Shadow Agenda: An Action Suspense Thriller (57 page)

In Malone’s mind’s eye, she’d always had an idea of what it might be like to see a nuclear explosion; the mushroom cloud, the shock of heat, vision seared blood-red, the chromatic scale all out of whack as the blast vaporized her and everything else within range, the horrifying reality reduced to a split-second.

She pulled at her wrist restraints; she couldn’t even cover her face in reflex when Park hit the green send button. She closed her eyes tight and prayed quietly, thinking about her parents and her little brother, and all of the people she loved but would never see again.

But nothing happened.

A second or two went by, and Malone opened one eye, then the other. A few feet away, Brennan leaned up on his elbow, shaking off the pistol-whipping. Park was looking at the phone, bewildered. The tactical team rushed into the room, weapons high.

“Down on the ground!” the commander yelled at Park. “Down on the ground, now!” They were about twenty yards from her, but Park didn’t drop as requested, instead standing there confused; she craned her head around, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, vaguely aware that somewhere in the warehouse, another phone was ringing.

“Down now!” the tactical team leader screamed again.

At the other end of the warehouse, the asset’s phone had begun to ring. That was his cue. He leaned back against the beam, using his knee to brace the rifle, and looked down through the scope. As soon as the crosshairs were centered, he squeezed the trigger, two decades of training and instinct taking over in a smooth motion, with no second-guessing the recoil.

The .50 caliber slug covered the sixty yards in well under a second, most of Park’s skull exploding on impact, spraying the area in gore. Alex’s mouth dropped open before her stomach caught up with what she was seeing. She turned to her left and vomited heavily, even as the near-headless North Korean’s torso collapsed to its knees, then to the ground. “Jesus Christ!” the tactical team leader said, wincing at the sight. He turned around quickly. “Who fired that? Which sonovabitch fired that shot?”

Brennan had only just made it to his feet, and had caught the slightest muzzle flash out of the corner of his eye. He tapped the team leader on the shoulder patch with the back of his hand. “Up in the rafters.”

“The fourth guard?”

Brennan picked Park’s pistol up off of the floor and headed for the front of the building. A pair of soldiers were standing near the west wall, guarding a rope that trailed down from the rafters high above. “There’s a fourth guard in the rafters,” the colonel said as they approached the pair. “We’ve got him pinned up there…”

“No, you don’t,” Brennan said pointing up and in the other direction. “There’s a skylight halfway down the side beam along the other wall.”

Sure enough, enough moonlight made its way through the upper opening to show that it had been left unsecured.

“Damn it!” the colonel said.

“Give me that!” Brennan said, grabbing the M16 from a confused corporal. He sprinted for the gaping hole where the front doors had once been, out into the dimly lit parking lot, his eyes scanning the area as completely and quickly as he could.

There.

In the woods, the gaps of light between the trees were being intermittently broken by the shadow of someone quickly fleeing the scene. Brennan gave chase, ignoring the broken rib and the throb in his head, willing himself on. He crashed into the tree line, pushing aside sharp branches, stumbling through roots and shrubs until he emerge on the other side.

The asset was fifty yards ahead already, going towards a Jeep parked beside the road. Brennan stopped abruptly, raised the rifle to his shoulder and sighted the fleeing shooter. Then he squeezed the trigger.

The man went down hard, face first into the grass and mud on the roadside. Brennan sprinted after him. Behind him, he could hear a police siren closing. He reached the man and rolled him over.

“Oh Jesus,” he said.

“You’ve … to be kidding,” the wounded man sputtered.

Brennan’s mouth was wide open. He shook his head slightly in shock, eyes wide and disbelieving.

“Callum?! Christ… Callum?! You’re the sniper?”

“You shot me. Goddamn, Joe, you shot me…”

“That was you in Moscow? And Montpellier?”

Blood was beginning to soak through his friend’s shirt. The shot had gone through his vest somehow, or hit an open gap, Brennan thought.

“Feel faint…” Callum said. “Think this might be it, bud…”

Brennan felt panic. It was alien, unfamiliar territory for so many years. Behind him, a vehicle’s tires bit into the gravel as it ground to a halt. “Callum… I don’t understand…”

“For Sarah, my sister,” he said. He was panting, barely holding consciousness. “They killed her, Joe. Khalidi and his greed, Borz Abubakar…”

His sister; he’d said she’d died in an auto accident. Brennan never made the connection, the timing. A car door slammed. Two more police cars ground to a halt a few feet away.

“Hang on, Callum,” Brennan said. “Please… Dear God, please hang on…” He cradled his dying friend in his arms. “For the love of God, someone… get a doctor. We need a doctor.”

