Shadow of Betrayal

by Brett Battles

  Quinn knew what she meant. He’d stayed in worse places, but none he’d had to pay for. There was the permanent smell of mildew in the air, and something else Quinn decided was best not to dwell on. The lights were all too dim, the management trying to save a few bucks by using low-wattage bulbs.

  From behind several of the doors, they could hear the grunts and groans of transactions in progress. A couple rooms ahead, a door opened and a man and woman stepped out. She looked done and anxious to leave, but he looked ready for more. When he saw Orlando, he lost all interest in the woman he was with.

  “Where’d you find her?” the man asked as he walked by Quinn.

  “Piss off,” Quinn told him.

  “Fuck you, too,” the man said. “Hey, babe, you got a number I can have?”

  Orlando didn’t look back, but she did flip him off.

  “That ain’t very ladylike,” he called out.

  Quinn could sense Orlando tensing beside him. For a second he thought she was going to pull her gun on him.

  “If he’s still out here when we leave, you can shoot him,” Quinn whispered.

  The hand that had begun moving upward relaxed back against her side.

  “Ah, never mind. You’re probably a pretty lousy fuck anyway,” the man said.

  Quinn stopped, then turned back around. The man was twenty feet behind them, the woman he’d been with long gone.

  “Hey, you’re the one who wanted me to relax,” Orlando whispered.

  “Excuse me,” Quinn said to the man. “Not sure I heard you correctly.”

  “Wasn’t talking to you,” the man said.

  Quinn took four casual steps forward, halving the distance between them.

  “You think you’re going to scare me?” the man asked. “Turn around and go have your little fuck. I’ll find her later when I’m ready.”

  Orlando moved up beside Quinn. “You sure I can’t shoot him?” she asked.

  “What’s your name?” Quinn said.

  “Mick Jagger. Who are you?”

  “Inspector Barclay.”

  The man laughed, though it wasn’t as assured as his tone had been moments before. “Inspector Barclay? That’s funny. And who’s she? Inspector Chan?”

  “Please,” Orlando said. “I’ll just graze him. I swear.”

  “You look kind of familiar,” the man said, squinting as he looked at Quinn. “I know you, don’t I?”

  Quinn smiled at the man. Then in a single swift motion he pulled his gun out of the holster under his jacket. Orlando followed his lead and had her weapon out a second later.

  “Shit. Oh, shit. Shit. Man, I didn’t mean anything, okay? Shit.” He was backing rapidly down the hall. “I’m sorry. I mean, I was just joking, okay? Shit.”

  He reached the elevator and tapped the down button over and over until the car arrived. He jumped in and began his button routine inside.

  Once the doors closed, Quinn slipped his gun back into its holster.

  “You should have just let me pop him,” Orlando said as she stowed her weapon.

  “Come on,” Quinn said, turning back in the direction they’d been headed before they’d been interrupted.

  He had no concern that the man would come back. The guy had had all the earmarks of some office jerk out for a little action. Quinn thought it might be a long time before Orlando’s would-be suitor would return to the Motel Monique.

  At room 326, he slipped the key into the lock and gave it a turn. It worked. If it had been a trophy from years before, the motel didn’t seem to care enough to change the locks.

  Quinn drew his gun again, then pushed the door open and slipped inside. Once Orlando joined him, she shut the door.

  The room was as worn and uninviting as the rest of the place. A bed with a spread from deep in the last century, a TV that couldn’t have been much younger, and awful dark red paint on the walls.

  “Are you sure she’s staying here?” she asked. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s used the room. I mean, you know, in the last twelve hours. I’m sure the room’s had plenty of use otherwise.”

  Quinn looked at her as she shivered in repulsion.

  “She had the key for some reason,” he said.

  Their search was a short one. The prize was lying flat on the floor, hidden behind the bed. A carry-on suitcase. Black like ninety-nine percent of the other carry-ons in the world.

  Quinn picked it up and placed it on the bed.

  “So she was planning on returning,” Orlando said. “Maybe she’s still coming back.”

  “Perhaps,” Quinn said, but he didn’t think so. The terror in her eyes had been genuine. And when she realized she’d left the key behind, Quinn didn’t think there was any way she’d risk coming back no matter what was inside.

  There was no lock, so Quinn unzipped the top and flopped it open.

  Clothes mostly. Women’s and—

  “This is for a little girl,” Orlando said, holding up a small dress.

  Quinn rooted around until he found something other than clothes. What he pulled out was a stack of passports. Four total. They were all Canadian. The first one was for Marion Dupuis. It was the most used of the bunch. There were several stamps inside, most recently from customs at JFK in New York, and a smeared one that he thought was from Côte d’Ivoire in Africa.

  He handed it to Orlando, then opened the next one. A child stared out at him. According to her date of birth, she was five. Her name was listed as Iris Dupuis. The child was either from Africa or of African descent. And it was evident that there was something different about her. Her face was round and her features seemed closer together than normal. But it was her eyes that were the telltale sign.

  “What do you think?” he said, showing Orlando the picture.

  “Did you see a child with her?”

