The Deceived

CHAPTER

SAN FRANCISCO BAY ROSE ON BOTH SIDES OF THE

plane. For a moment, it seemed as if they were going to land on the water. Then all at once there was runway beneath them.

After the phone call with Nate, Quinn forgot about his planned return to Los Angeles. Orlando had lost her aunt. With the exception of her son Garrett, her aunt had been the only close member of her family left. Quinn needed to be there for her.

It wasn’t until he and Tasha were in the air heading west that he remembered there was someone else he could pay a visit to while he was in town. Jorge Albina, the son of a bitch who hired him to get rid of Markoff ’s body, was based out of San Francisco.

At the airport, Quinn rented a sedan, and soon he and Tasha were driving north into the city.

“After we check into the hotel, maybe you can get a little rest,” he said.

“Sure,” she replied, sounding like she needed it.

Using one of his aliases, Quinn had reserved two adjoining rooms at the Marriott on Fourth Street before they left D.C. Quinn had stayed there before, and knew the hotel was always packed with guests attending conferences and conventions at the nearby Moscone Center.

It was the perfect blend of comfort and size, providing them whatever they might need, including anonymity.

When they pulled up out front, he told the valet to keep the car close as he would be leaving soon.

Tasha shot him a questioning look.

“I have something to do,” he told her. He could see the uncertainty in her eyes. He smiled and put a reassuring hand on her arm. “You’ll be fine. No one knows you’re here.”

“I don’t want to be alone. Maybe I should go with you.”

“You won’t be alone. Someone will be in my room next door.”

She pulled away. “Who?”

“A friend.”

She looked at him, obviously not pleased. But she said, “Okay. I trust you.”

Once inside, they bypassed the reception desk and made their way directly to the elevators. There were two choices: High Rise or Mid Rise.

Quinn pulled out his phone and punched in a speed-dial number.

“We’re here,” he said.

“Rooms twenty-seven-forty-six and -forty-seven,” Nate said.

It didn’t take Tasha long to fall asleep. Quinn had introduced her to Nate, then showed her that their rooms were connected on the inside. He could tell she still wasn’t happy with the situation, but she didn’t say anything more.

Once Quinn was sure she was out, he closed the door between the rooms so she’d have some privacy.

“Suit?” he asked Nate.

“In the closet.”

Quinn found a garment bag hanging inside. He removed a black suit and started to change.

“Protection?” Quinn asked.

“One for each of us. In there,” Nate said, nodding toward the suitcase at the end of one of the beds.

Inside would be a replacement for the SIG Quinn had had to leave in D.C. and a Glock for his apprentice.

“Do you want it?” Nate asked.

Quinn thought for a second, then shook his head. Though Orlando probably wouldn’t be upset if he was armed, it seemed wrong to go to her aunt’s funeral with a gun. “When I get back. I should be all right for now.”

“I feel bad that I can’t go,” Nate said.

Quinn gave him a half smile. “She’ll understand.”

“You’ll tell her I’m sorry, right?”

“I’ll tell her.”

They fell into silence as Quinn continued dressing.

As he was tying his tie, Nate looked toward the adjacent room. “What if your friend wakes up?”

“Get her something to eat. Let her watch TV. But don’t let her leave.”

Nate nodded, then as Quinn headed to the door he said, “Don’t forget to tell Orlando.”

“I won’t.”

Orlando’s Aunt Jeong had lived in one of those Edwardian shotgun houses built not long after the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A two-story with a basement. But unlike most of the other homes in the neighborhood, the building had not been subdivided into separate upstairs and downstairs apartments. Somehow Aunt Jeong had resisted the urge to mutilate her home for the quick cash.

It was the second time in the last five years Quinn had been to her house, and neither time had been a happy one. In fact, his previous visit had marked the beginning of a four-year stretch during which he and Orlando had lost contact with each other.

“Lost” wasn’t the right word, Quinn knew. More like “broke off.” But he preferred “lost”; it smoothed over the pain. That first time had been after a job he and Durrie had been on. But instead of bringing Durrie to her alive, Quinn had brought her an urn filled with ashes they both thought belonged to her boyfriend. That later it turned out not to be true didn’t change the fact it had been the worst day of Quinn’s life. And, he guessed, of Orlando’s, too.

There were five steps leading up to the front of the house. Quinn hesitated for several seconds at the bottom, then willed himself up the stairs. He knocked, waited half a minute, then knocked again. There was no response.

Orlando had told Nate the funeral was that afternoon, but she hadn’t mentioned exactly when. Quinn had tried calling her several times since arriving in the city, but she hadn’t answered.

He tried knocking again. Still no answer. He turned back to the street, looking first right, then left.

God knew where the service was being held.

All of a sudden, he felt very weary. Markoff dead. Jenny missing. The responsibility he was beginning to feel for Tasha. And now this, his best friend losing the aunt she had loved so much.

He sat down on the stoop. There was nothing he could do now but wait.

And if there was one thing he was good at, it was waiting.

“Let’s see. The first time you broke the law,” Orlando whispered.

Quinn thought about it for a moment. “I was twelve. Shoplifted a candy bar on a dare from a friend.” His voice also low.

“Get caught?”

“Sort of.”

She cocked her head, wanting more.

Quinn moved his legs a few inches to the left, trying to get comfortable. It was tough to do in the utility closet they were crammed in. Most of the space was taken up by a switching system for the company computer network.

Orlando was sitting closest to the door, while Quinn was shoved back in the corner, giving her as much room as possible.

“I actually took two,” he said. “It was the local grocery store. One of the managers stopped me on the way out and made me give one back.”

“Not both of them?”

“He didn’t know about the other one. But he did let me go. I think he thought he’d scared me enough.”

Again the questioning look.

