by Sam Powers
At the other end of the table, Carolyn was carefully taking notes on a tablet, keeping track of how the assignment had unfurled to that point. “What about the asset?” she said. “I assume we’re going with someone senior on this?”
Fenton-Wright smiled at her. “We’ll talk about that after the meeting,” he said. “I have some work I need you to do in that regard.”
Carolyn seemed oblivious, but Lang had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
10./
ANNANDALE, VIRGINIA
Joe was in the back yard playing with the kids when Carolyn got home. She didn’t disturb them at first; she snuck around the side of the house and found a perch on the deck stairs to watch them. He was pretending to be pinned, one kid on each arm. “Nooo!” he declared. “Caught by the terrible tickle monsters!”
The kids were laughing, and for just the barest moment, Carolyn was happy. Then she thought about David’s request, and watched Joe with the children, and she felt emptiness deep down inside. It bordered on sadism, what David had asked her to do.
But she didn’t have a choice. She tried to rationalize it to herself that Joe would understand because he knew what these people were like. After all, hadn’t he wanted back in?
At one point, months earlier. Now, he just wanted out. And he wasn’t going to get his wish. I can’t do this. I can’t be the one who tells him.
“Hey Hon,” she said, alerting them to her presence. The kids ran over and hugged her. Brennan slowly followed them, leaning down to peck her on the cheek.
“You’re home early. Or on time, by anyone else’s schedule.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Listen, we need to talk.”
“Uh oh. Sounds serious,” he said.
“It is. It is sort of serious, Joe.” She filled him in on Fenton-Wright’s request. “He wants me to smooth the way and to let you know that all is forgiven.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You have to go undercover, see what you can shake loose on the Euro shootings. And you’d be flying blind, for jurisdictional reasons.” She waited for an angry reaction, but instead he just seemed stunned. “You’re not saying anything. That’s kind of unnerving.”
“What should I say?” He sat down on the step next to her. “I’m guessing this was David’s idea?”
“I couldn’t say for sure.” It was kind of true; they hadn’t discussed where David had gotten the idea. She just knew it came from his office. “But he wants you there, certainly.” She waited for a few seconds, though it seemed like minutes. “Well? What do you think?”
“I think that three years ago these people just about crucified me for a deniable op. Now they want me to accept one on their behalf after being completely frozen out? That takes some balls.”
She was worried he would refuse. He was still on the agency payroll but had been inactive for so long, she thought he might actually get away with it. That would end her career; David would see to that. She also knew what Joe had been through after Colombia, how isolated he had felt. Was it really fair to ask him to go through something potentially similar?
“You could say no,” she said. “What are they going to do? You’re not a SEAL anymore, just a government employee. Technically, as long as you don’t break the Espionage Act and reveal secret information, all they could really do is fire you, right?”
They both knew that wasn’t entirely true. A lot depended on who made the call. “There are things you do on the job unofficially,” Brennan said. “Things they can hold against you later. Things they can get sealed by a Special Court, so the hearings aren’t even public. Hell, they could probably wrap me in paper and I couldn’t say a damn thing about it.”
“But would they go to all that…”
“Yes,” he said, cutting her off. “And you know that.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. And she meant it. “He didn’t give me a choice but to ask you. He gave me this long harangue about remembering who I work for, and that my career was tied up in ‘the kind of decisions you choose to make at this juncture’, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.”
Brennan loved her, deeply and completely. And he did so knowing that Carolyn could be insincere; she could put herself ahead of him just a bit too easily. But maybe she was worried about the kids, about what losing her income could do to the family.
Maybe.
“When does he want me in?” Brennan said.
She shook her head. “He doesn’t. A file will be mailed to you; that’s all you get.”
He got up and walked up the steps to the house, leaving her there.
11./
DEC 9, 2015, BARCELONA, SPAIN
The Mediterranean city sprawled like a terracotta-tiled blanket over the hilly terrain that bordered the sea, a mix of modern glass and steel, perversely modernistic new architecture and traditional whitewashed concrete buildings, grouped closely to produce shadows that could help citizens stay cool in the midst of summer. It was a temperate sixty-eight degrees, but the sun hid behind a slate gray sky and the air seemed heavy with moisture, as if it were calling out for a flash of rain at any moment to wash away the last tourists of the season.
Outside the airport, Brennan caught an off-white cab downtown to the El Torero Hotel, a short trip through intense multi-lane traffic to an aging eight-story sandstone building that sat near the circular Placa de Catalunya park.
Like most of the neighborhood the hotel was well-preserved and ornate, a monument to when architecture followed the whims of its creator and not mere functionality. Small carvings of cherubs surrounded a clock above the hotel’s grand metal nameplate; the building featured decorative cornice and concrete moldings, along with faux Juliet balconies outside each window, fronted by black iron railings.
