The Silenced jqt-4

by Brett Battles

He started to open his mouth, then paused, and turned back to the front door. “Call me if there’s a problem.”

  He pulled the door open and left.

  Chapter 40

  “Where are you?” Orlando asked.

  “I just got off the subway,” Quinn said into his phone. “I should be back to you in five.”

  “All right. I’ll prop the door open. But knock once before you walk in.”

  Quinn was instantly alert. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll see when you get here.”

  He hesitated, then said, “Orlando. How are things?” It was their code phrase. If she didn’t answer correctly, he’d know she was not in control of her situation.

  “Things are things,” she said.

  The I’m-okay response. He relaxed.

  “But …” She stopped. “Just hurry up.”

  Quinn made it to the Silvain Hotel in two minutes and all but ran up the stairs to his room. The door was propped open by the deadbolt.

  He knocked once.

  “Come on in,” Orlando said.

  The first thing he saw as he pushed the door open was Orlando standing in front of the television. She’d been armed only with a hairbrush when he’d left her, but now she was holding a gun in each hand, and was facing the bed.

  “Welcome to the party,” she said.

  Quinn engaged the deadbolt on the door, then walked the rest of the way into the room.

  There were two other people present. A middle-aged man with dark hair was sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard. And in the chair squeezed between the left side of the bed and the far wall sat a woman. But not just any woman.

  The Russian.

  Neither was tied up, but with Orlando covering each of them with a gun, they weren’t going anywhere.

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “This is interesting.”

  “You think?” Orlando handed him one of the guns. “They showed up not long after I got here with Annabel.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  Quinn glanced at the closed bathroom door.

  “She’s not using it,” Orlando said. “She’s tied up.”

  Quinn looked back at the bed. “So they knew you were here.”

  “They were watching the room. I caught a glimpse of the guy when we arrived. He made me a little suspicious, so I slipped my hose camera under the door for a look. I saw him peeking out of the stairwell every so often. He was definitely interested in us, so I decided to see if he wanted to come for a visit. The woman was a bonus.”

  “What have they told you?”

  “Not much. And once I got their guns …”

  “Remind me to ask you how you did that later.”

  “… they pretty much stopped talking.”

  “I would have thought the opposite.”

  “Me too,” she said. “The guy’s Mikhail. And the woman’s—”

  “Petra,” Quinn said.

  The Russian woman’s mouth all but dropped open in surprise.

  “What did she say before she shut up?” he asked.

  “Pretty much the same thing she told you at the park. That she’s been looking for you. That she wants to talk to you. Blah, blah, blah. That was it, though.”

  “Okay, Petra,” Quinn said, taking a step toward the woman. “Why is it we keep running into each other?”

  “How do you know who I am?” she asked.

  “We know because we’re good at what we do,” he said, then stared at her for a moment. “My patience level is a bit low, so I’d advise you to answer my question.”

  She hesitated, then said, “We don’t want to hurt you.”

  Quinn glanced at the gun in his hand, then looked back at her. “Good to know.”

  “I mean, you don’t need to point those at us,” she explained.

  “Thanks for the suggestion, but why don’t you convince us first.”

  “Okay. I understand. I would do the same.”

  “You would, would you?”

  “If I felt it was necessary.”

  Quinn smiled, as if amused. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “We only thought that you had been here. We waited on the chance you’d come back.”

  “Why would you think it was me?”

  “We … we had a picture of you we could show around,” she said. “A drawing.” She started to reach into her pocket.

  “No, no, no,” Orlando said, raising her gun a few inches and reminding the Russian she was still in the line of fire. Petra put her hands back into her lap.

  Orlando moved around the bed and reached into the woman’s pocket. She pulled out a piece of paper, then unfolded it.

  “This was never my favorite picture of you,” she said, holding it up so Quinn could see.

  It was the police sketch that had run in all the New York papers earlier that summer. First reports had said that the man in the drawing was a suspected killer, something that was later retracted and forgotten.

  Mostly forgotten, Quinn thought.

  “You lied to me before, didn’t you? You do work for Palavin,” he said.

  He’d wanted to provoke a response, perhaps a little tic, or a look in her eye that would either confirm or deny what they had learned from Stepka. What he got instead was a volcano.

  Petra’s face scrunched up in a snarl as her cheeks and forehead turned red. Her fingers seemed to dig into the arms of the chair, and she leaned forward like she was going to jump up. Mikhail, too, had become tense and angry. He said something to Petra in Russian that dripped with disgust.

  “I told you, we do not work for Palavin,” Petra said, barely able to get the words out through her clenched teeth.

  “You are connected to him somehow.”

  Mikhail again said something in Russian.

  “That’s not working for us,” Orlando said. “English only.”

  “Or what?” Mikhail asked.

  “Or we kill you,” Quinn said.

  Mikhail glared in defiance, but said nothing more.

  “We don’t work for him,” Petra spat. “We are trying to find him.”

  “Why?” Quinn asked.

  “He must answer for what’s he’s done.”

  Quinn’s eyes narrowed. “So you’re here to kill him.”

  “No,” she said. “We will take him home and put him on trial.”

