Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (50 page)

“And then?”

“Then we wait for it to be picked up, I guess. Look, Brennan, I don’t know who you’re working for these days, but I’ve got good paying openings for…”

Brennan smacked him in the nose with the butt end of the pistol. Corcoran yelped and grabbed at it, bloodied. “Fucker!” he said.

“Don’t ever insult me like that again, Terry, or I’ll forget why I decided not to kill you in the first place. What’s the meet code?”

Corcoran pinched at the cut on his nose and tried in vain to stop the blood flow. “You fucking prick…”

Brennan smacked him again, this time with the flat of the gun to the temple. The older man recoiled in his seat and clutched with both hands at the impact point, moaning slightly.

“The next time I have to do that, I’m either going to break something or you’re going to get a nasty concussion, or both. What’s the meet code?”

“A phrase,” Corcoran said, wiping more blood from his nose. “Doesn’t matter, though.”

“Eh?”

“There’s a code red number; you leave here, I dial it, the meet’s off. Brennan, these people are real pros. You think they don’t have contingencies? More than one delivery coming in to more than one location? You really haven’t learned shit since Al Basrah, have you? There’s always another angle, Brennan. You’re just too stupid to figure that out.”

“Who hired you?”

“A wire from a bank account in the Bahamas.” Even with the blood running down his face and the banged up head, Corcoran was smiling; he knew Brennan wouldn’t shoot him without necessity or without being ordered, and he knew he had no helpful information. “You can beat me senseless, but you’re not getting shit.”

He hated admitting it to himself, but as with Konyakovich, Brennan had no leverage. He couldn’t call in the cops over the customs robber without staying as a material witness, and he was wanted himself. All that would spur would be a bloody shootout, anyway, knowing Corcoran.

“I can’t deal with you right now, Terry, but remember our little conversation tonight; because at some point, I’m going to find the bomb you were helping someone build, and I’m going to take them down. And then you’re going away for a very, very long time.”

Corcoran smiled again, smugly. “Well, you just give it your best shot, there, young Joey. You just give it your best shot.”

“Oh, I will,” Brennan said. Then he hit Corcoran hard, on the point of the chin, with the butt end of the pistol, knocking him cold. The old man slumped back into the seat, unconscious. “Don’t you worry about that.”

Brennan rifled through Corcoran’s pocket and found his phone. He dialed 911 and told the police they’d find a body in the backseat of a car at the customs lot. It wasn’t entirely untrue. He tossed the phone down next to him and left as quietly as he’d arrived.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The parking garage had been empty when Jonah arrived, but he’d heard voices, pegged them as coming from a lower level. When he reached the third floor, he’d heard David’s voice and been sure he’d found the right place.

His boss’s requests had been simple: give me the benefit of the doubt, and bring a gun.

Jonah hardly ever took his pistol out of its lockbox. Like a lot of guys, he’d aspired to be a field agent at some point but had long ago decided his future lay in management. But he’d had it at the range just a week earlier, requalifying. He knew how to shoot, if he had to.

The door swung open.

There were three people, perhaps twenty-five yards away. He recognized David and Mark Fitzpatrick immediately. It took him a second or two to realize the woman was the reporter, Alexandra Morgan; they’d mentioned during a briefing on Brennan that she might be working with the rogue agent. Was he somewhere around, too? David had a gun pointed at Fitzpatrick and vice-versa.

Too many thoughts to process at once, Jonah thought.

“Jonah!” David said. “Am I glad to see you! Fitzpatrick is the leak! He’s a fucking traitor, Jonah…”

David had been his mentor for years. Jonah raised his pistol and sighted down the barrel at the NSA agent.

“Don’t listen to him!” Fitzpatrick said. “Jonah, he killed Walter. He killed Myrna Verbish and he’s going to kill all three of us if you help him!”

He didn’t know who to trust. The woman looked frightened but she was standing closer to Fitzpatrick. Was she just siding with her source, or was David really going to shoot her? Jonah swung his pistol over to David and chambered a shell. “David…

“Jonah, son…you’ve known me for nearly a decade. You know deep down I’m being set up, that I would never do any of those terrible things. For God’s sake, son…”

Jonah turned the gun back to Fitzpatrick. “Mr. Fitzpatrick, I’m sorry…” he began to say.

Malone got the sense everything was about to go horribly wrong. She had to interject. “Jonah, I know you don’t know me…”

“You’re the reporter.”

“Yes… think about that, Jonah. I’m not an agent; I’m just a journalist talking to a source about a rogue agency boss. You know what David did…”

“I know what you say he did…”

“Don’t listen to her, Jonah,” David said. “Listen to me, son. She gets inside people’s heads. That’s what she does for a living. Don’t trust her. You know for a fact you can trust me. Go with the team that got you here.”

