Shadow of Betrayal

He slipped his hand into the interior pocket of his jacket and retrieved a square piece of plastic, half the length of a business card, and a quarter-inch thick.

“What’s that?” the man asked.

Quinn glanced over again, but said nothing.

The answer to the question was, “A digital recorder,” but if Primus was too stupid to figure it out on his own, Quinn wasn’t going to enlighten him.

There were a couple of buttons along the top. Quinn pushed one of them, then wedged the square into the partially opened, unused ashtray, mic facing out.

“Time to talk,” Quinn said.

“I told you the meet is off.” The man looked out the window. “In fact, you can just drop me off here.”

Quinn whipped the car to the right, ignoring the honks from the car he cut in front of, then brought them to a sudden stop at the curb. He reached over and turned off the digital recorder, then pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster and rested it in his lap below window level. One pull of the trigger and Primus would be looking for a new way to digest his food.

The sudden stop must have surprised Primus, for he hadn’t moved an inch.

“You want out? Fine,” Quinn said. “But the step you take onto the curb will be your last.”

“W-What?”

“Who are you?”

The man’s gaze flicked from Quinn’s eyes to the gun and back. “You shoot me and you’ll lose everything that I know.” The words came out slow, as if the man were trying them out as he spoke.

“True,” Quinn said, the gun unmoving. “But at the moment it would be pretty damn satisfying.”

Quinn continued to stare at the man, daring him to give a reason to pull the trigger. After only a few seconds, the man turned away.

“So, are you leaving or are you staying?” Quinn asked.

The man mumbled something.

“What?”

“Staying.”

Quinn stared at him for a few seconds longer, then pulled the car back out into traffic, aiming the gun away from his passenger only after they were in the flow with the other cars.

He reached over and turned the recorder back on.

“Let’s start with a simple one,” Quinn said. “Who are you?”

“No,” the man said. “That’s not part of the deal. It has nothing to do with what I know.”

“It’ll tell us how serious to take it.”

Quinn could feel the man tense beside him. “That gunman back at the museum should have told you that.”

“You could have set it up,” Quinn said. “To convince us.”

“You think I’d—” He stopped himself.

For half a minute neither of them spoke. Then the man said, “My name isn’t going to tell you if the information is any good.”

“Then tell me something that will.”

Again, silence.

“I know who you are,” the man said.

“Don’t count on it.”

The man let out a small laugh. “You’re that cleaner.”

Quinn kept his eyes forward and his left hand lying across the grip of his pistol, his outward demeanor as cool as ever.

“Quinn,” Primus said. “Jonathan Quinn.”

Quinn did nothing to confirm or deny.

“You were in Singapore last September. Right?”

Quinn remained quiet.

“You had an unfortunate encounter with an assassin. I believe she killed a friend of yours.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Me?” the man said. “I’m one of the ones she worked for.”

CHAPTER

21

HOW HE KEPT FROM PULLING THE TRIGGER OF HIS SIG, Quinn never knew. He wanted to. He wanted to so much that his index finger ached from desire. He wanted to see the expression on Primus’s face as one of Quinn’s bullets shredded the man’s insides.

If he was who he said he was … if he was in charge of the assassin who had killed Quinn’s friend Steven Markoff the year before in a quest to do the same to a U.S. congressman, then he was right. The only thing keeping him alive was the information in his head.

And if he was who he said he was, it meant one other thing, too.

He was a member of the LP.

Only why would the LP be trying to work with the DDNI and Peter?

A year before, Quinn hadn’t even heard of the group, and now here they were again. While his knowledge of the organization had grown in the last year, it was still limited. That first time he’d crossed them, Peter had told him all he knew: that the LP was a shadow organization working from both within and without the U.S. government, that they had their own agenda, a desire to use the government for their own gains, taking an active hand in ensuring that their investments would flourish. Conveniently, those investments seemed to be wrapped up in the defense and security industries. So the LP’s main tools for keeping those industries flourishing was destabilization and the occasional bout of chaos.

After his encounter with the LP in Singapore, Quinn had wanted to learn more. So with Orlando’s help, he began subtly nosing around. It wasn’t long before they both suspected the LP’s financial angle was a means, not the end, and that the desire for power, real political power, was the main objective. And to achieve this, they’d inject a bit of chaos and instability throughout the world whenever they felt it necessary.