched around. There were no more loose items inside, but he did find two dome-shaped, incendiary devices fixed to the bottom, each one more than enough to destroy what had been in the trap.

Overkill. Which meant the owner had really wanted to make sure the black bag’s contents didn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Oops
.

Griffin unzipped the bag.

Not surprisingly, it was a standard dump-and-run kit: an envelope full of cash—about five grand, a change of clothes, and two passports, US and Canadian. The names were different, but the pictures were the same.

The driver, no doubt.

“Hello there,” Griffin said.

He pulled out his phone and took a picture of one of the passport photos. He then opened his e-mail, but before he could create a new message, he saw two e-mails waiting for him. One was from Morten, anxious for a progress report. The other was from Dima—no message, only three attached files.

Griffin opened them. The first was a picture of the woman. The second of the Asian man who had been in the car with her. And the third was the same man pictured in the passport.

Perfect.

Griffin opened a new e-mail, attached the photos from Dima and the one he’d taken, then wrote:

Identify. You have one hour.

Griffin

He addressed it to the best researcher he knew, a man who, like Dima, Griffin controlled. In this case, it wasn’t from knowledge of past criminal activities or some deviant sexual behavior, but merely by fear of Griffin himself.

Once the message was sent, he confiscated the Walther, its mags and suppressor, put them all in the black bag, closed the trap, and shut the trunk.

His work at the yard was done.

CHAPTER
22

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

A
N ICON FLASHED
in the corner of the Mole’s monitor, letting him know a new e-mail had arrived. At the moment, though, he was busy trying to coordinate his online team as they attempted to clear another street of the alien soldiers trying to invade Earth.

“Red Dog, what the hell are you doing?” he said into his headset microphone. “I said left side, dipshit. You’re with Monty, not Jasmine.”

“Why do I always get stuck with Monty?” Red Dog whined.

“What’s wrong with me?” Monty asked, his voice deep and booming. It wasn’t his actual voice, the Mole knew. The guy was a squirrelly, twenty-five-year-old grad student in the UK who’d purchased a vocal synthesizer. He’d be surprised that the Mole knew this, but then again, the Mole knew everything about his entire team.

The Mole was an info guy, a researcher, so looking into the people he gamed with was not something he even thought twice about. For instance, while Jasmine
was
a female, she wasn’t the kickass twentysomething she pretended to be online. Instead she was a sixteen-year-old honor student going through what he considered a prolonged awkward phase. Not that he was one to talk.

“I’ve got movement! I’ve got movement!” Ivan yelled.

The Mole, as team leader, had the ability to observe what each of his team was seeing. He switched to Ivan’s view. “Dammit! Everybody, left, left! Behind the building. There’s a whole squad of Jellys heading our way.”

The team scrambled down the street, but it was already too late. The Jellys—nicknamed for the way their guts poured out when shot—had seen them and opened fire. Warning lights started popping up on the Mole’s screen as members of his team were hit.

“What’s wrong with you people?” the Mole yelled.

“They came out of nowhere!”

“That wasn’t my side to watch!”

“Ah, crap!”

“I don’t think this is realistic! They wouldn’t have just shown up like—” The game cut off Monty’s voice the moment a Jelly’s plasma ray ripped through his combat suit. Once killed, a player was dead until the end of the battle.

The Mole looked around. Only two others had made it to the safety of the building with him, and one of them was badly hurt. The Mole had played the game so many times, he knew it was impossible for his team to finish this level with so few members.

Five minutes later, he was proven correct as his screen flashed white and his voice was cut off. Since he’d been the last man standing, there hadn’t been anyone to talk to anyway.

With the whole team dead, the game reset, putting everyone back in the ready room and reactivating communications.

“Well, that sucked,” Red Dog said.

“Way to state the obvious, asshole,” Jasmine shot back.

There were a few other choice comments before Monty said, “So are we going again, or what?”

The e-mail icon on the Mole’s computer was still flashing. He frowned, wanting to keep playing, but he did have a business to run.

“Five-minute bathroom break,” he said. “Then we go.”

He pushed his headset down around his neck, minimized the game, and brought up his inbox. It contained several unread messages. Two were notifications from his bank about payments he’d received—nice! One was an auto-generated message, from a bot he’d sent out to dig through some secured servers in Texas for some information a client wanted. The rest appeared to be requests for his services. He was always ambivalent about new work. While he usually enjoyed the process, the people asking for his help were, more times than not, pains in the ass.

