Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (40 page)

She was irritated by that. “Hey: you’re not giving me much. I’ve stuck my neck out using your information up until now, caused a major international scandal and have contract killers trying to make me their next payday. A little support would be appreciated,” Alex said. “At least give me an idea of what I’m looking for.”

He considered that for a few seconds. “When a ship enters the country, it has to clear Customs and Immigration. It also has to register its home port and how long it intends to be docked.”

“Its manifest and itinerary,” Alex offered.

“Exactly. That includes all materials being shipped, for whom, and to where…”

“Are you trying to tell me that Konyakovich is smuggling the bomb into the U.S.? Is that it?”

He turned to leave. “Investigate DynaTech,” he said. “And maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

PARIS, FRANCE

The drive from Marseille to Paris covers more than seven hundred kilometers on a good day if a driver can take one of the broad, smooth toll road highways that run between ever major center and most minor ones, as well. But Brennan was left without that option; every booth would have his photo, every one of them expected to flag police and, unless threatened, perhaps even deny him passage through the toll.

Instead, he’d guided the borrowed Peugeot along every secondary road and highway he could follow, adding nearly three hours to the normally eight hour trip. The pale blue sedan – a 1960s relic with a roof characteristically sloped from front to back -- rolled by hundreds of miles of meadows, hills, vineyards, riverside towns, tiny villages and vast chateaux estates, the car’s chrome hubcaps and whitewall tires whirring their way north.

The traffic around and in Paris was grotesque, seemingly millions of drivers constantly jockeying for position, gridlock on every other block, speeds in crowded areas that would make a NASCAR driver blanch. Tired as he was, Brennan had to be doubly alert, and more than once found himself wondering why anyone lived there and drove, given its far-reaching transit system.

The train station was in the tenth district and traffic on the narrow roads through the city was slow; Brennan turned on the radio and scanned for a news channel. It took less than ten minutes before an update of the hunt for the Montpellier killer, and the update had changed from earlier in the day. Now the news had a description of Victor’s cousin’s car. Brennan took the next right and negotiated a one-way street until he was in a quieter neighborhood. He pulled the car over, grabbed his gym bag and closed the door behind him, tossing the keys onto the driver’s seat. If he was lucky, someone would steal it before the police found it, and compound his pursuers’ problems.

He got out and followed the sidewalk, past boutiques and restaurants, a sushi place, a travel agent, looking for a street sign to orient himself.

Rue Antin. He followed the street until he reached the broader Avenue de L’Opera, then headed northeast, keeping his head down, bag over his shoulder, just another local heading home after work.  Gare du Nord was a few miles away, a brisk thirty-minute walk. All he had to do was make it unseen or, thanks to his dyed hair and moustache, unrecognized. The streets along the way were quiet, narrow, all flanked by six and seven-story concrete walkups; a truck was unloading fruit at a corner grocer; a line of motorcycles occupied the corner of the block as he headed up Rue Saint-Augustine. At its end, it merged with Rue Filles de Saint-Thomas, heading towards the Palais Brongniart, with its towering forty-foot roman pillars and wide open square.

The sidewalks were busy and Brennan blended with the tourists, young couples and students. He turned up Rue Vivienne, past the maroon awning and busy patio of Brasserie Le Vaudeville, with its view of the square in front of the palace steps.

A pair of policemen patrolled the square and one of them appeared to eye him momentarily from across the street. Brennan turned his head to look at the row of motorcycles, no doubt convenient transport for the stock brokers who worked at the exchange inside the former palace. He waited nervously for the policeman to use his radio, call backup, alert someone. He kept his gaze averted for about ten paces before looking ahead but stealing a glance in the periphery.

Brennan sped up slightly, trying to clear the area before…

The policemen were moving in his direction. One keyed a microphone on his lapel and said something, then waited, then gave an affirmative back. He leaned in slightly, peering at Brennan from thirty yards away.

Brennan sped up some more so that he was walking quickly, pushing his way through the crowd on the edge of the square. The policemen behind him were frustrated by the sudden glut of pedestrians and also began to cut a path through them, moving them aside. Frustrated, one pulled his whistle and blew it hard. A path began to clear for them and Brennan heard them yelling for him to stop.

