The Silenced Read online

  “How many more names are on the list?” Quinn asked.

  “Moody was the last,” Wills said.

  Quinn raised his eyebrows. “Last? Are you saying you came all the way over here to let me go? Or do you want me on standby for once they’ve taken care of Moody?”

  “No,” Wills said. “There’s something else I need you to do. A related job.”

  “What do you mean ‘related’?”

  “Mr. B asked if we could do a special project for the corporation on the side.”

  Quinn’s eyes narrowed with concern. If it was a project that involved him, it would mean someone was going to be killed. A few deaths of amoral thieves selling bomb plans to terrorists was one thing, but corporate murder? That would be going somewhere Quinn wasn’t comfortable with.

  Wills seemed to sense Quinn’s reluctance. “It’s not what you think.”

  “If it’s not what I think, then you don’t need a cleaner.”

  “There is a body. It’s in London. Hidden in a building that’s about to be demolished.”

  “Wait, what? Are you saying it’s already there?”

  Wills said nothing for a moment, then nodded. “It’s been there over twenty years.”

  “I GUESS THIS ISN’T A SURPRISE,” NATE SAID.

  “Not really,” Quinn agreed.

  They were still in Manhattan, standing across the street from a place called Molly Dryer’s Delicatessen.

  At the end of the meeting at the restaurant, Wills had asked Quinn to check out the address found on the dead man in the car outside Moody’s house. The name on the license had been William Burke, but the address listed belonged to the deli.

  “Hard sell, soft sell,” Quinn said, pointing to Nate first, then himself.

  “Fine by me.”

  Inside, a long buffet table served up everything from chow mein to Salisbury steak. Next to it another table specialized in salads. There were also shelves with chips and cookies and snacks next to glass-door cabinets filled with drinks. Beyond the buffet were dining tables and chairs ready for the next influx of customers.

  A typical New York deli.

  The employees manning the kitchen all looked Latin, while the two women at the registers looked Middle Eastern.

  He grabbed a bottle of water and a bag of chips and headed for the checkout.

  “Are you Molly?” he asked the woman who rang him up.

  She gave him an odd look.

  “Molly,” he repeated. “The name on the sign?”

  “Ah, right,” she said. She leaned toward him a few inches. “There is no Molly. It’s just a name my father picked out of a book. He said it sounded more American.”

  Quinn laughed. “He’s right.”

  At a signal from Quinn, Nate walked up.

  “Excuse me,” Nate said.

  The woman stopped herself in the middle of counting out Quinn’s change and looked at him.

  Nate smiled. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. Says he comes here all time, so I thought you might know him. Bill Burke. Sometimes goes by William.”

  The look on her face didn’t change. “Sorry. Don’t know him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Again, she gave him the silent stare.

  He raised a hand in the air. “Okay, thanks anyway.”

  As Nate walked away, Quinn said, “Nate was a bit of a jerk, wasn’t he?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  Quinn and Nate regrouped a block away.

  “Like we thought, fake ID,” Nate said.

  “You want these?” Quinn asked, holding up the chips.

  “Are you kidding?” Nate said. “Of course.” He snatched the bag from Quinn.

  “Is there anything you won’t eat?”

  Nate smiled, but kept munching. When he was ready to pop another chip in his mouth, he paused long enough to ask, “This new assignment, have you ever been asked to do anything like it before?”

  “I had to remove a corpse from a cemetery once. It had been in the ground about two years.”

  Nate gave him an odd look. “Why would you have to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said. “Client never told me.”

  “But why do you think … Never mind,” Nate said. “The thing Mr. Wills wants us to do, doesn’t it seem a little odd?”

  “A little, maybe.”

  “Couldn’t they just go in and remove the body themselves?”

  “I assume there’s a reason they need us to do it,” Quinn said.

  “But there can’t be much left, can there? Bones, maybe some clothes?” Quinn looked at him. “What is it you really want to say?”

  Nate stuffed a potato chip into his mouth. “Okay, I know it’s going to sound a little weird given what we deal with most of the time, but this kind of gives me the creeps.”

  “The creeps.”

  “Yeah. Come on. It doesn’t make you feel a little odd?”

  “No,” Quinn said. He started walking again.

  Nate was a step behind him.

  “Not even a little?”

  “Not even a little.”

  “Okay. Sorry I brought it up. It’s just, you know, you always said to go by your gut.”

  Nate stuffed another chip in his mouth.

  Despite what he’d said to Nate, his gut was telling him pretty much the same thing. Only it wasn’t the condition of the body that was bothering him. It was the whole nature of the project. For the first time in quite a while, he was starting to wonder if he was on the right side of things or not.

  His phone vibrated, bringing a welcome diversion. It was Orlando.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’s Garrett?”

  “What? Oh, he’s fine,” she said, seeming distracted. “Okay, so I’ve got you on a 6:40 flight on Continental out of Newark.”

  Quinn looked at Nate. “Get a cab.”

  “I could change it to the 9:45 if that’ll work better,” Orlando said.

