“I agree,” Quinn said. “But after my less than satisfying conversation with Eric Ferber, I have a feeling most of those who could tell us were killed in the blast.”
“I could dig around,” Jar said. “See if I can find anything out.”
Though Jar knew nothing other than what Quinn had mentioned about Ferber-Rae, she would be surprised if the Zurich headquarters was the company’s only location. If she was right, at least a few of Ferber-Rae’s in-house servers would be located at other facilities. And if the company was smart, its data would be backed up to more than one of these alternate locations.
“That would be great,” Quinn said. “Orlando and Nate should be here by eight a.m. Perhaps you could get up a little early and see what you can find before we pick them up.”
She nodded.
“Any other questions?”
Jar and Daeng shook their heads.
“Then I think we should all get some—”
“We’re wasting time,” Kincaid said. “We should be out there looking for Brunner.”
“Where would you suggest we start?”
“I don’t know. But I can tell you one thing—we are not going to find him while we’re asleep in our rooms.”
“How many recovery missions like this have you been a part of?” Quinn asked.
Kincaid didn’t respond.
“All right, then how many organizations with the resources these guys seem to possess have you gone up against?”
Again, no answer.
“My friends and I deal with these kinds of people every day. We know this stuff. And without a lead to work on, we’ll be running around in circles and getting even more tired than we already are.” Quinn paused. “I get your frustration, but you need to check it. Right now. We work smart, not emotionally. You want to be a part of this, then you need to be onboard with that.”
Kincaid took a beat before saying, “Fine.”
Quinn stood up. “We’ll meet in the lobby at six-thirty a.m. Get some sleep.”
Ten minutes later, Kincaid sat in his room, staring out the window.
He knew Quinn was right, but knowing that didn’t make doing nothing any easier. Sitting around like this was driving him crazy. If he had half an idea of where to start, he would go out on his own. But he didn’t. Nor did he have the resources to do so.
Quinn did, however. And if Kincaid wanted any chance at recovering the package and dealing with Clarke, he needed to stick around.
For now.
Though Jar had nodded when Quinn asked her to get up early, in truth she had no intention of waiting until morning to get started. She was wide awake now and excited to get to work.
She started by educating herself about Ferber-Rae. As she suspected, the main headquarters in Zurich was not the company’s only physical location. It also had a biological lab in Geneva, another technologies R&D facility outside Lucerne, and offices in over a dozen European cities, not to mention several manufacturing facilities spread across the globe. Two of which, she was not surprised to learn, were located in Thailand.
She probed the Ferber-Rae network, looking for a way in. Its system security was robust. No shock there. But Jar had hacked into considerably more difficult places without being detected—the Pentagon, for instance, and the NSA—so it took her only a few minutes to weave her way around the traps.
Once in, she sent dozens of bots scurrying through the system, searching for anything connected to or mentioning Thomas Brunner. When the results came in, she was a bit surprised. For someone who was supposedly important enough to actually live in the main facility, he had an extremely small digital footprint within the company—a handful of emails, two security memos, and a highly redacted letter from Stefan Ferber to a recipient whose name was removed. A search of the HR database discovered a personnel folder with Brunner’s name attached but no documents inside.
Disappointing, to say the least.
She checked the emails, hoping to find hints at what Brunner’s role was within the company. But that proved equally fruitless. All were from several years previous, and were company-wide messages sent about employee events. The only good thing Jar was able to get from this was the email address Brunner had been using at the time.
She sent in another bot, targeting any emails to or from that address, but it came back with nothing.
She looked out the window and tried to clear her head.
Outside, the snowstorm had intensified. In a weird way, the swirling flakes reminded her of her childhood in Isaan, in northeast Thailand. During the burning season, farmers would light their old crops on fire, and the ash would sometimes fill the air in a similar way. Snow was better, though. Sure, it was cold and wet, but no smell and no soot. And it didn’t get into your lungs.
She looked back at her screen. She would have to widen her search. She sent out a group of bots, each targeting a different major email provider, to see if Brunner’s address showed up.
While they were hunting, she opened a new browser window and performed a news search for anything mentioning the incident on the Nightjet train. It had been over twelve hours since Quinn and Kincaid left Bischofshofen, so she was hoping new information had come to light.
Using her browser’s translation function, she skimmed through several stories, all variations on the same things, and none providing anything she didn’t already know.
On one of the news sites, however, in a sidebar listing other stories, a picture above a headline caught her eye. The shot featured a small clearing in a forest and appeared to have been taken from a drone. At the edge of the clearing, several police officers huddled around something, while in the distance a train passed by.
The headline below the picture read:
SKIER FINDS BODY IN WOODS
She clicked on the article.
Quinn jerked awake, his hand automatically reaching for the gun hidden under the other pillow.
A tap on the door, like the one that had pulled him from his dreams.
