Shadow of Betrayal

by Brett Battles

  She narrowed her eyes. “Okay you’re going to get me out? Or okay you’re listening but you’re not going to do anything?”

  “Okay I’ll take you home.”

  She stared at him a moment longer like she wasn’t sure she should believe him or not. After several seconds she said, “Tell us about the meeting.”

  Quinn hesitated. It was possible there was no bug in the room; in fact, Quinn thought that very likely. The facility was supposed to be neutral ground, a safe house where no one asked what your business was. If word ever got out that that trust was compromised, then business would disappear. Worse, really. Someone would eventually show up to deal with the double-cross. Still, Quinn wasn’t interested in taking the chance.

  “Not here,” he said.

  “Then get me the hell out.”

  Before leaving the medical center, they made arrangements with the head of security to dump the stolen car someplace it wouldn’t be found for a few days. By the time they headed back to Quinn’s place in his BMW, the sun was starting to set.

  On the drive, Quinn told Orlando and Nate about his meeting with Hardwick. There was one thing he did leave out, though. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, his thinking that given Orlando’s current condition, she didn’t need any more stress. She could learn about Leo Tucker’s involvement later.

  “Yellowhammer?” Orlando said. Her voice was low and sleepy.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “He didn’t tell you where it was?”

  “Here in California somewhere. Said we should be able to find it easy enough.”

  “Does the name mean anything to you?”

  Quinn shook his head. “You?”

  “No.” She paused.

  There was a momentary lull.

  “I’ll check it out when we get to your place,” Orlando said.

  Quinn gave her a quick sideways glance. She was leaning against the passenger door, her eyes half-closed.

  “Nate can do it,” Quinn said. “You’re going to bed.”

  “That’s sweet, Quinn. But I don’t think I’m going to be in the mood.” Even in her near-semiconscious state, she was able to crack a smile.

  “Oh, God,” Nate said. “My ears. I didn’t really need to hear that.”

  • • •

  Quinn’s house was built against one of the many slopes of the Hollywood Hills. The top floor was at street level and contained the living room, dining room, and kitchen in an open format that made it feel almost like one room. The floor below, following the incline of the hill, contained the bedrooms and a gym.

  As soon as he got Orlando settled in the master bedroom, he returned upstairs. Nate sat at the kitchen table using Quinn’s laptop to try and get a line on Yellowhammer. Quinn didn’t want to disturb his progress, so he grabbed his phone and walked to the other end of the living room.

  He stood in front of the plate glass window that made up the whole rear wall of this level, and looked out on the city. The L.A. basin glowed white with millions of individual lights, some moving, some stationary, but all adding to the visual mix of the city.

  He took a deep breath, then looked down at his phone and called Peter.

  “I expected to hear from you hours ago,” Peter said, irritated.

  “I had a man down.”

  “Jesus,” Peter said. “I saw the news. The shooting at the museum. Who?”

  “Orlando.”

  Silence. “Is … is she okay?”

  “She’ll be sore for a while, but she’ll live.”

  “What happened?”

  Quinn gave him the rundown of the fun at the museum. “I’m willing to bet it was the same people who hired the assassin in Ireland.”

  “I think you’re right,” Peter said. “Tell me about the meeting.”

  “You mean the meeting with the guy from the LP?” Quinn said with no attempt to hide his anger. “The goddamn LP, Peter. I thought you were working against them, not using them as an information asset.”

  More dead air.

  “How long have you known?” Quinn asked.

  Still no response.

  “Peter, how the hell long have you known?”

  A chair in the kitchen screeched against the floor. Quinn glanced over and caught Nate looking at him before his apprentice could look away. Nate grabbed an apple off the counter and returned to the laptop.

  “Not long,” Peter said.

  “That’s a bullshit answer.”

  “After Ireland, all right?”

  Quinn stared out into the night. “The assassin,” he said.

