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

by Brett Battles

  He eased around a corner and headed east, keeping his speed down so as not to tip his hand. It took a half mile and two more turns before he found what he was looking for.

  __________

  IT WOULD HAVE been nice if Morgan knew where these assholes were taking the body, but given that they’d already backtracked from their original course, he wasn’t even sure they knew where they were going. He didn’t think they were looking for someplace they could dump the messenger. If they didn’t care where her body was found, they would have left her in the park. No, he was sure they wanted her to disappear and were looking for someplace specific. If it were him, he’d head to one of the rivers, steal a boat, and motor out to sea. But the others didn’t seem interested in the water.

  Ahead, the sedan took another turn. As soon as it was out of sight, Morgan sped up until he reached the corner, and then followed onto the new street at his previous pace. Beyond the sedan, a trash truck had just pulled out of an alley and was lumbering away from them toward its next pickup.

  Maybe that was the option they were looking for—drop the body in a Dumpster a few minutes ahead of the truck and let it do the work. In a few hours the body would be buried under a ton of trash and likely not discovered for months, if at all.

  “Hell, maybe they’re going to keep the damn thing,” he mumbled to himself.

  “What?” Fischer asked.

  He glared over at his partner. “Nothing.”

  As Morgan turned his gaze back to the road, the other car suddenly pulled into the oncoming lane and raced around the truck.

  “They’ve seen us,” Fischer said.

  Morgan stomped on the gas. “No shit.”

  The brake lights on the trash truck flared as the front end pulled into the other lane. A loud thud-thud-thud-thud-thud filled the street as the back end of the vehicle bounced on the asphalt while it tried to stop. The cab careened into a lamppost and sent a shower of sparks raining down, bringing the truck to a shuddering halt.

  Morgan slammed on his brakes to keep from ramming into the vehicle that now blocked the entire street. He quickly shoved the Mercedes into reverse, preformed a rapid Y turn, and then raced back to the previous intersection.

  There was no way they could show up in Rome and tell Mr. Loban the mission had been unsuccessful. That would be a quick way of making this their last job ever. Sure, they could just skip the flight and go on the run. They might even get away with it for a while, but Morgan had no doubt Mr. Loban would eventually track them down. And when he did, he would make them suffer for a long time before taking their lives. Finding the chip was the only option.

  Morgan circled the block to the other side of the crash, but, as he expected, the sedan was nowhere in sight.

  “What the hell are we going to do?” Fischer said. “They could have gone anywhere.”

  A half block past the crash was another intersection that could have taken the sedan north or south, and then another and another. And down each of those were more intersections, exponentially increasing the number of potential escape routes.

  Which way? he thought. Which way? Which way?

  Less than a minute after the sedan had left the park with the body, it had begun heading north. This had lasted for all but the last five minutes, when it had begun making turns and moving more easterly. It could have all been misdirection, but Morgan was willing to bet that the car’s initial direction had been set before the driver had known they were being followed.

  At the intersection, he turned north and allowed his instincts to take over.

  Fifteen minutes later, on the Henry Hudson Parkway, he spotted a gray sedan in the distance. He pointed it out to Fischer, who retrieved their binoculars and trained them on the car.

  “Son of a bitch. It’s them.”

  SAN FRANCISCO

  USING HER SELF-DEVELOPED search engine, Orlando initiated a hunt for any information on Russian mob boss Nicholas Loban. It took nearly twenty seconds for the results to appear, but given that the program was drawing from sources hidden behind what their owners thought were impenetrable firewalls, that was surprisingly quick.

  She skimmed the basic info to make sure it jibed with what she already knew, then whittled the list down to only entries concerning Loban’s ties to the US and his known associates. His profile in the States turned out to be pretty low-key, more an information-gathering network than anything else, and none of his few contacts were familiar to her.

  Annoyed that she hadn’t found anything useful, she decided to search for attempted robberies involving microchips. She found several computer-store thefts, and a missing bag of Intel processors from a wholesale supplier in New Jersey, but that was basically it.

  She thought about it for a moment and realized she was being too literal with search parameters. If this chip was important enough to kill for, its disappearance would probably not be reported to traditional authorities.

  She refined her search, concentrating on high-tech firms experiencing recent security breaches.

  The item that caught her eye was near the bottom of the third page, an alarm report received by the Newton, Massachusetts, police department.

  The security system at a local computer technology company had alerted the police to an alarm at 1:37 a.m. three nights earlier. Before patrol officers had arrived, the police received a call from a man named David Pinter, the company’s COO. Pinter said it had been a false alarm and apologized. The patrol cars were called back. End of report.

  The mistaken alarm would have been enough to spur Orlando to look deeper, but it was the company’s name that told her she’d found what she was looking for.

  Eli/Kreck Systems.

  E/K, like the letters on the box holding the chip.

  A check of the company revealed what she already suspected. Eli/Kreck was a defense contractor. In her experience, a high-tech firm that did work for the military would not employ a security system prone to false alarms. It could happen, but she wasn’t buying it.

