The Joe Brennan Spy Thrillers

by Sam Powers

  They were passing the short line of food vendors along the wall to the right, followed by a magazine and book vendor, a cigar shop, bathrooms along the other wall, a booth selling travel insurance…

  Brennan stopped. “Hey, hang tight here for a second, okay? I need to hit the head.”

  Better now than having to stop, I guess. “Fine. But make it quick.”

  The former SEAL walked toward the men’s room, pushed the swinging door open and disappeared inside.

  Liersch checked his watch. It was nearly seven in the evening, the flight Stateside not slated to leave until four the next morning. He gazed over at the bookstore, considering whether he had time to pop in there and grab something mindless and fun before Brennan came out of the john.

  Better not. If you lost track of this guy or he pulled something, you’d never hear the end of it. Done in by a civilian.

  He returned his attention to the bathroom door just in time to see it swing open. A pair of young white guys – high school or just a bit older – came out, giggling, then crossed the busy concourse, heading toward the stores on the other side. They were at least fifteen feet away, but Liersch could have sworn he smelled weed. He watched them with a sense of disdain. He’d never been one of the cool kids, one of the kids who got away with smoking dope in an airport and hitchhiking in Thailand. He’d studied, and worked hard, and gotten ahead professionally as a result.

  At the bookstore, the last patron had paid for her purchases and the clerk was left without anyone to tend to. She was older and looked weary, Liersch thought. She sat down on a tall stool by the cash register and played with her fingernails while she waited for someone else to stop by. He wondered if she’d ever left Thailand before; if she’d seen the bigger world.

  Maybe he had time to check the book rack out front, at least…

  No, he’ll be out any second here. Just keep it cool, Dan.

  He refocused on the bathrooms. The men’s room door swung open… and a Caucasian teenager came out. Liersch squinted, puzzled. Wasn’t he the same as one of the ones who already…

  You know you’re getting old when every person under twenty looks alike.

  He wondered what the ex-Navy guy had done in Chiang Mai to warrant such special attention. It probably involved drinking and hookers, he reasoned. Almost everything outrageous in Thailand did. He certainly didn’t seem like much trouble, well-built and fit, but no hint of tension or craziness, no brash posing.

  Another man came out of the washroom, in a red hoodie and with a typical Bangkok surgical mask, which people wore on days when the air pollution was too high.

  Lang had sounded genuinely concerned about the man’s well-being when he’d called to set the whole thing up.

  Liersch gazed down the concourse, watching people come and go, weary travelers pulling wheeled luggage, tired young kids holding parents’ hands or being carried, the odd crew person.

  It seemed like he’d been in there for quite a while. Then he thought about the man in the red hoodie who’d just come out. Thais wore those masks all the time, but very few of them were as tall as…

  Ah, geez...

  He made his way down the concourse as quickly as he could, ducking between the slower moving travelers. It had only been a minute or so, he reasoned. If he was lucky and moved quickly enough…

  Liersch hit a stretch of clear concourse and sped up to a light jog, not wanting to attract attention but needing to make up ground. Toward the terminal’s last set of exit doors to the pickup area, he saw a red hood poking up above the crowd. He quickened his pace, politely moving people aside until he was just a few meters behind the man. “Hey! Stop!” he yelled. “Stop!”

  He caught up and grabbed the man’s shoulder, spinning him around.

  The teenager under the hood had earbuds in and was listening to music on a portable CD player. He looked surprised and shocked.

  “What the Hell?” Liersch exclaimed. Was he… yeah, one of the teenagers who’d left the bathroom once before. What the hell was going on?

  He pushed the young man aside and quickly made his way back to the bathroom. He ran over to it and pushed the door open roughly. It swung fully wide with force slamming into the wall. Liersch ran into the room.

  It was empty. No one at the urinals or sinks. He crouched to look under the stall doors, but there was no one there.

  His head slumped. Somehow, he’d walked his package less than two hundred yards… and he’d already lost him.

