The Silenced

Chapter 16

“I guess this isn’t a surprise,” Nate said.

“Not really,” Quinn agreed.

They were still in Manhattan, standing across the street from a place called Molly Dryer’s Delicatessen.

At the end of the meeting at the restaurant, Wills had asked Quinn to check out the address found on the dead man in the car outside Moody’s house. The name on the license had been William Burke, but the address listed belonged to the deli.

“Hard sell, soft sell,” Quinn said, pointing to Nate first, then himself.

“Fine by me.”

Inside, a long buffet table served up everything from chow mein to Salisbury steak. Next to it another table specialized in salads. There were also shelves with chips and cookies and snacks next to glass-door cabinets filled with drinks. Beyond the buffet were dining tables and chairs ready for the next influx of customers.

A typical New York deli.

The employees manning the kitchen all looked Latin, while the two women at the registers looked Middle Eastern.

He grabbed a bottle of water and a bag of chips and headed for the checkout.

“Are you Molly?” he asked the woman who rang him up.

She gave him an odd look.

“Molly,” he repeated. “The name on the sign?”

“Ah, right,” she said. She leaned toward him a few inches. “There is no Molly. It’s just a name my father picked out of a book. He said it sounded more American.”

Quinn laughed. “He’s right.”

At a signal from Quinn, Nate walked up.

“Excuse me,” Nate said.

The woman stopped herself in the middle of counting out Quinn’s change and looked at him.

Nate smiled. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. Says he comes here all time, so I thought you might know him. Bill Burke. Sometimes goes by William.”

The look on her face didn’t change. “Sorry. Don’t know him.”

“You’re sure?”

Again, she gave him the silent stare.

He raised a hand in the air. “Okay, thanks anyway.”

As Nate walked away, Quinn said, “Nate was a bit of a jerk, wasn’t he?”

“I didn’t notice.”

Quinn and Nate regrouped a block away.

“Like we thought, fake ID,” Nate said.

“You want these?” Quinn asked, holding up the chips.

“Are you kidding?” Nate said. “Of course.” He snatched the bag from Quinn.

“Is there anything you won’t eat?”

Nate smiled, but kept munching. When he was ready to pop another chip in his mouth, he paused long enough to ask, “This new assignment, have you ever been asked to do anything like it before?”

“I had to remove a corpse from a cemetery once. It had been in the ground about two years.”

Nate gave him an odd look. “Why would you have to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “Client never told me.”

“But why do you think … Never mind,” Nate said. “The thing Mr. Wills wants us to do, doesn’t it seem a little odd?”

“A little, maybe.”

“Couldn’t they just go in and remove the body themselves?”

“I assume there’s a reason they need us to do it,” Quinn said.

“But there can’t be much left, can there? Bones, maybe some clothes?” Quinn looked at him. “What is it you really want to say?”

Nate stuffed a potato chip into his mouth. “Okay, I know it’s going to sound a little weird given what we deal with most of the time, but this kind of gives me the creeps.”

“The creeps.”

“Yeah. Come on. It doesn’t make you feel a little odd?”

“No,” Quinn said. He started walking again.

Nate was a step behind him.

“Not even a little?”

“Not even a little.”

“Okay. Sorry I brought it up. It’s just, you know, you always said to go by your gut.”

Nate stuffed another chip in his mouth.

Despite what he’d said to Nate, his gut was telling him pretty much the same thing. Only it wasn’t the condition of the body that was bothering him. It was the whole nature of the project. For the first time in quite a while, he was starting to wonder if he was on the right side of things or not.

His phone vibrated, bringing a welcome diversion. It was Orlando.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s Garrett?”

“What? Oh, he’s fine,” she said, seeming distracted. “Okay, so I’ve got you on a 6:40 flight on Continental out of Newark.”

Quinn looked at Nate. “Get a cab.”

“I could change it to the 9:45 if that’ll work better,” Orlando said.

“No. Should be fine. Just need to pick up our bags and head over.” They’d left their luggage in the car they’d driven into the city. It was parked in a lot just off Broadway. “I’ll call you back if I think we’re not going to make it. Have you found anything on that photo I sent you?”

“Not yet. The age might be a problem. But I’m running it through several databases.”

“Here we go,” Nate said as a taxi pulled to the curb. Quinn’s apprentice climbed in.

“Our ride’s here,” Quinn said into the phone. “I’ll check in with you before we leave. See if you’ve found out anything then.”

“Quinn,” she said.

The tone of her voice stopped him on the curb.

“What?”

