The Silenced Read online

  As far as his own team was concerned, after reading through the job specs, Quinn had determined there would be no need for more than the two people. So after Minnesota, Orlando had gone home to San Francisco to be with Garrett.

  “Be careful,” she’d said. “If you need me, I can be there in a couple hours.”

  “We won’t need you.”

  “That warms my heart.”

  “I need you, but not for this. Is that better?” he asked.

  “It’s a start.”

  Quinn and Nate waited quietly for five minutes to pass. The room they were in had served as an office at one time, but it had been years since it was last used. They had brought two folding chairs, a thermos of coffee, and a couple Styrofoam cups, but otherwise the room was empty.

  “Time,” Quinn said without looking at his watch.

  He tossed the walkie-talkie to Nate, who bagged it up with the thermos and cups. They then folded the chairs and set everything in the hallway to be picked up on their way out.

  A wipe-down was unnecessary. They’d been wearing gloves since before they’d gotten out of the van. They’d also taken the additional steps of wearing hairnets and garments that covered everything except their faces. Unless their DNA could be pulled out of the air, no one would ever know they’d been there. Quinn was always careful, but the fact they were doing this job in the same city he and Nate called home made him want to cut the risks down even more.

  The op room was on the other side of the building, one floor down. Nate walked past the door and continued on toward the nearest building exit to make sure that the others had left and no one else had shown up.

  While Nate did that, Quinn approached the op room door and pushed it open. A mixed odor of gunpowder and blood wafted out. Both were familiar smells, so were no more than background noise to him. There, but easy to tune out.

  The floor revealed what he expected to see. One body. Male.

  The man was on his back, a bullet hole just a little off center in his forehead.

  Quinn frowned. The shooter had used a 9mm by the looks of it. A .22 would have been better. It was a close-in job, so no need for more power than a .22 could provide, and, most important to Quinn, a .22 would have left less mess.

  But being prepared was something he took very seriously. So, from the start, Quinn assumed the ops team wouldn’t care about what they left behind. That’s why he and Nate had draped the entire room in a double layer of plastic when they first arrived. Just in case. As expected, the sheeting had contained the blood splatter. Now all they had to do was wrap everything up, carry the package out to the van, account for the bullet, then do a final sweep to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.

  Ten minutes tops.

  Nate walked up behind Quinn. “Building’s secure.”

  “Good.” Quinn motioned into the room. “After you.”

  The dead man looked to be in his mid-sixties. He had a bit of a spread around the waist, but was otherwise in decent shape. His hair was more salt than pepper. Visually, there was nothing particularly remarkable about him. Whatever sins had necessitated his removal ran deeper than his appearance.

  It wasn’t Quinn’s job to stand in judgment. He was only there to make the condemned disappear. It wasn’t that he was amoral, but he’d learned over the years that it was often hard to tell where the line between right and wrong was drawn, and sometimes there didn’t seem to be a line at all. The best Quinn could do was align himself with organizations he trusted, whose work was usually on the up-and-up.

  That had become harder after an organization known as the Office had been dismantled. They’d been his de facto employer for years, and for the most part he had always been confident where they stood. He felt he could trust them, and not constantly question their motives. Up until the end, they had given Quinn a steady stream of work, which meant he seldom had to deal with other clients.

  Now it was different. In a span of several weeks, he could work with multiple organizations whose motivations were often harder to discern. He did his best, doing what front-end investigation he could and trusting his gut when he had to. It kept things interesting, and made him realize just how easy he used to have it.

  In less than five minutes, they had the body wrapped and ready to go. At Quinn’s direction, Nate was probing the small bullet hole in the exterior wall. “Went all the way through,” he said.

  “We’ll make a quick sweep of the perimeter. If we can’t find it right away, we’ll forget it.”

  Their van was parked in back next to an old loading dock. The dock itself was sealed off by a chain-link fence, but a few feet away was an unimpeded double door.

  The first thing they did was load their equipment and the stuff they’d left upstairs into the vehicle. Once that was done, they only had the plastic-wrapped body left.

  They expertly carried the package out of the room and down the hall. At the exit, Nate had to lean it against his chest as he opened the door so they could pass through.

  “Hold on,” Quinn said, then moved his hands to get a better grip on the body. “All right.”

  As they stepped outside, Quinn registered a quick, sudden movement in his peripheral vision. But when he turned to look, nothing was there.

  They maneuvered the body into the back of the van, then Quinn leaned over to Nate and whispered, “I think we have company.”

  Nate kept his focus on securing the body so it wouldn’t roll around. “Where?”

  “At the end of the building. I’m going to slip back inside. If we do this right, he won’t see me. What I want you to do is get in the van and drive off. Take the body to Bernie’s like we planned. I want to keep on schedule.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll meet you at home.”

  “What about the bullet?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Even if someone finds it, they won’t have anything to tie it to.”

  “Got it.”

