The Discarded (27 page)

“Have no idea.” She moved the cursor across the screen. “Shall we take a look?”

She accessed the server where the bots had dumped their information into presorted files. She checked Hayashi first. During the time frame she had specified, three male bodies had been recovered in Japan with the correct height and general size. The one discovered nearly three months after the operation was the most intriguing.

It had been found in the wreckage of a building fire. Though the body had been severely burnt, the medical examiner found that the man had been shot in the back of the head and not recently. The doctor was able to extract some cells that hadn’t been wrecked by the fire, and discovered damage usually associated with extreme cold. To Orlando this meant only one possibility—the victim had been killed, put on ice, and, after a desired amount of time had passed, placed in a building that was then set ablaze.

“I’ve seen this method before,” Orlando said. “And if you ask me, that’s Hayashi.”

It took Abraham a bit longer to finish reading the file. When he did, he said, “I think you’re right.”

Orlando moved on to the files that might be the woman. There were four bodies—three in Canada and one in France.

“Why did you include Canada?” Abraham asked.

“That’s where Desirae is from.”

“I thought she was French.”

“French-Canadian. She’s from Quebec.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised.

Orlando went through the reports one by one, but while they found some similarities in each to Desirae Rosette, none was a perfect match.

“Could be they never found her body,” Abraham said.

She nodded. “Could be.”

She opened the file where information pertaining to Desirae’s personal life had been gathered. There were only a few names—a half dozen acquaintances in the business, and the name of a civilian woman the bots had dug out of a deep NSA file. The name was Nadine Chastain, and the search indicated an 85% chance of the woman being Desirae’s mother. She lived in the town of Lac-Saint-Charles, north of Quebec City.

Orlando first checked to see how long Chastain had lived in Lac-Saint-Charles—nearly forty years at the same house—and then found the name of a local newspaper. She searched through the obituaries for the years right after Operation Overtake.

Five and a half months after the job was over, there was a small, two-paragraph obituary for a woman identified as Nadine’s daughter. An accident overseas. No memorial service scheduled. Most interesting of all was the daughter’s name. Desirae.

After letting Abraham read what she’d found, Orlando said, “So, how do you feel about a trip to Canada?”

PENNSYLVANIA

Q
UINN STAYED AS
far to the side of the two-lane road as he could get without stepping off the asphalt. The temperature the day before had topped out at forty-five degrees, and it was supposed to reach the same level again today, allowing the softening ground and melting snow to form a dark muck that seemed hell bent on tugging his shoes off his feet.

The morning traffic was heavy, most of it going north toward the two factories outside Welton, Pennsylvania, the small town where Quinn, Nate, and Daeng had spent the night. The convenience store that the motel clerk had directed Quinn to was just up ahead. Quinn could have driven, but being on foot gave him a better chance to look around and make sure no one was keeping tabs on them.

After his and Nate’s encounters in Maryland and Virginia the night before, he was sure they would be on McCrillis’s most wanted list, but Quinn thought it unlikely someone from there would come as far as Pennsylvania to look for them. Still, prudence was always the best course.

At the store, he purchased orange juice, fruit labeled
FRESH FROM FLORIDA
, and some bagels, then made his way back.

Nate looked up from the computer when Quinn entered the room. “Any problems?”

Quinn shook his head. “We’re clean.”

Nate pointed at the laptop. “Story here about Boyer. ‘Hilltop House Fire. One Dead.’ Doesn’t call him by name, ‘pending notification of next of kin,’ but says he was trying to get out when he was consumed by smoke. No mention of the guards. Think they’re going the natural-causes route.”

Quinn tossed one of the bottles of orange juices to Daeng, who was sitting up on one of the beds.

“Much appreciated,” Daeng said.

“Picked up some fruit and bagels, too.” Quinn set the bag on the other bed. “But I’m not serving anyone.”

“Cream cheese?” Nate asked.

“Sorry.”

