by Sam Powers
“So that’s it,” Malone summed up. “We know someone’s targeting the ACF’s board members but we also know that the chairman, or one of his companies anyhow, has been involved in some dirty, dirty business.”
“The assassinations could be personally motivated, then?” Myrna suggested. “Someone who lost a loved one in Africa, or at least knows about it? Probably not the former,” she reasoned, “as I doubt rural villagers would have the contacts or resources.”
“That leaves knowing about it,” Malone said. “Joe said something, too, about information he’d received in Europe that the ACF had gone way out of bounds. He mentioned a couple of different locations: East Timor and Bosnia. Apparently they funded insurrections, to some degree.”
Myrna nodded sagely then looked at her watch. “Oh.”
“What?” Lang asked. He was exhausted but she looked genuinely surprised by something.
“I’ve just realized: it’s my birthday.”
All three were silent for a moment, aware for a moment of how disconnected they’d all become from the people who mattered to them. Malone’s family was half a country away, in Los Angeles. None of them had anyone else in D.C.
Lang rose. “You two should get some sleep. I imagine Joe will be trying to contact me soon. I’m going to head home. Myrna, call me tomorrow with an update?”
She nodded and rose to let him out. At the door, she lowered her voice. “Walter, are you really okay? We’ve been friends for a long time, and …”
He smiled at her, happy to be cared about. He put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “You’re a wonderful woman, Myrna, you know that, right?”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.
He was still smiling as he closed the door behind him.
7./
FEB. 28, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Lang’s phone rang at six o’clock the next morning. He’d only been home and asleep for slightly under three hours.
“Lang,” he answered blearily, swinging his legs out of bed.
“This is Faisal. We have not heard from you in some time. We require a status update.”
If the cancer doesn’t kill me, Lang thought, the stress will. “There has been very little new.”
“What about Wilhelm? Surely your agency does not think his death was an accident?”
“No, but we have nothing further to go on right now. I can’t give you what we don’t have.” He had no intention of giving up their intel on Africa; he didn’t want to play the two sides against each other, but holding onto two paymasters required tact.
“Then you can do something else for us,” Faisal said.
“What?”
“We need a problem fixed.”
“I’m not a field agent,” Walter began to explain. “I haven’t...”
“Irrelevant,” Faisal said. “You accepted our money, Mr. Lang. Now we require something in return. There is a reporter in Washington, a woman named Alexandra Malone.”
Walter got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I know of her,” he said.
“She must be eliminated immediately.”
“I won’t do that,” Walter said. “I didn’t sign up for that. You need some intel, I provided it…”
“And we provided you with a great deal of money, money I understand you require for your medical care.”
“In exchange for basic intel. I won’t kill for you.”
“Then you can locate her and detain her for us until someone with the stomach for the job is available,” Faisal suggested. “Either way…”
“No,” Walter said. “I’m sorry, but that’s it.”
“This is not optional, Mr. Lang. Placing yourself at odds with my employer would be most unwise. The consequences will be severe.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Walter said. He hit the end button and hung up the call.
Being a field handler for twenty years hadn’t killed him, nor had Colombia, nor cancer. Walter had never run from a fight; marshalling the forces to beat the disease had been behind his decision to take Faisal’s money in the first place.
He decided he’d take his chances.
Brennan called Lang just before noon from a hotel by Dulles Airport. “I’m on a pair of flights, to Paris and then to Luanda,” he said. “I’m leaving in two hours. What can you tell me about Angola?’
Lang was still tired, drinking coffee and reading the papers while Christmas music droned out of the radio in his kitchen. “I’m going to send you a couple of emails. One is a recent security briefing on the situation there; the other is a page from my passport, showing you what the local visa looks like. It’s just a stamp, but you’ll need one to get through customs. We have a papermaker in Paris who can help you with it, but it needs to be off the books, or he’ll flag the agency. How long do you have there?”
Brennan checked his itinerary. “About six hours.”
“That should be more than enough. Look, I’ll contact him for you, have him meet you at Charles De Gaulle. Once you’re in Angola, work on lining up ordinance and a guide for the area in question.”
“Is Alex okay?” Brennan asked.
“She’s under wraps and fine,” Walter said. “Don’t worry about her. I promised I’d look out for her and I will.”
“I’ll contact you once I’m on the ground,” Brennan said. “Stay safe, okay?”
“You got it,” Walter said. “Keep your head down.”
“Hey,” Brennan said, “they once called this place ‘The Pearl of Africa’. What could go wrong?
A half-hour away, Carolyn Brennan-Boyle sat in the family living room and watched Jessie unwrap her Birthday presents, relieved she seemed happy. She’d helped by giving her mother a lengthy list of suggestions. It included a kit that let her create her own perfume and makeup. Her eyes widened when she saw it under the paper and she ran over to hug her mom, who was sitting on the sofa. Then the little girl’s smile faded a bit.
“Are you okay with it, sweetie? Was that the one you wanted?” Carolyn asked.
Jessie smiled and nodded, but it wasn’t particularly convincing.
“You miss your father, don’t you?”
