Flight 12: A Jonathan Quinn Thriller: Flight 12 Begins Series Book

by Brett Battles

  Tune met Quinn halfway and held out his hand. “Right on time.”

  As they shook, Quinn said, “What have you got for us?”

  “A courier. Don’t know who did it, but they knew what they were doing.”

  Quinn glanced past him at the restaurant. “The body’s in there?”

  “No. Down the street.”

  “Inside or outside?”

  “Out.”

  Quinn looked down the road, concerned. “It’s on the street and no one’s found it yet?”

  “Not exactly on the street. Let me show you.”

  “Hold on.”

  Quinn waved Nate and Daeng over, then Tune led them all to a small, triangular park surrounded by streets. The park consisted of an area of bushes and trees encircled by a three-foot-high iron fence and a curved walkway. Along the walkway were several benches lined up end to end under the canopy of trees.

  As they neared, Tune said, “Kal? It’s us.”

  A shadow uncurled from among the bushes and stood up.

  “Still quiet?” Tune asked.

  “Nothing since that homeless guy,” Kal said.

  “What homeless guy?” Quinn asked.

  “Some old guy looking for a place to sleep,” Kal replied. “I made it clear he needed to find somewhere else tonight.”

  “Did he see anything?”

  “Nah.”

  Maybe he didn’t see anything, Quinn thought, but the guy would know something was going on here, and maybe he’d be curious enough to come back at an inopportune time. They’d have to keep an eye out.

  “The body?” he asked.

  “You’ll have to hop over,” Kal said.

  The courier turned out to be a woman. Early twenties by the looks of her, with dark hair and a tan complexion. Hispanic, perhaps, Quinn thought, or possibly Mediterranean. She was about five foot five and had the typical courier body shape—lean with strong arms and legs. She was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a brown leather jacket over what looked like a black T-shirt. The bullet hole in the middle of her forehead spoke to the cause of death. Quinn crouched down, turned her head, and noted there was no corresponding exit wound. A small-caliber gun, then, probably a .22, and, given the very public location, with an attached sound suppressor. Tune had been right. Her killer had known what he was doing.

  Quinn took a step back and looked out at the three surrounding streets. Though he and the others were under the cover of the trees, he could still see the windows of apartments in at least half a dozen buildings. It was a damn theater with the park center stage.

  “How is it no one saw anything?” he asked.

  “It happened around 1:30 a.m.,” Tune said, shrugging. “It’s a weeknight. Most people are already asleep.”

  “But not all.”

  “True, but if anyone had seen anything, the police would have been here long ago. The press, too, probably. Trust me, no one reported it.”

  “Not reporting isn’t the same thing as not having seen anything,” Quinn said.

  “Relax. We did two thorough night-vision scans of all the windows on the street and found no one paying any attention to this park. That make you feel better?”

  A bit, though Quinn didn’t tell him that. “So, no idea who did this.”

  Tune shook his head. “Only that it was someone who wanted her bag.”

  “So she was definitely on a run.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “For Helen?”

  Tune looked confused for a second, then said, “For Ms. Cho, yes. We arrived here to escort the person she was meeting to his final destination.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “No clue. We just found her.”

  Quinn took another look around for signs of an additional struggle that might indicate what had happened to the courier’s contact, but nothing caught his eye. “Are you hanging around?” he asked. “Would be nice to have a few extra pairs of eyes on the street while we work.”

  “Sorry. Other places to be. So if that’s it…”

  Quinn glanced at Nate and Daeng to see if they had any questions, but both men shook their heads. “I guess you’re free,” he told Tune.

  “Enjoy your night,” Tune said as he headed to the fence.

  “Don’t work too hard, boys,” Kal said, following his partner.

  As soon as the two were gone, Quinn said, “Daeng, you’re on vehicle. Nate, you and I are on prep. I’d like to be out of here in the next five minutes.”

  Daeng put down his duffel and left to obtain a ride, while Quinn and Nate began a thorough inspection of the area to make sure no evidence got left behind. The good thing, if you could call it that, was that they didn’t have to search for the bullet since it was still in the woman’s head. But there were other potential problematic items—bits of clothing, a phone that might have been in her hand when she was shot, jewelry. Their search, however, turned up nothing.

  Nate pulled the remaining plastic out of one of the duffels and laid it on the ground. They didn’t have enough left for a full body wrap, but they could at least bind the woman’s arms to her sides to make carrying her a little easier.

  “What was she doing back in here?” Nate asked. “Hiding?”

  “Who knows,” Quinn said.

  “Seems kind of weird.”

  Quinn shrugged. Maybe she was supposed to meet her contact at the benches and was hiding in the bushes until he arrived. Her killer might have sneaked up on her, and she might have turned at the last moment and seen her assassin right before she was shot. Or maybe the killer approached her directly, acting the part of her contact. Like with so much of their work, it was a question they’d likely never know the answer to.

  Carefully, they lifted her to put her on the plastic.

  “Got something,” Nate said, twisting so he could look under the body.

  “What?” Quinn asked.

  “Not sure. Saw something fall…from her jacket sleeve, I think.”