“How are we supposed to eat a bagel without cream cheese?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

Orlando called as Quinn was helping himself to a tangerine.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning back,” she replied. “How’s the patient?”

Quinn glanced at Daeng. “You know him—always the same. What about Eli’s stuff? Anything of interest there?”

“Lots, actually.” She told him what they’d found, then said, “We’re going to check out the potential mother. Should be there in the afternoon.”

“You want company?”

“We could always use company.”

“I’ll see what I can work out.”

CHAPTER
27

WASHINGTON, DC

T
HERE WAS NO
missing the somber mood when Gloria returned to McCrillis headquarters at 9:15 a.m. First the news of Ethan Boyer dying in a house fire, and then the discovery of Perry Davis in his office, collapsed over his desk, dead from an apparent heart attack.

Gloria felt a tinge of guilt about the secretary who’d found him, but that was the way it had to happen to sell the scene.

She exchanged a word or two here and there with people she knew, but avoided any lengthy conversations as she made her way to see Toby Martinez, assistant deputy head of research and her main contact in the department. He was on the phone when she walked into his office, but he waved her in and motioned for her to take a seat.

“Yeah, right…okay. Got it. Give me at least an hour. Two would be better….Thanks.” He was smiling as he talked, but as soon as he hung up, it seemed as if the weight of the world had just fallen on his shoulders. “You heard the news, right?”

“I heard.”

“Man, two people in one night. What are the odds? And both VPs, too.” He looked at her with a start. “Crap. Boyer was your boss. I’m really sorry.”

“Me, too. He was a good guy.”

“Fire. What a way to go.”

Though she had not seen the true reports yet, she was positive fire was not the way her boss had gone. She said nothing.

Martinez shook his head and leaned back. “So you’re here about the stuff in the suitcase?”

“Yeah.”

He clicked around his computer for a moment, and then turned the screen so she could read the report he’d brought up.

“Sorry,” he said. “They were all clean. Nothing hidden.”

That was disappointing.

Becker had been keeping information somewhere, she was sure of it.

“Well, thanks for taking a look. E-mail me a copy when you get a chance.”

She started to get up.

“Hold on,” he said. “You don’t want to know about the phone number?”

“Phone number?” she asked, lowering herself again.

He stared at her as if she might be crazy. “You put in a request to look into any calls Becker made or received before he fled.”

“Right,” she said, remembering. It had been a routine request, and not high priority after Becker was in her custody.

Martinez hit a few more keys and a new report came up listing six phone numbers.

“This is his call log for the twenty-four-hour period you asked about,” he said. “Not a big talker, apparently. Most recent first, with outgoing in green and incoming in red.”

Becker had placed four calls and received two.

He pointed at the top number, an outgoing call that occurred at 12:41 p.m. the afternoon he left town. “This number is for his office. We used a contact to check the records and apparently he’d called in sick.”

“Interesting,” she said.

“It is.” He pointed at the second number on the list, another outgoing that occurred at 12:03 p.m. the same day. “With the exception of this one, all the calls were from the previous day. The two incoming calls were from his doctor and the Red Cross blood donation line—and before you ask, the number’s confirmed. One of the outgoing was also his doctor, and the other to a Chinese place around dinnertime. Again, that number has been confirmed. This is the interesting one.” He pointed once more at the second from the top. “It’s a dummy. No number exists, and yet he was on the line for two minutes.” He looked at her. “Talks to someone at a nonexistent number, thirty minutes later he calls in sick, and then he leaves town? My opinion, whoever he talked to on this call”—he tapped the number again—“warned him to get out of town.”

Exactly the way she saw it.

Finally, a real break. Whoever warned Becker had to know about the girl. It was likely the person knew more than the late analyst. “I need to know where that call came from,” she said.

“Without a number, it would be extremely difficult.”

“But not impossible.”

He hemmed and hawed for a moment before he smiled. “Nothing’s ever impossible. My boys are already working on it. In fact, they’ve gotten a partial trace already.”

