by Sam Powers
She waited for the right moment to speak and when he didn’t continue made a point of it. ‘Can I say something now? Good...’
‘Well... that is why you’re here, Adrianne, because I value your advice.’
‘My advice would be to pull Brennan off of this right now,’ she said, obviously eager to get to her key talking point. ‘I know you respect Joe’s history...’
‘Especially the parts you don’t know.’
She was startled by that and couldn’t hide it. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Much of Brennan’s file is classified from anyone below the deputy director level. That likely doesn’t leave you enough of the picture to make a solid decision on his role. But I do value your input, obviously.’ He was basically telling her to keep her nose out of the operational end of things and stick to logistics. He didn’t expect her to listen. Hayes had been the director’s pick to take over Tarrant’s old position when he was promoted. Like most of the purely political appointees in similar roles, Tarrant sensed, the director was inclined to favor ambitious young women.
‘If he causes some sort of international incident before we can get the Chinese to agree on security protocols for the meeting with the President, the potential escalation could mean a new cold war... or worse,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to remind you how important....’
‘No, Adrianne, you certainly don’t. What you can do, however, is use your formidable reputation for running a tight ship and clamp down on any leaks. I’m making it your responsibility to guarantee any negotiations aren’t impacted by this.’
He saw the slight flare of her nostrils, the barely perceptible widening of her eyes as she recognized the implication: everything she’d wanted to use against him politically was now her responsibility. And yet she had no control over Brennan’s operation whatsoever.
‘Then we won’t be pulling him out?’
‘I see no reason to,’ Tarrant said. ‘He’s on route to Mexico now and making progress. In fact, I’m quite sure he has things well in hand.’
DAY 7
MERIDA, MEXICO
Brennan hung suspended by a single hand grip from the balcony ledge, the city a blurred backdrop of rooftops, mostly lower than his precarious locale.
He tried to tense his muscles up for just a moment, to center his weight and stop his body from swaying side to side, deadly asphalt beckoning from hundreds of feet below.
He looked back up to the ledge, every sinew in his body straining against his own weight.
Of course, it wasn’t supposed to have gone that way. He’d ziplined to the large balcony from the neighboring building’s roof, nine storeys up. As his feet set down upon the concrete, the balcony door to the apartment in question had opened and Brennan had flung himself over the rail to avoid detection.
But he’d missed with his right hand and had to hang on with one arm; then the two guards in question had opted to smoke cigarettes, and after two minutes, Brennan’s arm was rapidly tiring. The point of going down from the rooftop had been to get in quietly and undetected, to find his target and either question or extract. Now, he was either going to have to make some noise and attract enough attention to be shot before he could right himself... or fall to his death a few hundred feet below.
It wasn’t as if anything had gone smoothly since Macau. He’d flown back to the States, then from New York to Merida, a grand old city in the middle of the Yucatan jungle that had its heyday in the art deco/French colonial architecture era. That was back when the region’s staple crop, henequen, was the base fibre for rope. Use of sisal overtook it, and the city that once housed more millionaires than anywhere else on Earth went slowly broke. Decades later it had recovered somewhat, but much of its grandeur had wilted under the humidity and mildew.
It was over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the shade; the airport was crowded, tourists coming to town at the worst time, unless they liked ninety-nine percent humidity and torrential rain. Merida had a thriving community of gringo ex-patriots, taking advantage of the lower cost and the peaceful Mayan culture to set up new roots.
Brennan had everything he needed in his carry-on; anything operational would be waiting for him at his hotel or provided later.
Outside the airport doors, the heat and moisture felt like a wet blanket. He hailed a cab and rode it to Centro, where the boutique hotel hosted visitors in a converted mansion, complete with eight bedrooms and Romanesque columns surrounding the central courtyard pool.
His room was spartan but elegant. There was a small flat-screen TV on the wall behind the door, a bookshelf full of paperback loaners and a queen-sized bed with bright yellow linens.
His phone rang.
‘Brennan,’ he answered.
‘The package is amenable.’ Jonah Tarrant didn’t identify himself.
‘Where and when?’
‘He wants a public intro. There’s a restaurant in the Centro district, La Chaya Maya. Tortillas in a courtyard setting, that kind of thing. More entry points than you’d like but we’ve got you a corner table with decent sight lines.’
‘So what’s the plan? I buy him a few pork-and-cilantro specials, pick up an extended bar tab, and ...?’
‘He whispers sweet stories about Chinese spooks in your ear, we figure out what they’re up to, you fly home. That’s the general idea, anyway.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then what? That’s not part of your task, Joe. It never is. You know that.’
‘Just being curious. A few days ago, you were talking about this as if it was something really heavy; now I’m wondering what you plan to do with the information. There are talks coming up...’
‘That’s above both of our paygrades. Really, Joe, let’s not go there; we’ve got the possibility of this being just intel, sure; but more likely, there’s a real threat here. The Chinese wouldn’t be nearly as anxious if they didn’t stand to take the blame for something. I’m not jerking your chain for some politician.’
Brennan had long ago learned not to take assurances on face value, but also not to tip his own hand. ‘Okay. Are we expecting any resistance? Did you get any sort of make on Daisy Lee?’
