by Peter Nealen
“Who the hell is he?” I asked. “You talk about him as if he’s the spider in the web—which I can’t help but remember was the legend behind El Duque, too—but he’s a complete cypher to us, regardless of how much we’ve interacted with him. Who the hell is he, and what does he want?”
“He is a cypher,” Renton replied. “Rumors about somebody known only as ‘The Broker’ started circulating a little over a decade and a half ago. Nobody knew who he was, if he even was a ‘he,’ or even just one individual. He started making a name for himself as a ‘shadow facilitator,’ a dealer in primarily information, but also material resources, doing business throughout the global underworld. Word was that he had nearly bottomless resources, and he was very picky about security and who he’d do business with. But nobody ever had a clue as to who he was. He’s a ghost, even more elusive than El Duque was presumed to be.”
“Well, I assure you he’s a very real human being,” I told him. “And a very dangerous one, from what I’ve seen.”
“No shit,” Renton replied. “There have been several task forces that have been quietly put together to try to investigate him. The first two couldn’t find jack shit. Rumor has it the third one started to make progress, until the head of the task force was found electrocuted in his apartment. No sign of forced entry, no sign that anyone else was ever there. The task force dissolved a few days later, and the case files were buried.”
Given what I’d seen of The Broker’s capabilities and ruthlessness, that didn’t surprise me at all. I was sure several less subtle messages had accompanied the discovery of the task force head’s body.
“Can you describe him?” Renton asked after another moment.
I gave him a look like he’d just asked if I could speak English. Reconnaissance was part of our stock in trade, and if I hadn’t been able to describe a man I’d been in the same room with, I should have probably gotten out of the business long before.
So, I described the slightly pudgy, vaguely mousy, entirely non-threatening little man in as much detail as I could bring to mind. As I did, Renton’s frown deepened, and I could almost see the wheels turning.
When I finished, he was slightly pale, if still looking thoughtful. His eyes were far away, and for a moment it didn’t even seem like he was aware of either of us. “I need to track some things down,” he said distractedly. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Hold on a damned minute,” Eddie snapped, holding out the briefcase full of flash drives. They were the originals, though we had their collective contents on two larger external drives squirrelled safely away. The shit on those drives was poison, and we weren’t going to let it fly out on its own without having some kind of control over that particular weapon. We didn’t trust Renton and his Cicero Group that far. “Isn’t this what you came for in the first place?”
Renton seemed to shake himself, and reached for the briefcase. “Right,” he said. “Sorry. Got a bit distracted.” He took the case, and finally looked directly at both of us. “As important as these files are—though having Chu himself would have been better—The Broker’s involvement just made this even bigger. Like I said, I need to check up on some things. Keep your phones close, and be ready to move quickly. And for fuck’s sake, if he contacts you again, call me.”
I just nodded, unsure exactly what I was going to do if Mr. Gray showed up again. He was an unknown variable, and a dangerous one, at that. At the same time, he’d helped us out in a big way a couple of times, and as I’d already contemplated more than once, Renton’s organization was not exactly one hundred percent trustworthy. While The Broker might have murdered our target, he hadn’t leaked our identities to every hitter, terrorist, and gangster on the Dark Web.
I suddenly felt deeply weary as I watched Renton climb into his van and shut the door. It was a tiredness that went clear down to my bones.
I’d gotten into the business to make some money and stay “in the fight.” I’d been, admittedly, a little addicted to the lifestyle of a shooter, and there hadn’t been much else available in terms of work Stateside, at least not anything I’d had the patience to pursue. It had seemed easy; make money using my background and skillsets, maybe get a chance to put some lead in some pirates or jihadis, get paid to work out and shoot.
Instead, I had found myself in a poisonous snake-pit of politics, intrigue, conflicting agendas, and more and more dead bodies, including those of my friends and teammates. At that point, I didn’t know for sure who to trust.
And there were too many people involved to just kill all of them.
