by Sam Powers
“We need to find out which one of us has drawn his interest. Follow my lead.”
They walked out of the park side by side, taking the nearest exit and heading down the adjacent street. After a block, Brennan checked in the rear-view mirror of a parked car as they strolled by; sure enough, the man was following at a discreet distance. “When we get to the next corner, I’m going to take a right,” Brennan said. “He can’t follow both of us, so this should tell us something.”
“What if he follows me?” the professor hissed. “I’m not exactly in the shape I was when I was a young man.”
“Don’t worry, if he keeps heading straight, I’ll be right behind the two of you.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“If he turns to follow me, just wait on the street. I’ll be along eventually.”
The corner arrived and Brennan turned. There was a natural curve to the street, and he watched the window reflections as he followed the course of the block. After a hundred yards or so, he spotted the man again.
He took another quick right, into an adjacent alley, waiting until the man turned the corner; Brennan crouched quickly and swept his leg out in a semi-circle; but his pursuer was alert, anticipating a fight, and he jumped over the attempted trip, using a forward roll to put some distance between them. Both men moved into combat stances. The man was young, Asian, five-ten, in his twenties or thirties; he had a bounce in his step that suggested he knew his business. He spun a quick, whirling roundhouse kick and Brennan blocked it with a raised forearm, stepping back several paces as the pursuer smoothly transitioned from the kick motion to a blur of punches; Brennan recognized the style as Sleeping Crane Fist, the close-combat blur of blows a prescribed combination; he countered quickly and effectively, his hands, arms and feet moving with the same rapid precision as his foe, blocking each strike.
The man took a half-step back and Brennan took advantage, countering with East River Fist, throwing a pair of punches from an acute angle that he expected his pursuer to block, opening the younger man up for a reverse punch, which Brennan snapped home with the back of his fist, catching the man under his cheekbone and staggering him.
The attacker shook it off and wiped a smear of blood away from the corner of his nose, looking surprised at being caught. He charged at Brennan again, his stance shifting to accommodate Xing Yi Quan, the northern flying feet technique, a series of high-speed kicks snapping outwards as Brennan maintained his center by ducking low in horse stance, his feet wide, his body flowing with natural motion around each strike, not allowing the powerful blows near enough to cause damage. Then he moved into hanging horse, a squat, wide-footed stance that would allow him to step back quickly and avoid the full range of motion from each kick, then counter with a blow of his own.
Brennan bounced on the soles of his feet, looking for an opportunity to strike back. But the younger man was fast, faster than anyone Brennan had sparred with before. He went into a stance Brennan did not recognize initially, throwing a strike that, as Brennan moved to intercept, turned into a grabbing wrist hold -- a Chin Na Su, or locking technique. Before Brennan could react, the attacker had his thumb and wrist locked up behind him, the force feeling like it might break his arm. Brennan stamped, trying to break his assailant’s toes, but the quicker man jumped backwards and fell onto one side, taking Brennan with him. On the ground, Brennan felt an arm lock around his throat, legs around his waist. The man was going to choke the life out of him, if he could. Brennan tried to force his arm up between his body and the attacker’s hold, to break it up, but the pursuer was too strong. Brennan’s head was getting light from the pressure to his carotid artery. He turned it as far as he could and pushed up with his feet, the man’s grip slowly giving way. Brennan shoved once more, hard, until he was facing the side of the smaller man’s head, then sunk his teeth into the young man’s ear, tearing away a huge, bloody chunk of lobe. The man screamed and let go, grasping at the mess. Brennan rose quickly, but this time got a leg sweep in return for his troubles, and unlike his pursuer wasn’t able to dodge it, going down hard.
When he looked up, the man was a block away and sprinting, one hand grasping the side of his head as the blood flowed freely. He was already too far for Brennan to try and catch up. Brennan rolled over to the alley wall and leaned, seated, against it until he’d caught his breath.
He got up and backtracked to the street. Ballantine was standing in front of a shop window a half-block away.
“What happened? Good lord, you’ve got blood all over your chin.”
Brennan tried to wipe it away. “Not mine, fortunately.”
“Who?”
“Hard to say. Could have been freelance. Very skilled.”
“How did he know where we were meeting?”
“Again, hard to say. He might have been working on the assumption that I was looking for a nuke expert and then just tailed you. There are only a handful of men with your experience and knowledge; it probably wasn’t hard for whoever was employing him to set up stakeouts in several locations.”
“So I’ve got a target on my back?”
“Relax, professor; if he was after you, he’d have kept following you. No, whoever sent him was either after me or, more likely, was gathering intelligence. If he’d intended to confront us, he could have done it back at the park.”
“What do we do now, then?”
“Now we flag a cab down and take it to see your expert. Assuming she doesn’t punch me in the face then try to choke me, she’ll be an improvement.”
Dr. Han Chae Young’s lab was in a modern new tinted glass-and-steel addition to the venerable red-brick university. They took the elevator to the second floor and headed down a non-descript corridor to the last door on the right, simply marked C-142.