  She tried to break into the company’s data network, but it soon became clear it would take more than one of her quick hacks to get in. No problem. There were other ways to infiltrate a company’s system. The fastest and potentially easiest would be through one of the employees. Not some mid-grade or low-end worker, though. Those people tended to be more security minded, since any breach traced back to them would mean their jobs and possibly even a jail sentence. More times than not, the way in was through the personnel at the top.

  The company’s public website provided all the information she needed. The founder and president had a master’s in software engineering from MIT, so she immediately struck him from the list. The directors of the three main departments had similar stories and were also removed. The winner, as she’d suspected, turned out to be the same man who had called the police, COO David Pinter. His degree was in business administration. He had worked at several companies over the years, specializing in organization and client management. He was older than the others, and by the looks of him, a good three decades more than the founder. Which likely meant he had been a cosmetic hire, to put aging investors at ease by letting them know someone with experience was on the team.

  It took exactly seventeen seconds for Orlando to find out where Pinter lived. Hacking his home computer system was even easier. A minute and a half later she was in Eli/Kreck’s system, reading an internal memo on the events surrounding the alarm.

  It had not been set off in error. Two intruders had entered the building and made their way to the most secure room in the facility, a place called the GT lab. There, they took an item referred to as the SPYDER and then tried to leave the building. Unfortunately for them, at some point between entering and exiting the lab, they had triggered an alarm.

  Orlando was initially confused as to why company security hadn’t caught the intruders before their attempted exit, but then she found another memo, this one concerning the chemical analysis of the coffee the security officers h
ad been drinking. The powerful compound that had been added to it was a sedative Orlando and her team had used in the past.

  Two of the guards, however, were not coffee drinkers. When they heard the alarm, they had immediately responded. The thieves were taken down by single shots to the head. Apparently, getting a job with Eli/Kreck security required advanced military training.

  One unintended result of the encounter was that “irreparable damage” had been done to the SPYDER. The only other one in existence was stored at the company’s manufacturing facility in Sunnyvale, California. Needing it for the work they were doing in Newton, Eli/Kreck turned to the same military contacts who’d helped cover up the attempted robbery to arrange the SPYDER’s transportation across the country.

  That’s where the report ended, but Orlando had no problem filling in the rest. The military had contacted the NSA or perhaps the CIA, who, in turn, had contacted Helen Cho. She had then arranged for a secret transit by Jenna Tate. But the mission had been compromised.

  Another report said the drugging of the guards had been an inside job, the main suspect an engineer named Charles Williams who had failed to show up at work the next day. The head of security had gone to his house and found Williams gone, the place cleaned out. That was as far as the internal investigation had gotten so far.

  Orlando saved a copy of the suspect’s personnel file on her computer before logging out of Eli/Kreck’s system. She then fed the engineer’s picture into her facial recognition program. While that ran in the background, she did a background check on the man.

  Williams’s online presence was a bit too typical for her tastes. A few minutes of digging proved there was no substance to it. Though there were likely hundreds of Charles Williamses in the country, this particular one never existed.

  A small point of light began pulsing at the top of her screen, letting her know of a possible hit. She took a look. The man the recognition software had picked out had many of the same features as Williams, but unless the impostor had had extensive plastic surgery—always a possibility—he was not the man she was searching for. She saved the result, but let the program continue while she went downstairs to get a cup of coffee.

  Her shotgun house was over a hundred years old, and despite the fact she’d undertaken many renovations, the floor still creaked when she walked into the kitchen. So she wasn’t particularly surprised when she heard a door down the hall open a few moments later.

  “What you still doing up?” Mrs. Vo asked as she entered the kitchen.

  “Working. Just need some coffee. Go back to sleep.”

  Mrs. Vo frowned and waved a hand in the air as she walked over. “Coffee not good for you. You need take care yourself.”

  Mrs. Vo and her husband had worked for Orlando since when Orlando and her son, Garrett, had lived in the Vos’ native Viet Nam. They took care of things around the house, including helping with Garrett. Orlando didn’t think of them as employees. They were family.

  “I just need some caffeine,” she said.

  “You drink tea. Better. I get for you.”

  Mrs. Vo turned on the burner under the kettle and opened the cupboard where the cups were.

  Orlando knew better than to argue. Beside, Mrs. Vo was right—tea would be better.

  “You want food, too?” Mrs. Vo asked as she set a cup on the counter. “Can make something for you?”

  “No. The tea’s fine.”

  With fluttering fingers, Mrs. Vo brushed Orlando toward the door. “You need to work, go work. I bring up to you.”

  “No, it’s okay. I can—”

  “Go. Go.”

  Orlando smiled. “All right. Thank you.”

  When she reentered her office, the light was pulsing at the top of her screen again. In the time she’d been gone, the search had kicked out three more results. The first was definitely not the guy. The second was close but still not right. The last was an exact match.

