“That’s…not possible. I’m standing next to the body right now. She’s dead.” There was a big part of him that knew he should have kept his mouth shut. These were words that could easily come back and haunt him, but he was already committed so he couldn’t back down now.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m looking at her now,” Quinn said, his gaze fixed on nothing. “I’ll have her out before daybreak, and dispose of her as planned.”
“Then who the hell did they see?”
“I have no idea, but I guarantee you it’s not the target.”
Jergins swore under his breath. “I’ll send them a message, but if they’re chasing this other person, it’ll probably be awhile before they get it. Hopefully they’ll back off when they realize it’s not her.” He paused. “You’ve got her. I’m declaring end of mission and bugging out.”
“See you next time,” Quinn said.
“Hope it goes smoother for you than it has for the rest of us.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
__________
QUINN LEFT THE hospital, and drove to the Strip.
How in the world had they seen Mila? She should have been in the sub-basement safe room where no one would find her. No one.
He tried to reach Julien, but the call went straight to voice mail.
“Where are you?” he yelled, then hung up.
He knew for a fact that he and Mila had reached the Manhattan unobserved. From there it should have been simple. In through the garage, downstairs, hide. Even if, God forbid, she had shown her face in the casino for a reason Quinn couldn’t possibly imagine, who would have seen her? The spotter should have been driving around lost while Kovacs was at Planet Hollywood.
He tried Julien again. Voice mail.
The only thing more frustrating than not being able to get through to his friend was the traffic, which had gone from bad to horrible.
He made a snap decision and pulled into the entrance for Caesar’s Palace. Twenty feet in, he stopped along the side of the road and jumped out, leaving the engine still running. Horns blared at him, but he ignored them as he weaved through the cars trying to get to the hotel, and made his way to the sidewalk.
There, he turned south toward the Manhattan and ran.
CHAPTER 35
ITALY
THE QUICKEST WAY out of the country would have been to head straight back to Rome and catch the first flight available. It was also the most obvious choice, and therefore the first place someone trying to find out where they’d gone would check.
Perhaps Peter would keep a lid on things, but Quinn knew he’d be a fool to count on it. Not that Peter wasn’t trustworthy. It was just that in this business, trust wasn’t always a constant. Peter was obviously under considerable pressure, something he’d handled well in the past, but no matter how cool he remained as things pressed down on him, without the power and influence he used to have shielding him, his breaking point could be much easier to reach. There was just no way to tell, so it was best to be cautious.
As they neared the outskirts of Rome, Quinn leaned forward from the back where he was sitting with Orlando and Mila. “Go northeast,” he said to Nate. “We’re skipping Rome.”
“Venice?” Nate asked.
Quinn nodded, pleased they were on the same wavelength.
“You’re not going to Rome?” Mila asked as he settled back in the seat.
“No. Not safe.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I appreciate you setting me free, but you can let me out anywhere around here.”
“No one’s getting out.”
“I have something I need to do!”
Quinn stared at her for a second, then looked forward without saying anything.
“I said, let me out!”
He didn’t move.
“Dammit, Quinn! Let me the hell out!”
She tried to reach across him for the door. He pushed her back without looking. She then tried the same thing on Orlando’s side, but Orlando’s response was even rougher than Quinn’s.
Mila fell back against the seat, panting heavily. “So, what? I go from one group holding me hostage to another? Is this because you’re afraid that me showing up might get you killed?”
“Can I hit her?” Orlando asked.
“Not yet,” Quinn said.
Mila looked around, exasperated. “Let me out!”
Again, she reached for the door next to Quinn. This time when he shoved her back, he leaned toward her, his face stopping a few inches in front of hers.
“Stop it,” he said, his voice low but firm.
Her eyes narrowed. “I wish Julien were here to see this. He would never let you do this to me.”
With a sudden jerk, the SUV pulled to the side of the road, and braked to a stop. Nate shoved the vehicle into park, and whipped around so he was looking straight at Mila.
“We all realize you had a pretty raw deal. But as I understand it, you wouldn’t be breathing right now if it wasn’t for what Quinn did. Twice, actually.”
She glared at Nate.
“And let me tell you something about your friend Julien,” Nate went on. “He would have never questioned anything Quinn did. He gave his life helping Quinn. Maybe you should think about that. Maybe what Quinn’s doing right now is not so much motivated by his desire to help you as by his desire to repay his friend’s sacrifice for him.” He paused. “If there is anyone in the world I would want on my side, it’s the guy sitting next to you.”
He stared at her a moment longer, then put the car in drive, and pulled back onto the highway.
The rest of the car was silent. Even Mila sat unmoving, her lips pressed together while the anger on her face faded away.
The only one who seemed unaffected was Daeng in the front passenger seat. His eyes were closed, as they’d been since not long after the group left the farmhouse, and his head was leaning against the door.
__________
THE MEREST SUGGESTION of pink began coloring the eastern horizon as they continued on their way toward Venice. Since the incident at the side of the road, no one had said a word.
