The Collected jq-6

by Brett Battles

  She looked at her brother, her fear for Nate written on her face, but then she nodded. “You’re right. Sorry, I…just…”

  Quinn reached over and touched her hand. “We’re going to find him. Don’t worry.”

  Liz tried to smile, but failed. “I know.”

  Two Customs and Immigration officials met them in the parking area and processed their documents. Once that was done, Daeng and Liz headed back into the plane with the two pilots, while Quinn and Orlando hitched a ride with the C amp;I guys back to the main terminal.

  On the road, in front of the passenger arrival area, were two taxis, both drivers asleep in their seats. Quinn and Orlando woke the man in the first cab as they climbed in, and had him take them to Cristo de los Milagros Hospital, where Romero had been treated.

  By American standards, the place was small for being the main medical facility in the biggest city in the country. Of course, size was relative. Cordoba only had thirty-five thousand residents, while the island as a whole boasted somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred and seven thousand. When viewed that way, the two-story structure that wasn’t much larger than a grocery store back home was undoubtedly more than adequate for the people it served.

  They had the cabbie drop them off at the entrance to the parking lot, then took a quick, wide walk around the entire place.

  “CCTV,” Orlando said, pointing out the closed-circuit security cameras as she spotted them.

  Using the camera function on his phone, Quinn zoomed in to get a better look. “Reycons. Y23s,” he said, citing the make and model.

  They were decent enough, but not top of the line. Using his knowledge of their specs, he picked out a blind spot that would get them right up to the hospital next to a nondescript side door without being seen.

  They walked across a parking area, not deviating from the path, and reached the side of the building without incident. By the look of things, the door was used by hospital personnel in search of a smoke break. Butts littered the ground, and the aroma of stale tobacco and smoke lingered in the air.

  Before leaving the plane, Quinn and Orlando had equipped themselves with some of the items Veronique had loaded onto the aircraft at their request. Quinn removed a set of lock picks from his pocket, and seconds later had the door unlocked.

  Orlando ran a handheld scanner along the door, checking for an alarm. It vibrated once near the top. She hit a few buttons, put the scanner back over the spot, and held it there until the vibration stopped. Once she gave Quinn a nod, he opened the door.

  The hallway they entered was well lit and deserted.

  “That one,” Orlando whispered, pointing at a door just ahead on the right.

  From the name plaque mounted on it, it was clear that on the other side they’d find an office. And where there was an office, there would be a computer.

  Quinn picked the lock and then shut the door after they were both inside. The room was cramped but neat-books on shelves on both sides, and a desk in the middle with the hoped-for workstation.

  While Orlando delved into the hospital’s network, Quinn perused the books. They were mostly medical text, a mix of Spanish and English. There were also several binders specific to the hospital-guidelines, standard procedures, employee handbook, and a facility directory.

  After several minutes, Orlando sat back, her eyes still focused on the screen. “I need to get to another computer. This one’s blocked.”

  “If this one’s blocked, won’t they all be?”

  She paused. “I should be able to get around it in IT.”

  Getting them into an empty office in the middle of the night was one thing. Sneaking into the hospital’s main computer room was something else entirely. While there wouldn’t be a full staff on duty at this time, someone would be around in case any problems came up.

  Quinn snatched the facility directory off the bookshelf. Inside was a map, followed by pages listing names and extension numbers by department. He first located the computer room. It was on the same floor, but clear on the other side of the building. He pulled the map out of the binder, and found the page with the extensions for the IT department and one listing all hospital department heads. He removed them also.

  “Here,” he said, showing her the map. “This is where you want to be.” He gave her a moment to memorize it. “What’s the extension here?”

  She looked at the phone. “425.”

  “I’ll scope it out and clear the way, then call you.”

  He turned for the door.

  “Hey,” she said, stopping him.

  He looked back as she stood up and came around the desk.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said. She pulled his head down and kissed him.

  When she finally backed away, he said, “We haven’t been doing enough of that lately.”

  “You’re telling me.” She gave him a playful smirk. “Now go do your job. I’ll give you another one when we get out of here.”

  “Always nice to have a little motivation.”

  CHAPTER 44

  It was even worse than Nate thought.

  As he set out from the fort, he hoped to find a small village or, at the very least, some facility that might have a means for him to get a message out. But the journey to the far side of the island took only forty minutes, and in that time, the only man-made thing he came across was an empty blacktopped landing strip.

  He circled around the beach, thinking there might be a fishing hut or a dock, but it was clear that with the exception of the fort, the island was deserted.

  What made it even more frustrating was the glow on the horizon. It was too big to be a ship, so it must have been from a city, meaning there was another island-a bigger one-out there.

  Nate stared across the water. It couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty miles away. But since he had no way to get there, it might as well have been a thousand.

  He allowed himself a moment to sit and rest. Calling for help was apparently not an option. Neither was escaping the island. As soon as the other prisoners were roused from their cells and it was discovered he was gone, Harris’s men would come looking for him. There wasn’t far he could go, after all.