  ***

  By the time Brennan got off the plane, it had occurred that perhaps Walter Lang wouldn’t give up on The Apsonsi so easily. He’d said he would also be down in Bangkok ‘soon enough.’ If nothing else, it would mitigate any heat Walter faced over the loss of the colonel and of a promising recruit.

  The ex-SEAL walked through to the arrivals area, scanning the crowd. The company man stood out like a Roman candle in a dark room. Brennan approached him at a casual pace. The man took a faltering half-step forward before sticking out a hand to shake. “Daniel…”

  Brennan ignored it, looking over the shorter man’s head. If there was an opportunity to get away from his escort and find Lang, he might still be able to make amends. But a lot depended on avoiding conflict; he couldn’t risk harming anyone just to try and fix his mistakes. “I thought they were sending two of you,” he mentioned.

  The man was still standing there with his arm suspended awkwardly. Brennan reached out to shake… just as Liersch withdrew his hand. Brennan pulled his hand back… and Liersch leaned in again to shake. Before he could move again, Brennan grabbed the agent’s wrist with a firm left hand, then shook with his right.

  “Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way… where’s the other guy?” Two escorts massively complicated issues compared to just one.

  “I made the call,” Liersch said. “It… seemed an excessive use of resources to send two people for what was essentially a babysitting job. I mean… you’re not planning to cause any trouble… right, Mr. Brennan?”

  The man had obviously tried to add an air of menace to the end of the line. Maybe he wanted to get into a fight; maybe he’d never really been in one outside a hockey arena or drunken bar brawl. “None at all.”

  They began walking toward the doors, his civilian charge checking out the airport as they strolled. Brennan was being more specific, logging faces, what people were wearing, where they were moving, exits, cameras, where staff were looking. Keep him occupied, but keep it simple. “You like Bangkok?”

  “Hate it,” Liersch said. “It’s where civility came to die.”

  “Do you speak Thai? It probably makes things easier if…”

  “Hey… I’m not posted here forever, okay? I’m here until my transfer request is accepted and I can go somewhere more friendly to the human body’s sweat reflex.”

  Friendly guy. No wonder he’s so happy away from home. “Where are we headed?”

  “We are headed to the Airport Hilton, where I have vouchers to pay for your dinner and a room, which we will occupy until your next flight departs in nine hours. At that point, I shall take you to gate 18 and you will board said flight to New York.”

  He seems wound up enough to bite on anything that might make him feel excluded. “It’s too bad about Walter,” Brennan offered casually.

  Liersch stopped walking for a moment. “Sorry… what did you hear?”

  “Just that he seemed pretty sure he’s going to wear this one, the way things have gone so far.” Keep it generic, the notion that the ongoing mission is not the issue, but Walter’s fate.

  He resumed walking. “I’m not going to discuss agency business with a civilian,” Liersch said.

  “Walter didn’t have that problem.”

  “And look where it got him, trying to clean up his own messes.”

  “They’ll chain him to a desk,” Brennan suggested.

  “He’s still got a chance to pull it out. We’ll see.”

  And there you go. He’s st
ill working it. Thank you, Mr. Self-Absorbed.

  They were passing the short line of food vendors along the wall to the right, followed by a magazine and book vendor, a cigar shop; a janitor with a mop and bucket headed into the bathrooms along the other wall, a booth selling travel insurance…

  Brennan stopped. The two teenagers entered right after I walked into arrivals but haven’t come out. They were giggling. “Hey, hang tight here, okay? I need to hit the head.”

  “Fine, but make it quick.”

  Brennan crossed the concourse and entered the bathroom. He smelled the joint as soon as he got within five feet of the sinks. Sure enough, the two teens were huddled by a back air vent smoking it, the janitor standing there talking to them – perhaps sharing the joint. As soon as he’d seen the looks on their faces, he’d figured it was either booze or weed… or maybe porn. Either way, it was something they didn’t want going through security in departures upstairs.

  The two teens froze in place. The janitor looked down, grabbed his mop handle and withdrew it from the rolling bucket to begin mopping the floor.