  Quinn hesitated, then said, “I saw something in the back seat. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I think it might have been her.”

  Orlando looked at the picture again. “This girl has Down syndrome.”

  Quinn had thought the same. There was no mistaking the look.

  He looked at the remaining two passports. While the pictures were the same as in the other two, the names were different.

  “False IDs,” Quinn told Orlando. “She’s on the run.”

  Quinn put the two false passports back in the bag, but slipped the ones with the name Dupuis on them into his pocket.

  Across the top flap of the bag was a cover secured by a couple of metal hooks. Quinn released the hooks and lifted the cover. Underneath was a single item. A manila envelope.

  Orlando picked it up and unclasped the top. Inside was a stack of papers.

  Before she could pull anything out, Quinn said, “Let’s not hang around here any longer. We can look at this back at our motel.”

  Orlando nodded, then put the envelope back.

  As Quinn closed the suitcase, he thought about the child. Iris Dupuis. Marion’s child? If so, either her parents had disapproved or had not known. There had been no pictures of the girl in the house. Odd.

  Even odder, though, was the false set of identification. A dozen questions came to him, one on top of the other. But he had no answers.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Five rings, then voicemail again. A generic voice telling Quinn, “Leave your message after the beep.” But he disconnected the call before the beep could sound.

  “He’s still not picking up,” Quinn said.

  He’d been trying to reach Peter for the last ten minutes. He’d already left two messages on Peter’s mobile. A call to the Office’s main line had been equally frustrating, the night operator simply telling Quinn the message would be passed on.

  “I’ve got something here,” Orlando said.

  She was sitting on their bed at the Comfort Inn, her computer in her lap. Beside her was the manila envelope from Marion’s suitcase. The papers that had been inside now sat on top of the envelope in a neat stack.

  Quinn
walked over and sat beside Orlando.

  “Is that Marion?”

  She turned the screen so Quinn could see. On it was a photo of several people standing together, smiling for the camera. A posed shot that could have been taken almost anywhere. The background looked like it was the side of a building. The wall was dingy white, either stucco or plaster or something similar. There were five people total, four women and one man. Two of the women and the man were African. The other two were Caucasian. One was a lanky blonde, and the other a shorter brunette—Marion.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  Orlando hit the back arrow on her browser. A newspaper article appeared: The Daily Telegraph, from London, England. The photo was there, too, only smaller.

  U.N. SEEKS LOCAL HELP KEEPING CHILDREN SAFE

  “‘Community leaders pose in front of a new children activities facility in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, with UN workers,’” Orlando read. “This article says Marion Dupuis is part of the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire. That explains where she got all those.” Orlando nodded at the stack of papers.

  They had already established that the papers were printouts from a UN database. Before diving into them, Orlando wanted to see if she could establish what Marion Dupuis’ connection to them might be. Turned out it didn’t take her very long.

  “I have contacts in New York who work there. I can verify her position fairly easily.”

  “Do it.”

  While Orlando composed an email to her contacts, Quinn stood up and walked over to the door and peeked through the eyehole. The fish-eye magnifier on the other end gave him a near 180-degree view of the hallway beyond, though only for a distance of about fifteen to twenty feet. The area he could see was empty.

  Where the hell is Nate? he thought.

  He had expected his apprentice to be waiting for them when they returned. But instead, they were the first to arrive.

  Quinn wanted to call him, but that wasn’t procedure.

  “Maybe he got tired of waiting for us and went to get something to eat,” Orlando said, sensing, as she always did, what he was thinking.

  Quinn grunted a response, then walked over to the TV and looked around for the remote.

  “Please don’t turn that on,” she said.

  “Just thought I’d check the news.”

  She looked up from her computer and stared at him for a moment. “Even if something has happened to him, you’re not going to find anything local right now. And I doubt he’s made CNN yet.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just wanted to see if there was anything new about the Deputy Director’s death.”

  But his lie was a thin one, and she saw right through it. “Just leave it off.”

  He sat down on the chair next to the built-in desk, listening to Orlando’s fingers tapping on her keyboard. He pulled a brochure about Montreal out of the desk drawer and tried to read through it, but got halfway before he realized he couldn’t remember anything he’d just read.

  A glance at his watch told him more than twenty minutes had passed since they had arrived. If it reached thirty, he was going to call Nate, to hell with procedure.

  Quinn’s phone rang at minute twenty-seven, Nate’s name glowing on the touch screen.

  “Don’t be angry with him,” Orlando said as he was about to press Accept.

  “Fine,” he muttered, then connected the call.

  “Quinn?” Nate’s voice was hushed.

  Whatever Quinn had been feeling disappeared as he kicked into operation mode. “What’s going on?”

  “We weren’t the only ones interested in the woman,” Nate said.

  Quinn wanted to ask what happened, but suppressed the urge and said, “Do you need help?”

  “I think I might need you to pick me up. I dumped the car and have been on foot for the last thirty minutes. Think I might have lost them, but I’m not sure. Heading into the metro now. I’ll grab the first train and take it toward the end of the line … Hold on.” Quinn could hear the phone moving away from Nate’s ear, and rubbing against something. “Okay. I’ll be on the Orange line, heading toward Henri-Bourassa. I’ll plan on getting off a few stops ahead. Say … Sauvé.”