  Quinn used the open doors of the van to cover his retreat back into the building. Without being told, Nate completed the ruse by closing the van’s doors from inside, and crawling through to the front instead of walking around and getting in through the driver’s side door. There was no way for anyone watching to know that Quinn hadn’t been with him. Quality, intuitive work that emphasized it wouldn’t be long before Quinn would have to either make Nate a full partner or set him free to pursue his own projects.

  Another year, tops. Probably less.

  The crunch of loose gravel as the van pulled away was soon replaced by an eerie silence cut only by the distant drone of the 101 freeway. Most people would have been surprised by the lack of activity so close to downtown. But the warehouse district was one of the most underpopulated parts of Los Angeles. After several quiet minutes passed, Quinn began to consider the possibility that the motion he’d seen had been nothing more than one of the homeless looking for a warm place to sleep.

  More silence.

  Then a sound—no more than a single pebble skipping over the ground.

  There was no second pebble, no sound of footsteps on the gravel. Just that one moment of disturbance in an otherwise deathly still night.

  Quinn eased down the hallway until he reached the doorway of the large open space that had once been the main storage area. He stood in the threshold looking back toward the rear entrance.

  Click.

  A sound that almost wasn’t a sound at all.

  But he’d been waiting for it. The doorknob had been turned.

  Quinn stepped all the way back into the storage room, then leaned forward just enough so he could still see the back door. Nothing happened for thirty seconds.

  Cautious, Quinn thought. Definitely not a street person.

  Then, almost in slow motion, the door began to swing open.

  Quinn pulled completely back into the storage room, then took a quick look around. There was nothing he could hide behind except the door itself. But he knew he didn’t actually need to hi
de behind anything. If he went far enough in and kept near the wall, the darkness would be enough to conceal his presence. He began moving away from the door, careful not to step on any of the trash that was scattered around. As he did, he lowered the zipper on his coveralls enough to pull his gun from its shoulder holster. It was his standard SIG Sauer P226. From one of the pockets, he removed a suppressor, and attached it to the end of the barrel.

  After he’d gone twenty feet, he stepped against the wall and stopped.

  He could hear footsteps. Soft, with no pattern. Whoever was in the hallway was taking a step or two, stopping, then starting again. Cautious.

  Quinn rested his gun against his thigh as he tried to picture what the other person was doing. Whoever it was had to have at least seen Quinn and Nate put the package into the back of the van. There was a good chance he had seen the operations team leave, too.

  If this person was not here by chance, then the only way he could have found the warehouse was by following the ops team in. Quinn was the one who had secured the building, the one who had informed the operations team where it was after they were already en route. No one other than Nate knew about the location, and they had arrived together, without being followed.

  But whatever the reason the intruder was here, he was only one thing to Quinn—a problem.

  Quinn’s job was to cover up the crime scene, and make it so no one would know what had gone down. Sometimes that meant misdirecting someone who’d strayed dangerously close to the job site.

  But this was different. Here was a person who obviously knew that something had happened. By now the still-potent smells emanating from the op room were acting as a guide, drawing the intruder forward. The question was, what should Quinn do about it? Killing was not a normal component of his job.

  In the hallway, the steps stopped right outside the door to the big room.

  Quinn raised his gun and aimed it along the wall.

  A dark shape leaned through the doorway into the room.

  Not a man, Quinn realized. A woman.

  She was maybe five-five or five-six. Age, hair, skin tone, all impossible to tell due to the lack of light.

  She hung in the doorway, unmoving and patient. She was good. If someone other than Quinn had been the one hiding, he might have made a move by now, alerting the woman to his presence.

  So was she a direct threat or not? If yes, all he had to do was pull the trigger and she would be dead. But that would create another mess that would need to be cleaned up, this one without the benefit of any pre-placed plastic. And for all Quinn knew, she might not be alone. A successful cleanup was obtained through knowledge and planning. He had neither with this woman. Who knew what chain of events her death would set off?

  Until he saw a gun in her hand moving in his direction, he would wait and observe. Without shifting the SIG, he removed his finger from the trigger.

  The woman stood in the doorway a few seconds longer, then disappeared back into the hallway. As Quinn lowered his gun, he could hear her steps moving toward the op room.

  Quietly, he made his way back to the door, stopping just short of the jamb. The woman continued down the hall away from him, still unaware of his presence. As soon as he was sure she’d entered the op room, he headed for the rear exit.

  When he reached it, he checked back down the hallway, then stepped outside.

  It was another ten minutes before the intruder exited the building. Quinn watched her from behind a couple of old weather-beaten signs. She moved with caution, but not as much as she’d used entering the building. Quinn could now see she was Caucasian, in decent shape, and probably about ten years older than he was.

  He waited until she had rounded the side of the building out of sight, then crept out from behind the signs. The woman only had two choices: return to the back of the building or head toward the main road. Of the two, the latter made the most sense.

  Instead of following her, Quinn cut over to the other side of the building and made his way to the street, paralleling the path she would be taking on the far side.