  “No. Should be fine. Just need to pick up our bags and head over.” They’d left their luggage in the car they’d driven into the city. It was parked in a lot just off Broadway. “I’ll call you back if I think we’re not going to make it. Have you found anything on that photo I sent you?”

  “Not yet. The age might be a problem. But I’m running it through several databases.”

  “Here we go,” Nate said as a taxi pulled to the curb. Quinn’s apprentice climbed in.

  “Our ride’s here,” Quinn said into the phone. “I’ll check in with you before we leave. See if you’ve found out anything then.”

  “Quinn,” she said.

  The tone of her voice stopped him on the curb.

  “What?”

  “That problem I told you about before …”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s worse than I thought.”

  “Worse how?” he asked.

  “Whoever’s trying to find out about you knows what they’re doing.” She paused. “They found your name.”

  “Which name?” The sounds of the cars and the people on the street disappeared. Even the October chill seemed to vanish.

  “Your real name. Someone hacked into the Social Security Administration ninety minutes ago and looked you up.”

  “I don’t have a Social Security number.”

  “You did once.”

  “Yeah, but you got rid of that, didn’t you?” he asked. She hesitated. “I buried it, but I wasn’t able to delete it completely.”

  “But you told me …”

  “I told you I took care of it. Look, I’m sorry. I thought I had. No one should have been able to find it, but someone did.”

  “Okay. All right. What—”

  She cut him off. “Ten minutes later I got half a dozen alarm messages from some improved trips I set up last night on things connected to your life before Quinn.”

  “Where?” he asked.

  “IRS, the Phoenix Police Department—”

  “I know for a fact my record
with the Phoenix PD was removed.” His tenure there had been short and long ago.

  “Your file, yes. But you were cross-referenced on several others. I got what I could, but there were too many files to check. The tripwire at Phoenix did two things. Alerted me to the initial hack, then traced what the intruders were looking at. That’s how I knew it was the same people as the other day. They accessed two files. A burglary and an attempted rape. In both cases you were one of the responding officers.”

  “What the hell?”

  “There’s more,” Orlando said.

  “Hey, you going to get in?” the cabbie yelled out at Quinn.

  “Turn on the meter and give me a minute,” Quinn yelled back. Into the phone he said, “What more?”

  “They’ve also hacked into the record at School District 690,” Orlando said. “That’s the school district for Warroad, Minnesota.”

  “Warroad?”

  “You don’t have a file there, either. There is no trace of you in their system. But the flag I have there worked the same as the one in Phoenix, so I know it was them.”

  “Okay, so they checked, but I wasn’t there. So that’s good.”

  She hesitated. “Yeah. That’s right. They didn’t find your file. But they did find Liz’s.”

  Now it wasn’t just the noises of New York that disappeared, but the ground Quinn was standing on, too.

  “They didn’t stop there, either,” Orlando said. “They’ve traced her to Paris.”

  In a flash, the whole world came rushing back. He jumped into the cab and slammed the door closed behind.

  “The bags,” he said to Nate.

  Nate told the taxi driver where to go.

  “Forget London,” Quinn said into the phone. “We need to get to Paris.”

  “That’s the flight I booked you on,” Orlando told him.

  Of course it was, he thought. She would have predicted his reaction, and anticipated the request. There was no one on the earth who knew him better than she did.

  “My mother?” he whispered into the phone.

  “They would have gotten her address off Liz’s file.”

  For one of the first times in his life, Quinn felt paralyzed. Should he go to his sister or his mother? Perhaps he was overreacting. Perhaps the hacker had only been after information. Perhaps there was no threat.

  Perhaps, but Quinn knew he would be a fool to not assume the worst.

  Everyone had their weaknesses. The most common was family. That’s why most people in Quinn’s business did all they could to hide their pasts. Some specialities, such as op agents and assassins, were more likely to see threats in this area. Cleaners, not so much. If they ever ran into trouble, they were more prone to a direct assault than someone trying to leverage the people in their lives. But that didn’t mean Quinn didn’t worry about this possibility. And now that worry had become a reality.

  “I made a few calls,” Orlando said.

  Quinn shook himself back into the here and now. “Calls?”

  “Steven Howard was in Chicago,” she said. “He’s on his way to Warroad to keep an eye on your mother now. Should be there sometime tonight. I’ve also rounded up Rickey Larson and Brent Nolan. They’ll be there by noon tomorrow. And I’m going, too.”

  Quinn could feel some of the tension in his shoulders ease. “Thank you,” he said.

  “What I need you to do is call her,” she said. “Tell her you have a friend who needs a place to stay. Say he’s working on a project, writing a book or something, and needs to go someplace quiet for a week or two. Tell her I’m going to bring him by. It’ll let us get someone in the house with her.”

  “Good,” Quinn said. He knew his mother wasn’t going to like the idea, not this close to her husband’s death, but she’d do it for Quinn.

  “Once I get everything settled, I’ll fly over to you.”

  “You should stay with her.”

  “They can handle things without me,” Orlando said. “You’re going to need me to help with the job in London.”

  “Screw the London job. I’m not doing it.”

