Marion worked her way back to the door and felt for the knob, her palms moving frantically over the surface where it should have been. But there was no knob. She moved her hand along the edges of the door. No hinges, either. It must open outward, she realized.
So she did the only thing she could. She began pounding on the door.
“Help!” she yelled. “Help!”
Maybe she had been abandoned somewhere. Perhaps no one knew she was there.
“Help!” she screamed again.
Light. Faint, and seeping around the edges of the door. One second it hadn’t been there, then the next it was, like someone had flipped a switch.
“Let me out! Please, anyone. Let me out!”
Something banged against the door from the other side, loud and sharp, shocking her into silence.
“Step back,” a muffled voice said. It was male, and not sympathetic.
She shuffled backward and almost tripped over the mattress.
There were several clicks along the right edge of the door, then the distinct sound of a latch opening. Light streamed into the room, stinging Marion’s eyes and forcing her to cover them with her hands.
She heard steps, more than she could count, enter the room and approach her. She blinked again and peeked between her fingers. The light coming from behind her visitors was still too bright to make out anything more than several silhouettes. Three? Four?
She never saw the hand that slapped her cheek. It rocked her to the left. Her foot caught on the mattress and she went down to her knees. One of her hands grazed the wall as she tried to stop her fall, but she only bruised her palm and scraped the flesh at the base of her thumb.
Someone reached down, grabbed her, and pulled her to her feet. She tried to cover her face with her hands, not wanting to be slapped again, but her hands were shoved away.
She could see them now. Three, not four. All men. The two nearest her were big and unsmiling and unfamiliar. But the one behind them she had no trouble recognizing. It was the man from the parking garage, the one who had taken her.
He stared at her for a moment, then looked at the man nearest him. “Let’s go,” he said.
The two larger men grabbed Marion by the arms and pulled her toward the door.
“What do you want with me?” she said, voice trembling. “What are you going to do?”
No one even looked at her.
“Where’s Iris?”
She’d aimed her words at the man from the parking garage, but he remained silent.
“Where is she?”
She tried to plant her feet just short of the doorway, not wanting to go anywhere with them until they answered her questions. But it took only a halfhearted shove from the guy on her left to keep her moving across the threshold and into a narrow hallway.
The corridor was only wide enough for one man to walk beside her, so one of the brutes moved behind her, while the garage man took the lead. There were two light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, metal reflectors with dome wire cages on the bottom. Above them several pipes ran the length of the hallway, covering most of the actual ceiling. As they walked, she kept being bumped into the wall. It was hard and cold like the door of her cell. Metal, she realized.
The garage man opened the door at the end of the hallway, then stepped through. Marion and her escort followed.
They were in another corridor, this one considerably wider. Its walls were also gray and made of metal. A ship? Maybe military? There was no sensation of movement, so if it was a ship, they didn’t appear to be out at sea. Only something wasn’t right.
The doorways, that was it. Don’t navy ships have those doors that sealed shut in case of an emergency? There were no such doors here. But if she wasn’t on a ship, then where was she?
A door ahead opened and two men dressed in military fatigues and armed with rifles stepped out. As Marion and her escort neared, the men moved to the side of the hall, and nodded at the garage man like he was someone important.
Farther down the corridor, another soldier appeared, then another behind him.
Marion could feel her hands and feet go cold.
Whatever hope of escape she’d been clinging to slipped away like it had never been there at all.
* * *
“Who have you told?” Mr. Rose asked again.
The Dupuis woman was crying now. Tears poured down her cheeks as she wordlessly pleaded with Tucker’s boss to stop.
“Who have you told?”
She sobbed. Tucker could see she was trying to get words out, but nothing was coming. Mr. Rose nodded at him.
Tucker turned to one of his men, Linden. “Give her another.”
Linden touched the controller, and sent another jolt of electricity down the wires attached to the woman. She grew rigid as her muscles contracted, the restraints the only things keeping her from falling to the floor.
When the sequence ended, she slumped in the chair.
“Who have you told?” Mr. Rose asked again.
“Just Henrick Roos,” she said, naming her friend at the UN.
“Who else?”
“Noelle. Noelle Broussard in Côte d’Ivoire. That’s all.”
“I don’t believe you, Ms. Dupuis. Someone else knows. Someone else has been trying to help you. Who are they?”
She tried to look at him, her eyebrows furrowed. “I… I don’t know … who you mean. I’ve been alone. No one has …”
Her last words were lost as her head fell forward.
“Who have you told?” Mr. Rose said.
Her shoulders began moving up and down as her tears returned.
“More?” Tucker asked.
Mr. Rose stared at the woman. His face was scarred and wrinkled, his slicked-back hair pure white. On bad days his hands shook so much he had to drink from a straw. But his eyes were always like laser beams, cutting into whatever he was focused on. And his voice, that was the clincher. Strong, manipulative, and unrelenting.
“Who have you told?”
But Marion Dupuis seemed unable to respond.