He swung the pistol back towards Fitzgerald. “Have you been leaking agency secrets to this woman?”

“We’ve been working together to uncover David’s treachery,” the NSA man said. “Ask yourself how much Ms. Malone had to gain personally from all of this. She was just doing her job, and so was I.”

“Shoot him, Jonah,” David said, “or we’ll never make it out of her, son.”

Jonah had been at the agency for a relatively long time now. He knew how to make his own decisions, how to evaluate things with cold analysis, how to rationalize the difficult choices. He’d seen David do it week in and out. And just then, he realized something: “You know what,” he said, swinging the cocked pistol back towards his boss, “in all our time working together – in all the time that I’ve worked for you – I don’t think you’ve ever called me ‘son’ before. And you sure as hell haven’t done it three or four times within a few minutes. Sometimes, David, you try too hard.”

Fitzpatrick smiled. “Kid’s got your number.”

Fenton-Wright had to think. The numbers were against him but there were always other options. He shifted his aim slightly to the left, training the gun on Alex Morgan. “Okay, really quickly and gently, you’re both going to put your pieces down on the ground, or the civilian dies first.”

Jonah felt a wash of disappointment. “Oh… David…” He shook his head.

“We don’t have time for this shit,” Fenton-Wright said. “Guns down, now!”

Malone reacted without thinking, darting sideways as quickly as she could, trying to get behind Fitzpatrick. It had occurred to her in an instant that Fenton-Wright’s aim would track that way.

All three men fired, the gunshots cracking through the sharp echoes of the long, empty parking garage. Fitzpatrick took a sharp breath inwards, expecting the sharp stab … then exhaling when he didn’t feel it.

Fenton-Wright felt the hot, piercing pain of a bullet, then looked down, seeing the blood and instantly weak, falling to one knee, confused. He patted at the matte of blood forming through his dress shirt, pouring from the wound to his chest. He looked over at Jonah, who was still standing with the nine millimeter raised, his face frozen and aghast. “Shit,” Fenton-Wright said, his knee buckling as he collapsed sideways to the ground, his body stiffening slightly as his heart tried to keep up with the arterial flow then seizing, arresting, ending his life on the cold slab of concrete.

Jonah and the NSA agent both rushed to Fenton-Wright’s side. Jonah turned him over, but his eyes were already glassy, his functions gone. “I think he’s dead,” Jonah said. He felt a sudden rise of nausea and turned around to quickly vomit on the pavement behind them. Fitzpatrick checked Fenton-Wright’s pulse.

“And the knowledge of who paid him off, unfortunately.” Fitzpatrick took out his phone. He called in to the duty officer, explained what had happened. “Yeah, yeah…make it ten.” He ended the call. “We’ll have a team here in ten minutes,” he told Jonah. “Look, you only did what you…”

Then he stopped. He’d lost track of Alex Morgan. He looked around them, but the rest of the lot was already empty.

As soon as they’d gone to check David Fenton-Wright’s vitals, Alex had beaten a retreat. Somehow, their meeting place had been blown, and that meant that for the immediate, she couldn’t trust Fitzpatrick. Either he’d told someone or…

Had she been followed? It hadn’t occurred to her until just then. She sat behind the wheel of her car, two blocks away, waiting for the light to change. Maybe. She thought she’d been careful, but she wasn’t a pro. Maybe he’d staked her house out, broken the newspaper code.

She was tired and frustrated, running on adrenaline. Her source was compromised, Fenton-Wright had died without naming anyone, and they were still no closer to finding the bomb Brennan claimed was out there, somewhere. Khalidi was still both a suspect and a target.

Alex needed something resembling good news and she needed it quickly. The light changed and she nudged the car ahead, driving a few blocks before she realized that she didn’t know where she was going. She had to tell someone what she’d just witnessed, get a story going. She checked her phone; it was nearly eleven o’clock, and there was little to no chance anyone would still be at the office. She couldn’t call Ken at home, put him at risk. She needed a place to go for the night; as she drove up 18
th
Street, she saw a familiar building, the YWCA. Alex smiled; it beat sleeping in the car, she thought.

July 1, 2016, NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Brennan woke late, the sun already high over the city and his phone buzzing.

He got it on the fourth ring.

“Yeah.”

“You sound like crap,” Malone said.

“I was out until the wee hours scouring Yonkers for a potential target.”

“Yonkers?”

“Long story. What time is it?”

“Time for you to get up. It’s ten-forty-five and I’m heading your way.”

“Eh?”

“I got a hit.”

“You’ve lost me,” Brennan said. “Seriously, I’m half-awake here.”