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “Do a check along the way.”

  “I will,” Nate said. “See you in a bit.”

  “What is it?” Orlando asked as Quinn slipped the phone back in his pocket.

  “Someone else was looking for Marion. When they spotted Nate, looks like they tried to find out who he was.”

  “You’re going to bring him in?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “You need me to come with you?”

  “No. We’ll be fine. You see if you can figure out what she was running from.”

  They’d dumped the Lincoln several blocks from the Comfort Inn when they returned, thinking they wouldn’t need it anymore. Quinn considered using it again, but he wanted something less flashy.

  He hiked ten minutes and found another motel with a large anonymous parking lot where he appropriated a three-year-old Toyota Camry for the night.

  Soon he was back over the bridge into Montreal. He followed the Orange line aboveground as best he could until he reached Sauvé station.

  There were two entrances, one on either side of Rue Sauvé, neither larger than a three-car garage. Each looked grimy and gray in the artificial illumination from the surrounding lighting. Quinn imagined they didn’t look much better during the day.

  He drove by, keeping a few miles an hour below the speed limit, his eyes on guard for someone emerging out of the shadows, but there was no one. He looped around the small grass-covered island in the middle of the block and headed in the opposite direction, taking him by the larger of the two structures.

  He was almost past the end of the building when someone ran out toward him. His first instinct was to hit the gas, but he slowed to a stop when he saw the man’s face. It was Nate.

  Quinn reached across and opened the passenger door just as his apprentice arrived.

  Before he even had the door closed, Nate said, “I’m fine. Go.”

  Quinn pressed down hard on the accelerator. “Is someone back there?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nate said, breathing hard. “But I heard another train pull in, so you never know. They could still be looking for me.”

  Quinn spent several minutes driving randomly until he was sure they weren’t being followed, then settled on a direction that would take them back toward their motel.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  Nate took a few more deep breaths. “I was heading back to the motel. You know, like you told me to do. But after a few minutes I realized there was someone behind me. I made a few turns, normal stuff, nothing too fast, just to see if I was right. The guy stayed with me.”

  “Did you recognize him from earlier?” Quinn asked, trying to put the pieces together.

  “No. Like I said, I didn’t pay attention when I was following the woman.”

  “Her name’s Marion.”

  “What?”

  “The woman in the Saab. Marion Dupuis,” Quinn said.

  “Right,” Nate said.

  “So you were being followed,” Quinn said, trying to get Nate back on track.

  “Yeah. Once I knew for sure, I played it cool for a while, letting him get relaxed. Then, when I thought he was comfortable, I made a break for it. It worked great. I was able to get a little distance, enough that I could dump the car and head out on foot without them catching me.”

  “Them?”

  Nate nodded. “There were two. Both guys, strong looking. One a little older, but I didn’t get much of a look at either of them. I tried, I swear. But that’s all I got.”

  “What happened next?”

  “One of them got out of the car and chased me. But by then I had them beat. Lost them a few minutes later, then made my way to a metro station. That’s when I called you.”

  Quinn thought for a moment. “Maybe they weren’t following
the girl. Maybe they were just interested in giving you a hard time.”

  “I guess,” Nate said, his tone indicating he didn’t believe it.

  Quinn didn’t believe it, either. It would have been too much of a coincidence. And Quinn just didn’t believe in them. The easier answer, the more logical one, would be that they must have had some interest in Marion Dupuis. They had to have been staking out the Dupuis’ house from farther down the street. But did that mean they had seen Quinn and Orlando go inside? What if there were more of them than just those in the car? Could they have followed Quinn and Orlando back to the Comfort Inn?

  “Sorry,” Nate said.

  “What?” Quinn said. “No. You did fine. Better than fine. You got away.”

  Nate was silent for a moment, then said, “Thanks.”

  Quinn pulled out his phone, intending to call Orlando, but his phone began to ring before he could dial. Peter. Dammit. Quinn hit Accept.

  “Hold on, Peter,” Quinn said.

  “Wait. What’s going—”

  “I said hold on.” Quinn put Peter’s call on hold, then punched Orlando’s name on his quick-contact list.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Everything all right there?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she said. “Why?”

  “Serious. Are you okay?”

  She paused. “Hunky-dory,” she said, using their latest code to signify all was normal. “What’s going on?”

  “We may have been followed, too.”

  “From the Dupuis’?” she said. “You would have noticed.”

  It’s true. He would have. He was excellent at the spotting-the-tail game, and he hadn’t seen anyone suspicious on their way back to the motel. But if the others had the resources, there were ways to track a car without needing to keep visual contact.

  “I still want you to get out,” Quinn said. “We’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

  “All right,” she said, but she sounded annoyed.

  Quinn clicked back over to Peter.

  “What the hell are you doing putting me on hold?” Peter all but yelled.

  Quinn ignored the comment. “The Dupuis you wanted us to find. Is her name Marion?”

  Peter took a moment, then said, “I told you I don’t have a first name.”