The Unwanted (13 page)

"Shall I?" Orlando asked.

"It might be wired also," Quinn said.

"Should be easy enough to check," she said. "The metal's warped at this end."

Without waiting to hear what Quinn thought, she got down onto the floor and pressed the side of her face against the concrete. She moved her light so that it played into the opening, moving it back and forth several times. After a minute passed, she sat back up.

"Clean," she said.

"You're sure?" Quinn asked.

"Enough to stake your life on it."

"My life?"

She moved over to the padlock, removed her set of lock picks from her backpack, then set to work. It took her less than thirty seconds to open it.

"This is the part where you open the door," she said after she removed the lock from the loop on the latch.

"Maybe Nate should do it," Quinn said.

She stared at him. "You trust me that little?"

Quinn let out a short laugh, then reached down. "You might want to stand back. Just in case you're wrong."

"Oh, I'm not wrong," she said. But she took a few steps back anyway.

Quinn smiled, then pulled the trapdoor up. There was a loud groan as the hinges protested under the weight of the metal door. Quinn swung it all the way open so that it was leaning against the back wall.

"You guys all right in there?" Nate called.

"We're fine," Quinn and Orlando said in unison.

Orlando shone her light into the opening, revealing a steep, narrow concrete stairway.

"Nate," Quinn said, voice raised. "We'll be on radio."

"Radio?" Nate said. "Where are you going?"

"That's a good question."

Quinn looked at Orlando, then mounted the steps and started down. He could hear her following him a few feet back.

"What's going on?" Nate said in his ear.

Quinn gave him a quick description of what they'd found.

"So I just wait here while you guys have all the fun?"

"Call Peter," Quinn said. "Get an ETA on his men."

"Okay," Nate said. "What if he asks me what we've found?"

"Tell him I'll call him when we're done."

The steps of the stairwell were made of stone and spiraled downward. It reminded Quinn of some he had climbed in old European churches, just tread after tread surrounded by walls and ceiling. A curving tunnel leading to God knew where.

When they reached the bottom, there was only one way to go, a brick-lined tunnel leading away from the stairs. Unlike the cramped space of the staircase, this tunnel was wide enough for them to walk side by side, and the gently curving ceiling just tall enough for them to stand upright without being concerned about head injuries. In the distance they could hear a low rumble, almost more a feeling than a noise.

"So someone was trying to hide a secret entrance into the building," Orlando said.

"Or a secret exit," Quinn said. "Say you're afraid of being followed. You could duck into this building, come down to this tunnel . . . and from here you can probably get anywhere."

"Should we stop?" Orlando asked. "Or should we see what's ahead?"

"Let's go on a little longer. I'd like to see where this lets out."

There was a trickle of water running along the floor heading in the same direction they were, indicating a downward slope. The bricks of the walls and ceiling looked old. Quinn guessed the tunnel might be even older than the abandoned building above, perhaps from the early 1900s or the late 1800s.

"Quinn," Nate's voice said in Quinn's ear. "Should . . . think?"

"Nate, repeat. I missed that."

"Can't . . . you."

"The signal doesn't travel well down here," Orlando said.

"Nate, hang tight."

"What?"

"Hang tight," Quinn repeated.

"Copy . . ."

"Nate?" Quinn said.

There was nothing but dead air. They had moved out of range.

Ahead, the tunnel seemed to go on forever. The beams of their flashlights pushed the darkness back only so far before the black took over again.

"What
is
that?" Orlando said, cocking her head.

It was the rumble. It had grown louder as they moved deeper into the tunnel.

"Subway," Quinn said.

Though the noise was basically constant, it ebbed and flowed like trains would do as they moved through the busy New York system.

"Something up there," Quinn said.

An opening in the wall along the right.

As they neared it, Quinn's first guess was an intersection tunnel. But soon he saw that whatever it was, it was covered by an old wooden door. Decades of dampness, with an assist from unseen termites, meant at best it had only a few more years before it fell apart on the spot.

But the door wasn't the only thing that was deteriorating.

"Smell it?" Quinn said.

"Yes."

He shoved at the door with the end of his flashlight. It resisted at first, then began to swing open, scraping the floor as it did. The smell was stronger now, almost overpowering. What made it worse was the noise that accompanied it, a combination of smacking and chomping.

As Quinn shone his light into the room, dozens of rats scattered in every direction. Several even headed out the door and between Quinn's and Orlando's feet.

"Dammit!" Orlando said as she jumped to her left.

"You all right?" Quinn asked.

"I swear to God one of them tried to crawl up my leg."

Quinn scanned the room with the light again. Except for the most tenacious ones, most of the rodents were gone now. Those that remained glanced up every few seconds, seeming to dare Quinn to try to make them leave.

In the center of the room was the feast they'd all been enjoying. The body of a man.

Quinn stepped across the threshold. Again the rats looked up but didn't move.

The space appeared to be an old equipment room, long retired. There were bolts extending up out of the floor where machinery had once been secured. Pipes, some as wide as six inches, stuck down from the ceiling in a group. They were all truncated, their open ends either once connected to the long-gone machines or created that way to serve as conduits for cables and wires to pass through to the world above. There were no other doors out, no storage cabinets, no tunnels in the floor. Just the rats, and the memory of the machines, and the dead guy.