“The key,” she said. “My expert got a call back on the key. It’s to a locker at a gym in Queens. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“You got that right.” He’d spent the night in Yonkers pondering how Corcoran had come to be involved; it couldn’t be a coincidence, someone so prominently tied to his past. Once again, Brennan felt like he was being manipulated. “I have some questions for that source of yours, too, though.”

“Not an issue anymore, unfortunately,” she said. “Things went kind of haywire last night. My source is no longer secure and Fenton-Wright is dead.”

“How?” He was all business, she noticed, no hint of satisfaction.

“He found out where I was meeting my source. His assistant, Jonah, showed up. It got out of hand quickly.”

“Are you going to tell me now…”

“No. That’s not how it works. I can’t contact him or vice-versa, but I’m still not going to break his confidence.”

“So where were you in all this?”

“I ran as soon as the shooting started.”

“Smart.”

“Let’s not stretch things,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve got a flight out in forty minutes to La Guardia.”

He promised to meet here there, then hung up, shaking off the worst of the fog as he headed for the washroom. Maybe they still had a shot at this thing; maybe Fenton-Wright’s downfall would give Brennan an avenue back in with the agency, support to go after Corcoran, track his paymaster.

Or maybe whatever was in that locker would give them the answers they needed, the road map to stopping a nuclear catastrophe.

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

It had occurred to Christopher Enright early in the unfolding hours of his political boss’s latest problem that there were better ways to handle it. For one, he was convinced there was more to the donation than a face-value mistake.

For another, as he’d discovered a day earlier, there was an irregularity. The campaign worker who’d raised it was a volunteer and older, no one with any pull. But she was sure she’d specifically turned down a request from the same Gayda Goodwill Industries less than a year earlier, and made it clear that the campaign didn’t want its money. After all, Gayda was on a list she’d been given of companies in the Chicagoland area to avoid. She was absolutely sure of it, she’d said when she called in, because the name reminded her of the term ‘gaydar’.

Curious, Enright had asked the fundraising branch to get a copy of the check receipt out of records, so that he could take a look of it. But there was no copy; they had copies of every other receipt out there, but not the Gayda donation. The record of the deposit was there; so they’d taken the money. But there was no copy of the receipt.

That had sent him after a calendar of who’d handled deposits out of the Midwest in that period, which had led him back to a now-departed campaign volunteer named Aaron Nacostic … of whom he could find no other record. The address they’d been given more than a year earlier when he’d signed up proved to be a dead end, as did his number.

It was all too convenient, Enright thought. He’d been trying to tell the candidate that something was wrong for several days, but had had trouble getting hold of him. Addison March’s “March to Washington” was busy at a pitstop in South Dakota; then Wisconsin; then south to Kansas and New Mexico. It had been a full day since he’d left his messages.

He stood in the hotel lobby and tried the senator’s personal line again. Maybe it was too late, Enright thought; maybe March had fallen so far behind – eighteen points in the latest poll – that he should just pull the plug.

The politician answered. “Christopher. I thought we were routing all calls through the communications folks…”

“Yes, sir, my apologies; it’s just that we might have a situation developing with respect to the Gayda Goodwill story.”

March sighed audibly. “You can stop trying to make me feel better, Christopher; I’m quite aware that that particular millstone is responsible for our existing predicament.”

“But I think perhaps there’s more to it,” Enright said. “The paperwork doesn’t lineup properly for one. Then there…”

“Christopher…” March sounded tired. “You’re a good man; but I’ve got investigators working on this. You don’t need to get involved.”

“Senator, I’m certain that if I just had a few days…”

“No can do, son; we need you working on the undecideds, shoring up the delegates…”

“Sir, the party is still completely behind you; the delegate count…”

“…Is an important historical marker, Christopher. Posterity must be considered. Besides, these are well-trained men. If there’s any discrepancy, I’m sure they’ll catch it in time for us to use it in the campaign.”

“Senator, I can’t stress enough how I feel…”

“Enough,” March said. “Now I know how you feel, my boy, and I will give it some thought. But leave this with me. You have more important work ahead.”

He hung up, and Enright stood for a moment in the mid-level din of the lobby, staring at his phone. Was March really that naïve? Did he really believe it was beyond his opponent to try and set them up in some manner, to engineer an embarrassment? Enright felt disappointed with his mentor, even a little hurt that his concern was being downplayed.

He checked his watch then called for a cab. He had work to do at the Memphis office; maybe, he thought, it would help take his mind off the matter.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

It was early evening by the time they got there. The gym in question didn’t look like the kind of place that would be popular with wealthy Russian gun runners; in fact, the prevailing script on the front of the small pink stucco boxing club in Queens was graffiti, and a hole in one of the front windows had been patched over with tape and old fight flyers. The neighborhood was solid middle-class, rough but not tough; Brennan and Malone stood in front of the gym, each looking as puzzled as the other.

