The Silenced (4 page)

Then, two houses down and across the street from Winters’s place, she spotted a man leaning against a tree.

He wasn’t exactly hiding, but close enough. He had positioned himself in such a way that the tree blocked the light from the nearest streetlamp, creating a dark shadow that all but enveloped him. His short height made her think that he might be a teenager, but her gut said no. In her mind, a giant sign hung above him, reading
DOESN’T BELONG
.

Without missing a step, she continued down the sidewalk, one arm wrapped around her chest as if she was fighting off the cool night, the other draped at her side, her hand resting near the opening of her bag inches from the grip of the Glock.

When she’d closed to within ten feet of the man, she glanced at the ground pretending to check her footing. She stayed that way until she was abreast of him, then looked back up, her gaze swinging to the left like one might naturally do. She stopped abruptly, her eyes wide, staring at the man.

“My God, you scared me,” she said.

“Sorry,” the man said, not moving from the shadow.

Up close, the darkness did not mask him completely, and she could see he must have spent a lot of time in the weight room. No doubt, she guessed, to compensate for his lack of stature.

“It’s okay.” Petra let out a nervous laugh. “It’s just you’re kind of hidden there.”

The man smiled without showing his teeth, but remained otherwise silent. His attention seemed to be focused more on the house across the street than on her.

“Nice night, huh?” Petra said.

He responded the same way he had before.

After a moment, she smiled and started walking off. “Have a good evening.”

At the next block she turned left. As soon as she was out of sight, she stopped and turned around. She almost expected to see him standing behind her, but the sidewalk was empty.

He was a watcher, not a local. And by the bulge Petra noticed under his jacket, an
armed
watcher. But was he watching to make sure no one got in, or that no one got out?

Or was he
with
the group inside? Standing guard in case …

In case someone like me shows up
, she thought. She closed her eyes and swore under her breath. Like the others, Winters would soon be a dead end. If they hadn’t been delayed in New York, they wouldn’t have gotten stuck in traffic, and it was possible they would have been able to get to the house first. Winters would have been theirs.

She pulled out her phone and called Mikhail.

“We’re too late,” she said.

“What happened?”

She told him what she’d found.

“He’s still alive, though,” Mikhail said. “There’s still a chance.”

“The only chance I see involves a high percentage of bullets aimed at my head. Is that what you want me to try?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Have you made progress on Moody?”

“A little. I traced him from Philadelphia to an address in Manhattan, but he’s not there anymore, either. I’m trying to figure out where he went next.”

Petra wanted to scream, but instead she said, “Get us on a flight back tonight.”

She disconnected the call, then stood there for several moments thinking. Maybe Mikhail was right, and Winters wasn’t yet a lost cause. At the very least, pictures of those who had him could be very useful in identifying who the killers were.

She traded her phone for the palm-size digital camera in her bag, then, keeping low, moved back onto Winters’s street, crouching behind a parked car to mask her return. She was only there a few moments before the watcher stepped away from the tree and started crossing the street. He was tilting his head the way a person did when he was listening to a receiver in his ear.

She shot off a couple of pictures, then turned the camera on the house. The front door was now open, and standing just inside was a large man in a suit that did little to hide his bulk. He stepped aside so that another man, this one only slightly smaller than the first, could pass through. Two others appeared in the doorway. Neither was in the same size class as the two behemoths. One looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. He was thin, but walked with a confidence that made Petra think he was in charge. The other man looked pale and nervous. Petra estimated that he was in his mid to late sixties, the right age to be Winters.

The one in charge had a hold of the other guy’s arm and was helping to keep him from collapsing. Once they were outside, one of the big men took over, lifting the man so that his feet barely touched the ground as he walked him toward the Mercedes in the driveway.

When the car door opened, the dome light came on, illuminating the older man’s face.

Winters. Definitely
.

Even from this distance, she could see fear on the man’s face. She touched the zoom, took one more picture, then slipped the camera back into her bag.

Once Winters was shoved into the back of the silver sedan, Petra retreated to the next street down, then sprinted back to the Buick.

“Go!” she yelled as she jumped back into the car. “We have to follow them.”

Kolya pulled the car onto the road. “Follow who?”

“A silver Mercedes. They have Winters.”

Kolya turned onto Winters’s street just in time to see the taillights of the Mercedes turning two blocks away.

“Hurry,” Petra said. “But for God’s sake, don’t let them know we’re here.”

•   •   •

They followed the Mercedes south on the 101 freeway into Hollywood and then downtown. There it finally exited onto a side street.

“Not too close,” Petra said. Unlike on the freeway, they could be easily spotted now.

“I know,” Kolya shot back. “But I don’t want to lose them, either.”

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.”

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, but a few feet away was an unimpeded double door.

The first thing they did was load their equipment and the stuff they’d left upstairs into the vehicle. Once that was done, they only had the plastic-wrapped body left.

They expertly carried the package out of the room and down the hall. At the exit, Nate had to lean it against his chest as he opened the door so they could pass through.

“Hold on,” Quinn said, then moved his hands to get a better grip on the body. “All right.”

As they stepped outside, Quinn registered a quick, sudden movement in his peripheral vision. But when he turned to look, nothing was there.

