by Sam Powers
“Now rest easy, son, rest easy. What can I do for you?”
“I have a message from your assistant Christopher, sir; he wanted you to know he had information on the matter you’d asked about… I mean, the EU matter…”
“I get the general gist.” He took out his clip and gave the youth a twenty. “You done college, son?” he asked.
“Yes sir, Mr. March, sir.”
“Then you know better than to use the same word twice in the same sentence.”
The young man looked blank.
“It’s a joke, son. But don’t you worry about it.”
The young man backed away, practically bowing. March was accustomed to adulation, and he smiled politely as the messenger withdrew. Then he made his way a dozen feet to a red sofa nearby and sat down, unfolding the copy of the Washington Times he’d had under his arm. If he knew his assistant well…
His phone rang. “Right on cue,” March said as he answered. “Talk to me, Christopher. What’s new?”
“Senator, I’ve got some feedback on that issue you’d asked about. My NSA source tells us we’re pushing hard for an American-made solution to the enviro committee shootings and that Younger is one of the main advocates.”
“American solution? Why on Earth…”
“No idea sir. No idea. We don’t seem to have a horse in this race.”
“He has the president’s endorsement all but announced; maybe getting us involved was the price. POTUS always was fond of La Pierre’s environmental committee.”
“That’s the weird part, sir. They’ve been talking about it for a few days, but there’s been no official involvement yet and no request to join in the EU-led investigations already under way.”
“What’s your thinking, Christopher?”
“Maybe their ‘solution’ involves a diplomatic component, something other than just seconding staff to our allies across the pond. Or… maybe they have another reason for wanting control over this thing; maybe there’s something about it they don’t want getting out.”
“Perhaps. Keep your ears open. Younger’s on the stump for most of the next two months drumming up support, and that makes him vulnerable to information that breaks here first. Who knows? POTUS’s anointed might just trip himself up yet.”
ANNANDALE, VIRGINIA
Carolyn had slept fitfully since Joe’s departure. That was nothing new; but the fact that she felt as if she’d helped to talk him into going seemed to worsen her guilt; she found herself having bad dreams, waking up several times each night, pitching and turning under the covers.
The kids had a babysitter during the week and would be back at school soon anyway; and they were accustomed to their father disappearing for a few weeks at a time on business. But her nerves hadn’t settled with age and the familiarity of routine. If anything, her anxiety had heightened. Like Joe, she wondered what the real impact on them would be in the long-term.
At work, her blue suit and cream blouse felt like she couldn’t get them to fit quite right, and her panty hose felt bunchy. She dropped her first coffee of the day on her laptop while near-motionless at her office desk, a supremely uncoordinated moment. Then she realized she’d missed a briefing because her phone battery had died while the laptop was down, rendering her without mail in the exact ten-minute window David had used to call everyone into his office. Then Jonah called her on her office line and said she had a half-hour to get ready for another meeting with David, and if she missed that one, refreshing her resume might be a smart idea.
She sat down behind her desk, looking at the laptop, which now bore a yellow post-it sticker with the letters “IT” in marker. Not that they were likely to grab the wrong thing. Or show up any time soon. She had twenty more minutes before going in with her boss, and the day was heading south.
Had things gone as badly as she thought with Joe? She wasn’t sure. He’d been seething for the two days before leaving. But he was so non-communicative that she couldn’t tell if he was mad at the agency or at her for delivering the message. That’s all it was, really, she told herself. It wasn’t like either of them had much of an alternative.
She made a mental note to call Callum and Ellen, to see if they wanted to come around for dinner. She needed some cheering up.
There was a knock on her office door and it swung open before she could respond. “I thought I’d come to see you, rather than making you tromp all the way over to my neck of the woods,” David Fenton-Wright said.
She gestured to one of the chairs across from her desk but he shook his head quickly. “That’s fine, I’ll just be a moment. I wanted to piss on you again for missing the briefing, but I’m over it. What I did think you should know, however, is that we discussed Joe’s mission and we agreed that we uniformly felt confident in his ability to confirm a suspect.”
Jonah stood behind him, quietly taking notes. Carolyn had never liked the younger man, despite his sterling reputation. He seemed officious to an almost automaton-like degree.
And what was David up to?
“Is he okay?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Fenton-Wright said, perhaps too quickly. She wondered if they had any real idea; probably not. “We believe he’ll be looking into a number of new leads, however, so don’t leave the porch light on.” He smiled when he said it, like he thought she’d find that funny.
“David, when this is all done, will you let Joe resign? He’s tired of all of this. I mean…”
Fenton-Wright turned to her glass wall and peeked through the blinds at the rest of the office. Then he turned back to her. “We’ll see. You must understand, Carolyn, that his being frozen out … well, that was never my intention. We received a great deal of pressure.”
“From…”
“From other agencies. Let’s just leave it at that. Anyway, those relationships must endure; so it probably won’t be my decision. I hope you realize that.”
She nodded hesitatingly. “Of course, David.”
He moved to leave, opening her door a crack before smiling at her again. “And of course, should anything untoward happen, the fact that he’s been on the company payroll for so long would assure a healthy pension for you and the children.”