  “Yes,” Peter said. “Once we ID’d him we realized he was on an LP watch list. We didn’t know if he worked for them for sure, but we knew it was a possibility.”

  “What happened? He break when you questioned him?”

  “He didn’t break.”

  “Losing your touch?”

  “He didn’t break because someone got to him before he gave anything up.”

  “Someone got to him?” Quinn couldn’t believe it.

  “He wasn’t under our control. We handed him over to the DDNI as soon as the plane landed. One of my men worked up the ID kit on the plane. Fingerprints, hair and saliva samples, photos. But by the time we were able to figure out who he was, he was already dead. The Agency stuck him in a supposedly secure safe house, but he didn’t even last that first night. A suicide pill slipped to him by one of the agents in the facility. The agent left before anyone knew what happened and hasn’t been seen since. The DDNI was furious, but there was nothing he could do. When I confronted him with what I’d found out, he was reluctant at first, but I think he realized he had to close ranks and use only his most trusted assets. Apparently I was one of those.”

  “Help me out, Peter,” Quinn said. “The DDNI was getting information from someone in the LP, and the LP was also trying to kill his messenger and yours? How does that make sense?”

  A pause.

  “The contact was anonymous. He used some back channels to reach DDNI Jackson directly. Based on who you say Primus is, he could have just walked into the Deputy Director’s office and left a package on his desk.”

  “Is that how it was done?”

  “No. Emails, and a letter to Jackson’s home. Primus provided information on some small things at first. A planned kidnapping of a Russian official’s daughter by the Chechens in Odessa. DDNI Jackson passed that information on to his counterpart in Moscow. The kidnappers were caught, and the plan was exposed. And you remember what happened to Anton Likharev?”

  “The arms dealer?” Quinn said. “Sure.”

  Likharev, known in many places as the Merchant of Death, was a former Soviet officer turned gunrunner. Only he was distributing weapons on a scale no one had ever done before. He’d been captured in Southeast Asia, then deported back to the States to go on trial. A trial, as far as Quinn knew, that still hadn’t happened.

  “Primus told the DDNI about a meeting Likharev was attending in Bangkok. Jackson gave it to the station chief at the embassy, and the next day Thai police had Likharev in custody.”

  “Wait a minute,” Quinn said. “How long has he been passing on this kind of stuff? That was almost a year and a half ago.”

  “It started just before that.”

  “So when did the Deputy Director find out that Primus was LP?”

  “Only two months ago.”

  “And he didn’t break off contact immediately?” Quinn said.

  “The information Primus passed on had all been good. Very reliable.”

  “So fucking what?” Quinn said. “These are the same people who have been trying to dictate the way the country is run, to hell with what the rest of us think. At least that’s what you’ve told me. Didn’t any of you think maybe he was trying to get you to do the LP’s dirty work for them? Maybe they benefited from having Likharev out of the picture. Maybe everything Primus passed along helped their situation. Maybe he was using the Deputy Director. For God�
��s sake, Peter, didn’t anyone think of that?”

  “Calm down,” Peter said, his own tone becoming angry. “First, I didn’t find out about it until just a week ago. Second, I had the same reaction as you. I confronted the DDNI with the ID of the assassin. I told him I thought the LP might be trying to stop Primus from passing along information. That’s when he told me Primus was LP. Jackson told me everything then. He said Primus had become disillusioned with the movement. But he also knew he couldn’t just get out. That’s not the way the LP works. So instead he started passing information he came across. Doing what he could to balance his personal scales, I guess.”

  “When I met with him, he sounded like he was still very much part of the organization.”

  “But he did tell you he was working on his own. You told me that.”

  “It all sounds like bullshit to me.”

  “Jackson didn’t believe him at first, either,” Peter said. “But Primus gained his trust with more good information.”

  “Why did he tell Jackson at all?”