“Yeah,” Quinn said. “He did. I didn’t shoplift again until...well, until I started working for Durrie. How about you?”

“Stole fifty bucks from the principal’s office in sixth grade.”

“Holy shit,” Quinn said. “What’d he do when he found out?”

“Expelled a kid in another class.”

“He didn’t know it was you?”

“They found the other kid’s fingerprints on everything,” she said. “And it helped that he’d dropped his lunch card under the desk.”

Quinn smirked. He wanted to believe her, but he didn’t know her well enough to trust her yet. Besides, maybe she was just trying to impress him. Though they were both still apprentices—he with Durrie, and she with Durrie’s occasional partner Abraham Delger—Quinn was the veteran. He’d been at it almost four years, while Orlando had only begun her training nine months earlier.

“I think I hear someone,” she said, looking toward the door.

Quinn moved his head so that his ear was facing the door, then focused all his attention on the hallway beyond the door. A half-second later, he heard the steps. They were light but rhythmic and unhurried. No sense of urgency, no panic that might suggest knowledge of any security breech at the Net/Gyro facility. Though for the last thirty minutes, that had been exactly the case.

Quinn and Orlando listened as the steps drew nearer, walked past the door, then receded in the opposite direction. Not once was there a pause in the person’s gait.

“Your turn,” Orlando said once it was quiet.

“Why’d you decide to get into this?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Work’s off-limits. As is anything too personal.”

“Breaking the law’s not personal?”

She tilted her head, looking at him with dark smiling eyes. “Okay,” she said. “I got in because nothing else seemed as exciting.”

“That’s a job-interview answer.”

“Really? So tell me a better one.”

He smiled. “How about, I got in because if I’d said no, they would have killed me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Is that true?”

“You just asked for a better answer, not a true one,” Quinn said, though his answer was essentially correct.

“I took Abraham’s offer because if I didn’t, I’d have ended up sitting in a cubicle in Silicon Valley, programming crap so some idiot could spell-check his document a little faster. Bullshit work. At least this way, I get out sometimes.”

She moved a finger to her mouth and touched it to her lips, letting him know she’d heard something else. This time he didn’t turn his head, but instead looked toward the door. Which, of course, meant he had to look directly at her, too.

He’d met Orlando several times over the previous nine months, but before, Durrie and Delger were always around. This was the first time they had spent any time alone together.

For some reason, their bosses decided today’s mission would be best conducted by the two rookies. The task wasn’t that difficult. No cleanup involved. It was an info-gathering job. Get in, plant some bugs, then get out. It was a mission more aimed at Orlando’s specialties than Quinn’s, but Durrie had deemed it a good exercise for his apprentice.

The building was the research facility for Net/Gyro Inc., one of those overnight technology wonders that seem to have sucked in a lot of cash but had yet to turn a real profit. Someplace Orlando might have ended up working at if she had taken the safer path.

Quinn’s function on this mission was guide and bodyguard, while Orlando was tasked with inserting the bugs into the phone system so that specific lines could be monitored. Who would be making those calls, and what they would be concerning, neither of them had any idea. It was just another one of those “you don’t need to know” situations.

They’d gotten into the facility fine. They’d even planted the bugs without any trouble. It was the getting out that had been a problem. Their exit route, one planned by Durrie, had proved to be unusable. Building construction had sealed off an entire wing of the structure, removing it from play.

Exiting the same way they’d come in also wouldn’t work. The automated video loops of empty corridors that covered their arrival would have stopped working at least fifteen minutes earlier.

So Quinn had contacted Durrie, who told them to find someplace to hole up while he tried to figure out an alternate exit.

It should have been annoying, but Quinn didn’t mind. In fact, for the moment, he didn’t care how long they had to wait.

As Orlando glanced over at him, he raised a questioning eyebrow, hoping to hide the fact he had been staring at her. She pointed to the right, indicating the noise was coming from that direction of the hallway. Quinn had already heard it, but he pretended to listen, then gave her a nod as the footsteps grew nearer.

When she looked away again, he couldn’t help but let his gaze return to her—the curve of her neck, her pale brown skin, the ponytail of dark hair that reached just below her shoulders. He didn’t want to care. He didn’t want to be interested. But he didn’t know how not to be. She’d captured him, and she didn’t even know it.

Outside, the footsteps began to slow. They were close now, almost to the door. Quinn could feel Orlando tense. He cursed himself for not letting her enter the closet first so he would have been between her and the door.

One step.

A second.

Then a hand on the door.

Quinn pulled out the only weapon he’d been allowed to bring along. It was a handheld Taser. He leaned forward, across Orlando’s lap, ready to strike the moment the door opened.

He could hear the knob turn, then the latch release. He expected the door to ease away from the jamb slowly, but it didn’t.

With a jerk, it flew wide.

Quinn lunged forward, the Taser aimed straight in front of him. But the man on the other side seemed to expect the move. He was standing several feet away from the threshold, well out of Quinn’s initial range. Quinn started to push himself up for a second attempt, but the man’s words stopped him.

“Nice try,” Durrie said, a knowing glint in his eyes. He was wearing the uniform of a Net/Gyro security officer. “Get to know each other better in there, did you? Well, teatime’s over. Let’s go.”

It had been a test. Durrie had known all along the way out he had given them wouldn’t work. What he wanted to see was if they’d keep calm when things went wrong. It was an exam they both passed.

And though Durrie couldn’t have cared less, he had been right. Quinn and Orlando had gotten to know each other better, enough to establish a friendship that continued to grow stronger over the years. Only never in the direction Quinn had hoped. Instead, somehow that honor had fallen to Durrie. Orlando had been too good for Quinn’s old mentor, but there was no way he could tell her that. She had loved Durrie and taken care of him.

Quinn would have considered it a waste if not for Garrett—the son Durrie would never even acknowledge as his own.