by Sam Powers
“Not if he talks to us, it’s not. But it wouldn’t hurt for him to think so, so no good cop, bad cop, okay? Just let me be bad cop for a few minutes all by my lonesome. Stay here, enjoy your latte. I’ll be back with Mr. Grant in a few minutes.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.” He got up and left her with both coffees, disappearing out the front door and back down the street at pace. A minute later, Brennan was back in front of the Kalispell building. Instead of taking the broad stairs up to the front door, he followed the sidewalk another fifty yards to the parking lot side entrance to the building’s left. It led, in turn, behind the building to the large, open lot, divided into dozens of white-lined vehicle bays.
The lot was fenced, but behind the back fence was a small hill covered in pines, firs with old, dry needles. Brennan scanned the empty lot, then climbed the fence quickly and dropped over. It was a perfect vantage point, out of immediate eyesight, unlikely to draw attention.
He thought about the reporter, sitting just a block away. How would she react if she saw him working on Grant? If she actually saw how far he was willing to go to get the job done? Brennan didn’t like exposing her to field work at all, but it was a necessary wrong; her source too important for her to be on the streets without a safety net. She was probably safer with him, he reasoned, than in D.C. on her own.
Her business also meant that, best intentions notwithstanding, he couldn’t trust her with all of the details yet, not until he was sure she’d keep things under wraps until any danger to the public was averted.
Forty-two minutes later, the businessman walked out of the back doors of the building and headed towards his black Audi. Brennan moved quickly, scaling and hopping the fence in two motions. He walked quickly to intercept Grant just as he reached out a tan-suited arm to unlock the driver’s door. Brennan flashed the pistol and said quietly, “In the car, Mr. Grant. We need a quick word, and I’ll let you go back to your doubtless idyllic life.” Brennan used the pistol to direct him inside. “Open the passenger door lock before you get in, or I might get nervous,” Brennan added.
Inside the car, Grant put his hands on the steering wheel nervously. “Who are you?” he said. “Look, I don’t have any money on me. You can take my car…”
“Start the car, Mr. Grant.”
He had a dazed look but he followed the instruction. “Where are you taking me?” Grant asked.
“That depends. You tell me what I need to know, we don’t have to go anywhere. You cause me problems, I’ll take you to a world of pain. Are we clear?
Grant looked sideways slowly at the gun. “We’re clear. But you should know…”
“Yeah?”
“Some of the people I work for are likely to take substantial offense to intrusions into their business.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Grant?”
“No, sir…” he said haltingly. “Frankly, I’m as scared of them as you should be.”
“Tell me about that, Mr. Grant. Tell me why they scare you. First of all, who are ‘they’? Who owns Kalispell? I checked the EDGAR database and it’s not a public company.”
“The sole owner is an oil and gas conglomerate, PetroGlobal.”
“Based where?”
“France. Look, I’m just a title. I move money. I don’t ask questions.”
“Who owns PetroGlobal?”
The man sighed deeply, nervously. “AK Industrial SARL. In turn it’s controlled by the family of Ahmed Khalidi, a Jordanian national who lives in the United Arab Emirates…”
“I’m familiar with the name. Look at a picture for me.” He produced the headshot from the Nigerian file of Andraz Kovacic. “You know this guy?”
Grant’s eyebrows rose slightly and his lips parted minutely. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re lying, Mr. Grant.” Brennan prodded him with the gun. “From this sort of range, you don’t want to know the damage a .40 caliber slug will do to someone’s stomach.”
“Okay! Okay, for chrissake! He’s a fixer of some sort that Kalispell had on the payroll in Africa. But he left the company in 2009.”
“Left the company?”
“He disappeared. Off the radar, completely. I was told to cut off transfers to him.”
“How much had they sent him?”
“I couldn’t say exactly; it was for the whole four years that I’d been here by that point…”
“Give me a ballpark.”
“During that entire period? About six-point-two million.”
Details were sliding into place, Brennan thought. Khalidi had been financing regional insurrections, probably to force local villagers off of profitable oil leases; that explained the money and the village slaughter. He certainly wasn’t the first to do it. But his fixer, his money man, had disappeared. “How much of the money that you sent to him was unaccounted for when he vanished?”
Grant’s head slumped. “You realize they’ll kill me if any of this ever gets out.”
“You knew something seriously wrong was going on, but you chose to stay.”
“It’s complicated,” Grant said. “I had debts…”
“Don’t we all.”
“Who are you?”
“Do you really think it would be healthy for you to know?”
“I suppose not,” Grant said. “Are you going to kill me?”
“No. But if you tell anyone about this, they will, just to be sure you aren’t around to corroborate anything you told me. You know that, right?”
He nodded but said nothing.
“So how much?”
“About four million,” Grant said.
“They must have torn the country apart looking for him.”
“They were frantic, at the time. But in the long run, for a company the size of PetroGlobal, four million is lunch money. They got over it.”
“Turn off the engine,” Brennan said.
“Are you going…”
“I told you, I’m not going to kill you. But if I were you, I’d find another line of work.”