  “I was told you are terrorists. Are you telling me you work for the Russian government?”

  “I said nothing about our government.”

  “So you are terrorists?”

  “No!” she yelled. “The only one who caused any terror is Palavin.”

  The room was silent for a moment, then Orlando said, “A private trial, then.”

  Petra bowed her head a fraction of an inch, but said nothing.

  “And after you’ll kill him,” Quinn said.

  “Why not?” Mikhail said. “He is responsible for so much—” He stopped himself.

  “He’s responsible for so much what?” Quinn asked. “Why do you want him?”

  “Why don’t you tell us why you are working for Palavin?” Petra said, looking directly at Quinn.

  “Who said I was?”

  “It appeared that way to me in Los Angeles. Apparently you were in Maine, too, though I was a little too busy to see you. You were working for Palavin both those times.”

  “I was working for David Wills. Emphasis on was. Once he was dead, I was out.”

  “Semantics,” Petra said. “Wills was obviously hired by Palavin. So in effect you were working for him.”

  “Why obvious?”

  “Because the Ghost knew we were trying to track him down, and hired Wills to systematically kill all the people who would have led us to him. Ironic that Wills would also become the last victim.”

  “The Ghost. That’s your pet name for Palavin, isn’t it?”

  She said nothing.

  “You know for a fact Wills was killed by Palavin
?”

  She hesitated. “I told you, it’s obvious.”

  Quinn said nothing. He suspected she was right, but wasn’t going to accept it only on her word.

  “Show him the picture,” Mikhail urged her.

  Petra nodded, then started to lift one side of her jacket.

  “Careful,” Orlando told her.

  “I’m only taking a photograph out of my pocket,” Petra explained.

  She pulled the picture out of her pocket. It was large, maybe eight by ten, and folded in half. She opened it and set it on the bed.

  “Sit back,” Quinn told her once she was done.

  As soon as she was leaning back, he picked up the photo.

  It was a color picture faded in a way that made it seem several decades old. By the hair and clothing styles of the fourteen people captured in the image, Quinn guessed it had probably been taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

  Those photographed were scattered around what looked like a small restaurant, either sitting at one of the two tables, or standing along the bar at the back. With the exception of a middle-aged man off to the side, the rest appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “May I show you?” Petra started to push herself up out of the chair.

  “Stay,” Quinn told her. He held his gun out to Orlando. As soon as she took it, he knelt by Petra’s chair and held the photo out so they both could see it.

  “In Los Angeles, what was the name of the man whose body you took out of the warehouse?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Ryan Winters, correct?” She pointed at the photo. “There. Ryan Winters.”

  Though the Winters Quinn had seen was much older, there was definitely a resemblance. He shot Orlando a look.

  “At the other table. The one sitting in back. You know him, too. Kenneth Moody.”

  The skin at the back of Quinn’s neck began to tingle.

  “The man sitting with him is David Thomas,” she said. “Missing and most likely dead.” She paused. “Behind Thomas, Freddy Chang. Dead. The woman next to Winters, Stacy McKitrick. Dead. The two women at the bar, Alicia Anderson and Sara Hirschy. Both dead.” She looked at Quinn. “All of them murdered or presumed murdered. Most within the last six weeks. The only exceptions are the two men at either end of the bar, and the older man near the door.”

  Quinn took a closer look at the two men at the bar. They look like brothers, he thought. If one’s hair hadn’t been darker and wavier than the other’s, Quinn would have thought they could almost be twins.

  “The photo was taken in 1964 in Hong Kong. A youth meeting.”

  “Youth meeting?” Quinn said. That was a term he hadn’t heard used since his days back in Warroad. “You mean like church?”

  “A political youth meeting,” Petra said. “The kind you wouldn’t advertise in a British colony in the mid-sixties. Or anywhere in the West for that matter.”

  “A Communist Party meeting.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. There were hundreds of these kinds of groups all around the world at that time. I think the Soviets thought these would be the catalysts for revolutions, and since the groups were Russian backed, the USSR would be able to control the eventual outcome. But most weren’t more than opportunities to complain and argue.” She looked back at the photo. “This group called itself the Young Leninists.”

  Quinn shrugged. “The Cold War is ancient history.”

  “In this case, not so ancient.” Petra paused. “The older man at the door was named Yuri Kabulov. KGB.”

  Quinn took a look at the man. “If he’s alive, he must be over one hundred now.”

  “Kabulov died of a state-sanctioned heart attack in 1973. It is the dark-haired one at the bar we are really looking for.”

  Quinn took a good look at the wavy-haired boy. It wasn’t hard to imagine the man he would become. Quinn had actually seen him as an adult. The third photo in the folder from Annabel Taplin’s briefcase. “Palavin,” he said. “Your Ghost.”

  Petra smiled without humor. “A name of convenience.”

  “How did he get involved with a youth group in Hong Kong?”

  “The first question is really, how did Kabulov get involved with them?” she said. “He generally didn’t deal with these groups. His specialty was coordinating agent infiltration into enemy governments. At the height of his career, it was said he had dozens placed throughout Western Europe.”

  “Okay. So why was he there?”