The laser eyes turned to Tucker. “Again.”
The woman looked up, her eyes growing wide in fear.
“No. No. I’ll—” But the renewed current cut her off.
This time when the cycle ended, she fell forward against the restraints, unconscious.
“Goddammit,” Mr. Rose said.
Tucker moved in and checked the woman’s pulse. She still had one, which was almost a surprise. They’d been at this for a while now. He’d seen others who hadn’t lasted as long, needing to leave in a body bag instead of on their own feet.
And with all they’d given her, she hadn’t broken. Whoever the others at her house in Montreal had been, she wasn’t telling. The only ones she had given up were her two colleagues at the UN, people who had been easy to trace through other means so were no real revelation. Neither of them had lasted as long as Marion when Tucker had interrogated them.
It was the people in Montreal. If she did know who they were, Mr. Rose would find out. And if she didn’t, it wouldn’t matter anyway. Either result would end in her death. That was the only given here.
“You want me to wake her?” Tucker asked.
Mr. Rose looked at his watch. “Take her back to her room.”
Tucker nodded at Linden and his partner, Petersen. Both men stepped forward and picked the woman up.
As soon as they were gone, Mr. Rose said, “I need to get down to the lab to supervise the final preparations.”
“All right,” Tucker said. “When do you want her back here?”
“Walk with me.”
“Of course,” Tucker said.
Mr. Rose was one of those people who got annoyed if you didn’t read his mind, and got even more upset if he changed his mind about a task and you hadn’t anticipated it. Tucker didn’t like it, but he’d grown used to it. It was the pay that kept him around. Nothing else.
Tucker followed Mr. Rose out of the interrogatio
n room, through a short maze of hallways, then back into the main corridor. The lab of the underground facility was one level below, so Mr. Rose turned left toward the elevator.
“These people you saw in Montreal, do you think there is any chance they might have followed you here?” Mr. Rose asked.
Tucker felt a little like the woman. It wasn’t the first time Mr. Rose had asked him the question. It wasn’t even the second or the third.
“No way.”
“They concern me.”
“We searched her. Everything she had, everything she was wearing. We even ran her through the scanner. Nothing. No tracking device. No hidden radio transmitter. Nothing.”
Mr. Rose thought about this for a moment. “You’re sure?”
“One hundred percent.”
When they reached the elevator, Tucker pressed the down button to call for a car.
“And the child?” Mr. Rose asked.
“What about her?”
“You did the same with her? Check her clothes? Scanned her?”
This was a new question, but the answer was the same.
“Yes.”
The elevator door opened and Mr. Rose stepped inside. As Tucker stepped in to join him, Mr. Rose said, “I can’t have a loose end like this.”
“I understand.”
Tucker reached out and pushed the button marked R3, the lab level.
“Do you? Do you really understand?” Mr. Rose’s laser eyes kept Tucker from answering. “It’s a loose end. A distraction. We don’t want or need distractions at this point.” He paused. “There are people who want to stop me. Your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“That woman,” Mr. Rose said, more to himself than to Tucker. “She could ruin everything. That… that bitch!”
Tucker tried to contain his surprise. He’d never seen Mr. Rose react like that before.
“I think I’ll use the woman’s brat as the trigger.” As Mr. Rose said this, a smile grew on his face. “Yes, I think that will be an excellent idea.”
The elevator door opened, and Mr. Rose stepped out. Tucker knew to stay where he was.
“Find out who those people in Montreal are,” Mr. Rose said, looking back. “And make sure they won’t be a problem.”
“Yes, sir,” Tucker said.
Mr. Rose turned and walked away.
Alone in the elevator on the ride back up, Tucker wondered if the people in Montreal had let Marion Dupuis run so she could act as bait. It was something he would do.
But even if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to find her now. They would have lost her the minute Tucker’s plane left Toronto. Had they kept looking? Or had they just given up?
That’s what Tucker needed to find out.
CHAPTER 23
It took Quinn just over ten minutes to get to the private hospital facility from the old Helms Bakery lot where he’d left Hardwick. It was in Westwood, only a few blocks from the UCLA campus and the famed UCLA Medical Center.
The building itself looked like any of half a dozen other typical medical office buildings in the area. Five stories and bland. Brick on the first floor and concrete the rest of the way up, the whole structure in need of a new coat of paint. There were silver letters across the front. THE LUNDGREN MEDICAL BUILDING.
Quinn circled the block and entered the parking garage behind the building. A sign with an arrow pointing toward a gate at the base of the up ramp read Public Parking, but Quinn bypassed it, instead heading for a different gate at the top of the down ramp. Unlike the public gate that was made of wood and pivoted upward when open, this one was a wire fence that closed off the entire entrance like a see-through curtain. The sign above it read Employees Only.
To the side was a box mounted on a pole at driver’s eye level, which housed a keypad and a speaker. Quinn punched in an access code he kept stored in his phone.
“Yes?” a voice said. Male, businesslike.
