[Quinn 01] - The Cleaner

'I don't know. But he's obviously not down here. The basement door was still locked. If he didn't get away, then he must still be upstairs somewhere. You did say he was good.'

'I asked for professionals and Duke gives me morons.'

Quinn's lips pressed hard against each other. Duke, again.

Silence. 'What about in there?' One asked.

'The cold storage?'

'Yes.'

Their footsteps approached the refrigeration unit and stopped near the door. 'There's a safety pin that acts as a lock. It's still in place. If he was inside, he couldn't have put it back in.'

One finally said, 'Let's go.'

Quinn listened as the men left the room. He heard the door close, but he didn't move. Something wasn't right.

Finally after several minutes, he heard the shuffling of feet. Then a door opened, and the man who had been waiting behind departed.

Quinn remained still for a moment longer, his mind racing. It was the lingerer. The voice from the radio. The

person Matz had called One. The man Piper had

warned him about. A man he'd last seen in Toronto. Borko.

Chapter 21

It was nearly one in the morning by the time Quinn finally made his way out of the building. Borko had left guards, but as the Serbian himself had admitted, Duke's men were morons. Quinn had little difficulty sneaking through their surveillance.

Quinn caught the last train heading north out of the Rathaus Neukolln station, the U7. There were only a handful of other passengers aboard. For a while he just rode, his mind racing. He knew he had to get to the emergency rendezvous point, but he was having a hard time processing everything that had just gone down.

Borko had gotten the better of him, no denying that. Quinn had been lulled into believing he was in control. But it was Borko who had been in control all along. And even though Quinn had actually gotten away, Borko was still in control.

The Serbian wasn't an idiot. If they'd been able to grab Orlando and Nate, they wouldn't have killed them yet. Borko would know as long as the two of them were still breathing, they would be insurance in case he had any problems with Quinn.

Quinn got off at the Bismarck Strasse. Back at street level, he hailed a cab and took it to Ku'damm. While he sat in the back, he removed a small square of purple paper from his backpack. It was a sticker, one of a dozen he was carrying. Orlando and Nate had matching sets, only Orlando's stickers were gray and Nate's were black. Dark colors were chosen because they would draw less attention and could easily go unnoticed.

Quinn had the cab driver drop him off two blocks from the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. During the day, it was the most popular tourist site in the city. As one of the few remaining bombed-out structures from World War II left standing, it served as a memory of what had happened and could never be allowed to happen again. But at the late hour Quinn arrived, it was all but deserted.

An indoor shopping mall sat just to the southeast of the monument. There was an outside stairway leading down from the street to the lower level of the mall. When he was sure he was not being watched, Quinn descended the steps.

If possible, the air seemed even colder the lower he went. It was worse than Colorado, he realized. More like nights in the dead of winter from his childhood near the Canadian border.

Halfway down on the right side, he attached his purple square to the edge of the handrail. He had been hoping to find squares from Orlando and Nate, but his was the first. He tried not to think about what that might mean. In the morning he'd return to check again. Surely their markers would be there then.

In the meantime, he needed a place to sleep. Returning to the Dorint or the Four Seasons was out of the question. For that matter, it was probably a good idea for the moment to avoid all hotels.

That really left him only one choice. Reluctantly, he went back up the stairs and hailed another cab.

'Pilsner, bitte,' Quinn said, as he took an empty stool at the end of the bar inside Der Goldene Krug.

The bartender was a short, thin man with a full mustache and a three-day growth of beard. He filled a glass from the tap and put it in front of Quinn.

'Zwei euro.'

Quinn started to pull some coins out of his pocket when a voice stopped him.

'Nein, Max.'

The bartender looked over his shoulder at a woman who had just emerged from a back room. 'It's on the house, okay?' she continued in German. Max shrugged, then moved away to help someone

else.

The woman, a brunette with an hourglass figure who looked much younger than she probably was, walked along the bar until she was standing just behind Quinn. She tapped the shoulder of the man who was sitting on the stool next to him, and motioned him to move elsewhere. The customer was about to protest until he realized who wanted his seat. Without a word, he picked up his beer and moved to a table in the corner of the room.