  She pointed first at the Ghost, then at the straight-haired boy who looked like him.

  “Are they brothers?” Quinn asked.

  Petra shook her head. “Not brothers. Not even related. Palavin was born in Moscow, and was actually twenty-three when this was taken. All we know about the other one is that he was born in London, but lived most of his life in Hong Kong. If we knew his name, we wouldn’t have been looking for you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because in 1988, the Ghost,” she said, her finger hovering over the wavy-haired youth on the right, “became this man.” She moved her finger to his doppelgänger.

  Chapter 41

  “How did Palavin steal someone else’s identity?” Quinn asked.

  Petra looked back at the photograph. “The look-alike came to the attention of Kabulov in the early 1960s through a KGB agent named Glinka working in Hong Kong,” she said. “Glinka had met Palavin on a previous trip to Moscow, and noticed the resemblance between the two men.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “Kabulov was always looking for infiltration opportunities,” she went on. “He investigated, and agreed with Glinka. He arranged for Palavin to be transferred to Hong Kong and to be assigned as Russian youth advisor to the Young Leninists. Palavin’s real job, though, was to get close to the young man, get to know him and his habits.”

  “So the Ghost could eventually assume the other man’s identity,” Quinn said.

  “Exactly,” she said, nodding. “It was Kabulov’s ultimate plan, the piece that would be the crown jewel of his career. In his mind, once the Ghost had become the Englishman, he would return to the U.K. and begin a rapidly advancing career within the British government.”

  “But things didn’t work out that way,” Quinn said, making an educated guess.

  “No. Kabulov became involved in a series of failures, and was eventually declared an enemy of the party, and disposed of. Palavin, on the other hand, had been smart. He had taken a position in Moscow while waiting for the day Kabulov would decide it was time for him to become the Englishman. It was a job that obviously fed the sadist inside him. He became an internal security officer based out of Lubyanka Prison, and built his reputation within the party. He was able to use that to shield himself from Kabulov’s downfall.”

  “If Kabulov died, what happened to his plan?” Quinn asked.

  “It died with him. The only one who knew about the Englishman other than the Ghost was Glinka, and he had become a loyal member of the Ghost’s inner circle. For Palavin, assuming the Englishman’s identity transitioned from being a potential career as a British mole to a potential escape valve, just in case things went south for him like they had for Kabulov. It was perfect. If things did go bad, here was a new identity with a real-life history.”

  “So he just left his look-alike in Hong Kong? Hoping he’d be around if ever needed?”

  She smiled without humor. “Palavin was smarter than that. He recruited the Englishman, telling him he would be an agent for the Soviet Union, with Palavin as his handler, of course. Only he wasn’t an agent for anyone but the Ghost. It was a way to put the man on ice for as long as needed. Palavin would send him here and there, carrying packages that the man was told were top secret messages, or keeping tabs on people who really had no intelligence value at all. Palavin thought of everything, even setting him up with a woman who he probably thought cared about him. It wasn’t long before the Ghost controlled him co
mpletely.

  “Palavin continued his work in Moscow, honing his craft and becoming a master at extracting confessions. A KGB star. Most of those he interviewed never saw the outside of Lubyanka again. Their voices silenced, never to be heard by the people who loved them again.” She paused. “If you had been working for him, Mr. Quinn, you would have been kept very busy.”

  Quinn ignored the comment. “What drove him to take on the Englishman’s identity?”

  “By the late eighties, he realized the Soviet Union was heading for disaster. We all did. Only he had a way out, and decided to take advantage of it before it all crashed down. With the body count he’d amassed, he had to know if he stayed his own life would be in danger.

  “In 1988, he ordered his double to return to London. It was the first time the Englishman had been in the U.K. since he’d been a child, and what family he had there, he’d lost contact with long ago. The important thing for Palavin was that the U.K. Border Agency recorded the Englishman’s entry back into the country from Hong Kong.”

  She fell silent.

  “And then?” Quinn asked.

  “Palavin killed him, and became him. At that point, Nikolai Palavin disappeared.” She paused. “Like a ghost.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Petra exchanged a look with Mikhail. He started to say something in Russian, but then stopped, and said in English, “What will it hurt?”

  She nodded in agreement, then turned back to Quinn. “A man named Dombrovski brought us together. Mikhail, myself, and the others back in Moscow who have helped us, we all suffered at the hands of the Ghost. Some of us were victims who survived his interrogations. But most of us lost relatives and loved ones to his methods.” She looked at her partner. “Mikhail’s brother, tortured then killed. Kolya, our friend who died in Maine, lost his parents. Others in our group, too, lost brothers, sisters, whole families. All taken from us, silenced by the Ghost.”

  Mikhail took up the story. “Dombrovski had been a KGB doctor, but he had made the mistake of helping one of Palavin’s victims. The Ghost then tortured him, keeping him from death only because he was KGB. Though several years in a labor camp in Norilsk probably felt like death. When Dombrovski returned to Moscow, he found that his wife and his son were dead. More victims of the Ghost. But at the time, the only thing he could do was remember. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union dissolved that he saw his chance. He tried to locate Palavin to bring him to justice, but it was too late. Palavin had disappeared.”