by Sam Powers
“I would not bring that up, sir.” Although he had come to loathe Khalidi, Faisal still found himself compelled to do his well-paid job efficiently; and discussing Borz Abubakar had no upside.
“Then what?”
“Well, you have two options. You can try again to have the reporter eliminated, which may yet work. Or you can pull some strings in America and see if you can convince her publisher that the material is both defamatory and irresponsible. Even just getting him to demand to know the reporter’s source might be enough. It appears much of the material has been leaked by someone with considerable state-level intelligence.”
Khalidi smiled. “Faisal, you surprise me sometimes, you are so helpful.”
Without me you’d probably be dead six times over, Faisal thought. “It is my pleasure to serve, sir,” he said.
JUNE 1, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.
“PAGE SIX?!?” Alex was fuming. “Page freaking six, Ken? You must be kidding me!”
Her aging editor cowered slightly behind his old honey maple typewriter desk, which he’d carted from paper to paper for years. It had a small name plate at the front that said “Ken Davis” in fading gold gilt. Its one other notable feature was that it was almost completely covered, every square inch occupied with an assembly of pens, paper, newspapers, notebooks, coffee cups, cutlery, a tub of change, three pop cans and, perhaps surprisingly given Ken’s midsection, a bottle of salad dressing.
“It’s a follow, on a story nobody else is picking up much yet,” he mumbled.
“Jesus H…. You remember that movie “Zoolander”? I feel like Will Farrell in that flick: I feel like I’ve taken crazy pills. Any reporter with half a brain should want on this.”
“What did you expect?” he said. “You have a great story, but it has a lot working against it: your main source is anonymous, which means any reporter following it basically has to quote us; your overseas sources involving the Harbin incident are both nebulous and inconsistent in their accounts. You don’t find the guy from Africa – you know, the arms dealer who can tie Khalidi directly to Kalispell’s decisions. And that, incidentally, is the biggest reason the follow was on page six…”
“Yeah, but…”
“But nothing!” He’d been an editor a long time, and Davis only put up with so much reporter bull before moving on. “Look, I’m not going to give you a line of shit here, but the publisher hated that story. Hated it. Told me his friends in the business community – you know, our advertisers – had the same questions he did about who our main source was and what axe that person had to grind. Then there’s the fact that outside of the African incident, all of the so-called “victims” of the ACF’s operations were scumbags in and of themselves; plus, they were overseas scumbags, and nobody here really gives too much of a rat’s ass, you know? So that’s why it was on six…”
“Look, Kenny…”
“Don’t Kenny me, Ms. Malone…” Then he softened for a moment. “Look, Alex, we all know how good you are. That’s why we printed the first piece and gave you the cover. I know if there’s more solid material out there, you’re the person who can dig it up. But it’s like anything big: you have to follow the paper and the money. Right now, you’ve got the African massacre, and that’s a huge piece. But the rest is mostly innuendo. You have to show intent, prove motivation, get someone to turn over on the right people. Get me something more solid that anonymous sources; get me a whistleblower on the ACF board, or in the background. Get me a line on who the hell is blowing these guys away. Get me anything! Just don’t file any more of this “sources say” stuff, because I’ve got a good goddamn sense that if we had to take this into court, your high-level source – entirely real though I’m sure he is – would run for the hills rather than testify.”
Alex sighed. She had a sense of dread, and considered for a moment that Myrna might have been right; she might have gotten ahead of her own story, ahead of the evidence – at least inasmuch as she could prove. Chances were good that both her source was dead on and that she was protected by the legal “absence of malice” clause. But it wasn’t her job to just duck legal issues. She needed the whole story.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” he said, having known her for years and assuming there was a catch. “Really?”
“Really,” she said, pained at having to be contrite. “I’ll make sure anything I give you on this from now on is ironclad. But I’m telling you, Ken – these people have already tried to kill me. There’s a reason I’ve been laying low.”
“Duly noted, princess,” he said, highly doubting anyone was paying attention to who’d even written the piece. “Now get your ass out there and find us something solid.”
16./
JUNE 4, 2016, MONTPELLIER, FRANCE
The conversation was succinct. Brennan’s objections had been noted and discarded.
“Just don’t go anywhere,” David Fenton-Wright had said before he’d hung up.
Brennan wanted to tell him where to go … but instead, he considered his eventual chances of extracting himself from the agency permanently and without fuss, and let the matter rest.
He’d tried to get an audience with the chairman about his dealings with Abubakar; he was beginning to suspect the committee might have had a role in Flight 929 going down. But he’d been rebuffed twice.
Now David was effectively preventing him from following up the tip about Dmitri Konyakovich, who was scheduled to be at an international shipping conference in Copenhagen in a day’s time. The press had almost completely lost interest in Alex’s revelatory story after two days, and it almost felt as if it had had no impact at all.
He sat at his hotel room desk, checking his notes on his laptop and going over what Myrna had told him, reconciling it with what he’d learned in Angola and from Miskin.
The phone rang.
“Yeah.”
“Mr. Brennan?”