He checked through the requests to make sure nothing was pressing, and made it three quarters of the way through before a sender’s address caused him to stop.

Griffin.

Shit.

The Mole could go for months without thinking about that asshole. Months when he could just do his thing, and not worry that he’d find Griffin sitting in his room with a big knife in his hand, ready to slice the Mole’s throat from ear to ear.

But not only did Griffin know where he lived, he also knew the Mole’s real name. None of the Mole’s other clients had any idea. Well, Orlando did, but she was a friend, probably the only true one the Mole had, and she’d never used her knowledge against him.

Griffin, on the other hand, was all about using what he knew.

A sound of scratchy voices coming out of his headset broke the Mole’s trance. He pulled it back on.

“—keeping time?” Ivan said.

“Come on. Let’s go. We’re losing daylight.” This came from Red Dog.

“Change of plans,” the Mole said. “You’ll have to go on without me.”

“What are you talking about?” Jasmine asked. “I thought we all cleared our schedules.”

“Yeah, well, mine just got busy.”

“Serious, man?” Ivan said. “You’re going to screw us up.”

“Red Dog can step up to team leader,” the Mole said.

“Uh, sure. I can do that,” Red Dog responded.

Of course he could, the Mole thought. Red Dog had been dying to lead a mission ever since they all teamed up. Well, here was his chance. “Try to stay alive,” the Mole said.

He quit the game, and set his headset next to the vocal modulator box he plugged into anytime he talked to a client. It was light years better than the one Monty used, and gave the Mole’s voice a deep, haunting monotone that he augmented with a slow, uneven speech pattern. No need to use the unit at the moment, though. He didn’t want to talk to Griffin until he had the information the man requested. Besides, Griffin knew what his voice sounded like.

As he opened the e-mail, he automatically started up the familiar daydream of ways he could remove Griffin from his life. Most involved scenarios viable only in video games, but the truth was, the virtual world was probably the only place he could ever beat Griffin. The Mole was not a physically imposing individual. He could probably outthink the asshole, but—

He shook it off. He just needed to get the damn work done, and Griffin would be out of his hair.

For a while, anyway.

He read the message.

Identify. You have one hour.

Griffin

Four image files were attached to the e-mail. The first picture was of a woman in the passenger seat of a car. A Toyota Camry, by the looks of it. The second was of a man driving the same car. This one included a shot of the license plate. The subject of the third was another man behind the wheel of a BMW, and the fourth was the same man again, only this time he was looking directly into the camera in what was most likely a passport shot.

Identify
.

No problem, that was right up the Mole’s alley. It was the second part of the message—the “you have one hour” part—that concerned him.

A good fifteen minutes of that hour had been wasted while his team of dweebs had offered themselves up for slaughter to the Jellys. Still, with clear photos, license plate numbers, and three quarters of an hour left, he should be able to get enough information to keep Griffin from getting angry.

Both license plates were from Washington, DC. Utilizing a hack he’d used a million times, he entered a national motor-vehicle database that linked information from all states and US territories. He selected DC, and decided to start with the BMW. Turned out it was registered to a corporation with a New York City address. He minimized the database window, opened a new one, and did a search on the company. It didn’t take him long to realize it was a dummy corporation.

“Wonderful,” he muttered. While he had no doubt he could eventually track down the real owner, it would likely take more time than he had left. Best, he decided, to save the BMW for later.

He went back to the database and typed in the number for the Toyota. A part of him expected it to be owned by the same phony company, but when he hit
ENTER
, the response he got was:

NO MATCH

The Mole gave the database the benefit of the doubt, and reentered the plate number in case he’d mistyped.

NO MATCH

That couldn’t be right. He highly doubted the car’s owner had hammered out replica DC license plates. Perhaps the number had been altered in some way.

He brought the picture back to the front of the screen, enlarged it until the license plate filled the window, and examined the image. The magnification caused a loss of resolution, but he could still make out the letters and numbers, and, as far as he could tell, none of the characters had been tampered with.

So why wasn’t the plate in the database? A glitch, perhaps?

He accessed the source code, and quickly determined that while the software was not even close to being the best written one he’d ever come across, there didn’t seem to be anything blocking him from finding the info on this particular plate.