“Quinn?” Jar’s voice.
Quinn checked the time. It was 1:30 a.m.
Another tap.
“Quinn, wake up.”
He climbed out of bed, pulled on his shirt and pants, and hurried to the door.
A check through the spy hole revealed Jar standing alone in the hallway, her computer tucked under her arm.
He opened the door. “What’s going on?”
She hustled past him into the room. “You need to see this.”
“Uh, okay.” He closed the door and followed her back inside. “See what?”
She set her computer on the table and opened it. On the screen was a news article.
“I can’t read Thai,” he said.
“Oh, sorry.”
She turned the computer back around, clicked the cursor a few times, and then swung the screen back to him. The Thai text had changed to English.
He read.
The body of a man had been found the previous afternoon by a cross-country skier.
“He fell through the tree,” Jar said before Quinn finished the article.
“Through?”
She scrolled down until a picture of the damaged tree appeared. The breakage was far greater than would have occurred if the dead man had just climbed up and fallen. He must have come from a greater height, like from an airplane.
Or a helicopter.
“Where was this?” Quinn asked.
“Less than two kilometers from where Kincaid’s train would have been around the time Brunner disappeared.”
He looked up. “We need to wake the others.”
Chapter Ten
LOCATION UNKNOWN
A bright light shined in Thomas Brunner’s face.
He opened his eyes, then winced and put a hand up to block the beam.
“Sit up.” It was the voice of the woman, coming from somewhere behind the light.
Brunner did as ordered.
How long he’d been asleep, he had no idea.
That he’d fallen asleep at all was a surprise. He’d spent hours and hours either pacing the room or huddled on the bed, scared out of his mind. Surprisingly, the stress had not brought on a migraine. It would, though. Without his medicine, it was only a matter of time.
The woman said something in that other language, and the light mounted to the roof of the room came on.
There were two others with the woman, both from the group of soldier types who had been in the helicopter when Brunner was pulled on board. One held the flashlight that had been pointed at the scientist’s face. The other stood near the door, carrying a thermos.
The woman leaned down so her face was level with Brunner’s. “How was your sleep?”
“Terrible.”
She patted him on the cheek. “It’s okay. You’ll have plenty of time to make up for it.”
She walked over to the man at the door and took the thermos from him.
“Drink this,” she said, holding out the container to Brunner.
He kept his hands on the mattress. “What is it? Poison?”
“It is not poison. But if you do not drink this on your own, we will force it down your throat.”
Knowing she wasn’t bluffing, he reached for it, but before he could touch the thermos, the woman pulled it away.
“I will hold it,” she said.
“What?”
She moved it toward his mouth and pressed it against his lips. “Drink.”
He reluctantly parted his lips. The liquid had no real taste, which for a brief second made him think it was water. But quickly enough, he sensed the thickness of it.
He sputtered and tried to move his head away, but the man who’d been holding the flashlight grabbed him by the ears and kept Brunner’s mouth where it was.
“All of it,” the woman said.
Brunner drank until the thermos was empty.
“Very good,” the woman said as she pulled the container away. “Feel free to go back to sleep now.”
She and her two friends left, and the overhead light flicked off.
Brunner lay back down and wondered what the hell that was all about. Before the liquid, they hadn’t given him anything to eat or drink. Perhaps it had been some kind of nutrient-based drink. That was as good an answer as any.
His eyes grew heavy again, and soon he was back asleep.
Ninety minutes later, his colon began to cramp.
Chapter Eleven
SWITZERLAND
Nate’s plane touched down at Zurich Airport at 8:05 a.m. local time. It had taken him two flights to get there, the first a cross-country hop to JFK in New York, then the 6:30 p.m. Swiss Air flight to Zurich. Since he traveled with a carry-on only, he was through Immigration and Customs within twenty-five minutes.
He checked the arrivals board and saw that Orlando’s flight had landed not long after his, so he grabbed two cups of coffee and found a spot near the customs exit to wait.
Eighteen minutes later, Orlando walked into the public area, pulling her bag behind her and talking on her phone.
“Orlando!” he called.
She glanced over and adjusted her course.
“No problem,” she said into her phone as she neared. “We’ll handle it…uh-huh…okay, keep us posted…. Love you, too.” She hung up and looked at Nate. “The rest of the team has gone to Austria.”
“I take it that’s where we’re headed also?”
“Not yet. There are a few things here you and I are going to check first.”
“Cool,” Nate said. “And hello, by the way.”
“Right, sorry.” She hugged him. “Good to see you.”
“You, too.”
“Beach treating you well?”
“I should have made the move years ago.”
That past summer, Nate had moved out of Quinn’s house in the Hollywood Hills to a townhouse in Redondo Beach, a block from the water. After a devastating first half of the year, the change of scenery had done a lot to help him feel if not normal again then at least normal adjacent.