He was registered under Peter Taylor. “I think you have the wrong…”
“Mr. Brennan, I know who you are. I have information for you, information I believe will be very useful in your investigation.”
“Okay. Well… you know where I am...”
“Your hotel is much too public. We need to go somewhere quiet.”
“We’re outside of my usual stomping grounds,” Brennan said. “You have something in mind? And consider that, if it’s too private and I think you’re setting me up, I just won’t show.”
“Understood. But I’m sure you will want to see this.”
“Name the time and place.”
“La Place Royale de Peyrou; it is a monument, the city’s highest point and very public. Completely open.”
Brennan had seen it mentioned in a local tour guide. “No, I don’t think so. Completely open puts me potentially in someone’s sights. If we meet, it’s somewhere public but protected.”
“Fine. There is a large aquarium in the northeast of the city…”
“I’ve seen the listings.”
“In front of the penguin exhibit on the upper level, this afternoon at five?”
Brennan arrived early to survey the area, parking his rental in one of the handful of adjacent lots. It was as if an entire neighborhood had been set up just to deal with parents and their kids: a giant pedestrian mall, fronted by restaurants and tourism attractions that included a skating rink, a planetarium and the aquarium itself, which was housed in state-of-the-art facility, a grey-and-blue architectural mish-mash of circles within circles. Its front was made up of thirty feet of windows looking out onto a pedestrian concourse. Surrounding the businesses was a series of restaurants, mostly family friendly. The kids would love it, Brennan thought, and Carolyn even more for the relief factor.
He scoured the skyline, tracing over the tops of buildings, looking for easy access points for a shooter. It was probably a futile effort; if someone really wanted him dead, he knew, they’d eventually succeed so long as he was in public, in alien territory. It wouldn’t necessarily be
a bullet; the sniper had little access to the delegates, so a bullet from distance made sense. It might just have been the short, quick stab from the end of an umbrella, like Myrna’s Paris source, or the pointy tip of a shoe, dosed in a lethal concentration of toxins. If done right, he’d hardly even notice it; and by the time he went into cardiac arrest, it would be too late.
He took the middle of several doors into the building and, almost immediately, a set of semi-spiral stairs to the upper level. It only took Brennan a minute to become anxious about the meeting location: once up the stairs, a corridor followed the contours of the building in a near-perfect oval, channeling traffic in just two directions around a central giant, multi-story tank. That limited escape routes if the meet proved to be some sort of trap.
There were multiple exhibits to the left as Brennan followed the corridor, the open tops of tanks behind iron railings. From the lower level people could see the interior of each tank through a glass wall, the entire undersea environment of artificial reefs for hundreds of fish species.
To his right, the central hub of the building contained a giant shark enclosure, though it was sensibly built right up to the ceiling, the public’s view limited to a series of large round windows, like portcullises from some monstrously large vessel.
At the corridor’s midway point, near the back of the building, was the penguin habitat. Rocks were carved in angular fashion into short artificial cliffs, a perfect diving off points for the penguins as they plumbed the depths of the tank. Brennan checked both directions; the place was quiet on a Monday afternoon , just a handful of tourists and some locals with their kids.
It felt wrong. It was public, but it was enclosed, boxed in. A source who wanted anonymity – would there be risk in such a place, in being seen there? Maybe not.
But it felt wrong. He was anxious, watching the people as they passed, wary of anything out of place; a young mother with a stroller, kids holding hands to avoid getting lost, a senior couple heading the other way; a single tourist, guidebook in his college-aged hand looking like he’d seen too much in one day.
The source had given him a first meeting option that was obviously out of the question; the second option had seemed more reasonable; but perhaps that had been the point.
Brennan hadn’t survived in the business by ignoring his instincts. He turned back and began walking the corridor towards the stairs. The mother with the stroller watched him back, eyes tracking sideways as he passed; she felt out of place as well, too interested in him, her expression oddly neutral; ahead, the senior couple had stopped by the fish tanks but were both looking up, as if intent on his position, his situation. He wasn’t being paranoid, Brennan told himself. Each of the handful of people around him felt like they were going through motions.
It was a setup. The whole thing, the whole scene. He was sure of it.
He began to sprint, and the mother with the stroller turned quickly, her hand dipping in and out of the carriage, the machine pistol appearing in a smooth arc as she fired, rounds cutting into the walls, dust kicking up as Brennan tried to keep his head down. He ducked behind a board advertising the penguins’ feeding times and drew the Glock from the back of his waistband, but before he could fire back, a chunk of the board disappeared, showering him with chips of wood. He looked back quickly; both of the seniors were twenty yards away towards the front of the building, with silenced pistols drawn, trying to catch him in a cross-fire.
A handful of other patrons screamed and ran, momentarily cutting off the older couples’ view, and Brennan quickly moved to a narrow space between the two fish tanks, which offered cover on both sides as long as he could stay low. He leaned around the corner to his left; the “mom” was levelling the machine pistol in his direction but Brennan was quicker, the Glock readied and his aim true, both shots hitting her center mass; then he ducked back into cover. She tumbled to the ground after another half step, convulsing from an arterial rupture, a punctured lung filling with blood.