“That problem I told you about before …”

“What about it?”

“It’s worse than I thought.”

“Worse how?” he asked.

“Whoever’s trying to find out about you knows what they’re doing.” She paused. “They found your name.”

“Which name?” The sounds of the cars and the people on the street disappeared. Even the October chill seemed to vanish.

“Your real name. Someone hacked into the Social Security Administration ninety minutes ago and looked you up.”

“I don’t have a Social Security number.”

“You did once.”

“Yeah, but you got rid of that, didn’t you?” he asked. She hesitated. “I buried it, but I wasn’t able to delete it completely.”

“But you told me …”

“I told you I took care of it. Look, I’m sorry. I thought I had. No one should have been able to find it, but someone did.”

“Okay. All right. What—”

She cut him off. “Ten minutes later I got half a dozen alarm messages from some improved trips I set up last night on things connected to your life before Quinn.”

“Where?” he asked.

“IRS, the Phoenix Police Department—”

“I know for a fact my record with the Phoenix PD was removed.” His tenure there had been short and long ago.

“Your file, yes. But you were cross-referenced on several others. I got what I could, but there were too many files to check. The tripwire at Phoenix did two things. Alerted me to the initial hack, then traced what the intruders were looking at. That’s how I knew it was the same people as the other day. They accessed two files. A burglary and an attempted rape. In both cases you were one of the responding officers.”

“What the hell?”

“There’s more,” Orlando said.

“Hey, you going to get in?” the cabbie yelled out at Quinn.

“Turn on the meter and give me a minute,” Quinn yelled back. Into the phone he said, “What more?”

“They’ve also hacked into the record at School District 690,” Orlando said. “That’s the school district for Warroad, Minnesota.”

“Warroad?”

“You don’t have a file there, either. There is no trace of you in their system. But the flag I have there worked the same as the one in Phoenix, so I know it was them.”

“Okay, so they checked, but I wasn’t there. So that’s good.”

She hesitated. “Yeah. That’s right. They didn’t find your file. But they did find Liz’s.”

Now it wasn’t just the noises of New York that disappeared, but the ground Quinn was standing on, too.

“They didn’t stop there, either,” Orlando said. “They’ve traced her to Paris.”

In a flash, the whole world came rushing back. He jumped into the cab and slammed the door closed behind.

“The bags,” he said to Nate.

Nate told the taxi driver where to go.

“Forget London,” Quinn said into the phone. “We need to get to Paris.”

“That’s the flight I booked you on,” Orlando told him.

Of course it was, he thought. She would have predicted his reaction, and anticipated the request. There was no one on the earth who knew him better than she did.

“My mother?” he whispered into the phone.

“They would have gotten her address off Liz’s file.”

For one of the first times in his life, Quinn felt paralyzed. Should he go to his sister or his mother? Perhaps he was overreacting. Perhaps the hacker had only been after information. Perhaps there was no threat.

Perhaps, but Quinn knew he would be a fool to not assume the worst.

Everyone had their weaknesses. The most common was family. That’s why most people in Quinn’s business did all they could to hide their pasts. Some specialities, such as op agents and assassins, were more likely to see threats in this area. Cleaners, not so much. If they ever ran into trouble, they were more prone to a direct assault than someone trying to leverage the people in their lives. But that didn’t mean Quinn didn’t worry about this possibility. And now that worry had become a reality.

“I made a few calls,” Orlando said.

Quinn shook himself back into the here and now. “Calls?”

“Steven Howard was in Chicago,” she said. “He’s on his way to Warroad to keep an eye on your mother now. Should be there sometime tonight. I’ve also rounded up Rickey Larson and Brent Nolan. They’ll be there by noon tomorrow. And I’m going, too.”

Quinn could feel some of the tension in his shoulders ease. “Thank you,” he said.

“What I need you to do is call her,” she said. “Tell her you have a friend who needs a place to stay. Say he’s working on a project, writing a book or something, and needs to go someplace quiet for a week or two. Tell her I’m going to bring him by. It’ll let us get someone in the house with her.”

“Good,” Quinn said. He knew his mother wasn’t going to like the idea, not this close to her husband’s death, but she’d do it for Quinn.

“Once I get everything settled, I’ll fly over to you.”

“You should stay with her.”

“They can handle things without me,” Orlando said. “You’re going to need me to help with the job in London.”

“Screw the London job. I’m not doing it.”

She paused a moment, then said, “We’ll talk about that when I see you.”

He was about to protest again, but realized it would be useless. She’d hung up.