Martinez loved to make a problem seem insurmountable before giving a solution. She’d learned long ago it was easier to play into this than fight it. “That’s fantastic,” she said. “Please extend my thanks to your team. So, what have they learned?”

“Well, there were a lot of bounces and reroutes, but they’ve narrowed down the location to this.” He opened a map on his screen.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“Here. This’ll help.”

He widened the map, and water appeared at one edge of the land, and then at another and another until she finally recognized the area.

“That’s Hawaii.”

“Specifically a four-hundred-square-mile area of Oahu,” he clarified.

“I think your guys must have made a mistake. This is a perfect bounce location. It must go somewhere else.”

“I thought the same thing, but it’s not a bounce. They’ve checked it a dozen times. This is where the signal ended.”

“Hawaii.”

“Oahu.”

She was having trouble buying it, but in the years she’d worked for McCrillis, Martinez had never let her down.

“Four hundred square miles? Any chance of narrowing that down?” she asked.

“Possible, but it’s going to take a bit of time.”

“Send me everything you have so far and keep me updated via e-mail.” She stood up and held out her hand. “I’m counting on you guys, Toby. This could be big for the both of us, so the sooner you can pinpoint a location, the better.”

The gleam in Martinez’s eyes as they shook hands told her that her request had just moved to the top of his to-do list.

“As soon as we know, you’ll know,” he said.

“Excellent,” she said. “There is one other thing I need you to look into for me. But I’d appreciate it if you kept it on the down low. Kind of a personal matter.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.

“I need to find out everything you can about an operative who goes by the name of Quinn.”

CHAPTER
28

QUEBEC, CANADA

Q
UINN, NATE AND
Daeng’s closer proximity to Quebec City meant that their flight, though later than Orlando and Abraham’s, still arrived first. By the time Orlando and Abraham walked out of the airport, a three-row SUV had been rented and the route to Lac-Saint-Charles worked out.

Nate was behind the wheel with Quinn up front, leaving the two bucket seats in the middle row for the late arrivals. Daeng, crutches bound, had claimed ownership of the bench seat in the back, where he could stretch out his wounded leg.

“Comfy?” Orlando asked him as she buckled into her seat.

“I could use a pillow,” Daeng said.

“I bet you could.”

As soon as Abraham was strapped in, Nate took off.

“How do you want to play this?” Quinn asked Orlando.

“I don’t think Nadine Chastain will just roll over because we walk in there and start asking questions,” she said. “If we can swing it, I’d rather try a self-guided tour first. See if we can find something that proves Desirae is her daughter. Even better, something that points in Desirae’s direction. If we can avoid talking to Nadine at all, that would probably be best.”

Lac-Saint-Charles wasn’t officially a town on its own anymore, but a district within Quebec City. Even then, it had a remote country feel. It was located at the southern end of the lake for which it took its name, in a heavily forested area. The homes were quaint and colorful, most without fences, just snow-covered lawns and leafless trees, reminding Quinn very much of his hometown of Warroad, Minnesota.

“Left ahead,” he said, consulting his phone’s GPS.

They turned onto the road where Nadine lived. Like elsewhere, the houses here were on similarly sized lots, only these all seemed to back up to the woods. Nadine Chastain’s home was a half mile in on the north side, a mustard yellow two-story cottage with dual dormer windows in a black-shingled roof and a single-car garage to the side. The driveway was cleared of snow but had no cars parked on it.

They kept driving to the dead end of the street and were happy to find an area where they could not only turn around but park behind a snowbank, out of view of the homes.

“Did anyone see signs of someone home?” Quinn asked.

A chorus of nos.

He looked at Orlando. “You’re up.”

Orlando called the cell phone number she’d found for Nadine. After a few seconds, she leaned forward and said, “
Bonjour
.
Êtes vous Madame Loge?
….
Je suis vraiment désolé. J'ai fait le mauvais numéro
….
Je m'excuse de vous avoir dérangée
.”