[Quinn 01] - The Cleaner

That wasn't unusual at all. People were always keeping in touch with Quinn, in case anything came up. Recently he'd been receiving more messages than usual, averaging at least one a day. Things had been quiet for several months, so everyone was anxious to make some cash. It was a kind of espionage recession. Quinn blamed it on more and more organizations and state-run agencies trying to do things 'in-house' to hold down costs. But that would eventually change. The old adage 'You get what you pay for' would come into play soon enough.

What was unusual, though, was that the last of these looking-for-work e-mails was sent two days ago, about the time Quinn was making his way out of L.A. Since then, no you-got-a-gig-for-me inquiries from anyone. Had word gotten out about his 'situation'? That would explain why the e-mails had stopped. Still, it seemed unusual. Though rumor and gossip were as fast-spreading in Quinn's world as in any other subculture, the halt in any communication had been too fast and abrupt. No way word of his new situation could have traveled through the normal channels in that amount of time. Someone wanted word to get out, and had likely helped in its propagation. Of course, the lack of e-mails could have been a coincidence, but Quinn doubted it.

He frowned. It was the disruption again. It looked like the sons of bitches who'd included him on the target list had taken the extra precaution of making sure everyone knew about it, effectively cutting off his contacts and making him persona non grata. He was still having a hard time connecting the dots that put him on that list. According to Peter, he was the only non-Office staffer targeted. But that didn't make sense.

If he were an ops guy, okay, he could have seen himself being thrown in with the rest. Ops guys were subject to being removed. Even freelance ops. It was an occupational hazard. But Quinn was a behind-the-scenes player. An investigator, an assessor, a perception arranger, even an occasional setup man. In other words, a dry cleaner. An independent dry cleaner. No killings, no exchanges, no face-to-face meetings. No wet work at all.

Though he couldn't figure out exactly what the connection was, it must have had something to do with this business in Colorado. A guy named Taggert who'd been turned into a chunk of charcoal, and Jills, who'd come to the end of her career years before she planned. Perhaps whoever had done this thought Quinn had learned something necessitating his removal. If Peter had called someone else in to do the job, Quinn would have probably still been sitting on the beach on Maui enjoying his vacation, and the other guy would be the one scrambling for his life. Or, more likely, would be dead already.

Quinn looked at the three messages still unread. The first was from Chief Johnson, a copy of the Allyson Police Department's report on the Farnham fire. Quinn perused it quickly and didn't notice anything unusual. If need be, he could come back to it and read it more thoroughly later. The second was the e-mail Peter had sent him with flight information to D.C. prior to the disruption.

He didn't recognize the sender's address on the final message, but that wasn't unusual. The message had been sent only six hours earlier. He opened it.

Xavier,

Peter has asked I get in touch

with you. There is a project

that needs your help. Pls reply

upon receipt.

P4J

Quinn sat back, mildly surprised. Maybe not all his contacts had dried up. Xavier was a cover name he sometimes used for e-mail communications, but not anytime recently. And P4J was the identifier of a middleman in Europe named Duke. The last time they had worked together had been two years ago. A simple gig. Quinn had successfully pre-bugged a meeting so Duke would have a record of what went down. A painless operation.

Still, Quinn was glad to be finished. There was something slimy about Duke. Maybe it was the phony accent he cultivated, or maybe it was the threehundred-plus pounds he carried on his barely five-foot ten-inch frame. Whatever it was, he was the kind of guy Quinn never felt comfortable around.

The message was intriguing, though. 'Peter has asked I get in touch with you.'What did that mean? Was the Office back in business? It didn't seem likely. Maybe Duke was just fishing and was using Peter's name as bait. If that was the case, Duke was even stupider than Quinn thought.

Quinn picked up his phone and punched in the number for Peter. He let it ring ten times before hanging up. The fact that no one answered was perhaps not unexpected, given what had been happening, but it was certainly unusual. A bright neon sign in the front of his mind was flashing, Proceed with caution.

Returning to Duke's e-mail, he checked the routing to see what address it had initially been sent to. Nothing unusual there, either. It had gone to an anonymous ID at Microsoft Quinn had set up years before. He kept it active as a fallback in case any of his old clients wanted to get ahold of him. Old clients like Duke.

Quinn clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, thinking. He could either wait until he was able to get through to Peter or he could try and extract some more information from Duke. Cautiously, of course.

He clicked the Reply button.

Interested. Need details. X.

Quinn included instructions as to where Duke could securely upload any sensitive information, then hit the Send button. His computer would automatically reroute his reply so that it was delivered from the same address Duke had sent his message to.

Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten with the coming sunrise. The humidity was already inching toward a barely tolerable level, and Quinn was starting to feel sticky. It would be another hour at least before he could call Orlando. Plenty of time for a shower.

For years, Quinn's and Orlando's lives had paralleled each other's. While he was four years older, they had both gotten their start in the business at around the same time, Quinn as a clean-and-gather apprentice to Durrie and Orlando as a research specialist with Abraham Delger, Durrie's sometime friend, sometime partner.

Quinn had been a rookie cop, working in Phoenix, Arizona. He had been assigned to crowd control on a murder investigation, but as usual, his curiosity got the better of him. He did a little digging on his own time and ended up stumbling across some information that should have remained buried.

He traced the killer back to a hotel in Mesa, then was able to find a picture of the man on the hotel security tapes. For the next few days, he spent hours searching through mug books and criminal databases trying to match