The Cleaner

CHAPTER 33

The night had been a restless one. Quinn had spent most of it in a wooden chair next to Nate’s bed. He wanted to be there if his apprentice woke, but Nate barely stirred. In the morning he reluctantly returned to their makeshift base on Karl Marx Strasse.

“How is he?” Orlando asked. She was sitting on one of the chairs, the monitor on the floor beside her.

Quinn unfolded the other chair and joined her. “The same.”

She looked at Quinn. There were dark circles around her eyes. “They’re not going to be happy we found him.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “Did you sleep at all?”

“What if Piper or Borko does something to Garrett now?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“That’s the last thing they’ll do,” Quinn said. “He’s the only leverage they have over us.”

She took a few deep breaths, then said, “There’s something you should see.”

“What?”

“When I got back here after I left you last night, I checked the cameras in the plant again.”

“And?”

“At some point, someone put a bunch of boxes in the basement. It had to have been while we were following Borko. The boxes weren’t there before.”

“Something from the delivery van that was parked at the door?” Quinn asked.

“Could be.”

“Show me.”

She picked the monitor up off the floor and turned it on. The screen flashed to life. There was a view of one of the rooms in the basement.

“Those the boxes?” Quinn asked. There were several of them, some sitting on the worktable and several more on the floor.

“Yeah,” she said. There was hesitation in her voice.

“What?” Quinn asked.

Orlando stared at the monitor.

“What?” Quinn repeated.

“There are only fourteen boxes,” she said.

“So?”

“Last night there were twenty.”

Quinn looked at the monitor. Silently, he counted the boxes. She was right. There were fourteen. “Are those labels on the boxes?” Quinn asked.

“Yes. But I wasn’t been able to get in close enough to one to read it.”

“The sphere,” Quinn said.

Orlando switched to a live view inside the containment room. Quinn’s eyes grew wide in surprise at the new image.

“I don’t think this is good,” Orlando said.

There were four people in the room. All were dressed in bio-containment suits. Two were at the worktable against the wall on the right. On the table was a box that matched those still in the basement, its top open. On the floor were three more boxes, stacked. They looked like they were still sealed. Near the door, almost out of the camera’s range, were the last two boxes. These were open and empty.

The other two men were positioned in front of the safety cabinets in the center of the room. One of the men had his arms and hands shoved into the cabinet nearest the door, while the other man looked on.

“What are they doing?” Orlando asked, pointing at the men standing at the worktable.

They were removing the contents of the open box. What they took out looked to be smaller metal boxes in groups of ten, stacked double-wide and held together by shrink-wrap.

Each man lifted a stack out and set it on the table. They then removed the wrapping and placed the smaller boxes side by side on a tray, popping each of them open as they did so. When the tray was full, two stacks’ worth of tins, one of the men carried the tray to the center workspace and slipped it through a slot at the bottom end of one of the safety cabinets.

As the man was carrying the tray to the cabinet, Quinn was able to get a glimpse inside the tins. They were empty.

The hatch on the safety cabinet was now closed. The man who had brought the tray over had returned to the boxes at the other table. The man who was at the cabinet had removed his hands from the protective sleeves that allowed him to work inside the unit.

There were several buttons across the bottom of the cabinet. The man pushed one of them, and something in the cabinet moved.

As Quinn and Orlando watched, the bottom of the cabinet slid open. The tray that had been slipped in underneath it rose up. The man put his hands back into the sleeves. On the inside wall of the cabinet was a small shelf, and on the shelf was a container holding what appeared to be dozens of penny-size white pellets. They were rounded so that the middle was thicker than the ends. Quinn knew they had to have been the same ones he’d seen the men stowing in the small refrigerators earlier. The man at the cabinet removed the pellets one by one and placed them in the tins. Each box held six.

“Mints?” Quinn said.

“What?” Orlando asked, but Quinn’s attention was fully on the monitor.

It took a while, but when all the tins were full, the man closed the tops on each box. That done, he removed his hands from the sleeves and pushed another button on the case. The tray dropped downward, and the bottom of the cabinet closed above it.

The man then pushed another button. Up from the bottom of the second cabinet came the same tray of tins. When they were securely in place, the second man turned a dial on the cabinet. The entire cabinet instantly filled with a fine mist.

“Is that…?” Orlando left the question hanging.

“Disinfectant?” Quinn asked.

She nodded.

“Something like that, probably,” Quinn said. “Only a lot stronger than what you can pick up at the market, I’d guess.”

“So the stuff inside the tins…?”

“Is hot,” Quinn finished for her.

Quinn now knew what the delivery device was going to be. An innocent tin of candy. Brilliant. The agent had either been applied to the outside of the mint, or contained inside somehow. Quinn guessed the latter was the more likely. He was also able to surmise something about the biological agent itself. If it was fast-acting, the convention would be shut down and all the participants quarantined, so it couldn’t be anything that would show up right away. It had to be something with a long incubation period. Could that have had something to do with the “tailoring” Taggert had told Burroughs about? And how did it relate to the IOMP convention? That had been Duke’s tip.

Quinn paused.

Duke.

“Son of a bitch,” Quinn said.

“What?” Orlando asked.

“I think I know how they’re planning on distributing everything.”

“How?”

“Grob Promotions,” Quinn said. “I should have seen it before.”

“What’s Grob Promotions?” she asked.

“Duke owned a company called Grob Promotions,” Quinn said. “It was one of the stops he made that morning I followed him. At the time I didn’t care what they did, because I didn’t think it mattered. But it does. When I went online to find out more information about the convention, there was something I read, only it didn’t hit me at the time.”

“What?”

“Something like ‘IOMP Berlin managed by Grob Promotions.’” Quinn began pacing the floor in thought. “If so, that means Grob is handling all the promotion and running of the convention. Including,” he said, looking at Orlando, “the preparation of gift bags.”

“Gift bags?”

“All of the registered attendees receive complimentary gift bags when they check in. It was on the website. Inside there’ll be brochures, convention information, pencils, pens, buttons, and, if I’m right, a tin of mints.”

“You said the convention doesn’t start for nearly a week,” she said. “Why would Borko’s deadline be tomorrow? It’s too soon.”

She was right, Quinn knew.

“Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the convention isn’t ground zero,” she said. “If that’s the case, they could be targeting almost anything.”

Right again.

Quinn looked back at the screen. Work continued in the containment room, but he wasn’t really watching anymore. He had a decision to make. A decision, he quickly realized, with only one answer.

“It doesn’t matter what the target is,” he said, sounding far more sure of himself than he actually was.

“You’re going to try and stop them, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I’m going to get Garrett back,” he said. “And at the moment, the only way I can figure out how to get to Dahl…to Piper, is to steal something that’s valuable to him.”

“The mints,” she said, her face brightening as she realized his plan. “We get them, we can trade them for Garrett.”

“Something like that,” he said. It was leverage they sorely needed. He didn’t even want to think about what would happen if the candy was distributed.

“We’re still going to have to do this alone,” he said. “If we call anyone in, Piper will find out and he won’t hesitate to kill Garrett.” He paused. “We’re it.”

She smiled. “Good by me.”

From outside, Quinn heard a loud truck pass by the front of the store. There were people on the sidewalk, too. Laughing, talking, arguing. Sharing just another moment in the day. People who, if Quinn did nothing, might not make it to the end of the year.

Orlando’s voice suddenly cut through the noisy silence. “The Mole called right before you came in. He wants you to call him back.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“He wouldn’t tell me,” she said, an angry tremor in her voice. “I tried but he said he’d only talk to you.”