by Sam Powers
“You okay?”
He turned his head slightly and looked up. Callum McLean had spoken softly, tactfully. He was a large man with a blond crewcut. McLean was a good five inches taller than Brennan, six-five in his bare feet, a huge-chested, broad shouldered tank. They’d served together for nearly twenty years; McLean was the kind of team member who kept people alive with his mere presence. Brennan had always tried to tell himself that if Callum was the most talented and strongest guy he knew, he at least had the advantage of speed… but the truth was, Callum was faster than him, too.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay,” Brennan said.
“You don’t sound it. Or look it. You know we couldn’t have done anything about this, right?”
“Huh? Sure, yeah.” But Brennan didn’t know anything of the sort. Bobby had been along for Al Basrah and Brennan had known he was close to cracking, and Brennan had said nothing. He didn’t feel guilty, he told himself. Bobby’s decision was Bobby’s decision, not his.
“Chances are, even if Corcoran hadn’t precipitated what went down, he still would’ve cracked eventually,” McLean murmured. He’d known Joe since Great Mistakes, the affectionate name for their Recruit Training. They’d been best friends for nearly two decades, and he didn’t deserve to be beating himself up. “Besides none of it was your call.”
“The op was my design, my responsibility,” Brennan whispered back. They’d been over this before, and the timing wasn’t appropriate, he thought.
“But it was Corcoran’s call, Corcoran’s decision to go off plan. And Bobby’s decision to pull the trigger.”
Off plan? That was one way to describe it, Brennan thought. “Look, let’s just drop this? Okay? We can talk about it later. You know we will anyway.”
After the service, McLean waited outside on the broad marble steps that led from the funeral parlor to its parking lot. The attendees slowly filtered out and past him. It was a few more minutes before Brennan appeared, hands in his pockets, staring morosely at his shoes.
“I had to try and say something to them,” he said softly. “They were very polite.”
“You want to go get a drink?” McLean said. “Some of Bobby’s friends from his first team are meeting up at the Old Ebbitt Oyster Bar.”
Really? Brennan thought. They picked a bar full of politicians? He shook his head. “I don’t think so, not today.”
“Well… I’m going to head over there pretty much right away.”
“Okay. Look, don’t worry about me, all right? I’m good. I’m fine.”
He didn’t look fine, McLean thought. Joe looked like he’d just lost a family member. But he left it at that, knowing that, no matter how tough he felt about things inside, the one comrade he didn’t really need to worry about was Joe Brennan. He’d figure things out.
Brennan took the expressway south, his driving autonomic, his mind elsewhere as the traffic zipped by his sedan to the suburbs. His phone rang. He used the hands-free button on his wheel to answer.
“Brennan.”
“Agent Brennan? It’s Jonah Tarrant; David Fenton-Wright’s assistant?” He phrased it like a question, unsure if a field agent would be familiar with him. Brennan wasn’t exactly inclined to stop by Langley on a regular basis. “Are you busy?”
By busy, Brennan knew, he meant on assignment or working on something of national security interest… which also meant that he already knew the answer, as nobody went into the field anymore without Fenton-Wright’s personal approval. The deputy director hadn’t been in his post for long but had been with the agency for nearly twenty years all told, and had a fearsome reputation for keeping control over every detail.
“No, just driving home,” Brennan said, hoping to cut Tarrant off before the inevitable occurred.
No such luck. “We need you to head on in,” Tarrant said. “We’ve had some difficult news.” Once again, “we” meant Fenton-Wright. Brennan considered himself a nuts-and-bolts sort of guy, firm in his convictions and his sense of right and wrong. He wasn’t so sure how Fenton-Wright self-assessed.
“Anything more specific?”
“Not on this line. Come on in, Joe, and we’ll talk. It’ll just be for an hour or so.”
That was never good. If they couldn’t talk on an unsecured line that meant it was either an assignment for him or bad news about someone else’s. Either way, it wasn’t the day for it, not after Bobby.
“Look… I’m ten days back from Sri Lanka,” Brennan replied. “Do we really have to do this today? If it could wait until tomorrow…”
“It’s about Walter Lang,” Tarrant said.
He was about thirty miles out. “I’ll be there in a half hour,” he said, ending the call.
Walter was a staff operations officer, and Brennan had torn a strip of him when he’d said he was going back into the field, even though it seemed unlikely, a year earlier, that they’d take him up on the offer; he’d been a mentor for Brennan’s seven years with the agency, a good man with a solid, sober sense of the importance of what they did for a living, the true value of national security. Beyond that, Brennan just plain liked him.
He stepped hard on the accelerator.
At the agency, he left his car in the guest parking area and walked the short distance to the narrow path that led into the courtyard, across the red brick patio to the glass doors, under the broad glass arch. He stopped at security and got a guest pass, having left his own at home in Annandale, miles away. He clipped it to the front pocket of his black suit, crossing the marble lobby floor with the giant agency seal, passing two sets of grey stone columns before reaching the elevators. It seemed quiet in mid-afternoon, and he shared the elevator car with just one other person, a smiling woman in her fifties with frayed honey-blonde ends and a thickly woven olive-green cotton pant suit; she got off on the second floor. He rode on to fourth, to the offices of the multi-faceted National Clandestine Service.
