The Mac Ambrose Series: 1-3 (Boxed Set)

by HN Wake

  For the first time, a cold fear began to creep through her. She took in a few deep breaths, regained her control.

  Has something happened, Josh? If something has happened, you’re not alone in this. I’m coming.

  She poured the trash back into the bin and replaced it under the sink.

  A maid’s quarters—a tiny room big enough for a single bed—led off the kitchen. Through it was a small enclosed balcony intended for laundry. Two large storage hooks hung from the cement ceiling. She took photos of the maid’s room and the kitchen then padded her way down the long hall.

  A smaller bedroom was completely empty. A dust-ball lingered in a bare corner.

  The master bedroom was huge. A king-sized bed with a teak headboard dominated the far wall. The bedspread had been loosely made. A massive TV hung opposite. A low bookshelf was filled with knick knacks. The closet held a number of shirts and khakis—his suits were back at his oil executive apartment.

  She sat down on the firm bed. The sheets felt like one thousand thread-count Egyptian.

  They took a secluded table in the wine bar. Wanting to impress with a modicum of coolness, she had gone home after the Vietnamese restaurant to change.

  He noticed immediately. “You went home.”

  “Of course.”

  “You look fantastic.” His smile was easy and wide and turned up the corners of his eyes.

  “Thanks,” she said. “How was the dinner?”

  “Yeah, good, work.” He gave her another enormous grin. “I would much rather have been here.”

  Did her heart just clench? This one was getting under her skin.

  When their drinks arrived, they settled into an easy conversation.

  “Tell me about banking.” he asked.

  “I’m pretty new at it.”

  “What did you do before?”

  “I was with the US Chamber of Commerce.”

  “Oh. Interesting. Where?”

  “Jakarta.”

  “And what got you out?”

  “I wanted to do something different. It was time.”

  “So banking? Hong Kong?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I like big cities. Then this job came up. Someone knew someone, so I took it.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I follow government and regional regulations that may affect our business.”

  “Is it interesting?” he asked skeptically.

  She laughed. “It doesn’t sound it, does it? Yeah, it’s not bad. Keeps me busy. I get to use my brain.”

  “So you’re a smart one.”

  She wasn’t sure how to take that. Was he mocking her? “Uh, how does one answer that?”

  “Cleverly, if you’re smart.”

  He was making fun of her and she instantly liked him more. She laughed. “Yes, yes I suppose I would have to.”

  Over drinks, Mac confirmed her earlier impressions of him. He had the confidence of someone so exceptionally attractive that life came easier. He was the prom king all the girls wanted in high school. Men like Josh floated in a bubble of ease: all eyes turned when they walked in a room and everyone stopped to listen when they spoke. He was funny and charming. And he listened intently, a grin lurking behind brown eyes.

  Their natural banter was electrifying, yet unnerving. It had been a long time since she’d flirted with a man. She’d almost forgotten how it felt to feel special, to feel wanted. She felt her guard slipping.

  It made her uneasy.

  From a young age, Mac had learned to anticipate her mother’s subtle, insidious cruelty. The bright red lips curling into a mocking smile. “Is that you trying to be clever, Mac? How precious.” Pointed long fingernails digging into the back of her hairline. “At least they didn’t notice your unsightly bump or they’d be calling you Quasimodo.” The piercing pinch on the back of her arm. “Keep up, Mac, I don’t have time for your slowness today.” Demanding hands slicking down her brown hair. “Sit still and look pretty.” The taut, angular face an inch away and the curdled hiss. “You do know, don’t you, that you are less than I expected?”

  An Agency psychiatrist had concluded that Mac—in response to her mother’s narcissistic personality disorder—had become a ‘chess master’ with ‘impressively adaptive’ defense mechanisms and a ‘highly functioning individual’ who found self-worth by ’outmaneuvering’ others.

  In other words, Mac was wary of intimacy.

  Josh Halloway was making her very wary.

  It was later, after their third wines, that he made his move. “I’m staying at the Four Seasons.”

  The statement rested on the cocktail table like a balloon filled with water—wobbly and unstable.

  She calculated that aloofness would make her more attractive, more intriguing. “I bet it’s a nice room.”

  “It’s really nice.” His hazel eyes were serious.

  She wanted him to ache for her. “It’s too bad I’ll miss it. This time.”

  He reacted with a massive grin. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Isn’t that lucky?” Warmth spread across her chest. The tactic had worked. He was going to pursue her.

  He laughed, took her hand. “I sure do like you a lot, Mac.”

  A lamp shared the single bedside table with the framed photo of an Asian woman holding a small Eurasian girl. They both grinned at the photographer.

  Mac’s stomach clenched. She reminded herself that she had no claims on Josh Halloway. Was the woman in the photo starting to worry about Josh’s disappearance as well?

  She quickly knelt by the bookshelf and began rifling through the items. At least fifty older books on military history lined the bottom shelf. She flipped the pages on a few of them, gusting the dust of disintegrating paper. She shook a dusty old, small cardboard box, but it was empty. She dug into a glass bowl full of old coins and shell casings.

  So 007 of you, Josh, she thought.