“You figure Konyakovich for a fight fan?” Malone asked.

“Not the fair type. Plus, this isn’t exactly the big time. Place looks like it used to be a bodega or something.”

Malone gestured towards the twin glass doors, also covered in old flyers. “Well?”

“After you, madam.”

The inside was slightly more impressive, Malone thought, thanks to the old black and white photos that lined the walls, memories of better years.

But only very slightly. A bored-looking middle aged guy in grey sweats and a Radar O’Reilly-style jeep hat was behind the front counter, reading a copy of Ring magazine. He raised an eyebrow when he saw Malone. “How you doin’?” he asked with a greasy wink.

Then he saw Brennan. “Oh. Hey. What can I do you two for?”

Alex held up the key. “Friend of ours asked us to get something from his locker.”

He looked disappointed by the mundane request. “Round the corner at the end of the room. Gents only in the guys’ locker room.”

The corridor in question led to the main sparring area, where two rings were set up along with a series of heavy bags hanging from the rafters, and speed bags screwed to the wall. The place was fairly busy, a young guy skipping rope in one corner, sparring in both rings. Malone nodded toward the bench seating by the wall. “I’ll wait here.”

Ten yards away, a boxer who was stretching saw her watching and smiled at her.

“Enjoy the view,” Brennan said.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said, smiling back at the younger man, all the while being careful that she didn’t miss the bench and fall on her backside.

Brennan found the locker quickly. Inside was a large manila envelope. He retrieved it, ignored by the three men changing and drying off from showering.

In the main room, Malone was watching the sparring. She rose as Brennan approached, spotting the envelope immediately. “Curioser and Curioser,” she said.

“Alex in Wonderland?” he said.

“Something like that. Come on, let’s hit the coffee shop down the street and open this puppy.”

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

Enright’s day had gone from bad to worse. His Chicago source was now hesitant about repeating her story, and word had already filtered down from the road crew that the senator was unhappy with him, which made the local staff just as hesitant to do their jobs with him in the room.

After five hours of phone calls, haltering performances from the local yokels and a lot of half-glances tossed his way, he’d called it quits for the day and gone back to the hotel. Not a heavy drinker, it had nonetheless occurred to Enright that the bar in the lobby held a particular appeal after such a rotten turn of events.

So he sat at the faux-marble bar and drank a couple of scotches, downing the first quickly and taking his time with the second. The place was a prototypical fern bar, with the plants in question filling two corners – or silken replicas, anyway. The rest of the place was filled with square bar tables made to accommodate travelling groups that usually didn’t exceed four – or two and two dates. The bar itself fronted a dozen stools and ran perhaps twenty-five feet in length, backed by an obligatory Jack Daniels mirror and an always-lit faux neon sign advertising Cerveza Corona.

He sipped the scotch. What was March thinking? In his few brief years with the senator, Enright had come to respect his boss’s coldly efficient mindset, his ability to push aside the distractions. But this wasn’t a distraction; this was something much more. He wondered if someone had gotten to the lady in Chicago, scared her out of talking. Her hesitancy also seemed like something more; a day earlier, she’d been practically bubbling at the prospect of helping her political hero. Now she was hanging up the phone and saying ‘please don’t call here’.

Enright considered his options; the associations with Khalidi and now Islamic militants would sink the candidate in November. It wasn’t that he doubted March’s ability to mount a comeback, as he’d seen the senator do it in other races. But the presidency would be won on the fine margins that lie between the ranks of the politically committed, a few states swinging one way or the other. Maybe it was time to cut his losses, Enright thought, and to step away before his name became associated with March’s inevitable defeat. It seemed impossible that March could still have an ace up his sleeve big enough to turn things around.

Or…

There was another option. The election commission was making a major show these days of cracking down on fraud; a case involving the presidential race would make its day. At the very least, it would probably call in the cops. They might even dig around John Younger’s campaign looking for a motive, if they thought the Chicago volunteer was credible and could get her to talk.

His eyes narrowed as he finished the rest of the scotch. It was time to act, and to take the candidate’s faltering presence out of the equation.

Enright looked around the bar; it was nearly midnight. The place was almost empty, just a handful of dubiously aged young ladies in one corner, giggling and drinking colorful martinis. At the far end of the bar was another woman; he hadn’t noticed her come in. She was lean, curvy, and her black cocktail dress hugged her figure as she leaned forward on the bar. She smiled at him before looking down at her drink, her eyes flitting demurely back in his direction.