The Fractured, page 13
part #12 of Jonathan Quinn Series
“Maybe?”
“He looks a little familiar…I think.”
“Could he be one of your tenants?”
She looked up, shocked. “Good God, no. I know all my people, and he is not one of them.”
Quinn slipped the phone back in his pocket. “Do you remember where you may have seen him?”
“I’m not even sure I did.”
Quinn pulled out one of the business cards he kept with the badge and handed it to her. The number on it would route a caller to Quinn’s phone, with an alert informing him it was from his FBI line. “If you think of anything, just give me a call.”
The manager of the next building, an old guy in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, didn’t recognize the picture at all.
Quinn walked down the sidewalk and turned into the last apartment building. If he struck out here, too, then maybe all Nate had done was pass through the buildings to the other side. Perhaps the place where he was staying was on the next road or the one after that. Or maybe that was where Nate had parked his car.
The new building was a bland box, with open-air walkways on each of its three floors, shaped like a squared-off oval around a swimming pool in bad need of a cleaning.
Like the other complexes, this one also had a directory, only whoever had been in charge of maintaining it had either lost interest or quit, as few of the apartment numbers had names beside them, and those that did were missing letters. The listing for apartment 106 read M NAG R.
Stuck to the door of 106 was a Post-it note.
AVAILABLE RENTAL IS
OPEN FOR VIEWING
UNTIL 8:00 P.M.
APT 315
Quinn located the stairs and went up, assuming that’s where he’d find the manager.
The door to apartment 315 was wide open, light from inside spilling onto the walkway. Voices drifted out, a couple of young guys and an older one. Quinn paused at the threshold and looked inside. The small living room and a shotgun kitchen were both empty so he knocked on the door.
From a hallway to the right, the older voice called out, “Be with you in a minute. Have a look around.”
Quinn stepped inside. The only real selling point was a large window that offered a fairly decent view. He was looking out from it when the others entered the main room.
“The washer and dryer are on the first floor,” the older guy was saying. “Feel free to take a look on your way out.”
“Thanks,” one of the younger two said.
“And get that application back quick. We’re going to make our decision this weekend.”
“We will,” the other said.
As the two prospective tenants left, Quinn turned to face the older man.
“Evening,” the guy said. “I’m Paulie Wilkes, the manager. It’s a one bedroom, one bath. Back of the building and top floor, can’t get more private than that. Security deposit’s two grand, and the rent is—”
“I’m not interested in the apartment, Mr. Wilkes.” Quinn pulled out the badge and held it up. “Special Agent Marsh, FBI.”
“Oh, um, what can I do for you?”
Quinn showed him the picture of Nate. “Have you ever seen this man?”
The manager had barely glanced at the photo when his face scrunched up. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Why do you ask that? Are you saying you have seen him?”
“Of course I have. That’s Kyle McManus. You’re standing in what was his apartment until a couple weeks ago.”
“Mr…McManus lived here?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t already know that.”
“You’re sure this is him?” He held the phone out again.
Wilkes took another look. “Yeah, that’s him. No question.”
“And you say he moved out two weeks ago.”
“Uh-huh. Did he do something? Is that why he left?”
“No, sir. We just need to talk to him. Nothing more.”
Wilkes looked skeptical. “You sure he’s not a hired killer or something like that? He was really quiet. Kept to himself.”
“Sorry to disappoint you. Not a hired killer. Did he give you any notice that he was leaving?”
“Not beforehand. Just stuck a note under my door when he left.”
“Would it be possible for me to see it?”
Wilkes became guarded. “I don’t know. Don’t you need a warrant for that kind of thing?”
“Do you have something to hide?”
“No, of course, not. It’s just…it’s a private letter.”
“Which you can choose of your own volition to share with the FBI.”
The man appeared to undergo some kind of internal struggle before saying, “Fine. It’s downstairs.”
“After you,” Quinn said.
Wilkes stuck a BE RIGHT BACK note on the door and led Quinn down to apartment 106.
“It’s in my office,” the manager said, and disappeared into a hallway. When he returned he was holding a folded piece of paper, which, after a slight hesitation, he handed to Quinn.
Mr. Wilkes,
An unexpected personal matter has come up that I need to attend to immediately. This, unfortunately, means I am vacating my apartment. I realize that by leaving so suddenly I’ve put you in a difficult position. As compensation for my premature departure, please keep the security deposit and the remainder of the three months’ advance payment I made.
I apologize for any inconvenience.
Kyle McManus
Quinn recognized Nate’s handwriting. It was clear why Wilkes had been reluctant to share it. If he were able to find a new tenant right away, he could collect double rent for a while, probably pocket the excess without the property owners finding out.
