by Sam Powers
Maybe Alex had just lost her key.
She pushed the button on the ancient intercom system by her front door. It had been sloppily painted a light tan/orange, to match the walls of the entrance hallway.
“Who is it?”
“I have a package delivery here for a Myrna Verbish, ma’am.” The voice was young. “Would that be you?”
“Just leave it outside the front door and I’ll come down and get it. I’m not decent right now.”
“Can’t do that, ma’am,” the young man said. “You need to sign for it.”
“Who’s it from? I’m not expecting anything.”
A pause. “The return to sender is for a Walter Lang.”
Walter? Had he sent her something before he was shot? Why delay it and then use a courier service? What would he have been playing at?
Outside the building, the young man in the brown cap and shirt with the ginger hair and red beard waited. After a few seconds had passed, the buzzer sounded.
Inside the building, the delivery man took the two short flights of stairs to the third floor, second from the top, where Myrna’s apartment was situated at the end of the hall, on the right hand side. He checked the hallway both ways and listened for any sounds before proceeding to the door to knock. “UPS ma’am,” he said, using his free left hand to take the silenced pistol out of the back waistband of his shorts. He was nervous, on his first real assignment, a chance to impress the big boss.
There was no sound. He knocked again. “Ma’am?” He leaned in to see if she was using the spy hole to check him out. The glass exploded outward, the .22 caliber bullet passing through his left eye and lodging in his brain. He collapsed to the ground, spasmodic, the brain damage not killing him immediately but rendering him beyond repair.
Myrna opened the door slowly. The man was lying right outside it and she leaned down to see if he had any identification on him. She heard a slight noise to her left and looked up, for just long enough to see David Fenton-Wright’s silenced pistol.
The two shots were quick and precise, and Myrna slumped to the floor next to the delivery man.
He’d been right to follow the young man in, he decided, and that a veteran like Myrna Verbish would see right through the delivery ruse. But she was never a field agent, not inclined to check other angles of attack, or for backup. He walked over to the bodies and took the pistol from his own gloved hand, placing it in that of the fake delivery man. Then he picked up the delivery man’s own pistol and put it in his pocket. Police would be occupied for days trying to figure out who Myrna really was, or why a senior citizen would shoot it out with a man of no apparent employ, dressed in a fake delivery costume. Eventually, he might have to worry about a tie between Donald’s current job and Myrna’s past. But he had bigger problems to clean up in the immediate.
Myrna was still twitching, trying to overcome the inevitable, her foot shaking and her body shuddering slightly, blood entering her lungs, her breath sputtering. He stepped over her and entered the apartment quickly, looking around for her computer; it was on, her email open and unprotected. There was an audio file in the inbox from a French email address. He forwarded it to his own address, deleted the original, and flushed the computer’s garbage and cache folders.
Whoever Myrna’s contacts in intelligence were, Fenton-Wright decided, she wouldn’t be helping Alex Malone out, or anyone else, any longer.
Malone got back to Myrna’s building from the office later than she’d planned. She was still irritated by the whole argument with Kenny – and her lack of progress on named sources -- when she pulled into the parking garage. She got out of the old red Miata and crossed the parking garage to the stairwell, taking them up to the third floor.
She turned the corner and saw Myrna and another person laying in the hallway, a man. She gasped inwardly, shocked by the sight of the blood pooling around them. Before she could react, she heard a noise from the apartment, its door still wide open. She quickly turned the corner of the stairwell and moved up to the fourth floor landing, peering just over the edge of the bannister rail to watch the hallway. A moment later, a man passed by quickly, older, with sandy red hair.
She recognized him right away. She’d tried to do a profile on him once, back before it had all started.
David Fenton Wright.
And he’d just killed Myrna, which seemed certain. She waited until she heard his footsteps go down all three flights, and the front door open and close behind him. Then she rushed down and ran to Myrna. Malone turned her over. She was still breathing, clutching a hole through her neck, gurgling through the blood.
“Myrna! It’s Alex, sweetie. Hold on! I’m going to call an ambulance.”
She gently shook her head, smiling even as she choked slightly on blood. “No… too late.”
“No! Don’t you quit, goddamn you Myrna! Stay with me! Be tough for me!”
“Too late,” Myrna said, her eyes wandering slightly. “My phone… call Bernie…”
Malone fumbled through Myrna’s shawl pocket and found the phone. “I’ve got it…”
“Call Bernie…”
“No, dammit! Stay with me. I’ll have an ambulance here…”
Myrna closed her eyes for a second and coughed hard. The wounds were flowing hard now, the blood gathering in a widening puddle. “Going to see Walter,” she said gently.
And then she closed her eyes for the final time.
20,000 FEET ABOVE THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
The cockpit door closed and Eddie Shaw entered the luxuriously appointed cabin of the Gulfstream jet. It had seating for twelve, chairs facing each other for a more social atmosphere; but the spy with the ridiculous black dye job, moustache and aviators was the only passenger.
Eddie shook his head mournfully. “You look like an extra from a Beastie Boys video.”
