Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (18 page)

For a split second, Brennan didn’t realize he was being addressed. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” he said.

“It’s a shame,” the Englishman said. He had a tan raincoat on, an umbrella folded up in one hand; he wore a flat cap and had half glasses, a large man in all respects, flecks of grey and lines suggesting he was in his early fifties. He gestured towards the palace. “It’s sort of an Albert Speer-like sterile government idea of art. In fact, Hitler was said to have loved the place.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, he was quite enamored with it, apparently. The palace they knocked down to build it was a Romanesque monstrosity in its own right, the Palais du Trocadero. But it had character, a grand blend of styles, two giant church towers, broad marble stairs. And it was built for a purpose, to celebrate a famous victory over Spain. Its unworthy replacement, on the other hand, was for an international exposition, which just adds to its sense of artifice.”

Brennan raised the book slightly to see if the man was focusing on him for a reason, but the Englishman seemed uninterested. A moment later a blonde woman of similar vintage approached them; her hair was losing its artificial color at the roots, and she had a faux fur coat over her green sweater. “Is my husband bothering you?” she said, smiling warmly. “He does go on.”

“It’s… fine,” Brennan said. “Interesting stuff.”

“You’re on vacation as well, I take it?” she said, not waiting for him to answer before continuing. “We’ve come every year for years. Not always to Paris, of course; we also enjoy Strasbourg and Provence.”

“Uh huh,” Brennan said, barely paying attention. The observation deck was fairly busy and he wasn’t sure if he was missing the man, who was supposed to be quite short, balding, a bookish type.

There, just exiting the elevator. The man had a grey navy pea coat on, black woolen gloves to counteract the winter temperatures. Steam drifted from his mouth as he scanned the area also, a copy of the J.D. Salinger novel in one hand. He saw Brennan just a moment later and both men nodded towards the other. They met along the wall overlooking the palace.

“You’ve read the Catcher In The Rye, I see,” the man said to Brennan.

“I just started it,” he replied. “So don’t give anything away.”

Brennan looked over his shoulder. The English tourists were still close, so he gestured with his head for the contact to move a few yards away, then followed. He kept his voice low. “Do you have something for me?”

The bookish man nodded. “You have the money?”

“A thousand,” Brennan said. He checked around for people paying attention once more then slipped the man an envelope.

Behind them, they heard a gasp of surprise. Brennan turned quickly, wary of any potential problems; but it was just the British woman. She’d leaned on the wide edge of the viewing area but dropped one of her white gloves; along with several other tourists, she was watching it drift slowly towards the ground.

“Oh gosh,” she said as it fell almost from sight, the barest dot in the updrafts. “I really loved those gloves.”

Behind him, Brennan missed the moment when her husband casually moved behind his contact, missed the short jab with the tip of the umbrella; and he was just turning back as the Englishman strode away and towards the elevator car.

The contact was still standing there but he had a shocked look in his eyes, and they’d begun to dart around, as if he were confused; his head started to move slightly side to side, rapidly, as if he were trying to supplement poor eyesight by improving his field of vision; his lips were parted slightly as if, caught in a moment of surprise, he’d forgotten how he might look to someone else.

Brennan nodded toward him. “Are you okay? You look like you saw a ghost or some….”

The contact collapsed, his body seizing and convulsing as he went into cardiac arrest, foamy spittle dribbling out of the left corner of his mouth and onto the concrete. Brennan knew the symptoms right away, knew the man had no time. “The address,” he hissed at his source, as people began to gather around. Behind the crowd, the Englishman’s wife had stepped into the second car and the gate closed. “Give me the address!”

The convulsing man couldn’t communicate, but his eyes flashed down quickly, towards the book in his hands. Brennan quickly exchanged copies with him, then rose, pushed his way through the crowd, saying loudly, “This man’s having a heart attack! We need a doctor, now!”

Security were rushing over; there was a nurse on site, Brennan knew, but it wouldn’t matter. He headed towards the elevator, cursing his own carelessness, his own casual approach. It had been the English couple; that much was obvious. The poison? Probably ricin, injected with the tip of the man’s umbrella into the victim’s buttocks. The toxin was deadly efficient, and the contact stood no chance.

The café along Rue des Rosiers wasn’t exactly Langley, but it did the trick; the street was lined with trendy shops and restaurants, the pedestrians milling amongst each other on the narrow one-way street, cars giving way by moving at a crawl.

Brennan’s nerves were on edge from the incident at the tower, and he sat drinking a café au lait, going through the dog-eared copy of the Catcher In The Rye. It was mid-afternoon, the street outside chilly and the sky gray, but the café quiet, the only sounds the conversation between the waiter and a friend at a smaller corner table and the radio playing a scratchy old Edith Piaf song, the haunting melody drifting up from somewhere behind the main counter.

His first pass through the book hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary, although it was only a quick scan; he’d concentrated on each line of text, looking for small pen or pencil marks, dots or lines, anything that might indicate part of a phrase pattern.

