The cabbie looked at Daeng through his mirror, concerned. “What about the tip?”
Ethan Boyer did not take security lightly, especially his own. While he hadn’t noticed the cab following him, the men who always monitored his position from a trail car had.
Whitmore, the driver of his shadow car, said, “They’re turning off. What do you want us to do?”
“Has backup arrived yet?” Boyer asked.
“One minute out.”
Crap. The idea of driving around without his security detail for sixty seconds was unappealing to say the least, but if it was the only way to find out who had been following him, he didn’t see a choice.
“Go,” he said.
“Pull over anywhere in the next block,” Daeng said.
As if he’d been waiting to hear those words, the cabbie immediately pulled to the curb and turned off the meter. “Forty-seven twenty,” he announced.
Daeng paid the fare, with the extra hundred as promised.
Looking as if the weight of a thousand worlds had been lifted from his shoulders, the taxi driver said, “Next time, get into someone else’s cab.”
“You have a good evening, too,” Daeng said as he climbed out.
He looked both ways and spotted what he was pretty sure was the Explorer on the other side of the street, down about a block. Traffic was bumper to bumper on that half of the road, but would be easy enough to weave through. All he had to do was wait until the cars on his side cleared out of the way.
There, he thought, after the dark Dodge Caravan. A large enough gap to pass through.
He stepped into the road about a foot beyond the vehicles parked at the curb. He looked toward where his friends were waiting, but his view was blocked by the traffic. He checked to make sure the opening on his side was still approaching, then took another step out.
A truck.
A compact.
And finally the van.
But instead of driving by, the Caravan pulled to a quick stop, the front passenger window opened, and the man inside rested the suppressor-enhanced end of a gun on the frame. Not quite the family friendly image Dodge was going for.
“Stay where you are,” the man ordered.
As much as Daeng would have liked to disobey him, he knew the guy would be able to get off a shot before Daeng could find cover. His only chance was to play it cool and hope for an opportunity to escape.
“We’d like you to take a ride with us,” the man said.
“Thanks for the offer, but I’m not interested,” Daeng replied.
The side door slid open, and a ropy man with intense eyes climbed out.
“It wasn’t an offer,” the guy in the front seat said.
Daeng didn’t have to ask what this was all about. He knew it was that damn cabbie. The taxi had been spotted, and the man in the Maserati had apparently not taken kindly to the attention.
The ropy guy took a step toward Daeng and said, “Get in.”
He grabbed Daeng by the arm and pulled him toward the van.
“Wait,” the man up front said. “Search him.”
His buddy pushed Daeng against the side of the vehicle and patted him down, pulling out Daeng’s phone and his wad of cash. After stuffing the money into his own pocket, Ropy Guy showed the phone to the other guy.
“Get rid of it.”
Ropy Guy tossed it on the ground, crushed it under his heel, and kicked the remains under a car parked nearby.
Now! Daeng thought.
He shoved past the man and darted toward the back of the Caravan, hoping the second guy would hinder his friend’s view.
A single thup.
Daeng grabbed his left thigh as he stumbled forward and fell to the ground. He barely had time to register the burning pain of the gunshot before he was hauled to his feet and thrown into the van.
As they sped way, the man in front turned around, his gun peeking through the split between the seats. “So tell me, Mr. Nosy, what do we call you?”
CHAPTER 19
“Where the hell is he?” Nate asked.
Quinn had his phone to his ear as he tried Daeng’s number again, but like before, all he reached was voice mail. He called Orlando, putting her on speaker.
“I need to get a position on Daeng,” he said.
“Something happen?”
“Not sure. Maybe nothing.”
“Searching…” No matter where one of the team was in the world, Orlando could pinpoint that person via his phone to within a foot of his actual position. “Um…problem.”
“What?” Quinn asked.
“I don’t have a signal. Backtracking…okay, last ping was six minutes ago. Wait…”
When she failed to continue, Quinn said, “You still there?”
“According to his history,” she said, sounding both surprised and confused, “his last position was a hundred and seventy-three feet east of you on the other side of the street.”
Quinn and Nate whipped around and looked out the window. All Quinn saw were a few parked cars.
“We’ll call you back,” he said.
They jumped out of the SUV and sprinted between vehicles to the other side of the road. When they reached the ping point, Quinn scanned the ground and then dropped to his knees so he could look under the cars. With darkness falling, it was hard to see much of anything, but there was something just a few feet behind the rear tire of a Honda. A bump on the pavement.
By stretching his arm under the car as far as he could, he was able to get the tip of his fingers on the bump and work it toward him. Even before it cleared the bumper, he could feel that it was a phone, and once he had eyes on it, he knew it was Daeng’s.
“Quinn,” Nate said.
He was crouched next to a dark spot on the road. When he held up a finger, Quinn could see some kind of substance on it.
“It’s not oil,” Nate said.
“Tell me you found him,” Orlando said when Quinn called back.
“No,” he said. “He was here, but something happened.”
He told her about the smashed phone and the blood on the road.
“There are a few cameras on this street,” he said. “Security, traffic.”
“I’ll look,” she told him. “You want to stay on the line or…?”
“No. We’re coming to get you.”
“Okay.”
As soon as she hung up, she closed Eli’s computer and scooted it toward Abraham. “Put it away. We’ll deal with it later.”
“What happened?” he asked.
“Not now.”
On her own laptop, she accessed the DC metro traffic monitoring system and identified the cameras nearest the Renaissance Hotel. Choosing the one with the widest view, she backtracked through the footage at double speed until she came to the point where a dark Dodge Caravan stopped next to Daeng.
The location of the incident was too far from the camera for her to see details clearly, so she noted the time and switched to one of the closer cameras. Unfortunately, since they were intended to monitor intersections, none were pointing directly at the spot where Daeng had been.
She looked at the map, noting the businesses and buildings in the area. There was the Renaissance, of course. It would undoubtedly have surveillance out front, but given the point where Daeng was taken, it was unlikely the hotel’s cameras would be useful. There was, however, an office building close enough that its system may have picked up something.
After circumventing the firewalls into the building’s security system, she discovered seven cameras covering the outside of the building — three in the back where deliveries were made, and four in front. The first of the front cameras was angled so that it caught only a thin slice of the Caravan. Daeng, though, was clearly visible, as was a man standing outside with him. The gunshot seemed to come from inside the van. She had to watch the clip frame by frame before she could identify the tip of a suppressor sticking out the front passenger window.