The Collected

“I know.”

She squeezed his hand.

He had told himself that his hope for Liz and Nate’s relationship to eventually fade away was for her protection, to keep her from getting emotionally-and maybe even physically-hurt. And while that was true, he now saw that desire for what it really was-his own selfish need to control the world around his sister and keep her from harm.

“If I tell you that you can’t do something or come with us somewhere, you have to listen to me,” he said.

“I can’t guarantee I’m always going to be happy about it.”

“And I can’t guarantee I’ll always be nice about it.”

She pulled her hand from his, turned it sideways, and held it across the table. “Deal.”

He took her hand and they shook.

Quinn put an arm around Liz as they walked back to the hotel. She returned the gesture, even resting her head on his shoulder for a moment.

The smell of the food they were carrying preceded them through the doorway as they reentered the hotel room. It’d been a while since their last meal, so Quinn was sure Orlando and Daeng would hurry over to grab what they wanted. But they both remained by Orlando’s computer, looking at the screen.

“You’ll want to see this,” Orlando said.

Quinn immediately set the bags down and joined them, Liz only a step behind him.

“What’ve you got?” he asked.

“Nate’s beacon went active again for a few seconds.”

“What?” Liz said. “You know where he is?”

Orlando shook her head. “No. There seems to be some sort of interference. Only bits and pieces got through. There was enough, though, for me to narrow it down some more.”

“How much more?” Quinn asked.

Orlando didn’t look as hopeful as he would have liked. “Pretty much the whole Caribbean, with the tip of Florida and a bit of Colombia thrown in.”

“You said you only had it for a few seconds?”

“Yeah.”

“Like last time,” Quinn said, disappointed.

“Actually, not quite like last time. Before, it kind of faded out. This time it was just there, then gone. No fade. Like he turned it off.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Could be anything.”

As Quinn straightened up, a whiff of the empanadas drifted by, but the hunger he’d been feeling moments before was gone.

“There’s more,” Orlando said. “Before Nate’s signal went active again, I dug into the radar database for this area. Given the time our security guard friend told us the plane took off, I was able to isolate the cargo plane’s flight path. The database only saves snapshot readings once a minute, and it’s from only the first thirty minutes of the flight before the plane moved out of range, but it gives us direction.”

She brought up a map showing Tampico and the rest of eastern Mexico. A line of unconnected blue circles started at approximately the location of the private airstrip, then headed almost due east over the Gulf of Mexico. After eleven circles-or minutes-the plane adjusted its path into a more southeasterly direction. After nineteen more, it was gone.

“I did a projection,” she said, and hit a few more keys. The map zoomed out to include the entirety of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Where the blue circles stopped, a straight, red line took over. “If they didn’t make any other course corrections, their flight path would have taken them over the northern tip of the Yucatan, between Cuba and Jamaica, over part of Haiti, south of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and finally over Dominica before moving out into the Atlantic.”

“If they didn’t change their flight path,” Quinn said. “If they did, they could be on any of those islands.”

“I didn’t say the info was perfect, but I think there’s better than an even chance that I’m right.”

Even if she were right, the area Nate might be in was still huge.

“Anything else?” he asked.

She scowled at him. “You weren’t gone that long. I was just finishing up programming a worm that I’ll send out to search for radar data along that path. Hopefully, we’ll pick up the plane again. It’s a long shot, but it’s automated so worth trying.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

Letting her get back to work, he helped Liz unpack the food. He then took a tentative bite of a torta, but set the sandwich back down.

Once more he was waiting, and once more he didn’t like it.

He pulled out his phone, needing to do something, and moved toward the window. Misty’s line rang five times, and he was kicked again into her voice mail.

“It’s Quinn. Really hoping you found something. Call me back.”

CHAPTER 39

Washington DC

The ever-paranoid Peter had chosen his hiding spot for the Office’s archives well, storing them digitally in servers belonging to the Library of Congress. Each file was encrypted within an existing text, meaning that if anyone accessed the file, they would only see a book or collection of documents that had nothing to do with the world of secrets.

To actually view the Office’s information, one had to know where in the document to click. This would take the user to a command program that looked like a computer error. But if the correct twelve-character password were input, the hidden information would appear.

For extra security, there were two additional steps needed if one were trying to access the files remotely. Unfortunately, Peter had kept those steps to himself, so Misty was forced to visit the John Adams Building of the library in person.

There, she had to wait until one of the public workstations freed up. When one finally did, she located the manuscript that hid the Office’s main index and began her search. Cross-referencing and matching up the names Quinn had given her with particular assignments was slow going. If the Office had still been in business, with all its data living on its own servers, she could have finished the search in no time. The method she had to use now meant going back and forth between dozens of documents, opening the secret information, and, more times than not, closing the file again when she realized the job she was looking at was unrelated to what Quinn requested.

So far she had amassed a list of twenty-three projects that met at least part of his criteria. None, however, was a homerun. She returned to the index, found the next potential match, and opened the appropriate file.

As she read through it, she unconsciously leaned closer to the monitor, the skin on her arms beginning to tingle. The ops crew was nearly a complete match. It wasn’t until she read the second page, where the cleaner was mentioned, that she leaned back, disappointed.

Close, but not close enough.

Still, she jotted down the project number and list of participants, then read through the summary in case Quinn asked her any questions about it.

That’s when the tingle returned.

She remembered this job. How could she forget? Jobs that went well were soon distant memories, but the ones that went badly stuck in her mind for a long, long time. This was one of those jobs.

There was something else about it, she remembered. Something unusual. What was it?