“Does he have a name?” Quinn asked.
Wills thought for a moment. “Call him Mr. B.”
“I assume there’s a Mr. A.”
“There is.”
“Okay,” Quinn said. “Just wondering.”
“Mr. B knew that finding the cards might involve methods his corporation was not capable of performing.”
“Why not?”
“They are a publicly traded organization. Shareholders frown on wet work. Mr. B talked to one of the company’s contacts at MI6. The contact was concerned, but also smart enough to realize that knowledge of the leak needed to be kept to a small circle of people. That meant mounting an operation outside normal governmental channels.”
“You.”
“Yes, me,” Wills said. “We were told that this was to be a terminate operation from the start, and that all members of the thief’s network needed to be eliminated to prevent the potential release of the information. There was no telling which of them had copies. Our job was to isolate and eliminate. MI6 would then go in, do a search, and recover the cards and any copies that might have been made.”
“You weren’t doing the search?” Quinn asked.
“We were hired to question each target, and only search their person before removing them. MI6 would do the rest.”
It wasn’t a particularly unusual arrangement. A private group does the dirty work so that another agency can keep its hands clean. Quinn had been on similar projects in the past. The only unusual aspect was the involvement of a third organization, this corporation whose information had been stolen. Still, Quinn couldn’t help thinking that the story was almost too pat. The feeling wasn’t a strong one, just something that tickled at the back of his mind.
“Then who are these Russians?” he asked.
“We think they’re part of a Georgian group fighting to rejoin Russia. In other words, terrorists who want to get their hands on a bomb. The big problem now is that they’ve been able to take one of the targets before we could get to them. If he had one of the disks on him, the information could be anywhere by now.”
“I can’t imagine MI6 is happy about that.”
Wills paused. “MI6 doesn’t know yet.”
“You haven’t told them?”
Wills shook his head.
“Could they suspect something went wrong? Maybe that’s why they sent the watcher.”
“I told you, it was a miscommunication.” Wills’s tone was less convincing than his words.
“So what are you doing about Moody?” Quinn asked.
“I have a team trying to track the Russians down. Find them and we find Moody.”
“Donovan?”
“No. Donovan and his team have split and gone to ground. I haven’t talked to him since thirty minutes after the operation. If Moody’s found, the new team will take care of him.”
“How many more names are on the list?” Quinn asked.
“Moody was the last,” Wills said.
Quinn raised his eyebrows. “Last? Are you saying you came all the way over here to let me go? Or do you want me on standby for once they’ve taken care of Moody?”
“No,” Wills said. “There’s something else I need you to do. A related job.”
“What do you mean ‘related’?”
“Mr. B asked if we could do a special project for the corporation on the side.”
Quinn’s eyes narrowed with concern. If it was a project that involved him, it would mean someone was going to be killed. A few deaths of amoral thieves selling bomb plans to terrorists was one thing, but corporate murder? That would be going somewhere Quinn wasn’t comfortable with.
Wills seemed to sense Quinn’s reluctance. “It’s not what you think.”
“If it’s not what I think, then you don’t need a cleaner.”
“There is a body. It’s in London. Hidden in a building that’s about to be demolished.”
“Wait, what? Are you saying it’s already there?”
Wills said nothing for a moment, then nodded. “It’s been there over twenty years.”
Chapter 16
“I guess this isn’t a surprise,” Nate said.
“Not really,” Quinn agreed.
They were still in Manhattan, standing across the street from a place called Molly Dryer’s Delicatessen.
At the end of the meeting at the restaurant, Wills had asked Quinn to check out the address found on the dead man in the car outside Moody’s house. The name on the license had been William Burke, but the address listed belonged to the deli.
“Hard sell, soft sell,” Quinn said, pointing to Nate first, then himself.
“Fine by me.”
Inside, a long buffet table served up everything from chow mein to Salisbury steak. Next to it another table specialized in salads. There were also shelves with chips and cookies and snacks next to glass-door cabinets filled with drinks. Beyond the buffet were dining tables and chairs ready for the next influx of customers.
A typical New York deli.
The employees manning the kitchen all looked Latin, while the two women at the registers looked Middle Eastern.
He grabbed a bottle of water and a bag of chips and headed for the checkout.
“Are you Molly?” he asked the woman who rang him up.
She gave him an odd look.
“Molly,” he repeated. “The name on the sign?”
“Ah, right,” she said. She leaned toward him a few inches. “There is no Molly. It’s just a name my father picked out of a book. He said it sounded more American.”
Quinn laughed. “He’s right.”
At a signal from Quinn, Nate walked up.
“Excuse me,” Nate said.
The woman stopped herself in the middle of counting out Quinn’s change and looked at him.
Nate smiled. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. Says he comes here all time, so I thought you might know him. Bill Burke. Sometimes goes by William.”
The look on her face didn’t change. “Sorry. Don’t know him.”
“You’re sure?”
Again, she gave him the silent stare.
He raised a hand in the air. “Okay, thanks anyway.”
As Nate walked away, Quinn said, “Nate was a bit of a jerk, wasn’t he?”
“I didn’t notice.”
Quinn and Nate regrouped a block away.
“Like we thought, fake ID,” Nate said.
“You want these?” Quinn asked, holding up the chips.
“Are you kidding?” Nate said. “Of course.” He snatched the bag from Quinn.
“Is there anything you won’t eat?”
Nate smiled, but kept munching. When he was ready to pop another chip in his mouth, he paused long enough to ask, “This new assignment, have you ever been asked to do anything like it before?”
“I had to remove a corpse from a cemetery once. It had been in the ground about two years.”
Nate gave him an odd look. “Why would you have to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “Client never told me.”
“But why do you think … Never mind,” Nate said. “The thing Mr. Wills wants us to do, doesn’t it seem a little odd?”
“A little, maybe.”
“Couldn’t they just go in and remove the body themselves?”
“I assume there’s a reason they need us to do it,” Quinn said.
“But there can’t be much left, can there? Bones, maybe some clothes?” Quinn looked at him. “What is it you really want to say?”
Nate stuffed a potato chip into his mouth. “Okay, I know it’s going to sound a little weird given what we deal with most of the time, but this kind of gives me the creeps.”
“The creeps.”
“Yeah. Come on. It doesn’t make you feel a little odd?”