The Collected

CHAPTER 13

“The Cleaner has arrived?” Romero asked.

“Yes,” Harris replied. “He proved a bit of a challenge, but nothing that couldn’t be handled.”

“I don’t care about any difficulties. He’s here. That’s all I need to know.”

“Yes, sir.”

Truth was, Quinn’s capture had been more than just a challenge. If Harris hadn’t forced that idiot Moreno to continue the search and set up roadblocks after the cleaner got away in Monterrey, Quinn would have been in the wind, and they may have been staring at that one small error Harris had warned about at the start.

He had expected the taking of the cleaner to be difficult, just not that difficult. After all, Quinn’s abduction had been the hardest to set up. As a cleaner, the man was in charge of his own work, and not a part of the official ops team, which meant he called his own shots and hired his own people.

To achieve their goal, Harris needed to get someone close to Quinn to feed information to the group of police officers Moreno had put together. The problem wasn’t who that person would be. That was easy. Harris simply trolled the lower levels of the freelance world and plucked someone more interested in money than loyalty. Burke had served his role well.

Getting Quinn to hire Burke, though, was another issue. Harris’s research had shown that the cleaner had a small group of operatives he’d consistently worked with over the last few years. Jamming their schedules had been a necessary first step before even offering the job to Quinn.

The hardest person to deal with in Quinn’s select little group turned out to be a man named Daeng from Thailand. According to several sources, Quinn had been using him a lot as of late. When Harris tried to find a way to contact Daeng and put him on the same kind of hold as the others, the people he talked to said the man only worked for Quinn, no one else.

Harris decided it was time to get a little actual dirt on his hands, and followed a lead back to the man’s home country, where he was able to finally figure out a way to get Daeng out of the picture. It had been a while since he’d killed anyone, but he hadn’t forgotten how. More importantly, the ploy had worked.

Daeng was moved out of the way, Burke was hired, and now Quinn was here.

“The shooter?” Romero asked.

The shooter was the only one on the list left to pick up. “In progress, sir.”

“So he’ll be here…?”

“Tomorrow.”

In contrast to Quinn, taking the shooter had been the easiest to set up, so Harris had saved him for last.

“You will inform me when he arrives,” Romero said dismissively.

Harris tilted his head in acknowledgment, but it was a wasted gesture. Romero was no longer paying him any attention.