Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller

by Bradley West

  Two well-dressed Asians with military bearings and lithe physiques closed in, moving Nolan away from the open door. “Let him go, Kirill,” ordered one of the locals.

  Nolan took a few steps back. One Singaporean had a small automatic stuck in the Russian’s ribs as he took the man’s larger weapon out of his right hand. A third Asian ran up and blocked the sedan by standing in front of it, while a fourth rapped on the driver’s window with a pistol barrel. The door opened and the Caucasian driver exited, hands in the air. The men cuffed both Caucasians and deposited them in the back seat. Two of the officers got into the front and drove off slowly, leaving the remaining two Singaporeans behind with Nolan. The episode took twenty seconds.

  “Do you gentlemen need my help?” was the best Nolan could muster.

  “No, Mr. Larson. Get some rest. Your friend Mr. Barling asked us to look after you once you left the embassy. We can see that he was right. We’ll question these two and let the DEA know what we learn.”

  They walked off, both men on their cell phones. Nolan felt sick to his stomach. These officers had to be from the Internal Security Department, bosom buddies of the CIA and FBI. If his kidnappers were from FSB head office and talked at all about the Fourth Policy, he would go to prison. He looked around. Not fifty feet away the same commuters remained in line for cabs. Either they hadn’t seen anything, or more likely, had chosen not to see. For lack of a better option, he returned to the taxi rank.

  “Where to, sir?” asked the driver when he climbed into a taxi ten minutes later.

  “142 Watten Drive,” he said. With Teller busy in Burma and the Russians in custody, there didn’t seem to be anyone trying to kill him at the moment . . . unless he counted the MSS. But the Chinese probably wouldn’t have anyone following him in Singapore at the moment, so home it was. “Wake me when we get there. I’m taking a nap.”

  Nolan had the presence of mind to text Millie his home address with the appended message, “Dinner at 7 at my place,” before his phone died.

  “Sir? Sir? That’s $11.20.” Nolan paid the driver and lurched the few steps to the locked front gate of his modest home with an immodest mortgage. This was the third time in twenty-four hours he’d been there, but the first time he didn’t have to crawl through a drain to get in. He plugged his dead phone into the charger, set the bedside alarm for 6:30 and was asleep once his head touched the pillowcase.

  The sound of the bedroom door opening had him bolting upright. “Who is it?” he blurted out, thoughts of Teller’s men, or Russia or China agents flitting through his blurred consciousness. Flooding after came more sinister visions of the FBI, CIA or ISD here to arrest him.

  Instead it was Juanilla with an armload of ironing. She dropped the folded clothes on the floor, just as startled as he was. “Before Ma’am left she told me to come back from my sister’s today. She said you’d be home tomorrow.”

  “Yes, well, I’m home early. That’s OK; you can leave the clothes over there and put them away later.” Juanilla scooped up the errant garments, dumped them on the bedside armchair and beat a retreat.

  Just then his alarm clock went off: 6:30 p.m. on the nose. Millie due here at seven . . . Millie? Shit! Nolan raced to the phone and saw a text from Millie saying she was on the way, time-stamped five minutes ago. This was not good. Not good at all. How in the hell was he explaining to his wife that he was entertaining a twenty-six-year-old woman in the family home? An Indian woman to boot . . . with Joanie being Singaporean Chinese, there was a long history of mutual ethnic antipathy. Singapore’s prosperity and zero tolerance of racial discrimination had in recent years reduced tensions, but the two groups weren’t historically close. On top of that, Millie was half Joanie’s age with three times the bosom . . . well, it didn’t even bear thinking about if Juanilla spilled the beans.

  And speaking of Joanie, how in the hell was he taking her out of China without involving the Agency? He needed time to think. After dinner would be soon enough.