Eventually, Quinn had tried to fall asleep, but had failed miserably. Instead, he’d gone over and over the information Peter had given him about Mila’s termination order in 2006. He was torn. Should he try to hide her again? If he did, this time would be different. The others would know she was still alive, and would do everything they could to find her. The only other choice would be to tackle them head-on as Mila seemed hell-bent on doing. It was something he couldn’t fault her for. But how could it be done?
“I need to use a toilet,” Mila said.
Quinn looked over.
“I really need to go. Please,” she said.
He held her gaze for a moment, then nodded and said to Nate, “Wherever you can find a place to stop.”
A few minutes later, Nate pulled into a petrol station that looked like it had just opened for the day. The attendant gave directions to the bathroom, and Mila, with Orlando tagging right behind her, headed off.
The stop finally pulled Daeng from his sleep. As Nate and Quinn stood silently near the pump, the half-Thai man climbed out of the car and stretched. When he dropped his arms, he smiled at the other two.
“I can drive if you want,” he offered. “Give you a chance to sleep.”
Nate shook his head. “Thanks, but it’s not far now. Should be there within the hour.”
“The offer’s there if you change your mind.”
The two women returned a few minutes later. Quinn gave Orlando a look, silently asking if there had been any problems. She shook her head so only he could see.
Soon, they were back on the highway heading toward Marco Polo Airport on the mainland, just north of Venice.
At first, it seemed as if the silence that had prevailed before would continue, but then Mila glanced at Quinn and said, “What…what happened to Julien?”
He thought about sugarcoating it
for her, leaving out the details and just saying Julien had died in action. But Mila had worked in the business. She knew the harsh realities. The truth might have been difficult to hear, but she deserved that respect.
“He was shot.”
“In the head?” she asked, her emotions hidden.
“In the chest.”
Her head dipped. “Is that any better?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sure he died right away,” Nate said.
“How do you know that?”
“I was the one who found him.”
“And couldn’t you have stopped it from happening?”
“I said I found him, not that I was anywhere near him when it happened,” Nate said, patiently. “I was with…”
“He was with my sister,” Quinn finished.
Nate looked at Mila through the rearview mirror. “Without Julien’s help, both Liz and I would be dead, too.”
When she spoke, her voice was just above a whisper. “I don’t know how to balance that. Julien’s life for yours and…” She looked from Nate to Quinn. “Your sister’s? I don’t know if it’s a fair trade-off.”
Daeng leaned into the gap between the front seats. “There is no right answer to that, only ones that are skewed by how they affect those left behind.”
“Your monkness is showing,” Nate said.
“What the hell are you talking about? That’s a direct quote from Mr. Archibald, my history teacher at Hollywood High.”
“Smart guy,” Orlando said.
Daeng grinned. “Yeah, he wasn’t bad. For a teacher.”
In the silence that followed, Mila seemed to be contemplating something. Finally, she nodded at Nate and said to Quinn, “Was he right? Are you trying to help me to pay back Julien?”
“In part,” he said, but it wasn’t the only reason. As he’d told Peter, acting like there was no right or wrong didn’t mean it was true.
“All right,” she said. “Then what’s the plan? How do you want to help me?”
“We can get you someplace safe,” he said. “Where you can start again.”
“No. Not an option. I haven’t exposed myself like this just to forget about what I was doing and disappear again.”
A part of him had hoped she would take his offer despite the fact it was a far-from-perfect solution, because he still had no idea how to solve her problems otherwise. “All right, then I guess we help you do what you want to do.”
“How?” she asked.
He shifted in his seat so that he was facing her. “We can start with you telling us why all this is happening in the first place. Before you showed up in Tanzania. Before Vegas.” While Peter had given him much of the details, Mila would come at it from a different perspective. And this way the others would know exactly what was going on, too.
Mila held his gaze for several seconds, then nodded. “Sometimes my clients would have me piggyback on someone else’s travel arrangements. A month before Vegas, I was on a run in Atlanta, where that’s what happened.”
__________
THE BEGINNING OF her story about her trip to Portugal was typical enough. A prescheduled flight going her way, and a client trying to save a few bucks. Quinn had had similar experiences himself.
The exception, of course, was the prisoner. While it wasn’t unheard of that inmates would be moved out of the country, it was unusual. But these would always be foreign nationals, and more often than not they were being returned to their home country.
Where the story began to diverge from the norm was when Mila described her run for the toilet, and the prisoner’s subsequent outburst. That, Quinn knew, was the moment a date with an assassin became a certainty in her future.
“When we arrived in Portugal, I was instructed to remain in my seat until after the others got off. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to know that something wasn’t right.” She took a breath. “I had a concealed camera built into my bag. It was a security thing for me in case anything ever went wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have turned it on before the prisoner left, but I did. I caught him yelling his name again and that he was an American citizen. I also caught him getting shocked again.”
“You recorded it?” Quinn asked, surprised.
“Yeah. That’s why I was at Julien’s. He’d hidden a copy of the footage there for me, in case I ever needed it.”
