“Nobody around,” Duffy said.
There was a window on Quinn’s back wall near the red door. It was made from pebbled glass. Probably a bathroom window. It had iron bars over it.
“Security system?” Villanueva said.
“On a new place like this?” I said. “Almost certainly.”
“Wired direct to the cops?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “That wouldn’t be smart, for a guy like Quinn. He doesn’t want the cops snooping around every time some kid busts his windows.”
“Private company?”
“That’s my guess. Or his own people.”
“So how do we do it?”
“We do it real fast. Get in and out before anybody reacts. We can risk five or ten minutes, probably.”
“One at the front and two at the back?”
“You got it,” I said. “You take the front.”
I told him to pop the trunk and then Duffy and I slid out of the car. The air was cold and damp and the wind was blowing. I took the tire iron out from under the spare wheel and closed the trunk lid and watched the car drive away. Duffy and I walked down the side of the catering place and across the dividing lawn to Quinn’s bathroom window. I put my ear against the cold metal siding and listened. Heard nothing. Then I looked at the window bars. They were made up from a shallow one-piece rectangular iron basket that was secured by eight machine screws, two on each of the four sides of the rectangle. The screws went through welded flanges the size of quarters. The screw heads themselves were the size of nickels. Duffy pulled the Glock out of her shoulder holster. I heard it scrape on the leather. I checked the Beretta in my coat pocket. Held the tire iron two-handed. Put my ear back on the siding. Heard Villanueva’s car pull up at the front of the building. I could hear the beat of the engine coming through the metal. I heard his door open and close. He left the engine running. I heard his feet on the front walkway.
“Stand by,” I said.
I felt Duffy move behind me. Heard Villanueva knocking loudly on the front door. I stabbed the tire iron end-on into the siding next to one of the screws. Made a shallow dent in the metal. Shoved the iron sideways into it and under the bars and hauled on it. The screw held. Clearly it went through the siding all the way into the steel framing. So I reseated the iron and jerked harder, once, twice. The screw head broke off and the bars moved a little.
I had to break six screw heads in total. Took me nearly thirty seconds. Villanueva was still knocking. Nobody was answering. When the sixth screw broke I grabbed the bars themselves and hauled them open ninety degrees like a door. The two remaining screws screeched in protest. I picked up the tire iron again and smashed the pebbled glass. Reached in with my hand and found the catch and pulled the window open. Took out the Beretta and went headfirst into the bathroom.
It was a small cubicle, maybe six-by-four. There was a toilet and a sink with a small frameless mirror. A trash can and a shelf with spare toilet rolls and paper towels on it. A bucket and a mop propped in a corner. Clean linoleum on the floor. A strong smell of disinfectant. I turned around and checked the window. There was a small alarm pad screwed to the sill. But the building was still quiet. No siren. A silent alarm. Now a phone would be ringing somewhere. Or an alert would be flashing on a computer screen.
I stepped out of the bathroom into a back hallway. Nobody there. It was dark. I faced front and backed away to the rear door. Fumbled behind me without looking and unlocked it. Pulled it open. Heard Duffy step inside.
She had probably done six weeks at Quantico during her basic training and she still remembered the moves. She held the Glock two-handed and slid past me and took up station by a door that was going to lead out of the hallway into the rest of the building. She leaned her shoulder on the jamb and crooked her elbows to pull the gun up out of my way. I stepped forward and kicked the door and went through it and dodged left and she spun after me and went to the right. We were in another hallway. It was narrow. It ran the whole length of the building, all the way to the front. There were rooms off it, left and right. Six rooms, three on either side. Six doors, all of them closed.
“Front,” I whispered. “Villanueva.”
We crabbed our way along, back-to-back, covering each door in turn. They stayed closed. We made it to the front door and I unlocked it and opened it up. Villanueva stepped through and closed it again behind him. He had a Glock 17 in his gnarled old hand. It looked right at home there.
