The Enraged (A Jonathan Quinn Novel) Read Online Free PDF

he said to Daeng. “No. Wait.” He looked at his sister. “ You call them.” He quickly explained about Peter’s message and how it was delivered. “Tell them you’re Misty Blake, and you received the letter they sent. Ask them what their instructions were, where it came from, how long they had it. Can you do that?”
    “Yeah, sure,” Liz said.
    While Liz and Daeng moved to the other side of the room, Quinn brought his phone back up to his ear. “What does the message mean?”
    “I was hoping you would know,” Misty said.
    “You don’t?”
    “No.”
    “Any ideas?”
    “I was thinking it might be code, but the more I looked at it, the more it reminds me of the kind of passwords Peter liked to use.”
    “If it’s a password, what’s it to?”
    “Who knows?”
    “You must have some ideas.”
    “Off the top of my head…well, could be to one of the computers he stashed at his apartment or at the townhouse that we used as the Office’s backup headquarters.” When she spoke again, a hint of reluctance entered her voice. “I could go check, I guess.”
    “Not alone,” Quinn said. “Let me see if I can get Steve to go with you.” Steve Howard was the DC-area operative who’d accompanied Misty the last time she went to Peter’s apartment.
    “Okay,” she said, sounding relieved. “Thank you.”
    “I’ll call you right back.”
    After he hung up, he glanced at the other two, but Liz was still on the phone, so he located Howard’s number and gave him a call.
    “It’s Quinn,” he said.
    “Hey, can I call you back?” Howard said. “I’m a little tied up right now.”
    “Are you on a job?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So you’re not home.”
    “No. Boston. I’ll be back late tonight, though.”
    “That might work. Call me when you get home. I might have something for you.”
    “Will do.”
    When Quinn hung up this time, Daeng and Liz were waiting for him.
    “Well?” he said.
    “I talked to the manager,” Liz said. “Didn’t take much to convince him I was Misty, which, I’ve got to tell you, convinced me never to rent a box from him.”
    “Did he tell you anything?”
    “Oh, he was more than happy to share. Said he never met the sender in person. All their communications were by e-mail, except when he received the envelope he was supposed to forward. A messenger brought that in. The envelope was already addressed to Misty, with the mailbox place’s return address typed. His instructions were to send the letter if he received an e-mail telling him to do so within the next six months. If he didn’t, the envelope was to be burned. The only other instruction was that it needed to be signed for.”
    The skin on Quinn’s arms started tingling. A dead-man switch, only in this case not one designed to stop a machine from working if the operator died, but to trigger the e-mail that was sent to the P.O. box business in Raleigh upon news of Peter’s death.
    How? Quinn didn’t know, nor, for the moment, did it matter. What did was the fact Peter knew he might die, and had a message he wanted to make sure was sent in the event of that happening.
    Peter’s words echoed in Quinn’s head.
    I have a pretty good idea where the leak came from .
    That had been nearly the last thing he ever said to Quinn. He’d been talking about the list naming the members of the team who’d worked in the ill-fated Romero assassination, the list that had been leaked to Romero so that the madman could exact his revenge.
    Ignoring the connection was impossible. Peter had apparently known his life was in danger just months before someone had handed him over to Romero. Could the message he had sent to Misty point to the identity of the leaker? The person may not have physically been on Duran Island torturing the men, but he or she was as responsible for what had happened as Romero and his people. No, more responsible. For Peter’s death. For the injuries suffered by Nate and Lanier and Berkeley and Curson.
    And for nearly