The Deceived

CHAPTER

THEY MADE A FEW STOPS ON THE WAY OUT OF TOWN,

picking up some items they’d need.

“Park over there,” Quinn said when they reached the truck stop. He pointed toward a group of big rigs parked just behind a row of cars. Albina had called only five minutes before to tell him the container had just left the port, so he knew it hadn’t arrived yet. Still, he did a quick scan of the trucks to be sure Jorge wasn’t playing any games. The container wasn’t there.

After they parked, Quinn got out and had Nate pop the trunk. The storage space was covered by a dark gray carpet Quinn had installed himself. On the left side, on top of the carpet, were the items they’d purchased on the way.

Quinn ignored those and lifted up a section of the carpet on the right. Underneath was what anyone would expect, the metal bottom of the trunk. The only exception was a small black square mounted at the junction where the floor met the rear of the car.

Quinn placed the pad of his left thumb on the square. A moment later, the base of the trunk hinged up an inch, exposing a custom-built compartment below. He reached into the gap and released the catch, freeing the panel to open all the way.

The space below held his standard kit, things he might need at a moment’s notice. There were several cases, most made of hard plastic, and a few simple leather pouches. He ran his fingers over the cases until he found the one he wanted. After pulling it out, he grabbed one of the leather pouches, then shut the panel and put the carpet back into place.

He walked up to the open driver’s window. “You watch from here,” he told his apprentice.

“Got it,” Nate said.

Quinn opened the leather pouch and removed one set of communication gear. He inserted the earpiece into his right ear, its small size making it all but invisible, then attached the tiny transmitter inside his collar.

“Let me know if you spot anything I should know about,” he said, handing Nate the bag with a second set of radio gear still inside.

The interior of the truck stop was a familiar one—restaurant, gift shop, restrooms. Quinn wandered around looking at the postcards, the T-shirts, and the discount CDs as he checked out the other people inside. No one registered as a threat.

He bought a cup of coffee, found a stool near the window, and sat watching the action outside as trucks came and went. It was another forty-five minutes before a black Peterbilt semi arrived pulling a trailer that carried the familiar Baron & Baron, Ltd. shipping container. Following right behind it was a dark green Toyota Land Cruiser.

Quinn watched the driver park the truck, climb out of the cab, and walk over to the waiting SUV. His door was barely closed when the Toyota sped off back down the road.

“Follow them,” Quinn said quietly, so as not to draw the attention of anyone nearby. “Make sure they get back on the freeway. Then do an area check. See if anyone else might be hanging around waiting for us.”

“No problem,” Nate said over the radio.

Quinn watched his BMW pull out of the lot and disappear down the road. Cars and trucks continued to pull in and out while Nate was gone, but none paid any attention to the waiting truck.

Twenty minutes later, Nate returned. “All clear,” he said.

Quinn exited the restaurant and walked across the asphalt to where the semi was parked. Learning to drive trucks had been just another part of his own training when he’d been an apprentice. As a cleaner, he had to be ready to use anything at his disposal.

Quinn’s old mentor, Durrie, had enrolled Quinn in a three-month-long truck-driving class. Quinn had complained at the time, but in the years since, he’d realized it had turned out to be a very useful skill. Nate would be going through the same training the following year.

Quinn removed a thin rectangular metal box from the case he was still carrying, then flipped a switch near the top. He could feel a slight vibration as the detector came to life in his palm. Taking his time, he worked his way around the truck. The detector remained silent, picking up no evidence of any tracking devices. True to his word, Albina had left the truck clean.

Quinn returned the scanner to its case, then walked around to the rear of the container. A part of him wanted to make sure Albina hadn’t pulled a bait-and-switch and put something else in the box, but the real reason for the check was that Quinn needed to confirm for himself that the dead man inside was indeed who Jorge had said he was.

He did a quick scan to make sure no one was near, then opened the door.

Again the stench. Bad, but not as bad as it had been in the confines of the warehouse. He climbed inside and pulled the door closed behind him.

He pinched his nose closed with one hand, forcing himself to breathe through his mouth. With the other hand, he pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on.

The corpse was in pretty much the same place it had been when he’d seen it last—still against the wall, halfway back on the right side. He walked over and gently used his foot to roll the body onto its back.

For a couple of seconds, he all but forgot where he was. He stared down at the bloated face. Even with the disfigurement and the low light, there was no mistaking the features. It was Markoff.

“Everything all right?” Nate asked over the radio.

Quinn blinked. No, he thought. Everything isn’t all right.

“Time to go,” Quinn said.

