Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (51 page)

Enright got up and walked over, drink in hand. “Hi, I’m Chris,” he said, flashing his pearly whites. “Do you mind if I join you?”

She smiled back. She was beautiful, he thought, way out of his usual league. “I’m Annie.” She extended a hand and they shook gently, and she held his hand for just a split second longer than he expected.

Wow, she’s really into me, Enright thought. He smiled again, some of the pressure of the day lifting away. He’d never dated an Asian woman before. He wondered what her background was; Chinese, he thought… or maybe Korean.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

They sat quietly reflecting, the coffee shop empty besides the two of them and the thin, pasty white waiter/cook, on the late shift, looking about as disinterested as could be. Outside, the restaurant’s neon orange-and-blue ‘open’ sign reflected off the large window pane next to their booth. It was raining lightly.

Malone wanted a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in eleven years, since a year after getting out of college. But she could practically smell it now, and that nicotine yearning was there, as if it had only been a day since she quit. She pushed it away.

Brennan sipped his coffee. They’d both read the file; it was brief, after all, just a few pages of notes and a handful of memory sticks. But it was shocking, outlining Borz Abubakar’s deception, the destruction of the bus in Peru; from there, it took a turn, outlining how evidence of Konyakovich’s  past arms deals had been used by representatives of a shadowy European cabal to blackmail him into shipping weapons’ grade Uranium and bomb parts into the United States. Though he admitted to great profit from the shipments, he also stated his guilt in the letter, an admission that he knew he what could happen as a result, along with a request that whoever found the letter might pray for his soul.

“Nearly thirty people dead, millions of others threatened,” Alex said with an edge of despair. “And for what? An arms deal gone wrong?”

His only identifiable contact with the cabal had been Terence Corcoran, though Corcoran had mentioned a ‘Faisal’ as being in charge.

It contained nothing else.

“No location. No indication of a motive. No clue who hired Corcoran to blackmail him. And it had to be him? Someone from my past?”

“Khalidi.” she suggested. “His fingerprints have been all over this from the start.”

“I don’t know… someone has been pushing us towards him. He’s just too easy, too convenient a boogieman. And if he were planning something like this, why get us onto him in the first place by assassinating his fellow ACF board members?”

She shrugged. “Maybe they knew too much about his funding of the nuke purchase in the first place; maybe he’d tired of them or no longer needed them and was simply cleaning up.”

“No, that’s not it,” Brennan said. “Those assassinations were the loudest possible show of force. He could have had been much more subtle. Those shootings were about making a statement. This whole thing couldn’t have been more designed to guarantee outside interest in Khalidi’s activities. In fact, once the second shooting happened, it was almost guaranteed his African activities would come up at some point. Any man as powerful and ruthless as him has enemies.”

They were silent again. If Khalidi wasn’t responsible, then who? It made so little sense; a conspiracy to bring a nuclear bomb into the U.S., but one in which intelligence agencies were being strung along for a ride. Why give them a chance to prevent it, Brennan wondered. What did someone have to gain from concocting a terrifying conspiracy but then helping them to stop it?

“I feel like we’re being played, still,” he said. “But even that we can’t be sure of. We still have no idea where the device is.”

“There must be something we’ve missed,” Malone said. “Some piece of evidence that points us in the right direction.”

They went over everything, going all the way back to the shooting in Montpellier, followed by the assassination of Lord Abbott. They covered everything Brennan learned from Bustamente and in Cabinda, the information Malone gleaned from her federal source and the African file.

But there was nothing.

“Maybe your magazine will get another tip…” Brennan began to say, before Malone raised a hand and cut him off.

“Just a second… let me think for a second. You said the guy you knew from years back… what’s his name?”

“Terrence Corcoran.”

“Terrence Corcoran. You said he had a meet set up in Yonkers. So they were heading north.”

“Sure, but like I said, I spent hours touring the area looking for any sign or any potential target. And it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Why?”

“Well, because every simulation or projection ever run on this sort of scenario says the bad guys go for the maximum population hit; in this case, that’s downtown.”

“But he said they had a contingency, right?”

“Sure.”

Malone thought about it some more. Then she said, “Give me your phone.”

“This is a preloaded, picked up by Eddie.”

“Doesn’t matter. I just need maps.”

She brought up an image of the state. “Let’s go against the prevailing theory. It hadn’t helped us so far, right? So let’s look north.”

Brennan chafed internally at the idea. It wasn’t his style to ignore sensible intel. “You know, they don’t just make those projections up. They’re based on…”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m not criticizing the military. Jeez, Brennan…”

“Okay, okay: explain.”

“So maybe they’re going against the grain on this. Whoever set this up has managed to implicate Khalidi, bring down Fenton-Wright, and destroy the ACF. That kind of thinking just seems a little more devious and a little less obvious than your typical meat-headed fanatic.”

“Absolutely.”

“Let’s assume they had New York as a potential target, but Corcoran’s shipment was needed for that, and you brought the cops in.”

“Okay.”

“Plus, the city’s covered in agents looking for them. So they go to ‘Option B’, by landing something out of town, up river at a secondary target.”

He peered at her critically. “Alex… you’re stretching.”

“Humor me.”

They both examined the small screen as she scrolled to Yonkers then kept going north from the city, away from the densest populations. A series of suburbs scrolled by, including New City, West Haverstraw, Croton-on-Hudson.

“Nothing,” Brennan said. “Unless you want to kill a whole lot of upper-middle-class boomers.”

“Be patient,” she said. She scrolled further, the map following the contours of the Hudson River.

She stopped scrolling. “Bingo,” Alex said. “I think you owe me a beer for that.”

“I’ll pay you later,” Brennan said. He put his jacket on as he climbed out of the booth, taking a twenty from his wallet to leave with the bill. “We better get going.”

