by Sam Powers
Then he saw Brennan. “Oh. Hey. What can I do you two for?”
Alex held up the key. “Friend of ours asked us to get something from his locker.”
He looked disappointed by the mundane request. “Round the corner at the end of the room. Gents only in the guys’ locker room.”
The corridor in question led to the main sparring area, where two rings were set up along with a series of heavy bags hanging from the rafters, and speed bags screwed to the wall. The place was fairly busy, a young guy skipping rope in one corner, sparring in both rings. Malone nodded toward the bench seating by the wall. “I’ll wait here.”
Ten yards away, a boxer who was stretching saw her watching and smiled at her.
“Enjoy the view,” Brennan said.
“I’ve seen worse,” she said, smiling back at the younger man, all the while being careful that she didn’t miss the bench and fall on her backside.
Brennan found the locker quickly. Inside was a large manila envelope. He retrieved it, ignored by the three men changing and drying off from showering.
In the main room, Malone was watching the sparring. She rose as Brennan approached, spotting the envelope immediately. “Curioser and Curioser,” she said.
“Alex in Wonderland?” he said.
“Something like that. Come on, let’s hit the coffee shop down the street and open this puppy.”
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
Enright’s day had gone from bad to worse. His Chicago source was now hesitant about repeating her story, and word had already filtered down from the road crew that the senator was unhappy with him, which made the local staff just as hesitant to do their jobs with him in the room.
After five hours of phone calls, haltering performances from the local yokels and a lot of half-glances tossed his way, he’d called it quits for the day and gone back to the hotel. Not a heavy drinker, it had nonetheless occurred to Enright that the bar in the lobby held a particular appeal after such a rotten turn of events.
So he sat at the faux-marble bar and drank a couple of scotches, downing the first quickly and taking his time with the second. The place was a prototypical fern bar, with the plants in question filling two corners – or silken replicas, anyway. The rest of the place was filled with square bar tables made to accommodate travelling groups that usually didn’t exceed four – or two and two dates. The bar itself fronted a dozen stools and ran perhaps twenty-five feet in length, backed by an obligatory Jack Daniels mirror and an always-lit faux neon sign advertising Cerveza Corona.
He sipped the scotch. What was March thinking? In his few brief years with the senator, Enright had come to respect his boss’s coldly efficient mindset, his ability to push aside the distractions. But this wasn’t a distraction; this was something much more. He wondered if someone had gotten to the lady in Chicago, scared her out of talking. Her hesitancy also seemed like something more; a day earlier, she’d been practically bubbling at the prospect of helping her political hero. Now she was hanging up the phone and saying ‘please don’t call here’.
Enright considered his options; the associations with Khalidi and now Islamic militants would sink the candidate in November. It wasn’t that he doubted March’s ability to mount a comeback, as he’d seen the senator do it in other races. But the presidency would be won on the fine margins that lie between the ranks of the politically committed, a few states swinging one way or the other. Maybe it was time to cut his losses, Enright thought, and to step away before his name became associated with March’s inevitable defeat. It seemed impossible that March could still have an ace up his sleeve big enough to turn things around.
Or…
There was another option. The election commission was making a major show these days of cracking down on fraud; a case involving the presidential race would make its day. At the very least, it would probably call in the cops. They might even dig around John Younger’s campaign looking for a motive, if they thought the Chicago volunteer was credible and could get her to talk.
His eyes narrowed as he finished the rest of the scotch. It was time to act, and to take the candidate’s faltering presence out of the equation.
Enright looked around the bar; it was nearly midnight. The place was almost empty, just a handful of dubiously aged young ladies in one corner, giggling and drinking colorful martinis. At the far end of the bar was another woman; he hadn’t noticed her come in. She was lean, curvy, and her black cocktail dress hugged her figure as she leaned forward on the bar. She smiled at him before looking down at her drink, her eyes flitting demurely back in his direction.
Enright got up and walked over, drink in hand. “Hi, I’m Chris,” he said, flashing his pearly whites. “Do you mind if I join you?”
She smiled back. She was beautiful, he thought, way out of his usual league. “I’m Annie.” She extended a hand and they shook gently, and she held his hand for just a split second longer than he expected.
Wow, she’s really into me, Enright thought. He smiled again, some of the pressure of the day lifting away. He’d never dated an Asian woman before. He wondered what her background was; Chinese, he thought… or maybe Korean.
12./
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
They sat quietly reflecting, the coffee shop empty besides the two of them and the thin, pasty white waiter/cook, on the late shift, looking about as disinterested as could be. Outside, the restaurant’s neon orange-and-blue ‘open’ sign reflected off the large window pane next to their booth. It was raining lightly.
Malone wanted a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in eleven years, since a year after getting out of college. But she could practically smell it now, and that nicotine yearning was there, as if it had only been a day since she quit. She pushed it away.