He started to run, finding his top speed quickly, pulling away from them. A block ahead on the sidewalk, a group of pedestrians stopped suddenly at a side street to allow a car past, a police cruiser barring his path. Without slowing down, Brennan changed course and headed into the nearest adjacent building; a front desk clerk yelled at him as he ran past, ignoring the elevators, searching for a back exit but finding only a glass door into the first-floor offices of a local business. Behind him, the front doors to the building swung open and police began to file in. He opened the glass door and walked in cautiously. It looked like an accountant or legal firm, with a waiting area, a pair of secretaries and a receptionist to the right of the main door. Brennan ignored her and walked the length of the office towards a red exit sign; behind him, the receptionist was yelling at him in French that it was a private business, that he needed an appointment.

He pushed open the emergency exit. Beyond it lay a long sterile corridor, with another door at the other end and a stairwell to his left. If he was lucky, Brennan thought, the door led right out…

It swung open from the outside, police officers having cordoned off the building. Two officers, both with batons drawn. The first swung high, trying to strike him in the head from the left, Brennan’s left arm batting the assailant’s away even as his right blocked the second officer’s strike, then followed through, his elbow cracking hard into the policeman’s jaw. The first officer had recovered from the change of momentum and charged in, but Brennan spun quickly on his left heel, his right foot coming around in  a blurring spin kick that knocked the officer unconscious.

Brennan sprinted up the adjacent stairs. At the second floor he checked the stairwell door, but it was locked. He didn’t bother with the third or fourth, as both were too high off street level to be of any value. Instead, he continued up to the roof, taking the steps two at a time, looking for a potential route to the adjacent building. He could hear boots on the stairs, a sergeant yelling “vite, vite!”, “quickly, quickly!”

At the top landing, he pushed open the roof door and ran out, the brighter light of day catching him slightly, his eyes narrowing against it. The roof was flat and wide; he crossed it quickly on foot to the edge, Paris laid out ahead of him. The gap across to the next building was too wide, perhaps fifteen feet. Even with a run it was impossible.

The door slammed open, tactical officers pouring out on the roof. “Arret!” One yelled. “Stop or we shoot! Get down on the ground!” They began to cross the roof slowly, in formation, towards him. Brennan looked at the gap then looked back at the approaching officers. One recognized what he was thinking.

“Don’t do it, mister!” he said in French. “You won’t make it. Come quietly and at least you can argue your case…”

They were just twenty feet away and Brennan was out of time, out of options. He knew he couldn’t make the crossing. He glanced down for a moment and considered another option.

“Don’t!,” the officer yelled again. “Don’t jump...”

Brennan dropped off the side of the roof. The officers ran over to the edge in time to see him grasp the edge of the balcony, four floors down, hanging there from one arm, the street another three stories below. Brennan tried to reach up to the fire escape with his other hand, to pull himself up. But he didn’t have the strength in just one arm; the officers watched as his fingers slowly slipped off the wrought iron and he plunged.

Below the balcony, just above street level, the nearest business’s awning broke the remainder of his fall, at least somewhat. He slammed into it, snapping its support poles and sending it crashing to the ground, his body hammered by the impact, the pain in his shoulder excruciating. He’d either torn something or partially dislocated it, the arm seemingly immobile from just below the shoulder. He got up slowly, the sound of the police yelling high above barely audible over the street noise; then Brennan crossed the street, disappearing into a busy pedestrian mall.

He held his damaged arm up with his other hand and made his way cautiously through the crowds of shoppers, knowing full well other officers would be on route, that the mall could be cordoned off in short order. He found a side exit onto Boulevard Montmartre, one of the city’s busiest broad thoroughfares, and blended into the pedestrian traffic. After he’d gone a few blocks and was sure he’d lost the police, Brennan found a bar and used its washroom. Inside, he checked out the shoulder. It was starting to swell; he used his left hand to push it lower, so that the joint was in line again, then pushed in and up, as hard as he could, the dislocated joint popping back into place with a piercing pain that made him feel like screaming.

