The Aggrieved Read online

  As a caution against screen failure, the device could be linked to an authorized RejDawn technician’s computer via proprietary connectivity software, similar to Bluetooth, that would allow the tech to access the safe’s operating system. Fortunately, someone had hacked into RejDawn Systems and obtained the source code, and was offering it to anyone willing to pony up the small price of one thousand dollars. She cleared the purchase with Daeng and downloaded the hack.

  Four minutes later, Klassen’s safe had been reprogrammed to recognize not only its owner’s fingerprints but Jar’s, too.

  She was about to put it to the test when Daeng reentered the bathroom and said, “Nate texted. Klassen just arrived, so even if he turns around and leaves right away, we have at least thirty minutes.”

  “Why would he turn around and leave?”

  “It was a…never mind. We have at least thirty minutes.”

  “We do not need that much time.”

  She placed her fingers against the screen. A beep and a click and the safe door swung open.

  “Nice,” Daeng said.

  Inside were three pistols, eight boxes of ammunition, a stack of papers and files, and a high-end, Dell Inspiron laptop. She took a picture of the contents before she touched anything, and then pulled the laptop out.

  It would take far too long to go through the computer now, so after hacking into it, Jar uploaded its entire contents to a specified folder in the cloud. This would trigger one of her laptops back in Bangkok to begin processing the data. She would be notified via text of any hits.

  Ten minutes and the upload was done. Jar slipped the computer back into the safe, used the photo she’d taken to make sure everything looked exactly as it had, and shut the door.

  As a final step, she removed any trace of her fingerprints from the digital display and from the operating system.

  Once she and Daeng were outside the apartment, Jar reset the alarm and reactivated the cameras, while Daeng texted Nate to let him know they were done.

  “WHAT KIND OF job are we talking about?” Klassen asked.

  “Surveillance to start,” Nate said in a low voice. “If all goes well, product acquisition.”

  “Team size?”

  “We’ll discuss details if Mr. Tate decides to hire you.”

  “At your recommendation.”

  “At my recommendation.”

  “What do I need to do to prove myself?”

  “Are you enjoying your coffee?”

  “What?”

  “Your coffee. Are you enjoying it?”

  “My coffee’s fine.”

  “And mine is almost empty.” Nate picked up his cup and stood. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  At the bar, he ordered another latte.

  Approaching Klassen directly about the Hyena had never been the plan. Quinn didn’t trust Klassen, so neither did Nate. It was much preferable to find out what the man knew without the guy realizing it.

  Nate waited for his drink, and then carried it back to his seat. Stirring the latte, he said, “The feedback we’ve received concerning you is contradictory. On the one hand, we’ve been told you are always organized and prepared, but we’ve also heard that you’ve had more than your share of clashes with people you work with.”

  Klassen locked eyes with Nate. “I don’t need to justify myself to you. I have an excellent record. If you’re worried about petty things like disagreements, there are plenty of others out there who you can hire. That we’re sitting here tells me you really don’t care about some insignificant spats. That there’s a reason you need me.”

  Nate considered him for several seconds before dipping his head in acknowledgment. “You have some unique qualifications that would be beneficial.”

  “Such as?”

  Nate smiled. “Details later.”

  “Right.”

  Nate drew out the conversation by questioning him about his previous work. Klassen was good at discussing jobs without revealing details that would compromise his clients. If Nate was actually considering hiring him, that would have been a plus.

  “I don’t know what else to tell you,” Klassen eventually said. “If people do their jobs, I’m happy. Good enough? What I want to know is the fee. Your boss implied that it would be generous. But generous to one person can be stingy to another. And I’m not getting involved with a new client for anything less than—”

  “How does double your standard fee, plus the possibility of performance bonuses sound?”

  Klassen leaned back and grinned. “You should have said that at the beginning. I would have been in a lot better mood.”

  Nate’s phone vibrated in his pocket. “Pardon me,” he said as he pulled it out.

  The text was from Daeng.

  DONE

  “I have another meeting I need to get to,” Nate said.

  Klassen raised an eyebrow. “You interviewing someone else?”

  “Not for your position.”

  The man relaxed. “Then the job’s mine?”

  “Mr. Tate makes the final decisions, but I feel confident you’ll be hearing from us soon.”

  THEY RECONVENED IN a snack shop at the airport, on the ticketing level of Terminal 2.

  “Did we get the report?” Nate asked as his colleagues joined him at his table.

  “Give me a moment,” Jar said, and pulled out her laptop.

  While she concentrated on her screen, Nate said to Daeng, “Any problems?”

  “All good. You?”

  “Just like we planned it.”

  “He didn’t suspect anything?”

  “He might have at first, but once we discussed money, he was hooked.”

  Jar said something under her breath in Thai that sounded like excitement.

  “What?” Nate asked.

  “We have the report and his notes from the job,” she said.

  “And the Hyena?”

  “It is mentioned several times, but is not tied to a name. There is, however, a list of people he hired for the job in his notes. Hold on.” She studied the computer. “It was a nine-person team. Of that, only two were women.”