Brennan sipped his coffee. They’d both read the file; it was brief, after all, just a few pages of notes and a handful of memory sticks. But it was shocking, outlining Borz Abubakar’s deception, the destruction of the bus in Peru; from there, it took a turn, outlining how evidence of Konyakovich’s past arms deals had been used by representatives of a shadowy European cabal to blackmail him into shipping weapons’ grade Uranium and bomb parts into the United States. Though he admitted to great profit from the shipments, he also stated his guilt in the letter, an admission that he knew he what could happen as a result, along with a request that whoever found the letter might pray for his soul.
“Nearly thirty people dead, millions of others threatened,” Alex said with an edge of despair. “And for what? An arms deal gone wrong?”
His only identifiable contact with the cabal had been Terence Corcoran, though Corcoran had mentioned a ‘Faisal’ as being in charge.
It contained nothing else.
“No location. No indication of a motive. No clue who hired Corcoran to blackmail him. And it had to be him? Someone from my past?”
“Khalidi.” she suggested. “His fingerprints have been all over this from the start.”
“I don’t know… someone has been pushing us towards him. He’s just too easy, too convenient a boogieman. And if he were planning something like this, why get us onto him in the first place by assassinating his fellow ACF board members?”
She shrugged. “Maybe they knew too much about his funding of the nuke purchase in the first place; maybe he’d tired of them or no longer needed them and was simply cleaning up.”
“No, that’s not it,” Brennan said. “Those assassinations were the loudest possible show of force. He could have had been much more subtle. Those shootings were about making a statement. This whole thing couldn’t have been more designed to guarantee outside interest in Khalidi’s activities. In fact, once the second shooting happened, it was almost guaranteed his African activities would come up at some point. Any man as powerful and ruthless as him has enemies.”
They were silent again. If Khalidi wasn’t responsible, then who? It made so little sense; a conspiracy to bring a nuclear bomb into the U.S., but one in which intelligence agenc
ies were being strung along for a ride. Why give them a chance to prevent it, Brennan wondered. What did someone have to gain from concocting a terrifying conspiracy but then helping them to stop it?
“I feel like we’re being played, still,” he said. “But even that we can’t be sure of. We still have no idea where the device is.”
“There must be something we’ve missed,” Malone said. “Some piece of evidence that points us in the right direction.”
They went over everything, going all the way back to the shooting in Montpellier, followed by the assassination of Lord Abbott. They covered everything Brennan learned from Bustamente and in Cabinda, the information Malone gleaned from her federal source and the African file.
But there was nothing.
“Maybe your magazine will get another tip…” Brennan began to say, before Malone raised a hand and cut him off.
“Just a second… let me think for a second. You said the guy you knew from years back… what’s his name?”
“Terrence Corcoran.”
“Terrence Corcoran. You said he had a meet set up in Yonkers. So they were heading north.”
“Sure, but like I said, I spent hours touring the area looking for any sign or any potential target. And it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Why?”
“Well, because every simulation or projection ever run on this sort of scenario says the bad guys go for the maximum population hit; in this case, that’s downtown.”
“But he said they had a contingency, right?”
“Sure.”
Malone thought about it some more. Then she said, “Give me your phone.”
“This is a preloaded, picked up by Eddie.”
“Doesn’t matter. I just need maps.”
She brought up an image of the state. “Let’s go against the prevailing theory. It hadn’t helped us so far, right? So let’s look north.”
Brennan chafed internally at the idea. It wasn’t his style to ignore sensible intel. “You know, they don’t just make those projections up. They’re based on…”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m not criticizing the military. Jeez, Brennan…”
“Okay, okay: explain.”
“So maybe they’re going against the grain on this. Whoever set this up has managed to implicate Khalidi, bring down Fenton-Wright, and destroy the ACF. That kind of thinking just seems a little more devious and a little less obvious than your typical meat-headed fanatic.”
“Absolutely.”
“Let’s assume they had New York as a potential target, but Corcoran’s shipment was needed for that, and you brought the cops in.”
“Okay.”
“Plus, the city’s covered in agents looking for them. So they go to ‘Option B’, by landing something out of town, up river at a secondary target.”
He peered at her critically. “Alex… you’re stretching.”
“Humor me.”
They both examined the small screen as she scrolled to Yonkers then kept going north from the city, away from the densest populations. A series of suburbs scrolled by, including New City, West Haverstraw, Croton-on-Hudson.
“Nothing,” Brennan said. “Unless you want to kill a whole lot of upper-middle-class boomers.”
“Be patient,” she said. She scrolled further, the map following the contours of the Hudson River.
She stopped scrolling. “Bingo,” Alex said. “I think you owe me a beer for that.”
“I’ll pay you later,” Brennan said. He put his jacket on as he climbed out of the booth, taking a twenty from his wallet to leave with the bill. “We better get going.”
JULY 2, 2016, AMMAN, JORDAN
Ahmed Khalidi paced the white-and-grey marble floor of his palace’s sitting room, hands behind his back, his body language tense and troubled. Increasingly, he awoke each morning feeling more insecure than the last, and there seemed to be little possibility of the situation improving in the immediate future. He had come to rely on Faisal for all of his information, but his assistant had less and less to tell him as the days went by. The EU had moved to freeze his assets and he continued to be guarded around the clock by a corps of security personally picked by Faisal.
