Brett Battles - Shadow of Betrayal

Fearing the whole museum complex, including the parking lots across the street, would go into lockdown the moment the police arrived, Quinn led Primus into the neighborhood farther south of Wilshire, then over to Olympic before heading west toward Fairfax.

He found what he was looking for near the intersection with San Vicente Boulevard. Another parking lot, this one serving a Shakey’s Pizza at one end and a Starbucks Coffee at the other. There was enough room for maybe forty cars, not huge but big enough.

Quinn concentrated on the cars behind the pizza parlor. The restaurant had no windows along the back, so he could work unobserved. And since it was only a little after noon, most of the car owners would most likely be in the middle of their meals and not returning soon.

It took him under a minute to find a car that was open.

“Get in,” he said to Primus.

“You’re going to steal a car?” the man asked like it was the crime of the year.

“Get in,” Quinn said. His tone left no room for further conversation.

Primus climbed in through the driver’s door, then maneuvered himself over the center console and into the passenger seat. Quinn followed him in and closed the door.

“Belt up,” he said as soon as he got the engine running.

“You’ve done this before,” the man said.

“Once or twice.”

Quinn dropped the transmission into reverse, and looked out the rear window as he began to back up. Their new ride was only halfway out of its space when two men came around the corner of the building. Young guys, in slacks and dress shirts. They came to a dead stop at the sight of the car pulling out of the space.

“Shit,” Quinn said.

“What?”

Quinn didn’t have time to answer. He hit the accelerator, whipping the car the rest of the way out of the space, just missing the passenger van parked in the next spot. There was a moment’s pause as Quinn shoved the car into drive, and the two men continued to stare at them. Then they all began to move at once, the car and the two men.

The men were able to pull level with the rear fender as Quinn reached the exit, but that was as close as they got. Quinn swung to the right and sped off down an apartment-lined street. In his rearview mirror, he could see the men give up running.

But not the chase, Quinn thought as he saw one of them pull out a cell phone.

Quinn zigzagged through the streets, moving south, then west, then south until they reached Venice Boulevard. He headed west, keeping pace with other cars and blending in. Soon they would be in Culver City, an independent city with its own police force. A stolen car from Los Angeles would not be high on the priority list of the Culver City PD.

He glanced over at his passenger. Primus had sweat beading on his brow and balding dome. His right hand was rubbing the spot on his left arm Quinn had been holding on to, a grimace of pain on his face.

“You all right?” Quinn asked.

“Fine,” the man said.

“Good. We agree on that,” Quinn said, knowing Primus would have been dead without him.

He slipped his hand into the interior pocket of his jacket and retrieved a square piece of plastic, half the length of a business card, and a quarter-inch thick.

“What’s that?” the man asked.

Quinn glanced over again, but said nothing.

The answer to the question was, “A digital recorder,” but if Primus was too stupid to figure it out on his own, Quinn wasn’t going to enlighten him.

There were a couple of buttons along the top. Quinn pushed one of them, then wedged the square into the partially opened, unused ashtray, mic facing out.

“Time to talk,” Quinn said.

“I told you the meet is off.” The man looked out the window. “In fact, you can just drop me off here.”

Quinn whipped the car to the right, ignoring the honks from the car he cut in front of, then brought them to a sudden stop at the curb. He reached over and turned off the digital recorder, then pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster and rested it in his lap below window level. One pull of the trigger and Primus would be looking for a new way to digest his food.

The sudden stop must have surprised Primus, for he hadn’t moved an inch.

“You want out? Fine,” Quinn said. “But the step you take onto the curb will be your last.”

“W-What?”

“Who are you?”

The man’s gaze flicked from Quinn’s eyes to the gun and back. “You shoot me and you’ll lose everything that I know.” The words came out slow, as if the man were trying them out as he spoke.

“True,” Quinn said, the gun unmoving. “But at the moment it would be pretty damn satisfying.”

Quinn continued to stare at the man, daring him to give a reason to pull the trigger. After only a few seconds, the man turned away.

“So, are you leaving or are you staying?” Quinn asked.

The man mumbled something.

“What?”

“Staying.”

Quinn stared at him for a few seconds longer, then pulled the car back out into traffic, aiming the gun away from his passenger only after they were in the flow with the other cars.