  He knew he had only one course of action open to him. Do whatever he could to save the others. There was a good chance he’d be killed in the process, but he couldn’t just hide away while they were being tortured to death.

  He pushed himself to his feet and turned back to the jungle.

  First order of business: Get a better idea of the fort’s layout, and try to gauge how many soldiers Harris and the old man commanded.

  After that…

  Well, one step at a time.

  CHAPTER 45

  Isla De Cervantes

  From the hospital map, Quinn noted that the patient rooms were located along the back half of the first floor, and throughout most of the second. Those would be the areas with the highest concentration of personnel at this time of night, therefore places best avoided.

  The second floor wasn’t an issue. They had no need to go up there. It was the first floor patient wing that was the problem. The IT room was just down the hallway from it, near the far, rear corner building where, according to the map, a nurses’ station was located.

  He made his way across the building via a central corridor that led past several offices, radiology, and a medical lab. Two thirds of the way down, he needed to take a hall to the left, then another to the right that went all the way to the hall the IT room was located in. As he neared the first turn, he could hear the hum of a machine.

  He peeked around the corner. About twenty feet away, right where he needed to turn again, an older man was heading away from Quinn while pushing a large motorized buffer across the tiled floor. He’d move the machine from side to side, then push it forward a few feet and repeat the dance. Quinn watched him, silently urging him to hurry up. Five more feet and he could sneak behind the guy and down the other hall without the janitor even knowing.
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  Just as he was about to make his move, someone stepped out from the hallway that he’d been targeting, the person’s approaching footsteps having been drowned out by the buffer.

  Quinn pulled back quickly out of sight and began retracing his steps down the hallway. As he passed the lab, he checked the door. Locked. He did the same at Radiology.

  Also locked. The next door was too far away. He would never make it, so he pulled out his picks again and quickly let himself into the room.

  “Disculpe,” a male voice called out.

  Quinn closed the door behind him and did a quick scan. He was in a small outer room that opened into a larger one where a table for patients and the X-ray machine were located. He moved all the way into the big room and off to the side, out of view. On the wall next to him were several wide files sticking out of wall-mounted trays, presumably X-rays that needed to be viewed or filed away.

  The outer door opened a few seconds later. “Oiga, oiga. Usted no puede entrar ahi,” the voice said. The door closed. “Disculpe.”

  “I’m sorry?” Quinn called out in Spanish. He pulled a file from one of the trays and removed the X-ray from inside.

  The man stepped into the main room. A security guard-just Quinn’s luck. The guy was about Quinn’s height, but at least fifty pounds heavier.

  “You can’t be here,” the man said.

  “I’m Dr. Chavez. Just picking up some records.” Quinn raised the file a few inches so the man would see it.

  The security guard’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “That’s not my problem,” Quinn said, donning stereotypical doctor charm. “I’ve been here for a week. I’m the consulting surgeon from Puerto Rico. Dr. Fernandez assured me I would have full access to whatever I needed.” The directory page he had ripped out had listed Dr. Fernandez as the hospital administrator at the top.

  The guard looked unsure. “I wasn’t told anything about that. You should have been given a badge. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said defiantly. “I probably left it in the office. Don’t tell me I have to go get it.”

  “I’m afraid we have very strict rules about that here. I’ll go with you. Once I see it, you’ll be free to do whatever you need.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Quinn frowned as he stepped by the man into the smaller room, but then he stopped abruptly and turned back. Gesturing at the other room, he said, “There was one other record I needed. Can’t I at least get that?”

  Predictably, the guard turned to look where Quinn was pointing.

  Though he was big, the takedown when quickly. With an arm around the man’s neck, Quinn cut off the flow of blood to the guard’s head until he passed out. He dragged the man to the back corner beyond the table and lowered him to the floor.

  Never one to pass up an opportunity, Quinn relieved the guard of his badge and the ring of keys on his belt. He used a couple of electrical cords to bind the man’s wrist and ankles in case he woke too soon. To ensure no one would hear him if he woke up and yelled, Quinn closed the door between the two rooms before exiting the other door into the hallway.

  He hurried back to the end of the corridor and peeked around again. The janitor was much farther down now, still working back and forth. Quinn slipped around the corner and took the next hallway without being seen. He didn’t pause again until he reached the hallway that ran along the far end of the hospital. The IT room was thirty feet to his left, with the nurses’ station another twenty-five beyond it.

  He took a look, and grimaced. As he’d feared, the station was occupied. Two nurses were talking to each other as they shuffled through a stack of files on the counter.

  The best play was the old standby-act like you belong.

  Before turning the corner, he clipped the guard’s badge high up on his jacket so it would be clearly visible at a distance. Next he examined the man’s keys, identified the three he thought would be most likely to let him into the IT room, and proceeded.