It was a trendy area of the city. Brennan got out of the cab, a carry on over his shoulder. Pedestrians filled the street; many were young, hip, wealthy looking, brown leather jackets and designer purses. Others were old Spain, sports coats and flat caps adorning old men who leaned on canes. He was drawn back to his last visit, fifteen years earlier. The Spanish had eschewed strip mall culture, so the cobblestoned street was lined with stores, selling everything from travel insurance to diamonds. That drew people, filled the sidewalk, and imbued the city with vibrancy.
He paid the cabbie from a money clip loaded with Euros and looked up at the hotel. The file on Bustamante had been concise-but-meticulous, and Brennan sensed Walter had a hand in it. The drug lord and wind power mogul kept a suite on the top floor, and was usually surrounded by muscle.
Belying the exterior, the hotel lobby was modern, a mix of contemporary glass and wood with cool tile floors. He checked in at the long black marble reception desk, booking a room on the seventh floor under a long-standing clandestine cover, Roger Bates; his backstory was the he was a rubber products manufacturer from New Jersey and was in town for a quick vacation, but the clerk avoided any personal questions.
The room itself was uninspiring, featuring the typical firm mattress, sponged oil paintings and cheap furniture that he’d seen at a dozen other overnight rest stops. But it had a decent wireless connection and was dependable enough for his purposes. He kept his bag packed but hauled his laptop out and set it up on the desk, next to the television. He opened his overnight bag, removing black, form-fit clothing and a pair of crepe-souled shoes that would allow him to tread silently. He left the clothing and shoes on the dresser, then went out into the hallway.
He checked the stairwell at one end and found it unlocked and empty; then he did the same at the far end of the corridor.
Brennan took the elevator up to the top floor. Outside the doors, the corridor to his left ran east-west. To his right, a small window was set into the wall on the south side of the building.
He peered around the corner by the bank of elevators. There were only three rooms, each a grand suite. The largest, he suspected, was Bustamante’s. At the end of the hall a security guard in a dark gray
suit and tie sat on a stool next to the door. Based on his boss’s paranoia and background, there were probably three or four more inside, at least.
Brennan’s task was simple: he needed ears inside the suite. That meant either getting inside and bugging the place or finding an alternative, such as inserting a fiber optic line through the wall plaster. He’d considered the layout of each floor and the building in general when he’d arrived. But to be certain, he rode the elevators down to the main floor again; the lobby was busy; the guests were young professionals and older tourists, the hotel stylish but hardly full of family amenities.
He made his way back to the sidewalk outside. One side of the building was connected to its neighbor while the other side was the end of a block, open to the street. He walked around the base of the hotel, checking out the roof and where the ledges sat relative to one another. Then he went back inside and took the elevator back to his room, where he changed into his black clothing and slung the small overnight bag over his shoulder.
He took the elevator back up to the eighth floor, waiting for a few moments after getting out of the car and watching its indicator numbers to ensure both cars had gone down to lower levels. He popped open the window on the right-hand wall.
As he’d noticed outside, the two-foot wide ledge ran right around the top floor. He climbed out into the dimness of the early evening, pulling the window all-but-closed behind him. Brennan shuffled his feet carefully, following the ledge around the building and keeping his back to the wall, pausing at each window to check and ensure no one was looking out before passing by. He didn’t look down, but it wouldn’t have mattered; after nearly two decades of training and operations, he’d learned to turn off any nervous sentiment, to take a cold and calculated approach. He climbed around the corner of the building to the street side and the wind momentarily buffeted him, a gust pulling him away from the ledge. He leaned in, using his body weight to resist the momentum until the wind died down again.
Brennan had calculated where Bustamante’s multi-room suite would start but he checked each window in case, peeking around the corner of each deep well and getting a look inside. The first two were bedrooms, one larger with an attached bathroom but both plain and functional. The third window was to the living room, which seemed to occupy most of the building’s north side; Bustamante was propped up on an antique-style sofa, watching a large television above the fireplace. He was heavyset, with black-and-gray curls and a thin black moustache above the kind of jowls a man gets when he lets himself go, later in life. Two guards patrolled the suite, each armed with a machine pistol slung over a shoulder. A third was standing just inside the front door and a fourth sat adjacent to Bustamante in a deep, short-backed armchair.
Brennan took the small carry-on bag and placed it on the ledge. For a split second, he caught sight of the adjacent square below, the trees and ant-sized people nearly one hundred feet down, the wind and the sounds of city life blending; he turned away from it, refusing to allow for distraction. He unzipped the bag and withdrew a hairpin-sized black microphone, attached to a small suction cup. He wet the cup quickly with his tongue and attached the microphone to the bottom corner of the window, where its sensitive ribbon condenser would pick up sound as vibrations through the glass, then broadcast it wirelessly back to Brennan’s laptop. Then he pulled off two small strips of duct tape and used them to ensure the suction cup would stay attached. The window was a good fifteen feet from the sitting area, and it would take considerable bad luck, he thought, for someone to notice the tiny object.