Back to the start. Brennan ignored the narrative as he turned each page; when he read it for the first time at age fourteen, he’d been fascinated by Holden Caulfield; at seventeen, he’d realized the kid’s angry rebellion was just sorrow, outrage at losing his brother; at twenty, he’d read it for a third and final time, still surprised at Salinger’s ability in the fifties to express how isolated youths felt when their upbringing was ruptured by loss and emotional neglect. He’d joined the navy a year later, finding a sense of community in it– and later the SEALS -- that was as strong as his own family’s bonds, guidance in self and purpose that helped stave off the kind of demons that poor Holden suffered so convincingly.

Brennan shook the thought off, got back to the book. He scanned each page again line by line, not noticing anything in the text…

There, on page one hundred and five. He’d missed the marks the first time because they were beside the page number, in tiny pencil print at the upper left of the page. There was a dot, then a dash, then the number. Brennan’s code-breaking training wasn’t exactly extensive but it looked like a simple location key, the dot denoting a line, the dash a page. He turned to page five, then parsed down to the tenth line. The last letter of the line had been gone over in pen, just barely enhanced like a medium ‘bold’ of the type.

He returned to page one hundred and five; then he went forward, a page at a time, picking up each of the book locations, then building the words a letter at a time.  After ten minutes, he had a string: ’68 Rue du Globe, Stains’.

Stains was northeast of the city and it looked busy, middle-class, with a host of street-level shops and single-family homes behind privacy walls, along with plenty of both foot and car traffic. The tax dropped Brennan off a block from his target address, as instructed, and he paid the cabbie with fifty euros, telling him to keep the small amount of leftover change.

He walked the block, passing a handful of small businesses: a hairdresser, a falafel café, an insurance office. His address was the first on the opposite corner, a typical three- or four-bedroom Mediterranean-style home with a red tile roof and pink stucco walls. The wall around it was about six feet high, so he couldn’t make out much below the lower level windows; the back yard looked busy, though, with a few palms stretching high above, and the final few feet of the roof to a pool cabana at the end of the garden.

Brennan crossed the street and paced around the block at a slow walk using a slight head turn and his peripheral vision to check the place out, before rounding the block in left turns until he’d seen as much as he could. He looked down the street for a better vantage point; there was a five-story office block about five hundred yards away. He made his way up the street casually, then crossed over and entered through the public double doors; he ignored the front desk and walked confidently to the elevators. The first car that arrived was empty. He took it up to the fifth floor and got out, then looked for the emergency exit sign. The roof access was likely there.

The roof hatch was sloppily unlocked, but it saved him breaking through and potentially attracting attention. He climbed the short ladder attached to the wall at the end of the hallway and popped it open.

It was ideal. He crouched low and crossed over to the edge facing the villa. Brennan withdrew his small binoculars from the inside of his coat and placed the backyard into focus. It was nice, touristy, with an in-ground pool and a shaded back patio. No one was using it because of the December weather; but there was a guard outside the backdoor with a sizeable shoulder holster bulge under his suit jacket.

Okay, so probably one at the back, one at the front, a couple more inside. Best approach?
Brennan considered it for a moment.
Isolate the guy at the back, use the upper balcony for ingress as it’s likely where the bedrooms are, and most guards won’t expect someone coming from behind them, from the inside out.

But then there was the matter of getting Boudreau out. Walter’s intel was only that Fawkes’ mistress had been taken while Brennan was dealing with Bustamante in Barcelona. They didn’t know who, or why. The prime suspect was that she had his intel, or at least some intel, on the ACF.

He scanned the backyard through the binoculars.
Would a few hours matter? Probably not.
Brennan always figured that when push came to shove there were two ways to do a job: the easy way and the hard way. The hard way would mean stealing a vehicle, setting it up at the front of the house then running through the place from the back, taking out the guards one by one and taking Boudreau out the front door to the car. Assuming she was even in the house.

The easy way?
He scanned the street; halfway down the block a sign offered ‘voitures de location’, cars for hire. They’d be open in the morning, and there was a decent cheap motel down the street. No need to rush anything, maybe bring the police down on him. The extra day would give him some extra prep time, after all, and a chance to make sure Annalise Boudreau was available to be rescued in the first place.

It was early evening, the sun down, the light low. The guard at the backdoor was sloppy, straying every so often from his post and wandering forward into the garden; not far, but far enough to leave space between him and the door; far enough that the angle from the side wall entry point was behind his field of vision. The wall was about six feet high, and Brennan had waited until after dark, with little to no foot traffic about, before peeking over and looking for his opportunity.

As his surveillance had suggested, the man was inclined to walk further from the door when smoking a cigarette, maybe a subconscious hedge against annoying the non-smokers in the house. Either way, it gave Brennan time to get over the wall and drop into a shadow-covered corner.

He let the man take another pass, walking towards the door and then turning on his heel before pacing back towards the garden. Brennan came up behind him quickly but quietly, staying low, catching the man unaware until the crook of his elbow was already around the man’s carotid artery, cutting off oxygen. The guard slumped to the ground. Brennan scanned around the backyard to make sure they were still alone then dragged the man using his armpits until he was under the balcony that covered most of the back of the villa.