Brennan got out of the car and slammed the door. The lot was still empty. He strode quickly towards the sidewalk, blending in among the pedestrians, disappearing with the crowd.
FEB. 27, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.
They arrived back in D.C. just after midnight, and Brennan took Malone back to her townhouse. He parked across the street. “Thank you for your help today,” he said. “We made a lot of headway. Look, I know I can be a hard case, but…”
She interrupted him. “Something’s wrong.”
Brennan turned to look at the building. There were no cars parked on the street outside. He checked his wing mirror and saw no one on the sidewalk in either direction. “What?”
“My side table lamp.”
“Eh?”
“I always leave my side table lamp on when I leave in the morning, by the front door. The telephone table. I always leave that light on…”
“Maybe the bulb burned out?”
“No, it’s one of those long-life, low wattage things. I just changed it recently.”
The apartment was black. “When I get out of the car,” Brennan said, “I want you to slowly slide over to the driver’s seat. Try and keep your shoulders level while doing it. From that distance, if anyone looking out of your apartment window has already made us, they won’t realize you’ve changed positions. As soon as I get to the opposite sidewalk, I want you to start the car again and go. Once you’re at least ten blocks away, call Walter,” he said, repeating his friend’s phone number twice so that she wouldn’t forget it. “That’s his private cell, away from even agency ears. He’ll help you from there while I deal with whatever this is.”
“Are you going in there?”
“I have to know what we’re dealing with, whether they’re trying to get to me through you, establish my possible location through a contact.”
“Or?”
“Or whether they’re here to kill you, Alex. Quickly… give me
your keys.”
She did so silently, the weight of the prospect hitting her. “I’m going to get out now,” Brennan said. “Are you ready?”
Malone nodded. He opened the door quickly and climbed out. As he crossed the street, she did as he’d suggested and slid over into the driver’s seat. As he reached the sidewalk, he heard the engine start; she pulled away too quickly and the tiles squealed once.
And then the car was gone, and the night was as silent as it ever gets in the city, just a stiff breeze accompanied by background traffic noise from the busy road a few blocks away; somewhere, a long way off, a police siren sounded.
He’d been as honest with Alex as he thought she could take; there was no reason for anyone involved with the ACF to suspect he’d be at her townhouse. The only person anyone was looking for was the reporter. What he really wanted to know was who ordered the hit.
The fact that all of the townhouse’s lights were turned off suggested someone would try to double-tap her inside her own place, maybe move her elsewhere for disposal. Brennan was expecting a single assassin; a team would be too high-profile, too visible in such a public place. The fact that the person had stashed their ride out of sight meant whoever it was had eyes on the street, which meant he was being watched for the entire time it took to cross the road and walk up the short flight of steps to the front door, separated from its neighbor by a short black railing. The light above the door gave off a feint orange glow.
He unlocked it with Malone’s keys, but instead of opening the door simply left it untouched. Then he climbed over the outside rail, the angle too acute for anyone inside to see through the window, as he moved to the right of the building and down the parking lot driveway.
The assassin would have seen the lock turn; he’d know there was someone there. But when no one entered the apartment for several minutes, he would worry about an ambush of his own, Brennan thought, and begin figuring a quiet way out, probably via a side window. If Brennan was right, the would-be killer had surveyed the lay of the land and parked behind the building to avoid suspicion from being the only strange vehicle in front. That meant that, just as with David Grant, the next move would be to try and get out of there quickly.
Behind the building, he avoided going anywhere near the backdoor because of a proximity security light; instead, he followed the edge of the parking lot until he was on the other side of the property, before ensconcing himself in a shadowy corner, darkened by the presence of three-foot hedges.
It took less than thirty seconds before he heard the window slide open to Alex’s apartment and the faint sound of someone dropping to the ground below. It had snowed while they were in Baltimore, and a light sprinkling covered everything. The figure emerged from the half-light on the narrow gap between the building and the property line, a man dressed all in black, scanning the lot quickly for any threats before walking briskly towards a rented black Dodge. When they were within twenty yards, Brennan strode rapidly towards the black-garbed figure, pistol out. It had worked with David Grant; he just had to avoid…
The crunch of a piece of glass under his heel may as well have been a thunder clap in the still of the evening; the assassin wheeled around in one smooth motion, a silenced pistol in extended hand, the muzzle flash dimmed by the long suppressor attached to the barrel as he squeezed off three shots. But Brennan was moving from the second he stepped on the glass, running and tucking into a forward roll, coming out of it behind the cover of a sedan as the bullets sank into its bodywork.
He peeked around the front bumper of the car and a bullet ricocheted off the metal just in front of him. The assassin had taken cover, perhaps behind his own car. Brennan looked over and across the hood; a tuft of hair emerged from behind the other car and he opened fire, his unsuppressed weapon retorting loudly, the .40 caliber slugs tearing through the body work of the other vehicle but failing to find their target.
“Cops will be here soon,” Brennan yelled. “I’m guessing you don’t want that.”
He was right. The assassin took off at a sprinter’s pace; he headed back down the side of the building, following the same driveway out that Brennan had followed in. Brennan gave chase and the assassin turned as he ran, two more shots pinging off the brick wall to the agent’s right. Brennan fired on the run, his shots going wide of his target as the assassin reached the street and turned left.
