The fractured, p.21
The Fractured, page 21
part #12 of Jonathan Quinn Series
As the men entered the building, Daeng hopped to his feet. “Watch my back.”
He hurried back inside the apartment building and hustled down to the ground floor.
When he reached the front door, he said, “Am I clear to enter the street?”
“I see movement in the offices but no one’s at the windows. Go.”
“Copy.”
He pulled a tracker disk from inside his backpack, his keys from his pocket, then exited the building.
“Still clear,” Jar said.
Pretending he was heading to one of the cars, he crossed the road on a diagonal path that would take him by the rear end of the SUV. As he neared the vehicle, he fiddled with the keys like he was looking for the right one, then dropped them so they skidded toward the SUV’s rear tire.
Acting annoyed, he knelt down and grabbed them. When he started to rise again, he slipped the disk inside the wheel well, where it adhered to the side panel.
A second later, he was walking down the street again, toward a car that wasn’t there.
*
Nate watched the dot representing Daeng descend to street level. Jar’s dot remained on the roof. Once outside, Daeng paused, crossed the street, paused, and headed in roughly the same direction as the café Nate was in.
Nate’s concern that he’d been discovered disappeared when Daeng turned at the next intersection and stopped.
Something was definitely up.
Nate signaled the waiter for his check.
*
Jar thought Daeng’s acting job was a bit over the top, but since none of St. Amand’s people had seen his performance, she decided no harm had been done. She did, however, make a mental note to give him feedback when they had time.
She swung her binoculars back to the fifth-floor office. Most of the action she’d seen had happened out of sight, on the opposite side of the building. Every once in a while, though, she had seen movement through a doorway, and once, the driver had come into a street-side office, where he grabbed a hard-sided case and exited again.
Now there was no movement whatsoever.
She focused on the building’s entrance, but nothing was going on there, either.
“Status?” Daeng asked.
“Still inside,” she said.
“Are you picking up the tracker?”
Jar opened the app and selected the ID for the bug Daeng had used. A red dot glowed on a map, right where the SUV was parked.
“We’re good.”
She looked back at the building and sucked in a surprised breath. “They’re outside again.”
The men were all carrying hard cases—two of them lugging a pair each, the other two transporting one per man. The cases were wide enough to hold a couple of footballs—the international kind, not American—and, with the exception of two of them, looked to be the length of a standard briefcase. The two outliers were over a meter long.
Jar lowered her binoculars and took pictures as the men loaded the cases into the back of the SUV.
“It looks like they’re getting ready to leave,” she reported.
“I’ll follow them,” Daeng said. “You stay on the roof until they’re gone, then catch up.”
“Copy.”
As soon as the last case was safely inside, the men climbed into the vehicle.
“Affirmative on leaving,” she said as the motor started.
“Copy.”
The SUV pulled from the curb and headed down the street. When she could no longer see it, she texted Orlando the best pictures she’d taken and hurried toward the stairs.
*
By the time Daeng had his scooter on the road, the tracker app indicated he was five blocks behind the SUV. But Rome being Rome, his bike provided him the advantage of being able to maneuver around the traffic the SUV had to slog through. Soon he could see the vehicle a dozen car lengths ahead.
Deciding that was close enough for now, he settled into the flow and turned on his mic. “I have them in sight.”
No reply.
“Jar? Do you copy?”
Silence.
He scanned for a break in traffic to turn and go back, but it was bumper to bumper. “Jar! Do you copy?”
A beat. “I copy. Sorry…I, um…I’ll be there soon.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” she said quickly.
Ahead, the SUV had just turned a corner.
Daeng hurried to the intersection and swung onto the new road.
*
It took Jar four minutes to reach her scooter. She consulted her phone to get a fix on where the SUV and Daeng were, picked out a route that should put her on an intercept course, and pulled onto the street.
Three blocks down, as she rounded the corner to the right, she glimpsed someone hurrying down the sidewalk. She would have ignored him if not for the way he ran—with the slightest of hitches in his step—which seemed familiar.
She looked again, but he was gone.
Feeling a sense of unease, she slowed and turned back the other way.
“I have them in sight,” Daeng said in her ear.
Though she heard him, she was trying to figure out where the runner had gone.
“Jar? Do you copy?”
The runner must have entered one of the buildings. She didn’t have time to go searching. Besides, it couldn’t have been who she thought it was.
“Jar! Do you copy?”
She turned the scooter around again. “I copy.”
*
According to Nate’s phone, the nearest taxi stand was a couple of blocks south. He headed in that direction, thinking he needed to work on getting his own transportation as soon as he had some time.
