Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (28 page)

She might have something, Malone thought. As a reporter, she’d never been a big believer in coincidences. “Let’s flag it for a deeper look. Is Walter coming around tonight?” She was curious to see them together again, see how much deference the agency man showed Mryna.

“I don’t think so,” her host said. “He said he got called in for some work thing.”

“He pushes himself too hard. Did you notice how pale and thin he’s been looking?”

Myrna nodded. “I do worry about him. He’s a good soul, you know, even though he’s been in a dirty business for a long time. But he’s always been guarded and private. There was one point at which he and I…” She let the idea hang there.

“What!” said Malone. “You and Walter, an item?”

“Well, yeah… but it never went anywhere. Who knows, maybe we just weren’t attracted enough to each other. Or maybe we were frightened of alienating one of the few people either of us knew at the agency who could be trusted. Still, no regrets.” Myrna nodded towards Malone’s cup. “Would you like some more coffee?”

“I should probably quit it for the night, if I want to sleep. But it was very nice.”

“Speaking of very nice, did I get the impression correctly that you were enjoying being saved by our friend ‘Joe’?”

She smiled ruefully. “You did, but Walter said he’s married. So that’s not going anywhere.”

Malone wouldn’t lie to herself; she’d considered giving him a shot anyway, secure in the knowledge she was unlikely to ever meet Mrs. Joe. But then she’d remembered how she felt when her parents briefly separated, and wondered whether Joe and his wife had kids.

“Oh, well… then I hope you have better luck in the New Year, dear,” Myrna said. She went back to her screen. “It says they targeted the Fei Long shopping market on the edge of the city initially then began to demand protection money from other grocers as well. This went on and grew over the course of several years, until they were receiving proceeds from almost every Harbin construction business.”

“No mention of Fung?”

“No, but I might be able to find a copy of the court proceedings on an Asian database I’ve used a few times before.” She typed and searched for a minute more. “Yes, here it is. There’s a list of the affected companies.”

They searched the list of names one by one.

“Nothing,” Myrna said after about ten minutes. “You?”

Malone shook no. “Company directors?”

“Why not?”

It took another hour to build a list of directors for each firm then run their names.

“Hang on,” Malone said. “Here we go: the Xi Jiansung Company has a director listed as Wen Mah Ling….”

“… which also happens to be the name of Fung’s wife.” Myrna got up and took out her phone. “We need someone on the ground. I’ve got some contacts over there who owe me.”

“You’re quite a marvel,” Malone suggested.

Myrna smiled at that. “It has been so noted.”

“Myrna…”

“Hmm? Yes, dear?”

“Do you think there’s any chance still that you and Walter could end up together?” She wasn’t just being nosy; Malone’s career had always seemed to get in the way of her own prospects. Maybe, she thought, being Myrna’s age and single made a person give up entirely, assume love was never in the cards.

Myrna smiled and thought about her friend. She’d known Walter Lang for two decades; he was so dedicated to his job, so wrapped up in agency business; she’d thought she’d lost him after the Colombia incident. But Myrna had to admit – at least to herself – that she held out hope for the two of them. She’d been alone, awash in her need for control of every second of her own life, for far too long. She needed to open up to somebody, feel that affection and familiarity.

“Maybe, dear. One never knows. Maybe.”

MARCH 25, 2016 CABINDA, WEST AFRICA

The flight got in early, which Brennan figured was a good thing; he needed at least a few extra hours to recover from it.

They’d taken off from a private strip just north of Luanda in what could charitably be called a plane. It was an old junker of a twin prop from the late fifties, a yellow buckboard thing. One of the cabin doors was missing and the pilots spent the first half-hour arguing about flight procedures, one eventually grabbing a manual from under his chair, in full view of the handful of passengers, and using it to demonstrate to the other pilot how to properly fly it.

Turbulence had beaten the plane around until everyone was green in the gills. Everyone except Francisco, who insisted he had an iron-clad stomach. “Wait until you taste funge with pirri pirri gindungo,” he’d said, his voice raised over the roar of the props. “It’s a corn paste log covered in palm oil and pirri pirri peppers that have been picked in onions and garlic, usually with whisky or brandy. It’s Angola’s national dish and the hottest on the planet, yet also the blandest… an amazing and diabolical contradiction.”

Cabinda’s airport was a lime-green concrete pillbox, its name scrawled in cartoonish paint letters, like something out of a 1960s daycare. From the air, Brennan noted, it sure looked a lot like Luanda; and it was technically Angolan territory, even though a sliver of the Democratic Republic of the Congo separated the two and a fair swath of Cabindans wanted independence, based on their cultural individuality. Their dialect of Bantu was even a different language from the tribal tongues used in the south. But their living conditions were similar, shrouded in poverty.