  Work email brought no good news, just Matthews asking for the Airstrip One report and Flynn’s two-word follow-up on the hotel room ransacking: “No leads.” The DEA goody bag was now at the Sembawang naval base, where the U.S. Navy apparently had a facility that handled radioactive materials. Hecker was off the air, not surprising given his family’s ordeal. Singapore DEA head Damien Barling checked in to report that he’d heard about the aborted kidnapping and suggested Nolan drop by tomorrow. Constantine had approved security for Millicent Mukherjee while she was in Singapore . . . say what? That bluenose would receive a report tomorrow morning that Millie was over at Nolan’s house Monday night. Great, just great. What had happened to his request for security now that someone—presumably the FSB or its externally focused counterpart, the SVR—had tried to grab him? Constantine either didn’t know or didn’t care.

  Those Russians now in custody were doubtless being questioned as he sat there. If they talked, he could face a treason charge for sheltering Watermen’s stolen NSA files . . . . Goddamnit. Now that he’d slept a few hours, he realized a clearer mind wasn’t necessarily better.

  Downstairs, the front doorbell rang. Millie. Juanilla chirped that she’d get it.

  Wait a second, what had the ISD man said to his kidnapper? “Let him go, Kirill.” Kirill. The Singaporean knew the Russian’s name. That meant the hood was stationed locally and not off the overnight flight from Moscow. So the thugs were SVR and not FSB, and unlikely to know anything about Robert Nolan other than his name, a photo and urgent instructions to grab him. It was a desperate move, taking a foreigner in broad daylight standing outside Plaza Singapura mall. There wouldn’t have been any time to give the SVR cadre any background briefing on Watermen’s files. Nolan was sleeping in his own bed at least one more night.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DANGEROUS LIAISON

  MONDAY NIGHT, MARCH 10, SINGAPORE; BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA; RANGOON

  Juanilla poked her head into his home office. “Sir, your guest has arrived.” Nolan snapped awake and hustled downstairs. At the landing, he saw Millie dressed provocatively, those wonderful breasts straining the fabric of her tight white blouse. Complementing the look were torn blue jeans and high heels. Nolan was simultaneously aroused and alarmed.

  Despite her attire, Millie offered him a formal hand and said, “So nice of you to invite me to your home, Mr. Nolan.”

  “B-Bob. Please call me Bob. Uh, could you take your shoes off and leave them outside the front door? Chinese house, Chinese rules and all that.” Millie complied.

  “Would you join me in a glass of white wine?” Nolan turned toward the kitchen to see a watchful Juanilla already fishing a bottle out of the chiller.

  He turned on an overhead light and was angling toward a chair adjacent to Millie’s likely landing spot when she turned to him and said, “She’s beautiful!” Millie held Joanie’s twenty-five-year-old wedding picture. It was true. Joanie Lam had been a stunner in her day, and she could still swivel heads. He felt another pang of guilt. Not only had he cheated on his wife, but Joanie was in a Guangdong jail while he was entertaining this young woman in the living room of the family home.

  Millie sensed his unease and shifted gears as Juanilla handed them each a glass of Chardonnay. His helper put the bottle into a wine cooler given to them as a twentieth wedding anniversary present. Nolan felt another pang.

  “Sir, what would you like for dinner?”

  Screw it. No sense in hiding now. Turning to Millie he said, “Juanilla does a great chicken rosemary over long-grained rice with stir-fried vegetables.”

  “That would be fine,” Millie said, and off Juanilla went.

  Millie fixed her wide brown eyes on him and leaned in. His gaze was drawn toward her breasts and had to fight the urge to lean close enough to kiss her. “This afternoon I managed to do some work on your favorite fruit. It turns out Burma does grow a lot of mangosteens, but not in the delta at low elevations. They only grow upcountry in better soil. Furthermore, t
hey’re not in season now, and Burma doesn’t export them. However, they are in season in Malaysia.”

  “Interesting. So there’s no way those guards could have bought the mangosteens they were eating on Saturday locally. Remember, the gunman on the runway main gate spat his fruit out. It wasn’t something he was used to eating. His mangosteen must have come off of MH370.”

  “It seems so.”

  “Tell me what else is new. How is the task force? Did you meet Melissa?” For the next twenty minutes until dinner arrived and for another twenty thereafter, Millie apprised him of the strengths and weaknesses of her fellow CIA researchers, most of whom she had met for the first time on Monday. Melissa Shook seemed like a good leader, though Millie noticed several of her fellow task force members thought her aloof. Millie had swapped cubicles so she was next to Nolan. Nolan’s replacement laptop had arrived just after six o’clock. The IT fellows asked him to drop by Tuesday morning so they could get his opinion on a couple of configuration wrinkles.

