Patriot Act

by James Phelan

  As he walked across the gangplank, he saw in the reflection of the ticket booth the man following him, four people behind. This time Fox caught a glimpse of him talking into his sleeve, in what would be notification to another party of his location. Another party he may not be able to detect until too late.

  Fox walked deliberately slowly to the newspaper vendor, buying the day’s International Herald Tribune. After another glance to be sure his follower was still acting alone, Fox walked into the men’s room.

  Looking around, he figured he had two options.

  Escape via a small window with the hope of losing his pursuer, or waiting long enough for the man to come in and check. He knew he only had a few minutes, as the ferry crew would check all lifeboats and moorings before casting off. The loose raft might buy him an extra two minutes, tops.

  Fox’s decision was soon made for him.

  The man entered while Fox washed his hands at the basin. Fox watched his back as he moved to the urinal.

  Leaving the faucet running, Fox took three quick steps and was behind the man, pressing his keyring into the back of his head.

  “Turn around and you’ll have a new hole in your head,” Fox bluffed, hoping the bulbous keyring felt metallic enough to pass as a pistol.

  The man didn’t move but for the instinctive raising of hands to show compliance.

  “Who are you?” Fox said, pushing the keyring harder.

  No answer.

  “Who do you work for?”

  Still no answer.

  A whistle blew and Fox knew it to be the ferry’s last-minute warning.

  With a sharp blow to the side of the neck, the man went limp and hit the wall in front of him. Fox hefted him backwards, sitting him on the toilet in a cubicle. Using a handful of tissues, he brushed aside the man’s jacket.

  A pistol in a hip holster. Glock 19.

  A badge on his belt. FBI.

  “Shit.”

  A minute later Fox was back on the ferry. The warm summer-evening breeze blew down the East River as he stood at a side rail looking at Manhattan.

  A million little pieces ran through his mind.

  Within fifteen minutes Fox stepped on the deck of his houseboat and punched the code into the security pad by the door.

  The lights flashed in sequence: it signalled secure, with no internal motion detected in the past 24 hours.

  Dumping his bags in the entry, he walked into the kitchen and put some coffee on. On the bench was a pile of mail collected over the past three weeks by his friend, Alister Gammaldi. The phone that hung on the wall was flashing with messages, and he picked up the receiver with a grimace.

  “You have…” the metallic voice said, taking time to compute the number, “… twenty-seven messages.” They could wait until morning.

  He dropped the thick brown envelope that had been in the New York Times onto the sofa on the way through to his bedroom, allowing himself a moment to lie down. His own bed, the smallest and nicest of missed luxuries.

  Despite himself, Fox felt his eyes growing heavy and he slept. The adrenalin that had fuelled his weary body over the past hour had subsided, leaving him exhausted.

  And he dreamed. Always the same. He always dreamed of dead people, two in particular. He saw the face of Birmingham, a soldier under his command on a UN peacekeeping mission in Timor. Fox watches on helpless as Birmingham is killed. In the dream Fox isn’t there but he’s omniscient, he’s looking from above, he’s looking into the man’s face. Into his eyes. Fox hears all and sees all, and there’s a moment in that final look of Birmingham that asks Fox “Why?”.

  The dream shifts to Venice, he sees a boat. Fox’s view zooms in from the heavens, the picturesque location turning to shit as his mind’s eye enters a cabin to close in on a woman’s face. Alissa Truscott. She is young, beautiful, broken. Fox wants to empathise with how she feels but he can’t. He tries to tell her it will be okay, as if he is in a position to provide deliverance, but nothing comes out. The scene switches to a bird’s-eye view, so that Fox this time sees himself there too. He knows this is not how it happened exactly. He’s sure the figure of him standing there in complete stillness had some emotions at the time, some movement. He sees a tear run down her face, he tracks it in slow motion as it leaves her eye. Those eyes. They say, ‘save me’. Fox watches in slow motion as the silhouette of a man fires a gun and Alissa’s head buckles from the shot. He sees the life leave her eyes as …

  Fox jolted up, rolled from the bed and pulled his .45 calibre SOCOM pistol from a holster under the bedside table. Purpose-built for the US Special Operations Command, the Heckler & Koch slide was silent as he chambered a round, his back against the wardrobe as he closed his eyes and waited for the sound again. It was the first time that he had held the pistol, like this, since Venice. He blinked hard to get the dream world out of his mind.

