Enemy Agents (8 page)

PART TWO:

THE SECRETIVE AGENTS

9

Quarrel was in the driver’s seat of a GMC van on a hot day in Venezuela. His passenger was suspect #1, Peter “Shark” Scarret. Shark was in the back as Quarrel drove through an unfamiliar neighbourhood, in the space at the edge of San Cristobal where the houses were far apart but you weren’t quite into the rougher Andes terrain. Quarrel could barely hear over the rock station blaring on the radio, but he noted the sound of something banging around, and the sound of zippers and buckles being fastened.

It was three in the afternoon on a sunny Wednesday, which Shark thought was a great time for an assassination. One of the major drug lords had recently moved his residence into this country, and was bribing local officials. The CIA wasn’t happy about this kind of man making friends with the socialists. They much preferred drug lords confined to impoverished narco-states.

As they passed a walled and gated villa, Shark shouted from behind Quarrel.

“Pull over past the house,” he said in a rough, but somewhat disinterested voice. Shark was more focused on listening to the music than talking to Quarrel.

Quarrel had been assigned to carry out this mission as a way to study and learn about Shark. The cover was that the CIA wanted someone to evaluate Shark’s methods, which was flimsy and they both knew it. Shark was very aware that Quarrel was there to spy on him, but he had to put up with the situation. Like anything else the CIA told him to do, Shark had an easy choice—comply or die. The bomb in his neck made the decision pretty easy.

The van rolled to a stop a hundred yards past the villa, and Shark threw open the sliding side door. With a backpack thrown over his shoulder, he pulled the door shut and approached the passenger window.

“You sure you don’t want to wait ‘til dark?” asked Chris.

“Pff. Twice as many guards at night.”

“You didn’t tell me how you were going to get inside.”

Shark smiled. Despite the ugly melted skin down the right side of his face, he was a handsome man. “Gettin’ inside’s easy. They’ll take me in once they catch me.”

Quarrel was dumbfounded. “Once the
y
catc
h
you?”

“Yeah,” Shark said, raising a piece of equipment for Chris to see. “After I fire the grenade launcher.”

“
Grenade launcher
?”

“Yeah. They’re gonna be so pissed.”

Shark rapped on the roof twice in lieu of a goodbye, and headed off toward the villa. He didn’t turn back to look at his indignant “partner,” but he did turn on the radio earpiece and test the signal. He wore many-pocketed black cargo pants and a matching vest. His long black hair was slicked back behind his ears, and he had a toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth.

At the outside wall of the villa, Shark smiled for the security camera, then took a left to follow the wall down the side of the property. Once he found a tall tree, he shimmied up the trunk and settled on a branch that looked over the wall and into the property. It was beautiful and perfectly maintained, with green grass, bushy gardens, and bright trees that had as much pink as they did green. The house was a mansion, with smooth white stucco walls and arched windows. Birds were chirping, a limping old gardener trimmed the bushes, and the two guards patrolling the perimeter together were smiling and talking.

Quarrel watched from the van as Shark fired the grenade launcher into the yard, and a few seconds later the explosion sounded, and Quarrel felt the van shake. Quarrel counted three Mississippis before the alarm went off. These guys were slow.

Shark shimmied along his branch until he was over the ten-foot-high brick wall, then flipped upside down, hung on with one hand, and let his legs drop until he was standing on the wall. Walking along the wall, he watched the guards rushing past the windows inside the house, on the first floor. He looked ahead to where they were going and fired a grenade in front of them, but into a window on the floor above them. Quarrel couldn’t tell if the floor caved in on the guards, but Shark seemed happy with himself.

The scar-faced agent aimed at something else in the courtyard, and fired. A huge orange fireball rose above the wall and Quarrel recognized it as a gasoline explosion.

“What was that?” Quarrel said aloud, mostly to himself.

“Lamborghini convertible. Musta had a full tank.” Shark said through his earpiece, “They might not like the van sitting there. You should probably drive around back.

“There’s no road around back,” said Quarrel.

“You got tires, don’t ya?”

Shark hopped down from the wall and Quarrel was left alone. He put the van in gear and looked around. Over the earpiece, he heard guards shout at Shark.

“Hands up,” said the first guard in Spanish. Quarrel knew a handful of languages, and thankfully Spanish was one of them. He had been working toward a job in the Americas, so his Spanish was much stronger than his Mandarin, Japanese or his German. He knew almost nothing of the Middle Eastern languages.

Shark must have complied with the guards since there was no sound of gunfire or violence.

“Do we kill him?” asked Guard Numero Dos.

“No,” said Numero Tres. “He blew up the Lamborghini. The Boss wants him.”