“Dr. Paul to see Dr. Yamata,” Quinn said, using the code phrase.
“What time is your appointment?”
“My patient’s already here.”
“Hold one moment, please.”
The delay lasted fifteen seconds while they no doubt compared his security camera image to the one they had on file, then the gate began to open.
“Please park in spot number seventy-two,” the voice said.
Spot 72 was on lower level three, the same level as the entrance to the facility. As Quinn got out of the stolen car, he saw his BMW parked nearby in spot number 67.
The door to the facility was not marked. Most who saw it wouldn’t have given it a second glance. It was painted the same off-white as the rest of the garage.
As Quinn approached it, he felt his cell phone vibrate twice, then stop. A message. He then remembered the call that he had ignored when he’d been with Hardwick. He pulled out his phone and listened to his message.
“Jake, it’s Liz. I thought you were going to visit Mom and Dad. I talked to Mom a few minutes ago, and she said you hadn’t been there yet. I’m not sure what’s keeping you so busy, but could you at least do me a favor and not tell Mom you’ll be coming then don’t show up?”
Quinn stood in the parking lot for a moment, his eyes closed and his hand rubbing his brow. He had never told his mother when he’d be coming, just that he would be coming soon. The events of the last couple of days had obviously delayed the trip. He should have called her. He made a promise to himself to do it as soon as he had a moment. Liz he wouldn’t bother with. She’d never understand anyway.
As he neared the door, he heard a faint click. He turned the knob and stepped into a long hallway that stretched from the garage to the lower level of the Lundgren Building.
A similar door and a similar click greeted him at the other end. Again, he wasted no time passing through it.
Not a hallway this time. A twelve-foot-square room. The off-white was gone, too, replaced by light green walls. If there had been chairs, it would have looked like a waiting room.
A man stood in front of a second door across the room. Broad shouldered, but about Quinn’s height. He was wearing a gray suit, jacket unbuttoned. Medical facility or not, the bulge under the man’s jacket was not a stethoscope.
“Mr. Quinn,” the man said.
“Yes.”
“You’re here about your team member.”
“Yes.”
The man turned and opened the door behind him. “This way please.”
The facility occupied the three basement levels of the Lundgren Building. It billed itself as a high-end plastic surgery operation. Very private, very discreet. All of which was true. They made plenty of money that way, for sure. But there was another side of the business, a secret side that very few of their employees knew about.
The facility was a medical sanctuary for those whose injuries were best not reported to the local authorities. No unnecessary questions asked, no damaging information given. There were only two conditions for using the facility: one, patients had to come with a recommendation from someone the facility had previously cleared, and two, because their services were anything but cheap, they had to have the ability to pay.
Quinn had long ago been cleared after a recommendation from Peter. In turn, he had later secured access for both Orlando and Nate just in case.
Quinn’s guide led him to an open elevator, then pressed the button marked B2.
“How is she?” Quinn asked.
“You’ll have to ask the doctor,” the man said.
The car stopped one level up, but the doors didn’t open.
The man looked up at a security camera mounted in the corner of the car. Quinn did the same. A second later there was a ding followed by the door sliding open.
“Welcome to Lundgren,” the man said as he let Quinn pass through first.
He led Quinn down several more corridors before stopping in front of a door marked 403.
“She’
s inside,” the man said, then walked away.
What Quinn found beyond the door was better than he hoped.
Nate was sitting in a chair near the bed, his eyes glued to the TV mounted on the opposite wall. On the screen was an overhead image of LACMA and the La Brea Tar Pits.
“We made it on TV again,” Nate said when he noticed Quinn. “And by ‘us,’ I mean you.”
“You really know how to keep a low profile,” Orlando said. She was propped up in the bed. A large bandage covered her neck and shoulder, but she was smiling, so that was a good sign. “This isn’t going to do us much good at getting future work.”
“Well, maybe if you hadn’t let yourself get shot, things would have gone smoother,” Quinn said as he stepped over to the bed.
“Now it’s my fault?”
Quinn shrugged. “You set the tone.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Then Orlando started to laugh, but stopped suddenly, wincing in pain.
“So humor’s not exactly a good idea?” Quinn asked.
“Not at the moment,” she said, her voice tight with pain. “Are you okay?”
“Me?” he asked. “I’m fine. You’re the one in the bed.”
“I mean the meeting, with Primus. Nate said you were with him when he called.”
“Yeah,” Quinn said.
He glanced at the TV. Orlando followed his gaze.
“What are they saying happened?” Quinn asked Nate.
“Some lunatic with a gun,” Nate said. “Two people injured.”
“Two?”
“A woman on the street, and a guard inside one of the buildings.”
Quinn nodded. The security officer probably got in the way of the assassin’s route to the roof.
“The woman’s doing okay, but the guard’s in critical.”
“They catch the gunman?” Quinn asked.
“Nope, unless they’re not saying.”
Quinn turned back to Orlando. “How you doing?”
“I’m fine.”
Quinn raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
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