‘The analysts have already run her playing schedule for the last four years, and they match up with a pattern of tradecraft incidents involving the Chinese.’
‘Color me shocked,’ Brennan said. ‘She could throw a heck of a right cross, I’ll tell you that much.’
‘We’ve touched base with our Mexican colleagues and there’s no indication of Lee entering the country. We feel you’re probably good to go.’
‘So why the public place?’
‘That was the professor’s choice. He’s working on some pretty hi-tech stuff, I guess, and we dropped this on him basically overnight. I think he’s worried you may not be legit.’
‘They have any cartel problems down here, any locals I should worry about?’
Tarrant snickered a little. ‘In Merida? Are you kidding? No. He’s probably just being paranoid. It’s a different vibe in the Yucatan. It’s hot as hell, so people are more laid back. They get along to get along, and it’s generally safer than here. Like I said, you don’t have anything to worry about. Trust me.’
15/
DAY 8
The restaurant was popular with locals, which Brennan figured was a sign the food was decent. Nestled in the grid of narrow two-lane downtown streets, it was a pink-pastel-shaded building with a bright-yellow central courtyard, an old full-sized carriage resting in its midst as an art piece. Around it, the surrounding shaded nooks and crannies were occupied by four-person wooden tables, each with a centre piece and candle. In a few spots, they’d been pushed together for larger parties.
Most of the families appeared to be Mexican, with the men in short-sleeve dress shirts and trousers, the women in light blouses. But there were quite a few tourists as well, inevitably wearing knee-length shorts, sandals and sunburns. Almost everyone was eating fresh tortillas. A few were drinking wine or beer,
but it was a family place, not a party atmosphere.
Pon was by himself at a two-person table in the far corner, adjacent to a street exit. He was aging, perhaps in his sixties, with a small, frog-like face and thinning black hair, streaked with grey. According to his dossier, he’d been jailed for four years during the cultural revolution, prompting his eventual exodus to the west. In the ensuing years, he’d become one of the world’s foremost experts in the production of graphene, a new ultra-strong material produced at the molecular level. Score another one for Madame Mao’s contempt for the intellectuals, Brennan thought.
He approached the table. Pon saw him and put down his water glass. ‘Excuse me,’ Brennan asked, ‘didn’t we meet at the Mall of America?’
Pon looked around furtively. ‘In the sporting goods section?’
Brennan pulled out the chair opposite the man and sat down. He didn’t like having his back to the courtyard. The heat was stifling, the humidity proving itself in the beads of sweat along his brow. ‘I bought a tennis racquet, remember?’
‘Slazenger, wasn’t it?’
‘Donnay Borg Pro.’
‘You’re Brennan?’ Pon asked.
‘I am.’
‘Good. Are we eating?’
‘I hadn’t planned on it.’
‘Also good.’ But he was staring over Brennan’s shoulder, surveying the room avidly.
Brennan checked his six but there was nothing out of place. ‘Are you expecting someone else?’
‘That depends. Would it sound paranoid if I told you I think someone has been following me?’
‘Not really. The last professor I met over drinks ended up with a hitman on his tail.’
‘Comforting. Merida’s not the sort of city where you find trouble. It’s one of the reasons I like it here. Then I get a call from your Mr. Tarrant and he sounds genuinely concerned about Legacy.’
Brennan checked the room again quickly. ‘Maybe keep it down a little with that stuff, eh Prof?’
Pon looked bemused. ‘Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, and I tried to convey this to your boss, but the whole thing is crazy. Even if we assume it was ever real to begin with, it’s a thirty-year-old plan, and its architects are all long dead. And like I said: that’s if we assume it was real, and I don’t think it was.’
‘Then why so worried?’
‘I have... local business interests who are growing impatient. After I left China, I needed help establishing my company and laboratory here. We’ve made a lot of money for both PonTech and Santerra’s company since then, but he wants the return of his original investment post haste, due to a downturn in his own business.’
‘Which is.
‘Wholesale methamphetamine delivery to the illicit international market, I believe.’
‘Fantastic.’
‘Yes, well... financing is difficult to obtain when you’re a relatively unknown dissident Chinese refugee. My limited contacts in Taiwan came up with Ramon Santerra, a real estate developer.’
‘And meth dealer.’
‘And meth dealer. But he sells a lot of homes, and he sells a lot of meth, and Graphene sheets are incredibly expensive to produce. Prohibitively, for practical purposes.’
‘So why is he interested if it’s such a money sinkhole?’
‘Because he likes the chase.’
‘The chase?’
‘We’re all chasing the same thing, you see, which is a cheap and consistent method to produce graphene sheets. Whoever comes up with that first and patents it will have a license to print money that’ll make the old robber barons of the early oil age look like paupers in line at a soup kitchen.’
‘But he’s got meth problems....’
‘And he may have had a change of heart about how soon it will be before graphene is financially commoditized.’
‘Eh?’
‘He read an article in Newsweek saying it may yet be decades before graphene is an everyday household sort of thing. I’d suggested a shorter time frame.’
‘Such as?’
‘By next year.’ The professor took a long swallow from his water glass.