The traffic light at the intersection ahead was green, but he didn’t think it would stay that way for long, so he picked up the pace and made it across just in time. He was several meters farther down the sidewalk when he heard a scooter turn the corner behind him. As it passed by, he caught sight of the driver—a thin, tiny woman with black hair flying out the bottom of her helmet.
Jar! Crap.
He dropped behind the cars parked at the curb.
When he heard the scooter slow, he quietly chanted, “Just keep going. Just keep going.”
Only instead of driving on, the scooter circled back and rolled slowly by his position. If Jar parked and got off, she’d find him right away.
After she turned back toward her original direction, he heard her say, “I copy. Sorry…I, um…I’ll be there soon.”
The scooter took off and vanished down the street. Nate checked the tracker to make sure she was gone, then got up and resumed his journey to get a taxi.
*
The SUV stuck to the main thoroughfares as it traveled past the Forum on its way into the eastern portion of the city. Daeng was able to keep the vehicle in sight, and hadn’t needed to check the tracker for over twenty minutes.
When the vehicle turned onto a less crowded side street, he assumed they were getting close to their destination. Sure enough, ten minutes later the SUV stopped.
Daeng pulled to the curb just around the corner, long enough to don sunglasses and make sure his hair was all tucked under the helmet, and then turned the corner and drove by the SUV. The men were heading into the restaurant they’d parked in front of, a place called De Luca’s.
Seemed odd to drive this far just for lunch. Unless, of course, the restaurant was close to their next destination.
Daeng would have loved to go inside, too, but having been seen up close the night before by the big driver, that was out of the question.
He parked his bike down the street, and perused the produce on display in front of a small market on the corner. He’d barely had a chance to move from the squash to the tomatoes when the restaurant door opened again. Three of the men emerged and headed for the rear of the SUV. As one of them opened the hatch, the driver stepped out of De Luca’s in the company of an older man wearing an apron. Instead of joining the others, they stood near one of the patio tables, talking.
The older guy nodded several times, as if agreeing to whatever the driver was saying. The restaurant manager? Owner?
At the SUV, the men removed the six hard cases and carried them toward the restaurant. After a quick word with the driver, they headed inside.
So, not just a lunch stop.
The driver and the older guy shared a few more words and shook hands. The driver walked over to the SUV and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Daeng eyed the restaurant, expecting the others to come out, but the vehicle’s engine roared to life and the driver sped away.
Heading back to his scooter, Daeng clicked on his mic. “Daeng for Jar.”
“Go for Jar.”
“Where are you?”
“Parked a block behind you. My tracker shows the SUV moving again.”
“Yeah, they just left.”
“What were they doing here?”
He described what he’d seen. “I want to get a look inside the restaurant and see if I can figure out what’s up, but…”
“But what if they remember you from last night?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I will go.”
He almost argued that the driver was gone, and was the only one who could ID Daeng, but he realized she was right again. Though it was unlikely the men who’d stayed behind would recognize Daeng, he couldn’t be sure. Jar, on the other hand, had been facing away from the group when the driver told them to get out of there. None of them would know what she looked like.
“Are you sure you can handle it?” he asked.
“I go in. I order spaghetti. I eat. I leave. Yes, I can handle it.”
“I’ll be right outside if you run into any problems.”
“That would be a waste of resources. You should follow the SUV.”
Normally, he’d have done exactly that. But Jar, despite having gained quite a bit of field experience since January, was still learning. “I think it’s better if I stay.”
“Daeng, I will be fine. What if the SUV is going to where St. Amand is right now? We can’t miss that opportunity.”
“What if St. Amand is inside the restaurant?”
“Then we will have both possibilities covered, won’t we?”
He snorted. “Okay, I’ll go. But leave your mic on so I can hear everything you hear.”
“Copy.”
*
The first cabbie Nate used quickly became uncomfortable with the many changes in direction Nate gave him. The man finally pulled to the curb and all but physically shoved Nate to the street. The guy behind the wheel of the second taxi was younger, and actually got excited at the prospect of not having an exact destination in mind. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Nate had promised a hundred-euro tip.
The switching of cars and Daeng’s head start meant Daeng had been at his stop in the eastern part of the city for nearly ten minutes by the time Nate arrived in the area. Jar had also shown up there, three minutes before Nate.
To be safe, Nate had the cabbie stop a block from Jar and two from Daeng. He gave the driver both the fare and the promised tip, and held up another hundred-euro bill. “Wait for me for fifteen minutes. If I don’t come back, you can leave. Okay?”
