[Quinn 01] - The Cleaner

Arriving early p.m. in Berlin. Will see you at nine. I hope

you got me a room. I'm not sleeping on your floor. 0.

If anyone was going to sleep on the floor, it would be Nate. But there'd be plenty of room for both once Quinn moved over to the Dorint. The Four Seasons suite would be a perfect base for Orlando to set up her gear.

Quinn logged off his e-mail more relieved than he expected by the news about the slide.

As exhausted as he was from the travel, he still had a little while before he would allow himself to go to sleep, so he opened his web browser and brought up a search engine. He typed in 'Robert Taggert' and was rewarded with nearly ten pages of hits. Apparently it was a common name. He found one mention of a Robert Taggert from the eighteenth century. There was also one who served in the Army of the Republic during the American Civil War. Quinn quickly discarded any links to Taggerts who were either dead or too young to be the man who'd been consumed by the fire in Colorado. This narrowed his list considerably.

Quinn's Taggert had probably been in his fifties. This impression was backed up by the photocopy of the driver's license Ann Henderson had given him. To be safe, Quinn decided to give himself a ten-year window, considered for a second, then adjusted it to a range of men between forty-eight and sixty-five years old. The list condensed again, leaving only twenty-five relevant links.

Seven referred to the same Robert Taggert, a business administration professor at Clemson University. Two more led Quinn to an East Lansing, Michigan, man who was protesting the local development of a shopping mall. Twelve links were to different locations of a chain of auto service establishments in Kentucky owned by a Robert Taggert. And the final four were articles, each of which mentioned a different Robert Taggert.

A knock on the door interrupted Quinn. Room service had arrived with his dinner. As the server set the tray on the table next to his computer, Quinn pulled out five euros from his pocket. He tipped the man, who smiled politely, then left.

Quinn sat back down at the table and took a bite of his steak before returning his attention to his computer. With a little more searching, he was able to find pictures of five of the matches: the professor, the Michigan protester, the auto service king, and two others. None even came close to matching the picture Quinn had. There were no pictures available of the other two, but after reading the articles, he doubted either was the man he was looking for.

It was what he'd expected when he'd begun: no records of his Taggert. That left two possibilities. The first was that Taggert had never done anything to get his name on the Internet. Quinn found that highly unlikely. The second, however, that Robert Taggert wasn't the real name of the guy who had died in Colorado, made more sense.

Removing the Taggert name as a variable, Quinn spent the next hour searching for any missing persons who matched Taggert's description and fit the time frame. There were a few, and he made a note of each. He'd give the info to Orlando after she arrived and let her take a crack at it.

After another forty-five minutes of surfing the net, Quinn disconnected the link and put his computer into sleep mode. He got up and stretched. His body, screwed up by all his recent travel, didn't know which end was up. Most of his dinner remained untouched. He was tempted to just crawl into bed and go to sleep, but instead he plopped down on the couch and grabbed his phone.

'Where are you?' Peter asked as soon as he came on the line.

'En route,' Quinn said into his cell phone.

'You're not in Berlin yet?'

'Duke said he didn't need me until Sunday.'

'Really?' Peter said. 'I guess that makes sense.'

'Why?'

'Duke got word to me that there's some sort of meeting going down next week. He has evidence it might have something to do with our . . . situation. He's trying to get a fix on its location. Once he does, you'll go in, bug it, then see if he's right.'

'Do you know who's involved?' Quinn asked.

'Still no word.'

Quinn considered sharing the name Piper had told him, but decided not to. Best to be sure before throwing gas on a fire. 'I heard the contract on me has been canceled.'

'I heard that, too,' Peter said. 'Lucky you.'

'I take it things aren't going well there?'

Silence on the other end.

'Who'd they get?' Quinn asked.

'Pretty much the whole first string. Every ops team has had damage. '

'How many dead?'

'Seven for sure. Three more we can't get ahold of. Another three in the hospital. And a fourth at home nursing a concussion. ' 'What about there in the District?' Quinn asked.

'Things have been quiet for days now, ' Peter told him. 'But I'm not doing a lot of walking around in the open. '

'How many other operations have you been able to get going?'

'You're kidding, right?' Peter asked. 'The only thing I have even partially going is the thing with you and Duke; otherwise I've got no one available to me. My ability to mount even a simple field operation is gone. They didn't need to get any of us here in D. C. They've already put us out of business. For the short run, anyway. '