Brett Battles - Shadow of Betrayal

“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.”

“I’ve been making arrangements,” Peter said. “This is a delicate matter.”

“You think?” Quinn said, unable to subdue his annoyance.

“It’s not something that can just disappear,” Peter shot back.

“Stating the obvious, Peter. I need a location. Someplace I can drop him off.”

There was a pause. “I’ve been on the phone with a friend from Washington.”

Quinn tensed. He didn’t like the idea of bringing more people into this. “And?”

“And he’s going to take care of it.”

“Exactly when is that supposed to happen?”

“He’s to call me back in five minutes with an address. You’ll leave the car there, then walk away.”

“This is someone you trust?” Quinn asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re not setting me up, are you?”

“No. Of course not.”

Quinn paused. “Five minutes?”

“Yes. I’ll call you back as—”

Whatever Peter was going to say was drowned out by the crunch of a car ramming into the sedan’s rear bumper.

“Shit!” Nate said.

Quinn kept his foot on the gas. In the rearview mirror he could see the other car. It was a Ford Explorer SUV. One of its headlights had been damaged by the impact and had gone out. But that didn’t seem to discourage whoever it was behind the wheel. He was coming at them again.

Quinn pushed the pedal all the way to the floor, but it wasn’t enough. The SUV slammed into them again.

He glanced at the rearview mirror again, expecting to see the grille of the Ford preparing for a third hit, but the truck had dropped a car length back, and seemed content for the moment to just follow.

“Nate,” Quinn said. “Get a visual.”

There was a pause, then Nate said, “The front window’s tinted. I can’t see inside.”

“How long has he been behind us?” Orlando asked.

Quinn shook his head. “Not long. I checked less than a minute ago, and he wasn’t there.”

As always, Quinn had been keeping watch on the road both in front and behind. Twenty seconds before the initial hit, Quinn was positive the SUV had not been following them.

Orlando’s phone began to ring. It must have gotten disconnected sometime during one of the collisions.

“It’s Peter,” Orlando said, looking at the display on the mobile.

“Tell him we’ll have to call him back.”

Quinn looked back into the mirror as she talked to Peter. The SUV was approaching again. Quinn switched his gaze to the road ahead. The end of the block was coming up quick.

“Hold on,” he said.

He waited until the last second, then whipped the wheel to the right, taking the turn at near full speed. The Ford grazed the corner of his bumper as it shot by, causing Quinn’s car to weave to the left.

The sedan’s tires screeched as they tried to grip the surface of the road, then the car rocked in protest as Quinn straightened the wheel before it settled down.

Quinn looked in the mirror again. The truck had missed the turn and was no longer behind them. He flicked his gaze back and forth from the road to the mirror, expecting the truck to reappear. But it never did.

A half block ahead, several taxis were parked near the entrance to a small hotel. Quinn slammed on the brakes, bringing the sedan to a stop.

“Out! Both of you,” he said. “Grab a cab and follow me. If that guy comes back, see if you can get a visual. Coordinate with Peter. He should be able to get us some backup.”

Nate was out the door before Quinn finished speaking. Orlando hesitated only a moment longer.

“Be careful,” she said.

“Go, go,” he said.

He waited until they were climbing into the cab at the front of the line, then pressed down on the accelerator again.

If Quinn had been the follower, he would have gone up another block and circled around so that he might be able to catch up to his prey at the next intersection. As he neared the end of the street, he slowed and looked left, hoping to get an early glimpse of the truck if it was there.

It being night in New York City, he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure. There had to be dozens of cars within a one-block radius. The majority were cabs, but there were still plenty of private vehicles, including a fair share of SUVs. None, though, were missing a front headlight.

He turned right onto Park Avenue, heading south toward Grand Central Terminal. A few seconds later, he saw Orlando and Nate’s cab pull onto the road behind him.

Still no sign of the one-eyed SUV.

Quinn reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He placed his thumb on the touch screen, deactivating the security lock. Glancing back and forth between road and phone, he found Orlando’s number in his quick call list and touched it. As the line began to ring, he engaged the speakerphone, then set his mobile on the passenger seat, securing the end in the crevice between the back and the bottom cushions.

“As far as I can tell, the tail’s gone,” Orlando said.

“Slow down a little,” Quinn said. “See if he’s hanging farther back.”

“Okay.”

He could hear her relay the instructions to the driver. There was a few seconds’ delay, then the cab slowed.

“Still nothing,” she said a minute later. “I think he’s gone.”

Quinn turned west on Forty-seventh Street, then south again on Fifth Avenue, each time relaying his actions to Orlando. As he crossed Forty-second Street and came abreast of the New York City Library, his phone beeped, indicating he had another call.