Tarrant had been told by security that Brennan was heading up, and he waited at the elevators, a short, plump young man with curly light brown hair, his hands in his pockets out of slight nervousness. Well-regarded for his analytical abilities and grace under pressure, Tarrant nevertheless couldn’t help but feel a little inadequate when he ran into guys like Joe Brennan, field agents with a strong track record and no small amount of minor celebrity at the office. He’d seen Brennan’s mug in his field services file, but he still didn’t have a sense of the man until he met him face to face.
Brennan shook the younger man’s hand firmly. “Walter’s spoken about you,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you, Jonah.”
“I wish it were better circumstances. Let’s walk and talk.” They headed towards the executive offices, through a small series of staffed cubicles, young analysts and officers on headset phones. “You couldn’t have known this because it’s officially off the books but Walter was on assignment in Colombia.”
“Was?”
“He volunteered because of his fluency and because our official hand down there is tied up with bigger things. Walter said he was tired of being chained to a desk and that it was a good lead.”
That sounded like Walter, thought Brennan. He’d been complaining for years, even though his retirement from field work was well-earned.
“Walter was never an agent,” Brennan said. “He was an Ops officer, a handler.”
“Yes,” Tarrant said as they walked, choosing his words carefully. “David felt that there was considerable risk in this circumstances and wanted someone who could operate blind. His experience as a handler and later cultivating sources as an SSO …”
Brennan stopped walking and cut him off. “As I said, Walter was a support player, not ParOps. Did he have any local backup?”
Tarrant shook his head as they began walking again, turning down a narrow corridor past a series of offices, the lights off in most, pressboard doors open but no one home. “The Colombians were… unenthused by the nature of the project.” At the end of the hallway, he used hi
s security card to swipe a keypad and the executive offices door unlocked with a quiet click. “But David felt the potential information was too valuable not to have a try. It was relatively low-risk, just a drop from an existing source.”
Brennan had been around ambitious types like Tarrant and Fenton-Wright before; he knew better than to say what he was actually thinking… which was that describing a black book, one-man operation in hostile environment as “relatively low-risk” might have been taking things too lightly from the start. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time, he thought; probably not even the first time this month.
Fenton-Wright’s office was at the back of the section, down a non-descript uncarpeted corridor – something about static electricity and computers -- past a secretary and waiting area, and past two more nondescript offices including Jonah Tarrant’s. It was large, almost imperious by agency standard, with double doors, a huge copy of the agency’s emblem emblazoned into the carpet ahead of his antique desk, a sitting area off to the left. Behind the desk, windows looked out onto the central yard, the day still bright and sunny in the room’s muted atmosphere. The secretary ushered them in; Fenton-Wright was seated but rose quickly and walked around the desk to greet them each with a handshake. He had a gray suit on with a white shirt and yellow tie, but his jacket was slung over the back of his desk chair. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Thank you for coming. This has been a difficult day for some of us and it isn’t going to immediately get easier. Please… have a seat.”
Brennan noticed his orange hair had thinned to almost nothing since the last time they’d met in person, three years earlier. Now it was just a neatly trimmed crown, flecked with white. Fenton-Wright had long, thin features, his skin always pink and slightly florid, as if waiting for a skin condition to break out. He’d always struck Brennan as something of a vulture, in both personality and mannerism, his neck slightly too thin for his head, which bobbed forward slightly as he spoke.
He motioned to the two chairs ahead of the desk and they sat. Tarrant crossed his legs uncomfortably, his body language tense. Brennan got the immediate sense Fenton-Wright’s bad news went beyond Walter being in a small amount of trouble.
“Joe, I know you’re on vacation and I do apologize for having to disturb that; but we felt it important that you hear the news from us first,” Fenton-Wright said. “After all, we know you and Walter have been close friends for some time now.”
Drop the other shoe already.
“More than that, however, we felt it prudent to remind you of how important it is to keep those with emotional investments away from an operation that has gone badly. We all know full well how emotional attachment can cloud a field agent’s judgment, and that’s the last thing Walter needs right now.”
“What happened?” Brennan asked, trying to get to the point.
“We lost contact with Walter ten days ago in Colombia,” Fenton-Wright said. His delivery was flat, emotionless, a pure statement of fact. “He’d agreed to meet with a highly placed source with information on the location and shipping routes of the Villanueva Drug Cartel, as well as the identity of a particularly dangerous forger.”
Brennan’s diplomacy momentarily went out the window. “You let Walter into the field in Colombia alone, on a narco case?” He didn’t actually say ‘are you nuts?’, because he didn’t have to. The tone was sufficient.