Jessie nodded again. “How come daddy couldn’t be here?”
“He wants to be here,” she said. “You have to remember how much your father loves you. He wouldn’t be away at all if it were his choice.”
“Then how come…”
“The work he does is very important,” Carolyn said, anticipating her child’s question. “He helps keep the public safe.”
She was saying the right things, but Carolyn felt a distance from her husband greater than the miles between them. Before he’d left, they’d fought often, and he’d hardly been speaking with her because of her role in getting him back into the field. At least they’d had a chance to get past that. At least he’d stopped in and seen the kids before going overseas again.
Once again, she had no idea when her husband would return. David Fenton-Wright had been deliberately vague about Joe’s progress in tracking down the EU sniper. Perhaps it was just a question of “need to know,” but she suspected from David’s manner in the few days prior that they weren’t getting far. She’d seen the story of Tilo Bustamante’s death on CNN, and she knew he was considered a suspect by several agencies.
She’d always known Joe had to kill people as part of his job; or, she’d assumed it. She’d never been involved operationally with his work, but other agents had to dispatch targets with an almost routine regularity. Was that why he was so distant of late? Was it catching up to him, contributing to his self-doubt about his role?
The phone rang.
“It’s me,” Brennan said when she answered. “I had to call, make sure everything’s okay there.”
She smiled. She was glad he hadn’t just let it pass. “Do you want to talk to the little beasties?”
“Yeah.”
She handed the phone to Jessie first and watched h
er face light up as she talked to him. Then the little girl handed the phone to her brother and watched the reaction again. He smiled and laughed at something his father said. Then he came back to her with the phone. “He wants to talk to you again, mommy.”
Carolyn put the phone back to her ear. “Hi.”
“That was pretty awesome,” he said.
“It was worth it, wasn’t it?” she said. “Where are you?”
“En route to Africa, following up a lead.”
David had told her he was leaving Joe in Europe for the time being. She wondered how far out of the loop she was.
“Don’t ask where,” he added, before she could say it. “Need to know only. Look, I have to go; my plane’s boarding soon.”
“Does Walter know where you are?”
“Yeah, but he’s laying low for a couple of days. Don’t worry about it. I’ll call you in a week or so when I know what I’m doing next. Oh… they just announced my flight. I’ve got to go.”
“Okay,” she said. “I love…”
But he’d already hung up.
8./
March 2, 2016, LUANDA, ANGOLA
It had been seven years since he’d last set foot on African soil, but there was a familiarity to it when the doors opened and the stairs led the 747’s passengers down to the tarmac at Aeroporto 4 de Fevereiro. He’d never been to Angola before; but an assignment in Gabon had offered that same humid blast of wet, hot African air when getting off the plane, temperatures in the eighties, humidity approaching a similar figure.
But it wasn’t just the weather. Africa smelled different, to an outsider. The combination of local living conditions, local diet and the effect of constant heat on organic material led to a strange mixture of sweat, garbage and decay in the air. At first it was as unpleasant as it sounded. But he knew it wouldn’t take long before he wasn’t even noticing it. Brennan imagined New York or Washington probably smelled just as strange to someone from Africa.
The passengers filed down the stairs, the majority local but a fair smattering of foreigners among them. Angola’s rich oil, gold and diamond deposits had turned it into the latest kleptocratic former communist nation, with eighty-five percent of the population in abject poverty while the remainder cut deals with multinational conglomerates to fleece the country dry. They’d even begun developing a southern satellite city to the capital, Luanda, replete with North American-style housing subdivisions, so that the foreigners could live near the nicest beaches, at Kilometer Seventeen and the Mussolo Peninsula, and not have to watch the local children and their malnourished, swollen stomachs as they starved to death.
At the bottom of the plane’s stairs, a standard city transit-style bus was painted in garish, multi-shaded blue advertising colors, hocking a Portuguese soft drink with peacock subtlety. If it hadn’t been daylight still, and he hadn’t known better, Brennan might have been fooled into thinking Angola was stable, and normal. From overhead, looking out the tiny airplane window, he’d seen the huge Mussaque – or slum – that bordered the airport, and the many that dotted the city’s landscape, wedged between blocks of old colonial homes and the friends of the government who’d commandeered them.
Across the city, corrugated tin-shack favelas told the real story; they were mostly one-room huts, with no sanitation, no running water, garbage, filth and vermin everywhere. The walls were muddled together from old packing crates, shipping containers, scrap metal, mud and wire mesh. And they were home to most of the nation’s population of twenty-two million.
In 1972, Walter’s briefing had noted, Angola had become known as the “Paris of Africa” or even “the Pearl of Africa”, a land of abundant natural resources, beautiful weather, centuries-old Colonial architecture, astonishing beaches and African wildlife. Unfortunately, the local residents were treated like just another natural resource, and forced into indentured servitude by the Portuguese for generations. Even in the last few decades of Portuguese rule, they were prevented by law from learning skilled trades or taking jobs in those areas away from Portuguese settlers.
