“No,” Quinn said. He started walking again.
Nate was a step behind him.
“Not even a little?”
“Not even a little.”
“Okay. Sorry I brought it up. It’s just, you know, you always said to go by your gut.”
Nate stuffed another chip in his mouth.
Despite what he’d said to Nate, his gut was telling him pretty much the same thing. Only it wasn’t the condition of the body that was bothering him. It was the whole nature of the project. For the first time in quite a while, he was starting to wonder if he was on the right side of things or not.
His phone vibrated, bringing a welcome diversion. It was Orlando.
“Hey,” he said. “How’s Garrett?”
“What? Oh, he’s fine,” she said, seeming distracted. “Okay, so I’ve got you on a 6:40 flight on Continental out of Newark.”
Quinn looked at Nate. “Get a cab.”
“I could change it to the 9:45 if that’ll work better,” Orlando said.
“No. Should be fine. Just need to pick up our bags and head over.” They’d left their luggage in the car they’d driven into the city. It was parked in a lot just off Broadway. “I’ll call you back if I think we’re not going to make it. Have you found anything on that photo I sent you?”
“Not yet. The age might be a problem. But I’m running it through several databases.”
“Here we go,” Nate said as a taxi pulled to the curb. Quinn’s apprentice climbed in.
“Our ride’s here,” Quinn said into the phone. “I’ll check in with you before we leave. See if you’ve found out anything then.”
“Quinn,” she said.
The tone of her voice stopped him on the curb.
“What?”
“That problem I told you about before …”
“What about it?”
“It’s worse than I thought.”
“Worse how?” he asked.
“Whoever’s trying to find out about you knows what they’re doing.” She paused. “They found your name.”
“Which name?” The sounds of the cars and the people on the street disappeared. Even the October chill seemed to vanish.
“Your real name. Someone hacked into the Social Security Administration ninety minutes ago and looked you up.”
“I don’t have a Social Security number.”
“You did once.”
“Yeah, but you got rid of that, didn’t you?” he asked. She hesitated. “I buried it, but I wasn’t able to delete it completely.”
“But you told me …”
“I told you I took care of it. Look, I’m sorry. I thought I had. No one should have been able to find it, but someone did.”
“Okay. All right. What—”
She cut him off. “Ten minutes later I got half a dozen alarm messages from some improved trips I set up last night on things connected to your life before Quinn.”
“Where?” he asked.
“IRS, the Phoenix Police Department—”
“I know for a fact my record with the Phoenix PD was removed.” His tenure there had been short and long ago.
“Your file, yes. But you were cross-referenced on several others. I got what I could, but there were too many files to check. The tripwire at Phoenix did two things. Alerted me to the initial hack, then traced what the intruders were looking at. That’s how I knew it was the same people as the other day. They accessed two files. A burglary and an attempted rape. In both cases you were one of the responding officers.”
“What the hell?”
“There’s more,” Orlando said.
“Hey, you going to get in?” the cabbie yelled out at Quinn.
“Turn on the meter and give me a minute,” Quinn yelled back. Into the phone he said, “What more?”
“They’ve also hacked into the record at School District 690,” Orlando said. “That’s the school district for Warroad, Minnesota.”
“Warroad?”
“You don’t have a file there, either. There is no trace of you in their system. But the flag I have there worked the same as the one in Phoenix, so I know it was them.”
“Okay, so they checked, but I wasn’t there. So that’s good.”
She hesitated. “Yeah. That’s right. They didn’t find your file. But they did find Liz’s.”
Now it wasn’t just the noises of New York that disappeared, but the ground Quinn was standing on, too.
“They didn’t stop there, either,” Orlando said. “They’ve traced her to Paris.”
In a flash, the whole world came rushing back. He jumped into the cab and slammed the door closed behind.
“The bags,” he said to Nate.
Nate told the taxi driver where to go.
“Forget London,” Quinn said into the phone. “We need to get to Paris.”
“That’s the flight I booked you on,” Orlando told him.
Of course it was, he thought. She would have predicted his reaction, and anticipated the request. There was no one on the earth who knew him better than she did.
“My mother?” he whispered into the phone.
“They would have gotten her address off Liz’s file.”
For one of the first times in his life, Quinn felt paralyzed. Should he go to his sister or his mother? Perhaps he was overreacting. Perhaps the hacker had only been after information. Perhaps there was no threat.
Perhaps, but Quinn knew he would be a fool to not assume the worst.
Everyone had their weaknesses. The most common was family. That’s why most people in Quinn’s business did all they could to hide their pasts. Some specialities, such as op agents and assassins, were more likely to see threats in this area. Cleaners, not so much. If they ever ran into trouble, they were more prone to a direct assault than someone trying to leverage the people in their lives. But that didn’t mean Quinn didn’t worry about this possibility. And now that worry had become a reality.
“I made a few calls,” Orlando said.
Quinn shook himself back into the here and now. “Calls?”
“Steven Howard was in Chicago,” she said. “He’s on his way to Warroad to keep an eye on your mother now. Should be there sometime tonight. I’ve also rounded up Rickey Larson and Brent Nolan. They’ll be there by noon tomorrow. And I’m going, too.”
Quinn could feel some of the tension in his shoulders ease. “Thank you,” he said.
“What I need you to do is call her,” she said. “Tell her you have a friend who needs a place to stay. Say he’s working on a project, writing a book or something, and needs to go someplace quiet for a week or two. Tell her I’m going to bring him by. It’ll let us get someone in the house with her.”
“Good,” Quinn said. He knew his mother wasn’t going to like the idea, not this close to her husband’s death, but she’d do it for Quinn.
“Once I get everything settled, I’ll fly over to you.”
“You should stay with her.”
“They can handle things without me,” Orlando said. “You’re going to need me to help with the job in London.”
“Screw the London job. I’m not doing it.”
She paused a moment, then said, “We’ll talk about that when I see you.”
He was about to protest again, but realized it would be useless. She’d hung up.
Chapter 17
Fall in Paris meant two things: cooler weather and fewer tourists. It wasn’t that there were no tourists, it was just that their number was a fraction of what it was during the summer months. In August, the streets and monuments were overwhelmed by what seemed to be a torrent of refugees from the Tower of Babel. In October, it was more of a trickle.
When Quinn and Nate had gotten into the taxi, Quinn had asked the driver to turn up the heat. It was hovering around forty-four degrees Fahrenheit, several degrees colder than it had been in New York, and more than two dozen less than it was back in Los Angeles. To Quinn it was now officially too cold. The cabbie had fiddled with a few knobs, but from what Quinn could tell the temperature hadn’t changed. He pulled his collar tight to his neck and looked out at the gray morning.