The officers converged as Brennan held his brother in arms, barely lit by the overhead street lamp in the earliest hours.

At the command post, the last of the guards was being booked and loaded into a detention van. The director and Jonah were standing by the trailer, being briefed by the colonel, as a group of local and state police cordoned off the road and kept both the public and media away.

It hadn’t taken long for word to get around the small town then out via its local newspaper reporter to the wire and the city papers, and within an hour, the place was crawling with press. Malone watched it all seated on the side steps up to the trailer, a blanket around her shoulders and a cup of hot herbal tea in hand, courtesy of a federal victims’ services worker. She was told to wait until they were ready to debrief her but the truth was, she wasn’t ready to go anywhere yet. She knew she had to file; she had to call Ken and tell him she had the story of the century, and art to go with it. But instead, she sat there, her face, hands and arms still featuring the odd little spatter of Park’s blood that the aid worker had missed in the near-dark of the parking lot.

The woman’s death had been surreal and had rocked Malone, as had the final few moments. She wondered why they’d been spared, what had happened to make the fates decree that the device wouldn’t go off when Park made the call. And she felt a little empty and numb for the experience being over.

Jonah saw her from the corner of his eye and walked over. “Ms. Malone?”

“Mr. Tarrant.”

“In a parking lot again, no less. We have to stop meeting like this,” he said.

She gave him a thin smile. “Thanks for trying. I think I might be in shock, a little.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Where’s Joe? Have you seen him?”

“Not in the last twenty minutes, but I’m sure he’s here somewhere. Look, we’d like to offer you a flight back to D.C. with us on the director’s plane. We’d have a chance to debrief you at length and you could get away from…” he pointed around at the near-chaos around them, “… all of this for an hour or two.”

Her first instinct, her gut feeling, had been to shrink away, to assume she couldn’t trust them. People had been hunting the two of them for months; their friends were dead, and a few enemies, too. But Tarrant had a warmth about his approach, a sense for the first time in longer than she could remember that the other person didn’t have the most vested of interests in helping her.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’d like that. Thank you.”

He began to walk back to the director’s side.

“Wait!” she said. “What about Joe?”

“I imagine we can make room,” he said. “Assuming he takes us up on the invitation. He’s turned us down before, you know.” He smiled when he said it, and for a second, Alex felt like things were a little bit normal again.

July 5, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.

By the time Malone got home to her townhouse it was just past dawn.

They’d been back since before three in the morning, and she’d promised Jonah to not only continue her debriefing with them on the following Monday, but to get some sleep and take some time off to recover.

So of course, she’d immediately called Kenny and gone in to work. Newsman that he was, he understood why, and they began working on the story and special edition while most of the nation slept.

The headline and second deck when she left the office had been unequivocal, a damning condemnation and, doubtless, the start of a long national headache: Nuclear Attack Foiled, with the subhead “Attack financier tied to presidential candidate”. The story outlined everything: the Association Commercial Franco-Arabe’s attempts to cover its tracks, to Borz Abubakar’s use of Khalidi’s oil insurrection money to buy the nuke in the first place, to the resulting fatal consequences to a bus-load of tourists and locals in rural Peru.

It outlined Callum’s role in the sniper attacks, and his motive, along with the fact that he was being manipulated by an American paymaster, someone other than the duplicitous David Fenton-Wright. While it didn’t state implicitly that Addison March was that paymaster, it did note his ties to Khalidi, and Enright’s suicide two nights before the nuclear plot was exposed, along with Khalidi’s assassination by a vengeful Jordanian soldier. People, she knew, would draw their own conclusions. March might never be directly tied in, she knew, but he would be investigated, scrutinized, and his chance at the White House was gone.

She opened the door to the townhouse. The telephone table answering machine was blinking furiously, but Malone ignored it. She hung her coat up, but left her overnight bag in the hallway. She kicked off her boots and headed for the bedroom to collapse for a well-earned twelve or so hours of sleep.

Malone flung herself onto the mattress. It felt good; a little soft compared to the motel, but good.

But something was wrong.

She wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it was familiar; she’d run into it before as a reporter, just not on such an important story.

Doubt.

It was itching away at her, ever present.

There were too many questions unanswered, things that didn’t add up. Like how two of Brennan’s former colleagues wound up involved, when Addison March couldn’t possibly have influenced the agent’s involvement. Or why the North Korean agent had let Joe live in Angola. Or why Callum had taken Park out. Or why the device didn’t’ go off.

And that was just scraping the surface.