Daeng pulled an envelope out of his pocket and held it back to her. “This?”
She grabbed it from him. “Yes. Thank you. Did you…”
“No one’s looked at it,” Nate said.
She nodded.
“Julien knew about this, then,” Quinn said.
“I’d hinted to him about it before Vegas, but after, I told him the whole thing.”
“You mean when he met up with you in Guaymas?”
She shook her head. “I mean after that. He visited me when he could. But no one else knew. It was never a problem.”
Only by sheer luck, Quinn thought. If Julien had ever been followed and Mila discovered, the three of them might have already been spending eternity in unmarked graves. He gave himself a second to let his anger pass, and refocused on the problem at hand.
“The prisoner. You said he yelled out his name. Do you remember what it was?”
“I’ve never forgotten. Thomas Gorman.”
It was the same name Peter had told him.
Orlando’s brow furrowed. “Thomas Gorman? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Mila said. “I never saw his face, though. Only heard his voice.”
“And?”
Mila shrugged. “It sounded like him.”
“Because it was him,” Quinn said.
“How do you kn—” Orlando stopped herself. “Peter?”
Quinn nodded.
“Do you know what this could mean?”
He nodded again.
“This Gorman person,” Daeng said. “He’s important?”
“Was,” Orlando said. “Several years ago. He was a commentator on Prime Cable News. Had his own show.”
“I remember him,” Nate said. “Isn’t he the one who died in that boating accident in…Virginia, or somewhere like that?”
“Hilton Head Island,” Orlando corrected him. “South Carolina.”
“Right.”
Quinn looked at Mila. “On the same day as the flight to Portugal, right?”
“Seven hours prior to the flight,” she said.
“And Hilton Head would have been less than a five-hour drive from Atlanta,” Orlando added.
“More like four hours to the private airfield,” Mila corrected her.
“You checked?” Quinn asked.
She nodded. “After I finished my assignment and returned to the States, I’d all but convinced myself the prisoner had just thrown out the name because he’d heard it on TV or something. But then I learned about the boating accident. I mean, how could I not? It was all over the news.” She paused. “It was impossible not to make the connection. I knew I had to check. An American citizen who’d just been reported dead, being flown out of the country as a prisoner? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s not something we do.”
“You’re right,” Quinn said. “It’s not.”
“I looked into the accident first,” she said. “The reports stated Gorman was out sailing with a friend, got a little drunk, and fell overboard. Before his friend could get turned around, Gorman drifted into the path of another vessel, and, well, death by speedboat.”
“Not exactly the way I’d choose to go,” Nate said.
She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “The body was mangled, the face unrecognizable, but there was no autopsy done, also no DNA, no dental check, and no prints. ID was based on Gorman’s friend witnessing the event.”
“But it wasn’t Gorman,” Quinn said.
“No. And I’m sure there was no accident, either. The friend’s name was Ed Zahn. Supposedly, he was a college buddy who worked for a brokerage firm in DC. The day
after the funeral he was transferred to an office in Madrid.”
“Did you look into him?”
She nodded. “Both in DC and Madrid. Had to be really quiet about it. I wasn’t sure what might happen if someone found out what I was doing.” She frowned. “Except I guess they did find out.”
“This Zahn guy. I’m betting he doesn’t exist.”
“I don’t know if he does or doesn’t, but no one I contacted at either office had ever heard of him.”
“What I don’t get is why,” Nate said. “I mean, sure, Gorman was probably a pain in the ass sometimes, but—”
“Probably?” Orlando said. “Did you ever watch his show?”
“Once or twice, maybe.”
“He was a nutjob like all those extremist commentators. Both sides have them. Gorman loved digging into what he considered governmental waste and reporting on it whether he had proof or not,” she said. “And he was not a fan of the former administration.”
“So he pissed them off enough that they faked his death and flew him out of the country? No way.”
“I agree,” Quinn said. “The administration might not have liked the things he was saying, but putting up with assholes is a rite of passage. Actively silencing him was a line they would have never crossed.” He looked at Mila. “But you’re not talking about the administration, are you? Not specifically. Someone within the government who thought it was his duty to take care of what he perceived as a problem?”
She stared at him in disbelief. “You know?”
“Who’s she talking about?” Orlando asked.
“At the time, the guy was the deputy secretary of defense. Christopher Mygatt.”
Orlando and Nate looked stunned.
“Is that right?” Nate asked Mila.
“Yes,” she said. “I mean, I’m sure it is. That’s what I’ve been doing—looking for proof.”
“He left the administration a year after the Vegas operation,” Quinn explained. “One of the senators from his home state had died of a heart attack, and Mygatt was appointed by the governor to fill the seat. The year after that, he won the position outright in a special election. Last year, Mygatt left the senate to become his political party’s chairman. He’s been able to manipulate things and help sway the direction the primary elections have gone. He’s tight with the guy who looks like he’ll get the party’s presidential nom, so tight that Mygatt will be filling a very high-ranking position if his guy wins the general election. The rumor is vice president.”
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