  He stopped at the corner, tight to the wall, and did a quick visual sweep. The areas in front of the warehouse and off to the right were deserted. The building next door, a dingy two-story monstrosity with more windows broken than intact, was dark and dead.

  Quinn turned to the wall, then eased his head out just enough to clear the corner. In the distance, the lights of downtown glimmered against the night sky. Closer, but still about a hundred yards away, a solitary streetlamp provided the only illumination for blocks.

  He searched for any sign of the woman, but all was still. He then focused on the far corner of the building and waited.

  It wasn’t long before a shadow took a step away from the warehouse, paused, then took several more. He gave her a head start, then followed. She must have a car stashed somewhere. His goal now was to get a plate number. He stuck as close as possible to the empty buildings that lined the street, and kept a good fifty feet between himself and the woman as she walked along the curb.

  About sixty feet shy of the feeble streetlight, she turned into a small warehouse parking lot. Quinn slowed, then dropped to a crouch and continued forward another twenty feet. There he used the bushes growing at the base of a useless chain-link fence as cover. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, accessed the camera, and switched to night vision mode.

  Ahead he heard a car door open, then voices. One voice was muffled and indiscernible, while the other was clearer and female. The words they spoke weren’t from any of the several languages Quinn was either fluent in or familiar with. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a pretty good idea what language they had used.

  Russian. Or, at the very least, some derivative.

  Quinn slid around the chain-link fence and shimmied in as close as he could get, then watched the woman climb into the car and pull the door closed. He took four pictures before they pulled away: one of the car, a close-up of the license plate, and one each of the young guy behind the wheel and the woman. The intruder.

  Whoever she was, Quinn had never seen her before.

  “I’M NOT A KILLER,” QUINN SAID.

  He was walking toward Little Tokyo, a more populated part of downtown Los Angeles, where he’d be able to arrange for a taxi. Under his left arm he carried the folded-up coveralls he’d been wearing over his clothes at the warehouse. His first call had been to Nate to make sure everything was going as planned.

  It was.

  He’d then put in the call to David Wills.

  “I know you’re not a killer, but aren’t you supposed to take care of loose ends?” Wills said, irritated. “Aren’t you supposed to make sure no one finds anything?”

  “And she didn’t,” Quinn said. “We were finished by the time she entered the building.”

  “Did she see you carry the body outside? Did she see the vehicle that took it away?”

  Instead of answering, Quinn tried to change the focus. “Whoever she was, she had to have followed the ops team in. She waited for them to leave before nosing around.”

  “So you’re saying she didn’t see you remove the body? Didn’t maybe take a picture of your vehicle’s license like you did of hers?”

  “If she did, it’s not going to lead her anywhere.” As always, he and Nate had taken the proper precautions. “And in case you forgot, my standard procedure when something like this happens is to follow, identify, and report. It’s one of the conditions we discussed when we first started working together. Or don’t you recall that?”

  “What if she was a police officer?”

  “Even better reason not to shoot her,” Quinn said, then added, “She wasn’t police.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Because the cops in L.A. don’t usually speak Russian.”

  Silence. Then, “What do you mean?”

  “I heard her say something to her partner.”

  “In Russian?” The Englishman sounded trouble
d, but not surprised.

  “If it wasn’t, it was pretty damn close. Does that mean something to you?”

  “You’re sure she wasn’t waiting there the whole time?” Wills asked.

  “Yes, David. I’m sure. I was the only one who knew about the location ahead of time. When I called your ops team, I was already there, and had done several area checks. We were clean at that point. The only possibility is that she followed the others. Unless you have some other theory.”

  Wills said nothing.

  “I don’t like the fact someone showed up on one of my jobs any more than you do,” Quinn said. “But I did everything according to my rules. I even got you pictures.” Around him traffic was starting to pick up. “Sorry you’re not happy, but that’s not my problem. Gotta go.”

  “Wait,” Wills said. “Look, I apologize. You’re right. You did exactly what you should have. I’m just feeling a lot of pressure on this one. But that’s not an excuse.”

  Quinn took a moment, letting his own agitation ebb. So far Wills had been a decent client, fair even. No sense in damaging a good relationship.

  “It’s fine, David. It happens.”

  “I seem to be staying just a step or two ahead on this one, when I’d rather it be a mile,” Wills said. “We need to talk about the next assignment.”

  Quinn looked around. Though there were more cars on the street, he was still the only one on the sidewalk. “All right.”

  “After what happened tonight, I don’t want to take any chances, so I’m moving up the next phase. I need you and your team on the East Coast by tomorrow morning.”

  Quinn didn’t need to check his watch to know it was almost 10 p.m. “Not possible. By the time we could get to the airport, there won’t be any flights.”

  “You won’t go commercial,” Wills said. “I’m chartering a plane for you. I’ll email the details within the next thirty minutes.”

  “Where exactly are we going?”