He reached over and turned the recorder back on.

“Let’s start with a simple one,” Quinn said. “Who are you?”

“No,” the man said. “That’s not part of the deal. It has nothing to do with what I know.”

“It’ll tell us how serious to take it.”

Quinn could feel the man tense beside him. “That gunman back at the museum should have told you that.”

“You could have set it up,” Quinn said. “To convince us.”

“You think I’d—” He stopped himself.

For half a minute neither of them spoke. Then the man said, “My name isn’t going to tell you if the information is any good.”

“Then tell me something that will.”

Again, silence.

“I know who you are,” the man said.

“Don’t count on it.”

The man let out a small laugh. “You’re that cleaner.”

Quinn kept his eyes forward and his left hand lying across the grip of his pistol, his outward demeanor as cool as ever.

“Quinn,” Primus said. “Jonathan Quinn.”

Quinn did nothing to confirm or deny.

“You were in Singapore last September. Right?”

Quinn remained quiet.

“You had an unfortunate encounter with an assassin. I believe she killed a friend of yours.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Me?” the man said. “I’m one of the ones she worked for.”

CHAPTER

21

HOW HE KEPT FROM PULLING THE TRIGGER OF HIS SIG, Quinn never knew. He wanted to. He wanted to so much that his index finger ached from desire. He wanted to see the expression on Primus’s face as one of Quinn’s bullets shredded the man’s insides.

If he was who he said he was … if he was in charge of the assassin who had killed Quinn’s friend Steven Markoff the year before in a quest to do the same to a U.S. congressman, then he was right. The only thing keeping him alive was the information in his head.

And if he was who he said he was, it meant one other thing, too.

He was a member of the LP.

Only why would the LP be trying to work with the DDNI and Peter?

A year before, Quinn hadn’t even heard of the group, and now here they were again. While his knowledge of the organization had grown in the last year, it was still limited. That first time he’d crossed them, Peter had told him all he knew: that the LP was a shadow organization working from both within and without the U.S. government, that they had their own agenda, a desire to use the government for their own gains, taking an active hand in ensuring that their investments would flourish. Conveniently, those investments seemed to be wrapped up in the defense and security industries. So the LP’s main tools for keeping those industries flourishing was destabilization and the occasional bout of chaos.

After his encounter with the LP in Singapore, Quinn had wanted to learn more. So with Orlando’s help, he began subtly nosing around. It wasn’t long before they both suspected the LP’s financial angle was a means, not the end, and that the desire for power, real political power, was the main objective. And to achieve this, they’d inject a bit of chaos and instability throughout the world whenever they felt it necessary.

Though Orlando couldn’t prove it with facts, she’d uncovered enough to know the LP played a large role in the Asian market crisis of the late 1990s. And that was only the beginning. It had only been a test for what both she and Quinn now suspected was a grander scheme, one that began the previous year. Soaring gas prices, an American mortgage crisis, then the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the publicly traded, federal mortgage organizations that had a hand in trillions of dollars of American home loans, both bought out mid-crisis by the U.S. government. And it didn’t end there. Financial institutions, near self-implosion, sold to other institutions for bargain-basement prices. Countrywide, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch. A consolidation of power, and chaos for the everyday man.

The only question was, what was their endgame? Because it certainly seemed like they were moving toward something. But neither Quinn nor Orlando could come up with an answer. So Quinn had turned over what they’d learned to Peter, then moved on.

According to Peter, he’d been unable to connect any more dots. He needed someone who had knowledge of the details. Someone who knew the LP, was maybe even a part of it. But no one had ever officially been identified as a member of the organization, so there had been no one to interrogate. Worse yet, most high-level government members didn’t even believe the LP existed.

DDNI Jackson had been one of the few believers. And the revelation of Primus’s connection to the LP at least cleared up in Quinn’s mind why the DDNI had been so actively involved. The DDNI would have had to proceed with caution, but here was a potential source within the organization itself, someone who could shed light on the true mission of the LP.

Quinn glanced at the man, his eyes hard and angry. “Name,” he said.

“I told you, you don’t need my name.”