  His name was listed as Maurice Larchmont, though given the long list of other aliases, it was likely Larchmont was not his birth name, either. Larchmont had started his criminal life at the age of seventeen, when he combined his innate computer skills with his lust for money to bring in over five million euros via Internet phishing. Though convicted, he fled his native France before he could be put in prison.

  More scams followed, and it was only natural that he would eventually come to the attention of organized crime. Specifically, the group run by one Nicholas Loban.

  Bingo.

  Though the info wasn’t in the file, it would be obvious to even the most lay person that Loban—or his friends in the Russian government—had arranged somehow for Larchmont to be hired by Eli/Kreck, with his real job being to assist in obtaining this SPYDER chip that seemed to be the nucleus of all the trouble.

  Orlando was just about to close the program when the indicator light pulsed again. She switched back to the results page and was surprised to find another match. The information, however, was not from any of the intelligence agency databases but from the Boston PD—a report entered into their system only a day before.

  The picture was definitely Larchmont. He was laid out on a narrow spit of sand between a rock wall and the bay. He had no apparent wounds but was unquestionably dead. His body had been spotted in the river a few hours before the report was filed. The preliminary time of death was anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours prior to that. So, after the failed burglary attempt at Eli/Kreck.

  Again, it wasn’t hard for her to connect the dots. After the attempt to steal the SPYDER, Larchmont had likely logged in to Eli/Kreck’s system—probably using someone else’s ID—and learned of the plan to transport the second chip across the country. Once he reported this to Loban, he became a loose end and was dealt with accordingly.

  A quiet knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Orlando said.

  Mrs. Vo entered and set a cup of tea and a steaming bowl of pho on the desk.

  “Make healthy,” the woman said. “Good for you.”

  “Thank you,” Orlando said. The smell of the soup did make her stomach rumble, but what she was really craving was muffins. Moist, chocolate chip muffins. Maybe with a nice dollop of peanut butter on top.

  “You need something else, you tell me,” Mrs. Vo said as she walked to the door.

  “I’ll be fine. You can go back to sleep.”

  “You need something, tell me.”

  “Okay, okay. If I need anything, I’ll wake you up, okay?”

  Mrs. Vo studied her for several seconds before saying, “I will know if you do not.” She walked out and pulled the door closed behind her.

  Nibbling a carrot, Orlando focused back on her computer. She was willing to bet that whoever had killed Larchmont was the same person who had killed the courier. If the assassin was someone within Loban’s organization, she would have difficulty IDing him. But if Loban had contracted a freelancer, she might have hope.

  It took nearly twenty minutes of hunting through darknet message boards before she found the request for an acquisition job with associated termination, location specified as eastern North America. The date range corresponded with the estimated time of Larchmont’s death.

  The broker, Jergen Berke, was someone Orlando had worked with in the past. She called him, and when she mentioned the termination job he’d listed, his initial pleasant demeanor evaporated.

  “I’d love to talk but I have other things I need to get to,” he told her.

  “All I need is the name of who got the job,” she said.

  “You know I can’t give you that.”

  “Because you’re afraid of Loban?”

  “Who said anything about Loban? I never mentioned him.”

  “Really, Jergen? Even if I hadn’t been sure that he was involved, I would be now. You should practice your lying. You’re losing your touch.”

  “I’m not lying. He has nothing to—”

  “Loban enlisted you to find someone to obtain an item from
Eli/Kreck Systems in Newton, Massachusetts. The job also included the termination of a man going by the name Charles Williams or possibly Maurice Larchmont. When that failed, you sent a second person, didn’t you? To finish the job.”

  His voice tight, Berke said, “If you expect me to confirm that, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “You just did.” A pause, then, “Look, I have no interest at all in Loban, if that’s what you’re worried about. I am not going to touch him. His man in the field, though, has crossed paths with my team. If he becomes a problem for us then I promise you, it will become a problem for you. But if you’re having a hard time deciding what’s the right thing to do, I’d be happy to get Quinn on the phone for you.”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “You don’t need to do that.”

  The last time Quinn and Berke had worked together, things had not gone well. Because of a screwup by Berke, Quinn had come within seconds of being thrown into a Nigerian prison. Quinn had made sure Berke knew how unhappy that made him.

  “So?” she said. “You’ll give me the name?”

  He hesitated for a moment. “Names,” he corrected her. “There are two of them.”

  CHAPTER 6

  YONKERS, NEW YORK

  “SAMUEL MORGAN AND Thomas Fischer,” Orlando said over the speakerphone. “Fischer would be the trigger man. Morgan is more the operations end.”

  “Never heard of them,” Quinn said. “Experienced?”

  “Yeah. They’ve been active for a while. Morgan at least nine years, and Fischer six. Eastern Europe mostly.”

  “Pictures?”

  “I’ll text them to you in a minute.”

  “Good,” Quinn said. “Did Berke know anything about the chip?”

  “Berke didn’t even know it was a chip,” she said. “He put Morgan and Fischer in touch with Loban then got out of the way.”

  “You have anything else about these guys that might be helpful?”