who had held Quinn’s head during Paras’s execution. A Caucasian, perhaps ten years older than Quinn. He was an inch or two below six feet, with a mop of curly dark hair that drooped over his ears and provided natural insulation from the cold.
He knelt in front of Quinn, looked him in the eyes, then nodded at Paras’s body. “Your buddy there was a son of a bitch, you know that?” the man said, his accent American.
Quinn tried to spit in the man’s face, but his mouth was too dry. “Fuck off,” he managed to whisper.
The man smiled. “Attitude,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”
The man stood back up and pulled out a large pocketknife. As he opened it, Quinn braced himself for the worst, knowing soon his head would be lying in its own puddle of blood. But instead of slashing him across the neck, the man moved around behind him, out of sight.
Quinn waited for the blade to cut into his skin. Maybe the executioner would go for an artery, or perhaps he’d start with the soft spot just below Quinn’s ribs. If he was really sadistic, he could even go for Quinn’s spinal cord, crippling Quinn before killing him.
As the seconds passed, Quinn continued to tense, almost willing the knife to find its mark. Then, without warning, he was on the ground, the pressure on his wrists and shoulders gone. The ropes that had bound him in place for the last several hours lay near his feet.
“Can you walk?” the man asked.
Quinn opened his eyes. The man was leaning over him.
It could still be a trick. Some game the man was playing. Not wanting to take any chances, Quinn kicked out, aiming for the man’s shin. But his muscles betrayed him, and his leg moved only a foot, then stopped, coming into contact with nothing but air.
“If you really want to hit me,” the man said, “why don’t you save your strength and wait until we get out of here. I’ll give you a free shot when we’re safe.”
Quinn didn’t remember many details from the next few hours. At some point, the man had gotten him to his feet. Then there had been what seemed like an endless barefoot walk along a cold and rocky path. He remembered mumbling a question to the man, but couldn’t recall what it had been or if there had been an answer.
At some point, he found himself no longer walking, but sitting in the passenger seat of a car. The man was behind the wheel, eyes forward. Quinn looked out the window. There seemed to be trees everywhere, illuminated by the splash of the car’s headlights as they cruised down the road.
He wanted to ask who’d planted all the trees. He wanted to know why it was so dark. And just before his body completely shut down, he wanted to ask where they were going. But the only question that he was able to ask was, “What’s your name?”
The driver laughed for a moment good-naturedly, then said, “Call me Steven.”
That had been the first time Quinn met Markoff.
The CIA man had been working undercover in Andrei Kranz’s organization. Kranz had been into trafficking Soviet-era weapons—both conventional, biological, and, he claimed, nuclear—to anyone buying in the West. Double-P had been one of the man’s dealers, but had decided he should be the big boss. Without even realizing it, Quinn had stumbled into a turf war.
Why Markoff had decided to save him, Quinn never knew for sure. Markoff said his job was done anyway, so giving Quinn a hand on the way out was no big deal. Quinn didn’t believe him. By all reports, Kranz had gotten away. If Markoff had finished the job, Kranz would have been dead.
But whatever the reason, Quinn knew then what he still knew now—he would forever owe Markoff for his life.
“I got two addresses,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. It was one of Quinn’s contacts, a guy named Steiner who worked out of a mailbox and shipping store on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Quinn had called him a couple of hours ago to see if he could find out where Jenny lived.
Steiner’s main gig wasn’t information. He was a documents man who could assemble a set of IDs that would stand up to almost any inspection. Because of his talents, he also had a lot of contacts. Which made him a good person to know if you needed to find out something quick.
“Give them to me,” Quinn said.
“The D.C. one’s the most recent.” Steiner read off an address in Georgetown. It had a unit number, so it wasn’t a single-family residence.
“And the other?”
“In Houston. The information is a little old, but as far as I can tell, still valid.” He gave Quinn the Texas address.
“Thanks,” Quinn said, then hung up.
The back wall of his living room was all window, floor-to-ceiling. He stood in front of it and stared out into the distance. The day was one of those hazy, hot, early September ones Quinn hated. He could barely make anything out beyond Beverly Hills.
He wished it was fall, and the air had cooled, and the winds had blown away the haze. Or even winter just after a rainstorm, when the sky was crisp and clean, and the city shone at night like a bundle of white Christmas lights. But he’d gladly take the hazy day if someone could have granted the wish that he had been out of the country working a job when Albina called about the body at the port.
He should have just said no when Albina called him the previous day.
But he hadn’t.
He took a deep breath, then walked across the living room into the foyer and opened the front door. Nate was lying on the hood of his ten-year-old Accord, reading his flight instruction manual and soaking up a little sun.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Quinn said.