  Then from out of the blue, “What will you do with Watermen’s NSA files?”

  Where had that question come from? “I don’t have them back yet, and it’s not something I’m going to talk about now or in the future.”

  Millie took the hint and changed subjects, describing her plain bedroom in an overstuffed safe house shared with another six task force boarders.

  The food and wine finished and the dishes cleared, it was time for Nolan to extricate himself from this delicate situation. Before he could say a thing, Millie leaned over and whispered, “I want to apologize for what happened last night. I don’t want you to think I’m some sex-crazed nut. I was really, really afraid at the airport after the guards took you away. After I made those phone calls, I figured I would be arrested next. On the plane and after, well, I was so relieved to see you that I got carried away.”

  “Well, I’m equally at fault. As you can see, I’m a married man and I love my wife, but, but . . . well, I had an affair that ended several years ago. It almost broke up my marriage. My wife took a long time before she trusted me at all, and even now we, uh, we, well, we—”

  “Shush! I got it,” Millie said. Unbidden and silent as a cat, Juanilla appeared with two bowls of Häagen-Dazs. She had to have heard that last exchange. Nolan was well and truly screwed if the helper blabbed.

  Millie ignored her ice cream while Nolan rehearsed a series of flawed explanations he might try on Joanie to account for an attractive Indian woman dining with him alone at home.

  “I’m not a dominatrix or weirdo. That stuff in my suitcase is all props for a bachelorette night I’m hoping to attend on Friday. One of my old classmates from SOAS is getting married here in early April, and I found a hole-in-the-wall shop in Bangkok a few weekends back that had all sorts of cheap S&M gear. I bought it for a laugh.”

  “I have to admit, I was a little surprised to see a whip on the bed this morning,” he offered.

  “I don’t even like being play-spanked,” she said and leaned forward. He had no problem maintaining eye contact this time as she continued, “I’m just looking for a man who treats me like a woman and not a sex object. Travis Ryder might have six-pack abs, but he has a sixth-grade mentality toward sex. I’m so mad at myself for falling for that macho line of shit again. It’s—”

  “You don’t have to explain. I understand.” He took both of her hands in his own, feeling her warmth. He leaned over to kiss her forehead. Instead, she looked up and her mouth met his in a short, wet kiss. Juanilla appeared at their side, and they broke it off in startled silence as the maid collected their dessert bowls.

  Alone again, they stared at one another for several seconds. Millie broke the spell by saying in a voice not much more than a whisper, “Do you want to take me upstairs?”

  Nolan’s brain told him this was a horrible idea while his loins sent another signal. His eyes drank in the innocent face and shy smile. He stood up and reached out a hand, helped her to her feet led her up the staircase and into the master bedroom.

  * * * * *

  It was almost eleven before Millie emerged from the shower and dressed. “Do you need a taxi?” he managed from the twisted, soaked sheets, wholly spent. He could no longer hide behind the Clintonian definition of fidelity. And the deeds were done in his marital bed, with a couple of his wife’s scarves added into the mix. Hoo-boy.

  “No, I have an embassy car and a couple of bodyguards cooling their heels outside.”

  “Oh, right.” Nolan’s brain was completely unwired, all his synapses having spent the last three hours residing in his nether regions. “I’ll walk you to the gate.”

  She looked at his naked form slumped on the edge of the bed, walked over and put her hands on the back of his sweat-streaked hair. She leaned down to kiss him on the mouth. “I can show myself out, and you probably don’t need any more bad PR.” He was still debating the pros and cons of escorting her when she closed the door behind her and left him to survey the mess, while over the MP3 speakers Shirley Manson of Garbage sang the words to “Vow” just for him. The two torn, baby oil–soaked and knotted Hermes scarves Joanie so prized went into the trash. How was he to know that Millie enjoyed a little playful bondage? As for that bachelorette party story, well, he wasn’t quite sure how much of that he was buying. But why, oh why, hadn’t he dug out an old tie or two instead? Finding perfect matches for vintage scarves would be damn near impossible short of flying to Paris.