  Sweat ran down his face. His heart topped out steady at one-eighty. He again saw the faces of Birmingham and Truscott. Their expectant but lifeless gazes straight at him. He shook them away.

  There!

  The sound of footfalls on the upper deck, constant and heavy this time. Walking towards the unlocked front door.

  He waited out of sight behind his bedroom wall as he heard the glass door slide open. The safety off on his pistol, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the sounds. Having lived on the boat for almost a year, he knew every creaking board of flooring: someone had just stopped at the kitchen bench.

  Thump.

  A heavy sound reverberated through the boat and Fox took his chance. Rolling out of the bedroom he came up on one knee behind a sofa, pistol raised in a steady two-handed aim.

  “Don’t move!” Fox shouted, the figure silhouetted in the dark kitchen.

  The sound of breaking glass rang out as a bottle hit the ground. Fox squeezed more pressure onto the trigger.

  “Jesus Christ, Lachlan! You’ve been in the African sun too long!” The voice was instantly recognisable—Alister Gammaldi, Fox’s best friend since high school.

  Fox laughed and put the pistol on the coffee table before squeezing his friend in a bear hug.

  “Shit, sorry, Al—thanks,” Lachlan said as he took an offered beer from the case Gammaldi had brought in.

  “You going to shoot me?” Gammaldi asked as he eyed the pistol.

  “Why would I shoot you?” Fox said. “Especially when you bring imported beer around.”

  “How was Zimbabwe?” Gammaldi asked as he cleaned up the dropped bottle.

  “Hot, miserable, and full of trouble,” Fox said. He sat on a stool at the kitchen bench, picking at his beer label. “I’ve collated enough dirt on Mugabe and his government over the past three weeks to have the UN sit an emergency meeting to see about forcing an election and taking the bastard to the International Court. Well, that’s if they bother to read what I filed.” Fox shook his head to clear some of the horrific images he’d seen, still blending with the dream world he had just been in.

  “And, by the looks of things, you haven’t eaten for a while,” Gammaldi said. “You’ve lost about ten kilos, I reckon.”

  “Mostly in my writer’s paunch,” Fox said and rubbed his stomach. “Seriously, though, humping it around the countryside in forty-plus degree heat with nothing but MREs to eat—yeah, you lose weight pretty quick. That, and what witnessing several mass graves dug up by UN investigators does to your appetite.” Fox shook his head again, thinking about all the interviews he had done with widows and orphans of political dissidents, many guilty of nothing more than speaking out.

  “Well, mate, I’ve got just the thing,” Gammaldi said. He threw the dishcloth in the sink, went outside and returned with two pizzas. “I had to put them down to get in the door.”

  “Good man!” Fox said, as they moved over to the sofas. “Ooh, it’s from Grimaldi’s Pizzeria no less. A Gammaldi with a Grimaldi.”

  “Spare no expense,” Gammaldi said with a mock I
talian accent. “Why do you think I followed you over the river to live in Brooklyn? This pizza is as close to my mama’s as we are ever gonna find.”

  When he sat down, Fox felt the newspaper push into his back. He pulled out the plain envelope and considered it—he was too tired right now for another burden.

  “What’s that?” Gammaldi asked, almost a full slice of Capriciosa stuffed in his mouth.

  “This…” Fox looked at the envelope, then the pizza, then to the muted sports channel Gammaldi had put on the television. He looked out the windows across the East River to the twinkling Manhattan skyline. Coming from strife-torn Africa had awakened him to the liberties that, like so many westerners, Fox took for granted. And those liberties came at prices that were unavoidable.