“Alarm?” he whispered.
“Silent,” I whispered back.
“So let’s be quick.”
“Room by room,” I whispered.
It wasn’t a good feeling. We had made so much noise that nobody in the building could have any doubt we were there. And the fact that they hadn’t blundered out to confront us meant they were smart enough to sit tight with their hammers back and their sights trained chest-high at the inside of their doors. And the center hallway was only about three feet wide. It didn’t give us much room to maneuver. Not a good feeling. The doors were all hinged on the left, so I put Duffy on my left facing out to cover the doors opposite. I didn’t want us all facing the same way. I didn’t want to get shot in the back. Then I put Villanueva on my right. His job was to kick in the doors, one by one. I took the center. My job was to go in first, room by room.
We started with the front room on the left. Villanueva kicked the door, hard. The lock broke and the frame splintered and the door crashed open. I went straight in. The room was empty. It was a ten-by-ten square with a window and a desk and a wall of file cabinets. I came straight out and we all spun around and hit the room opposite, immediately. Duffy covered our backs and Villanueva kicked the door and I went in. It was empty, too. But it was a bonus. The partition wall between it and the next room had been removed. It was ten-by-twenty. It had two doors to the hallway. There were three desks in the room. There were computers and phones. There was a coat rack in the corner with a woman’s raincoat hanging on it.
We crossed the hallway to the fourth door. The third room. Villanueva kicked the door and I rolled around the jamb. Empty. Another ten-by-ten square. No window. A desk, with a big cork notice board behind it. Lists pinned to the cork. An Oriental carpet covering most of the linoleum.
Four down. Two to go. We chose the back room on the right. Villanueva hit the door. I went in. It was empty. Ten-by-ten, white paint, gray linoleum. Completely bare. Nothing in it at all. Except bloodstains. They had been cleaned up, but not well. There were brown swirls on the floor, where an overloaded mop had pushed them around. There was splatter on the walls. Some of it had been wiped. Some of it had been missed altogether. There were lacy trails up to waist height. The angles between the baseboards and the linoleum were rimed with brown and black.
“The maid,” I said.
Nobody replied. We stood still for a long silent moment. Then we backed out and turned around and hit the last door, hard. I went in, gun-first. And stopped dead.
It was a prison. And it was empty.
It was ten-by-ten. It had white walls and a low ceiling. No windows. Gray linoleum on the floor. A mattress on the linoleum. Wrinkled sheets on the mattress. Dozens of Chinese food cartons all over the place. Empty plastic bottles that had held spring water.
“She was here,” Duffy said.
I nodded. “Just like in the basement up at the house.”
I stepped all the way inside and lifted up the mattress. The word justice was smeared on the floor, big and obvious, painted with a finger. Underneath it was today’s date, six numbers, month, day, year, fading and then strengthening as she had reloaded her fingertip with something black and brown.
“She’s hoping we’ll track her,” Villanueva said. “Day by day, place by place. Smart kid.”
“Is that written in blood?” Duffy said.
I could smell stale food and stale breath, all through the room. I could smell fear and desperation. She had heard the maid die. Two thin doors wouldn’t have blocked much sound.<
br />
“Hoisin sauce,” I said. “I hope.”
“How long since they moved her?”
I looked inside the closest cartons. “Two hours, maybe.”
“Shit.”
“So let’s go,” Villanueva said. “Let’s go find her.”
“Five minutes,” Duffy said. “I need to get something I can give to ATF. To make this whole thing right.”
“We haven’t got five minutes,” Villanueva said.
“Two minutes,” I said. “Grab what you can and look at it later.”
We backed out of the cell. Nobody looked at the charnel house opposite. Duffy led us back to the room with the Oriental carpet. Smart choice, I thought. It was probably Quinn’s office. He was the kind of guy who would give himself a rug. She took a thick file marked Pending from a desk drawer and pulled all the lists off the cork board.