  She took snaps of the bookshelf, turned and snapped the whole bedroom from numerous angles.

  In the suite bathroom, she took more photos then sat down on the closed toilet to consider where he would hide important items. Given the sparse nature of the apartment, she knew it was likely in the bathroom. Under an old ceramic cover, the toilet was empty. She reached out of the small window, feeling along the outside wall, making her hands grimy.

  She washed her hands with soap and heard the pipes creak in the walls. The noise stilled her.

  One of the most common plumbing problems was clogged toilet pipes, which meant plumbers often tapped out wall tiles to reach them. She knelt and started tapping the tiles behind the toilet. One was loose and she gently pried it out.

  Inside the wall, her hand felt a large Ziploc bag.

  The bag protected the printed receipt of a Malaysian Air one-way flight to Miri, Sarawak Province on the island of Borneo and a brochure for Monkey Divers with a logo of a red monkey mouthing a respirator.

  Why hide these? Clearly they were important to him. And they were her only clues.

  She slipped both documents back in the Ziploc, placed them inside the wall, and tapped the tile back in place.

  I’m coming Josh. Hold tight. I’m getting closer.

  Langley, VA

  Half way around the world, Frank Odom stepped into the rarefied air of the office of Arnie Dunne, Director of Asia for the CIA. The air conditioner was on full blast to fend off the muggy summer temperatures. Dunne was standing at the window in a crisp grey suit, watching the sun rise. He was an inch above average height, slightly built, with dark hair slicked back. He tilted his head at Odom’s entrance, but remained staring out the window. “Any news on Halloway?”

  “Nothing. The local watchers have reported no movement at his residences,” Odom said.

  “What a cluster.”

  Odom cleared his throat. “I’ve put Mac Ambrose on Halloway. She’s in Malaysia. Shipman met with her.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Dunne turned, his hawk-like eyes glared at Odom from behind wire rim gla
sses. “Do you trust her?”

  “Yes, she’s solid. She’s a team player.”

  “I want this contained. In Langley, it’s you and me. No one else read in on this. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  6

  Langley, VA

  It had taken Joyce Terrell Tattle three hours and four coffees to sift through the documents in the supermarket bag. On the right side of the desk were piles of photocopied official forms—each bearing the logo from the Companies Commission of Malaysia—in three categories: first-time submissions to register a company, renewals of company registration, and termination of businesses. Each of the forms had Bahasa Malaysia on the right and English on the left.

  On the left of her desk were photocopies of Company Reports and accounting audits.

  From what she could tell, the agent was a bureaucrat within the commission who had photocopied everything that may be of interest to the CIA in terms of new businesses registering in Malaysia. While the trove was certainly not a pirate’s map to the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, it was intriguing.

  Anatoli rushed toward her from across the Hive. In a whisper, he asked, “You hear about the Station Chief out of Istanbul?”

  “No. What happened?”

  “I heard he wrote an aardwolf memo laying out the real deal. He basically said that the US strategy in Pakistan wasn’t working. That the Islamic extremists were winning. He said the Agency needed more resources there. He claimed the Agency had short-changed the strategy by not sending enough resources. He basically said it was an Agency cock up. Didn’t sweeten it, didn’t pull any punches.”

  “And?”

  “His memo came through last night.”

  “And?”

  “Apparently the top floor didn’t like it. Wanted more ‘patriotism’ and less grit.”

  “And?”

  “They’re bringing him home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re rotating him home. Rumor has it, he’s going to quit the Agency. He has had enough with the Administration.”

  Joyce shook her head. “Holy shit. They’re recalling him for speaking the truth?”

  “Totally.”

  “This place is so ass-backward.”

  “It’s crazy. These days, I guess, the message from on high is slant your intel to suit their interests.” Anatoli walked around the cubicle wall eyeing the piles on her desk. “How’s it going? What have you got?”

  “Lots of official forms.” She took another long sip of coffee, let it settle on her tongue. “I guess every business that wants to operate in Malaysia has to register with this particular commission. We obviously have someone inside who copies shit for us and ferrets it out.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  Gotta start somewhere if you want to be a high flyer in the Agency, she thought. “You never know what you’ll find. Diamonds start out as dirt.”

  “What did O’Don’t say about it?”

  “That it wasn’t high priority,” she said. “He just wants me to clear it.”

  Anatoli grunted and disappeared back into his chair.

  An hour later, she had dissected the first pile from those on the right of her desk. She had started a database list of the fifty company names and had a further five piles on the grey carpet in the cubicle. For the fifty new businesses registered in the last three years, she had:

  A Certificate of Incorporation

  Memorandum and Articles of Association

  Form 66 with the name of Directors

  They had all been submitted on various days throughout the year. The logos for the companies had begun to bleed together in her mind. The addresses for each registered business were heavily dominated in KL, but there were some in other cities.

  She knelt on the floor and picked up the first company document to read.

  Six hours later, the overhead lights had been scaled back to night shift hours, bathing the room in a soft glow. Anatoli had left an hour earlier with a wave and a smile.