He smiled one more time and left. Caroline sat agog at the comment, wondering if the man had Asperger’s, or something. She didn’t want his pension; she wanted her husband back.
DEC. 15, 2015, PARIS, FRANCE
The Eiffel Tower elevator chugged north at a pace so leisurely, Brennan initially wondered if something was wrong. There were perhaps a half-dozen other people in the ancient-looking elevator cage, and a middle-aged Englishman with a round face saw his expression. “It’s about a minute, maybe ninety seconds between floors,” he said. “Are you afraid of heights?”
“Something like that,” Brennan said. In reality, he just wanted to get to the meeting more quickly, the tension of a new, unknown source eating at him. Walter had found the contact through an old colleague, Myrna Verbish, a former agency analyst who kept up on the trade. It was the source’s idea to meet at the top of the tower, as public and safe a spot as a local could imagine in the city. Brennan was holding a copy of The Catcher in The Rye, as requested.
“Well, most people like the view,” the man said. “Just keep your eyes shut and we’ll be there before you know it. The trip takes about eight minutes. The wife and I have done this before, you know.”
Brennan smiled politely at the man but couldn’t help rocking on his heels. The height wasn’t a problem, but the confined space was adding to his impatience.
Finally, the car creaked to a halt at the observation level. Brennan climbed out, his erstwhile confidante right behind him. “You see?” the Englishman said. “It’s not such a bad ride.”
There were already a few dozen people on the deck. Brennan moved towards the rail. The view was spectacular, Paris sprawled out in a grand circle around them. The city had long prohibited buildings over seven stories tall, giving the central landmark a sp
ectacular perspective; the bridge across the Seine river below was busy with seemingly tiny traffic, the Trocadero gardens running beyond it in a narrow green strip of manicured brilliance and water fountains, and past them the grand marble pillars of the enormous Palais De Chaillot, the building’s two wings spread grandly, covering several hundred feet to each side.
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” The Englishman from the elevator had sidled up next to him.
For a split second, Brennan didn’t realize he was being addressed. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” he said.
“It’s a shame,” the Englishman said. He had a tan raincoat on, an umbrella folded up in one hand; he wore a flat cap and had half glasses, a large man in all respects, flecks of grey and lines suggesting he was in his early fifties. He gestured towards the palace. “It’s sort of an Albert Speer-like sterile government idea of art. In fact, Hitler was said to have loved the place.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes, he was quite enamored with it, apparently. The palace they knocked down to build it was a Romanesque monstrosity in its own right, the Palais du Trocadero. But it had character, a grand blend of styles, two giant church towers, broad marble stairs. And it was built for a purpose, to celebrate a famous victory over Spain. Its unworthy replacement, on the other hand, was for an international exposition, which just adds to its sense of artifice.”
Brennan raised the book slightly to see if the man was focusing on him for a reason, but the Englishman seemed uninterested. A moment later a blonde woman of similar vintage approached them; her hair was losing its artificial color at the roots, and she had a faux fur coat over her green sweater. “Is my husband bothering you?” she said, smiling warmly. “He does go on.”
“It’s… fine,” Brennan said. “Interesting stuff.”
“You’re on vacation as well, I take it?” she said, not waiting for him to answer before continuing. “We’ve come every year for years. Not always to Paris, of course; we also enjoy Strasbourg and Provence.”
“Uh huh,” Brennan said, barely paying attention. The observation deck was fairly busy and he wasn’t sure if he was missing the man, who was supposed to be quite short, balding, a bookish type.
There, just exiting the elevator. The man had a grey navy pea coat on, black woolen gloves to counteract the winter temperatures. Steam drifted from his mouth as he scanned the area also, a copy of the J.D. Salinger novel in one hand. He saw Brennan just a moment later and both men nodded towards the other. They met along the wall overlooking the palace.
“You’ve read the Catcher in The Rye, I see,” the man said to Brennan.
“I just started it,” he replied. “So don’t give anything away.”
Brennan looked over his shoulder. The English tourists were still close, so he gestured with his head for the contact to move a few yards away, then followed. He kept his voice low. “Do you have something for me?”
The bookish man nodded. “You have the money?”
“A thousand,” Brennan said. He checked around for people paying attention once more then slipped the man an envelope.
Behind them, they heard a gasp of surprise. Brennan turned quickly, wary of any potential problems; but it was just the British woman. She’d leaned on the wide edge of the viewing area but dropped one of her white gloves; along with several other tourists, she was watching it drift slowly towards the ground.
“Oh gosh,” she said as it fell almost from sight, the barest dot in the updrafts. “I really loved those gloves.”
Behind him, Brennan missed the moment when her husband casually moved behind his contact, missed the short jab with the tip of the umbrella; and he was just turning back as the Englishman strode away and towards the elevator car.
The contact was still standing there but he had a shocked look in his eyes, and they’d begun to dart around, as if he were confused; his head started to move slightly side to side, rapidly, as if he were trying to supplement poor eyesight by improving his field of vision; his lips were parted slightly as if, caught in a moment of surprise, he’d forgotten how he might look to someone else.
