The tremor in her voice made him think she might start crying again, but while a few tears did slide down her cheeks, she held her emotions in check.
Once they crossed the Potomac River into DC, they headed into Georgetown, eventually parking on a quiet, residential street.
Misty pointed ahead. “Hard to see from here, but Peter’s building is right behind those trees.”
Without another word, they exited the car and walked down the block. The building was an old, stately structure with a white stone façade and matching steps leading up to a surprisingly modern, windowed entrance.
There, Misty used a key she pulled from her pocket to let them in, and led them across the lobby to the elevators. Once they arrived on Peter’s floor, she headed down the hallway until she came to a door marked 17A. She flipped open a small, numbered keypad in the wall next to the jamb, and raised her finger to punch in the code. Before she could, Quinn put a hand over hers.
“Hold a moment,” he said.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“I assume there’s some sort of alarm.”
“It deactivates once the code’s entered.”
He scanned the door, looking for signs of a break-in, but saw no scratches or other damage that would imply forced entry.
“How many people know the code?” he asked.
“Just Peter and I as far as I know.”
“The security company?” Daeng suggested.
Misty shook her head. “No security company. The alarm used to go straight to Office headquarters. After we were shut down, it would alert Peter wherever he was so he could decide what to do. He always said he had better resources than any alarm company did.”
And yet the people who kidnapped him must have had the code, too, Quinn thought, but he kept that to himself.
“Okay, go ahead,” he said.
Misty entered an eight-digit code on the pad and opened the door.
Before she could step inside, Quinn said, “Let us check first.”
Quickly, he and Daeng moved through the apartment, making sure no one else was there. While the flat was empty, it was clear someone had been inside recently.
“You can come in now,” Quinn said as he and Daeng reentered the living room.
Misty made it only two feet past the doorway before she stopped and stared. “Who…how…?”
The living room, like the rest of the apartment, had been tossed. Tables upended, couches and chairs sliced open, bookcases and cabinets emptied. Even the paintings and photographs that had been on the walls had been pulled down.
This wasn’t a normal search. There was an eeriness to the mess left behind. Peter’s possessions had not been haphazardly dumped on the floor. Everything was in neat piles, as if each item had been individually inspected first. A quiet, methodical exploration that would not have been noticed by the neighbors.
Quinn knew this was not the way the apartment had looked on Misty’s last visit. He’d seen it himself on the video call Misty and Howard had made to him at the time.
“Shut the door,” he told Misty.
She blinked, pulling herself out of her spell, and did as he asked.
“What happened?” she said, moving farther into the room.
“It seems someone was looking for something,” Daeng said. “I guess the questions are: What was it? And did they find it?”
“Most importantly,” Quinn added, “does it even matter to us?”
“It matters to me,” Misty said, anger beginning to replace her shock.
“Of course it does,” Quinn said. “But we need to stay focused on why we’re here.”
She stared at him before finally nodding.
“So, where do we start?” she asked.
The signal was routed through the existing SG Security fiber-optic line that had been installed in the Georgetown building two years earlier to service customers in apartments on the third, fourth, and fifth floors. The line’s purpose was to alert the security company to potential break-ins, fires, carbon monoxide leaks, and — in the case of a client on the third floor — heart failure registered by sensors placed throughout her apartment.
If this particular signal had originated from a flat owned by one of SG’s clients, it would have appeared on the monitor of one of the company’s emergency operators, and the appropriate authorities would have been dispatched. This signal was not, however, from a registered SG Security user. Instead, it bypassed the company’s system completely and traveled across DC to a nondescript industrial building on the edge of Hyattsville, Maryland, housing the administration of the organization known as O & O. Nothing fancy about the initials. They stood for Observe and Operate.
For the first few days of the assignment, the apartment had physically been watched by rotating, two-man O & O teams. Since nothing had happened, the director of O & O determined that electronic surveillance would suffice, and the teams were reassigned to other projects — a side benefit of this being that the money saved found its way, after passing through appropriate filters, into the director’s personal account.
“Central? Terminal Eight.” The voice came out of the computer speaker on the duty supervisor’s desk. Though different individuals manned the station, they were always referred to as Central.
Central tapped the Talk key on his keyboard. “Go ahead, Terminal Eight.”
“Sir, I have a door-open signal for RZ-47.”
Central entered the identifier into the database and saw that RZ-47 referred to an apartment in Georgetown. A quick scan of the notes revealed that protocol on this particular case required interception of any transgressors, followed by isolated detention, and, if the client deemed it necessary, termination. The identity of the client on this job was, as always, omitted from Central’s file. The whos and whys were left to those with higher pay grades at O & O.
“Terminal Eight, who’s up next?”
“Sir, we have a team that just wrapped up at RY-23. Fifteen minutes out.”
Central frowned. Fifteen minutes might be too long. “No one closer?”
“They’re the closest, sir.”
If they were closest, they would have to do. “Send them.”
“Yes, sir,” Terminal Eight said.
Central barely had time to wrap his fingers around the can of Sprite sitting by his keyboard when the speaker came back to life.
“Central? Terminal Three.”
“Go ahead, Terminal Three,” Central said, RZ-47 already forgotten.
CHAPTER 6
“It’s gone,” Misty said.
They were in Peter’s bedroom. The hidey-hole along the base of the wall, behind where the nightstand had been, was wide open and empty. According to Misty, they should have found a laptop inside, but whoever had searched the place must’ve gotten to it first.
“Are there any other computers here?” Quinn asked.
“I don’t know. This is the only one he told me about.”
“How about other secret compartments?”
“Three that I’m aware of.”
“Show us.”
As Quinn moved out of her way, he felt a crunch of glass under his foot. He looked down and saw he’d stepped on a picture frame that had probably been on Peter’s nightstand. When he lifted his shoe, he remembered something Misty had said to him over the phone that night she had checked the apartment with Howard.
… the picture of his wife…
Until she had said that, Quinn had never known Peter was married.
He leaned down, dumped the glass onto the floor, and picked up the picture.
Misty had said Peter’s wife had been dead ten years. Quinn had already begun doing jobs for Peter at that time. Was it possible he’d been working for Peter when she’d passed away? He couldn’t recall any changes in Peter’s demeanor that year or, for that matter, in the years that surrounded it. On the surface, that could have been interpreted to mean Peter hadn’t cared about what happened to her. And yet, a decade on, he still had her picture by his bed.