  Of the fifty companies she had researched, twenty were in manufacturing, fifteen were professional services of accounting, legal or consulting, ten were small businesses in consumer goods or food, and five were in natural resources. All of them had been registered within the last three years. None of them had revenue over $100,000 in their first year. Four of them suffered a loss. Nothing stood out as unusual in any of them.

  One company—Malay Petro Reliance--had been a purchased “shelf company” that had been reactivated that year in KL. Shelf companies were existing companies that had gone inactive but maintained current registration and paperwork so that they could be bought by someone who wanted to quickly open a business. The old paperwork from the original company as well as the documents for the new company had been submitted as part of the purchase.

  Her stomach grumbled. She rubbed her eyes then re-read her notes. For anyone else, this would be boring work, but for Joyce, it was a maze of possibilities.

  She reread the revised Memorandum of Association for Malay Petro Reliance. It said only that the primary objectives of the company were to “advise and provide consultancy services for clients on all matters regarding the implementation of projects in the petrochemical sector.” She squinted at the sentence.

  Why not just register a new company like the fifty others that had registered in the last three years? Instead, someone had purchased it last year for one hundred thousand Ringatt.

  She leaned over her desk and looked up the exchange rate for the US dollar to Malaysian Ringatt.

  The number was not insignificant. Someone had paid the equivalent of $27,000 to have Malay Petro Reliance up and running.

  What was curious was that it only cost a thousand dollars to register a new company with the commission.

  Joyce’s curiosity was peaked. A lot.

  7

  Langley, VA

  “Who is the agent that gave us all this KL documentation?” Joyce asked.

  Neville O’Dore looked up from his screen, lifted his hands off his keypad, and chewed on his toothpick. “Huh?”

  “Those documents you gave me, the folders in the grocery bag.”

  O’Dore nodded. “Right. Okay. What?”

  “Who is the Malaysian agent?”

  “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “Well, it’s just that I’ve found something interesting.”

  “Oh yeah?” He rested his hands on the keyboard.

  “Someone bought a shelf company last year. There is no mention of the new owner in the official paperwork. Maybe an oversight. Or maybe someone is intentionally hiding their details.”

  “Anything we can relate to Osama?”

  The bluntness of his interest surprised her. “Uh, no.”

  “POTUS is only interested in the war on terror. Is it even marginally related?”

  Wow, when did it become so all encompassing? She shook her head.

  “Yeah, then not so interesting to the top floor,” he said and resumed his typing.

  She waited him out.

  Irritated, he looked up.

  She asked, “Can you tell me who gave us this material?”

  He gave her a half answer. “The agent is in the Companies Commission of Malaysia. It’s where you register any new company, get licenses, what not.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out. I meant, what’s his name?”

  “Tattle, you’re not need to know.”

  She tried a different approach. “So how do we get his stuff normally?”

  O’Dore was distracted by something on his computer. He ignored her and clicked his mouse, reading something on his screen.

  She sat down in the worn chair opposite his desk.

  He clicked a few more times. “Oh, yeah. Uh, he sends stuff through maybe once a year. Usually through KL Station. They pay him out locally. I don’t think they’ve ever gotten anything worthwhile.”

  “So KL Station isn’t aware we have this batch?” That wa
s interesting. She was the only one in the Agency who knew about these documents.

  “Not that I know of. No.”

  “Is anyone aware he brought this to the US?”

  O’Dore chomped on his toothpick and gave her a disapproving look. “Tattle, I just need you to do a quick skim on those documents and move on.”

  She remained silent.

  He said, “I’m not clearing you for anything deeper than a skim. The name of the game is current events. We don’t have time for side research.”

  For a dream job, sometimes being at the Agency felt like the equivalent of an intellectual prison. “We’re DI. The Directorate of Intelligence. Intelligence. Intel. You do realize that if we only focus on current events, we are missing the bigger stories, the longer games, the nuanced understanding?”

  “I don’t make the rules around here. 1600 Pennsylvania does.”

  “Someone should remind POTUS that there are 193 other countries in the world other than Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Does everyone just want us to ignore them?”

  He lost his patience. “Finish the skim, slap a cover note on it, and turn it in.”

  She stood, “I protest this.”

  He chuckled. “Protest all you want, Tattle. This isn’t a democracy.”

  She did her best not to stomp on her way out.

  Back at the cubicle, Anatoli asked, “Did O’Don’t ‘don’t’ cha?”

  She ignored him.

  “What’s got you so worked up, Madame Tattle? What did you find in that plastic bag of treats?”

  She asked, “Would you pay twenty seven thousand to buy a company with all the paperwork when you could register a new one for a thousand?”

  “Only if I didn’t want to deal with the paperwork.”

  “And why would you want to avoid that?”

  Anatoli was awkward but he was smart. “Because my company was bullshit and I was trying to hide something.”

  “Exactly.”

  She slumped down, pulled up the template for a cover note. “I guess I could ignore this mystery of the purchased company and just write that DI signs off on this being a dumb-ass pile of bureaucratic forms that provided absolutely no stinking intel of any kind but for which the US Government is surely paying top dollar to some dumb-ass bureaucrat in some dumb-ass bureaucracy in Asia.”