Another guard, likely Guard Numero Uno again, spoke in stilted English. “You bad news, pal. Boss wants you. Boss not happy.”

Shark was almost laughing at these three. Whatever they were doing—patting him down, tying him up, who knows—he clearly thought it was amusing. “Yeah. I heard. Stick to Spanish, your English sucks.”

And then the three guards led him inside, which is exactly where he wanted to go.

Quarrel pulled off the road and drove through some brush on the south side of the villa, circling toward the back, which was the farthest you could get from the front gate. When he got there, he heard a new voice, this one spoke English with almost no accent. Quarrel pulled to a stop and listened as Shark was now in a room with his target.

“You blew up my car,” said The Boss.

“Yup.”

“You American?”

“Man can’t help where he’s born.”

“Who do you work for?”

“People.”

“I have a soundproof room in the basement and I employ five interrogators. Why not just tell me everything about the people who sent you now and we can get this over with.” As The Boss spoke, Quarrel wondered if he should load a gun and try to help Shark.

Shark’s voice: “Sure, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

Quarrel spoke up, “You can’t—”

Shark’s earpiece volume went down, something you could only do if you were touching the earpiece itself. “It’s fine, kid, I got this,” he said in his now-quieter voice.

There were some surprised, confused voices in Spanish, and then Shark chuckled. “Yeah, sorry. Took those off. Chafing.”

Quarrel heard The Boss scream at his men in Spanish.

“Here’s the thing,” said Shark. “I could tell you everything, but you’d really have no use for the information when you’re dead.”

The boss stammered but gave no commands to the men.

“Because your guards made four mistakes.” Shark paused, and Quarrel imagined him raising four fingers to count. “They let me live. They kept me conscious. They brought me inside. And they left my belt on.”

With the sound turned down, Quarrel couldn’t tell what the metal clinking sound was, but it could have been a man unbuckling his belt. “Now you can surrender peacefully and I’ll just arrest you, or you all die in about ten seconds.”

The boss scoffed, and said “Fuego—”

There was a whip-crack sound and a gunshot, followed by a very fast rustling and two more shots. The sound of running footsteps, going away from Shark, and another shot.

“Roll over, fatty, or I’ll shoot ya again.” Shark was still alive, and that must have meant the guards were dead. Quarrel couldn’t understand how he had done it. Cartel thugs were ex-military. How Shark could kill three of them while armed only with a belt seemed absurd.

Quarrel’s smartphone lit up, showing a streaming video of The Boss’s face. Shark was connected to both Quarrel and the CIA, filming the boss in close-up.

“Say your name.”

The fat man spat at Shark.

“Say your name.”

“
Vete al infierno
.”

Shark reacted immediately with a hard pistol-whip to the boss’s face, knocking him out and spraying blood on the camera phone. He grabbed the man’s right hand, and pressed the phone’s screen against the man’s thumb. A moment later The Boss’s name and photo appeared on Quarrel’s screen.

“Positive ID,” said Quarrel. “This is the guy.”

Shark pointed the camera back at the boss’s face and then the tip of a gun barrel appeared onscreen. Shark fired at the man’s face until the gun was empty. One shot would have been enough, but Shark kept shooting until the screen showed a horrifying mush instead of a face. Then he fiddled with the phone, and Quarrel realized he was sending the video to CIA to confirm the kill. Then Quarrel’s camera feed cut off.

“Still with me, kid?” Shark asked over the earpiece.

“Yeah, where are you?” said Quarrel, trying to sound calm despite what must have been a near-overdose of adrenaline by now.

“Coming over the southeast corner of the wall.”

Quarrel stepped on the gas and followed the wall around the house. He stopped at the corner and idled. Shark didn’t appear. Quarrel was off-road in a bulky, twenty-year-old van, parked within five feet of the home of a very powerful man whom he had just watched die. It wasn’t the sort of situation that led to a lot of patience. After a half-minute, Chris spoke to his earpiece.

“Where are you?”

He heard a crackle of static followed by silence.

Quarrel watched the clock count off two more minutes. There was nothing. Not even the sound of a gunshot from inside the compound. He put the van into drive.

There was a startling bang as something smashed into the roof. Quarrel looked over his shoulder and saw a three-pronged grappling hook impaled through the steel. A second later there was a thump as a man hit the roof, cut the line, and the hook fell to the floor behind Chris. A figure dropped past the passenger window and out of sight. Quarrel picked up his gun, but he was also ready to stomp on the gas pedal if the man outside was hostile.

Shark rose into view, opened the door, and tossed the heavy backpack onto Chris’s lap.

“Let’s go.”

Quarrel dug into the pack. It was overflowing with cash in various currencies, mostly US dollars. “You took the drug money?”

