He didn’t recognize the sender’s address on the final message, but that wasn’t unusual. The message had been sent only six hours earlier. He opened it.
Xavier,
Peter has asked I get in touch with you. There is a project that needs your help. Pls reply upon receipt.
P4J
Quinn sat back, mildly surprised. Maybe not all his contacts had dried up. Xavier was a cover name he sometimes used for e-mail communications, but not anytime recently. And P4J was the identifier of a middleman in Europe named Duke. The last time they had worked together had been two years ago. A simple gig. Quinn had successfully pre-bugged a meeting so Duke would have a record of what went down. A painless operation.
Still, Quinn was glad to be finished. There was something slimy about Duke. Maybe it was the phony accent he cultivated, or maybe it was the three-hundred-plus pounds he carried on his barely five-foot ten-inch frame. Whatever it was, he was the kind of guy Quinn never felt comfortable around.
The message was intriguing, though. “Peter has asked I get in touch with you.” What did that mean? Was the Office back in business? It didn’t seem likely. Maybe Duke was just fishing and was using Peter’s name as bait. If that was the case, Duke was even stupider than Quinn thought.
Quinn picked up his phone and punched in the number for Peter. He let it ring ten times before hanging up. The fact that no one answered was perhaps not unexpected, given what had been happening, but it was certainly unusual. A bright neon sign in the front of his mind was flashing, Proceed with caution.
Returning to Duke’s e-mail, he checked the routing to see what address it had initially been sent to. Nothing unusual there, either. It had gone to an anonymous ID at Microsoft Quinn had set up years before. He kept it active as a fallback in case any of his old clients wanted to get ahold of him. Old clients like Duke.
Quinn clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, thinking. He could either wait until he was able to get through to Peter or he could try and extract some more information from Duke. Cautiously, of course.
He clicked the Reply button.
Interested. Need details. X.
Quinn included instructions as to where Duke could securely upload any sensitive information, then hit the Send button. His computer would automatically reroute his reply so that it was delivered from the same address Duke had sent his message to.
Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten with the coming sunrise. The humidity was already inching toward a barely tolerable level, and Quinn was starting to feel sticky. It would be another hour at least before he could call Orlando. Plenty of time for a shower.
For years, Quinn’s and Orlando’s lives had paralleled each other’s. While he was four years older, they had both gotten their start in the business at around the same time, Quinn as a clean-and-gather apprentice to Durrie and Orlando as a research specialist with Abraham Delger, Durrie’s sometime friend, sometime partner.
Quinn had been a rookie cop, working in Phoenix, Arizona. He had been assigned to crowd control on a murder investigation, but as usual, his curiosity got the better of him. He did a little digging on his own time and ended up stumbling across some information that should have remained buried.
He traced the killer back to a hotel in Mesa, then was able to find a picture of the man on the hotel security tapes. For the next few days, he spent hours searching through mug books and criminal databases trying to match the face with a name. When he finally did, he took the information to the detective in charge of the investigation. That earned him a quick trip to the chief’s office, where he was told that he was operating outside his area of assignment. That if it happened again, he would be demoted to parking duty. That was on a Tuesday.
On Wednesday, he was called in again. With little explanation, he was told his services would no longer be needed. Even the union rep was there, nodding his head in agreement with the chief.
“They were going to kill you. You realize that, right?” Durrie said to him months later. “The Office had you fired, then arranged for someone to deal with you.”
“Right,” Quinn said, thinking his mentor was just trying to scare him. He was still new to the business then, naive to the ways of the world he’d been brought into.
“Believe me or not, Johnny. It’s up to you. But you found out too much, too quickly. You were a problem that needed to go away. That’s how it’s done here.” Durrie paused. “Remember that job interview in Houston? The one where they were going to fly you out?”
Quinn nodded, brow furrowed.
“What if I told you there was no job?” Durrie said.
“What?”
“I’m just telling you, if I hadn’t shown an interest in you, you’d have been dead. Of course, if you hadn’t been too smart for your own good, I wouldn’t have cared about you one way or the other.”
Quinn remembered how Durrie’s revelation had sobered him. It was at that point things started to become more real for him.
As for Orlando, she had been plucked from the ranks of a computer trade school in San Diego — a hacker who was constantly riding the probation list. She, like Quinn, had been curious about things most people left alone.
Because their mentors tended to work together a lot, and since they were both new to the business, it was natural that Quinn and Orlando would form a bond of friendship. What was more surprising was that Durrie and Orlando would form their own kind of bond. Years later, when Quinn was a successful solo operative, and Durrie’s own career had taken a bit of a downturn, things for all three of them changed.
When Quinn was just an apprentice, Durrie was the most buttoned-up person in the business. But not later. At some point in the years after Quinn struck out on his own, Durrie lost focus. Quinn heard about all sorts of things: jobs Durrie worked on that didn’t go as planned, assignments where things were missed, and more times than not the need for extra work to keep events suppressed.
It wasn’t from Orlando that he heard these things. It was from Peter at the Office, who was forced more and more to hire Quinn instead of Durrie.
Orlando was quiet at first, telling Quinn nothing when he called. But eventually she told him about Durrie’s growing anger and frustration. At first she thought it was just with work, his lost jobs, his less-than-stellar performances. Not that he ever talked about how his work went; she just knew him too well not to be able to read between the lines. But as his slide continued, she realized it was more than work. It was as if he were mad at life itself. And when his anger turned to depression, it seemed almost a natural progression.
When Quinn called Orlando and told her he had a project he was thinking about offering Durrie a job on, she had told him she thought it was a great idea. She said she’d even encourage Durrie to go. And when Durrie said yes, Quinn assumed Orlando’s influence had helped.
The job should have been a simple one. But somewhere along the way, it turned ugly. A gunman had been hidden in the warehouse they’d been sent to. Even then, they should have gotten away unhurt. Durrie, though, entered the building before they’d done a proper assessment. Quinn had tried to stop him, but his mentor just scoffed.
Thirty seconds later, gunfire broke out. Even as Quinn dove for cover, he could see Durrie jerk from the impact of several bullets.
Quinn knew it was too late even before he reached Durrie. Durrie’s clothes were drenched in blood, and though Quinn searched frantically, he could find no pulse. Stunned, Quinn knelt next to Durrie’s body. His mentor was dead. Orlando, he thought. How am I going to tell her? Guilt over what he could have done to save Durrie collided with the realization that it didn’t matter. There was nothing he could—