In truth, he owed Markoff so much more.
Finland. A decade before.
“Are you still with us, Mr. Quinn?” It was the voice of Andrei Kranz—flat, uninterested, and speaking English with a heavy accent. The rumor was he’d been born in Warsaw, but to Quinn his accent seemed more German than Polish.
Quinn opened his eyes and looked up at his tormentor. Kranz stood in front of him, his face only a foot away from Quinn’s own. What passed for a smile grew on Kranz’s thin-lipped mouth.
“Good,” Kranz said. He reached over and patted Quinn on the cheek. “Have a good night, okay? We’ll see you in the morning.”
Kranz stood up and laughed. Behind him, two other men, no more than shadows, laughed also.
A moment later, Quinn was alone.
For a while, he could hear them walking away through the forest. Then their steps grew faint until there was only the sound of the breeze passing through the trees, gusting above him one moment, then slowing to nothing the next.
The post–midnight air was bone chilling. A few degrees colder and it would have been numbing. But numbing would have been a relief.
The night sky, what he could see of it through the trees, was cloudless. The stars that packed the void seemed to be piled one on top of the other, unhindered by any interference from nearby civilization. It reminded him of the sky of his youth, where millions of stars filled the northern Minnesota night. Looking around, he also realized there was little difference between the land he’d grown up in and the Finnish countryside he would apparently die in.
The closest real city was Helsinki, but it was over a hundred kilometers away. It could have been a thousand kilometers away or even a thousand miles for all it mattered to Quinn. He knew no help would come from that direction. And though he tried not to think about it, the truth was no help would come from
If he had any doubt, he just needed to look down at the lifeless body of Pete Paras—Double-P to his friends. But Double-P would have a hard time answering to that nickname anymore. His head lay on a dark stain in the sand, the only remnant of the pool of blood that had flowed out of the gash in his neck.
Kranz had made sure Quinn watched as he sliced Paras’s throat himself, having one of his men hold Quinn down while another held Quinn’s head still and eyes open.
“I’m not doing this because I want to,” Kranz had said as he grabbed a handful of hair and pulled Paras’s unconscious head upward. “I don’t like to do this, eh?” He ran the knife just above the skin covering Paras’s throat without touching it. It was like he was deciding what would be the best line to take. “I mean, it’s not like this is something I go out of the way for. Sometimes, though, it’s part of the job.” He took another swipe, this time the blade slicing deep into the flesh.
Kranz had to jump back to avoid getting splattered by any of the blood. As it was, his knife hand was covered with it. He walked up to Quinn and wiped the blood off on the cleaner’s T-shirt.
The message was clear. Unless Quinn talked, his throat would be next. But he didn’t know the answers to Kranz’s questions. He’d been hired for a very specific assignment, and only knew the details he needed to know. Unfortunately, the Pole didn’t believe him. After the initial questions garnered nothing, Kranz decided to let Quinn have some alone time.
They had left Quinn kneeling in the dirt, wearing just his T-shirt and boxer briefs. His wrists were bound together behind him by a short rope that was then tied around his ankles. It pulled his wrists backward, hog-tying him so that his outstretched fingers could almost touch his heels. If he could’ve sat back on his legs, he would’ve been able to relieve some of the pressure, but there were two additional ropes, one looped under each of his arms and tied to tree branches ten feet above him, preventing any backward movement. The ropes were rigged just long enough so that only Quinn’s knees were able to rest on the ground—any shorter and he would have been hanging in the air.
They hadn’t killed him, but he knew that was only a temporary stay of execution. Kranz and his men would be back in the morning. If he was still alive, they’d see if a night of tenderizing had done anything to jog his memory. But when they realized they’d get nothing more out of him than they already had, he’d join Double-P on the ground.
As the hours passed, Quinn fought the urge to shiver from the cold. Each time he did, his body would jerk against the unforgiving ropes and make it feel like his arms were about to be ripped from his shoulders and out of his skin.
He tried to figure out a way to get free. But the more he tried to concentrate, the more his mind fogged up. Maybe if it hadn’t been so cold, he would have been able to think more clearly. That’s what he told himself, at least. That’s how he rationalized his failure.
What did pass through his mind, giving him at least a few minutes’ respite from his hopeless situation, was the image of what he would do to Kranz if he were to somehow escape. Quinn wouldn’t make the same mistake Kranz did. Quinn would walk up to him and kill him. A single shot to the head, point-blank range. A straight-out execution. Never mind that Quinn had never done anything like that before, or that his chances of being in a position to carry it out were nonexistent. For those brief moments, he was happy.
He heard things during the night: the wind, a small animal in the trees above him, the occasional car on the distant road. And there had been the voice of Durrie, too. His mentor talking to him in a voice so low Quinn couldn’t make out the words, but the meaning was clear.
Disappointment. Displeasure. Disgust.
But the worst sound came two hours before dawn, when he heard steps approaching in the distance. They could only mean the return of Kranz and his men. And that could only mean death.
As the steps grew closer, he realized it wasn’t the group returning, but just one person. Perhaps Kranz had decided there was little he could learn from Quinn after all, so he had sent back a solo executioner to finish the job. In Quinn’s exhausted and incapacitated state, a three-year-old with a plastic hanger could have killed him, so one man would be more than enough.
When the new arrival appeared before him, Quinn’s guess was confirmed. It was one of Kranz’s men. The one