When the inevitable glorious people’s revolution came – as it had in most of post-Colonial Africa – the Portuguese fled and left Angolans, segmented socially by tribes, fighting amongst themselves; ostensibly they each represented a modern political ideology, although in fact it continued feuds that went back five centuries, to when the Queen of one major tribe began enslaving the others and selling them to Europeans.
The civil war raged for twenty-six years, ravaging the population and leaving up to 80% missing at least one limb from a landmine explosion; in fact, there were estimates that landmines covered an eighth of the country, which was one of Africa’s largest.
It only ended with the death of the UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002. A former Pan-African Socialist, Savimbi had “transformed” into a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist conservative by the time of his death … because that was a requirement of the millions in aide he received from the U.S. His opponents, in Jose Eduardo Dos Santos’ MPLA party, eventually turned to democratic reform anyway, due to the near-global collapse of Marxism… along with its money supply from the defunct Soviet Union.
The money vacuum that supplied and controlled the local power elite was filled by multinational corporations, intent on massively ramping up the country’s oil production, already among the world leaders, and taking advantage of a vast mineral base. The Jesuit-trained former communist leader, Dos Santos, became a corrupt oligarch, extending his terms over and over, enriching his family and friends with hundreds of millions of dollars in patronage and business advantage. Like so many African leaders, the power he wielded within his nations border had given him a sense of superhuman ego, a complete loss of empathy, and the delusion of right-by-association. The country had a Gross Domestic Product of more than a hundred and twenty billion dollars, and yet per capita income was just shy of six thousand.
Black market dollars continued to dominate the local currency, leaving the population in poverty while their political leaders enriched themselves and built idyllic suburbs. Fourteen years after the ceasefire, as 2016 was about to begin, Luanda was the most expensive capital on the planet, due to the outrageous boom-town prices charged to foreigners to live and work there. And yet still, the locals starved. The city remained covered in the signs of utter poverty, services were near-non-existent even for the wealthy, oil-backed expats; crime was staggeringly high. A machine gun cost less than a good steak while a case of cola could set you back three hundred bucks.
To Brennan, the place reeked of the worst of human nature; power-hungry leaders, a cowed and terrified populace, foreign elements – including many American companies – more than willing to take what Angola had to offer and leave nothing behind for those who lived there. How was it allowed to go on? Even after all of his years of service, he never ceased to be struck by how people could treat one another, all in the name of personal gain.
He got on the bus to the airport terminal, which looked as though it had been upgraded from Walter’s description and modernized. He muttered a quiet resolution to himself to stay on point, to follow up the story of the missing nuke and Khalidi’s missing money man. He wasn’t in Angola to save the local people, and he grimly reminded himself that in that part of the world, that attitude was par for the course.
The trip through customs was monotonous, dull, time-consuming. Liberalization hadn’t decreased the airport graft, and one of the customs workers took a bottle of whiskey from Brennan’s bag – which he’d expected; he’d brought two for just such purposes. His bag search was done by hand after he’d filed around a cordon with about two hundred other tired travelers, a mix of black and white, old and young, male and female, some families with young kids, some older kids alone, some single working men. Everyone was dressed for the heat, with short sleeved shirts, t-shirts, shorts, sandals.
After the search they filtered through to a row of steel-and-rubber baggage carousels then waited nearly an hour
for their stuff to be unloaded. Brennan ignored the odd soldier in olive drab, the local police in two shades of blue, their white dress gloves stark against dark African skin. He walked the short distance from the carousel to the front doors and out into the city afternoon, the whirr of the cicadas a dull roar in the background and the circular road that front the terminal packed with traffic. It was hot and dusty, ninety degrees in the shade, with the stifling humidity weighing his clothing down, pinning it to his skin with damp gravity. Past the road ahead was a vast parking lot; but to his right was a taxi stand, and only one taxi. He made a beeline for it, getting there before anyone else intervened. The driver, Rucca, was a Portuguese expat who’d married a local.
“I warn you in advance,” he said. “The fares here are kind of crazy.”
Brennan knew the background, the stratospheric local prices; he’d emptied his only remaining contingency account in Europe to finance the trip. “Just keep the route as short as it needs to be, okay?” he replied. “I tip better when I feel like I’ve been well-treated.”
The driver smiled while looking back into the rearview mirror at his passenger and nodded. “Just remember that once you’ve been in the local traffic for a few minutes; remember that I’m on your side,” he said. He chuckled slightly at the end in the knowing manner of someone who has just warned a greenhorn off of eating the hottest local peppers.
The driver headed towards downtown, where old Portuguese colonial office buildings, homes and shops were slowly being dwarfed by new glass office towers, guest lodgings and condo apartments. There were plenty of signs that capitalism was beginning to lift local conditions despite all the corruption; but the poverty among those being left behind was staggering. Kids with swollen bellies walking barefoot beside his car, trying to catch up to beg for food and money; men in their thirties who looked sixty, their arms and legs thin as sinewy pipecleaners; young teenage girls with bellies so swollen from malnourishment they could be mistaken for pregnant. They didn’t dominate the sidewalks of the capital, its white plaster architecture reminiscent of Barcelona; but they could be seen amongst the crowds, down alleys, in front of shops begging for food.