The Shadow Agent

by Daniel Judson

  Of the dozen-plus photos, two interested Tom the most.

  The first was of Slattery as a young girl, maybe five.

  That early face looked the most familiar to him.

  The eyes, the mouth, the shape of her cheeks—so close to the features he’d seen in another photo recently.

  The second photo was of a thirteen-year-old lighting a row of candles with that same man and woman at her side—Slattery’s bat mitzvah, no doubt.

  Tom was staring at that photo when Slattery entered the room. “You wanted me,” she said.

  Tom turned to face her. “I have some questions I think you can answer.”

  “Of course.”

  “Am I right to assume you know a lot about the Benefactor?”

  “I’ve been investigating the man and his network for most of my adult life. It’s actually the only job I’ve ever had.”

  “Do you know his identity?”

  “I believe so.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “That information was only revealed recently.”

  “How was it revealed?”

  She paused. “Someone inside his operation approached us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  Tom waited for her to say more, but when she didn’t, he said, “I need you to tell me everything you can about the Benefactor.”

  “Is there anything specific you want to know?”

  “Stella’s on her way,” Tom said. “Sooner or later, she’ll be part of this again. The consensus seems to be that the Benefactor is . . .”

  Tom was searching for the word when Slattery jumped in.

  “Vicious,” she said.

  Tom nodded. “I want to know what we’re up against. I want to know what to expect. So exactly how vicious is he?”

  Thirty-Nine

  In a darkened room, Esa struggled for consciousness.

  Whenever she approached the edges of wakefulness, the only sensation she was aware of was a weight pressing down on her body, and the only movement she could make for a long time was to open her eyes.

  But at best her lids would flutter to the halfway point before blinking closed again.

  Those brief moments of semiconsciousness, though, grew more frequent, each one lasting just a little bit longer.

  Finally, she sensed more than the heaviness of her limbs and head.

  Someone was nearby.

  At some point this presence spoke, and she recognized Karl’s voice.

  “Just take it easy,” he said. “Rest up; you’re going to need your strength.”

  It was only then that she realized she was trying to sit up—and fighting him as he attempted to subdue her.

  His hands around her wrists, he eased her back down onto the cot, then picked up the thin wool blanket she had flung off and covered her with it.

  “You’re my nurse?” she muttered.

  “Something like that.”

  “Where am I?”

  “That doesn’t matter now. He wants to see you once you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “No, you need to rest more. He wants you fully conscious.”

  She became aware of something else—a throbbing, searing pain in her shoulder. “When will I see a doctor?”

  “He already came and went—took the pellets out and stitched you up this morning. He sedated you before he left. Pretty major stuff. It’ll take a while more for you to shake it off.”

  “Where am I?” she repeated.

  “You’ll see soon enough. Right now you need to get better. He won’t see you till you’re better.”

  Esa was drifting back toward unconsciousness, but she felt the cot shift as Karl stood.

  A door opened and closed, and she heard nothing after that.

  Esa woke with a start, opening her eyes to a bright light that caused her to turn her head to one side and squint.

  The blanket was gone, and she was dressed—jeans and a black sweater, socks but no shoes.

  She tried to raise her arm to shield her eyes but felt the same heaviness she had felt before, or at least thought she did.

  There was something different, though. What was stopping her from moving her arms this time wasn’t a uniform weight pressing down but rather something specific, something localized.

  Her wrists were tied to the cot by plastic zip ties.

  Attempting to move her legs, she felt the same restraints around her ankles.

  When her eyes could tolerate the harsh light, she assessed her surroundings.

  The room was small. Brick walls, cement floors, no windows. Maybe a storage area, but her cot was the only item in it.

  The ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes of varying thickness. An exposed steel crossbeam was coated with flame-retardant foam that had been painted over, seemingly a long time ago.

  Restricted by her restraints, she’d only made a few movements so far, yet every one of them had caused a pinching sensation in her shoulder, where her torn flesh just hours ago had been sewn closed.