“Let’s go,” Villanueva said again.
We came out through the front door exactly four minutes after I had gone in through the bathroom window. It felt more like four hours. We piled into the gray Taurus and were back on Route One a minute after that.
“Stay north,” I said. “Head for the city center.”
We were quiet at first. Nobody looked at anybody. Nobody spoke. We were thinking about the maid. I was in the back and Duffy was in the front with Quinn’s paperwork spread over her knees. Traffic across the bridge was slow. There were shoppers heading into the city. The roadway was slick with rain and salt spray. Duffy shuffled papers, glancing at one after another. Then she broke the silence. It was a relief.
“This all is pretty cryptic,” she said. “We’ve got an XX and a BB.”
“Xavier Export Company and Bizarre Bazaar,” I said.
“BB is importing,” she said. “XX is exporting. But they’re obviously linked. They’re like two halves of the same operation.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want Quinn.”
“And Teresa,” Villanueva said.
“First-quarter spreadsheet,” Duffy said. “They’re on track to turn over twenty-two million dollars this year. That’s a lot of guns, I guess.”
“Quarter-million Saturday Night Specials,” I said. “Or four Abrams tanks.”
“Mossberg,” Duffy said. “You heard that name?”
“Why?” I said.
“XX just received a shipment from them.”
“O.F. Mossberg and Sons,” I said. “From New Haven, Connecticut. Shotgun manufacturer.”
“What’s a Persuader?”
“A shotgun,” I said. “The Mossberg M500 Persuader. It’s a paramilitary weapon.”
“XX is sending Persuaders someplace. Two hundred of them. Total invoice value sixty thousand dollars. Basically in exchange for something BB is receiving.”
“Import-export,” I said. “That’s how it works.”
“But the prices don’t add up,” she said. “BB’s incoming shipment is invoiced at seventy thousand. So XX is coming out ten thousand dollars ahead.”
“The magic of capitalism,” I said.
“No, wait, there’s another item. Now it balances. Two hundred Mossberg Persuaders plus a ten-thousand-dollar bonus item to make the values match.”
“What’s the bonus item?” I said.
“It doesn’t say. What would be worth ten grand?”
“I don’t care,” I said again.
She shuffled more paper.
“Keast and Maden,” she said. “Where did we see those names?”
“The building behind Quinn’s,” I said. “The caterers.”
“He hired them,” she said. “They’re delivering something today.”
“Where?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“What kind of something?”
“Doesn’t say. Eighteen items at fifty-five dollars each. Almost a thousand dollars’ worth of something.”
“Where to now?” Villanueva said.
We were off the bridge and looping north and west, with the park on our left.
“Make the second right,” I said.
We pulled straight into Missionary House’s underground garage. There was a rent-a-cop in a fancy uniform in a booth. He logged us in without paying a whole lot of attention. Then Villanueva showed him his DEA badge and told him to sit tight and keep quiet. Told him not to call anybody. Behind him the garage was quiet. There were maybe eighty spaces and fewer than a dozen cars in them. But one of them was the gray Grand Marquis I had seen outside Beck’s warehouse that morning.
“This is where I took the photographs,” Duffy said.
We drove to the back of the garage and parked in a corner. Got out and took the elevator up one floor to the lobby. There was some tired marble decor and a building directory. The Xavier Export Company shared the fourth floor with a law firm called Lewis, Strange & Greville. We were happy about that. It meant there would be an interior hallway up there. We wouldn’t be stepping straight out of the elevator into Quinn’s offices.
