[Quinn 03] - Shadow of Betrayal

The body removal was the easy part. It was dealing with the vehicles that was trickier. There were three of them for only two people— the van, and the two sedans the meeting’s participants had arrived in.

Quinn didn’t want to take a chance driving around with a van full of dead men more than he had to, so they started with the cars first. They each took a sedan and drove south for twenty minutes before turning down a narrow back road.

After another ten minutes, Quinn spotted an opening between the trees. Not another road, nor even a cart path. Just a break in the vegetation wide enough for the sedan to navigate through. He was able to work his way almost a hundred feet into the brush before he could go no farther. It was enough. There was no way the car could be seen from the road. With any luck, it might be days or even weeks before someone stumbled upon it. By then, it wouldn’t matter.

He retraced his steps to the road, where Nate waited in the other car, and soon they were heading back north.

“Kind of fitting, I guess,” Nate said after a while. “Dying in a church.”

“Dying in church is a common thing, is it?” Quinn asked.

“Not the dying so much,” Nate said. “But being dead in church. You know, funerals. Memorials.”

Quinn looked at Nate, all but rolling his eyes. He then pulled out his cell phone and located a number in his contact list. The line rang twice.

“Hello?”

“We’re on,” Quinn said.

“When should we expect you?” the voice asked.

“Before dawn.”

“We’ll be ready.”

Quinn and Nate separated again at the church, Nate staying in the sedan while Quinn got behind the wheel in the van. This time they headed north toward Dublin. They kept their speed steady, not too fast, not too slow, so as not to draw undue attention. But they needn’t have worried. There were few other vehicles on the road. When they reached the Irish capital, they skirted around the south edge, and made their way to Dun Laoghaire Harbour.

The boat was ready and waiting. It was a private yacht, a forty-six footer that could be run by one person if necessary. A Meridian 411 Sedan. Luxurious yet practical.

The name painted near the bow read The Princess Anne.

The crew of two was waiting just inside the access gate to the private dock where The Princess Anne was moored. The men, David Baulder and Steven Howard, were people Quinn had worked with in the past and had come to trust. He had hired them and rented the yacht as a safety precaution just in case the need arose. That was part of being a cleaner, always being ready for any contingency, but not always having to activate your plans.

Dawn would arrive in less than two hours, so at best they had thirty minutes before activity at the marina picked up. The dock they were using had been chosen with care. Security in this part of the marina was lax. No cameras, no guard station, and only two motion-activated lights in the vicinity—one at the gate and a second on the dock. Both had been disabled.

Not wasting a second, they moved the plastic-wrapped bodies out of the van and onto the boat. There was no blaring of sirens in the distance, no sudden arrival of the police.

Fifteen minutes later, they motored through the marina and out into the Irish Sea.

Quinn helped Nate and Howard remove the bodies from the plastic, while Baulder piloted the boat. Once free of the wrapping, each of the dead men’s torsos was bound with a steel cable attached to a set of metal weights. The pieces of plastic that had enclosed the corpses were then folded and piled in the corner. Once all the bodies had been removed, the pile of plastic was wrapped with its own cable and weights.

After they were finished, Quinn went inside the cabin and pulled out his phone.

“Hello?” a female voice said. It was Misty, Peter’s assistant.

“It’s Quinn for Peter.” Though it was the middle of the night in Washington, D.C., Quinn was pretty sure Peter would still be there.

“Quinn,” Misty said, her voice mellowing. “We were wondering when you’d call. Hold on, he’s expecting you.”

There was a short pause, then Peter came on the line.

“Well?” he asked.

“The church is taken care of,” Quinn said. “The bodies are about to disappear, too.”

“No blowback?”

“Not from my end,” Quinn said, annoyed. He was good at his job, and blowback from anything he was responsible for never happened.

“Good.”

“The shooter?” Quinn asked.

Peter hesitated. He was notorious for not wanting to share more information than he had to. But then he said, “He’s on a plane. Should be here in a few hours.” Another pause. “You did great. Catching him, I mean. That’s bonus worthy.”

“You’re right. It is.”

The ship’s engines suddenly died down to a low rumble. Quinn stepped out of the cabin and onto the rear deck. The sky was a mixture of dark blue and faded orange. In the east, over the sea and toward the U.K., the sun would soon peer above the horizon.