  At one point she heard the sound of footsteps approaching and determined as they got closer that they belonged to two men.

  The door to her small room was unlocked and opened, and the two men who had been part of her exfil team—who had disarmed and drugged her earlier—entered the room.

  Their hands were free of weapons, but their MA-1–style nylon flight jackets hung open, offering Esa glimpses of holstered sidearms.

  In the pockets of their jeans, held in a quick-draw position by clips, were folding knives.

  It looked to Esa as if these men had recently trimmed their buzz cuts, because the fine hairs covering their scalps shimmered under the bright overhead light.

  One man was blond, the other had darker roots. Both had complex tattoos on their necks and hands.

  Esa had seen their type many times before—angry, restless, and ready for violence.

  Her exiled grandfather had attracted men just like these, and there hadn’t been a month during her long years as his caretaker when some misfit hadn’t shown up at the door of his cottage, drawn to him like flies to waste.

  She’d hated those men then, and she felt an instinctual hatred for these men now.

  The blond stepped into the room, removed and opened his pocketknife, cut her ankle ties followed by the ties around her wrists, then stood beside the cot.

  Esa sat up, placing her feet on the floor. Even with socks on she felt the coldness of the cement. Immediately, her head throbbed and a wave of nausea gripped her, but she ignored both issues and stood, facing the blond.

  She asked for shoes, but the man in the doorway told her she wouldn’t need any.

  Esa didn’t bother to ask what he meant by that, because the reason for withholding footwear was clear to her—it was unlikely that she could fight well with just socks on, and it was also unlikely that she would get far, should she somehow escape.

  The blond man nodded toward the doorway. The dark-haired man gestured for her to follow him. She did, with the blond walking close behind her.

  Beyond that small storage room was a larger one. This space was vast but empty, its tall windows—four walls of them—painted over with thick paint.

  Much of the far end of that room was lost to darkness.

  A chair and a short stool were located to the right of the door behind Esa. The dark-haired man picked up both, handed the stool to his partner, and placed the chair next to Esa, positioning it so it was facing the room.

  The blond man carried the stool to the center and set it down.

  The man next to Esa told her to sit in the chair. She hesitated before following his orders.

  It was then that Esa saw something suspended from the ceiling.

  A long piece of wire, connected to a crossbeam, hung directly above the short stool.

  The end of the wire, roughly seven feet above the floor, had been fashioned into a noose.

  The dark-haired man removed a walkie-talkie from his pocket, cli
cked the “Transmit” button, and said, “She’s up.”

  Karl’s voice came back right away. “On our way.”

  Forty

  “We believe the Benefactor is a man named Pascal Henkel,” Slattery said. “Born in Munich in 1950, university educated, he worked as a mercenary following his discharge from the KSK, but it was really just a means for him to meet and, in many cases, serve under the men he admired, all those dictators who employed escaped Nazis after the war. Legend has it Henkel even worked in Saddam Hussein’s notorious torture room. It was through Skorzeny that Henkel was told of a man named Ernst Schmidt living in exile in Argentina. In 1944 Schmidt had been recruited out of the Hitler Youth to be one of Skorzeny’s guerrillas, the Werwolves. Schmidt quickly proved himself, even accompanied Skorzeny on the mission to liberate Mussolini from an Italian prison. Another Werwolf was a woman named Ilsa Hirsh. She and Schmidt married and had two sons, one of whom had a daughter in 1962.”

  “Let me guess,” Tom said. “Esa Hirsh.”

  Slattery nodded. “She assumed her grandmother’s surname at some point. Esa first met Henkel when she was a teenager. Later, when he consolidated power and became the Benefactor, Henkel employed her grandfather and father, and when she was old enough, he employed her as well.”

  “Why is he known as ‘the Benefactor’?”