They maneuvered the body into the back of the van, then Quinn leaned over to Nate and whispered, “I think we have company.”

Nate kept his focus on securing the body so it wouldn’t roll around. “Where?”

“At the end of the building. I’m going to slip back inside. If we do this right, he won’t see me. What I want you to do is get in the van and drive off. Take the body to Bernie’s like we planned. I want to keep on schedule.”

“And you?”

“I’ll meet you at home.”

“What about the bullet?”

“Don’t worry about it. Even if someone finds it, they won’t have anything to tie it to.”

“Got it.”

Quinn used the open doors of the van to cover his retreat back into the building. Without being told, Nate completed the ruse by closing the van’s doors from inside, and crawling through to the front instead of walking around and getting in through the driver’s side door. There was no way for anyone watching to know that Quinn hadn’t been with him. Quality, intuitive work that emphasized it wouldn’t be long before Quinn would have to either make Nate a full partner or set him free to pursue his own projects.

Another year, tops. Probably less.

The crunch of loose gravel as the van pulled away was soon replaced by an eerie silence cut only by the distant drone of the 101 freeway. Most people would have been surprised by the lack of activity so close to downtown. But the warehouse district was one of the most underpopulated parts of Los Angeles. After several quiet minutes passed, Quinn began to consider the possibility that the motion he’d seen had been nothing more than one of the homeless looking for a warm place to sleep.

More silence.

Then a sound—no more than a single pebble skipping over the ground.

There was no second pebble, no sound of footsteps on the gravel. Just that one moment of disturbance in an otherwise deathly still night.

Quinn eased down the hallway until he reached the doorway of the large open space that had once been the main storage area. He stood in the threshold looking back toward the rear entrance.

Click
.

A sound that almost wasn’t a sound at all.

But he’d been waiting for it. The doorknob had been turned.

Quinn stepped all the way back into the storage room, then leaned forward just enough so he could still see the back door. Nothing happened for thirty seconds.

Cautious
, Quinn thought.
Definitely not a street person
.

Then, almost in slow motion, the door began to swing open.

Quinn pulled completely back into the storage room, then took a quick look around. There was nothing he could hide behind except the door itself. But he knew he didn’t actually need to hide behind anything. If he went far enough in and kept near the wall, the darkness would be enough to conceal his presence. He began moving away from the door, careful not to step on any of the trash that was scattered around. As he did, he lowered the zipper on his coveralls enough to pull his gun from its shoulder holster. It was his standard SIG Sauer P226. From one of the pockets, he removed a suppressor, and attached it to the end of the barrel.

After he’d gone twenty feet, he stepped against the wall and stopped.

He could hear footsteps. Soft, with no pattern. Whoever was in the hallway was taking a step or two, stopping, then starting again. Cautious.

Quinn rested his gun against his thigh as he tried to picture what the other person was doing. Whoever it was had to have at least seen Quinn and Nate put the package into the back of the van. There was a good chance he had seen the operations team leave, too.

If this person was not here by chance, then the only way he could have found the warehouse was by following the ops team in. Quinn was the one who had secured the building, the one who had informed the operations team where it was after they were already en route. No one other than Nate knew about the location, and they had arrived together, without being followed.

But whatever the reason the intruder was here, he was only one thing to Quinn—a problem.

Quinn’s job was to cover up the crime scene, and make it so no one would know what had gone down. Sometimes that meant misdirecting someone who’d strayed dangerously close to the job site.

But this was different. Here was a person who obviously knew that something had happened. By now the still-potent smells emanating from the op room were acting as a guide, drawing the intruder forward. The question was, what should Quinn do about it? Killing was not a normal component of his job.

In the hallway, the steps stopped right outside the door to the big room.

Quinn raised his gun and aimed it along the wall.

A dark shape leaned through the doorway into the room.

Not a man, Quinn realized. A woman.

She was maybe five-five or five-six. Age, hair, skin tone, all impossible to tell due to the lack of light.

She hung in the doorway, unmoving and patient. She was good. If someone other than Quinn had been the one hiding, he might have made a move by now, alerting the woman to his presence.

So was she a direct threat or not? If yes, all he had to do was pull the trigger and she would be dead. But that would create another mess that would need to be cleaned up, this one without the benefit of any pre-placed plastic. And for all Quinn knew, she might not be alone. A successful cleanup was obtained through knowledge and planning. He had neither with this woman. Who knew what chain of events her death would set off?

Until he saw a gun in her hand moving in his direction, he would wait and observe. Without shifting the SIG, he removed his finger from the trigger.

The woman stood in the doorway a few seconds longer, then disappeared back into the hallway. As Quinn lowered his gun, he could hear her steps moving toward the op room.

Quietly, he made his way back to the door, stopping just short of the jamb. The woman continued down the hall away from him, still unaware of his presence. As soon as he was sure she’d entered the op room, he headed for the rear exit.

When he reached it, he checked back down the hallway, then stepped outside.

It was another ten minutes before the intruder exited the building. Quinn watched her from behind a couple of old weather-beaten signs. She moved with caution, but not as much as she’d used entering the building. Quinn could now see she was Caucasian, in decent shape, and probably about ten years older than he was.