Ballantine pushed it open and leaned around the corner, not entering completely; Brennan could see the room through the narrow horizontal glass window in the door. The lab was brightly lit, a handful of tables positioned to accompany bizarre-looking interconnected contraptions, bulky chrome cylinders with octopus arms, long hoses uncoiled, connecting glass tanks to computer servers, the guts of a device suspended from a hoist, a series of brass discs turning inside it as a student tinkered with a tiny screwdriver. Brennan couldn’t pretend to recognize any of it, aside from the handful of computer workstations; students in white lab coats, masks, and hairnets alternated between taking readings from the various machines and entering data at the terminals, discussing theory as they did so, going over their projects in a thoughtful manner.
Dr. Han was in her thirties, with long, dark hair that she’d swept back into a pony tail; she had thin lips and broad cheekbones, and she moved quickly when Ballantine opened the door, hustling over to join them and closing it quickly behind her.
“Protocol,” she said quickly. “Some of what they’re working on is sensitive.” She held out a hand to Brennan and he shook. “You must be Joe. Allan said you’d probably need to speak with me.”
“Dr. Han is a South Korean researcher, seconded to the school from the University of Seoul,” Ballantine said.
“Allan said you’re the go-to source for information on a nuke that might have disappeared from the South African disarmament, in the early nineties.”
“It’s my pet project.” She smiled and looked slightly distant for a moment, as if caught in the thought of it. “Sort of a hobby, I guess.”
“Chasing the legend of a stolen nuke?” Brennan asked. “I guess I’ve heard stranger ways to kill a weekend.”
“But not many, right?”
“You could say that, sure.” Her English was perfect, Brennan noticed. “You studied in America?”
She smiled. “University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,” she said. Then she saw the puzzled look on his face. “It’s got a great nuclear engineering program, basically, and I couldn’t get a slot at MIT. Look, let’s go get a coffee in the commissary; we can sit down and I’ll fill you in.”
“We’re not
pulling you away from work?” Ballantine asked.
She waved a hand towards the lab, shooing the idea. “It’s fine. I needed a break anyway.”
They took a door at the end of the hallway that fed into another non-descript passage, back into the main building. The cafeteria was just inside the main doors and nearly empty, a sea of Formica tables with a serving line fronting a kitchen at the back, along with a row of vending machines along the left wall.
“Most of the students have gone home for the Christmas break,” she said. “There are a few dedicated types still kicking around, and some like myself who don’t celebrate the season.”
They each bought a coffee from the machine in the corner then sat down at one of the long, empty tables. “I got onto this when I was a student. My former prof at U of M was Dennis Carruthers, who did most of his work in fission. He passed away last year, unfortunately.”
“My condolences,” Brennan said, with Ballantine echoing the sentiment.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He was very old when he died; he’d been an intern on the Manhattan project, and he was well into his nineties. Anyway, twenty years ago he was advising the South Africans on how to safely disarm in the wake of its shift to a non-Apartheid democracy.”
Ballantine seemed shocked. “So he knew about the weapon? But surely he passed the word on to authorities…”
“Oh most certainly,” Han said. “But all he had was the vaguest story, references to something that was rumored to have happened. He tried initially to discuss it with the South African government but was rebuffed. And he did mention that UN officials had inquired after it during the inspections that followed, again with no indication that it was actually true.”
“But you think it is?” Brennan said.
She nodded. “The details at the time were interesting; there was no information about where this weapon was allegedly stolen from, or its yield, or anything like that. But there was a story that it had been smuggled out of the country by land, north along the West African coast. Problematically, Namibia is a desert and Angola was – and still is – rebuilding after decades of civil war, and that’s where the trail ran cold.”
“Is it possible it could have just been sitting there this entire time, without being discovered?”
“In Angola?” Ballantine said. “There are parts of the country that are extraordinarily remote. If someone wanted to hide it, and the people looking for it didn’t know where to start? Absolutely.”
17./
JAN. 17, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.
When Alex Malone awoke at eight o’clock, she followed her usual routine; she rose as the sun streamed through the small bedroom window, grabbed her robe from its usual spot on the floor and searched in vain for her slippers for about ten seconds before giving up and staggering, blearily, towards the kitchen.
The coffee machine was on its usual timer and a steaming cup awaited her, black as pitch. She retrieved her favorite mug from the rack by the sink, shambled over and poured a cup, then dipped her head slightly to slurp up the first inch. Her eyes rolled back in her head at the joyful flavor, the automatic bliss of knowing the caffeine would hit at any moment. “Geez, what a night,” she said to the empty kitchen.
Most of the evening had been spent at a benefit staged by the Nigerian embassy. Malone had been trying to get to a particular source for a story she was working on, but it had required drinking his assistant almost under the table. Her head hurt, a throbbing reminder that she wasn’t twenty-one anymore.
She took the doorway on the other side of the kitchen, to the short, twisting staircase that led to the front door of her townhouse; Malone opened the door and squinted at the glare of the sun, both thankful it was a nice day and immediately stung by it due to the hangover; she reached down to retrieve her morning copy of the Washington Post from the top step.
Only there were two.