  He pulled the sheets of folded paper out and flipped through them, scanning each page.

  “Oh shit…”

  2

  MONT BLANC, FRANCE

  Mont Blanc is the highest peak in Western Europe. From atop its 4807 metres the snow stretches as far as the eye can see, westwards over the Rhone Alps and into the interior of France, and to the east into Italy and Switzerland. At its base sits the picturesque town of Chamonix, home of the first ever Winter Olympics and one of the most popular ski fields in the world.

  Twelve kilometres north of Chamonix, sunk deep into an inhospitable mountain, is France’s most secure and secretive military base, Fort Gaucher. Nestled into a sheer rock basin, the bare, craggy cliffs surround a permanently frozen lake, the snow-capped rims measuring five hundred to a thousand metres on every side. Tens of thousands of years ago it was the site of one of the most violent volcanic eruptions the world has ever seen, millions of tons of rock being blown skyward, leaving a deep, desolate sinkhole.

  The site, a region cordoned off for training by the military, was found to be the perfect hiding place by France’s first military imaging satellites in the late sixties. Originally set up in 1974 as a secondary command post for the French forces in the event of an all-out war in Europe, by 1983 it was being run by the French external intelligence service, the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure). Now, there are two twenty-metre satellite dishes housed in fibreglass radomes that resemble giant golf balls situated there. The radomes, used the world over by communications intelligence agencies to hide the direction their satellite dishes are pointed, in this case also keep the snow off and the equipment inside from freezing.

  To further protect from observation from above, twenty-six turbo-fans surrounding the basin provide cloud-cover for the entire area, the mist settling just below the ridge line. A mixture of water vapour and chemicals brought to the right temperature and dissipated into the atmosphere, the cloud is thick enough to shield all outside installations and activity from the likes of imaging satellites and reconnaissance aircraft.

  To keep away the occasional adventure-seeking skier or snowboarder who may manage to hike the five kilometres from the nearest public road, the company of white-clad commandos stationed at the base can have a squad anywhere on the outer-rim within three minutes of a sensor or alarm being triggered.

  Put simply, Fort Gaucher is as secret and secure as an intelligence base can be.

  Major Christian Secher blocked the first two blows with ease, taking the hits to his forearms while he made a move of his own: a feigned upward thrust of his left knee, followed by an extended right arm. His palm to the instructor’s throat sent the man spattering to the ground, where he then kicked him over onto his back.

  “You’re dead,” Secher said, stomping on the gym mat next to the fallen man’s head, then walking off towards the shower.

  The sound of clapping rang through the open space of the gymnasium. It was the first time in the week he’d been on the mountain that someone had watched his 5 am judo class.

  Secher turned to see General Danton leaning against a doorway.

  “As impressive as ever,” General Danton said, stubbing out his cigarette against the steel doorjamb. “Be in my office in five minutes.”

  Secher, dressed in gym clothes with a towel around his sweating neck, entered the general’s office ten minutes later. Big for a Frenchman, he stood at six-three and around 210 pounds, and spent every possible spare moment doing judo and gymnastics wherever in the world he was stationed.

  “Well, Major?” General Danton leaned forward in his chair, looking over his reading glasses at the agent he had hand-selected for the mission. He was as impressed as ever by Secher’s physique, and remembered back to when he had recruited him as a pugnacious teenager. Back then, the lean and lanky Secher had been a reserve member in the French Olympic gymnastic team. That all changed when the intelligence agency got its claws into him.

  “My current assignment is on track, if that is what you are concerned about.” Whenever Secher spoke it was in a lyrical way, his tone at once comforting and persuading, measured and exact. He was used to getting his way, Danton knew, but it would be different today. He needed straight answers from this young man, and hoped the sweat coming off his temples did not appear as conspicuous as it felt. This was quite literally the operation of a lifetime.

  Secher helped himself to a bottle of water from his boss’s bar fridge.

