Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (17 page)

BARCELONA

Brennan reacted instinctively as the men burst into his hotel room, ducking behind the edge of the bed and drawing the silenced pistol from his waistband in one smooth motion. The men opened fire, machine gun bullets ripping into the mattress and sending a flurry of feathers into the air.

He’d spotted at least three before taking cover, and when he popped up from behind the mattress he moved with machine-like precision, squeezing off three shots in quick succession, each finding its mark, two head shots and the third center mass.

Two of the men were dead before they hit the floor, and the third lay bleeding on the carpet, twitching spasmodically. There were two more in the doorway, but they ducked back around the doorjamb.

Brennan remained crouched and moved to the corner of the mattress, looking for the slightest motion. The pair reached around the doorway in unison but stayed in cover, spraying the room wildly with fire as Brennan hit the deck. He rose out of cover again, swinging the pistol left, then right, the sequence timed perfectly as each of the two remaining guards tried to charge the room. Each went down within three steps.

Brennan looked back at Bustamante; at least two of the machine pistol bullets had hit him in the chest, and he was coughing up blood. The drugs probably weren’t helping as the immobilized gangster fought for breath, and the gunfire would have alerted others. He had to move quickly.

He ripped Bustamante’s shirt open, but the wounds were gaping, blood flowing freely. There was nothing he could do for him. Brennan knew he had perhaps a minute, at best, before others arrived. He retrieved the syringe from the dresser and injected the remainder of the cocktail into the dying drug dealer.

“Tillo!” Brennan smacked his face gently to rouse him. “Tillo!”

“Eh?” He was fading fast. “Feel like sleeping…” Bustamante said.

“Tillo, the bomb. Where is it now?”

“Eh? The nuke… ask the chairman. It is his mistake.” He drifted out of consciousness again, and Brennan slapped him twice again.

“Tillo, where is it going? You said it was being shipped?”

Bustamante smiled. “Go to hell.” His head bobbed twice and his heavy eyelids slammed shut.

“Tillo, it’s me, it’s Juan,” Brennan said loudly. “Tell me where the bomb is? We need to find it.”

Bustamante was nodding in and out of consciousness. Brennan knew it was futile; he had to go. He left the tycoon behind and turned to the desk. He dropped the laptop and gun into his carry-on bag and walked out of the room, heading for the stairwell, at the far right end of the corridor. The door closed slowly behind him just before the elevator slid open. A minute later, he exited a side door from the hotel to the street. He walked around the corner to the next block, dropping his gloves into a nearby garbage can as he blended into the anonymity of evening on the Barcelona street, a cacophony of police sirens growing louder.

DEC. 14, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The young man in the grey-green herringbone suit was nervous, and he paced back and forth by a window of the Capitol Club, his tension rendering him oblivious to the tasteful opulence of the place, his brown brogue dress shoes shuffling a little too much on the blue patterned carpet. He ignored the Edwardian chairs and the portraits of Republican Party greats; instead, he tried to remember the exact wording of the message Addison March’s assistant had asked him to pass on.

His nerves were justified, as March was his new idol. Unsatisfied with the namby pamby professors and community organizers adored by his college classmates, he’d looked for a leader made of sterner stuff. He found it in the smooth-talking Tennessean. The young man thought March had the charisma of Reagan and the smarts of Lincoln, combined with the aggression of his other idol, the former vice-president Dick Cheney.

In short, he believed with every fiber of his being that he was about to pass a message to the next President of the United States; and so he paced, trying to keep his hands from shaking as he gripped the message.

March kept a regular table at the Club, where he was a committee member and sponsor of an annual Wine Tasting attended by every important West Coast Republican, a significant portion of the senator’s donor base. The young man expected him around by 4 p.m. but he was running late.

He paced some more.

“Careful, son, or you’ll wear a hole in this here carpet.” The voice was rich and melodic, utterly friendly.  He turned and found himself face-to-face with the presumed Republican nominee. March was smiling, his small teeth just visible, lips a thin line across his bony face.

“Sir, Mr. March, sir…”

“Now rest easy, son, rest easy. What can I do for you?”

“I have a message from your assistant Christopher, sir; he wanted you to know he had information on the matter you’d asked about… I mean, the EU matter…”

“I get the general gist.” He took out his clip and gave the youth a twenty. “You done college, son?” he asked.

“Yes sir, Mr. March, sir.”

“Then you know better than to use the same word twice in the same sentence.”

The young man looked blank.

“It’s a joke, son. But don’t you worry about it.”

The young man backed away, practically bowing. March was accustomed to adulation, and he smiled politely as the messenger withdrew. Then he made his way a dozen feet to a red sofa nearby and sat down, unfolding the copy of the Washington Times he’d had under his arm. If he knew his assistant well…

His phone rang. “Right on cue,” March said as he answered. “Talk to me, Christopher. What’s new?”

“Senator, I’ve got some feedback on that issue you’d asked about. My NSA source tells us we’re pushing hard for an American-made solution to the enviro committee shootings and that Younger is one of the main advocates.”

“American solution? Why on Earth…”

“No idea sir. No idea. We don’t seem to have a horse in this race.”

“He has the president’s endorsement all but announced; maybe getting us involved was the price. POTUS always was fond of La Pierre’s environmental committee.”

“That’s the weird part, sir. They’ve been talking about it for a few days, but there’s been no official involvement yet and no request to join in the EU-led investigations already under way.”

“What’s your thinking, Christopher?”

“Maybe their ‘solution’ involves a diplomatic component, something other than just seconding staff to our allies across the pond. OR maybe they have another reason for wanting control over this thing; maybe there’s something about it they don’t want getting out.”