She sighed a little, both tired and dismayed. Malone knew what she had to do. She got up and found her phone on the nightstand; then she dialed Kenny.

“Hey boss … yeah… yeah, I know, me too…but we have to kill it. We have to kill the story, just go with the basic wire piece for now, on the site. Something’s up. Look… yeah… I know, but look, just trust me on this. We can’t get this wrong. The stakes are too high. Besides, everybody else is going to draw the wrong conclusions. Think how good we’ll look when we get it right.”

She’d barely gotten off the line when her phone rang. “Yeah?”

“It’s Brennan.”

“Joe! Where the hell are you? You didn’t make the flight back…”

“I had something to take care of and some things to check out. So you’re in D.C.?”

“Yeah. What’s going on?”

“Checking into some loose ends,” he said. “You file a story yet?”

“Yeah...”

“Kill it. Like I said, loose ends.”

The tone was decisive. Tired as she was, Malone’s reporter instincts kicked in. “You know, don’t you? You know what’s actually going on.”

“Yeah. And I’m so goddamned tired of running, Alex. Get your tape recorder out. There are a few things you need to know.”

In the end, Malone wasn’t surprised that her part in the whole thing came down to meeting with her same secret source, away from prying eyes and the Capitol Hill crowd.

Only this time, it was at a small pub about twenty blocks away, a favorite of an old friend of Joe Brennan’s. Walter would have wanted to be there, Malone thought as she walked into the bar with Ken Davis at her side. Myrna, too.

The place was busy, lots of young college types hanging around drinking the cheap eight-ounce glasses of draft. Fitzpatrick was at the back of the bar, in a booth by himself. He had a glass of water in front of him but looked otherwise unfazed by the events of the days prior.

“Ms. Malone, Mr. Davis,” he said, raising the glass. “To a job well done. Please, join me.” He motioned to the bench seat across the table.

Alex was composed. She’d had a few hours’ sleep, finally. “Well, that’s a tempting offer, Mark,” she said. “But I thought you’d like to see the headline we put together for a special edition of the magazine.”

She tossed the mockup onto the table. Addison March’s face grinned back, almost taking up the whole page. The headline indicted him thoroughly.

Fitzpatrick grinned, a rare show of emotion. “Spectacular,” he said. “Absolutely perfect.” He picked it up and nodded approvingly. “I especially love the picture you used. He looks like such a stereotypical evil Republican robber baron type. Just perfect.”

“I guess you’ll be disappointed, then, because it’s never going to run,” Davis said. The editor picked up the cover mockup and folded it into two, then in half again. “In fact, for posterity’s sake, I’m just going to hang onto this.” He put it into his coat pocket.

Malone peered at him. “You have weird priorities sometimes, boss.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Fitzpatrick asked. “Alex, what is this…?”

“You can stow the act,” Malone said. “We know you hired Callum McLean and Terrence Corcoran – your old CO back in the day, right, Paddy?”

Fitzpatrick’s face was cold, impenetrable. “That’s pretty clever, Ms. Malone. Mr. Brennan, I presume?”

“Once I told him you were my source, he looked you up. As cover agent, he’d had virtually zero dealings with the NSA, so he didn’t make the connection until he saw your photo.”

Fitzpatrick leaned back against the rear corner of the booth, relaxed and confident, beer in hand. “It’s a shame that connection will do you no good. Corcoran is unlikely to testify on anyone’s behalf, as you’re well aware, and Callum McLean was so unfortunately shot by his old Navy buddy, Joe Brennan.”

She could have sworn the corners of his mouth twitched slightly, as if he was suppressing a gleeful smile. He was pure poison, Malone thought, and he had to go down. “Yeah, about that…” she said.

She looked back towards the door. Callum and Nicholas Wilkie entered together, alone with a pair of police officers. Callum walked slowly over to the table. He was still recovering from the bullet wound to his shoulder, with one arm in a sling.

“Paddy,” Callum said, nodding towards him.

“Well,” Fitzpatrick said. “Well, well. It seems news of your demise was greatly exaggerated.”

“Oh yeah, no doubt. You underestimated Joe; not that he’d take the shot even if he knew it was me. He would have, in the circumstances. Joe’s nothing if not about doing his duty, so you were right about that. I see him, I pause because of who it is, he takes me out. He closes the information loop for you. But you severely underestimated how good a shot he is from fifty yards, on the run. We didn’t even get a good look at each  other before he put me down.”

“What have you told them, Callum? I’m sure he’s come up with all sorts of stories to try and account for his complicity in this,” Fitzpatrick said.

“I told them what you offered me: a chance to get revenge against the men who got away with my sister’s murder.”

