[Quinn 04] - The Silenced

“Mighty important task for a low-level analyst.”

“I’m a case officer.”

“Field cases?”

She shook her head. “My department is tasked with handling defectors and other sensitive foreign nationals living in the U.K.”

“Like Palavin,” he said.

She nodded.

“Well, isn’t that interesting. Did he come to you or did you go to him?”

“It was all before my time.”

“That’s not very helpful,” he said. “I’d be happy to turn you over to my two other guests. I’m sure they’d love to get ahold of someone who worked directly with the Ghost.”

“It’s not like that!”

“Then enlighten me.”

“You don’t understand. I’m good at my job. I love doing work that helps protect my country. But this …” She paused. “This wasn’t right.”

Quinn waited for her to go on.

“When Robb contacted—”

“Robb?” Quinn asked, not recognizing the name.

“That’s what he goes by now. Trevor Robb.”

The name Petra was so desperate to know, Quinn thought. “Go on.”

“When … Palavin contacted us, I had to look up his file just to know who he was. Former KGB. Arrived U.K. in 1988. According to the report, he’d already established himself as Trevor Robb, but he’d left Moscow in a hurry and had arrived with only limited funds.”

“So he came to you for money, is that it?”

“Yes. He agreed to share what he knew in exchange for enough cash to make him wealthy, and the promise that we would provide whatever protection he deemed necessary for the remainder of his life.”

“That’s a pretty steep price.”

“Apparently his information more than compensated for his demands at the time.”

“But not now,” Quinn said.

“He hasn’t been an active asset for us for many years. I understand he still tries to keep his fingers in things, but nothing we would be interested in. Then we heard from him a little over a month ago that his life was in danger, and that we were bound by our agreement to protect him. He was an inactive client I inherited from previous case officers, so it fell to me to arrange what he wanted. I talked with his representative, who laid out their plan, and instantly I knew it was something MI6 couldn’t touch. I took it to my superiors, thinking they’d instruct me to tell Mr. Robb to go to hell. But they didn’t. They agreed we shouldn’t be directly involved, but they felt it was important we stick to the deal. There are British interests at stake. It was decided that we would pass it on to one of our contractors, giving them a story that they would find plausible.”

“David Wills, and suitcase bombs for North Korea?” Quinn said.

“You’ve figured a lot out.”

Another connection surfaced in Quinn’s head. “Did you set him up with a computer information specialist, too? Someone to dig into the histories of those working for him?”

She looked away. “That … that we kept in-house. One of our top hackers was assigned to the project.”

Quinn stared at her in disbelief. “You’re telling me your little group there at MI6 is responsible for the danger my … people are facing?”

“Whatever Palavin’s done with the information is all on him,” she said quickly. “We had no idea what he wanted it for.”

“No idea?” he yelled. “That does not absolve you!”

“Hey, everything all right in there?” Orlando asked through the door.

“Fine,” Quinn shot back. He locked eyes with Annabel. “If anything happens to them, anything, then I will kill you myself. That’s not a threat, nor a promise. That’s a fact.”

She sucked in a nervous breath, but said nothing.

Quinn allowed himself a moment to calm down, then said, “Once you passed the job onto Wills, why didn’t you just let it go then?”

Her lips trembled slightly as she spoke. “This wasn’t something that was furthering national security. It was eating me up. When I found out Palavin had planted a man on Wills’s teams, I knew I had to do something.”

“Wait. Planted?”

“A man named Mercer.”

“Mercer? David said Mercer was his man.”

“Cover story. Mercer’s mission, as I later found out, was to not only make sure the targets were neutralized,