  They set the courier on the plastic, and then Nate hunted around until he found the item. Picking it up, he said, “It’s some kind of box.”

  “Let me see.”

  Nate handed it to Quinn.

  The box was made of black plastic and was approximately one inch square and a quarter inch thick. On one corner were three small raised characters. Quinn pulled out his pocket flashlight and shined it on the surface.

  E/K

  He had no idea what that meant.

  He examined the rest of it in the light and found a seam running around three of the narrow sides. Slowly so as not to disturb the contents, he opened it like a clam.

  Another square, this one only half the size of the box, sat in a custom-cut indentation on a bed of foam in the bottom section. Quinn didn’t need to pull the square out to know what it was. A computer chip.

  He closed the box and shoved it in his pocket. He would worry about its importance after they finished what they’d come to do.

  As they secured the plastic with duct tape, Quinn’s phone vibrated twice with an incoming text. He checked it, then whispered, “It’s Daeng. He’s on his way.”

  Quinn made sure the body was ready to go, and then moved through the bushes so he could peek down the road. Fifteen seconds later, a large SUV rounded the corner to his right. The glare of the vehicle’s headlights prevented him from seeing the driver, but he had no doubt it was Daeng. A van or small covered truck was always preferable, but certain SUVs were more than adequate for the task.

  Quinn was about to go back and help Nate move the body closer to the fence when a second pair of headlights swung around the corner. A sedan, but not the run-of-the-mill family type.

  A police car.

  “Down,” he whispered back toward Nate as he dropped to the ground.

  Daeng had obviously seen the vehicle, too. Instead of slowing when he neared the park, he drove by, his pace steady. Suddenly, Quinn saw flashing red and blue lights on the buildings and heard the police car speed up. Daeng im
mediately floored the SUV and screeched around the corner just past the park. The police car, siren off but lights still flashing, took up pursuit.

  As soon as both vehicles were out of sight, Quinn yanked out his cell and called Daeng.

  “Tell me that isn’t you in the SUV,” he said.

  “Wish I could,” Daeng said in his usual calm voice.

  “I figured as much. All right, be careful, but try to get them as far way from here as possible before you lose them.”

  Over the phone, Quinn heard the wail of rubber on asphalt.

  “A little update,” Daeng said. “There are two of them now.”

  Quinn grimaced. More would likely join them soon. “Scratch what I said. Ditch the vehicle before they can cut you off.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  The line went dead.

  Keeping low, Quinn crept back to Nate.

  “I’m just going to put this out there,” Nate said. “Feel free to ignore me, but I’m not a big fan of doing jobs we can’t properly plan ahead of time.”

  “You and me both.”

  “I take it you want me to find us a ride,” Nate said.

  Before Quinn could answer, a vehicle turned onto the street. He rose high enough to take a look.

  Another police car, this one pulling to a stop in the middle of the road at the far end.

  As he watched, two officers climbed out and headed over to the opposite sidewalk. The guy in the lead pulled a flashlight from his belt and turned it on, pointing the beam at the sushi restaurant straight in front of him.

  “Dammit,” Quinn muttered to himself.

  When the cops reached the door, one of them stood back a few paces while the other tried the handle. Tune had apparently reengaged the lock when he’d left because the door remained closed.

  Flashlight cop shined the beam through the window on the door before doing the same at the larger front window. Quinn could hear him say something to his partner, but the words were lost in the night. They checked the doors of the neighboring buildings before heading down the sidewalk toward the park.

  Quinn tensed. Someone had definitely seen something and called the police. The question was, had the observer seen Tune escort Quinn and his team all the way to the park and reported that, too?

  The officers came within fifty feet of the park before they finally stopped.

  Quinn heard one of the men call in to the station, and then say, “Everything’s locked tight. No signs of a break-in.”

  A moment later, the flashlight went off and the two cops headed back to their car.

  As they drove off, Quinn turned to Nate. “We need to get out of here fast.”

  “On it,” Nate said.

  Quinn watched him sneak out of the park and disappear down the street.

  CHAPTER 3

  NOTHING WAS LIKE the silence of being alone with a corpse. Even in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, where the hum of life never stopped, the quiet was so all encompassing it could overwhelm those unprepared. For Quinn, though, it was a sensation he knew well, an old acquaintance he ran into time and again.

  He looked down at the body. Over the years he had become an expert at reading the dead. And though he might not have known them in life, he could easily see who they’d been.

  The courier had a kind face. Pretty in that girl-next-door kind of way. She might not have turned every head when she walked into a room, but many would have looked her way. She had probably entered the secret world the way most did—recruited by someone who had seen something in her. It was how Durrie had recruited Quinn, and how Quinn had recruited Nate. The excitement of the job and the chance to see the world had probably appealed to her. Whatever her reasons for saying yes, they had all led to this—death in an undersized park on a late New York night.

  “What happened to you?” he asked under his breath, once more unable to quell his curiosity.

  A courier’s job was a deceptively dangerous one. Years could go by without a problem, but all it took was that one time when the courier carried something others would do anything to obtain. Tune had said the girl’s bag was missing, so that was probably the case here. But Quinn wondered, as he touched the box in his pocket, if her killer had missed what he or she had come for.