Quinn drove the rig east through San Bernardino and over the Cajon Pass toward Las Vegas. He exited a few miles later at Highway 395 and headed north into the Mojave Desert. Nate followed a half-mile behind in the BMW, watching for tails.

The desert had once been hundreds of square miles of nothing but sagebrush and dirt. Both were still there, but over the years the occasional town had popped up, creating pockets of forced green in the endless brown landscape. It was by no means a full-scale human invasion. There were parts where you could drive for nearly fifty miles without seeing anything more man-made than the distant high-power lines or some out-of-date billboards or the occasional abandoned car rusted to a deep brown and half buried in the sand by a flash flood.

There were roads, though. Dirt ones, branching off from the highway and winding miles into the nothingness. Some were well worn by traffic, perhaps indicating a home in the distance. Others looked as though they’d been abandoned for dozens of years.

It was easy to lose things out here, things that wouldn’t be found for a long time. And if you did the job right, things that would never be found.

Because he rarely took work so close to home, Quinn seldom had a need to come out this way. Of course, that didn’t mean he was unfamiliar with the terrain. One always had to be prepared.

About twenty miles before Randsburg, there was a little-used dirt road that led off to the southeast. Quinn made sure the only other car in sight was his own BMW, then turned the rig down the road, slowing to navigate the uneven terrain.

It took thirty minutes to reach a suitable spot. The road first went past several hills before dipping into the deep ravine. Not far beyond where Quinn stopped, the road seemed to disappear, as though its destination had been washed away by one of the spring storms, giving it no reason to continue.

By the time he got out of the cab, Nate had caught up to him in the BMW. Quinn motioned for his apprentice to park behind the truck. He then walked around to the container’s doors.

In the distance, the sun was approaching the horizon. Night was less than an hour away.

Quinn reached up, hesitated for only a second, then flung both doors open all the way. He almost didn’t notice the smell this time.

Behind him, he heard the door to the BMW open and shut, then footsteps approaching the truck.

“Coveralls, gloves, and plastic sheeting,” Quinn called out without looking around.

“What about the gasoline?”

“Not yet.”

As Nate returned to the car, Quinn climbed inside and walked over to the body. He couldn’t imagine what had led to Markoff being entombed in a shipping container. Sure, Markoff had once been CIA, but he’d taken an early retirement the previous winter, bored stiff by the desk job at Langley he’d taken only months before.

So what happened? Quinn silently asked his dead friend.

The only answer was the sound of Nate’s footsteps outside the back door.

“Here,” his apprentice called out.

Quinn turned toward the back. Nate was standing on the ground, only the upper third of his body showing above the lip of the container. In one hand he held up a pair of coveralls and gloves.

Quinn looked down at Markoff one more time, then headed toward the opening to get changed.

They worked quickly and efficiently. Nate, more times than not, seemed to anticipate Quinn’s next request, helping to keep conversation to a minimum.

Dealing with Markoff was first. They wrapped his body in the sheeting, then placed him across the hood of the BMW, securing him in place with several lengths of rope. Next, Nate donned a breathing mask, and used a portable paint sprayer to douse the interior of the container with gasoline.

“Quinn?” Nate called out. He’d finished half of the inside, but had stopped and was staring at the wall. “Did you see this?”

Quinn pulled on his mask and joined his apprentice. After his eyes began to adjust to the dimness inside the box, small marks began to

appear on the wall.

“Grab some paper and a pen,” Quinn said.

While Nate was gone, Quinn knelt down to get a better look. He adjusted his face mask, but the stink of gasoline and death still seeped in around the edges. He forced himself to ignore it, focusing his concentration on the marks on the wall.

They were crude, like something a child would have written. Or maybe by someone writing in the dark, he thought. Someone already weak, about to die.

As Nate climbed back in, Quinn pulled out his flashlight and turned it on. The beam exposed walls dripping with gasoline. He pointed the light at the marks on the wall.

Numbers. Letters. Seventeen of them. Repeated twice.

45KL0908NTY63779V

“Looks like a VIN number,” Nate said, meaning a vehicle identifica

tion number.

“It’s not.”

Though the sequence had been written twice, there was something different about the second time around. At the very end, separated by a small space, were an additional two characters.

lP

They were only there the one time. Perhaps they were part of the long sequence and they had just been forgotten the first time through, or perhaps they were something else entirely.

Quinn handed the flashlight to Nate, then took the pen and paper and wrote down the sequence. He included the last two characters, though kept them apart from the others, just like they had been on the wall. The one thing he wasn’t sure about was whether it was the letter L or the numeral 1. Either way, none of it meant anything to him.

“Is that blood?” Nate asked.

