Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (3 page)

Enrique turned left down a side street, between a small community store with a blue awning advertising meats and groceries, and a row of homes. Then he turned right, onto a long alleyway that ran off as far as Lang could see. There were trees and a mesh fence to the left, buildings to the right. Lang followed cautiously five cars behind, almost losing him on the quick alley turn, stepping on the brakes of the rented Toyota just before passing the entrance, seeing the motorcycle a hundred yards along. He turned the wheel and pointed the car down the alley.

He wasn’t ten yards in when the truck screeched to a halt behind him, blocking the entrance. Another backed out of a space behind one of the houses, ten yards ahead, boxing him in exactly as he’d worried might happen if he followed too closely – and if Enrique had sold him out.

Lang reacted on instinct, getting out of the car quickly, not even bothering to close the door, sprinting towards a gap between the houses that backed onto the alley, recognizing his need to flee the trap before it closed all of the way. He looked back for a split second to see if anyone was pursuing him, just as a larger man in a red-and-white striped vest stepped out of the bush carrying an assault rifle, an AK-47 knockoff. The butt slammed into the side of Lang’s head and he went down hard, his mind swimming.

He tried to stagger to his feet, blinking through the haze. He saw Enrique running towards him, the sky beyond a grey, cloudy smudge. “See!” Enrique yelled, looking past him to someone else. “I told you that you could trust me!” A pistol fired twice, the report just a few feet behind Lang and loud. The bullets’ momentum stopped Enrique’s progress, and he collapsed in a bundle. Walter tried to turn his head, to see where the sound had come from; his last glimpse was a dark shadow from the butt of the assault rifle as it came down hard one more time.

October 10, 2012, WASHINGTON, D.C,

The funeral parlor chapel was small and plain, a long aisle from the door separating the eighteen rows of nearly empty wooden pews; it had whitewashed walls and a terracotta tile floor, beams of light streaming in from a pair of stained glass windows on the west wall as the attendees listened to the pastor at the pulpit.

Two dozen people in mourning divided themselves between the first three rows on each side of the aisle, a mixture of men and women, one child, a boy of about ten.

Joe Brennan had been quiet throughout the short service, not meeting with the widow and son when he arrived or offering condolences; he knew they didn’t want to hear from another former SEAL. He rocked on his heels slightly, hands held together uncomfortably in front him as the pastor spoke.

If it hadn’t been for his time in the service, they probably would state, Bobby would still be alive. It had been his widow Bea’s mantra since Bobby’s suicide ten days earlier, and it was probably true. Brennan turned his head perhaps five degrees, searching her out with his peripheral vision. She wasn’t crying, but her bottom lip pouted out slightly and her eyes were dark, bottomless wells of sorrow. He looked away quickly and took a sharp breath, surprised after so many years and so many missions at how upset he felt.

It wasn’t that Brennan felt guilty; when they’d served together in Iraq, he recognized right away that there was something a little different about Bobby, that the stress of being over there longer than the rest had unhinged him a little. He took chances he shouldn’t have, played the hero when it meant endangering others. He’d barely made it through the nerve-shattering Al Basrah assignment. Bobby always had a look, too, a certain nervous tension, a clench-jawed attempt at looking gung ho that shouldn’t have fooled anyone.

But it did.

Brennan was never certain when it happened, or how a SEAL with a half-dozen years of experience suddenly lost his nerve. It was before Al Basrah, he knew that. It had just been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But while others had missed the signs and always put their confidence in their teammate, Brennan had spent many dangerous days in the Gulf watching Bobby out of the corner of his eye.

Knowing something was wrong and being able to do basically nothing to help had worn on him; so no amount of reminiscing could make Brennan feel any less remorseful, any less sad that a good man had died young, taken away by the impact of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that had plagued him for the better part of a decade.

The priest was saying something about God’s plan and how Bobby’s decision was surely part of it that mere mortals just couldn’t understand. Brennan tuned it out again and stared at his shoes for a few moments. It might have been comforting to his family, who were devout, but it wasn’t what Brennan wanted to hear. God hadn’t taken Bobby for any purpose; Bobby’s death was a product of the selfish detachment that came with leadership, sent into places to see and do things no good man should ever see or do. Brennan clung to the knowledge that at least they’d made a difference; at least, he knew, Bobby’s legacy wasn’t lacking.

“You okay?”

