“Here you are,” the agent said. She set the tickets and passports on the top of the counter. “Any luggage?”
Quinn shook his head. “Just our carry-ons.”
She smiled in approval, no doubt guessing they were seasoned travelers. “Enjoy your flight.”
“Thank you,” he said. “We will.”
Quinn eased his chair back, then glanced out the window at the Pacific Ocean, thirty thousand feet below. It was the first time in nearly twelve hours he wasn’t doing anything. Physically, he was exhausted.
Nate was across the cabin, three rows back. Quinn had offered him a sleeping pill before they boarded, and apparently it had worked quickly. Nate’s head lolled to the side, his eyes closed.
Quinn let his mind drift, trying not to think of anything at all. He needed to unwind and relax. More than anything, he knew he needed to sleep. But his mind kept replaying the events of the last twelve hours: Gibson on his porch, Peter on the phone, Nate on the floor, and—
A flight attendant touched him on the shoulder. “Pad Thai or chicken curry with rice?” she asked.
Quinn glanced at his watch and was surprised to find several hours had already passed. Sometime during his mental storm he must have actually dozed off. “Pad Thai,” he said.
“And to drink?”
“Just water.”
As he ate his food he forced himself to concentrate on trying to figure out who Gibson might have been working for, and why they had targeted Quinn.
He had searched Gibson’s body thoroughly before turning it over to the local disposal guy. He hadn’t expected to discover anything useful, and he’d been right. Other than the tools of the trade in his bag, the only thing Gibson had on him was three hundred dollars in cash.
It was a pretty fair guess that whoever had hired him had deep pockets, enough to fund a small-scale, one-night war on the Office. How many agents had they gone after? Five? Six? A dozen? More? Whatever the number, from the sound of things, Quinn getting the upper hand on Gibson appeared to be the exception. Others, apparently, hadn’t been so lucky.
A disruption, Quinn thought.
That someone had attempted to pull one off was hard to believe. Yet it looked like it had happened. And, more surprisingly, it seemed to have been successful.
It was mind-blowing, really. A disruption almost never worked. The idea behind it was to cause as much chaos as possible within a particular agency. There were many reasons why: to cover up something that was happening, to cover up something that was going to happen, to foul up an ongoing operation, to get rid of an annoying competitor, or simply to take down somebody else’s organization entirely for no particular reason at all. You heard about them when you first started out in the business. About the theory. About the attempts to pull them off in the past, all but a very few unsuccessful. And finally you heard about how no one tried them anymore. History was against success.
Apparently, someone hadn’t been paying attention when that lesson had been taught.
Once his tray had been removed, Quinn leaned his chair back as far as it would go. His thoughts were taking him nowhere, and his lack of sleep wasn’t helping. He closed his eyes, hoping his mind would settle down and allow him the rest he needed. But his thoughts took one final turn back to the core question.
Why him? He wasn’t a member of the Office. He was only a freelancer. He should have been exempt, right?
As sleep began to take hold of him, an answer started drifting toward the surface. Nothing fully formed. More of a hunch, really.
Taggert.
Somewhere between Los Angeles, a brief stop in Osaka, and landing in Bangkok, they lost Sunday. Travel to Asia from the States was always painful that way, the international date line exacting its toll for daring to travel nearly halfway around the world.
Quinn and Nate were only in Thailand a few hours before they caught a connecting flight out of the country. Nate seemed both disappointed and confused when Quinn said their trip wasn’t over. But to his credit, he kept his questions to himself. The second flight was a short trip, but it took them a million miles from everywhere else.
After the plane landed and began taxiing to the terminal, a flight attendant’s voice came over the public address system. “Thai Airways would like to welcome you to Ho Chi Minh City.”
It was midmorning in Vietnam, and the heat was rippling off the tarmac. There were a few clouds in the distance, but otherwise the sky was clear. Quinn looked around the interior of the cabin. Several people were already pulling out bags and purses from under the seats where they’d been stowed. Quinn was content to sit quietly and wait.
Before he left home, he’d cleaned out his safe, taking everything except his gun. In addition to his laptop computer, he had a dozen passports: American, Canadian, Swiss, Finnish, German, Russian — each in a different name. Plus corresponding sets of credit cards, ten thousand U.S. dollars in cash, a two-gigabyte flash memory stick on which was stored hundreds of contacts and other information, and a notebook filled with pages and pages of visas for various countries around the world. All the sensitive material was stored in a false hard-plastic lining in his suitcase. If he was ever asked to start up his laptop at a security checkpoint, the desktop that would appear would look like that of a typical businessman. Charts and graphics and spreadsheets, all very serious-looking but none important enough to draw undo attention.
He’d inserted Vietnamese visas into both his and Nate’s passports in the lavatory of their previous flight just before landing in Bangkok. He’d used a palm-sized stamping kit to apply the appropriate dates, then studied his forgeries to make sure everything looked correct.
The ploy had worked in Bangkok, where they had to show a valid Vietnamese visa in order to pick up their tickets. But that had just been a Thai Airways employee. Now that they were in Ho Chi Minh City, they had to deal with the Vietnamese themselves.
Quinn put his passport in his shirt pocket and pulled his bag out of the storage bin above his seat. With Nate right behind him, he joined the line of passengers making their way off the plane.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Nate said just loud enough for Quinn to hear as they reached the exit.
There was no covered ramp on the other side of the door leading into the terminal. Instead, passengers disembarked the old-fashioned way, via a wheel-up staircase.
Quinn gave his apprentice a quick, hard look.
“Sorry,” Nate said.
Without another word, they made their way down the ramp, then proceeded to walk across the tarmac to customs. Quinn made sure they inserted themselves into the middle of the pack of departing passengers.
“They won’t ask,” Quinn said, “but if they do, we’re here on business. Researching investment opportunities. I’ll do the talking, though. You just look serious. Businesslike.”
The terminal building reminded Quinn of a large warehouse. It was old and dingy, cavernous, with mold growing on the walls. There was none of the polish or amenities of Western airports.
Inside, the first thing they came to was passport control. Though there were several stations set up, only two were open, and the lines were long. To be safe, Quinn chose the one with the more bored-looking official. As they neared, he slipped twenty U.S. dollars, a tidy sum in Vietnam, into his passport next to his visa.
He looked over his shoulder at Nate. “We can only go up one at a time,” he said. “Try not to say anything. Not even hello. If there’s a problem, just motion for me to come back and I’ll take care of it.”