  “We have less than a week,” Danton said. “Just over five days to make the on-location connection. You’ve had months of planning, an unlimited budget and manpower…”

  “You’re questioning me?” Secher said.

  “Still you do not have the key,” Danton replied, drying off the palms of his hands on his pants. “You planned to have it by now.”

  “My plans are fluid, organic, ever-changing,” Secher said. “It’s what has made me succeed.”

  “This is for the future of France.”

  This made Secher smile. He knew well what this was for. Danton included him on all the intricacies of the plan. He knew that France would soon be radically and forever changed politically.

  “The connection will be made—you will get your Sixth Republic,” Secher said, taking a long pull of the water and staring at Danton. “By the time your computers are ready, you will have the key in your hand. Get the key earlier than you are able to use it, and the risks escalate. Much like your cleaning operation is doing.”

  “Excuse me?” Danton felt his reply did not match the expression on his face. He knew what Secher was alluding to.

  “You have to stop killing these men. It makes my job much harder.”

  “It’s not me.” Another lie. Danton knew this man could see through it but he had to play this out for his audience.

  “Of course it’s not.” Secher leaned on the back of the chair facing Danton. “You don’t know what it’s like being a field officer. If you think a few dead Europeans won’t make the Americans suspicious, you are wrong. If they change their security patterns now, when we are so close, the failure will be yours.”

  Secher went to the door and dismissed himself, turning at the last moment, smiling.

  “France is close to being great again, Monsieur Danton,” he said. “We both know it.”

  Danton sat pensively behind his desk, staring at the back of the door after Secher’s departure.

  “An interesting choice, mon General.” The voice came from the videophone on his desk, which had been on through the meeting for the benefit of his boss.

  From the LCD screen, a pair of light-green eyes pierced out from a round face. Her wispy blonde hair was tied back, her lips thin slits of pale pink. Sianne Cassel.

  “He’s the best agent in France,” Danton said, knowing there was some degree of uncertainty in his voice. Cassel had been around the political scene long enough to pick up on it.

  “But you have doubts?”

  “He’s a bit … reckless, a bit ruthless,” Danton said. “The price of brilliance.”

  “We are so close, mon General. The success of our plans is on your shoulders,” Cassel said. “Can you stop your
other agents?”

  “It was an order-and-forget mission,” Danton said. “The assassins will work until their job is done.”

  Danton shifted in his chair. He’d gone too far over the past few years, failure now was treason. His palms still sweated, and a bead ran down his temple. He hoped it didn’t show up over the video feed. The silence meant he had to answer her question.

  “It’s too late.”

  3

  NEW YORK CITY

  The headquarters of the Global Syndicate of Reporters (GSR) occupied the top five floors of the Seagram Building. Between exposed bronze columns that soared up to the sky, the dark amber glass façade reflected the morning sun onto the neighbouring towers of Manhattan.

  Fox rode his bicycle across the stark expanse of the grey granite plaza, dismounting without stopping and hoisting the bike across his shoulder, moving through the revolving doors and past the security desk. A nod to the guards behind the desk—who replied with a casual salute out of respect to the ex-navy officer—and they allowed the secondary set of glass doors to slide open, which Fox continued through to the fire door.

  He took the stairs, running the flights to his thirty-seventh-floor office, the bike over his shoulder. His iPod pumped Jay-Z and Linkin Park through headphones, drowning out the background clutter of his mind as his thoughts and heart raced.

  Three months ago the Frenchman Joseph Cassel was killed. Decorated war hero during World War II and Algeria. Leader of the extremist National Front Party. A founding member of the right-wing Euro power group LeCercle.

  Since then, six Bilderberg Group members have been killed. Bilderberg could be seen as a rival group, on political and economic grounds.

  All six of those men had attended the last LeCercle meeting.

  So someone’s cleaning out the group. But which group is doing what? And who could do it? Someone connected, either with intelligence ties or within one of the groups. Given the membership list, it could be any high-placed official who owed his or her position thanks to either exclusive club’s significant global influence.