He turned his head slightly and looked up. Callum McLean had spoken softly, tactfully. He was a large man with a blond crewcut. McLean was a good five inches taller than Brennan, six-five in his bare feet, a huge-chested, broad shouldered tank. They’d served together for nearly twenty years; McLean was the kind of team member who kept people alive with his mere presence. Brennan had always tried to tell himself that if Callum was the most talented and strongest guy he knew, he at least had the advantage of speed… but the truth was, Callum was faster than him, too.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay,” Brennan said.

“You don’t sound it. Or look it. You know we couldn’t have done anything about this, right?”

“Huh? Sure, yeah.” But Brennan didn’t know anything of the sort. Bobby had been along for Al Basrah and Brennan had known he was close to cracking, and Brennan had said nothing. He didn’t feel guilty, he told himself. Bobby’s decision was Bobby’s decision, not his.

“Chances are, even if Corcoran hadn’t precipitated what went down, he still would’ve cracked eventually,” McLean murmured. He’d known Joe since Great Mistakes, the affectionate name for their Recruit Training. They’d been best friends for nearly two decades, and he didn’t deserve to be beating himself up. “Besides none of it was your call.”

“The op was my design, my responsibility,” Brennan whispered back. They’d been over this before, and the timing wasn’t appropriate, he thought.

“But it was Corcoran’s call, Corcoran’s decision to go off plan. And Bobby’s decision to pull the trigger.”

Off plan? That was one way to describe it, Brennan thought. “Look, let’s just drop this? Okay? We can talk about it later. You know we will anyway.”

After the service, McLean waited outside on the broad marble steps that led from the funeral parlor to its parking lot. The attendees slowly filtered out and past him. It was a few more minutes before Brennan appeared, hands in his pockets, staring morosely at his shoes.

“I had to try and say something to them,” he said softly. “They were very polite.”

“You want to go get a drink?” McLean said. “Some of Bobby’s friends from his first team are meeting up at the Old Ebbitt Oyster Bar.”

Really?
Brennan thought.
They picked a bar full of politicians?
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, not today.”

“Well… I’m going to head over there pretty much right away.”

“Okay. Look, don’t worry about me, all right? I’m good. I’m fine.”

He didn’t look fine, McLean thought. Joe looked like he’d just lost a family member. But he left it at that, knowing that, no matter how tough he felt about things inside, the one comrade he didn’t really need to worry about was Joe Brennan. He’d figure things out.

Brennan took the expressway south, his driving autonomic, his mind elsewhere as the traffic zipped by his sedan to the suburbs. His phone rang. He used the hands-free button on his wheel to answer.

“Brennan.”

“Agent Brennan? It’s Jonah Tarrant; David Fenton-Wright’s assistant?” He phrased it like a question, unsure if a field agent would be familiar with him. Brennan wasn’t exactly inclined to stop by Langley on a regular basis. “Are you busy?”

By busy, Brennan knew, he meant on assignment or working on something of national security interest… which also meant that he already knew the answer, as nobody went into the field anymore without Fenton-Wright’s personal approval. The deputy director hadn’t been in his post for long but had been with the agency for nearly twenty years all told, and had a fearsome reputation for keeping control over every detail.

“No, just driving home,” Brennan said, hoping to cut Tarrant off before the inevitable occurred.

No such luck. “We need you to head on in,” Tarrant said. “We’ve had some difficult news.” Once again, “we” meant Fenton-Wright. Brennan considered himself a nuts-and-bolts sort of guy, firm in his convictions and his sense of right and wrong. He wasn’t so sure how Fenton-Wright self-assessed.

“Anything more specific?”

“Not on this line. Come on in, Joe, and we’ll talk. It’ll just be for an hour or so.”

That was never good. If they couldn’t talk on an unsecured line that meant it was either an assignment for him or bad news about someone else’s. Either way, it wasn’t the day for it, not after Bobby.

“Look… I’m ten days back from Sri Lanka,” Brennan replied. “Do we really have to do this today? If it could wait until tomorrow…”

“It’s about Walter Lang,” Tarrant said.

He was about thirty miles out. “I’ll be there in a half hour,” he said, ending the call.

Walter was a staff operations officer, and Brennan had torn a strip of him when he’d said he was going back into the field, even though it seemed unlikely, a year earlier, that they’d take him up on the offer; he’d been a mentor for Brennan’s seven years with the agency, a good man with a solid, sober sense of the importance of what they did for a living, the true value of national security. Beyond that, Brennan just plain liked him.