  She paused a moment, then said, “We’ll talk about that when I see you.”

  He was about to protest again, but realized it would be useless. She’d hung up.

  FALL IN PARIS MEANT TWO THINGS: COOLER weather and fewer tourists. It wasn’t that there were no tourists, it was just that their number was a fraction of what it was during the summer months. In August, the streets and monuments were overwhelmed by what seemed to be a torrent of refugees from the Tower of Babel. In October, it was more of a trickle.

  When Quinn and Nate had gotten into the taxi, Quinn had asked the driver to turn up the heat. It was hovering around forty-four degrees Fahrenheit, several degrees colder than it had been in New York, and more than two dozen less than it was back in Los Angeles. To Quinn it was now officially too cold. The cabbie had fiddled with a few knobs, but from what Quinn could tell the temperature hadn’t changed. He pulled his collar tight to his neck and looked out at the gray morning.

  During the flight over he kept his eyes shut, hoping sleep would overtake him, but his mind only let him catch a moment here and there. By the time they landed, the only thing the attempt had been able to accomplish was to keep Nate from asking him questions. All his apprentice knew was that their destination had changed. Quinn had told him nothing else.

  In the taxi, Nate tried again to find out what was going on. But Quinn cut him off with “Not yet.” Yes, he was going to have to tell Nate something, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not yet. The thing he was most focused on was that he was going to have to see his sister. And no matter which scenario he played out in his mind, none ended with Liz happy to see him.

  He had toyed with the idea of not letting her know he was there at all. He and Nate could set up a perimeter surveillance that might work well enough. They could shadow her, bug her apartment when she was away, plant a GPS chip in her purse or shoes to keep track of her no matter where she went. It would be tricky, but not impossible. Still, relying on a blip on a screen was not a comforting idea.

  He knew he was going to have to bite the bullet and approach her directly. That still didn’t guarantee success. She might give him two minutes, or an hour. She might give him nothing, and then where would he be?

  He would have to be careful in his approach, telling her just enough of the truth to get her cooperation. She already thought he was in international banking, so he could use that. Maybe he could tell her he was being targeted by a criminal organization that had a grudge with his bank. Maybe their problems were with Quinn specifically, and he feared the trouble might spread to her since she was in Europe.

  Quinn frowned, then shook his head. The idea was ludicrous and convoluted. If it were true, why wouldn’t the police be involved? That would be the first question out of Liz’s mouth. She would poke holes in Quinn’s story he wouldn’t be able to plug fast enough.

  He played a few more scenarios through his mind, but none proved any better. He needed something different, something believable. But what?

  The cab stopped at the curb.

  “Le Sorbonne,” the driver said.

  On the other side of the intersection was the tan, stone, block-long Sorbonne, the world-renowned Paris university.

  “Merci,” Quinn said as he handed the driver enough euros to cover the trip.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on now?” Nate asked once they were on the sidewalk.

  Quinn stared at the Sorbonne for several seconds, knowing it was time. But how much to tell? Everything, a voice in his head said. Orlando’s voice. “Come on.”

  They turned right at Rue des Écoles, walking on the opposite side of the street from the main entrance to the school. He eyed the people going in and out the front doors on the off chance Liz would be among them. No such luck. A short block down and to the right was a small park. Quinn led Nate inside.

  The park was enclosed by an iron fence lined
with bushes and trees that made it almost impossible for anyone on the outside to see in. Much of the vegetation was showing its fall colors. Scattered around the park were granite statues and a few benches.

  In addition to Nate and Quinn, there were only three other people present. Two were reading books, while the third, an older gentleman, seemed interested in some birds on the path. None were threats.

  Quinn motioned to a bench in a deserted corner. They sat. It was over a minute, though, before he finally spoke. “What I’m going to tell you goes no further than between you and me.”

  “How’s that different from anything else?”

  “This isn’t anything else. This isn’t about a job.”

  “Orlando?” Nate asked, unable to keep the worry from his voice.

  “No. She’s fine.”

  “Okay. Then, what is it?”

  Quinn stared at Nate, his face hard. “I have your word, your blood oath, that you will never tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Of course you have my word. You shouldn’t even have to ask that,” Nate said. “What the hell is going on?”

  Quinn took a moment, knowing he was about to break his most important taboo. “My personal life may have been … compromised.”

  It took a second, then Nate said, “Oh, God. How far back?”

  “All the way,” Quinn said.

  Nate digested the information, then asked, “Is that why we’re in Paris and not London?”

  Again, Quinn hesitated. He couldn’t help it. It was a reflex he’d honed over many years. Finally, he nodded. “You remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was out of town?”

  “Sure.”

  “I was attending my father’s funeral.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nate said. “I had no idea.”

  “How could you? I didn’t tell you.”

  “I really am sorry.”

  “We weren’t close,” Quinn said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “So the funeral has something to do with us being here?”

  “Only in the sense that you need to know about it.”

  Again, Nate looked confused.

  “You’re going to meet someone who was there, and if she mentions it I don’t want you to be surprised.”