  Out of the shower, he sat at his desk and reflected. Joanie’s refusal to sleep with him might have justified the odd call girl, but the wife had hinted that the intercourse embargo would soon be over. He’d kept his nose clean as of late in anticipation of a rapprochement. The Millie affair was out of hand and under less stressful circumstances, wouldn’t have happened at all. He didn’t have the luxury for a lot of self-pity, but he indulged for a minute longer to understand what had transpired and to determine what had to happen next.

  A review of his Gmail and encrypted Safe-mail accounts showed nothing further from Joanie. The silence signaled that her situation was serious. It was now 11:15 p.m., late enough for the West Coast Nolans to be legitimately awakened. He called Mei Ling’s burner, and on the fifth ring was greeted with a cautious “Hello?”

  Mei Ling was a fine young woman of twenty-five who had played solid second base on the varsity softball team at Pomona while majoring in the classics. She had excelled in having her heart broken by poetic, sinewy upperclassmen. Now working at a real estate investment banking firm just across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, Mei Ling was coming into her own both professionally and socially. Having inherited her mother’s catwalk physique and looks, her Eurasian beauty attracted suitors from across the racial and social spectrums. Nolan’s fishing buddy Bruce Goodhill headed Good Earth Advisors and hired Mei Ling out of college three years ago. Mei Ling had earned a recent promotion from analyst to associate, including a salary bump up to a living wage. Bruce and his vivacious wife Lena kept Joanie and him apprised of Mei Ling’s social gyrations. Right now she seemed to be unattached and enjoying it.

  “It’s Dad. I’m in Singapore. How are you guys doing?”

  “We’re fine. How much longer do we have to hide out here? Bert’s getting cabin fever.”

  “Cabin fever? Hell, it’s been all of one day. I sent your mom to stay with her relatives in Guangdong on the duck farm. China’s intelligence services detained her—”

  “Mom’s under arrest? Oh, no!”

  “Stay calm. She left a voicemail and sent an email confirming she’s fine. She also said the people holding her want me to come to China. Mei Ling, you know about my job and why I can’t do that. My employer wouldn’t allow it, and if I did it on my own, there would be security and employment implications.”

  “Dad, this isn’t about avoiding trouble at work. It’s about Mom.”

  “Here’s my suggestion. Do you still have a China visa?”

  “Yes. It expires in July or August this
year.”

  “Then Bert drives you to the Vancouver Airport later today. You speak Mandarin and Cantonese. Buy a plane ticket to Guangzhou or Hong Kong. I’ll email your Safe-mail account once I can get a lead on where your mother might be. Go to where she’s being held, and I’ll give you the right things to say. Visit your mother if at all possible. Tell them I can help them, but I cannot come to China. If you pass that message along, I think everything will be fine.”

  “Why can’t you go to your CIA bosses, tell them Mom’s been arrested and have them put pressure on the Chinese? Arrest the wife of their ambassador to the US and swap them.”

  “I’m not popular with my employers. And while your mom’s a very important person to us, in diplomatic circles she’s not worth the wife of China’s ambassador. If your efforts don’t pan out, the next step will need to be more drastic. On balance, I think a quieter approach will get her released in the shortest time with the least fuss.”

  “Alright. What about bringing Bert with me?”

  “Two reasons not to. First, he’s still in college and needs to stay in school or he’ll have wasted his spring semester. Second, and more important, he’s not under control like you are. He’s a hothead, and I can see him taking on a half-dozen soldiers at the slightest provocation—”

  “Yeah, and he’d likely kick their asses, too.” Mei Ling was right: Bert was a beast, 6’2” tall and two hundred twenty pounds carved from granite, with Singapore Commandos training under his belt, augmented by years of Muay Thai fighting.

  “That's all well and good until they draw down, then either shoot him or lock him up for real,” Nolan said. He continued, “Do you have money? I can fix the time off with Mr. Goodhill.”

  “I have plenty of money. I’ll call Bruce from the airport to tell him I’ll be abroad for a week or so.”