“Better I have it than them.”

Quarrel said something under his breath, tossed the pack behind him, and drove.

As they reached the road, Shark turned the radio up.

“What was that about your belt?” Quarrel asked, trying not to sound like a nerdy schoolboy.

“What?” Shark asked over the music.

“The bit with your belt. I counted three guards and their boss. You had a belt. Four on one and you only had a belt. How did that work?”

“Maybe if you weren’t Mr. Stay-In-The-Van you’d know how to do things like that.”

“I just can’t figure it out.”

Shark laughed a little. Quarrel heard the ringing sound of a blade being drawn, and then Shark stabbed a small dagger into the dashboard. This was a strange weapon. It had a two-inch blade and instead of a handle it had a small square of metal, just big enough to hook two fingers into. Quarrel realized the square was a belt buckle.

“I see.”

Shark lit a cigarette, and turned up the music so loud it ended the conversation.

In Caracas, Shark got on a private flight to a destination he wouldn’t tell Quarrel. He took the bag of money with him as a carry-on, and somehow the security guard didn’t look inside. Chris got the feeling Shark was afforded that type of discretion on a regular basis.

He had spent almost twenty straight hours with Shark, mostly driving, and mostly in silence. And he had no idea if Peter Scarret was a mole or not. At the very least, he knew that he didn’t like him. Altogether, his investigation had turned up absolutely nothing solid.

After Shark had disappeared on his private plane, Quarrel got on a commercial flight to Washington, to meet with the next suspect on his list.

10

Jessica Swift crawled through the ventilation ducts of WBS, but this time it was no reconnaissance mission. This time was for real. After her first visit, she knew how dirty the vents were, so tonight she wore grey instead of black. With her brown hair in a bun at the top of her neck and her belt covered in tools and pouches, there would be no mistaking her for anything other than a burglar, so she promised herself there would be no slip-ups this time.

It had been a long time since the woman codenamed Io had started stealing from people. As a teenager she was always shocked at how dumb the boys were—stealing things by smashing and grabbing, or robbing a place at gunpoint. It was much easier to just sneak into a place where nobody was looking and walk out with what you wanted. By the time she was seventeen, Jessica had hooked into the world of organized thievery, cracking safes for some very dangerous characters. It was decent work: four big, scary men would coerce and bribe any guards who needed to be absent, and Jessica would just have to walk into a place and open the safe. She was making an equal share to the rest of the gang—great money for any seventeen-year-old.

Of course, she wasn’t aware that all the money was just a down payment for the burden she would have to carry for the rest of her life.

Inside the vent, Jessica weaved a strong fishing line through the slats in a grate below her face. Once she was sure the line would hold, Jessica tied off the ends of each fishing line attached to a frame that fit around the outside edges of the grate. The frame was magnetic, and wouldn’t move once the line was holding the weight of the metal grate.

Now she inserted a J-shaped hand-cranked screwdriver through the vent, hooking back up to the first of the screws that held the vent in place. Cranking the handle, she removed the screw. Her steady hands kept the screw balanced on the tip of the bit, until she raised it back up and pocketed the screw. She did this for the other five screws in less than a minute. As the last screw came out, the grate dropped, dragging along the fishing line for an instant before it ran out of slack, and then swung open, the end which was tied by the wire acting as a hinge.

Dropping into the back room of the bank, she felt the same familiarity that hit her on every break-in. The same sense of almost being caught, the thrill of the trespass, the sickness in her gut. Sense memory of this feeling ruined it every time, corrupting the thrill into a flashback of the day that ruined her life.

After months of flawless robberies, Jessica’s crew had set their sights on the office in the back of a strip club. Ricky, the crew’s leader, insisted that the safe in there would be the biggest job they ever pulled. He was right. The building had no security aside from basic door locks, and the safe itself. Jessica cracked it in no time, and they found almost three-quarters of a million dollars inside. Ricky never told them whose money it was.

In Switzerland, Jessica was using a drill to access the inner working of the vault’s keypad. She would first have to manipulate the time lock, which was connected to a physical timepiece inside the wall. Once the clock thought it was 8:47 a.m., opening time, she would be able to hack the keypad and open the vault. It was a three-minute window. Once the lock reached 8:50 a.m., a silent alarm went out to the security company, who would then call police.

Ten years earlier, she was tucking some of her cash into a getaway bag in a locker she rented from a fitness club. It was one of several stashes she used, just in case she had to leave town in a hurry. Even at seventeen, Swift had been thinking about contingencies. The radio station the gym piped in through overhead speakers gave the news every half hour.