  At first the nurses gave no reaction, but as he neared the door to IT, first one looked over at him, then the other. He smiled and gave them a friendly wave. Once they saw where he was going, they smiled back and returned to their conversation.

  Quinn gave the doorknob a quick twist, checking to see if it was locked. It was, so he slipped one of the three keys into the slot. No go. Number two, though, worked just fine.

  As he opened the door, he glanced back at the nurses, but neither seemed to even realize he was still there. He stepped inside and was enveloped by the hum of servers and routers. The room was about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide. There was one row of machine racks along the back wall, and two more down the middle. Against the wall that ran adjacent to the hallway was a long workbench.

  At first Quinn thought maybe he was alone. The workbench and the area he could see around the racks were empty. He walked farther in, looking between the rows, and finally spotted a young guy with a mass of curly hair sitting at a computer station in the back corner. He was wearing headphones, and his body rocked forward and back as it kept time with whatever music he was listening to.

  Moving in behind him was a piece of cake. The kid didn’t even know he wasn’t alone until Quinn’s arm wrapped around his neck.

  As soon as he passed out, Quinn laid him on the floor, then picked up the phone and dialed 4-2-5.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Orlando said.

  Quinn was standing several feet away, in a spot where he could keep an eye on the IT room door. “What is it?”

  “A flag.”

  He hurried over. “What kind of flag?”

  “One that’s going to let someone know if I set it off.”

  “Hospital security?”

  “No. This is third-party stuff, outside.” She glanced down at the guy on the floor. “Don’t think Mr. IT there or any of his colleagues know anything about it.”

  “Attached to Romero’s files?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “There are no Romero files. Everything must have been removed. There’s nothing even in the backups.”

  “Then a flag on what?”

  “Thought I’d give the hospital’s normal search function a try, just in case my program missed something. I checked the code first so I’d know how effective it might be. That’s when I found it. It’s set to go off if anyone searches the name Javier Romero.”

  “Can you tell who gets notified?”

  “A Gmail account. Probably a dummy address that forwards it on.”

  “What does it tell them?”

  “The parameters of the search and the IP location of the computer used.”

  Quinn thought for a moment. “Can you manipulate what information it sends?”

  She looked at him with distain. “Of course.”

  He grinned. “How about you try this. Grab an IP address from a room in a nearby hotel, then do the search using ‘Javier Romero’ and ‘current location.’ That should get a response.”

  Orlando stared thoughtfully at the screen for a moment. “If we want to guarantee a response, we should add your name to the search.”

  “Great idea,” he said. “Do it.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Janus smiled as he walked down the hallway. Though he wasn’t fond of rising before daybreak, he did love waking up the prisoners. And since there weren’t going to be very many more opportunities, he wanted to relish each.

  He let one of Romero’s security force open the door to the hallway they’d transformed into a cellblock, and then he stepped through. All was satisfyingly dark and quiet.

  “Turn on lights,” he said.

  Another soldier flipped the switches that illumined the corridor, and turned on the bulbs inside each cell.

  “Wakie, wakie!” Janus yelled.

  He moved down to the room that held the squat bald guy who’d upset Mr. Romero the night before, and pounded his fist against the door. “Get up! Time for more fun.”

  He pulled
up on the handle, releasing the bars that held the door in place, and gave it a yank.

  “Up, up, up!” he ordered as he walked in.

  The guy was already standing up, his face impassive.

  “Hood and cuffs,” Janus told the guard who’d entered with him.

  Once the prisoner’s head was cloaked and his hands were bound, he was led out of the room. Janus and another guard visited Berkeley’s cell. After that, it was Lanier, then on to the last two, Quinn and Curson.

  Janus was surprised Curson had lived as long as he had. The shooter had put up a big fight when he arrived on the island, and had tried to escape when he was escorted to dinner with Harris. It had been Janus’s job to remind the man he had no say in anything anymore. One more beating and he was sure Curson would never get up again. Or, perhaps, this morning’s planned whipping would do the trick. That was, if he hadn’t already died in his sleep.

  But first-Quinn.

  “Wakie, wakie!” he yelled at the door to the cleaner’s cell.

  As he did each previous time, he slammed his fist against it, then turned the handle and pulled the door open.

  “Up, up, up!”

  There was a loud knock on Harris’s door. He pulled it open and found Janus standing there, panting like he’d been running.

  “A prisoner is gone,” Janus blurted out.

  “What do you mean, gone? Dead?” Harris asked, knowing Janus’s English wasn’t always the best.

  “No. Gone. Not in cell!”

  A gentle poke, like someone in the back of his mind tapping a finger against a wall. One small error. “How the hell did that happen?”

  “The vent, I think,” Janus said.

  “The vent? What vent?”

  “In the door.”

  The vents in the doors weren’t even wide enough for a child to crawl through. “Impossible.”

  “Come. You see.”

  Harris moved into the hallway and pulled his door closed. “Which one is missing?”

  “Quinn.”