“This is all complete nonsense, of course,” Fitzpatrick said. “Some vague association we had twenty years ago, a conspiracy theory.”

“I have evidence; wire transfers to my account, recordings of your voice claiming this was an off-the-books mission, making it sound official.”

The NSA man had a shocked look, and it immediately struck Malone for its naïveté.

“And I have pictures of our meetings in the parkade,” Alex said. “Then there were the tips you offered, each designed to get us closer to the target, but each a little off, or coming up empty like in Seattle; everything pushing us closer to Khalidi, then the ties between Khalidi and Addison March. The donation that you check washed and redirected via a plant in the March campaign – which is what Christopher Enright figured out. There’s a hotel security camera that has footage of him meeting Agent Park in the hotel bar, by the way.”

“Well…” Fitzpatrick said.

“Well indeed. You led us on a chase, Mark,” Alex said. “You used Callum’s grief, and Corcoran’s greed. But the techs have examined the weapon. It would never have gone off. That was why you had to kill Konyakovich and Park, close the information loop. This was never about an attack. It was about winning a campaign, ruining a candidate’s reputation. Joe Brennan was supposed to see Callum and take him down, his sense of duty giving him the drop on Callum’s remorse. You probably had Khalidi’s murder arranged, as well. And the public is left believing that a man running for president almost financed a nuclear terrorist.”

The NSA man had a look of futility. “I want my lawyer,” Fitzpatrick said. “And then I want to cut a deal.”

July 8, 2016

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, 10:26 p.m.

Four days later, the attempted terrorist attack continued to dominate the television news, and like the faithful braying sheep they were, the broadcast journalists spent hour after hour outlining the story that had been leaked on the day: that Ahmed Khalidi’s money purchased a dirty bomb, that his radical associates tried to blow up New York … and that Republican presidential candidate Addison March was a supporter.

Sen. John Younger had been following the coverage religiously, watching his opponent’s reputation disintegrate before his very eyes. He sat alone in his hotel room, smiling, his tie undone and a scotch and ice in one hand. He was, he had already decided, having the single finest week of his life.

March had held several press conferences to angrily deny the associations, but the paper trail made it impossible. Every day of that week there had been calls – demands, even – for his resignation not only from the presidential race, in which he was now thirty points behind and dropping quickly, but from his House seat as well.

Younger took a fat cigar from his pocket, a King Edward Invincible corona, thick and musky. He bit one end off, then spit the tobacco into his hand and put it in the ashtray on the table. Then he took out his lighter and proceeded to puff, glad that he could have a smoke away from the glare of the campaign spotlight.

The lighter flame flickered heavily, then blew out. Younger turned his head to follow the source of the gust. The tall, sealed hotel window had been forced open, and a man had just finished climbing through it, dressed all in black.

He had a silenced pistol in one hand.

“Senator,” Brennan said.

Younger looked at the gun. “Are you going to shoot me?”

“This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that you won’t get away with it. That we know Mark Fitzpatrick was working on your behalf when he planned and executed everything.”

“And I suppose I’m supposed to cower in fear and repent my sins? Is that it, Mr….?”

“You can call me whatever you want,” Brennan said. “It doesn’t really matter. Fitzpatrick told us everything: how you planned the sniper shootings to draw America into this, knowing of Lord Abbott’s role as an undercover agent and Khalidi’s tie to the weapon. One investigation would meld perfectly into the other. You led me on a hell of a chase.”

The senator slowly swallowed the rest of the glass of scotch. “Not that anyone would believe any of this nonsense,” he said. “I assume you must be here to arrest me, if Mark had some sort of evidence to support this flight of fancy.”

“He doesn’t,” Brennan said. “He tried to cut a deal, give you up in exchange for a lighter sentence. But he had nothing really to give, except claiming a series of meetings, instructions from you.”

“Ah,” Younger said. Then his face soured as he realized the alternative. “That would explain the entrance through the window, then. So you’re here with a silenced gun, but you’re not here to arrest me.”

“No senator.”

“It doesn’t occur to you that Fitzpatrick is trying to save his own skin? I mean, certainly, he offered guidance and advice to me when I sat on the NSC, and he was a loyal supporter…”

“He took a polygraph, senator. And he passed.”

The color had begun to drain from Younger’s face. “A polygraph wouldn’t be admissible evidence in court,” he said haltingly.

“I’m not here to arrest you, like I said,” Brennan reminded him. “But sometimes we have to work around the law. We have no evidence with which to prosecute you, Senator Younger, nothing to prevent you from continuing on in your presidential campaign, which you would doubtless win. And I’m not your judge and jury.”