Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (25 page)

He unlocked it with Malone’s keys, but instead of opening the door simply left it untouched. Then he climbed over the outside rail, the angle too acute for anyone inside to see through the window, as he moved to the right of the building and down the parking lot driveway.

The assassin would have seen the lock turn; he’d know there was someone there. But when no one entered the apartment for several minutes, he would worry about an ambush of his own, Brennan thought, and begin figuring a quiet way out, probably via a side window. If Brennan was right, the would-be killer had surveyed the lay of the land and parked behind the building to avoid suspicion from being the only strange vehicle in front. That meant that, just as with David Grant, the next move would be to try and get out of there quickly.

Behind the building, he avoided going anywhere near the backdoor because of a proximity security light; instead, he followed the edge of the parking lot until he was on the other side of the property, before ensconcing himself in a shadowy corner, darkened by the presence of three-foot hedges.

It took less than thirty seconds before he heard the window slide open to Alex’s apartment and the faint sound of someone dropping to the ground below. It had snowed while they were in Baltimore, and a light sprinkling covered everything. The figure emerged from the half-light on the narrow gap between the building and the property line, a man dressed all in black, scanning the lot quickly for any threats before walking briskly towards a rented black Dodge. When they were within twenty yards, Brennan strode rapidly towards the black-garbed figure, pistol out. It had worked with David Grant; he just had to avoid…

The crunch of a piece of glass under his heel may as well have been a thunder clap in the still of the evening; the assassin wheeled around in one smooth motion, a silenced pistol in extended hand, the muzzle flash dimmed by the long suppressor attached to the barrel as he squeezed off three shots. But Brennan was moving from the second he stepped on the glass, running and tucking into a forward roll, coming out of it behind the cover of a sedan as the bullets sank into its bodywork.

He peeked around the front bumper of the car and a bullet ricocheted off the metal just in front of him. The assassin had taken cover, perhaps behind his own car. Brennan looked over and across the hood; a tuft of hair emerged from behind the other car and he opened fire, his unsuppressed weapon retorting loudly, the .40 caliber slugs tearing through the body work of the other vehicle but failing to find their target.

“Cops will be here soon,” Brennan yelled. “I’m guessing you don’t want that.”

He was right. The assassin took off at a sprinter’s pace; he headed back down the side of the building, following the same driveway out that Brennan had followed in. Brennan gave chase and the assassin turned as he ran, two more shots pinging off the brick wall to the agent’s right. Brennan fired on the run, his shots going wide of his target as the assassin reached the street and turned left.

Brennan rounded the corner at speed… and was caught dead to rights; the man had stopped running less than twenty yards ahead and instead was waiting for him, gun extended, stable. Brennan flung himself sideways towards the ground, the two quick shots going overhead; he squeezed off two in response, prone, but the target was already moving again, heading down the block. He gave chase; the man cut down an alley to his left. This time, Brennan was more cautious, peering around the corner before pursuing. The assassin had tried the same ploy but the three shots were wasted, clipping the brickwork near Brennan’s head and carving off chips and chunks.

And then there was just a clicking sound. Brennan looked around the corner. The alley was a dead end, and the assassin’s clip was empty. Brennan walked around the corner, gun extended.

It was the Asian agent from Brussels, he realized. Even in the dark, with his face blacked over, his build and his missing earlobe were dead giveaways. Brennan kept the pistol trained on him. “Who are you and why have you been following me?”

The man shook his head and smiled demurely.

“Why were you trying to kill Alex Malone?”

The man ignored the question. Instead, he said, “When we fought in Brussels, you showed great skill. You could not have defeated me, but you fought admirably.”

His accent was Japanese, Brennan thought. “I’ll ask again: Why Alex Malone? Who do you work for?”

The assassin began to walk towards him. “We both know I’m not going to tell you anything,” the man said. Then he moved into a defensive stance, feet shoulder-width apart and nodded towards Brennan. “Put that toy away and let’s settle this correctly.”

“Hand to hand?” Brennan said.

“With honor,” the assassin said.

“No,” Brennan said, quickly raising the pistol and firing. He caught the assassin square in the forehead, a large red-black hole appearing immediately, blood gushing from the head wound. The man collapsed to the ground, convulsing for a few moments before breathing his last.

He could hear sirens getting closer, the police doubtless responding to a “shots fired” complaint. He looked down at the man’s vacant gaze and felt a momentary pang of regret.

The man’s offer had been tempting; but they weren’t playing a game and there was nothing particularly honorable about any of it.

The call from Alex Malone had shocked Walter Lang initially, as there were fewer than five people on the planet with his private number. It had only taken a few moments for her to explain, however, and twenty minutes later, they were meeting at a mall parking lot in Crestwood, north of downtown.

They took Lang’s car, leaving Brennan’s rental in the lot. “We’re going to a friend’s place. She lives in Northeast Washington,” he explained. “You can lay low there for a few days until our friend has figured out who was trying to have you killed.”