  One of the teens went to butt out the joint. “We wasn’t doing nothing.” It sounded like “nuffink” in the boy’s tough English accent.

  “I don’t care,” Brennan said. “They’re your lungs. You too, janitor man. I’m not going to bust any of you.”

  “Thank you, the taller teen said. He was about Brennan’s height, blonde with rosy cheeks and blue eyes that were bloodshot, his lids drooping a little.

  “You guys backpacking?”

  The smaller, bulkier teen nodded. “We’re doing a tour of beach resorts, looking for the perfect Thai birds what like Englishmen.”

  “Oh! So, you’re on a quest,” Brennan said.

  “Exactly!” the taller stoner enthused.

  Brennan leaned in. “Say… how’d all three of you like to make some quick dollars. Nothing illegal or weird.” Before they could get too freaked out, he added in a conspiratorial tone, “my wife is a major pain in my ass sometimes, you get my drift?”

  The youth didn’t want to seem like they didn’t understand, so both nodded vaguely. The janitor was more enthusiastic. “My wife also big pain in my ass,” the Thai man said. He was too short at about five-ten for Brennan’s plan to be ideal, but it would have to do.

  “I’ll give you each a hundred bucks to do me a different favor. You,” he gestured to the shorter teen, “are going to run out of here in a few seconds like you’re glad you got away with something, and head right into the clothing store across the way and two doors down. Buy the red hoodie in the window and the black baseball cap with the other twenty and bring them back here, and I’ll give you another hundred.”

  The kid’s eyes widened. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay, sure!” The kid couldn’t believe his luck. Not only was he not getting busted for the joint, he was making two hundred bucks for five minutes’ work.

  “You,” Brennan said, turning to his taller friend, “are going to put on that red hoody, and you are going to walk brusquely out of here, as if you had to get somewhere but didn’t want to be rude and run. Keep the hood up, listen to that CD player on your belt. Walk rapidly to the far end of the airport and wait there. I’ll give you a hundred now and a hundred later.”

  The kid looked at his friend. “Sorry, guv’nor… I don’t mean to piss on a parade or nothing, but what’s this all about, then?”

  “Like I said, my wife is busting my balls. She has our driver following me everywhere, keeping tabs. This is a little distraction to get him out of my hair for twenty minutes, so that I can cross over the concourse myself and have a beer.”

  The young man seemed satisfied. “Right. Let’s have the money then…”

  Brennan handed it over. While the young man was across the concourse, he turned to the janitor. “You: give me your surgical mask and switch clothes with me, then loan me your bucket for ten minutes. I’ll leave it by the nearest exit, okay?”

  “I… don’t think I should…” The janitor had had to pass a security screening. He knew lending out his identity badge could get him into serious trouble.

  “I don’t want your ID, just your clothes,” Brennan stressed. “And I’ll pay you five hundred American dollars.”

  It was the janitor’s salary for an entire month. He stared at the five bills, his mouth agape. Then he took them from Brennan’s hands. If need be, he knew, he could leave, call in sick, say he had to go home suddenly. But such opportunities did not present themselves regularly, and he intended to take it.

  The bathroom door swung open. Brennan tensed, ready to dart toward the opening, knock down Liersch if necessary and bolt. But it was the stockier teen, carrying a white plastic shopping bag. He handed his friend the red hooded sweatshirt. “What about the cap?”

  “That’s for you, sport,” Brennan said. “Follow your friend.” If he’d judged Liersch’s arrogance and inexperience correctly, the hat would be enough visually to throw him off the boy being the same to leave yet again. At best, he’d be confused.

  The tall teen pulled on the shirt. “Why are you so sure he’ll follow me?”

  “Red. Our eyes are drawn to it subconsciously, automatically. He’ll see you, for sure, and then he’ll register that you’re wearing a surgical mask; but that’s normal here, and he lives here, so it’ll take him a few more seconds to figure out that you’re too tall to be Thai…”

  The kid smirked. “That’s fucking brilliant mate. Really. You’re pretty dodgy, yeah?”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “You know, dodgy. Sneaky.”

