[Quinn 04] - The Silenced

“A little late, if you ask me,” a man near Quinn muttered.

“What happened?” Quinn asked.

“Someone got shot,” he said, nodding toward the clear area in the center of the crowd.

Quinn thanked the man, then worked his way to the front of the crowd.

There was a body on the ground, blood pooling around his torso. Quinn couldn’t see the man’s face, but he didn’t have to. He recognized the hair and the clothes.

It was the man who had been watching the station exit, the man who had been in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt in New York.

Wills’s man.

Quinn looked over his shoulder. The crowd had begun to separate him from the Russian woman. He stepped forward into the clear area and jumped over the dead man’s body.

“Hey!” an officer yelled as he emerged into the center of the circle. “You can’t do that.”

“Sorry,” Quinn said.

Behind him, he could hear the Russian woman fighting through the throng of gawkers. “Excuse me.… Please let me pass.”

Quinn was only feet from the entrance to Embankment Station.

The woman, having guessed his intent, had given up trying to follow him directly, and was heading back out of the crowd. The second she took her eyes off him, Quinn crouched down next to a rubbish can, out of sight. Using the receptacle as cover, he angled himself so that he could see the entrance to the Underground station.

A few seconds later, he watched the Russian rush inside. The moment she disappeared, he stood up and started moving clockwise around the crowd. As he did, he spotted a man getting into a cab just under the train bridge.

It was Mercer. No mistake.

Wills had said Mercer was working for him. So was he Wills’s second watcher? Quinn wondered. Perhaps he had been on the outer perimeter, then had come back to check on his colleague and found him dead in front of the station. If Quinn were in Mercer’s shoes, he would have gotten the hell out of there, too. In fact, he did need to get the hell out of there, right now.

As soon as he cleared the crowd, he headed up the cobbled street back toward Charing Cross. At the end of the block, he tucked himself in between two souvenir kiosks and checked to see if the Russian had followed him. She hadn’t.

Instead of using the Underground, he walked toward Piccadilly Circus. No matter what the weather or the time of day, there was always a crowd there. He could blend in and take the tube to anywhere from there. A few blocks away, his phone vibrated. He checked the caller ID, then pressed Accept.

“I’m in London,” Orlando said. “You got my email, right?”

“I got it.”

She paused. “Is something wrong?”

“Where’s the flat you rented?”

“Quinn, what’s wrong?”

“I’d rather tell you in person.”

“You’re here?”

“Yeah.”

She rattled off an address on Charlotte Street in Soho. “You know where that is?”

“I know the area,” he said. He was only a ten-minute walk away.

“Okay, then I’ll see you soon.”

“Not soon enough.”

“WILLS IS DEAD?” MIKHAIL SOUNDED LIKE HE almost expected it.

“Killed right in front of me,” Petra said into her phone. “I tried to stop the shooter, but she got him before I could.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. We need to concentrate on finding Quinn.” Petra had heard Wills speak the name into his phone. Then she had heard him rasp it again when the body snatcher, Quinn, had tried to comfort the dying man.

“Who is Quinn?”

“The body snatcher,” she said. “The one I saw in Los Angeles. He was there, too. When I spoke the Ghost’s name, I could tell he had heard it before. He knows, Mikhail. We just need to find him, and convince him to tell us.”

“But where would we look? If he wants to stay lost, he sounds like the kind of man who can do it. Today might have been our only chance.” He paused. “You had him, Petra.”

“I know,” she whispered.