“Did he leave anything else?” Quinn asked. “A forwarding address, perhaps?”
“Nope. Just that.”
As Quinn read the letter again, he could sense Wilkes’s discomfort increasing.
“Look,” the manager said. “I’m just trying to make a living here. It ain’t easy these—”
Quinn held up a hand. “How you run your business is up to you, Mr. Wilkes. My only concern is locating Kyle McManus.”
“Oh. Okay. Good. I mean, I understand.”
“What day did he leave?”
“Wednesday before last. Well, I guess he could have split late that Tuesday night. I found the note when I woke up on Wednesday.”
“And what time was that?”
Wilkes grimaced and mumbled, “About ten, I guess.”
Quinn folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket. “I’m going to hold on to this.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
Wilks nodded slowly, as if convinced Quinn was going to hand it over to the IRS.
*
Quinn filled Orlando in on what he’d learned, and then drove to the Aria Hotel, where she had reserved him a room. He was toweling off after a shower when she called back.
“I was able to track Nate to a housing tract in Spring Valley,” she said. “No cameras after that point so I couldn’t see where he went, but thirty-five minutes later, he drove out in a Toyota Camry.”
“Anyone with him?”
“Nope.”
“Were you able to get a look at the plates?”
“Yeah. The car belongs to a woman named Lorena Cheng, who, it turns out, lives four blocks from where I lost Nate.”
“Did he steal it?”
“No. He bought it.”
“Bought it?”
“I checked LVPD for a stolen-vehicle report first, but none was filed. So I set up a search for anything connected to the car and Ms. Cheng. Got a hit on her phone number. She’d been advertising the car on Craigslist. No record of the sale at the DMV yet, though. Which tells me Nate left town pretty much right away and didn’t bother filing the papers.”
“You weren’t able to determine where he went?”
“Lost him in another area where there weren’t many cameras. I have a bot searching Department of Transportation footage, but there are a lot of Toyota Camrys out there. And if he did leave town, there are several ways he could have gone without being videotaped.”
“So I guess I just hold here.”
“At the moment.”
They said their goodnights and though it was still relatively early, Quinn crawled into bed. In his line of work, he had to grab whatever sleep he could, when he could. This time, whatever turned out to be just over an hour.
He grabbed his buzzing phone off the nightstand and answered with a sleepy, “Yeah?”
“I hope you’re still packed,” Orlando said. “I have you booked on a plane to Chicago in two hours.”
Chapter Twelve
ROME
Christophe St. Amand had only one philosophy, political or otherwise: If it benefited him, he was all for it.
Like many arms dealers, he was more than happy to supply both sides of a conflict. The longer animosities could be stretched out, the more money flowing into his accounts. His old boss, Janus Sideropoulos, had not been as good at that business practice, and far too often cash had been left on the table.
Removing Sideropoulos had been easy. The old Greek had trusted St. Amand. A touch of something in the old man’s coffee to knock him out, a long plunge off an empty stretch of cliffside road on the Italian coast, and that was that. A tragic accident. In the aftermath, while everyone was still trying to come to terms with Sideropoulos’s death, St. Amand was quietly taking control of the operation.
In his first eighteen months in charge, he’d had to fend off several rivals who’d thought they could take advantage of the change in leadership to muscle in on St. Amand’s territory. But St. Amand had been planning his ascension for over two years. Case in point was the largely Bulgarian security force he and his primary lieutenant, Drake, had pulled together long before Sideropoulos was removed. St. Amand’s mother had been Bulgarian, and he had exploited that connection to recruit a team of men from her homeland loyal to him, who spoke a language few others did. It had taken years for Drake to become fluent enough to speak to them in more than a few basic sentences.
It was also during this transitional time that he saw the true power of his anonymity. The masks had been useful when he was a security man; there was nothing scarier to someone than a visit from the mysterious St. Amand. Now that he was in charge, his enigmatic persona raised him to mythological status.
Customers and competitors alike were curious and fearful of the faceless man, sentiments he was more than happy to stoke with carefully placed rumors. To further confuse everyone, he had employed several faux St. Amands over the years to show up wherever he wanted them to, wearing the same disguises he did. The thing he liked best about this was that it allowed him to appear at meetings sans disguise and pretend to be a trusted St. Amand advisor.
At the moment, he was sitting unmasked in his private control room, watching one of the favorite aspects of his work.
There were ten screens of monitors in two rows of five, mounted on a curved steel framework. St. Amand’s chair sat at the center of the imaginary circle they created, allowing him to swivel and face whichever monitor he was interested in. On the desk in front of him were a touch-screen control pad and a gooseneck microphone.