The ‘elderly woman’ tried to flank him by crossing the corridor to a small area of fake palm trees, her speed of movement betraying the grey wig, while her husband laid down suppressing fire, but Brennan had just enough angle from behind the corner of the right-hand tank to hit her before she got there. He unloaded five shots in quick succession, catching her in the legs and ankles. The woman screamed and went down, her gun sent sliding across the marble.
Brennan heard a slight shuffle of shoe on concrete from behind him and instinctively dodged sideways, the blade of a butterfly knife slashing past his face in a short, sharp arc, the tip a quarter-inch from his throat, a foot coming up quickly to kick the Glock from his hand.
He dropped into a defensive posture then jabbed upwards with an open-hand punch, blocking the attacker’s arm away from him. The ‘confused tourist’ had almost managed to sneak up on him, but now the man’s left kidney was exposed and Brennan hit it hard, with a hook, the attacker arching his back in spasmodic pain. Brennan kicked hard, sideways, the arch of his boot striking the side of the man’s knee, dislocating it. The phony tourist screamed in agony and went down to one knee, but still managed to wildly swing the knife in his right hand; Brennan caught the arm and turned the man around, like dancing with a rag doll, just as the elderly assassin fired three more shots, the impromptu human shield taking each bullet in the back.
Brennan dropped him to the floor and sprinted towards the old man, who was trying frantically to get another clip into place. As Brennan leaped into a flying sidekick, the old man dropped the weapon in favor of throwing up a cross-armed block, deflecting the kick’s force. Brennan landed and rolled into a crouched position facing his adversary. The man was genuinely old, he realized absently. The old man began to go into a defensive martial arts crouch, but then staggered sideways slightly… then to his left, then backwards, as if he’d had too much to drink and could suddenly barely stand. Then he spread his feet wide, leaning back with one hand to his chin as if taking a deep drink of something.
His ‘Drunken Man’ form was impeccable, Brennan noted, a sign of expertise in Choi Le Fut Kung Fu. The old man came out of the backward lean by lurching forward then flipping head-over-side in a cartwheel of kicks. Brennan instinctively set his feet wide and shuffled backwards out of the way. He threw a series of rapid punches, but the old man swayed backwards again, his back seemingly made of rubber as he arched it to avoid the blows. The old man did a single back flip so that he was in a balanced position again then took a quarter-turn before lurching sideways, a series of strikes catching Brennan in the side of the head and sending him reeling.
He shook off the blows, but the old man rolled sideways again and came up with the pistol. He squeezed off a shot but was a split-second too late as Brennan closed the distance and slapped the gun to one side; the elderly assassin was left open, and Brennan drove the side of his hand into the man’s throat. The old man collapsed to his knees, clutching for air, and Brennan threw two more quick punches, knocking him out.
Alarms were sounding and he could hear footsteps running up stairs. He looked for a quick exit point; there was a washroom to his left, and he ran inside, the door swinging shut hard behind him. There was a window, high on the wall above the sinks and small, but big enough to get through. He clambered up onto the back of the sink; his ear was ringing from the senior assassin’s punches. Brennan pushed the window open and leaned out quickly to look for foot traffic, the sound of the city instantly taking over. It led out onto the end of a metal platform that ran part of the way around the outside of the building, leading to several service entrances on the rear of the building, and then a second metal set of stairs down to ground level.
As he took the stairs two at a time, police sirens buzzed by in the street ahead, behind the walls separating the aquarium from the mall and restaurants. He found a spot where the concrete turned to a lower mesh fence and climbed it quickly, dropping to the sidewalk on the other side and walking away. A few minutes later, as police beg
an to clean up the carnage at the aquarium, he was flagging a cab from outside a nearby hotel.
Faisal Mohammed had been behind his desk for nearly an hour, waiting for the line to blink. Finally, the call came through.
“Yes?”
“The operation was unsuccessful, sir, and the contractors have failed to complete the terms of the agreement arranged by the American.”
“I see.”
“Would you like me to arrange other contractors…”
“No. No, that won’t be necessary for now.”
“Very good, sir.” The line went dead.
He dialed Khalidi. “Sir?”
“What is it, Faisal?”
“The issue with the American agent, Joe Brennan, was not resolved. He is intent on getting answers with respect to the African incident…”
“I thought we had control over his movements.”
“We have control of his handler, technically,” Faisal said. “But he informs us that Brennan was commissioned ‘below board’, which is to say…”
“I know what ‘below board’ means, Faisal,” Khalidi said, fatigued. “Can we have our contact recall him to America? If we cannot eliminate the problem, perhaps it is best to at least get him out of our hair – or, perhaps, have him stationed somewhere out of the way until things are calmer.”
“I can certainly put that to our contact, sir,” Faisal said. “He may not be receptive but…”
“Remind him of how much he is being paid. Remind him of our expectations, and that he can always be replaced if he does not meet them.”
“Yes, your highness.”
“And if he cannot manage it, remind him that we still need a solution to Mr. Brennan. Tell him to bring force to bear.”