The town had been around in one form or another for five hundred years, but only as Cabinda from the eighteen hundreds on. Like Benguela, it was a slave port for decades until the trade’s eventual demise. As was typical of the day, the king’s tribe sold his rival tribe’s members to the Portuguese and Belgians. A diary of one king of the Kikongo, as the land was then known, noted the sale of four thousand slaves through the area in one year.

So life there had always been difficult, while its proximity to oil and minerals made the nation valuable. Brennan was glad Francisco had come along for the first leg, at least, and brought a couple of men with him. “We’ll take you as far as your man’s camp and I will arrange a meet. After that you are definitely on your own,” he said as they waited inside the airport for their driver, a handful of passengers and locals milling around, not moving much due to the heat. “He lives nearly eighty kilometers north of here, near the other border with the DRC.”

“Why so far out of town?” Brennan asked. “You’d think his customers …

“Wouldn’t mind going to him. Kovacic is not exactly a lightweight – and he’s going by ‘Anders Kallstrom’ now, by the way. Before he starting running guns out of Cabinda, the rumor is he was fighting with a group of neo-Marxists in the Russian republics. He had a client based immediately on reputation alone.”

“So his threat level…”

“… is considerable. Your guy went to impressive lengths to disappear up here and set himself up as a supplier to the Cabindan resistance movement; it’s only by virtue of us doing business with the same people that I even know he exists. Come on, let’s go wait outside for the car.”

As remote and broken down as Cabinda was, the vehicle turned out to be a Range Rover, which made it the safest car Brennan had seen since arriving in Africa. They had minimal gear, just an overnight bag each. Francisco’s plan was to set up camp in the bush near Kovacic/Kallstrom’s base and be available if Brennan needed a quick escape, and he’d brought along a pair of beefy helpers, along with tents and mosquito nets. They loaded everything up. In short order, they were heading west out of town, towards a perfectly paved two-lane road that ran through the center of the tiny province, cut from the dense jungle that surrounded it and layered in immaculate tarmac that seemed to have never been driven upon.

“Where are we going?” Brennan yelled to Francisco over the road noise.

“Your man’s operations base is just south of a place called Massabi Lagoon. It’s right out in the jungle in the middle of nowhere. The nearest village doesn’t even have a name. They make a living by selling crocodiles caught in the lagoon and the small lakes.”

Though the lagoon should have been just a half-hour from the city, the sole road ran a circular path across around the Cabinda interior, through thick, dense jungle. Small shanty villages had popped up along the route every ten kilometers or so. Like Luanda, the heat wasn’t blistering but the humidity made the air so wet Brennan could taste it.

Just five kilometers from the turnoff to a second dirt road – this one just a track slashed out of the foliage by enterprising machete owners – an old colonial-style two-story building stood near the side of the road, nearly overgrown by the jungle and dilapidated, its once-salmon pink paintjob almost completely worn off. Francisco nodded towards it. “We set up camp there. At one point in the nineteen thirties, someone thought it might be worth developing up here. Not sure why. The locals don’t seem to have any more background on it than that.”

They parked the car just off the track and got out. The building was being reclaimed by the jungle, Brennan thought, vines twisting around its porch columns, the thick grass almost up to its side windows. It probably had dry rot throughout. He tried the steps up to the porch slowly, putting weight down one foot at a time to make sure he didn’t go through the wood.

It held. “I wouldn’t worry so much,” Francisco said from behind him. “People have been camping at this place for decades. And anyway, it’s probably safer in there with a bit of rotten wood and the insects than it is out here; there are things in this jungle that would happily eat you, my friend, if you strayed out too late at night.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Lang wondered if he could transfer.

If he beat the cancer, he thought as he followed David Fenton-Wright down the street from the restaurant, he’d put in for a move to a lower pay grade or even a different agency, maybe something in Florida helping out customs and immigration. Lying around the pool was starting to hold a certain allure, Lang thought, and it had everything to do with age.

Who knew, maybe Myrna would agree to go with him. He doubted it, but maybe.

Fenton-Wright had been talking about some nonsense, something about a television show he’d been watching. “… and then he just shoots her. I mean, who sees that coming? And where do they get this stuff?”

“You got me,” Lang said. “TV these days is crap.”

“Incorrect, Walter,” Fenton-Wright said. “There’s some great stuff out there; but it’s like sig ints: you have to wade through piles of crap before you get to it. Hmmm…” He pulled his buzzing phone from his pocket. “… I’ve got to make a stop. You know the old safe house two blocks from here?”