The situation was beneath him; it angered him that he had to rely on a servant, that his family’s name and his fearsome reputation were no longer enough to guarantee his intentions were fulfilled. His colleagues had been systematically cut down like lambs to the slaughter – although in some cases he conceded it nothing short of just – and the influential contacts he had maintained within U.S. intelligence had been eliminated.
And so he paced the room, unsure of how to direct his energies, tempted to insult both the Prophet and his God by having several stiff drinks, keenly aware that he already had ample reason to pray for guidance.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come.”
It opened and Faisal entered the room, typically dapper in a light grey suit. “Your highness,” he said with a short bow. He made a sweeping motion with his arm, and a young soldier in tan-colored army garb followed him into the room. He was perhaps eighteen, with a narrow face and a wispy moustache. “This is Private Aboud.”
“What is this, Faisal,” Khalidi asked wearily. “You had best have some information…”
“Be quiet,” Faisal said. “Old fool.” He reached inside his suit jacket and removed a nine millimeter; he took a small suppressor out of his side pocket and screwed it onto the barrel.
Khalidi was flabbergasted. His face turned red with embarrassment. “Faisal! How dare you speak to me thusly! I shall have you flogged, you Egyptian dog…wait…what are you doing?”
“Private Aboud is a simple boy, recruited for this task specifically from an institution in Aqaba, where he was committed for being unable to care for himself,” Faisal said. As if to confirm the statement, the private said nothing, staring ahead wide-eyed and glassy, oblivious to what was going on around him.
“I don’t understand…” Khalidi managed to say, before Faisal held the barrel up to the boy’s forehead, and pulled the trigger, killing him instantly.
Faisal walked towards his shocked employer. “Initially, the news reports sent out by the state press agency will merely confirm you were killed by an assassin but that you heroically took his life in the process,” he said. “It will not be until later that they find the evidence among his belongings, implicating you in the explosion that reigned Hell upon America, that they realize young Private Aboud died a hero, trying to prevent a tragedy.”
The wealthy Jordanian’s mouth dropped open. “My God, Faisal…” he said. “You cannot mean this. What have you done?”
“Me?” Faisal said. “Don’t worry about me, sir.” He raised the gun and shot Khalidi through the mouth. The chairman dropped to his knees, eyes instantly distant and confused. Faisal walked over and kicked him over. “I’m nobody.”
He took his phone from his pocket and dialed a number.
“Yes?” A man’s voice replied.
“It’s done. The official statement will go out in two days. You have until then. The remainder will be dealt with after everything has been taken care of on your end.”
“Your task is complete,” the voice said. “The money will be wired by noon.”
“I hope never to hear from you again,” Faisal said.
“You won’t.”
The line went dead.
Faisal looked down at Khalidi’s prone body. Ultimately, he knew, people would suspect his involvement; he had rarely left Khalidi’s side in a decade. But memories are short, Faisal knew, and the money would last a very long time.
JULY 3, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.
The President wanted it to be over.
On one level, anyway. Really, he wanted another four years, another eight, another twelve; whatever it took to help build a stronger country. He had at least that much faith in himself.
But facing a grave national security threat, declining popularity nu
mbers and a lame duck administration, paused in time by the inertia of career fear? He just wanted it to be over.
Four more months, he told himself as he twiddled his ballpoint pen, sitting behind the Roosevelt Desk while some of his top advisors sat in front of it and fidgeted, each trying to look less guilty than the next.
“Would perhaps one of you gentlemen like to explain to me how deputy director Fenton-Wright managed to so thoroughly evade our internal screening and policies? Our own security? Anyone?”
Fitzgerald was there as a courtesy; the NSA had a direct interest, and he had a personal one, even though forensics had shown it was Jonah Tarrant’s shot that had killed the rogue spy. But Wilkie, the Colonel and the Defense Secretary knew they were all seen as complicit, given that they’d all promoted and support Fenton-Wright’s role on the National Security Council. They’d treated him like the golden boy for the president’s entire final term.
Eventually, though, the director knew it fell to him. Wilkie cleared his throat then said, “I will, of course, offer my resignation…”
The president rolled his eyes. “Give it a rest, Nick, okay? I’ve known you for twenty years. I don’t want your resignation. I want a genuine answer. Do we even know who was paying him?”
“We suspect the Russians, Mr. President,” the defense secretary interjected.
“We’ve just gotten a lead to trace on that today sir,” Wilkie said. “When he died, Fenton-Wright had an unlisted cell phone on him. We’ve run back several of the calls made from it in the months prior, and he took part in some telebanking with an outfit in Switzerland. Now, as you know, the Swiss are much more amenable these days to working with us…”
“Bottom line it, please,” the President said.
“Money was transferred into accounts held by Fenton-Wright in Zurich. Given the routing, they suspect the transaction originated in the Middle East. But by tomorrow we’ll have a definitive answer.”