  Nate had said the box fell from her sleeve.

  Quinn hesitated, knowing he should leave it alone, but he couldn’t stop himself. He pulled out his pocketknife and cut a slit in the plastic wrap just large enough so he could work her hand and wrist out.

  Her jacket had a large, folded-back cuff. Perhaps the box had fallen into it when she’d been shot. As he turned it down, he detected a stiff band of plastic inside the cuff. Not something he’d like in a jacket, but he wasn’t exactly up on the latest fashions. The underside of the cuff was covered in a soft fabric a few shades lighter than the rest of the jacket. At first, there didn’t appear to be anything unusual, but as he ran a finger along the seam where the cuff folded, he found several stitches missing.

  He slipped his finger into the gap and discovered that the hole wasn’t there because of wear and tear, but it had been purposely created as the opening to a small pocket.

  He retrieved the box and moved it through the slit. A perfect fit. He also realized this explained the stiff plastic. When the cuff was folded up, the band would hide the presence of the box from a quick search.

  He heard another car enter the street so he quickly put the box back into his pocket and reinserted the woman’s hand through the hole in the plastic. When the vehicle stopped next to the park and popped open its trunk, he knew it was Nate.

  As soon as his partner was out of the car, Quinn tossed him the duffel bags, then went back and hoisted the woman over his shoulder. He carried her back to the fence and handed her across.

  “Got her,” Nate said after he’d slipped his arms under the woman.

  While Nate put her in the trunk, Quinn hopped the fence and climbed into the driver’s seat. Lying in the wheel well on the passenger side were the car’s license plates—Nate having done the job the way Quinn had trained him. If someone spotted them, all the witness would be able to tell the police was that they had left in a dark sedan. And how many of those were in New York City?

  The trunk clicked closed, and as soon as Nate jumped into the passenger seat, Quinn shoved the car into DRIVE and sped off.

  Both men were silent for the first several blocks, listening for sirens, but the city remained at rest. When Quinn felt they were safe, he pulled into an alley and stopped so that Nate could reattach the license plates. Back on the road, Nate switched his phone to speaker and called Daeng, but the line rang until the voice-mail message came on.

  “Call Orlando,” Quinn told him.

  Three rings. “Come on!” Orlando answered. “Just because you’re three hours ahead of me doesn’t mean it’s not late out here, too.”

  “We’ve got a situation,” Quinn told his girlfriend and partner back home in California.

  “What do you mean, ‘situation’?” she asked, all business now. “I thought you were done.”

  As he always did, Quinn had copied her on the completion notification he’d sent to the client.

  “Helen called,” he said.

  Silence. “She called you directly.” Orlando’s voice was dangerously calm.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice? What did she want?”

  The work agreement they had with Helen was that all assignments would go through Orlando, the de facto operations manager of the team.

  “She had something here in New York she needed us to take care of.”

  “She knew you were there?”

  “Yeah. Apparently she found out through Annabel.”

  “This just keeps getting better and better. I hope you told her no.”

  “If I had, we wouldn’t be in a situation.”

  She took a deep, annoyed breath. “Spill it.”

  He quickly told her what
had happened. “I don’t know what’s going on with Daeng. See if you can find him and help him out. You might also want to call Helen and let her know she’ll have to pull a few strings if the police grab him.”

  “Oh, I’m calling Helen. Don’t you worry about that. Is there anything you need?”

  “If you have time, it might be helpful to know who killed the courier.”

  “Why? You expecting trouble?”

  Quinn hesitated. “Maybe.”

  Nate looked at Quinn, his brow furrowed. “Something I should know?”

  “I think that chip you found could have been what they were after.” He described the hidden pocket in the woman’s cuff.

  When he finished, Orlando asked, “Do you know her name?”

  “No. But Helen should be able to tell you.”

  “She might not be interested in sharing that info.”

  “I’m sure you can convince her.”

  “I’ll snap a picture of the girl and text it to you as soon as we’re done,” Nate said.

  Orlando sighed. “All right, I’ll see what I can do. One request—try not to take any more jobs before you finish the one you’re on.”

  She hung up.

  “I don’t think she’s happy,” Nate said.

  “Figure that out on your own, did you?”

  __________

  GETTING THEIR HANDS on the courier had been easy for Morgan and Fischer. Their employer had learned where the handoff was to take place, allowing them to arrive in the area first. After identifying the man the courier was to meet, they had shoved an ice pick into his heart and then dumped his body in a trash bin several alleys away from the exchange location. After that, it was a simple matter of taking the dead man’s place.

  The plan hadn’t been to kill her, only to get the chip she was carrying. The fact that she was dead was her fault. All she had to do was believe they were her contacts and everything would have been fine. But the bitch was too suspicious, and Fischer had been forced to use his .22 before they could get close enough to choke the life out of her.

  That should have been the end of it. They should have been back at their hotel already, resting up for their midnight flight to Rome, where they would deliver the chip to their client, Nicholas Loban.