“Chuck Merrill’s old apartment?” Lang said. “We still own that?”

“Yeah. It mostly sits vacant except for when someone in senior management needs … private time, if you get my drift.”

Lobotomized monkeys could get your drift
. “Sure.”

“Yeah, well I left my jacket there last night. It’ll only take us a second, okay?”

“Not a problem,” Lang said. He’d learned that with David, the right answer was whatever David wanted to hear.

The apartment was above a Korean grocery store, a second-floor walkup. They trudged up slowly to its landing. It was the first apartment on the floor, at the very front of the building. Fenton-Wright produced a key and let them in. They walked inside, and Fenton-Wright began scanning the room. The small radio that rested on ta window frame overlooking the street was on quietly, Julio Iglesias singing “La Mer,” the original French version of “Somewhere Beyond the Sea,” to a funkier seventies beat.

“Hmm… must’ve left that on,” Fenton-Wright said. “Where the hell did I put it? I’ll check the bedrooms. Do me a favor, look in the kitchen would you?”

Lang nodded and went into the kitchen, to their right. He took two steps in and realized he was stepping on a large sheet of plastic. He looked down at his feet. It covered the kitchen floor completely, doubled over.

Behind him, Fenton-Wright held the silenced pistol to the back of Lang’s head. “I need the reporter’s location, Walter,” he said matter-of-factly. “Although, I’m only asking out of obligation, on behalf of our mutual friend. I know you’re a better man than to actually tell me.”

Walter knew what the drop sheet meant. It really didn’t matter how he answered. Faisal had decided to make good on his threat. Colombia hadn’t beaten him, and neither had cancer. But some streaks, Walter figured, were just bound to even eventually.

“Go fuck yourself, you officious little prick,” he said.

“If it were up to me… well, let’s not even go there. Sorry about this, Walter, really I am,” said Fenton-Wright.

“If you knew what I thought of you, you wouldn’t be,” Walter said.

Walter closed his eyes. The pistol recoiled twice, the silencer reducing the end of his life to two quick decompressions of air, without a bang or a whimper. The first one made him drop to his knees, and the second ensured that Walter pitched forward onto the plastic sheet.

MARCH 26, 2016, NORTHERN CABINDA

Andraz Kovacic’s camp bordered the Massabi Lagoon, a sixty-mile long giant coiled snake that wound its way from fat to thin, from the interior where it resembled nothing less than an enormous lake, to the coast, where its narrow tributary rediscovered the Atlantic Ocean.

At the very edge of the body of water, a dirt road cut back into the jungle, heading east. They followed it in the rented Land Rover. The foliage on both sides of the road was dense, seemingly impenetrable to light. It reminded Brennan of parts of Sri Lanka, the sense that something dark and foreboding lay beyond the wall of foliage, branches and vines, the weight of the humidity that much heavier in the moment. The trail ended after about two miles and they came to a wire fence gate supported by two tall, thick wooden posts, the size of tree trunks. “No trespassing” signs were posted on it in four languages.

“Your guy really doesn’t like company,” Francisco said. “You would think just being located hell-and-gone from anywhere would be dissuasion enough.”

“Now what?” Brennan said.

“Now, we ring the bell and wait for instructions.” Francisco got out of the vehicle and starting pulling the gate open, swinging it wide across the road as Brennan watched. “That was a joke, by the way. There’s no electricity out here unless you have generators and your own power lines to transmit the stuff.”

The Land Rover rolled on for another kilometer before it reached a checkpoint, where a pair of gunmen in olive soldier fatigues manned a small hut and a red-and-white barricade. One walked over to the Land Rover’s driver, finger on the trigger of his AK47 knockoff. He rattled off something in a language Brennan didn’t recognize; Francisco’s driver associate answered in kind.

“Bantu,” Francisco whispered. “It’s the local tribal tongue. Fewer of the residents in Cabinda speak Portuguese; in fact, for most their second language is French.”

The pair chatted for a moment and the guard at the gate nodded, then took a few steps away from the car before unhooking the walkie-talkie from his belt and speaking rapid-fire. He nodded a couple of times then repeated the motion to his companion nearby, who lifted the barrier.

A minute later, the red-dirt trail emptied into a large clearing. Two long, corrugated tin bunkhouses were on its right side, perhaps a hundred yards from the banks of the lagoon. Ahead was a large two-story house built out of what looked to Brennan like the remains of shipping containers. Two Jeeps were parked in front, along with another Land Rover and a Range Rover; to the left, a massive garage or metal shop had also been thrown together out of tin. Next to it, a towering winch crane stood waiting to load or unload cargo.