All the screens were dark except the bottom center one, which showed a sun-dappled road surrounded by jungle. The sun was not yet out in Rome, as it was 3:13 a.m. The image was from Indonesia, where it was after nine in the morning.
From what he’d been told, the road was usually humming with cars and trucks at this time of day. But thanks to army roadblocks at either end, it was currently deserted. A good thing, given the giant tree that had been toppled across it by St. Amand’s men.
“Convoy ETA five minutes forty seconds.” The male voice from the speaker belonged to one of the strike-team members.
St. Amand touched the control pad and leaned into the mic. “I’m still only receiving the feed for camera A.”
“Tovar? What’s the deal?” Salah’s voice. He was leading the operation.
“Sorry, Mr. St. Amand,” Tovar said. “We had a bad cable. It’s being replaced.” A pause. “You should have picture any second.”
After a beat, the remaining nine monitors flared to life. The majority showed shadowy shots of the jungle. These were the body cams worn by six of the team members. The remaining three were stable shots, like that of camera A. Two had different angles of the same stretch of road as A, while the third showed a different part of the highway, a kilometer away.
St. Amand activated his microphone again. “It’s working now.”
For the next few minutes, nothing. Then the first voice said, “Convoy ETA two minutes fifteen seconds. Passing camera D in thirty seconds.”
St. Amand focused on the appropriate feed. Right on time, the first convoy vehicle—an armored truck with a manned machine gun mounted on the back—drove through the frame. This was followed by four identical semi-trucks pulling enclosed trailers filled with goodies. And at the back, two more machine-gun trucks. While St. Amand wasn’t above paying for his inventory, securing requested items for just the cost of manpower, and perhaps a little bribery, was always his preference.
Another minute passed.
“ETA forty-five seconds.”
The weaving body cameras all grew still.
Over the speaker, St. Amand could hear the sound of engines, faint at first.
“Thirty seconds…fifteen.”
The sounds were louder now, St. Amand’s speakers vibrating from the rumble.
“Ten. Nine. Eight…”
Right as the count reached zero, the gun truck at the front rolled into view on cameras A, B, and C, and stopped a few meters short of the felled tree. The big rig directly behind it appeared next and slowed to a stop. The others followed suit.
The machine-gun operator on the lead truck swung his gun back and forth before leaning down and shouting something into the vehicle. The passenger door opened, and a soldier in an officer’s uniform climbed out.
His gaze moved along the length of the toppled tree. If it had been sawed down, he would have ordered the trucks to back out of there, but Salah’s men had worked long and hard to expose the tree’s roots and pull it down so that it looked like a natural event. The officer walked up to the trunk for a closer look.
“Team three, go,” Salah said.
Team three—five men, two with cams—snuck out from a bush-filled gully beside the road and crept up to the last truck in the convoy. The team’s sharpshooter put a sound-suppressed bullet into the head of the soldier manning the machine gun.
As the soldier slumped forward, the other team members moved up to the cab, two on either side. Though the vehicle might be armor plated, the windows were not bulletproof, courtesy of the general in charge of procurement who’d lined his pockets with the money saved from cutting that corner. The two men in the cab were clearly aware of this flaw, as they raised their arms the second they saw the guns pointing at them.
The soldiers were quietly removed from the vehicle and escorted into the jungle. Two of Salah’s men took the soldiers’ place in the cab, while the sharpshooter climbed onto the back of the truck, shoved the dead gunner onto the floor, and assumed the man’s spot.
“Team three in position,” the man in the driver’s seat announced.
“Copy, team three,” Salah said. “Team two, go.”
Team two’s takedown of the other gun truck at the back went as smoothly as the first hijacking.
“Team two in position.”
“Copy, team two. Team one, go.”
St. Amand turned his attention to the body cams worn by team one.
As expected, the officer who’d gone to check the tree had followed the trunk up the meter-and-a-half slope at that side of the road, to the upturned roots. This took the officer behind some brush, hiding him from his colleagues’ view. None of them saw the bullet pierce the back of his head, sending him flopping face-first into the hole the roots had been in.
One of Salah’s men knelt next to the officer and stripped him of his uniform. This was passed to another man roughly the same size as the dead officer. The man pulled the clothes on.
A few moments later, the faux officer reappeared on cameras A, B, and C and approached the lead truck from the side, to avoid being scrutinized too closely. The only one who had any chance of realizing the man was an impostor was the gunner in the back. But the soldier was focused on potential trouble from the jungle, not on his commander.
The impostor pulled the cab door open and climbed inside.
Though camera A had a view of the truck’s windshield, the reflection of the jungle on the glass prevented St. Amand from seeing what was going on inside.
But clearly everything went as planned, as several seconds later the impostor announced, “Team one, interior cleared.”