We didn’t have long to wait. We’d started going over the contents of the drives, as much as we could stomach, to start building our own target deck. The Broker’s warning about what might have happened had Chu lived were resonating with both Eddie and me. Contingencies needed to be in place, in case our sponsors decided that some of these scumbags were “valuable” enough to let them get away with some of the truly heinous shit that Chu had first facilitated, and then documented.
I had stepped outside of the tent we had pitched in the backwoods of Kentucky. I needed some air. Damn, I had known some twisted fucks in the military, but even the most depraved infantryman or special operations soldier I’d ever known hadn’t gotten quite as low as some of these politicians and captains of industry who had done business with Chu.
The Renton phone buzzed. I’d been expecting it.
“I’m sending you an address in Martinsburg, West Virginia,” Renton said as soon as I’d answered it. “The meet is there in eighteen hours.”
“What’s the deal?” I asked.
“Not over the phone,” he replied. “Eighteen hours. Don’t be late.”
I just sighed as he hung up and the phone vibrated in my hand to announce the text message with the location for the meeting. I had a feeling that if he was trying to keep The Broker from finding out about it, he was barking up the wrong tree.
But I stuck my head back inside the tent. “Hey,” I said. “We can put the electronic sewer away for a bit. We’ve got a meeting in West Virginia in the wee hours of tomorrow morning.”
Eddie snapped the laptop shut. “Good. This shit’s bad even for me. I’m about to just start skimming for names and putting a bullseye on them just for being in the mix. Fuck what they did; if they’re on here, they’re dirty and need to die.”
“No argument from me,” I replied. “But let’s get going. I want to have the meeting site scoped out before Renton or his cronies show up.”
The address turned out to be an old red-brick factory right on the railroad tracks. The place was locked up tighter than a drum, which apparently didn’t deter most teenagers, judging by what we could see. The chain link fence surrounding the complex was bent and twisted in several places where someone had evidently climbed it, and many of the windows in the buildings were broken, smashed thoroughly enough that someone could easily climb through.
It wasn’t going to deter us much, either. Of course, sneaking into a locked up local landmark in broad daylight was probably ill-advised, so we settled for spreading out nearby and observing.
The locals didn’t pay the place much mind. It was, after all, a constant fixture of their daily existence. Frankly, it was likely that the only people who cared much about the old brick structure were the local cops, who had to try to keep the teenagers out.
After several hours of careful observation, comparing notes via Derek’s secure, encrypted messaging app, we couldn’t see any signs of surveillance on the train station, or on us. We were clean, as far as we knew.
The day crept to a close, and darkness descended. The streetlights came on slowly, bathing the street and the empty, fenced-in parking lot in front of the factory buildings in dim, orange light.
That part of Martinsburg really didn’t have much of a night life. The tire shop, paint store, and auto parts store had all closed just after seven. There was a diner on the far side of the factory complex, but it was well masked from the rest of t
he factory itself, which looked properly ominous and haunted in the sodium light of the streetlights.
We faded back into the shadows and maintained our vigil.
Shortly after midnight, a car pulled up next to the auto parts store just south of the tracks and parked. A few minutes later, a pickup parked on the street in front of the paint store. No one got out of either vehicle.
“I think the party’s here,” I muttered. Next to me, in the passenger seat, Larry just nodded.
For about ten minutes, everyone just sat there, watching and waiting. I couldn’t see the guys in the truck, since they’d carefully parked in the shadows, but I was pretty sure they were doing what we’d been doing for the last several hours.
Finally, an old, beat-up Chevy Suburban, its white paint job peeling and rusting along the bottom, pulled up to the gate that stretched across the entrance to the parking lot. A figure got out, unlocked the gate, and swung it open, allowing the Sub to roll inside and park next to the building.
Once it was parked, three more men got out, scanning the surrounding buildings, then went inside. The light was bad, but unless I missed my guess, they were all packing some kind of short-barreled weapons, either subguns or SBRs.