They pulled up and parked next to the Range Rover. Within a minute, a short white guy with close-cropped hair exited the house and headed over to them. “Francisco?” the man asked as the foursome got out of the Land Rover. “You’re Benny Goncalves’ friend?”

Francisco extended a hand, and the men kissed on both cheeks as they shook. “Anders! Your reputation precedes you.” The meet-and-greet was being watched over by a dozen or more armed guards and there was movement around the compound. “It looks almost like you have your own army up here.”

Kovacic beamed a smile. “We are quite proud of the place, it’s true. But it’s not an army; just enough men to stay cautious. Besides, labor is cheap around these parts. My man Antonio tells me you want to buy some hardware?”

Francisco was earning his extra ten thousand, agreeing to use a purchase as cover while Brennan performed recon. “That’s right; along with the rifles we need a few more specialized items.”

Kovacic slung an arm around the man’s shoulder and began walking him towards the house. “Then remote or not, you are most definitely in the right place, my friend. Come, let’s go talk in the house. I have AC and cold beer.”

Francisco looked at Brennan. “You,” he said in French, “stay with the vehicle.”

“But boss,” Brennan answered in French. “He has AC…”

“Just do your job,” Francisco said. “If you get bored, walk the compound a bit.” He looked over at Andraz. “You mind if he looks around?”

The arms dealer shrugged. “Out here? Not much to see, but you are welcome.” They strolled up towards the house together then went inside.

They’d worked out the little act before getting there; Brennan had a pocket-sized Geiger counter, along with suspicions about what Kovacic had done with Khalidi’s missing millions. Given his background before Africa as a Chechen dissident and militant, there was every chance he was either the buyer or the seller of the nuke. The questions were why he was in the middle of the Cabindan jungle, and what he’d done with the weapon.

While his guide kept the arms dealer busy, Brennan strolled by each building in turn, slipping the counter out of his pocket whenever out of direct view, to take readings. But the entire place was hot, it seemed, way too many readings from way too many sources for it to be a single device. He wondered if there was something wrong with the Geiger counter. If anything, the readings got stronger the closer he got to the main house.  Under a series of suspicious glares, he strolled around the perimeter until he was almost behind it, making sure to stay in sight of Kovacic’s nervous men.

Behind the house, the two sides of the perimeter fence converged at an opening into the rock face at the very edge of the tree line. It was sizeable, more than just a natural cave, as if an opening had been blasted out. He kneeled for a moment and ran some topsoil through his fingers, then tied his shoelace as a pretense for the guards, before taking a small sample of the soil and pocketing it.

The Geiger counter was getting into high exposure zones. Whatever was in the cave was putting off major readings; Brennan looked at the reading and began to back away nervously.

When he was back to main yard, he headed for the car. It was another twenty minutes before Francisco emerged from the meeting. He waved backwards towards Kovacic, who was standing in the doorway to the container house and waved back. Francisco, Brennan and their two guards got back into the Land Rover. The driver turned it around and headed back out through the main gate.

“We’re going to talk more tomorrow,” Francisco asked Brennan. “Did you figure out what you needed to know?”

“Not exactly. There’s an old cave of some sort behind the property. The readings out of it were high. Most of the people in that camp are getting significant doses of radiation.”

Francisco’s eyebrows rose. “I wonder if Kovacic is aware of it, even. He did say the place was built near an aborted mining operation, so maybe…”

“Maybe they weren’t mining gold,” Brennan said. “You know anything about the local geology? I’m going to do a test reading when we get back to the camp. Either my Geiger counter was way off, or that camp is sitting on some kind of radioactive ore.”

The Geiger counter had been afterthoughts on Brennan’s part, and he’d been lucky Francisco’s connections had come through; he’d expected to fly up to Cabinda, question Kovacic and then have a new set of leads to follow. It didn’t occur to him that the bomb might be at the compound until just before leaving Luanda – after all, it had been years; whatever Kovacic’s connection, it should have come and gone.

And the man still looked familiar; it was eating at Brennan, trying to figure out where he’d seen him before.

While Francisco’s men got busy making a fire and cooking supper, Brennan tried to use the satellite phone, first to check in with Walter, from whom he got no answer, and second to try and get a mobile web connection, which he eventually managed. Readings suggested the soil contained Uranium, in significant concentrations. Brennan cursed himself silently for not paying more attention during his primer training.

