The Unknown

by Brett Battles

  As Quinn reached for the sheet to pull it back over the body, Kincaid looked at the corpse again. “Oh, shit.”

  Quinn stopped. “What?”

  Kincaid grabbed the corpse’s left arm and turned it, his fear of the body temporarily forgotten. He was focused on a barbed-wire tattoo encircling the dead man’s bicep. Laced within it was a vine of roses.

  “You’ve seen that before?” Quinn asked.

  “This is Clarke.”

  Quinn cocked his head. “Your partner?”

  Kincaid’s mouth tensed. “The person I was teamed with. Not my partner.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Unless someone else has this exact same tattoo.”

  “It’s a big world and I doubt it’s that original.”

  Kincaid looked the body up and down. “The size is right. And the hair, too.”

  “The most we can say is, it could be him.”

  Kincaid whirled around. “Where are his clothes? I doubt he would have had time to change from when I last saw him until he fell. If I can get a look at them, I’ll know for sure.”

  They found the corpse’s clothes in a box on a shelf in one of the cabinets.

  “It’s him,” Kincaid said. “No question. This is exactly what he was wearing.”

  “Well, then, I guess that’s one less person we need to look for.”

  Quinn returned to the table and pulled the sheet back in place. When he finished, he noticed Kincaid glaring at the body.

  “You all right?”

  Kincaid took a breath, then looked up. “I hope he was conscious the whole way down.”

  Jar sat in front of her laptop in the team’s hotel room, growing more frustrated by the second. She’d spent the last thirty minutes searching through stored radar data, looking for any signs of a helicopter in the area of the Nightjet train at the time of the kidnapping, but had come up with nothing.

  The use of a stealth craft would partially explain the lack of information, but no stealth craft she had ever heard of could maintain one hundred percent invisibility. At the very least, it should have shown up as digital artifacts or insignificant blips, the kind air traffic controllers would routinely ignore. But there’d been no artifacts and no insignificant blips. The only possible reason for this, if there had been a helicopter, was that the aircraft had flown low enough to avoid detection.

  Jar considered the problem. If the helicopter had stayed that low, someone on the ground might have seen or heard something. Even a stealth aircraft wasn’t completely noiseless. There was a decent chance any witnesses would have mentioned it online.

  The only problem was the timing. The kidnapping occurred around 1:45 a.m., which meant the pool of people who could have heard it was considerably smaller than it would have been a few hours earlier.

  But since she’d struck out elsewhere, she decided it was worth a check.

  She input her desired parameters into a program of her own creation, and within five minutes, had lists of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Whatsapp users registered as living within two hundred kilometers of the kidnapping site. She created a search of those on the list, targeting posts, tweets, chats, or messages that a) occurred any time between 1:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., and b) contained one of the following keywords or phrases in English, German, or French: helicopter, aircraft, airplane, weird noise, unusual noise, strange noise, and noise in the sky.

  This search, she knew, would take longer than five minutes, so while it ran, she scoured news sites and blogs for any mentions of the helicopter.

  She’d been at it for about fifteen minutes when Daeng returned.

  “Here you go,” he said in Thai, setting a cup of coffee in front of her. “Latte, one sugar, double stirred.”

  She picked up the cup, removed the cover, and looked at the liquid inside. The shade of tan was correct. She gave it a sniff and a taste, then nodded. “Good. Thank you.”

  He pulled a bag out of his backpack and set it next to her cup. “And one chocolate croissant.”

  She removed it, smoothed out the bag, and placed the pastry on it. The croissant was warm and smelled delicious. As she started to tear off a piece, her computer bonged and a message appeared on the screen.

  SEVEN MATCHES FOUND

  She’d been hoping for more but expecting less. So, all in all, she was pleased.

  Forgetting about her croissant for the moment, she clicked on the alert box. A window opened, displaying two Whatsapp conversations and five tweets.

  Three of the tweets concerned a war movie that had apparently been playing on TV at the time of the kidnapping, and one of the Whatsapp conversations was about strategies for the latest Star Wars video game. Jar could have given them a tip or two that would have been much better than anything the two gamers had come up with.

  The other two tweets and the last conversation were different.

  Fi Vogel 02:03 AM

  Anyone else’s house get buzzed by a plane? I just heard something fly over my place and I swear if I was on the roof, I could have touched it.

  Bernard Haas 2:37 AM

  Some crazy rich guy out in his helicopter tonight, I guess.

  This last tweet was accompanied by a grainy photo of a blurry, gray spot in the sky that Jar assumed was the helicopter in question. The Whatsapp conversation was in a similar vein.

  2:48 AM

  HADDIE: Do you hear that?

  ELENA: What are you talking about?

  HADDIE: Like a plane or something…wait.

  2:49 AM

  ELENA: Hey, are you still there?

  HADDIE: Yeah. I swear a plane just flew by real low. But I don’t see anything.

  ELENA: I hear it now.

  2:50 AM

  ELENA: That WAS low! I saw a dull light, but I couldn’t see anything else.

  HADDIE: Maybe it’s in trouble. Did it sound like it was going down?