  She magnified the list and pointed at the two names.

  MARA GOMEZ

  KATRINE DEHLER

  Nate couldn’t help feeling excited. If Klassen’s Hyena was the one they were looking for, then she had to be one of the two.

  “You know either of them?” Daeng asked.

  “Never heard of them,” Nate said. “Any contact information?”

  “There are phone numbers for each,” Jar said.

  “Can you track down their locations?”

  Jar turned the computer back around and got to work without answering. Nate and Daeng grabbed some food and brought it back to the table.

  After about fifteen minutes, she said, “Both phones are registered under names other than Gomez or Dehler. The number associated with Gomez is Italian, and is registered to a shell corporation that will take some time to unravel. The Dehler phone is Swiss, and owned by someone named Louis Goode.”

  “Are both still active?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where they are now?”

  “The Gomez phone is a landline located in the outskirts of Florence.”

  “The Dehler one?”

  “It appears to be just a voicemail box.”

  Both answers made sense. The numbers must be for the women’s job-inquiry lines. Quinn and Nate had a similar setup for clients to call and leave a message. Easier to turn someone down that way. Any cell numbers the women had used while working with Klassen were likely for disposable phones that were destroyed as soon as the job was over.

  “We could do what we did with Klassen,” Daeng suggested. “Set up meetings. If either woman is the one who shot Liz, we’ll have her.”

  “The second she sees any of us, she’d run.”

  “I was thinking we could get someone else to do the meet.”

  Nate frowned. “I’d rather know—”r />
  “Why are we talking about a meeting? Jar asked. “We do not need a meeting.”

  “You have something else in mind?” Nate asked.

  “Of course. There will be records of who called the numbers. It is logical that one of those numbers will belong to each woman calling to check her messages. Even if they change phones every day, there will be a pattern. And if they use blocked numbers, there will be a record somewhere.”

  That was definitely better than attempting a meet-up. “How long will it take you to unravel it?” Nate asked.

  She thought for a moment. “We might want to get a hotel room.”

  Chapter Eight

  WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

  QUINN AND ORLANDO found a small town ten miles from XA014 that had a mostly empty, ten-room motel and a rundown café. After a lunch of cornbread and chicken soup, they got a room and slept as best they could until well after nightfall.

  Quinn finally woke to find Orlando spooned against him, his arm draped over her ribs. He started to pull away, but she moaned sleepily and pressed against his chest, causing his hand to slip off her shirt onto her exposed stomach. Her soft skin sent a jolt of electricity up his arm and through every inch of his body.

  In bed, he and Orlando had done nothing more than sleep since the night before Garrett and Claire had been kidnapped. He’d almost forgotten anything more was possible.

  When he slipped his hand under her shirt, she moaned again. His lips brushed the side of her neck. Her ear. Her cheek. Each touch echoed in Orlando’s breath. Louder and louder they grew until Orlando turned, took his face in her hands, and kissed him deep and hard, like they hadn’t kissed in years.

  Desperation and longing ruled at first, as if each was trying to prove to the other they were still alive. But their anxious rhythm soon slowed and intensified as their love for each other took over.

  Afterward, sweaty and sated, they lay in temporary amnesia of all that had been going on. In the silence, there was no need to say “I love you” or “I’m nothing without you.” Those were a given. There was no Quinn without Orlando. No Orlando without Quinn.

  They were one. They would always be one.

  The alarm on Quinn’s phone broke their trance.

  Nine p.m.

  Time to move again.

  THOUGH THERE HAD been no more than a few falling flakes when they left the motel, by the time they reached the snow-covered back road, white clumps all but filled the sky.

  Once more, Quinn obscured their tracks after they’d turned onto the road, though he was sure that within an hour they would have been filled in anyway. They parked at the same spot as before and began the hike.

  They climbed the ridge a few hundred yards west of their previous ascent and summited at a point farther from the facility, where they would be unlikely to draw any attention.

  The storm was really going now. If the wind had been blowing, it would have been a blizzard, but thankfully the flakes did nothing more than gently swirl on their way to the ground.

  Orlando’s detector picked out the first camera when they were still four hundred yards from XA014. It was attached to the trunk of a tree at eye level, thirty-six meters directly in front of them. The good news was that it was transmitting back to the base.

  After an initial failed attempt, Orlando tapped into it and examined its output. Though the camera was equipped with night vision, the intensity of the storm caused the signal to be intermittent. Another kilometer to the base meant the receivers there probably weren’t getting the signal at all. No way to tell for sure, though, so Orlando used her device to jam the camera until they had passed it.

  They encountered two more surveillance cams, one at five hundred meters from the base, and another at two-fifty. Orlando dealt with them in the same manner she had the first.

  At a hundred meters were three cameras in close proximity to one another. Being so close to the base meant someone inside had a much better chance of receiving at least a glitchy version of the signal. The good thing was, so much snow was falling that even with night vision, none of the cameras was getting much more than images filled with fluff.