He walked out of the abandoned old house. Francisco was drinking a beer on the front porch while the two guards cooked the chicken on an open pit out front. He tilted the bottle towards Brennan then nodded at the cooler, but Brennan declined.

“You figure out what you need to know?” Francisco asked.

“Maybe.” Brennan checked his watch; it was seven-thirty, and evening was falling. It wasn’t like Walter to be away from the phone when he knew someone might be checking in.

It didn’t make sense. Why there? Why would an arms dealer force his customers to go out of their way so that he could set up on radioactive soil?

“How long has he been out here?” Brennan asked.

“Not sure. I’d say a year at least.”

That meant there were four years unaccounted for between Kovacic disappearing from the Khalidi’s Nigeria operation to him showing up at the camp as “Anders Kallstrom.”

“This was a hell of a long way to go for ‘maybe’, my friend,” said Francisco. “I know you are paying me well, but so far what you’ve got amounts to background information, the type you could…”

“That’s it,” Brennan said, interrupting him. “That’s the reason: it’s a ‘forest for the trees’ gambit. There’s so much background radiation …”

“Eh?” Francisco muttered. “You are losing me, my friend.”

“His camp: it’s been in the same location the entire time?”

Francisco yelled to one of the guards who answered in rapid-fire pigeon French. “He says the camp has grown quite a lot and moved closer to the access road. It was further in from the lagoon originally.”

“And Kovacic? Does anyone know where he came from before this?”

Francisco asked the driver. “He said he was operating out of a warehouse in Porte Noire.” The port city in the Congo – the former Zaire – was a few hours north of the lagoon.

That fit, Brennan thought. Kovacic wasn’t hiding the nuke in Cabinda; he was looking for it.

“Francisco, you up for a little recon mission tonight?”

“Hey, man, I just brought you out here.  I do not get involved in other people’s fights. It’s bad for business.”

“I don’t need you to fight; just to drop me off near his base and wait.”

The call came early in the morning, just after seven o’clock, which was why Myrna Verbish knew it was something important. Few people called her anyway, which Myrna preferred. Those who did so knew her well, and knew she didn’t get up that early any more.

Alex was already up and Myrna saw her tapping away at a computer keyboard, out of the corner of her eye. The call was short and to the point.  “Yes?” she answered.

“Am I speaking with a Ms. Myrna Verbish?”

“You are.”

“My name is Det. John Brink, Ms. Verbish, with Metro D.C. Police. Walter Lang had you listed as an emergency contact on his insurance card.”

“That’s correct.” Myrna felt her stomach turn.

“I’m sorry to have to inform you of this ma’am, but Mr. Lang was found dead this morning in his apartment. It appears he was shot during a robbery attempt.”

Myrna didn’t reply. She was stunned. They’d been friends for so long, and so often coming close to more. They loved each other, she knew. And she hadn’t really realized how much that meant to her until twenty seconds earlier, when she found out she’d never see Walter again.

“What happened?” she finally managed.

“It looks as though they jimmied the back window open to his living room. There was a pair of muddy boot prints right under it, although they were too smudged to be of much help. Maybe it’ll be a solid lead. Ms. Verbish, we have an excellent service available to people who are feeling the way you do right now, someone you can speak with…”

Myrna didn’t need a counsellor. She knew Walter hadn’t been robbed, and the meticulous nature of the crime scene suggested professionals. It was agency business that had taken her best friend, the same kind of business that had prompted her to take early retirement, her nerves near shattered. Now, she just felt numb.

“Ma’am?”

She’d zoned out of the moment. “No, that’s fine, detective. I’ll need to contact his friends…”

“He has next of kin?” The detective sounded surprised.

“We worked together for the federal government,” she said. “He has an ex-wife and a stepson. They were still close even after they split up.” Contacting Audrey would be awkward for Myrna; she hadn’t learned until near the end of Walter’s marriage that their friendship had contributed to his ex-wife’s ill ease.

But it had to be done.

“We can do that for you if you’d like, Ms. Verbish, so that you can have some time…”

“Thank you, detective, that would be nice.” She knew she should probably make the call herself, make sure the information was sensitively and correctly conveyed; but Myrna felt disconnected, shattered in the pain of the moment, unable to take on much of anything.

After she’d hung up the phone, she sat down on the sofa, distant still. Eventually, she turned to Malone, who could see abject misery in the wrinkle of Myrna’s brow and her pursed lips. “What? What is it?”

“It’s Walter.”

Malone knew immediately that he was dead. “How?” she said.

“The kind of burglars who leave convenient-but-useless evidence behind,” Myrna said.