At first, they appeared identical and Malone assumed the deliverer had just made a mistake. She left them both on her kitchen table while she went to get ready.
Five minutes later, she was running back to the kitchen, head and body wrapped in towels. She’d just stepped under the water when she realized why one paper looked slightly different: it didn’t have her address scrawled on the front. Her carrier did it with all the papers on his route. She would have ignored it, but her reporter instinct was kicking in. So she rushed downstairs, realizing half way that she hadn’t even bothered to properly dry herself first.
Sure enough, the paper on top was address-free. There was no way he’d miss one; even in the modern age of free electronic muck, the Post still printed multiple sections daily.
She picked up the copy and leafed through it, not seeing anything out of the ordinary. She went back to the beginning and started again. On the second read through, she was eighteen pages in when she noticed the blue dot, a tiny pen mark next to the second line of a story, halfway down the page. Malone went back to the beginning of the paper and started again. Sure enough, there was a series of dots. Every few pages, they’d be substituted with a short line. She collected the letters next to each of them and began rearranging them, using the lines as word divisions, until she had: Sheridan Fifth Lv 2 p lot 9 pm.
Sheridan and Fifth was the site of a popular rec center, Malone knew. “P lot” obviously meant parking lot. At least whoever sent it had a sense of history, she thought. Meeting a source in a Washington parking lot was very Deep Throat, very Woodward and Bernstein. It also made her nervous as hell; Malone had been a good reporter for more than a decade and generally dug her own stuff up. She didn’t do ‘anonymous’, and she certainly didn’t meet people she didn’t know in dark parking garages.
But… the newspaper was a tactful touch. If someone crazy wanted to take a shot at her, she reasoned, they could just have called her up about a potential story and lied. Whoever left the newspaper wanted complete privacy, but in a place public enough to allay some of their fears.
It was enough. It wasn’t enough to make her feel safe; but it was enough to make her go.
Eleven nerve-clenching hours later, she was seated in her car on level two of a parking garage near the corner of Sheridan and Fifth. She waited as the clock approached nine; then she watched it go by; she gave it another ten minutes before it became apparent no one was going to make an appearance.
She switched on her headlights and started the engine. As she did, a figure stepped out from behind a nearby vehicle. Malone turned the engine off, and the lights, and then got out of the car.
The person was standing in the shadows. “You know who I am?”
She’d recognized him immediately. Malone came closer, her heels clicking slightly on the cold concrete. “Of course.”
“You’ve been investigating David Fenton-Wright, the deputy director of the agency. The rumor is that he’s next in line to become director.”
“Okay,” she said, offering nothing back. The less she said the more dead air was left for him to fill.
“He’s just an errand boy. You need to start with the two dead diplomats, work backwards from there.”
She knew he was talking about the EU sniper, a topic of discussion for months but recently quiet. “You mean Lord Abbott and the Marie Lapierre shooting? What do they have to do with….”
“Start there. Everything else follows. The chairman has his fingers in many pies.”
“I don’t understand; What chairman? Her committee? Why would anyone care about an environmental committee to the point…”
“That was a great front for La Pierre, but not much more,” the source said. “She was into much deeper issues. You’re aware of what happened in Dar Es Salaam last year?”
“Of course; the UN did some heavy handling of a group of eco-terrorists, and in turn they killed their hostages. But I don’t see…
“Be quiet, I don’t have long,” he said. “Compare that with other events over the last two years. Look for similarities. It’s all there. Then look up a firm c
alled AK Industrial SARL, based in Paris and Montpellier. You’ve heard of Ahmed Khalidi?”
“Sure, oil magnate from the Middle East.”
“He is the chairman, and is based in Jordan. He has a group of insiders, political types who he meets with far more often than is healthy; its official name is the Association Commercial Franco-Arabe, or ACF. We’ve obtained information from a deep source, and that’s all you get on that. But the names of his board members are worth looking into. Boris Miskin, former Russian cultural attaché to America. He has some sort of personal feud going on with the Khalidi right now, but we’re not sure why; Fung So Dook, a state secretary for Jiangdong province in China; Yoshi Funomora, a businessman from Japan; and Hans-Karl Wilhelm, the German representative, a physician and former national politician. La Pierre was also a member and, we suspect, Abbott as well.”
“We? As in the…”
“The U.S. intelligence community. We’ve been investigating the ACF for several years, trying to tie it to operations that ultimately supported Islamist terrorist cells, among others. We believe Khalidi’s true goal is destabilization and reaping the economic consequences of being able to predict it will happen in each locale, but the group also has heavy political connections, policy connections; they’ve used them for purposes both good and bad, sharing those connections and working as a united front.”
It was a lot of information, a ton of innuendo. “What am I supposed to be looking for?” Malone asked. “I’m assuming these people have had lengthy careers already or they wouldn’t have been involved with a guy like him in the first place. Why would someone shoot two of his board members?”
“Concentrate on Khalidi,” he said. “Most people in the public have never heard of him or from him, despite being the chairman of a major conglomerate. But he has some interesting history of his own.”
“Interesting as in ‘ha ha’, or interesting as in ‘blam, blam’.”