‘An update on the fire at Club Mystique strip club, authorities now say the fire was set deliberately; an act of arson meant to cover up that the people inside had been shot before the fire started. Police are calling it an act of organized crime, as the club’s owner was a known associate of gangland kingpins.’

Jessica had stolen from the mob. And when the strip club owner tried to explain that he’d been ripped off, the mob bosses didn’t believe him. He paid for that seven-hundred thousand dollars with his life, and the lives of his two best friends, his wife, and a stripper who had the bad luck to show up early. As the realization hit her—
these people died because of me
—Jessica had to run for the washroom. She didn’t make it. She threw up in a bin of towels.

The vault opened at what it thought was 8:48 a.m., and Jessica found the safe deposit box easily. Number 191. She picked the lock with practiced ease, and pulled out the drawer. Inside was a thin folder. She grabbed it. There were also several bundles of cash, freshly counted and bound in paper bands. American dollars. Fifty grand. She took that too.

Normally, she would climb back into the vent, carefully remove her equipment, and leave the vent cover exactly as it had been. But after running into the guards during her scouting mission, she didn’t trust the vents not to sag and squeak while she did so. So instead of bothering with all that, she pulled a thin fabric mask over her face, opened the deadbolts from the vault room and ran through the bank and out a fire door. She was sprinting from the second she touched the pavement. She was a mile away before she heard sirens. They would already have security footage of her from the first attempt at infiltrating WBS, so now they would have a little more: Footage of a masked, petite woman escaping with a small pack and a belt of tools. That was better than taking the risk of guards cornering her again.

“Io to Jupiter. I have the documents.” She typed into a smart phone, while sitting on the bed in her hotel room. She waited almost five minutes before the phone lit up with a response.

“Confirm.”

She used the phone’s camera to take a picture of the file folder, and sent it back. The response was immediate:

“Burn them.” That was all Jupiter had to say.

Shrugging, Jessica pulled the trash bin over to the side of the bed. Opening the folder, she started to crumple the pages and toss them into the basket, until something caught her eye.

There were several photographs inside the folder, showing a beautiful, well-dressed woman lying in a pool of blood. She had an entry wound in her forehead. It was the caption that got her attention, the one that started with her name: “Jessica . . . ” Suddenly compelled to know more about this woman, Jessica began to read through the file.

At first, it seemed to describe a murder. A woman named Jessica Jordan had been killed in Paris. She was a suspected American spy. Then she started to read about the killer. Khalid Saleb, also a US spy. There were photocopies of a kill order. A type-one job, as they called it. One spy had killed another. Why would they do that? Then things got stranger.

There were other documents; a train ticket ordered online. From Paris to Lyon. The same night as the murder. What was going on? Was this proof of an escape? Evidence of Saleb’s getaway? And why did the name Khalid Saleb sound so familiar?

Swift picked up her laptop and googled the man’s name. It came up right away—the Afghan-American who killed a spy. Standing about ten feet away from each other, both Saleb and Jordan had simultaneously shot each other, like a wild west shootout. Jordan died, Saleb lived. It was a mess of extradition. Very public. If Saleb was really a spy, that kind of public spectacle shouldn’t have happened. Not in an American ally like France. This guy, Saleb, was being hung out to dry.

It was the final page that put it all together. It was an email from one numbered address to another. No names.

Saleb has orders to be in Lyon. They will be apart. I’ll take Saleb. You take Jordan. Leave a mess for the police to find.

Saleb hadn’t killed her. They had orders that kept them apart, so that they would both be alone. Whoever was pulling the strings wanted them both dead, but when Saleb survived a bullet to the head, the Powers That Be framed him for his partner’s murder.

Suddenly Jessica flashed back to the morning news report. The black body bags on gurneys being wheeled out of the burnt husk of the strip club she had robbed three days earlier. Five people dead because of her greed.

Jessica Jordan was dead because of someone else. Khalid Saleb was locked up somewhere because of someone else. Five people were dead because Jessica Swift had acted in her own interest.

She knew she couldn’t let it happen again. Saleb was up for treason and murder. It was a guaranteed death sentence. These papers exonerated Saleb for the murder he had taken the fall for. She was supposed to destroy them, and in doing so destroy any evidence that he was a victim, not a traitor. The people she worked for, even her handler Jupiter, wanted this man to die for a crime he didn’t commit. She couldn’t do it.

No one was going to die because Jessica Swift stole from the wrong people. Not again. She was going to have to find this man, Khalid Saleb. This spy who was under lock and key in some black site somewhere in the world. And she was going to set him free.

She tucked the documents into her carry-on bag, then tossed the folder they had come in into the trash can and set it on fire. Snapping a photo of the flames, she typed a message:

“Documents destroyed. Io out.”