Quinn adjusted the gun in his hand, making sure his movement was broad enough to draw the attention of his passenger. Since he was keeping his eyes on the road, he didn’t see the man look at the weapon, but he did feel Primus shift in his seat, his sense of superiority come down a notch.

“I will kill you,” Quinn said. “I don’t give a shit about whatever information you have. If you don’t answer my questions, I will kill you. Is that clear?”

A hesitation, then, “Your boss at the Office won’t be too happy if you did.”

“I don’t care. I will kill you. Right where you’re sitting. Do. You. Understand. Me?”

“Yes.”

“Then answer the question.”

He could hear the man take a deep breath, then let it out.

“Hardwick,” the man said. “My … my name is James Hardwick.”

A tickle in the back of Quinn’s mind. He had heard the name before.

As if in confirmation, Hardwick said, “We’ve met before, you know.”

Quinn didn’t respond, but he knew. It wasn’t recently. Hell, not even in the last ten years. It was back when Quinn was still an apprentice for his mentor, Durrie.

A stuffy room … in Jordan … Amman.

The target had been an arms dealer who had crossed the wrong people. Durrie and Quinn weren’t there to remove the body. Their client wanted the body found. They were there to remove any evidence that might have been left by those who had done the killing.

Hardwick had been in that room. He’d sat in the corner as others did the briefing. Only once did he speak. He’d been asked to elaborate on something one of his colleagues had said. He spoke for maybe thirty seconds, then went silent again. Quinn had the clear impression at the time that the man was a desk jockey, not an operative, brought along as an information source only.

Until that afternoon, those thirty seconds in Jordan were the last words Quinn had heard the man speak. Hardwick had been thinner then, with a lot more hair. He had also been CIA. So how long had he been splitting his loyalty between the Agency and the LP?

“You remember, don’t you?” Hardwick said.

Quinn pulled into the center turn lane, then made a left onto the small road that ran along the east side of the old Helms Bakery Building. He only stayed on it for a moment before turning left into a small parking lot next to an art gallery. There were half a dozen open spots along the Venice Boulevard side. He chose one in the middle of the group, pulling in as close to the car on the right side as he could so it would be impossible for Hardwick to open his door and flee.

As he turned to Hardwick, he switched the gun from his left to his right hand, the barrel never moving from its target. With his free hand, he reached over to the digital recorder. He pulled it out of its resting place, then took a quick glance at the display screen to make sure it was still running. Satisfied, he shoved it back into the ashtray.

“Okay. What is it?” Quinn asked.

Hardwick’s brow creased, a question on his face.

“The information you have for us. What is it?”

Hardwick nodded, then leaned back against the passenger door like he was trying to put as much room between himself and the gun as possible. “All right.” He paused. “At first we weren’t sure what was happening.”

“We?” Quinn asked. “The CIA?”

“I’m not CIA anymore. I haven’t been with the Agency for over six years. NSA now.”

“Sorry. I haven’t been keeping up with your career.”

“You’ll check me out anyway and find out soon enough. I work directly with the National Security Advisor.”

“You still haven’t answered my question. I don’t think ‘we’ was in reference to the NSA, or am I wrong?”

Hardwick stared at Quinn for a moment. “You know you’re not wrong.”

“Then say it.”

“What? That the information I have has been developed by … an outside organization?”

Quinn stared at Hardwick.

“Do you want what I have to tell you or not?”

Quinn said nothing.

“Then I can continue?”

A single nod.

“At first we didn’t know what was happening. In fact, we still don’t know everything. But something bad is about to go down. That is, unless your people do something to stop it.”

“Why haven’t you tried to stop whatever it is?” Quinn said.

“We are not… equipped in that way.”

“You could have used your NSA resources. Gotten word to the right people.”

“Better to keep this separate,” Hardwick said.

Quinn snorted, but motioned for Hardwick to continue.

“I chose Los Angeles to meet for a reason,” Hardwick said. “Enough time has been wasted, but this is the last time I do any of the work for you.”

“I’m sure we can arrange a medal for you later,” Quinn said.

A perfunctory smile from Hardwick. “Northeast of here there is a facility. It used to be military, but that was decades ago. Though the facility was transferred to civilian use, it has remained very hush-hush. Even the locals don’t know about it. Not that there are really that many locals around. The government called it Yellowhammer.”