  “The literal definition of benefactor is one who provides help to a cause, and that’s what he did—for a price. ‘The Benefactor’ was his code name during his time in Chile, and from there, as he took the steps necessary to bury his name and personal history, it became his only identity.”

  “Other than his time working as a torturer for Hussein, what has he done to earn his reputation for viciousness?”

  “When he was a merc in Africa he was known for flaying prisoners.” She paused. “He’d skin them alive, starting at their ankles. It often would take all night to complete, and the only parts of his victims where any skin remained were their feet. In Chile he perfected torture by electricity. I won’t even tell you the things he mastered under Hussein. He was promoted from torturer to state assassin, which he also excelled at. But he learned the hard way that all regimes fall, so he went freelance, training terrorist groups throughout the world, passing on to them what he’d learned from the men who had mentored him. Later, those groups became the pool he would draw from to build his own stateless terror organization. Just like Skorzeny, Henkel had a collection of hyperloyal operatives he controlled and directed, but the fact that he lacked any ideology allowed him to make his terror units available to anyone willing to pay. Any sides, all sides. In the ’70s terrorism was on the rise all over the world, and terroristic acts provided the perfect cover for what in reality was a targeted assassination.”

  “Henkel would direct an operative in a particular terrorist cell to carry out an assassination and disguise it as terrorism,” Tom said.

  “That was part of what he did, yes. Another service he provided was to create or increase tensions in any given region through propaganda. He would sustain that tension for as long as it was profitable, then once he’d milked it for all it was worth—once he’d made everything he could from selling arms and providing mercs—he’d tip the scales just enough to trigger an all-out war. Somalia is the best example of what he did. By supplying arms to opposing warlords and sending in small units of his own operatives to stir up the shit when necessary, he added to the chaos and escalated the violence, which resulted in more arms sales and more opportunities for his own guerrillas to create havoc.”

  Slattery paused before continuing. “There was one man who studied everything Henkel did, who observed what small-scale guerrilla units and the terrorist techniques first envisioned by Skorzeny could achieve. This man saw what happened in Somalia in 1989, when the mighty United States of America—a mixed force of Army Rangers and Delta—were driven out of a black hole they should have easily dominated. Our best-trained fighters, with the benefit of uncontested air superiority, were essentially defeated by a poorly led militia of drug-addicted insurgents armed with AKs and Soviet-era RPGs.”

  “You’re talking about the Battle of Mogadishu,” Tom said. “The events of Black Hawk Down.”

  Slattery nodded. “And for one man, that confirmed what he had experienced fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. All it took was a ten percent loss of personnel and a prolonged fight with no clear win in sight to drain a superpower of its will to fight. The same thing happened to the US in Vietnam. Mogadishu was a bad day for a lot of good fighters, but in terms of losses it was, at best, a bloody nose. And yet within weeks the Rangers and Delta were pulled out by an administration that was more concerned with bad headlines back home than achieving its objective. The man who saw this—who lived it firsthand fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, who celebrated as the US recoiled after Black Hawk Down—was Osama Bin Laden. All Bin Laden wanted was to defeat the ‘great Western Satan that is the United States of America,’ and all he needed to achieve that was to drag the US into a war in Afghanistan—the graveyard of empires. He set off a truck bomb in the World Trade Center back in ’93 and attacked the USS Cole in 2000, but it took 9/11 for him to finally achieve his goal, which was the realization of Skorzeny’s theory that acts of terrorism—small, independent cells working toward a shared goal—could not only affect policy but also dictate it. Nineteen men hijacked four commercial airliners, and eighteen years later the US is still fighting a war that can’t ever be won, because the enemy isn’t a place that can be bombed or a division of fighters that can be overrun. It isn’t even an idea. It’s an emotion, a gut feeling. You can kill people, you can flatten entire cities and regions, but you can’t kill the irrational hatred of ‘the other’ that’s in all of us. I’ve read your psych reports; I know your personal history—you seem to be a decent man, defined by your deep sense of loyalty and high intelligence. And yet I know there are ‘others’ in your life—men and women who oppose you in one way or another or whose values are in direct conflict with yours and who therefore can be viewed, when push comes to shove, as less worthy of living. It’s human nature to feel hatred for those who are in opposition to us. Not to get all Jedi Knight on you, but hatred rises from only one place: fear. Fear of losing to the other, fear of having what’s ours taken by the other—that’s the engine that has driven human history. The ideological children of Skorzeny know this. As long as there is that innate fear and hatred, there will be wars. And asymmetrical wars cannot be won by the side with the most power, not anymore. The philosophical children of Skorzeny bet their lives on that understanding, and the smart ones, well, they find every and any way to profit from it.”