  Peter took a breath. “He told Jackson pretty much the same thing he told you. That a group had approached the LP with a potential project, but that the LP had declined. But the project troubled him enough to keep tabs on it. Primus realized that something needed to be done, but that LP wasn’t going to make a move. He had already established a relationship with the DDNI, so decided to give him the info. But to convince the DDNI that what he was going to pass on was credible, he knew he had to come clean about who he worked for. He also knew the risk of exposure to his own people would increase, so he took steps to cover his tracks.”

  If Ireland and what had happened at LACMA that afternoon were any indication, he hadn’t done a very good job.

  “A turncoat in the LP,” Quinn said under his breath. It didn’t seem possible. These were the same people who had killed a friend of his. Hell, the same people who had destroyed Nate’s leg and forced him to use a prosthetic the rest of his life. “You believe he’s not just using us?”

  “I’m not one hundred percent. I know caution is in order. But goddammit, Quinn, something’s going on. Something that people are trying to stop us from finding out. And if it has anything to do with the G8 meetings … they start the day after tomorrow, for Christ’s sake. We can’t just sit around and see if something happens.”

  Quinn frowned. “Hold on,” he said.

  He moved the phone away from his ear and tried to let his mind go blank for a second. He needed to clear away all the conflicting thoughts that were ramming against one another. Only then would he be able to truly assess the situation.

  In the distance he could see a police helicopter circling above the Beverly Center. It wasn’t much more than a point of light, but he watched it go round and round several times before he brought the phone back up to his ear.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen. You will tell me everything you know,” Quinn said. “You will send me copies of any information you have. And you’ll do it right now.”

  “So you’ll stay on it?” Peter asked.

  “That was our deal, wasn’t it?” Quinn said. “But you need to know moving forward, whether my team and I continue is going to be a minute-to-minute decision.”

  “Okay … okay. I can live with that. I … appreciate it.”

  In the distance, the helicopter had moved off in search of trouble elsewhere.

  “Talk,” Quinn said.

  CHAPTER

  24

  PETER WAS TRUE TO HIS WORD, AND AS SOON AS HE had finished briefing Quinn on the phone, he uploaded everything he had to a secure FTP site. Quinn booted Nate off the laptop for a few moments so he could download and print out all the documents. Stack of paper in hand, he got out of Nate’s way and moved over to the kitchen counter.

  Peter had done the same thing to Deputy Director Jackson that Quinn was doing to him, demanding everything the DDNI had from and about Primus. There was almost two years’ worth of material. Most was information passed on before Hardwick had revealed his LP ties. The information on the Odessa kidnapping was there, as was the tip about the arms dealer’s trip to Thailand. There were other things, too. Guerrilla cells in South America, money transfers between terrorist organizations, two potential assassination attempts.

  Good stuff all, and a treasure trove that would make whoever possessed it look like a superstar. But from all Quinn could tell, the DDNI didn’t use any of his newly obtained knowledge to improve his position. Instead he acted on it, often passing tips to appropriate governments anonymously. No personal gain, just doing the job he was hired to do.

  Quinn opened the refrigerator to grab a beer before diving into the stuff that was most relevant, the information concerning the group who had approached the LP.

  “Can I have one of those?” Nate asked, looking up from the laptop.

  “Depends. You get anything yet?” Quinn asked, already reaching for the second bottle.

  “I think so,” Nate said. “At first I did all the basic searches. Public sites and that kind of stuff.”

  Quinn set the bottles on the counter and popped the tops, letting Nate go over his process uninterrupted. It was the way Quinn had taught him to operate if time permitted. Quinn had said it was so that he’d be able to evaluate Nate’s progress. That had been true at first. But Quinn had come more and more to trust Nate’s abilities, so now it was just habit.

  “I got a couple hits,” Nate went on. “But they were mostly about the state bird of Alabama. But I did find a Yellowhammer Lake in California.”

  “That sounds promising,” Quinn said as he handed Nate a beer.