We just waited. After a few more minutes, the door opened again, and then two more figures got out of the sub and went inside. It must have been crowded in that vehicle.
Larry glanced at me after we’d sat there for a couple more minutes. I glanced down at the phone in my lap, saying nothing. Finally, the screen lit dimly as the phone buzzed.
“Mars and Spooky confirmed,” the message said. “No LOS on their position in the building. No other movement.” “Mars” had been General Stahl’s callsign in Libya. Renton had gotten the terribly original nickname “Spooky” because he was a spook. It was a callsign that probably fit The Broker better, but he already kind of had a nickname, as it were.
Jack and Eric were up on the roof of the auto parts store, with their long guns. Full-length sniper rifles were superfluous at those distances, so they’d just carried up their ACE 52s.
One hundred percent overwatch on a building complex that big, with the numbers we had, was impossible. But if we had to break out of there in a hurry, we at least knew that we had the parking lot covered.
Even so, I still waited. Let Renton stew a bit.
Finally, the Renton phone buzzed. “Where are you?” he asked.
“Outside,” I replied calmly. “Making sure nobody else is coming to crash the party.”
He apparently didn’t know what to say to that, as the phone went quiet. But then another voice came on. “The building’s clear, Hillbilly,” Stahl said. “Come on in. We can’t afford to stay in one place too long right now.”
That told me a lot all by itself. If Stahl was concerned about staying in one place for long, even in a small town in West Virginia, it meant that whoever had gone after us was just as hot after him.
“We’ll be in momentarily,” I told him, and ended the call. Then I sent a mass text to the rest. “Green.”
As soon as I put the phone down, I put the car in gear and rolled toward the open gate in the fence.
I could feel the guys in the pickup on the corner watching us as we went by. I got the distinct impression we’d surprised them; they hadn’t spotted us until we’d moved.
As we rolled through the gate, an old Ford Bronco, just as beat-up as Stahl’s Suburban, followed us from the direction of the auto-parts store. That would be Eddie and George. The rest of both our teams were scattered around the neighborhood, on overwatch.
We parked on either side of Stahl’s vehicle and proceeded, carefully, inside. We each had one of Logan’s homemade 9mm subguns hanging on tension slings under our jackets, in addition to pistols. They stayed hidden, but our hands were never more than a few inches from the weapons as we went in the door.
It wasn’t that we didn’t trust Renton or Stahl. It was that we didn’t trust anybody.
George grabbed the door and pulled it open swiftly, and Larry and I stepped inside. We kept it as casual as possible, but each of us turned as we entered, clearing the corners on either side of the door with our eyes, even if we didn’t cover them with our muzzles. It wasn’t time to go guns-up, yet, but we were fractions of a second away, if that time came.
The inside of the factory had been pretty well stripped down to the rafters and the bare, brick walls. The concrete floor was dusty and littered with broken glass and bits of tile and crumbled brick. Aside from the dirty orange glow coming through the dingy windows, the only source of light was a single flashlight aimed at the floor.
There were four men situated around the room, each giving us a glance as we entered, but primarily keeping their attention focused out the windows. They were all carrying slung SIG MPXs. I thought I recognized one of them from a long time back; he looked like another Marine I’d known in Libya.
“Hey, Stone,” he said, giving me the nod. “Long time.”
I squinted at him briefly. “Stewart?” I asked.
“The same,” he replied. The big machinegunner had aged a lot since Libya, though I imagined I wasn’t exactly looking like the fresh-faced young Marine I’d been all those years ago, either. “Good to see you again. We’ll have to catch up over a beer later.”
I just nodded. Stewart had been with our QRF down in Al Jawf. We’d bullshitted and played far too many games of Spades in between missions and the occasional jihadi attack on the FOB. We’d fallen out of contact in the years since, but he’d been a damned good dude when I’d known him.