Brennan rounded the corner at speed… and was caught dead to rights; the man had stopped running less than twenty yards ahead and instead was waiting for him, gun extended, stable. Brennan flung himself sideways towards the ground, the two quick shots going overhead; he squeezed off two in response, prone, but the target was already moving again, heading down the block. He gave chase; the man cut down an alley to his left. This time, Brennan was more cautious, peering around the corner before pursuing. The assassin had tried the same ploy but the three shots were wasted, clipping the brickwork near Brennan’s head and carving off chips and chunks.
And then there was just a clicking sound. Brennan looked around the corner. The alley was a dead end, and the assassin’s clip was empty. Brennan walked around the corner, gun extended.
It was the Asian agent from Brussels, he realized. Even in the dark, with his face blacked over, his build and his missing earlobe were dead giveaways. Brennan kept the pistol trained on him. “Who are you and why have you been following me?”
The man shook his head and smiled demurely.
“Why were you trying to kill Alex Malone?”
The man ignored the question. Instead, he said, “When we fought in Brussels, you showed great skill. You could not have defeated me, but you fought admirably.”
His accent was Japanese, Brennan thought. “I’ll ask again: Why Alex Malone? Who do you work for?”
The assassin began to walk towards him. “We both know I’m not going to tell you anything,” the man said. Then he moved into a defensive stance, feet shoulder-width apart and nodded towards Brennan. “Put that toy away and let’s settle this correctly.”
“Hand to hand?” Brennan said.
“With honor,” the assassin said.
“No,” Brennan said, quickly raising the pistol and firing. He caught the assassin square in the forehead, a large red-black hole appearing immediately, blood gushing from the head wound. The man collapsed to the ground, convulsing for a few moments before breathing his last.
He could hear sirens getting closer, the police doubtless responding to a “shots fired” complaint. He looked down at the man’s vacant gaze and felt a momentary pang of regret.
The man’s offer had been tempting; but they weren’t playing a game and there was nothing particularly honorable about any of it.
The call from Alex Malone had shocked Walter Lang initially, as there were fewer than five people on the planet with his private number. It had only taken a few moments for her to explain, however, and twenty minutes later, they were meeting at a mall parking lot in Crestwood, north of downtown.
They took Lang’s car, leaving Brennan’s rental in the lot. “We’re going to a friend’s place. She lives in Northeast Washington,” he explained. “You can lay low there for a few days until our friend has figured out who was trying to have you killed.”
“By our friend, do you mean Joe?” she asked. But Walter wasn’t taking the bait.
“Is that what he’s calling himself?” he replied, eyes still on the road. “Anyway, my friend is ex-agency, and she’s a pro. Good soul, too. She’ll be good company until then.”
“When is ‘then’?” Malone asked. “How long is this going to take? I have a story to work on.”
Lang shook his head. “You can’t write it if you’re dead.”
It took about a quarter-hour to get to the apartment building in question, a four-story walkup. For the second time in as many days, Malone got the sense she was being taken on a guided tour designed as much to keep her away from sensitive information as to protect her.
Lang parked the car on
the street out front. He got out first and scanned the area, then walked around the car and opened Malone’s door for her. “Okay, let’s go.”
Inside the building, he rang 3C on the buzzer board.
“Yep,” a woman’s voice came back.
“It’s us,” he said simply.
The door buzzed and they entered the lobby; they took the stairs to the third floor. Malone was exhausted; but she noticed in the bright light outside the front door how pale and thin Walter looked, a shadow of the man she’d met in the pub a few years earlier – and he’d still been recovering at that point from his Colombian ordeal.
“Walter…”
“Yes, Ms. Malone.”
“One, call me Alex, okay? Two, you look terrible. Have you seen a doctor or anything recently?”
Lang could only glance at her quickly, embarrassed. “I’ve been having some issues but they’re being dealt with, thank you,” he said, politely but firmly.
The woman who greeted them at the apartment door was large; not obese, but of grand proportion, standing over six feet two inches, broad-shouldered. She had a shock of lanky brown-grey hair and looked to be in her late fifties or early sixties, Malone thought.
“Alex, this is Myrna Verbish, one of my oldest friends.”
Myrna extended a hand and Malone shook. “Any friend of Walter is okay with me,” she said. Then she looked Walter over. “Walter, you look…”
“I know, I look terrible. I haven’t been sleeping, okay? Let’s just get inside and talk.”
Myrna led them in and found them a place on her living room couch while she moved to the adjacent kitchen and made them tea. It was after two o’clock in the morning, but all three were wired from adrenaline. She briefly wondered why she’d said yes to Walter so easily; they were old friends, to be sure, but Myrna was divorced from the intelligence community, and with plenty of good reasons.
Malone filled them both in on her source and the African file, along with the threads that connected the atrocities in Nigeria to Khalidi’s company, and Khalidi, in turn, to the shootings. Myrna looked intrigued, fascinated even, Malone thought; but Walter just kept his head down, stoic, as if his mind were somewhere else.