  “The widest gap is between the two on the right,” Orlando whispered. “If we keep on a straight line down the midpoint, the jammer should be able to scramble each.”

  After successfully traversing the area, they came to another set of cameras at fifty meters out, and a third group at twenty-five.

  Not long after that they came to the end of the trees, where the clearing that pretended not to be a clearing began. Fifteen meters out from the tree line was a tall fence that enclosed the base. There was no way they could get to and over it without being seen.

  Not at ground level, anyway.

  Approximately twenty feet above them, the camouflage canopy that stretched over the open area was tied to every three or four trees by heavy-duty cables and ropes. Staying just inside the forest, Quinn and Orlando moved parallel to the clearing, stopping momentarily at each tree the canopy was attached to.

  “This looks good,” Orlando whispered after they’d examined more than a dozen trunks.

  Quinn nodded. “Good by me.”

  Wrapping one of the climbing ropes around the trunk, Quinn used it to work his way up to the canopy. He gave the netting a tug. Not only was it sturdy, it was tied off so tight that it didn’t move when he grabbed it. He eased out onto it. Not even a jiggle.

  He tied his rope to the cable right next to the tree, and dropped the other end to Orlando. When she was within reach, he helped her onto the canopy. They crawled toward the compound.

  It turned out the canopy was not a solid covering. It was made up of hundreds of interlocking, mostly circular patches of various sizes, colored to appear as trees from above. Between some of the circles were wedge-shaped gaps. Even the mesh on the circles was wide enough to allow much of the snow to fall through.

  Quinn and Orlando could have tried to drop down through one of the larger gaps as soon as they were past the fence, but it made more sense to wait until they were over one of the buildings. They skipped the first structure they came to. It was one of the small buildings, and, according to the Mole’s information, served as a storage facility. They waited until they were over one of the four large, arched-roof buildings close to the middle of the compound. It was one of the living quarters.

  They couldn’t find any gaps in the canopy there, but this wasn’t surprising. The building would need to be completely hidden. Having no other choice, Quinn cut a one-meter slit along a meshy seam, where it would be less noticeable.

  Before lowering through the hole, Orlando checked for cameras again but detected none covering the roof. Down she went, Quinn holding her hands to lower her until her drop was only about a foot. When she was ready, he tossed her the backpacks. He then hung through the hole, his feet just reaching Orlando’s shoulders. As he let go of the netting, she crouched slowly, allowing him to make a controlled descent and land on the roof with barely a sound.

  They moved down to the retaining wall at the far end. Using the gooseneck camera, they looked over the wall at the center of the compound.

  A kind of plaza was directly in front of them, with an identical, arch-roofed building on each of the other three sides—everything an exact match with the plans the Mole had sent them.

  What hadn’t been on the plans, of course, were the guards. Three of them. One in each hut next to the front doors of the other three buildings. Which probably meant a fourth guard was in front of the building they were on.

  Quinn caught Orlando’s eye and nodded toward the rear of their building. They crept back across the roof.

  “Compass points,” Orlando whispered once they’d stopped.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The buildings, they’re at compass points.” As she spoke she motioned to each structure. “Northeast, northwest, southeast.” She touched the building they were on. “Southwest.”

  “The designation,” Quinn s
aid.

  “Exactly.”

  The Mole’s information indicated Dima had been designated N/E, with no explanation of what that meant. Now it seemed obvious.

  Quinn looked back the other way and could barely see part of the roof of the building directly across the square from them. The northeast building. The one, if they were right, where Dima was.

  Using the camera again, they checked the back of the building. Only a single light attached to the wall. No guard shack or entrance, and no footprints in the snow to indicate a guard on patrol.

  Orlando pointed at a pipe sticking out of the roof near the corner. After Quinn tied one of their two remaining ropes to it, they rappelled silently to the ground. Quinn peeked around the side of the building. Two doors, each with its own light above it. In addition, a row of windows ran along the entire length of the wall. They were high and narrow, the kind meant only to allow sunlight inside, not for those inside to look out.

  Quinn and Orlando couldn’t walk through the center of the plaza to get to Dima’s building. That would be death by stupidity.

  Fortunately, if the Mole was correct, there was a better, more covert choice.

  “Which one?” Quinn asked.

  Orlando consulted the facility plans on her phone, and then pointed to the right.

  Staying low, they sneaked over to the smaller building behind the southeast living quarters. The structure had a single door on the compound side. Like elsewhere, there was a light above it. Quinn glanced toward the square and confirmed the doorway was not in direct view of any of the guard huts. Using the blade of his knife, he tapped the bulb until it broke, the sound all but swallowed by the storm. Orlando made fast work of the lock.

  Inside, dozens of tiny indicator lights lit up a large room filled with pipes and wires and machinery of one type or another. Quinn and Orlando quickly checked to make sure no one else was there, and then took a better look around.

  Along the far wall were eight generators, their exhaust funneling into a pipe that led outside. On the wall nearest the entrance were the pumps and pipes of a water system. Another section contained what looked like HVAC equipment—heating and cooling.