He wasn’t looking over his shoulder for the Chinese, Brennan knew. He just thought his investor might show up guns blazing. ‘Smooth.’
‘It’s been more than a decade since I arrived here, to be fair.’
‘So you gave him an estimate years ahead...?’
‘Well... no. Initially I gave him a three-year window, and then that came and went, and then we extended it to seven, and then ten years. He was angry after ten years, I remember, but I met his wife at a gallery show and managed to talk her into a further injection of funds...’
‘Problematic. And you know someone was following you because...’
‘Because I recognized him. He’s one of Santerra’s bodyguards. I think he was figuring out what it would take to get past my building’s security. I thought initially that your boss’s call was an attempt to draw me out, but a few checks with colleagues in the States confirmed his legitimacy.’
‘You were glad to meet with me, not because of what you could tell us but because you figured I could what? Protect you? That’s not how this works, professor. I need some incentive, as in some real information.’
‘I’ll tell you what I can.’ The waitress arrived and Pon waved off the menu. ‘I’ll just have a cup of green tea, please.’ He gestured toward Brennan. ‘And my colleague?’
‘A bottle of Perrier,’ Brennan said. The waitress scratched it down on a pad.
He waited until she’d left. ‘You were saying...’
‘Yes,’ Pon continued. ‘Project Legacy.’
Then his eyes widened.
‘We have company.’
Brennan half-turned in his chair but knew instinctively it was going to be too late. Both men had drawn pistols with suppressors attached. They had dark suits on, and dark glasses, and they meant business. They took aim at the professor.
The woman seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment she was seated at a table, only her long black hair and the back of her blue silk dress visible from Brennan’s vantage point; the next, she was rising and turning in a single motion, pirouetting into a position between the two men, her hands coming up from behind them to slam their heads together.
Brennan saw her face clearly.
‘Daisy Lee.’
Pon was on his feet immediately and, even in his sixties, was spry enough to head for the patio’s rear exit. Lee saw him and ran to intercept. Brennan slipped out of his chair and grabbed its back in one smooth motion, hurling the four-legged projectile at her. Lee didn’t break stride, batting it to one side with her right arm even as she closed on Pon. But Brennan was a step ahead; the second that the chair left his hand he was taking a half-step into a crouch followed by a long, low leg sweep.
It caught her flush across the ankle, at speed, and she went head-over-heels, her back slamming to the patio. Across the courtyard, Brennan saw two more gunmen enter. ‘Go!’ he yelled at Pon. ‘Find a crowd!’ Lee was recovering, spinning her legs like a coffee grinder and pushing off with both hands simultaneously, the momentum pulling her up to her feet. Brennan’s hand had gone to the inside of his sport coat and the Sig Sauer concealed in his shoulder holster; but she struck quickly, darting in with a punch to the nerve cluster in his shoulder joint, deadening his arm, then following it with a hard, quick kick to the side of his knee that he just managed to slip. He threw a wide arcing elbow and caught her in the side of the head, following it with a pair of punches that she blocked ably.
She wanted to face off, it seemed. Brennan looked behind her; both gunmen were training their weapons toward the pair, without regard for the threat to customers or staff. He shook his arm to regain some of the feeling.
Behind him, he could hear Pon rattling the door, which was clearly locked, or...
‘I think they’ve barred it from the other side,’ Pon said.
Brennan nodded toward the carriage in the center o
f the courtyard. ‘Get behind that and hide. If you see an opening behind them, head for the front door.’ Then he looked back at Lee. ‘We don’t have time for this,’ he told her. ‘The guy who is chasing him has more men here than even you can handle.’
Lee turned around in one smooth motion and released the two throwing stars she’d secreted in the folds of her sash. They were unerring, whirring through the air and thunking into each man’s throat, both gunmen clutching wildly at their weapons as they collapsed.
‘You were saying?’
Customers were screaming, running for the doors, staff bravely shielding them and helping them escape. Pon ran out amongst them.
‘Aside from the spectacle,’ Brennan shouted at her, ‘it’s not the ones in here I’m worried about.’ He nodded toward the back wall and exit. ‘It’s the ones out there.’
On queue, a gunshot resounded from somewhere outside. Lee looked at him and then back at the two men and the rapidly emptying restaurant. She seemed to be spoiling for a fight, Brennan thought, but torn. She turned in the moment and sprinted for the door.
Brennan followed her, barely able to keep up with the lithe woman, who had kicked off her shoes during the encounter. She ran out into the suddenly busy street, Calle 55, and looked both ways. Pon was running east, toward a small park.
‘Professor!’ she yelled. ‘Please! Wait!’
Just as he turned to look for the source of the call, an old tan Renault compact screeched to a halt next to him. The back door opened and a pair of beefy arms reached out, grabbing Pon by the jacket and pulling him inside.
She turned back toward Brennan, an angry look on her face, her fists clenched. But a siren sounded nearby, and she looked past him. He braced himself, expecting her to charge him, as she’d done in Macau. Instead, the sound of the nearby siren had given her pause, and the poker player known as Daisy Lee quickly blended into the crowd and disappeared down the side street.