  ELENA: I don’t think so. We would have heard a crash by now, right?

  HADDIE: I guess. Weird.

  Included with the tweets and conversations were the location data from where each had been sent. Jar input the information on Google Maps and smiled. The dots formed an almost perfect line heading east from the kidnapping site toward Vienna.

  “You going to let me in on what you’re doing?” Daeng asked.

  She jerked in surprise and glanced back at him. She’d forgotten he was there. “I don’t have time for you right now.”

  She adjusted the parameters and performed a wider search, hoping to pick up more messages. A few moments after she started, Daeng’s phone rang.

  “Hello?” he said, in English. “Oh, yeah, he and Kincaid are checking out the body. Probably couldn’t get to the phone…. Well, I think Jar might have found something, but she’s not sharing. Maybe you can get it out of her…. Hold on, I’m putting you on speaker.”

  He set his phone next to Jar’s computer.

  “You still there?” he said.

  From the speaker came Orlando’s voice. “I’m here.”

  “Jar, you want to tell Orlando what’s going on?” Daeng said.

  She frowned at him, then said, “I believe I have found out which way the helicopter went.” She explained what she’d done.

  “That’s brilliant,” Orlando said.

  “I am running another search to see if anything turns up farther out.”

  “Good.” Orlando paused. “I have an idea. Whoever the kidnappers are, they don’t want to be found. And while a stealth helicopter was great at night, if they continued going after the sun came up, a lot more people would have seen them.”

  “You want me to check for any mentions of helicopters during the daylight? I will have to widen the parameters again.”

  “If you can set it up to run in the background, sure, but I doubt you’ll find anything.”

  Jar said, “You think they landed before dawn.”

  “I do. If I had to guess, I’d say they switched to a car or even a plane. Set up the
daylight search just in case I’m wrong, and in the meantime, I’ll try to figure out where they could have stopped. When you free up, you can help me out.”

  “Okay,” Jar said.

  They said their goodbyes and hung up.

  Daeng looked at Jar, an eyebrow raised. “Would that have been so hard to tell me before?”

  “And then have to repeat it again to Orlando?” She rolled her eyes, stuck a piece of her pastry in her mouth, and turned back to the computer. “Thank you for the croissant.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Quinn knocked on the hotel room door and whispered, “It’s us.”

  Daeng let him and Kincaid in. “Come on. You’re missing out on all the fun.”

  He hurried back into the room, and Quinn and Kincaid followed to where Jar sat at a built-in desk with her computer.

  “What’s going on?” Quinn asked.

  From a phone sitting next to the laptop, Orlando said, “Hey, babe.”

  “Hey,” he said, surprised. “Still in Zurich?”

  “Yeah. I checked the dead guys who attacked Ferber’s home. They all had the same two hundred euros and fake IDs as the guys you took down. I’m running their pictures through the system but no hits have come back yet.”

  “What about the bombing site?”

  “Nate’s handling that. He should be here anytime now.”

  “Do you know if he found anything?”

  “He said he did, but I was too busy to go into details with him.”

  “Busy with what?”

  “Jar and I have been hunting for the kidnapper’s helicopter.”

  “Jar found it,” Daeng said triumphantly.

  “I did not find it,” Jar said. “I found where it was headed. Orlando found the helicopter.”

  “Technically, I found where it was,” Orlando said.

  “That is true,” Jar said. “We do not know where it is right now. But that is not important.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Quinn said. “Back up.”

  “Oh, sweetie, are we talking too fast for you?” Orlando said.

  “Ha. Ha. Do me a favor and start at the beginning.”

  Orlando described how Jar had figured out the helicopter’s flight path. “After that, Jar and I located all the airfields and helipads within a hundred kilometers of Vienna.”

  “We did not find all of them,” Jar said.

  “As many as we could,” Orlando said. “We then pulled satellite images for each from the last couple hours before sunup, and discarded any that didn’t have a helicopter present. After that, it was a simple backward time jump through stored images to find helicopters that arrived during the early hours of the morning. Guess how many that was?”

  “One?” Quinn said.

  “Well, two, actually. But one’s too small to have been used in the kidnapping. The other one was a Ghost 1A1.”

  Manufactured in Russia, the Ghost 1A1 could carry up to fifteen people including pilots, and was one of the top stealth aircraft.

  Quinn grimaced. “Okay, but you said you didn’t have radar data, so you can’t be sure it’s the helicopter they used. Unless I’m missing something.”

  “You are,” Orlando said. “Jar, show him.”

  Jar tapped her keyboard and a satellite image filled her screen. Though clearly taken at night, the buildings and roads in the shot were easily distinguishable. Jar hit the space bar, and the image began to zoom in on a group of lights in the lower left corner, not far from a river.

  As the magnification increased, Quinn saw that the road he’d noticed next to the lights was actually a runway. Within the halo of lights were a rectangular building and the aforementioned Ghost helicopter parked beside it.

  The image continued to zoom in until the helicopter filled the bottom portion of the screen, with the building along the top edge. The satellite’s angle should have allowed Quinn to see identifying numbers on the aircraft, but there were none. As far as he could tell, there were no markings at all.