The sleeper hold was an effective technique but its victims usually woke quickly once blood flow was restored. He retrieved a pair of plastic restraints, looping the simple plastic ties around the man’s angles and wrists before covering his mouth with several wraps of duct tape.

Brennan had been glad for the extra day; he’d kept eyes on the upper floor windows, eventually catching a glimpse of Boudreau as she was escorted from her suite to the bathroom. Then he’d rented the vehicle, banked on the house sticking to normal schedules, and waited until the light was low, shortly after eight o’clock.

He put an ear to the backdoor but couldn’t hear any immediate presence. He glanced up; the upper balcony was ten feet above, a short flight of concrete steps to its right leading to the garden. Brennan took them silently, staying low to get past the first window on the floor, hugging the wall once he’d reached the balcony, sliding past the door to check around the corner of the window. It was a large bedroom, the doorway to an in-suite bathroom in one corner and a fireplace against the wall.

The master suite? He watched it for a few minutes but there was no foot traffic. He crossed in front of the door again and leaned around the corner to check the first room.

Boudreau was sitting on the end of the bed in a thigh-length red silk robe, her legs up and under her, her weight on her right hip as she flicked through the channels on a TV ahead of her, the look on her face more one of boredom than fear. The door to the room opened quickly, a man striding in. For a moment, it seemed as if he caught the slightest movement from Brennan out of the corner of his eye, as he turned that way, then quickly walked over to look outside without raising the window. Brennan scurried to one side and flattened himself against the wall as the guard peered each way through the glass; after a few agonizing seconds, he retreated into the room. The American gave it thirty seconds before slowly making his way back to the window’s edge, looking around it cautiously. Inside, the guard in the dark gray suit and white dress shirt was barking some sort of instruction at Boudreau and she was arguing with him. Brennan moved back to the door, leaning against it with his weight as he listened, in case anyone tried to open it at just the wrong moment.

The hallway sounded quiet. He tried the handle, depressing it slowly, waiting for the click to see if they’d locked it or just assumed the lower guard was sufficient. The latch drew back smoothly.

Mistake number two. He opened it a crack and peered inside. The corridor ran the length of the upper floor with two rooms on each side and ‘t’ junction flight of stairs halfway along leading to the lower level. The corridor was carpeted, and his movements were silent.

The second door to the left swung inward; Brennan’s instinct took over and he sprinted forward, catching the man walking out of the room by surprise. He was tall, in a light gray suit, and his hand flashed to his waist band, the pistol up quickly in his left hand; but Brennan was ahead of him, anticipating; he locked up man’s left wrist with his own right, twisting his own body away from the man so that they were practically back to back, wrenching backward on the gun arm and dislocating it at the shoulder, even as his trailing left elbow swung wide and backwards, driving into the back of the guard’s neck. Brennan spun a quarter-turn back the  other way then drove a foot downward, hard into the side of the man’s knee, which buckled and tore.

He let out a shriek of pain as he went down, loud enough to be heard around the house.

Damn it. Could’ve done that more quietly,
Brennan thought. He’d told Walter he’d avoid as much bloodshed as possible, keep anything related to Fawkes on the down-low. He strode towards the first bedroom.
Using the suppressor might have saved me some trouble…

The first guard was waiting for him at the door, and the blade in the man’s hand arced outwards in a semi-circle, Brennan dodging backwards just in time as its shiny stainless steel surface flashed past him. He drove his palm into the back of the man’s shoulder, the nerve strike deadening the man’s arm; the man’s other arm came up instinctively to protect him even as the chair the woman was holding came crashing down on him from behind.

Annalise’s eyes were wide, the broken pieces of the wooden chair in her hands.

“Merci, Madame” Brennan said.

“Uh huh.”

“Are there any more?”

She nodded, her eyes drifting towards the stairs.

“Follow me,” he said. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“Who are you?”

“A friend of a friend.”

She looked down at the guard. “How will we get out of here?”

“Just a second,” he said. Brennan ran towards the stairs, timing the overhand punch just as the first guard climbed the last step. He crashed backwards into the man behind him and both went down. They hit the landing, the first man unconscious, the second struggling to find his feet. Brennan dove down the five steps feet first, driving his heels into the man’s temple as he began to rise, the bulky enforcer collapsing in a heap.

Back on the second floor, Annalise heard the crashing of bodies but stayed rooted to her spot, frozen, wondering just what the hell was going on
. If I get out of here, I swear, I’m moving in with my sister in Biarritz and never coming back to Paris…

The stranger’s head poked back around the corner of the stairs. “You okay?” he asked.

She nodded vigorously then realized she was still holding a piece of chair. She put it down carefully on the floor, like she’d offended it. “Perhaps we should leave now.”

“I’d have to agree. I’ve got a car out front, the black Mazda.” He gestured towards the stairs and she scurried over to join him. They headed downstairs cautiously, the entryway just ten feet from the last step. “I think we’re good,” Brennan said.

They headed outside, the muted evening street lights casting spotlight ovals on the sidewalk. The car was as advertised, parked in front of the house next door. They climbed in, Annalise taking the passenger side. “Where are we going?”