  “Sure. Go earn your money,” Brennan suggested.

  The two teens left the bathroom. “Okay,” Brennan told the janitor, “you take stall one, I take stall two. Let’s get this over with.”

  A minute later, they walked out of the bathroom, the janitor following Brennan’s advice to go into the bookstore across the way, walk to the back and browse the magazines for ten minutes. Brennan pushed the bucket and mop down the concourse, keeping is head down and his back bowed, as if old and stooped. The charm of looking like staff, he decided, was that nobody pays attention to them. He rolled the bucket along the concourse, watching in the distance as Liersch tried to move people aside and gain ground on the kids.

  At the first exit doors, he propped the bucket against the wall and walked out.

  CHAPTER 12

  Locating the Apsonsi in Bangkok was a lot easier once Walter Lang knew the name of its leader. Amanda Sạkdi̒s̄ithṭhi̒’s family name lit up the Agency’s database like a penitentiary searchlight chasing a convict.

  Her father, like most Thais, went by a single name, Sạkdi̒s̄ithṭhi̒. He was suspected of an array of criminal enterprises under his SakCorp brand, starting his empire with a humble fishing boat in the nineteen sixties, using it to smuggle heroin to the Philippines and Taiwan. From there he built up the usual array of criminal tributes, kicking money back up to the man who financed or protected them, all the while building a parallel public life as a corporate investor and raider. By the time he retired, in his mid-seventies, he was one of the richest men in the country.

  His daughter, by reputation, did not get along with him for years, until a return visit from the United States, where she lived with his second wife, led to him offering her a corporate role. The Agency wasn’t aware of her unofficial activities, having never been able to track the backflow of money from the retail level. But they knew one thing about her that was consistent: every Tuesday at eight in the morning, the company had an administrative planning session at its corporate headquarters on Charoen Krung Road. And she hadn’t missed one, outside of a few scheduled vacations, in years.

  Lang sat on a bench across from the building, reading a newspaper. It allowed him to look inattentive and busy, but still peer over the top every other page to watch the cars entering the building’s underground lot. A few mid-range sedans went
in first, just after seven-thirty; eight minutes later; a bulky looking Lincoln cruised slowly up to the ramp, leading a black limousine down into the bowels of the parking garage.

  He noted the plate number. Lang had used some of his petty cash to hire a local private investigator, a man trusted by the agency due to his father’s long association, dating back to the Vietnam War. He’d show up around nine, when the meeting usually ended, in case she decided to call it a day. Regardless of when she left, the P.I. would follow and note locations, times, take headshot photos of anyone with whom she met.

  In the meantime, Walter would try to establish a source for her upcoming agenda, see if he could discretely learn where she’d be ahead of time. For that, he would use the Inter-Continental Trade Association.

  One of the Agency’s “front” companies in Thailand, the ICTA was an NGO, or ‘non-governmental organization,” a lobby group for more open trade between Asia and the United States. By lobbying on behalf of Asian producers looking for American partners over the years, it had gained enough influence in the Thai business community to place high-level assets at several prominent firms and government departments.

  It wasn’t the kind of backstory that would get him a meeting with the woman herself; but it would get Lang into the building, talking to one of their people, in his environment. And that posited multiple opportunities.

  But his meeting with SakCorp’s director of external relations wasn’t until ten o’clock. That meant he had at least an hour to wait still on the bench before he could begin wandering around the lobby and other open access areas, getting the lay of the land. Any earlier and they’d start paying attention.

  His phone buzzed. He removed it from his pocket. The number was local but unfamiliar. Lang answered the call. “Hello?”

  The voice was a surprise, and not a particularly welcome one. “I’m in Bangkok still. Where are you?”

  Lang breathed deeply to lower the sudden onrush of anxiety. “Mr. Brennan. How ever did you get my number?”