  The image flickered, then flickered again, and again and again. Each time appearing as if it was the same photograph, but Quinn knew Jar was working through a series of images. After a few more flickers, someone backed out of the building. More flickering, and the person was joined by others, also walking backward. The pictures were so clear, if the people had all looked up, their faces would have been identifiable.

  The total number of people ended up being seven. Six appeared to be men, while the last was either a man with long hair or a woman. Unfortunately, because of the two-second delay between shots, it was impossible to detect any odd gaits or other distinct mannerisms.

  The group reached the helicopter and backed into it. Several more image flickers and the helicopter rose into the air.

  Jar tapped different arrow keys and hit the space bar. This time the images played as a movie. The helicopter landed and the group climbed off and headed into the building.

  While Quinn had noticed it during the backward progression, it was even more evident now that one of the men was being physically escorted by a man on either side of him.

  When the group disappeared into the structure, Jar stopped the playback.

  “Can you back it up and pause it at some point where they’re all still outside?” Kincaid asked.

  “Who said that?” Orlando asked.

  “Orlando, meet Kincaid,” Quinn said. “Kincaid, Orlando.”

  “Ah, the bodyguard. Hello.”

  “Hi,” Kincaid said.

  “Jar, can you do what Kincaid asked?” Quinn said.

  Jar scrolled back to an image in which the whole group was outside.

  “Any chance you can push in closer?” Kincaid asked.

  “Sure.”

  She zoomed in until the seven people’s heads took up most of the frame.

  “That’s got to be Brunner,” Kincaid said, pointing at the man being escorted. “The hair’s like his, and the nose…well, I mean, I never saw him from this angle but it looks correct.” He moved his finger over the long-haired person. “And this must be the woman I saw on the train. Again, right hair color.” He studied the image for another moment. “And this one”—he switched his finger to the man at the head of the group—“if I had to bet, he’s the one who boarded with her.”

  Quinn studied the screen. None of it—not what Jar and Orlando had found, or Kincaid’s guesses—was proof that they were looking at Brunner and the people who’d kidnapped him. But it was the best lead they’d come up with so far and, circumstantially, was pretty damn convincing.

  “You said the helicopter left again, but that it wasn’t important,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because none of these people were onboard when it took off,” Jar said.

  “Did they catch a ride on something else?”

  “No.”

  “Are you saying they’re still there?”

  Jar readjusted herself in her seat. “I did not say that. I do not know if they are.”

  Orlando jumped in. “We believe they’re still there. We’ve only had time to do spot checks of images between when they arrived there and now. After the helicopter left, they posted two guards outside. In every image we’ve checked that came after that, including one from eight minutes ago, the guards are still there.”

  Jar clicked her computer a few times and brought up a daylight image of the area, zooming in so that the building was large and center screen. Two men stood on its roof, one facing the runway, and the other facing some trees on the side opposite.

  “This is fifteen seconds ago,” she said.

  “Wow, excellent work, everyone,” Quinn said. “So where is this place?”

  “Approximately fifty kilometers east of Vienna,” Orlando said.

  “East? That would be in—”

  “Slovakia.”

  WESTERN SLOVAKIA

  It took a little less than four hours to reach the Slovakian border, and another thirty minutes for Quinn, Jar, Daeng, and Kincaid to approach the pri
vate airport where the helicopter had landed.

  “That one up there,” Jar said. She was sitting in the front passenger seat, her laptop open, displaying a satellite image. “On the left. You see it?”

  “I see it,” Quinn said.

  Quinn slowed the sedan, but instead of making the turn, he pulled onto the shoulder, short of the intersection. There were three cars behind them, one of which had been following them since very near the border. He didn’t think any of the cars was trouble, but in this business, one could never be too cautious.

  All three vehicles passed without slowing. Quinn waited until they disappeared and then made the turn.

  The new road was narrow with no lane markers, just a strip of blacktop running between farms. Two kilometers down, the fields were replaced by a dense grove of pines.

  “Coming up on the right,” Jar said. “Start slowing…now.”

  Fifty meters ahead, a break in the trees marked the dirt road. Quinn checked behind them. There was no one in sight so he turned, keeping his speed slow to avoid kicking up a cloud of dust that might give away their presence.

  This road was even narrower than the last, the trees encroaching on either side.

  “Any changes?” he asked.

  He heard Jar tap on her keyboard.

  “None,” she said. That meant the guards were still in place at the airport.

  Seven minutes down the road, Jar pointed through the front window and said, “There. That wide spot. Just past it should be the turn.”

  As they reached the spot, Quinn slowed to a crawl.

  “I do not see it,” Jar said.

  Quinn couldn’t, either. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  “Yes. Positive.” She grimaced. “I will go look.”

  Before Quinn could stop the car, Jar jumped out and searched the edge of the road. About four meters behind the car, she disappeared into the woods.

  When she came back out, she waved her arms and shouted, “Back here.”

  Quinn reversed until he reached her and lowered the passenger-side window.

  “It’s overgrown,” she said, “but only here at the start. It is not bad after that.”