They had his face; they knew what area of the city he was in. Avoiding the police wasn’t going to be easy. He needed an advantage. Brennan walked back out to the bar and asked the barman if there was a pharmacy nearby. The man nodded and gestured to the east. “A block or so,” he said. “You can’t miss it. Big sign.”

At the pharmacy, he purchased hair dye, a tourist sweatshirt and a pair of oversized Ray Ban-style aviator sunglasses. He used a public washroom to apply it as cleanly as possible in the circumstance, then spent twenty minutes sitting in one of the washroom stalls, waiting for it to dry.

He continued up the street, crossing the busy boulevard, up Passage Jouffray – little more than an alley with a few businesses along it, leading into the popular tourist zone, Montmartre, and parallel to the elegant Rue de Faubourg Montmartre. Every few blocks he would see another pair of policemen, avert his glance, try and keep cool.

It took thirty-five minutes before he was within site of the train station. The Gard du Nord was grand, more grand perhaps even than the Whitehouse, Brennan thought, block after block of ornate white concrete and marble, glass, carved pillars, its name etched across the front in twenty-foot letters, the roof lined with classic statues of figures in gowns, each representing a different destination nation. Europe’s busiest station, with more than a half-million visitors every single day, it was likely to be crawling with police. But the sheer amount of foot traffic gave Brennan a chance; every airport in Europe, every ferry port, would have his picture. But most weren’t as busy as the Gare du Nord, nor as close to his destination. Outside the station, he used a ticket booth on the adjacent street corner to book a one-way trip on the Eurostar to London.

Paris was nothing if not predictable: inside the station, each side of the main terminal was lined with businesses, mostly cafes and magazine shops. He kept his eyes on those to his left as took the escalator to the platform. He had a half-hour to kill before the train departed and Brennan’s gaze quickly sought out the men’s room. It wasn’t particularly dignified, but it was less risky than sitting out in the open. Getting on board would be more difficult; they would have his picture, but the dark hair and facial growth made him look dramatically different. It would take an attentive clerk – probably earning minimum wage and therefore not inclined to pay attention – to reconcile his appearance with the shot police had sent out. Besides, it had been several days; he was no longer a lead story, just another unexercised arrest warrant among thousands.

The train trip was uneventful, with Brennan appearing to be just one more tourist among many. In London, his passport passed muster without a second glance, even though his hair was a different color. He used a prepaid Visa card to rent a car; then he began to the five-hour drive to Holyhead, Wales, an unplanned tour of England’s rural west, through aging stone villages and across country roads, avoiding the larger population centers. At Holyhead, he booked a ferry ticket to Dublin, leaving the rental behind and enduring the rolling, thrashing waves for two hours as the ferry crossed the Irish Sea to the port at Dún Laoghaire, an ancient harbor protected by a vast concrete sea wall. Dozens of yachts were moored to the ferry’s right in a smaller marina at it cruised up to the terminal.

At the port, Brennan found a taxi and had it take him out of town, to the north, where the fields surrounding villages like Ballyboughal and Oldtown gave rise to the nickname Emerald Isle, the verdant landscape sparsely scattered with family farms and other rural fare. Just outside the coastal town of Balbriggan, the taxi dropped him off at a private airfield. Brennan paid the cabbie with his quickly dwindling cash supply.

He was bone-weary from days of adrenaline, poor sleep and high-stress. As he sat on a fence outside the small private airstrip, he thought about how nice it would be to head home to Maryland, to Carolyn and the kids. The fatigue made the whole exercise seem futile; he was being hunted by his own government even as he tried to protect Americans from a nuclear threat; the man responsible – assuming it was Khalidi – seemed to be facing little more than public censure. He’d made no progress on the sniper or figuring out why a South Korean agent had made off with a nuke.  Brennan rubbed the thickening stubble on his face. He hadn’t showered in two days and smelled ripe, and he rubbed both eyes with his thumb and forefinger, attempting to get his head straight and clear the sleep out.