"Too well dressed to have been living down here, don't you think?" Orlando said.

She had come in behind him, and was following close, flashlight in one hand and gun in the other. Quinn thought if another rat came within a few feet of her, she'd shoot it.

"Yeah," Quinn said.

The body was wearing a suit. Dark gray, and made with expensive-looking material. And the man's shoes. Mezlans. At least three hundred dollars a pair. Not the kind of outfit you'd expect a tunnel dweller to be decked out in.

The man was lying on his back. His suit was open, and the shirt had been ripped by the rats to get at the flesh underneath. There was even more damage along the man's neck and jaw, but his face was largely still intact.

"I think we can rule out natural causes," Quinn said.

The corpse's most prominent facial feature was not one he'd been born with, nor one caused by the rodents feasting on him. It was a bullet hole, a half inch above his right eye.

"He look familiar to you?" Quinn asked.

Orlando shook her head. "Someone you know?"

"I'm not . . . sure."

He took a step forward and looked hard at the man's face.

The state of the dead didn't always resemble that of the living. It was in the way the muscles let go, relaxing for the last time. But Quinn had seen plenty of dead, and had learned how to see the living in the decaying flesh.

And there was something familiar about this guy. Not the familiarity of someone Quinn knew personally, but more like someone he'd seen before. In pictures, or on TV, or something like that.

But no name came to him.

Quinn shooed a couple of the rats away with his flashlight, then leaned down and patted the man's jacket. The pockets were all empty.

He opened the jacket and moved it out of the way so he could check the pants pockets. In the left front pocket was a thin card carrier, the kind some men used instead of a wallet. Less bulk. More streamlined. Inside were two credit cards, an insurance ID, four business cards, and a driver's license.

The license gave him a name. Christopher Jackson. But it was the business cards that connected with Quinn.

Quinn stared at the top one for a moment, not sure he wanted to believe what he'd read.

"Who is he?" Orlando asked.

Quinn told her the man's name.

There was still a question in Orlando's eyes. It was to be expected. Even if she hadn't spent so much time out of the country, there was a good chance she wouldn't have known who he was. Quinn hadn't gotten it on the name, either. Though Jackson had a high-level job, he kept a very low public profile.

"The DDNI," Quinn said.

Her eyes grew wide. There was no need to explain to her what the initials meant.

DDNI—Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

CHAPTER
9

ON MOST JOBS THE DISPOSAL OF THE BODY WAS
the easy part. It was the time spent at the incident scene that could be the most problematic. The situation had to be assessed, cleaned up, and the body moved to the transport vehicle before anyone could come snooping around. It was during that segment of the job when the chance of discovery was at its highest. And if that happened, things could get really messy.

A body safely stowed in the back of a van or the trunk of a car, and the vehicle racking up the miles from where the corpse had been found, lowered the risks considerably. From there, it was straight to a preplanned disposal site. The Irish Sea for one, or an after-hours crematorium, or a deep hole in some out-of-the-way spot. Usually Quinn would have two or three options lined up. Often, as had been the case in Ireland, there would be a team on standby to help him. Being prepared was what made him one of the best.

Unfortunately, none of that applied to the body riding in the trunk of their sedan.

"Christopher Jackson. Born March 6, 1949, in Tampa, Florida," Orlando said.

She was in the front passenger seat, her laptop opened on her lap, as Quinn drove through the city. Nate was in the back seat, quiet but looking worried.

"He had been with the agency since the late eighties," she continued. "Worked his way up. Did some time in Germany, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and South Africa before settling in at Langley. Seemed to be a specialist-at-large, moving from one division to another. Eastern Europe, Mideast, Latin America." She looked up from the computer for a moment. "Building quite a résumé. Must have already been thinking about higher office." Her gaze returned to the screen. "He was number two in the office of Russian and European Analysis on 9/11. He quickly moved up from there. Became Deputy Director of National Intelligence two and a half years ago. Married. Two sons. One's still in college, Penn State. The other's just passed the bar exam in D.C."

"Politics?" Quinn asked.

"Nothing concrete here, but reading between the lines, he appeared to be a little right of center, but not much."

"And nothing about him being missing?"

"Nothing."

Then someone's keeping it quiet,
Quinn thought. The body was at least forty-eight hours dead. "Try Peter again," he said.

They had already tried calling the head of the Office twice since leaving the not-so-abandoned apartment building, but both times no one had answered. The last time Quinn had talked to him had been in the building hallway after Peter's men had arrived to pick up Al Barker. When Quinn told him about Deputy Director Jackson's body, Peter's initial reply was a shocked silence, followed by a quick "Get him out. I'll call you back."

Orlando switched her phone to speaker so they could all hear. After the fourth ring, Quinn was sure they'd be redirected to the generic voicemail message again. But then there was a click.

"Hello?" It was Peter.

"Where the hell have you been?" Quinn asked. "We're driving around with the—" He stopped himself from saying, "the DDNI." The chance anyone would be able to tap into his line was minimal. But minimal wasn't impossible. "With . . . someone we're not really interested in hanging out with much longer."