“You’re dating yourself, Ed,” Brennan said. Eddie took the seat across from his.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Eddie said. “Although on the upside, no one was shooting at the plane this time. Thank bloody God; you know how much one of these things costs?”
Brennan looked around quickly. “How did you manage this anyway?”
“Pulled in a lot of markers; one of the guys I trained as a young whelp had some success in the business world, so he loaned her to me. We have to stop to refuel and clear customs in Halifax; Vancouver’s another six hours beyond that.”
“I’m sorry for pulling you into this,” he said.
Eddie seemed nonplussed. “When I heard about Walter I knew something bad was going down; then the agency started putting out feelers to see who’d heard from you and I got real worried, bro. But you seem okay.”
“It’s been a hell of a few months, Ed. I haven’t seen Carolyn and the kids since before Christmas, I’ve got a growing list of agencies that want my scalp and you know what the kicker is? Despite everything I haven’t prevented a damn thing; there’s a loose nuke out there…”
“Damn.”
“And on top of that my boss at the agency is trying to set me up, take me out.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish I was.”
“Joe, you know why I stayed a pilot after coming back from the Gulf? Because up here, there are just fewer problems. I don’t know how you do it…”
Brennan had been running on automatic for so long, he hadn’t really thought about it. “It’s all just second nature now, I guess. Whenever I take my mind off the immediate and start pondering the why of it, I end up in trouble.”
“Yeah? Well, the why part is easy for me, man,” Eddie said. “I’m here because you asked me to come.”
Brennan felt a glow of support but was embarrassed, too. “Geez, Ed, you don’t have to say…”
“No,” the pilot said quickly, cutting him off, “it’s true. You know, when you got on board, the first thing you said before you settled back into your seat and I went into the cockpit was “thanks Ed, I guess I owe you another on
e. But that’s the thing, Joe: you don’t owe me a damn thing. Not one thing. People like Walter and me – God rest his soul – people like Walter and me, we support you because we know your character; we know you’re a good man, Joe, and in your line of work, that’s a difficult thing to be.”
Brennan smiled a little grimly. He didn’t feel good about his “line of work.” Mostly, he felt dirty.
The pilot wasn’t done. “So when you go get stuck in some hemorrhoid of a backwater and you need me to come get you, I don’t do it so that you’ll ‘owe me one’. I do it because I figure whatever you’re up to, it’s probably the right side to be on. My old man always told me that whether we like it or not, life is about one side or the other. It’s inevitable.”
Brennan’s phone rang. It was Myrna’s number. “Talk to me,” he said.
“Is this Bernie?” a familiar voice said.
“Alex?”
“Yes … who… Joe?”
“Yeah. I’m on route to Vancouver. Where’s Myrna?”
Malone gave him the news.
“We have to make that son of a bitch pay, Joe,” she said. “Myrna saved my life and yours, and he killed her. He killed her, Joe. He left her bleeding in the hallway of her building.”
“He’ll pay, believe me,” Brennan said. “I’m going to resend you the file I sent to Myrna. Chances are he’s either wiped her computer already or, at the least, the recording I mailed. Take it to your intelligence contacts. They’ll know what to do with it.”
“But what about…”
“That’s what will make it happen. There’s a snippet of a conversation on there with Funomora in which he confirms DFW set me up, potentially on Khalidi’s orders.”
“Potentially?”
“It’s enough to have him taken in, questioned. He’s done, Alex. And if this doesn’t get him, I promise you that I will.”
Malone smiled grimly, then used her free hand to wipe away her tears. “So what now?”
“I find Konyshenko and see if I can figure out the Korean connection. I’d assumed Han was working for the Association when she stole the item in Cabinda, but that’s not the case.”
“I can ask my source about that, as well. Why would South Korea have any interest in a rogue nuke? It makes no sense.”
“In the meantime, you need to get to Vegas, see if you can figure out this DynaTech connection your guy mentioned.”
“If you’re still looking for a potential sniper motive, maybe it’s Dmitri, clearing out the collective memory with respect to the device. He certainly has the contacts. He brokered the deal, allegedly, in which the Koreans double-crossed Abubakar, so he must be working with them, maybe to smuggle it into the country in the first place.”
“That’s one more reason to get someone inside DynaTech.”
“You have any suggestions on how I can cultivate a high-level source in a matter of hours?” Malone had faith in her ability to get information out of people, but that was asking a bit much.
“You’ve got two options,” Brennan said. “You can either find someone inside the company who’s got an axe to grind…
“Or?”
“Or someone outside the company with an even bigger one. The last time I talked to Myrna she sent me a basic agency backgrounder on Konyshenko, including his suspected criminal affiliations. That’s our in. I’ll send it along … along with a little surprise for DynaTech.”
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
It was just before midnight when the charter flight got into McCarran airport, south of the city. Jefferson Kane watched dispassionately through the picture window as the cream-colored twin-prop plane landed, his hands in the pockets of his mink overcoat, which he only wore during chilly desert nights and on special occasions.