He began to make his way back around the building, the wind picking up slightly and causing him to pause every few seconds, to wait for it to die down, the gusts strong and loud at the increased altitude. Brennan took his time, shuffling his feet along the ledge carefully and keeping his back to the wall, not looking down at the ant-filled street below. He rounded the corner … just as a guard opened the window to a bathroom, the frame of it catching Brennan flush.
He half-stumbled backwards, his feet sliding off of the ledge, his weight carrying him over the edge.
He grasped outward at the last moment, catching the ledge with both hands, every muscle straining to keep his body momentum from swinging too far forward and causing him to lose his grip, his fingers rigid almost to the point of breaking, the street below a blur of bad intentions. His black gloves were deliberately tacky – a sticky polymer grip that helped him hold on as he swung suspended. He pulled himself back up until he could get his arms and chest to resting height against the narrow shelf, then swung the rest of his body up and back to safety.
He lay there for a few moments, panting, his arm muscles strained from a sudden onrush of fatigue.
He heard flushing from inside the room. The guard had evidently finished with the toilet; Brennan rose and carefully pushed the window closed, just far enough to get safely around it.
At the elevators, he climbed back through the small window and closed it firmly behind him. He took off his gloves, placing them in the carry bag, and rolled up his sleeves to reduce any suspicion generated by his clothing; then he took the elevators back down to the seventh floor.
Back in his room, he started his laptop, plugged in a USB range extender and ran the microphone’s app, before putting on a pair of headphones with a long cord.
Bustamante’s Spanish was flawless, but characterized by a slight lisp common to Catalans.
“… and don’t bring me any more of that fucking lettuce,” he was telling one of his flunkies. “I just want the sandwich and the fries, not all of the food for rabbits that they always use.”
Like most in intelligence, Brennan hated stakeouts. It was one thing for an analyst to get excited about the contents of a tap, to generate something useful. It was another to be the person doing the tapping, sitting listening for hour upon hour for a grain of information.
“Juan, put on the recording of Aida,” the tycoon said, about twenty minutes in. “I want to catch up.”
An hour passed, then two, with Bustamante saying little. His food arrived and he ate it, complaining that the hotel had once again put lettuce on his sandwich. Someone got him a drink, then another, then later on some bottled water. Brennan listened implacably, his training preventing boredom or anxiety from intruding as he waited for a comment, a word, a slip – anything that might tie the wind magnate to the shootings.
Just before eleven o’clock, Bustamante went to bed. Brennan checked the timer on the audio recording so that he’d know where to cue it to the next day for checking. Then he went to bed himself, sleeping above the covers.
Brennan rose early the next morning and substituted his smartphone for the laptop, taking his ear buds with him to the restaurant adjacent to the lobby, where he ordered breakfast, eating a plate of eggs and bacon slowly as he listened in. Bustamante wasn’t up yet, so all that he heard was the occasional sound of a guard moving about the suite.
When the businessman finally rose at eight o’clock, he ordered breakfast from room service then discussed business matters on the phone for the better part of an hour. His tone was mercilessly superior as he reminded his staff how upset he was to be holed up in the hotel all of the time, with too many enemies to be a public figure any longer. He sounded intermittently paranoid and psychotic. Brennan wondered how Bustamante had managed to hold an organization together for so long without some sort of mutiny.
He went back to his room and switched back to the laptop, checking out the rest of Bustamante’s file for the third and fourth time while he waited for something to happen.
There. The businessman was talking to someone about the Abbott shooting, the first actual mention he’d made of the sniper case. “What about his woman?” he told the lackey on the other end of the line.
“His wife?”
“Not his wife,” Bustamante said, sounding slightly disgusted. “His mistress. The French woman.”
“She has already spoken with the authorities.”
“So? That does not mean she told them everything. If, as we suspected, he was working at cross purposes with the chairman, he might have passed something to her, something useful. Something that could incriminate the lot of them.”
“Should we talk to her?”
“Do you think so?” Bustamante said sarcastically. “Get going! Get hold of our friend in Paris, get him to pick her up and have a chat.”
The other man agreed and hung up.
It was early afternoon by the time the stakeout bore fruit again. Bustamante was talking to an assistant about checking something out, something about a shipment.
“What’s the time of arrival by that route?” Bustamante asked.
“Several weeks. That is the reality no matter who they use,” the assistant said.
“Mother of God!” Bustamante sounded annoyed. “We’re not talking about Christmas presents. He has doubtless gone to ground once again in the meantime. The question is whether he has kept the fissionable material.”
“And if so?”
“Then he will sell it, not use it. If terrorism were the point of this, he would done so years ago. No, he wants money, and lots of it. And it is worth a lot to the right people,” Bustamante said. “If not… well, then perhaps it is too late already. Either way, it is lost to us, and the prospective negotiating power that comes with it.”
“Where did he get it from in the first place? The Russians?” the assistant asked.
“You don’t worry about that stuff, okay? You just keep me updated on where things are at.” There was silent for a moment before he elaborated. “It went missing twenty years ago in South Africa, after the end of Apartheid; I’m not even sure which stories about it are true.”