“By our friend, do you mean Joe?” she asked.  But Walter wasn’t taking the bait.

“Is that what he’s calling himself?” he replied, eyes still on the road. “Anyway, my friend is ex-agency, and she’s a pro. Good soul, too. She’ll be good company until then.”

“When is ‘then’?” Malone asked. “How long is this going to take? I have a story to work on.”

Lang shook his head. “You can’t write it if you’re dead.”

It took about a quarter-hour to get to the apartment building in question, a four-story walkup. For the second time in as many days, Malone got the sense she was being taken on a guided tour designed as much to keep her away from sensitive information as to protect her.

Lang parked the car on the street out front. He got out first and scanned the area, then walked around the car and opened Malone’s door for her. “Okay, let’s go.”

Inside the building, he rang 3C on the buzzer board.

“Yep,” a woman’s voice came back.

“It’s us,” he said simply.

The door buzzed and they entered the lobby; they took the stairs to the third floor. Malone was exhausted; but she noticed in the bright light outside the front door how pale and thin Walter looked, a shadow of the man she’d met in the pub a few years earlier – and he’d still been recovering at that point from his Colombian ordeal.

“Walter…”

“Yes, Ms. Malone.”

“One, call me Alex, okay? Two, you look terrible. Have you seen a doctor or anything recently?”

Lang could only glance at her quickly, embarrassed. “I’ve been having some issues but they’re being dealt with, thank you,” he said, politely but firmly.

The woman who greeted them at the apartment door was large; not obese, but of grand proportion, standing over six feet two inches, broad-shouldered. She had a shock of lanky brown-grey hair and looked to be in her late fifties or early sixties, Malone thought.

“Alex, this is Myrna Verbish, one of my oldest friends.”

Myrna extended a hand and Malone shook. “Any friend of Walter is okay with me,” she said. Then she looked Walter over. “Walter, you look…”

“I know, I look terrible. I haven’t been sleeping, okay? Let’s just get inside and talk.”

Myrna led them in and found them a place on her living room couch while she moved to the adjacent kitchen and made them tea. It was after two o’clock in the morning, but all three were wired from adrenaline. She briefly wondered why she’d said yes to Walter so easily; they were old friends, to be sure, but Myrna was divorced from the intelligence community, and with plenty of good reasons.

Malone filled them both in on her source and the African file, along with the threads that connected the atrocities in Nigeria to Khalidi’s company, and Khalidi, in turn, to the shootings. Myrna looked intrigued, fascinated even, Malone thought; but Walter just kept his head down, stoic, as if his mind were somewhere else.

“So that’s it,” Malone summed up. “We know someone’s targeting the ACF’s board members but we also know that the chairman, or one of his companies anyhow, has been involved in some dirty, dirty business.”

“The assassinations could be personally motivated, then?” Myrna suggested. “Someone who lost a loved one in Africa, or at least knows about it? Probably not the former,” she reasoned, “as I doubt rural villagers would have the contacts or resources.”

“That leaves knowing about it,” Malone said. “Joe said something, too, about information he’d received in Europe that the ACF had gone way out of bounds. He mentioned a couple of different locations: East Timor and Bosnia. Apparently they funded insurrections, to some degree.”

Myrna nodded sagely then looked at her watch. “Oh.”

“What?” Lang asked. He was exhausted but she looked genuinely surprised by something.

“I’ve just realized: it’s my birthday.”

All three were silent for a moment, aware for a moment of how disconnected they’d all become from the people who mattered to them. Malone’s family was half a country away, in Los Angeles. None of them had anyone else in D.C.

Lang rose. “You two should get some sleep. I imagine Joe will be trying to contact me soon. I’m going to head home. Myrna, call me tomorrow with an update?”

She nodded and rose to let him out. At the door, she lowered her voice. “Walter, are you really okay? We’ve been friends for a long time, and …”

He smiled at her, happy to be cared about. He put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re a wonderful woman, Myrna, you know that, right?”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.

He was still smiling as he closed the door behind him.

FEB. 28, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Lang’s phone rang at six o’clock the next morning. He’d only been home and asleep for slightly under three hours.

“Lang,” he answered blearily, swinging his legs out of bed.

“This is Faisal. We have not heard from you in some time. We require a status update.”

If the cancer doesn’t kill me
, Lang thought,
the stress will
. “There has been very little new.”

“What about Wilhelm? Surely your agency does not think his death was an accident?”

“No, but we have nothing further to go on right now. I can’t give you what we don’t have.” He had no intention of giving up their intel on Africa; he didn’t want to play the two sides against each other, but holding onto two paymasters required tact.

“Then you can do something else for us,” Faisal said.

“What?”

“We need a problem fixed.”

“I’m not a field agent,” Walter began to explain. “I haven’t...”

“Irrelevant,” Faisal said. “You accepted our money, Mr. Lang. Now we require something in return. There is a reporter in Washington, a woman named Alexandra Malone.”

Walter got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I know of her,” he said.