“I’ll wait twenty,” the guy said. This was probably the most fun he’d had in ages.
Nate gave him the extra hundred and climbed out.
When he reached the intersection with the street that ran past the corner Daeng was on, he looked at the tracker again. Check that—the corner Daeng had been on. Nate’s friend was on the move, at a pace that indicated he was using a vehicle again—a scooter seemed most likely, given that’s what Jar had been riding.
Jar was moving, too, but her pace was walking, not driving.
Nate considered returning to the taxi and following Daeng, but he was curious as to what Jar was up to.
He moved to the grocery store at the corner where Daeng had been.
There was no need to check the tracker now. He could see Jar walking down the other side of the road, away from him. She passed a few buildings and entered what looked like a restaurant.
From the way she had walked up to it, the restaurant had been her destination.
Nate scanned the street. Not quite straight across from the restaurant was a bakery. He’d have preferred a café like before, but the place did have a few tables set up on the sidewalk, which hopefully meant there were more inside.
Chapter Twenty
A bell rang as Jar entered De Luca’s restaurant. Two of the five tables in the front room were occupied, but not by the men from the SUV. Through an archway to her left, she could see into two additional dining areas, but both appeared to be unoccupied.
A stocky, older man wearing an apron stuck his head around the archway and said, “Buon pomeriggio. Prego, si accomodi al tavolo che preferisce.”
She understood the good afternoon, and though the rest of his words were a mystery, it was obvious from the way he gestured at the tables that she could sit anywhere. She chose the spot nearest the archway, taking the seat that allowed her a clear view into the back rooms.
The waiter returned a few minutes later with a menu, and asked her what she wanted to drink. At least, that’s what she thought he asked.
“Water…um…acqua?”
“Si, si. Pellegrino?”
“Si,” she said, and mangled her attempt at thanking him in Italian.
“Grazie,” he corrected her.
“Grazie,” she repeated.
He started to walk away.
“Wait. May I order, too?”
The waiter looked back.
She held up the menu, and gestured at him to write something down.
“Ah, okay, okay,” he said.
He nodded as she pointed at items on the menu, but by the time she finished he looked concerned. “Um…you…mangi…uh, eat. You eat?”
“Friends coming.” She motioned to the other chairs.
He smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.
“Toilet?” she asked.
He pointed through the archway toward the back, and then headed toward one of the other occupied tables.
Wanting to remain mobile, Jar slipped a couple of the microcameras into her pocket and pushed her backpack under the table before heading to the back of the restaurant.
Her large order would buy her plenty of time, but she didn’t want to be gone too long and cause the waiter to become curious. She decided to give herself five minutes, with the possibility of an extension if necessary.
Beyond the last of the additional dining rooms was a hallway that ran off to either side. A sign with the familiar man and woman toilet symbols pointed to the right. Past the toilets was another doorway. From the sounds coming from the other side, she guessed it was the kitchen. Down the hallway to the left was a set of narrow stairs that curved out of sight. She doubted the men had gone into the kitchen, which left somewhere upstairs as their possible destination.
She glanced back into the restaurant. The waiter was nowhere to be seen, and the only customer in sight had his back to her. Jar went left.
When she reached the stairs, she heard voices drifting down from the floor above. She pulled out one of the micro cams and stuck it in an unobtrusive spot with a view of the ground-floor hall.
Worried that the old wooden stairs might squeak, she placed her foot at the edge of the first tread and transferred her weight. A slight moan, but nothing earth shattering. Sticking to the sides of the steps, she worked her way up to the top, where she found a hallway that paralleled the one below.
There were several doors along the hall, the voices she’d heard coming from behind one at the far end. The nearest door had been left open a few centimeters. The room was dark and quiet.
She carefully pushed the door inward, and found an unoccupied private dining room.
She continued down the hall and discovered two more rooms with identical setups.
She checked the time. She’d been gone for almost four minutes. She studied the hallway and found a spot to hide the final camera.
She had just finished securing it in place, and was contemplating walking down to the last door and listening for a moment, when she heard its handle turn.
With zero chance of making it to the stairs without being seen, she rushed into the nearest private dining room and hid behind the partially open door.
Someone entered the hallway and walked past her door. She recognized the man in the suit as one of those she and Daeng had been following.
She expected him to take the stairs down, but he stopped at the top and called, “Matteo!”
After a few seconds, someone shouted from below.
When the suited man spoke again, he did so in Italian, which didn’t help Jar.