JULY 2, 2016, AMMAN, JORDAN

Ahmed Khalidi paced the white-and-grey marble floor of his palace’s sitting room, hands behind his back, his body language tense and troubled. Increasingly, he awoke each morning feeling more insecure than the last, and there seemed to be little possibility of the situation improving in the immediate future. He had come to rely on Faisal for all of his information, but his assistant had less and less to tell him as the days went by. The EU had moved to freeze his assets and he continued to be guarded around the clock by a corps of security personally picked by Faisal.

The situation was beneath him; it angered him that he had to rely on a servant, that his family’s name and his fearsome reputation were no longer enough to guarantee his intentions were fulfilled. His colleagues had been systematically cut down like lambs to the slaughter – although in some cases he conceded it nothing short of just – and the influential contacts he had maintained within U.S. intelligence had been eliminated.

And so he paced the room, unsure of how to direct his energies, tempted to insult both the Prophet and his God by having several stiff drinks, keenly aware that he already had ample reason to pray for guidance.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come.”

It opened and Faisal entered the room, typically dapper in a light grey suit. “Your highness,” he said with a short bow. He made a sweeping motion with his arm, and a young soldier in tan-colored army garb followed him into the room. He was perhaps eighteen, with a narrow face and a wispy moustache. “This is Private Aboud.”

“What is this, Faisal,” Khalidi asked wearily. “You had best have some information…”

“Be quiet,” Faisal said. “Old fool.” He reached inside his suit jacket and removed a nine millimeter; he took a small suppressor out of his side pocket and screwed it onto the barrel.

Khalidi was flabbergasted. His face turned red with embarrassment. “Faisal! How dare you speak to me thusly! I shall have you flogged, you Egyptian dog…wait…what are you doing?”

“Private Aboud is a simple boy, recruited for this task specifically from an institution in Aqaba, where he was committed for being unable to care for himself,” Faisal said. As if to confirm the statement, the private said nothing, staring ahead wide-eyed and glassy, oblivious to what was going on around him.

“I don’t understand…” Khalidi managed to say, before Faisal held the barrel up to the boy’s forehead, and pulled the trigger, killing him instantly.

Faisal walked towards his shocked employer. “Initially, the news reports sent out by the state press agency will merely confirm you were killed by an assassin but that you heroically took his life in the process,” he said. “It will not be until later that they find the evidence among his belongings, implicating you in the explosion that reigned Hell upon America, that they realize young Private Aboud died a hero, trying to prevent a tragedy.”

The wealthy Jordanian’s mouth dropped open. “My God, Faisal…” he said. “You cannot mean this. What have you done?”

“Me?” Faisal said. “Don’t worry about me, sir.” He raised the gun and shot Khalidi through the mouth. The chairman dropped to his knees, eyes instantly distant and confused. Faisal walked over and kicked him over. “I’m nobody.”

He took his phone from his pocket and dialed a number.

“Yes?” A man’s voice replied.

“It’s done. The official statement will go out in two days. You have until then. The remainder will be dealt with after everything has been taken care of on your end.”

“Your task is complete,” the voice said. “The money will be wired by noon.”

“I hope never to hear from you again,” Faisal said.

“You won’t.”

The line went dead.

Faisal looked down at Khalidi’s prone body. Ultimately, he knew, people would suspect his involvement; he had rarely left Khalidi’s side in a decade. But memories are short, Faisal knew, and the money would last a very long time.

JULY 3, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The President wanted it to be over.

On one level, anyway. Really, he wanted another four years, another eight, another twelve; whatever it took to help build a stronger country. He had at least that much faith in himself.

But facing a grave national security threat, declining popularity numbers and a lame duck administration, paused in time by the inertia of career fear? He just wanted it to be over.

Four more months, he told himself as he twiddled his ballpoint pen, sitting behind the Roosevelt Desk while some of his top advisors sat in front of it and fidgeted, each trying to look less guilty than the next.

“Would perhaps one of you gentlemen like to explain to me how deputy director Fenton-Wright managed to so thoroughly evade our internal screening and policies? Our own security? Anyone?”

Fitzgerald was there as a courtesy; the NSA had a direct interest, and he had a personal one, even though forensics had shown it was Jonah Tarrant’s shot that had killed the rogue spy. But Wilkie, the Colonel and the Defense Secretary knew they were all seen as complicit, given that they’d all promoted and support Fenton-Wright’s role on the National Security Council. They’d treated him like the golden boy for the president’s entire final term.

Eventually, though, the director knew it fell to him. Wilkie cleared his throat then said, “I will, of course, offer my resignation…”

The president rolled his eyes. “Give it a rest, Nick, okay? I’ve known you for twenty years. I don’t want your resignation. I want a genuine answer. Do we even know who was paying him?”

“We suspect the Russians, Mr. President,” the defense secretary interjected.

“We’ve just gotten a lead to trace on that today sir,” Wilkie said. “When he died, Fenton-Wright had an unlisted cell phone on him. We’ve run back several of the calls made from it in the months prior, and he took part in some telebanking with an outfit in Switzerland. Now, as you know, the Swiss are much more amenable these days to working with us…”

“Bottom line it, please,” the President said.

“Money was transferred into accounts held by Fenton-Wright in Zurich. Given the routing, they suspect the transaction originated in the Middle East. But by tomorrow we’ll have a definitive answer.”

That was one issue potentially resolved, the president thought. “What about your other rogue agent, the asset in Europe?”

“Agent Brennan is still out of touch, unfortunately sir,” Wilkie said. “But we’re taking steps to track him down and assure him that he is very much back in the fold. It’s our understanding sir, per our briefing note to you, that he is at this present time working on case of grave urgency involving a potential weapon of mass destruction.”