  “Thanks,” Nate said. They both took a drink. “I thought so at first, too. But it’s remote. Yosemite area. You have to hike into it. So I thought I should keep digging.”

  “Let me guess,” Quinn said. “Couldn’t find anything.”

  “Close, but you’d be wrong. I came across a few odd entries that mentioned an actual place called Yellowhammer, and it didn’t seem like they were talking about a lake. The first was so random I thought someone must have mistyped it.”

  “I’m guessing there’s a ‘but’ here.”

  “Right,” Nate said. “The second one. It was on a blog that posts wartime letters. Some of them from as far back as the Revolution. I found another mention in one of the letters. It was dated near the end of World War II. Some guy writing home to his wife saying he’d been assigned to a place called Yellowhammer.” Nate turned to the computer. “I’ll read it to you.”

  He clicked one of the tabs in his browser, then skimmed the text on the screen with his finger.

  “‘They’re sending me to Yellowhammer until my time’s up. I finally get to go to California, I guess, but it’s so far from you. At least it’s only four months and then I’ll be home. I do wish I was there now.’ Goes on for a little while longer, but that’s the important part.”

  “That could be anything,” Quinn said. “The military loves code names. Might not even be a place at all, but an operation.”

  “I had the same thought.”

  “Another ‘but’?”

  Nate smiled. “Orlando’s been giving me tips for accessing some less public sources.”

  “Skip the rundown, and tell me what you found.”

  “There was a government facility, here in California, called Yellowhammer. The last mention of it was in the early sixties, a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was apparently decommissioned then.”

  “Where exactly is it?”

  “See, that’s the funny thing. I’ve found nothing on that anywhere. I found the name. I know it existed. I’m just trying to pinpoint it now.”

  Quinn stared down at the laptop, not really looking at the words on the screen. A secret facility? A secret decommissioned facility? That didn’t make Quinn feel very good. But it jibed with Hardwick’s story.

  “All right,” Quinn said. “Keep at it. Also send what you’ve found to Peter. Maybe he can
use his resources to dig something up.”

  “Yeah,” Nate said. “I was going to suggest that.”

  “Were you?” Quinn said.

  Nate brought up a window on the laptop that had been hidden. “I’ve got the email ready to go.”

  Quinn was impressed, but kept his face blank. Once again, he had taken to underestimating Nate.

  “Send it,” he said. “I’m going to go check on Orlando.” He picked up the papers from where he’d left them on the counter. “Don’t stay up all night. I have a feeling we’re going to be on the move tomorrow.” He paused as he was about to walk out. “Nate. Good work.”

  Downstairs he found Orlando in the same position she’d been in when he’d watched her fall asleep. She didn’t even twitch as he sat beside her and checked her pulse. Steady and strong. By all accounts she was doing fine.

  It should have made him happy, but he was pissed that she was in this condition at all. The LP had taken the leg of his apprentice the year before, and they had come within inches of paralyzing the woman he loved. Whether it was the LP behind the shootings or not didn’t really matter. They were involved, and that was enough. Those sons of bitches had screwed with Quinn too much. He only wished there was something he could do about it.

  He took his beer and the papers out onto the small balcony off the back of his bedroom. There was a chair, and a table, with a light plugged in to a socket at the base of the wall. Often a gentle breeze would move through the hills, but tonight the air was still.

  He took another swig of his beer, then dove in. Though there were dozens of pages, most were painfully short on details. The first half-dozen items had been email exchanges, each no more than two lines long. The final one arranged for a meeting where Primus promised to hand over tangible information. Looking at the log Peter had sent along, this meeting took place in Philadelphia three weeks before the Ireland disaster.

  The tangible info turned out to be an initial tracking report on someone identified at the time simply as Alpha, but who Hardwick claimed was Leo Tucker. The document was very similar to the one Peter had passed on to Orlando while they were still back east, only a little lighter on details. There was also a note from Primus.