Brennan nodded toward him. “Are you okay? You look like you saw a ghost or some….”
The contact collapsed, his body seizing and convulsing as he went into cardiac arrest, foamy spittle dribbling out of the left corner of his mouth and onto the concrete. Brennan knew the symptoms right away, knew the man had no time. “The address,” he hissed at his source, as people began to gather around. Behind the crowd, the Englishman’s wife had stepped into the second car and the gate closed. “Give me the address!”
The convulsing man couldn’t communicate, but his eyes flashed down quickly, towards the book in his hands. Brennan quickly exchanged copies with him, then rose, pushed his way through the crowd, saying loudly, “This man’s having a heart attack! We need a doctor, now!”
Security were rushing over; there was a nurse on site, Brennan knew, but it wouldn’t matter. He headed towards the elevator, cursing his own carelessness, his own casual approach. It had been the English couple; that much was obvious. The poison? Probably ricin, injected with the tip of the man’s umbrella into the victim’s buttocks. The toxin was deadly efficient, and the contact stood no chance.
15./
The café along Rue des Rosiers wasn’t exactly Langley, but it did the trick; the street was lined with trendy shops and restaurants, the pedestrians milling amongst each other on the narrow one-way street, cars giving way by moving at a crawl.
Brennan’s nerves were on edge from the incident at the tower, and he sat drinking a café au lait, going through the dog-eared copy of the Catcher in The Rye. It was mid-afternoon, the street outside chilly and the sky gray, but the café quiet, the only sounds the conversation between the waiter and a friend at a smaller corner table and the radio playing a scratchy old Edith Piaf song, the haunting melody drifting up from somewhere behind the main counter.
His first pass through the book hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, although it was only a quick scan; he’d concentrated on each line of text, looking for small pen or pencil marks, dots or lines, anything that might indicate part of a phrase pattern.
Back to the start. Brennan ignored the narrative as he turned each page; when he read it for the first time at age fourteen, he’d been fascinated by Holden Caulfield; at seventeen, he’d realized the kid’s angry rebellion was just sorrow, outrage at losing his brother; at twenty, he’d read it for a third and final time, still surprised at Salinger’s ability in the fifties to express how isolated youths felt when their upbringing was ruptured by loss and emotional neglect. He’d joined the navy a year later, finding a sense of community in it– and later the SEALS -- that was as strong as his own family’s bonds, guidance in self and purpose that helped stave off the kind of demons that poor Holden suffered so convincingly.
Brennan shook the thought off, got back to the book. He scanned each page again line by line, not noticing anything in the text…
There, on page one hundred and five. He’d missed the marks the first time because they were beside the page number, in tiny pencil print at the upper left of the page. There was a dot, then a dash, then the number. Brennan’s code-breaking training wasn’t exactly extensive but it looked like a simple location key, the dot denoting a line, the dash a page. He turned to page five, then parsed down to the tenth line. The last letter of the line had been gone over in pen, just barely enhanced like a medium ‘bold’ of the type.
He returned to page one hundred and five; then he went forward, a page at a time, picking up each of the book locations, then building the words a letter at a time. After ten minutes, he had a string: ’68 Rue du Globe, Stains’.
Stains was northeast of the city and it looked busy, middle-class, with a host of street-level shops and single-family homes behind privacy walls, along with plenty of both foot and car traffic. The taxi dropped Brennan off a block from his target address, as instructed, and he paid the cabbie
with fifty euros, telling him to keep the small amount of leftover change.
He walked the block, passing a handful of small businesses: a hairdresser, a falafel café, an insurance office. His address was the first on the opposite corner, a typical three- or four-bedroom Mediterranean-style home with a red tile roof and pink stucco walls. The wall around it was about six feet high, so he couldn’t make out much below the lower level windows; the back yard looked busy, though, with a few palms stretching high above, and the final few feet of the roof to a pool cabana at the end of the garden.
Brennan crossed the street and paced around the block at a slow walk using a slight head turn and his peripheral vision to check the place out, before rounding the block in left turns until he’d seen as much as he could. He looked down the street for a better vantage point; there was a five-story office block about five hundred yards away. He made his way up the street casually, then crossed over and entered through the public double doors; he ignored the front desk and walked confidently to the elevators. The first car that arrived was empty. He took it up to the fifth floor and got out, then looked for the emergency exit sign. The roof access was likely there.
The roof hatch was sloppily unlocked, but it saved him breaking through and potentially attracting attention. He climbed the short ladder attached to the wall at the end of the hallway and popped it open.
It was ideal. He crouched low and crossed over to the edge facing the villa. Brennan withdrew his small binoculars from the inside of his coat and placed the backyard into focus. It was nice, touristy, with an in-ground pool and a shaded back patio. No one was using it because of the December weather; but there was a guard outside the backdoor with a sizeable shoulder holster bulge under his suit jacket.
Okay, so probably one at the back, one at the front, a couple more inside. Best approach? Brennan considered it for a moment. Isolate the guy at the back, use the upper balcony for ingress as it’s likely where the bedrooms are, and most guards won’t expect someone coming from behind them, from the inside out.