“Sometimes I have difficult decisions to make very quickly,” Fenton-Wright said. “I won’t apologize for that, Agent Brennan. Walter spent nine months in Colombia…”
“Twenty years ago.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that he speaks Spanish like a local, knows the cities in question and knew the risks,” Fenton-Wright insisted. “He’s a fully trained operative…”
“Twenty years ago,” Brennan repeated. “He’s been on a desk for the last decade, you know that.”
The deputy director had expected resistance. Brennan was the kind of troublemaking know-it-all who would interject with a problem whenever possible. “We’re not here to discuss or argue my authority,” Fenton-Wright said, his voice toughening. “We’re here to ensure that you recognize your responsibilities as a clandestine operations officer, and to reassure that you will not become involved in this matter without my say so.”
Tarrant spoke up for the first time. “Your psychological profile suggests you’re likely to try and intervene personally on Walter’s behalf, Joe,” he said. “You know that’s unacceptable.”
Brennan ignored the implied threat. “Where is he and who has him?”
“Insufficient intel at this time,” Fenton-Wright said.
“Do we have boots on the ground looking?”
“As I said, my inclination is for you to not be involved in this. It’s too personal. But rest assured, we will do whatever we can within reason to ascertain his safety and see if we can arrange an expedient pull-out.” His delivery remained flat, all business.
Brennan stared hard at the man for a moment; he hardly knew Fenton-Wright and had rarely ever dealt with him. His knowledge of office politics was limited to the odd conversation with an ops officer. But he recognized a weasel answer when he heard one. “So you’re leaving him there to fend for himself? Is that it?”
“As I said, the details are need-to-know. But rest assured…”
“Sure,” Brennan said. He got up to leave.
“Agent Brennan,” Fenton-Wright said as he made for the door, “Don’t ignore my directive on this.”
It wasn’t a request, Brennan knew. As he walked out of the office he didn’t reply, but he had the urge to tell Fenton-Wright where he could stuff it.
The drive home was uneventful and Brennan tried to keep his mind off the meeting by listening to National Public Radio, a show on the damage to wetlands in the counties bordering D.C. An avid angler, the subject should have been interesting; but he couldn’t escape the mental image of Walter shackled in some armpit prison.
There were only two likely options: he’d either been caught by the government and was being worked over before doubtless disappearing into the Colombian penal system; or, he’d been caught by the Cartel, in which case he was being tortured for information or just shot and dumped in the jungle for the wildlife to finish off. An exchange seemed unlikely; U.S. policy didn’t look kindly on swapping drug dealers for government employees who weren’t supposed to be inside another nation’s borders.
Brennan exited at Annandale, the road taking him past a series of new housing developments, six-foot-fenced-in family lots half the size of what they used to be, but with homes that seemed grand compared to those of his youth. It was a nice place to live, and he knew it. He turned onto their driveway, a short strip of asphalt with a car port, adjacent to their nineteen sixties three-bedroom bungalow. They’d been pragmatic about the place; the white siding was new and lifetime guaranteed, there was a big backyard for the kids compared to most new lots and a deck made of pretreated lumber. They planned on living there for a long time, so it had had to be right, with a sunken living room and a nice open plan kitchen adjacent to it, with white cabinets, steel pulls his wife had chosen and black granite countertops.
Carolyn left a note on the counter saying she’d taken the kids to play with Michael, Callum and Ellen McLean’s son. Michael had Down syndrome but was such a happy and wonderful child, they’d had no problems convincing their own pre-teen son and daughter that he’d make a good playmate. The note also said Callum was on his way over.
The doorbell rang a few minutes later, just as Brennan uncapped his first beer. He carried the sweating bottle of Michelob to the front door with him.
McLean had brought his fishing rod with him. “Only a few more weeks until winter kicks in,” he said, holding it up. “And you looked this morning like you needed a break.”
They drove out to Huntsman Lake, past innumerable subdivision crescents, privacy fences and roofs all one could see of them, set against backdrops of dark green trees.
More than that, it would be quiet during the week. The lake was large, and still, and dark, with plenty of shoreline to afford them some privacy. They found a shaded spot under some trees and cast off the bank using night crawlers, the wiggling guaranteed to get the hungry fish interested.
Both men were silent for nearly the entire first hour, just enjoying the solitude, the company, the taste of a cold beer and the slow ripple of the water as it lapped against the shore.
“You know, you look like hell,” McLean finally said.
Brennan frowned. Why did Callum pull the big brother routine every time he sensed tension? “I’m fine. Just forget it.”
McLean propped his rod against the forked stick he’d buried in the mud for just that purpose. “Bud, how long have we been friends again?”
“Nineteen years, I think. Something like that.”
“Yeah… well in nineteen years, the only time I’ve seen you with that crappy look constantly was when we lost someone in Iraq. And this morning. Like I said…”
“I know,” Brennan said. “This isn’t about Bobby. Not really, anyway.”
“What then?”
“Work.”
“Ah.” McLean knew he wasn’t supposed to ask. They hadn’t technically been teammates in seven years, and he’d only just received his own honorable discharge. But he’d looked on Joe as a “brother from another mother” for so long, he couldn’t really help it. “Serious?”