We got back in the elevator and pressed 4. Faced front. The doors closed and the motor whined. We stopped on four. We heard voices. The elevator bell pinged. The doors opened. The hallway was full of lawyers. There was a mahogany door on the left with a brass plate marked Lewis, Strange & Greville, Attorneys at Law. It was open and three people had come out through it and were standing around waiting for one of them to close it. Two men, one woman. They were in casual clothes. They were all carrying briefcases. They all looked happy. They all turned and looked at us. We stepped out of the elevator. They smiled and nodded at us, like you do with strangers in a small hallway. Or maybe they thought we had come to consult with them on a legal matter. Villanueva smiled back and nodded toward Xavier Export’s door. It’s not you we’re looking for. It’s them. The woman lawyer looked away and squeezed past us into the elevator. Her partners locked up their office and joined her. The elevator doors closed on them and we heard the car whining down.
“Witnesses,” Duffy whispered. “Shit.”
Villanueva pointed at Xavier Export’s door. “And there’s someone in there. Those lawyers didn’t seem surprised that we should be up here at this time on a Saturday. So they must know there’s someone in there. Maybe they thought we’ve got an appointment or something.”
I nodded. “One of the cars in the garage was at Beck’s warehouse this morning.”
“Quinn?” Duffy said.
“I sincerely hope so.”
“We agreed, Teresa first,” Villanueva said. “Then Quinn.”
“I’m changing the plan,” I said. “I’m not walking away. Not if he’s in there. Not if he’s a target of opportunity.”
“But we can’t go in anyway,” Duffy said. “We’ve been seen.”
“You can’t go in,” I said. “I can.”
“What, alone?”
“That’s the way I want it. Him and me.”
“We left a trail.”
“So roll it up. Go back to the garage and drive away. The guard will log you out. Then call this office five minutes later. Between the garage log and the phone log it’ll be on record that nothing happened while you were here.”
“But what about you? It’ll be on record that we left you in here.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t think the garage guy paid that much attention. I don’t think he counted heads or anything. He just wrote down the plate number.”
She said nothing.
“I don’t care anyway,” I said. “I’m a hard person to find. And I plan to get harder.”
She looked at the law firm’s door. Then at Xavier Export’s. Then at the elevator. Then at me.
“OK,” she said. “We’ll leave you to it. I really don’t want to, but I really have to, you understand?”
“Completely,” I said.
“Teresa might be in there with him,” Villanueva whispered.
I nodded. “If she is, I’ll bring her to you. Meet me at the end of the street. Ten minutes after you make the phone call.”<
br />
They both hesitated and then Duffy put her finger on the elevator call button. We heard noises in the shaft as the machinery started.
“Take care,” she said.
The bell pinged and the doors opened. They stepped in. Villanueva glanced out at me and hit the button for the lobby and the doors closed on them like theater curtains and they were gone. I stepped away and leaned on the wall on the far side of Quinn’s door. It felt good to be alone. I put my hand around the Beretta’s grip in my pocket and waited. I imagined Duffy and Villanueva stepping out of the elevator and walking to their car. Driving it out of the garage. Getting noticed by the guard. Parking around the corner and calling information. Getting Quinn’s number. I turned and stared at the door. Imagined Quinn on the other side of it, at his desk, with a phone in front of him. I stared at the door like I could see him right through it.
The first time I ever saw him was on the actual day of the bust. Frasconi had done well with the Syrian. The guy was all squared away. Frasconi was very adequate in a situation like that. Give him time and a clear objective and he could deliver. The Syrian brought cash money with him from inside his embassy and we all sat down together in front of the judge advocate and counted it. There was fifty thousand dollars. We figured it was the final installment of many. We marked each bill separately. We even marked the briefcase. We put the judge advocate’s initials on it with clear nail varnish, near one of the hinges. The judge advocate wrote up an affidavit for the file and Frasconi held on to the Syrian, and Kohl and I moved into position ready for the surveillance itself. Her photographer was already standing by in a second-floor window in a building across the street from the café and twenty yards south. The judge advocate joined us ten minutes later. We were using a utility truck parked at the curb. It had portholes with one-way glass. Kohl had borrowed it from the FBI. She had drafted three grunts to complete the illusion. They were wearing power company overalls and actually digging up the street.
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