“She must be eliminated immediately.”

“I won’t do that,” Walter said. “I didn’t sign up for that. You need some intel, I provided it…”

“And we provided you with a great deal of money, money I understand you require for your medical care.”

“In exchange for basic intel. I won’t kill for you.”

“Then you can locate her and detain her for us until someone with the stomach for the job is available,” Faisal suggested. “Either way…”

“No,” Walter said. “I’m sorry, but that’s it.”

“This is not optional, Mr. Lang. Placing yourself at odds with my employer would be most unwise. The consequences will be severe.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Walter said. He hit the end button and hung up the call.

Being a field handler for twenty years hadn’t killed him, nor had Colombia, nor cancer. Walter had never run from a fight; marshalling the forces to beat the disease had been behind his decision to take Faisal’s money in the first place.

He decided he’d take his chances.

Brennan called Lang just before noon from a hotel by Dulles Airport. “I’m on a pair of flights, to Paris and then to Luanda,” he said. “I’m leaving in two hours. What can you tell me about Angola?’

Lang was still tired, drinking coffee and reading the papers while Christmas music droned out of the radio in his kitchen. “I’m going to send you a couple of emails. One is a recent security briefing on the situation there; the other is a page from my passport, showing you what the local visa looks like. It’s just a stamp, but you’ll need one to get through customs. We have a papermaker in Paris who can help you with it, but it needs to be off the books, or he’ll flag the agency. How long do you have there?”

Brennan checked his itinerary. “About six hours.”

“That should be more than enough. Look, I’ll contact him for you, have him meet you at Charles De Gaulle. Once you’re in Angola, work on lining up ordinance and a guide for the area in question.”

“Is Alex okay?” Brennan asked.

“She’s under wraps and fine,” Walter said. “Don’t worry about her. I promised I’d look out for her and I will.”

“I’ll contact you once I’m on the ground,” Brennan said. “Stay safe, okay?”

“You got it,” Walter said. “Keep your head down.”

“Hey,” Brennan said, “they once called this place ‘The Pearl of Africa’. What could go wrong?

A half-hour away, Carolyn Brennan-Boyle sat in the family living room and watched Jessie unwrap her Birthday presents, relieved she seemed happy. She’d helped by giving her mother a lengthy list of suggestions. It included a kit that let her create her own perfume and makeup. Her eyes widened when she saw it under the paper and she ran over to hug her mom, who was sitting on the sofa. Then the little girl’s smile faded a bit.

“Are you okay with it, sweetie? Was that the one you wanted?” Carolyn asked.

Jessie smiled and nodded, but it wasn’t particularly convincing.

“You miss your father, don’t you?”

Jessie nodded again. “How come daddy couldn’t be here?”

“He wants to be here,” she said. “You have to remember how much your father loves you. He wouldn’t be away at all if it were his choice.”

“Then how come…”

“The work he does is very important,” Carolyn said, anticipating her child’s question. “He helps keep the public safe.”

She was saying the right things, but Carolyn felt a distance from her husband greater than the miles between them. Before he’d left, they’d fought often, and he’d hardly been speaking with her because of her role in getting him back into the field. At least they’d had a chance to get past that. At least he’d stopped in and seen the kids before going overseas again.

Once again, she had no idea when her husband would return. David Fenton-Wright had been deliberately vague about Joe’s progress in tracking down the EU sniper. Perhaps it was just a question of “need to know,” but she suspected from David’s manner in the few days prior that they weren’t getting far. She’d seen the story of Tillo Bustamante’s death on CNN, and she knew he was considered a suspect by several agencies.

She’d always known Joe had to kill people as part of his job; or, she’d assumed it. She’d never been involved operationally with his work, but other agents had to dispatch targets with an almost routine regularity. Was that why he was so distant of late? Was it catching up to him, contributing to his self-doubt about his role?

The phone rang.

“It’s me,” Brennan said when she answered. “I had to call, make sure everything’s okay there.”

She smiled. She was glad he hadn’t just let it pass. “Do you want to talk to the little beasties?”

“Yeah.”

She handed the phone to Jessie first and watched her face light up as she talked to him. Then the little girl handed the phone to her brother and watched the reaction again. He smiled and laughed at something his father said. Then he came back to her with the phone. “He wants to talk to you again, mommy.”

Carolyn put the phone back to her ear. “Hi.”

“That was pretty awesome,” he said.

“It was worth it, wasn’t it?” she said. “Where are you?”

“En route to Africa, following up a lead.”

David had told her he was leaving Joe in Europe for the time being. She wondered how far out of the loop she was.

“Don’t ask where,” he added, before she could say it. “Need to know only. Look, I have to go; my plane’s boarding soon.”

“Does Walter know where you are?”

“Yeah, but he’s laying low for a couple of days. Don’t worry about it. I’ll call you in a week or so when I know what I’m doing next. Oh… they just announced my flight. I’ve got to go.”

“Okay,” she said. “I love…”

But he’d already hung up.