Brett Battles - The Collected

He took a bite of his pork sandwich, and nodded at her makeshift bulletin board. “You’re missing a name.”

She looked at the glass. “Whose name?”

“Mine.”

“Right.” She wrote Quinn on a blue piece, put parentheses around it, and butted the square against Nate’s. She then repositioned Peter’s Post-it so that it was centered beneath them. “Okay, now look at the names. Anything stand out?”

Quinn set his sandwich down and examined the Post-its. “Well, the obvious connection is that I’ve worked with everyone up there, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere.”

“Just concentrate on you and Nate and Peter and Berkeley. Anything you all have in common? Any jobs you may have worked on together? Anything.”

He frowned. “We’ve all worked together over the years. Nate not so much, of course, but sometimes.” He looked at Orlando. “I could come up with a dozen or more connections that might or might not mean anything.”

She turned back to the names and stared at them for several seconds. “We need to narrow down the pool.”

As much as he thought they might be going down the wrong road, he didn’t see what else they could do at this point.

After they quickly finished lunch, Quinn called the next name on his contact list. As he was in the middle of what he realized would be another fruitless call, Orlando yelled, “Quinn!”

He put a hand over his phone and whispered, “What is it?”

“I just got a ping.”

“Sally, I’m sorry,” he said into his cell. “I need to get off the phone. I might call you back later. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine,” the woman told him.

“Thanks.”

He hung up and moved behind Orlando. On the screen of her computer was the program she’d set up to automatically ping Nate’s emergency beacon until it made a connection. Which, according to the display, had finally happened.

“Can you get a location?” he asked.

“I’m trying. The signal’s weak. I just need a little more-dammit!”

The readout in the program window switched from CONNECTED to SIGNAL LOST.

She tried to reestablish the link, but after a few minutes, it was clear it wasn’t happening. She set the software on automatic, and opened a new window that was filled end to end and top to bottom with what looked to Quinn like a single string of numbers and letters. She scrolled through it carefully, her head angling back and forth as she scanned each row.

When she reached the bottom, she grunted in frustration and leaned back. “Partial coordinates. I can get us a range based on which satellite picked up the signal, but that’s it.”

“A range is better than nothing,” Quinn said.

Not looking happy, she said, “Yeah, but I was hoping for more. Hold on.” She ran the numbers through another program, and a map appeared on the screen. “Here’s what we’ve got: St. Louis, Missouri, in the north; Trujillo, Honduras, in the south; Hermosillo, Mexico, in the west; and Roseau, Dominica, in the east.”

The area included, among other things, pretty much the entire southern US, the Caribbean, and a good chunk of Mexico, with a little bit of Central America thrown in.

“Northern Mexico,” he said, pointing at the map. He thought for a moment. “Can you bring up that news report about that manhunt?”

Before going to bed the previous night, Orlando had done a search of news sites serving northeastern Mexico to see if there was anything about the manhunt Pullman had mentioned. The only article she found was about a search police had conducted for someone they were calling “an important operator” in the drug trade. It had taken place in Reynosa, though, not Monterrey. And while witnesses said they saw someone taken into custody and flown away on a helicopter, the police had yet to confirm that. The timing was right, especially if Nate was making a run for the border, but it seemed iffy at best.

They had planned to make some follow-up calls once people woke up in the morning, but the disappearance of Peter and the possibility of even more missing had pushed the manhunt to a back burner.

Perhaps that had been a mistake.

Orlando opened a web browser, and brought up the bookmarked article. It was in Spanish, but that wasn’t a problem. Both Quinn and Orlando spoke it fluently.

Quinn leaned in as he skimmed through the piece, stopping a third of the way down. There was a quote from a captain in the Federal Police, and a photograph that must have been his official police portrait.

“This guy,” he said. “Captain Eduardo Moreno. Can you find a number where we can contact him?”

“Give me a second.”

It took more than a second, but not much. “This is interesting,” she said. “He’s not based in Reynosa.”

“Where, then?’

She glanced at him. “Monterrey.”

Quinn felt the tingling he got when he started making connections. Monterrey, where the job Nate had been working on was located. Where, if Burke was to be believed, several police cars had been waiting to intercept them. If they were actual officers and not just men dressed up in uniforms, someone would have had to organize them. Someone in a position of authority.

There are no coincidences.

“Maybe it would be better if we talked to the captain in person,” he said. If Moreno was involved, he was the best lead they had so far, and the last thing Quinn wanted to do was scare him off with a phone call.

As Orlando returned her attention to her computer, Quinn looked over at Daeng. “US passport?”

“I have two.”

“Break one out. We’re going to Mexico.”

At what he guessed was around eleven a.m., Nate heard a door open somewhere outside his cell. It was too far away to belong to one of the rooms his neighbors were being held in, and seemed to be coming from a different direction than that of the courtyard he’d had dinner in the previous evening.

Several seconds passed, then he heard footsteps. Three…no, four pairs. As they neared, he moved over to the vent and scrunched down so he could look through the thin slats.

The light in the corridor was dim, but more than enough for him to see the feet as they walked by. There were three pairs of dark work boots, and one of men’s black sneakers. The person in sneakers was between two of the people in boots, and it was clear they were assisting him.

The steps went on for another couple of seconds, then stopped. A door opened, this one much nearer than before. Intermixed with the shuffling of feet was a firm “In,” then the door slammed shut, the locking rods shifted up and down, and the three booted pairs of feet walked away.

Apparently the new member of their party had arrived.

Things remained quiet for twenty minutes, then Lanier called out like he had with Nate. The new guy, though, didn’t respond. Nate was willing to bet he’d been nearly unconscious when he was dumped off and completely knocked out now.

Back on his mattress, Nate pulled the threadbare blanket over his legs and leaned against the wall. It wasn’t that he was cold. He wanted to access the storage compartment in his prosthetic leg. Though he hadn’t spotted a camera, it was safer to assume one was tucked away somewhere, keeping tabs on him.

Acting like his leg itched, he reached under the blanket and pulled his pant leg up over his fake calf. He separated the seam just enough so he could open the storage container and remove the bolt he’d hidden away. It was doing him no good just hitching a ride. If he was going to use it-as a weapon or whatever-it needed to be accessible.

He pulled at the shaft, but the bolt didn’t move. Confused, he tried to get the tip of his finger all the way around it so he could give it a tug. The bottom end seemed to be jammed into the crevasse where the back panel and the side one met. The head of the bolt had been shoved up into the top of the container.