“Come on,” Orlando said. “We’re already behind on this one.”
As they headed for the exit, he asked, “What’s the plan?”
“I’m going to pay a visit to the coroner, and you’re going to take a look at the bomb site.”
He glanced at her. “What bomb site?”
“I don’t think we should go any farther,” Karl Braun, an agent from FIS said. “The floor is very unstable.”
Nate placed a gloved hand against a cracked slab of concrete hanging from the ceiling and surveyed the way ahead.
Three meters down the hall, the floor sank like a V, exposing rebar that had, until yesterday, kept everything level.
“What about that lip?” Nate said, pointing at a narrow strip of the old floor that had remained attached to the right side of the corridor wall.
The agent looked at him like he was crazy. “What about it?”
“We could use that to get to the other side.”
“Safety regulations clearly state—”
“I don’t care about safety regulations. My job is to keep something like this from happening again.”
“How is getting to the other end of the hall going to stop another bomb?”
“I won’t know the answer to that until I see what’s over there.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Usually, when Nate had to assume a fake identity, his ability to pull it off was determined by how well he played the part. On occasion, he might have the assistance of a colleague acting as an official on the phone to confirm who he was. On this job, however, Misty and her contacts at the CIA had used their influence with FIS to allow an FBI bombing expert—Nate—free reign throughout the crime scene.
“Your concern is noted. But I’m going.”
Braun raised his hands in mock surrender and took a step back. “Whatever you want. Just don’t expect me to join you.”
Nate preferred it that way, but he said nothing as he moved cautiously over to the lip and examined the way ahead. Though it wouldn’t be a walk in the park, it wasn’t going to be as difficult as Braun thought.
Nate stepped onto the lip, his shoe taking up all but a few centimeters of concrete on either side. Leading with his right foot and scooting his left behind, he moved down the corridor, with cracks in the wall from the explosion acting as handholds. When he reached the far end, he stepped gingerly onto the larger floor, in case it was on the verge of collapsing, but the concrete held steady.
The hallway ended at a T-intersection. A collapsed portion of the floor above blocked the way to the right, about five meters in. Thankfully the way to the left—where Nate had wanted to go all along—remained mostly clear.
He called back to Braun. “I should be back within ten minutes.”
“What if you’re not?”
“Then give me ten more.”
Nate stepped into the left hallway.
According to building blueprints obtained by Orlando, the suite of rooms Thomas Brunner had been calling home for the last year or so were just ahead.
“I doubt you’ll find anything that will point at who took Brunner or bombed the building,” Orlando had said before they parted. “So concentrate on finding anything that might help us get a handle on what kind of work he’s been doing that makes him such an attractive target.”
Nate had already struck out at Brunner’s office and lab. Not because there wasn’t anything of interest, but because that entire section of the building had been obliterated. The scientist’s residence was Nate’s last chance.
Upon reaching the door, Nate saw it was secured with a pair of biometric locks. He tried the knob anyway but the door didn’t budge. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. He had an app on his phone, which had a seventy-five percent success rate with locks like these. The problem was, the biometrics portion of the locks had stopped working when the bomb took out the power, freezing the locks in engaged positions.
Nate tapped the door. Metal. That wasn’t great, either, but there were other ways besides doors to get into an apartment.
He spotted a half-meter chunk of loose concrete not far away, picked it up, and thrust it into the wall next to the door.
It sliced through the outer layer like nothing was there and cracked the layer on the other side, creating a small opening into Brunner’s place. Nate hauled the block out and heaved it into the wall again. The manmade rock crashed through the inner layer into the room beyond.
“What’s going on?” Braun yelled. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Nate responded. “Hold tight.”
After kicking the opening to widen it, Nate flipped on his flashlight and slipped inside.
He was in a kitchen, cabinet doors hanging open or ripped off completely. Below them, broken dishes covered the floor. A living room was to the left. There, the blast had upended furniture and dislodged three bookcases’ worth of books.
Nate proceeded carefully through the mess, searching for a computer or notebooks or anything that might give the team insight into the man.
A door at the other side of the living area led into a bedroom. The damage here was less, but this was due to the room containing only a bed and a dresser and a nightstand.
Nate searched the drawers of the latter two, finding only clothes.
He checked the attached bathroom and closet but discovered nothing of interest, so he exited and moved on to the last room in the suite.
Bingo.
An office, complete with desk and chair and file cabinet and bookcase. The most important item, a desktop computer, sat in shambles on top of a small sea of books.
The monitor’s casing hung broken and skewed around a screen spiderwebbed with cracks. The computer itself had been snapped in two, its guts spilling from the center.
Nate crouched beside the dead machine and sifted through the parts until he found the hard drive. It was intact and, from appearances, undamaged. He disconnected the wires running into it and placed the device in the inside pocket of his jacket.
The Unknown Page 11