Quinn nodded. Markoff must have used the only ink he had available.

“Okay,” he said, rising back to his feet. “Finish up. We don’t have much time.”

As soon as Quinn was out of the container, Nate sprayed the rest of the inside with the fuel, giving the message a double douse. Before he started on the outside, they unhooked the semi from the trailer, and Quinn drove it back to the point where the road climbed out of the ravine, parking it.

By the time Nate finished the exterior, there were about three quarts left of the five gallons of gas they’d brought. He unhooked the paint reservoir that contained the remaining fuel and placed it on the ground, then tossed the rest of the paint sprayer and the empty gas cans into the back of the shipping container.

“Done,” Nate said.

Quinn nodded, then climbed behind the wheel of the BMW. He eased the vehicle back down the wash, putting a good one hundred and fifty feet between the car and the container.

“All right,” he said.

Nate acknowledged the go-ahead by lighting a couple of pieces of dried sagebrush on fire. Through the receiver in his ear, Quinn could hear a whoosh as his apprentice flung one of the branches deep inside the container.

A torrent of flames began swirling through Markoff ’s former tomb, and once Nate lit the outside, the entire box became engulfed in a roiling inferno.

Their timing was good. Any later and their makeshift bonfire might have been seen for miles in the desert night. But the sun was just touching the western skyline, so even though day was passing, the darkness had yet to descend in full force. In fact, the fading daylight did double duty, hiding the temporary illumination while masking the smoke against the dimming sky.

The scent of the remaining gasoline in the container he carried preceded Nate as he rejoined Quinn. Without being told, he hopped up on the trunk.

“I’ll ride here,” he said.

Quinn slowly drove the BMW farther into the wilderness, away from the road. A couple miles later, they found another dry riverbed. At some point, the two empty waterways probably met, but it wouldn’t be an issue. Not here, where it might not rain significantly for years.

As soon as they’d stopped, Nate retrieved two shovels from the trunk.

Even baked by the desert sun, the sand in the wash was soft and easy to dig up. The darkness of the desert night had finally descended, so they worked by the headlights of the BMW. In less than fifteen minutes, they dug a body-length hole three feet deep. Perhaps in a year or two, the spring rains might root up what was left of Markoff, but by then there would only be bones. Still, the thought bothered Quinn. He contemplated digging the hole deeper, but he pushed the idea out of his mind and kept to his script.

They slipped Markoff into the hole, unrolling him from the plastic as they did.

“You want me to check his pockets?” Nate asked.

Quinn stared down at the body. “No. I’ll do it.”

He leaned down and searched each pocket with his gloved hands. No wallet. No money. No receipts or papers that might have given a clue to where Markoff had been. Just a photo. It was folded and worn, and had been hidden in the collar of the dead man’s shirt. Quinn almost missed it because the paper had gone soft. But the image on it was still clear. A woman.

There was a red smear along the bottom. More blood. Markoff had evidently pulled it out at one point to try and look at it. But in the darkness, it was doubtful he would have seen her image.

“Shit,” Quinn said to himself.

He looked at it a moment longer, then unzipped the front of his coveralls and slipped the photo into his shirt pocket.

Nate doused the body with most of the remaining fuel. When he was done, he removed a small box of wooden matches. As he was about to strike one, Quinn reached out and stopped him.

“Let me.”

Nate glanced at his boss, surprised, then nodded and handed over the box.

Quinn removed one of the sticks, but didn’t strike it. Instead, he looked down at his old friend’s body lying in the hole. He felt like he should say something, anything. But he didn’t know what. Then, as he swiped the match against the side of the box, he said, without thinking, “I’m sorry.”

After they burned and buried the body, they removed their coveralls and gloves, adding them to the pile of plastic sheeting in a smaller hole thirty feet away. They used the rest of the fuel to set the pile on fire. Once that was complete, the only thing left to do was to drop the truck someplace where Albina’s people could get it.

“Who’s the woman?” Nate said as he drove them back toward the semi.

“What?” Quinn asked. He’d been lost in thought.

“The picture. Do you know the woman?”

Nate pointed toward Quinn’s hand. Held tightly between his thumb and his forefinger was the picture that had been in Markoff ’s collar. It surprised Quinn because he didn’t remember pulling it back out.

The woman in the picture was smiling into the camera, her light brown hair flowing to the side, caught in the wind. A hand was on her shoulder close to her neck, a spot only someone very close would touch. Markoff ’s hand. Though not in the picture, the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego would have been just off to the right.

It had been a Saturday, just after lunch. Nearly a year earlier.

The woman’s name was Jenny Fuentes.

The person who’d taken the picture was Quinn.