Stahl and Renton were standing in the middle of the enormous room, waiting. Stahl was holding the flashlight in one hand, with the other one buried in a pocket, a lit cigar clamped between his teeth, wreathing his head with clouds of smoke that glowed in the backsplash of the flashlight’s illumination.
Renton was holding a tablet, the combination of pale, bluish light from the screen and the flashlight beam bouncing off the floor making him look a little like a corpse. As we approached, he turned the tablet around to show me the screen.
The man on the screen was unmistakably The Broker, though he was far younger in the photo. “Is this The Broker?” he asked.
I nodded. “I take it you’ve figured out who he is,” I remarked.
Renton blew out a deep breath. “Yeah, you just confirmed it.” He looked at Stahl. “Ryan Bates is alive.”
“That’s interesting,” Stahl said dryly, around the cigar. “Who the hell is Ryan Bates?”
“Sorry,” Renton said, putting the tablet back in the case at his feet. “I sometimes forget that that story isn’t well known outside the intelligence community. Hell, it’s kind of a taboo subject within the IC.
“Ryan Bates was an up-and-coming legend in the Clandestine Service,” he explained. “He had a knack for finding information and putting seemingly disparate pieces together on the fly. He wasn’t an analyst, but he considered most of the analysts to be morons. He wasn’t popular, but he was usually right. He was my mentor for a few months at the beginning of my own career, during his last desk job, where he’d been stuck to try to keep him out of trouble.
“He wasn’t ever the kind of guy who would ‘stay in his lane.’ He’d get curious about things and start digging. He uncovered a couple of nasty terrorist plots doing that, and found some connections between seemingly disparate groups that would have been missed without him.
“Well, eventually he started getting interested in Yuri Bezmenov and Anatoly Golitsyn.”
When he paused, as if we were supposed to know who those two characters were, Stahl stared at him along with the rest of us. “More names I don’t know,” he growled. “Get to the point.”
“They were both Soviet defectors,” Renton explained. “Bezmenov had been KGB, and shed a lot of light on Soviet information and influence operations; the way that they carefully shaped perceptions outside of the Soviet Union. Golitsyn was also KGB, but whereas Bezmenov had been a glorifi
ed PR guy, Golitsyn was in the strategic planning office.
“Golitsyn made the case that Perestroika, Glasnost, and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union were all carefully orchestrated, by design, starting with Andropov. He said that it was all a radical restructuring of the Soviet Union, effectively bringing it under KGB control, only in disguise.”
Stahl frowned. “Given the way the Russian economy and government got split up among mostly former Party and former KGB oligarchs, it doesn’t sound to me to be all that far-fetched.”
“The rise of the siloviki under Putin lends it some more credence,” Renton agreed. “But the powers that be didn’t want to hear it. The Soviet Union was dead, and at the time, history was over. Later, the big threat was the jihad. Russians were our friends, at least until they became a useful political bogeyman again.
“But Bates never let it go. He wasn’t a ranter; it wasn’t his style. But occasionally he’d talk about it, and talk about what he thought needed to be done about it. He was afraid that we were going to find ourselves blindsided by an underground KGB, undermined and weakened before being pushed aside by a resurgent Soviet Union.
“He’d given it a lot of thought. He knew just how to get inside the networks, some of which went back clear to the Cold War. He liked to quote Jim Morris in Soldier of Fortune, saying, ‘They’re all wearing the same uniforms, using the same weapons, and getting the same training.’
“Then, about eighteen years ago, his house burned down. There were human remains inside, though the roof had collapsed and mangled what was left, so there was no way to check dental records. But Bates had disappeared, and it was easier to think that he’d died in the fire than that he’d pulled a disappearing act.
“He was smart; not a word was breathed about The Broker until almost three years later. Even I never put the two together. I figured Bates was dead. But here he is, surfaced again, as the very shadowy underworld facilitator he said somebody needed to become.”
“So, how does this affect our operations?” Stahl asked.