He had a richly colored purple dress shirt underneath it, and a large platinum rope chain. Even though it was night, he still wore the same Carrera-style sunglasses, blowing the odd bubble from a wad of pink gum, a three-year-old affectation substituting for cigarettes. His hair was in narrow cornrows and he was heavy, at least three hundred pounds, which caused him to wheeze slightly when talking, a result of the hot, dusty daytime air and years of marijuana smoke.
“You want us to go out and meet the plane?” one of his underlings said. There were three of them, just hanging and waiting for him to tell them what to do. They were dressed in linen suits but without ties, perhaps in deference to the town’s vacation nature.
“Nah. We’ll pick her up in arrivals like normal folk. Just be cool, yo,” he said. “We still got a long night ahead of us.”
Kane was uncommonly nervous for a man with a reputation of being stone cold when he needed to be, when business demanded it. He had no idea how the job was going to go because it wasn’t like anything he’d handled before. At the same time, it was the business opportunity of a lifetime. He knew if he’d let it pass, he’d miss his shot, maybe his one shot, to become the biggest dealer in Sin City.
It had started eight hours earlier with a call from a reporter in D.C. She had information about him, she’d told him, information supplied by the kind of people who could shut him down in a minute. But instead, she needed his help, and was going to offer him a bigger chunk of his marketplace in return.
“And how, pray tell, are you going to pull that off?” he’d asked. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”
Malone had pointed him to her recent bylines. “I think we can help each other. Meet me; you have nothing to lose.”
“Except my valuable time,” he’d said. “Give me one reason why …”
“Paul Parker.”
Parker was Kane’s main rival in the local trade. Or vice-versa, given that Parker controlled most of it. “I’m listening,” Kane said.
“I’ll come down tonight. There’s a charter flight this evening out of Dulles.”
They picked her up in arrivals, watching unsurprised as she gazed up at the giant neon “Welcome to Las Vegas!” sign, and at the slot machines in the arrival terminal, most occupied by elderly women. Malone wondered where they’d all come from or were going; or whether they were maybe locals who just liked losing their money among the relative anonymity of international travelers.
Ten minutes later, her new associates were pulling Kane’s SUV out of the pay lot, on the road into the city core.
“So, you going to tell me how my name came up as the guy to talk to for this “deal” of yours?” Kane asked her.
“Let’s just say there are a lot of weird people in Washington and leave it at that,” Alex said. “It’s one of those questions no one really wants answered.” It sounded ominous enough, she supposed, without being too much of a shot at the gangster’s manhood.
“So explain.”
“You have one of your men break into the offices of a company called Dynatech.”
“You want us to steal documents or something? Take a little ‘proprietary’ technology?”
“Nope. We’re going to leave something behind.”
Dynatech’s new five-story office building was in the far west of the city in a business development park; it was made of light-colored concrete and dark tinted windows, so sterile and featureless it could have been doctors’ offices, or a school, or a public library. In front, a massive parking lot held three hundred slots, all empty in the wee hours, but illuminated for safety by the dull glow of the stylized street lamps.
They pulled up alongside the curb near the glass front doors.
“Clarify,” Kane said. “What, exactly, are we going to leave behind? Because if it’s a horse’s head or some freaky shit like that, then yo, this shit is already over.”
“A piece of malware, designed to open their system up to someone outside.”
“So…?”
“We can get in and take things whenever we want, including their shipping records. My sources tell me the company’s owner, Mr. Konyshenko, imports a dubious amount of off-market product from the Golden Triangle and South America. Most of it winds up with yo
ur friend Mr. Parker.”
Kane nodded slowly. “Uh huh.” The ramifications were clearer. “And you’re just going to share this information with me…”
“In exchange for you getting me access to it, yes.”
“Uh huh.” The rotund dealer considered the possibilities. “So if you plan on poking around somewhere down the line, I suppose you want us to figure out a quiet way to handle this, is that it?”
“Something like that.”
“Okay then. Give us a few minutes to make sure everything’s cool, then follow us in.” He undid his seatbelt. “Shorty, Malcolm, you’re with me. Malivai: stay here and take care of the lady.”
Malivai was the driver. He was busy texting someone something. “What?”
“I said get your ass off your phone and pay attention, dumbass. We’re going inside. Take care of the lady.”
“Okay Jeff.”
They got out of the car and made their way across the parking lot. The front doors were locked, and there was a manned security station just twenty yards beyond them. The gangster noticed a buzzer pad by the doors and keyed it.
Inside, the middle-aged, tall, thin security guard leaned forward nervously into a mic. “Office hours are over for the evening,” he said.
“Yo, man, let us in,” Kane said. “I’ve got to ask you something.”
The guard pushed up his glasses, then shook his head then keyed his mic again. “I can’t do that sir, sorry. You need a security clearance pass. You can come by in the morning after eight, however, and they can set that up for you if appropriate.”
Kane needed to employ some bargaining leverage. He pressed the button again. “Yo man … your employer give you good benefits for this job?”
The guard seemed a bit surprised by the question. “Not… really, I guess.”
“So how much you figure they was willing to spend on the glass in these here front doors? If I take out my Glock and unload a magazine, you think this stuff is bulletproof? You think I can get in there before the police arrive to save your ass? Or, you can let us in and have a quick word. I swear man, that’s all.”