  Tom took a moment, then said, “You said someone inside Henkel’s operation approached us recently. That’s how you now know who Henkel is, where he came from, the men he studied under.”

  “That’s correct. For the first time, we have an agent on the inside. Negotiations are ongoing, but the plan is that when the time is right, he will act.”

  “Act how?”

  “Take out Henkel for us.”

  “You trust this man.”

  “It’s not about trust. Everyone has a price.”

  “And the Colonel knows about this.”

  “He handled the negotiations.”

  “Why didn’t he say anything about this to me?”

  “He wanted you to stay focused on what you needed to do.”

  “So why are you telling me?”

  “Because like you, I know what it’s like to have vital information withheld, and for far too long.” She paused. “And before this is over, we may need to depend on each other. To stay alive—to keep those we care about alive—we have to trust each other fully. I’ll keep nothing from you if you keep nothing from me. Deal?”

  Tom nodded. “Deal.”

  Slattery extended her hand, and Tom took it.

  “So who is your man on the inside?” he said.

  Forty-One

  It took close to
a minute before Esa heard another set of approaching footsteps.

  These took much longer to reach her, and they were echoing loudly by the time they had arrived at the door at the far end of the large room.

  Karl opened that door and started to cross the empty space, followed by a man Esa had never seen before.

  An older man, maybe in his sixties.

  The two men reached the wire noose and stood on either side of the stool beneath it.

  Karl was dressed in the usual expensive, well-fitting suit that showed off his powerful build, but over his right shoulder was a medium-size backpack made of ballistic nylon.

  The tailored suit and tactical bag struck Esa as being at odds with each other.

  Another moment passed before Esa heard one more set of footsteps approaching—but this time a single set.

  Finally, those steps reached the door. It opened, and the Benefactor entered. He was talking on a cell phone, but ended the call once he reached Karl and the unknown man.

  The Benefactor looked at Esa for a moment before saying to the unknown man, “Would you hand me that stool, General?”

  The man picked up the stool and handed it to the Benefactor, who walked toward Esa.

  Setting the stool in front of her, he sat down, facing her.

  “I hope you’re not in too much discomfort, Esa,” he said. “Unfortunately, I instructed our doctor not to administer any pain medication after your surgery. It is essential that you feel what is about to happen to you, and, of course, any medication that would ease the pain caused by your wound would also numb you. I need you fully aware, able to sense everything—every sensation and emotion. Otherwise, there’d be no point in doing what now must be done.”

  Esa glanced briefly at Karl and the unknown man.

  “And what now must be done?” she said to the Benefactor.

  “Address your betrayal.”

  “The video proves that I gave them nothing.”

  “Yes, that much is clear.” He nodded to the two thugs behind him. “Our friends here enjoyed that show quite a bit, by the way. In fact, they reminded me just moments ago that, despite your age, you’d bring a fair price, should the decision be made to sell you instead.” He smiled. “Our partners in that trade are skilled at confinement, but you’d likely escape nonetheless, so that isn’t an option I’m willing to consider. Can’t risk the possibility of you—with all your skills and training, and with the blood that runs through your veins—getting free and coming after me for revenge.”