Becoming Quinn by Brett Battles Page A

necessary.
    When the hotel manager and the security man came out, Durrie listened closely to the conversation. He couldn’t help being impressed by the rookie cop’s resourcefulness. Using the cover of the robberies was excellent. It played right to the hotel’s biggest concern—the safety of its guests. Though he couldn’t see the kid’s face, Durrie could sense no hesitation or uncertainty in Oliver’s voice. It was as if the cop truly believed what he was saying. Durrie knew veteran operatives who wouldn’t have been able to pull off the deception as well as the kid did.
    By the end, the cop had talked himself into a free look at the hotel’s security tapes without the need of a warrant or even confirmation from someone higher up in the force. Brilliant.
    Also a potential problem.
    There was no doubt that Durrie, Larson and Timmons—the two ops team members who’d also been staying at the Lawrence—would be on those tapes. But chances were slim at best that Oliver would peg any of them as people of interest. Like always, standard procedures had been in place, and the three men had acted as if they didn’t know each other while at the hotel.
    No way the cop would spot them, but damn if Oliver wasn’t clever to get this far.
    Durrie would give him a day. That would be more than enough to make sure the kid wasn’t a threat. And if, for some reason, it turned out he was, Durrie would undoubtedly be ordered to eliminate him.
    There was a third possibility, but that barely even registered on the cleaner’s radar.
    Slowly he stood up and lifted his arms, a man stretching after sitting for too long. He twisted at the waist, working out those last creaking muscles that weren’t actually bothering him, and took a look around. As he knew they would be, Oliver and the two hotel employees were gone. As for the others still in the lobby, none were looking in his direction.
    Durrie was just another anonymous business traveler, here today, gone tomorrow. Or, in his case, here right now, gone in thirty minutes.
    He went up to his room to get his bag.
     
     
     

9
     
    There was a digital clock in the middle of the wall of monitors. Its numbers were red and impossible to miss, a quick reference for security guards tasked with keeping an eye on the feeds from the hotel cameras.
    The monitor room wasn’t particularly large, but it was big enough for two to sit behind the laminated desk set back several feet from the monitor wall. There were eleven screens in all: a large one in the center, with ten smaller units surrounding it.
    Jake was in the chair nearest the door. Beside him was a guard named Parker. After making introductions and giving Parker a quick rundown, Evans had left them alone, with a simple, “If you need anything else, Parker can find me.”
    The guard had then routed the archived footage feed to the small monitor in the lower left corner, closest to Jake.
    “We have everything on hard drive,” Parker explained.
    “That must take up a lot of space,” Jake said. Most systems he’d come across still relied on tape backups, or DVDs.
    “It does. Each day gets its own set of disks.” It was obvious Parker was enjoying his role as police assistant. “We have sixty sets in all, so basically we keep footage for sixty days before the set gets used again. The way the system works is that there are six disk ports. One contains today’s disks, four contain the last four days’, and the last one contains the disks from two months ago that will be used tomorrow.”
    “Got it,” Jake said. “So the days I need to look at are still connected to the system.”
    “Yep.”
    Parker showed him how to access the older footage, then Jake got to work.
    The hotel had thirty-six different cameras throughout the property, mainly covering the lobby, elevators, outside exits, and employee-only areas.
    Even just skimming through the last forty-eight hours, it would take him forever to go through all the different feeds. So