noon.”
“Thanks,” Quinn said, not sure if he meant it. “Where is she?”
“Where else?” Nate said. “At the computer.” He stepped into the hallway, then leaned back into the room. “Coffee’s ready, too.”
Orlando couldn’t have been gone too long, Quinn thought. He remembered holding her while he slept, and waking every once in a while because he wanted to know she was really there.
As he got up, he could smell her on the pillow, the distinct scent of her body: tangy and sweet and inviting.
A quick hot shower cleared the fog from his mind and helped him to focus on the here and now. Once he was dressed, he went straight for the kitchen, grabbed a cup of coffee, then returned to the living room.
“Hey,” he said as he approached the table where Orlando was
working. “Hey,” she replied. The silence wasn’t exactly awkward, but it wasn’t normal either. “Did you sleep all right?” Quinn asked. She glanced up at him, the barest of smiles on her lips. “I slept
fine.” “Good,” he said, then added a little too quickly, “So did I.” Another lull. “If anyone’s wondering, I slept pretty good, too,” Nate said. Usually Quinn would have said something like “Nobody’s won
dering” or “I really don’t care,” but instead he said, “Excellent.” “Well, it wasn’t
of the computer at the Quayside.” Quinn pulled out a chair and sat down next to her. “See, I told you
you could do it.” “I never thought I couldn’t.” “Anything worth noting?” She smiled. “Stuff you’d expect, mainly. Office-type software and a
few document files. There’s also a whole PDF catalog of everything they’re selling. You might find this interesting.” She clicked on a file, and a spreadsheet opened up. “Price list.”
The document listed items and their individual price followed by lower and lower discount prices depending on the volume of weapons purchased.
“Anything on who these guys are?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Even the software and the computer are registered to a generic name. A. Lee. No company.” She paused. “Something else interesting, though. I went into the system and got the serial number on the machine. Turns out it’s less than a month old. Sold two weeks ago right here in Singapore.”
“You know where?”
“Mail order to an address just off Orchard Road. And, yes, I checked it out. No such address.”
“Wonderful,” Quinn said. “What about clients? Was there anything on the drive about them?”
“There is a client folder, but it’s empty.”
The look on her face told him there was more. “But?” he said.
“I dug around the hard drive and retrieved any deleted files I could. There weren’t many. Either everything else has been written over, or they just don’t use the computer that much.”
“But there was something?”
“Yes. Several files were spreadsheets. Strictly numbers, so I have no idea what they mean. There was a copy of the catalog, some temp files the computer generated, and a text document.”
She opened the text document.
A Kamarudin SR-98
“Kamarudin. Sounds like a name,” Nate said.
“It is,” Orlando said. “But I didn’t get any unusual hits on it.”
“Could be an alias,” Quinn told them. “It’s the ‘SR-98’ that’s interesting to me.” He had heard the numbers before. He knew they denoted a weapon, but he was having a hard time bringing up an image of it. “Rifle,” he said, half remembering.
“Sniper rifle,” she corrected. “British. Used by the military in the UK, Australia...” She paused and looked up at Quinn. “And even Singapore.”
“So it would be easy to obtain.”
“That would be my guess,” she said. “But it’s weird, you know? Why would this one file still be retrievable? It would seem to me this would be something they’d do a secure dump on, make sure it was written over. There are no other deleted files like it.”
“Maybe they just missed it,” Nate offered.
“It’s a possibility,” she said, then glanced at Quinn. “But even more than before, I think you’re right. It’s just too perfect.”
“Like a setup,” Quinn said.
“Yes. Only for what?”
Quinn leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his still-damp hair. “I don’t like it. I don’t like any of this.” He took in a quick, deep breath, then forced the air out of his lungs. “I don’t care what Jenny wants. We’re going to find her, and we’re going to get her the hell out of here. End of story.”
“But we don’t know where she is,” Nate said.