He stepped hard on the accelerator.

At the agency, he left his car in the guest parking area and walked the short distance to the narrow path that led into the courtyard, across the red brick patio to the glass doors, under the broad glass arch. He stopped at security and got a guest pass, having left his own at home in Annandale, miles away. He clipped it to the front pocket of his black suit, crossing the marble lobby floor with the giant agency seal, passing two sets of grey stone columns before reaching the elevators. It seemed quiet in mid-afternoon, and he shared the elevator car with just one other person, a smiling woman in her fifties with frayed honey-blonde ends and a thickly woven olive-green cotton pant suit; she got off on the second floor. He rode on to fourth, to the offices of the multi-faceted National Clandestine Service.

Tarrant had been told by security that Brennan was heading up, and he waited at the elevators, a short, plump young man with curly light brown hair, his hands in his pockets out of slight nervousness. Well-regarded for his analytical abilities and grace under pressure, Tarrant nevertheless couldn’t help but feel a little inadequate when he ran into guys like Joe Brennan, field agents with a strong track record and no small amount of minor celebrity at the office. He’d seen Brennan’s mug in his field services file, but he still didn’t have a sense of the man until he met him face to face.

Brennan shook the younger man’s hand firmly. “Walter’s spoken about you,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you, Jonah.”

“I wish it were better circumstances. Let’s walk and talk.” They headed towards the executive offices, through a small series of staffed cubicles, young analysts and officers on headset phones. “You couldn’t have known this because it’s officially off the books but Walter was on assignment in Colombia.”

“Was?”

“He volunteered because of his fluency and because our official hand down there is tied up with bigger things. Walter said he was tired of being chained to a desk and that it was a good lead.”

That sounded like Walter, thought Brennan. He’d been complaining for years, even though his retirement from field work was well-earned.

“Walter was never an agent,” Brennan said. “He was an Ops officer, a handler.”

“Yes,” Tarrant said as they walked, choosing his words carefully. “David felt that there was considerable risk in this circumstances and wanted someone who could operate blind. His experience as a handler and later cultivating sources as an SSO …”

Brennan stopped walking and cut him off. “As I said, Walter was a support player, not ParOps. Did he have any local backup?”

Tarrant shook his head as they began walking again, turning down a narrow corridor past a series of offices, the lights off in most, pressboard doors open but no one home. “The Colombians were… unenthused by the nature of the project.” At the end of the hallway, he used his security card to swipe a keypad and the executive offices door unlocked with a quiet click. “But David felt the potential information was too valuable not to have a try. It was relatively low-risk, just a drop from an existing source.”

Brennan had been around ambitious types like Tarrant and Fenton-Wright before; he knew better than to say what he was actually thinking… which was that describing a black book, one-man operation in hostile environment as “relatively low-risk” might have been taking things too lightly from the start.
It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time
, he thought;
probably not even the first time this month.

Fenton-Wright’s office was at the back of the section, down a non-descript uncarpeted corridor – something about static electricity and computers -- past a secretary and waiting area, and past two more nondescript offices including Jonah Tarrant’s. It was large, almost imperious by agency standard, with double doors, a huge copy of the agency’s emblem emblazoned into the carpet ahead of his antique desk, a sitting area off to the left. Behind the desk, windows looked out onto the central yard, the day still bright and sunny in the room’s muted atmosphere. The secretary ushered them in; Fenton-Wright was seated but rose quickly and walked around the desk to greet them each with a handshake. He had a gray suit on with a white shirt and yellow tie, but his jacket was slung over the back of his desk chair. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Thank you for coming. This has been a difficult day for some of us and it isn’t going to immediately get easier. Please… have a seat.”

Brennan noticed his orange hair had thinned to almost nothing since the last time they’d met in person, three years earlier. Now it was just a neatly trimmed crown, flecked with white. Fenton-Wright had long, thin features, his skin always pink and slightly florid, as if waiting for a skin condition to break out. He’d always struck Brennan as something of a vulture, in both personality and mannerism, his neck slightly too thin for his head, which bobbed forward slightly as he spoke.

He motioned to the two chairs ahead of the desk and they sat. Tarrant crossed his legs uncomfortably, his body language tense. Brennan got the immediate sense Fenton-Wright’s bad news went beyond Walter being in a small amount of trouble.