They were surrounded first by skyscrapers, then by squat storefronts with signs mostly in Spanish. After a while, these gave way to warehouses and manufacturing plants, most with no identification at all.
It was quiet here, almost deserted. The buildings that didn’t look abandoned were shut down for the night. But it wasn’t only the buildings that looked abandoned. The roads, too, were nearly deserted. Petra was sure they would be spotted at any moment.
“Slow down,” she said.
“Trust me,” Kolya told her.
He immediately turned right onto a side street. As soon as they were out of sight of the Mercedes, he flipped the Buick’s headlights off, then executed a quick one-eighty. A moment later they were back on the main road, the Mercedes’s taillights fading in the distance.
“Don’t lose them,” she said urgently.
“Which is it? Don’t lose them or slow down?”
Petra didn’t answer.
They raced forward, closing the gap by a third before Kolya eased back on the accelerator. Ahead, red brake lights shone brightly in the otherwise dark, empty night. Kolya let the Buick coast to a halt in the darkness near the curb.
After half a minute, the brake lights dimmed as the Mercedes crept forward several feet, then turned off the road. A second later it slipped behind a building, but it didn’t completely disappear. The brake lights had come on again, and the red glow leaked back to the street. It stayed like that for half a minute, then everything went dark.
“There was a parking lot about half a block back,” Petra said.
“I saw it,” Kolya said.
“Take the car there and wait. If the Mercedes comes back out, duck down and make sure they don’t see you.” Petra opened the door and climbed out.
“How long do I wait?”
“You have something better to do?”
“No. I was just … I mean, what if you need help?”
“I won’t.” Petra hesitated in the opening. “If I’m not back in two hours, go to the airport and call Mikhail.”
“What about you?”
“If I’m not back by then, I’m dead.”
Chapter 5
Quinn and his apprentice, Nate, had been waiting for almost two hours. But waiting was part of the job, and they were both experts at it. They sat quietly, saying very little, their minds wandering but their senses alert. When their handheld radio came to life, neither of them even flinched.
“Give us five to clear out, then you’re on,” a male voice said on the other end.
Quinn clicked the Talk button. “Copy.”
He had no idea who the prime op was on this job. Wills had supplied Quinn with all the instructions he would need, so there had been no face-to-face with the other team. Sometimes you knew who you were working with, sometimes you didn’t. It was the world they lived in.
As far as his own team was concerned, after reading through the job specs, Quinn had determined there would be no need for more than the two people. So after Minnesota, Orlando had gone home to San Francisco to be with Garrett.
“Be careful,” she’d said. “If you need me, I can be there in a couple hours.”
“We won’t need you.”
“That warms my heart.”
“I need you, but not for this. Is that better?” he asked.
“It’s a start.”
Quinn and Nate waited quietly for five minutes to pass. The room they were in had served as an office at one time, but it had been years since it was last used. They had brought two folding chairs, a thermos of coffee, and a couple Styrofoam cups, but otherwise the room was empty.
“Time,” Quinn said without looking at his watch.
He tossed the walkie-talkie to Nate, who bagged it up with the thermos and cups. They then folded the chairs and set everything in the hallway to be picked up on their way out.
A wipe-down was unnecessary. They’d been wearing gloves since before they’d gotten out of the van. They’d also taken the additional steps of wearing hairnets and garments that covered everything except their faces. Unless their DNA could be pulled out of the air, no one would ever know they’d been there. Quinn was always careful, but the fact they were doing this job in the same city he and Nate called home made him want to cut the risks down even more.
The op room was on the other side of the building, one floor down. Nate walked past the door and continued on toward the nearest building exit to make sure that the others had left and no one else had shown up.
While Nate did that, Quinn approached the op room door and pushed it open. A mixed odor of gunpowder and blood wafted out. Both were familiar smells, so were no more than background noise to him. There, but easy to tune out.
The floor revealed what he expected to see. One body. Male.
The man was on his back, a bullet hole just a little off center in his forehead.
Quinn frowned. The shooter had used a 9mm by the looks of it. A.22 would have been better. It was a close- in job, so no need for more power than a.22 could provide, and, most important to Quinn, a.22 would have left less mess.
But being prepared was something he took very seriously. So, from the start, Quinn assumed the ops team wouldn’t care about what they left behind. That’s why he and Nate had draped the entire room in a double layer of plastic when they first arrived. Just in case. As expected, the sheeting had contained the blood splatter. Now all they had to do was wrap everything up, carry the package out to the van, account for the bullet, then do a final sweep to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.
Ten minutes tops.
Nate walked up behind Quinn. “Building’s secure.”
“Good.” Quinn motioned into the room. “After you.”
The dead man looked to be in his mid-sixties. He had a bit of a spread around the waist, but was otherwise in decent shape. His hair was more salt than pepper. Visually, there was nothing particularly remarkable about him. Whatever sins had necessitated his removal ran deeper than his appearance.
It wasn’t Quinn’s job to stand in judgment. He was only there to make the condemned disappear. It wasn’t that he was amoral, but he’d learned over the years that it was often hard to tell where the line between right and wrong was drawn, and sometimes there didn’t seem to be a line at all. The best Quinn could do was align himself with organizations he trusted, whose work was usually on the up-and-up.
That had become harder after an organization known as the Office had been dismantled. They’d been his de facto employer for years, and for the most part he had always been confident where they stood. He felt he could trust them, and not constantly question their motives. Up until the end, they had given Quinn a steady stream of work, which meant he seldom had to deal with other clients.
Now it was different. In a span of several weeks, he could work with multiple organizations whose motivations were often harder to discern. He did his best, doing what front-end investigation he could and trusting his gut when he had to. It kept things interesting, and made him realize just how easy he used to have it.
In less than five minutes, they had the body wrapped and ready to go. At Quinn’s direction, Nate was probing the small bullet hole in the exterior wall. “Went all the way through,” he said.
“We’ll make a quick sweep of the perimeter. If we can’t find it right away, we’ll forget it.”
Their van was parked in back next to an old loading dock. The dock itself was sealed off by a chain-link fence,