“Perhaps. Keep your ears open. Younger’s on the stump for most of the next two months drumming up support, and that makes him vulnerable to information that breaks here first. Who knows? POTUS’s anointed might just trip himself up yet.”

ANNANDALE, VIRGINIA

Carolyn had slept fitfully since Joe’s departure. That was nothing new; but the fact that she felt as if she’d helped to talk him into going seemed to worsen her guilt; she found herself having bad dreams, waking up several times each night, pitching and turning under the covers.

The kids had a babysitter during the week and would be back at school soon anyway; and they were accustomed to their father disappearing for a few weeks at a time on business. But her nerves hadn’t settled with age and the familiarity of routine. If anything, her anxiety had heightened. Like Joe, she wondered what the real impact on them would be in the long-term.

At work, her blue suit and cream blouse felt like she couldn’t get them to fit quite right, and her panty hose felt bunchy. She dropped her first coffee of the day on her laptop while near-motionless at her office desk, a supremely uncoordinated moment. Then she realized she’d missed a briefing because her phone battery had died while the laptop was down, rendering her without mail in the exact ten-minute window David had used to call everyone into his office. Then Jonah called her on her office line and said she had a half-hour to get ready for another meeting with David, and if she missed that one, refreshing her resume might be a smart idea.

She sat down behind her desk, looking at the laptop, which now bore a yellow post-it sticker with the letters “IT” in marker. Not that they were likely to grab the wrong thing. Or show up any time soon. She had twenty more minutes before going in with her boss, and the day was heading south.

Had things gone as badly as she thought with Joe? She wasn’t sure. He’d been seething for the two days before leaving. But he was so non-communicative that she couldn’t tell if he was mad at the agency or at her for delivering the message. That’s all it was, really, she told herself. It wasn’t like either of them had much of an alternative.

She made a mental note to call Callum and Ellen, to see if they wanted to come around for dinner. She needed some cheering up.

There was a knock on her office door and it swung open before she could respond. “I thought I’d come to see you, rather than making you tromp all the way over to my neck of the woods,” David Fenton-Wright said.

She gestured to one of the chairs across from her desk but he shook his head quickly. “That’s fine, I’ll just be a moment. I wanted to piss on you again for missing the briefing, but I’m over it. What I did think you should know, however, is that we discussed Joe’s mission and we agreed that we uniformly felt confident in his ability to confirm a suspect.”

Jonah stood behind him, quietly taking notes. Carolyn had never liked the younger man, despite his sterling reputation. He seemed officious to an almost automaton-like degree.

And what was David up to?

“Is he okay?”

“Oh, he’s fine,” Fenton-Wright said, perhaps too quickly. She wondered if they had any real idea; probably not. “We believe he’ll be looking into a number of new leads, however, so don’t leave the porch light on.” He smiled when he said it, like he thought she’d find that funny.

“David, when this is all done, will you let Joe resign? He’s tired of all of this. I mean…”

Fenton-Wright turned to her glass wall and peeked through the blinds at the rest of the office. Then he turned back to her. “We’ll see. You must understand, Carolyn, that his being frozen out … well, that was never my intention. We received a great deal of pressure.”

“From…”

“From other agencies. Let’s just leave it at that. Anyway, those relationships must endure; so it probably won’t be my decision. I hope you realize that.”

She nodded hesitatingly. “Of course, David.”

He moved to leave, opening her door a crack before smiling at her again. “And of course, should anything untoward happen, the fact that he’s been on the company payroll for so long would assure a healthy pension for you and the children.”

He smiled one more time and left. Caroline sat agog at the comment, wondering if the man had Asperger’s, or something. She didn’t want his pension; she wanted her husband back.

DEC. 15, 2015, PARIS, FRANCE

The Eiffel Tower elevator chugged north at a pace so leisurely, Brennan initially wondered if something was wrong. There were perhaps a half-dozen other people in the ancient-looking elevator cage, and a middle-aged Englishman with a round face saw his expression. “It’s about a minute, maybe ninety seconds between floors,” he said. “Are you afraid of heights?”

“Something like that,” Brennan said. In reality, he just wanted to get to the meeting more quickly, the tension of meeting a new, unknown source eating at him. Walter had found the contact through an old colleague, Myrna Verbish, a former agency analyst who kept up on the trade. It was the source’s idea to meet at the top of the tower, as public and safe a spot as a local could imagine in the city. Brennan was holding a copy of The Catcher In The Rye, as requested.

“Well, most people like the view,” the man said. “Just keep your eyes shut and we’ll be there before you know it. The trip takes about eight minutes. The wife and I have done this before, you know.”

Brennan smiled politely at the man but couldn’t help rocking on his heels. The height wasn’t a problem, but the confined space was adding to his impatience.

Finally, the car creaked to a halt at the observation level. Brennan climbed out, his erstwhile confidante right behind him. “You see?” the Englishman said. “It’s not such a bad ride.”

There were already a few dozen people on the deck. Brennan moved towards the rail. The view was spectacular, Paris sprawled out in a grand circle around them. The city had long prohibited buildings over seven stories tall, giving the central landmark a spectacular perspective; the bridge across the Seine river below was busy with seemingly tiny traffic, the Trocadero gardens running beyond it in a narrow green strip of manicured brilliance and water fountains, and past them the grand marble pillars of the enormous Palais De Chaillot, the building’s two wings spread grandly, covering several hundred feet to each side.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” The Englishman from the elevator had sidled up next to him.