by Sam Powers
He stepped into the nearest adjacent alley, local onlookers amused by whatever he was up to. Once away from the sidewalk’s prying eyes, he stripped off the black shirt, then removed a pale blue t-shirt from his bag and changed into it. A few moments later, he stepped out of the other end of the alley, no worse for wear personally but filled with rage. Brennan knew he had to mute it, control it. Going postal would help no on and get him killed, alongside Amanda.
He spotted a café across the street and, despite only being a few blocks from the chaotic scene, sat down at one of the outside tables. A waiter stopped by and he just said ‘coffee’. The waiter took one look at his vacant expression and happily beat a retreat inside with the order.
How had it gone so terribly wrong? Surveillance turned sideways; impromptu rescues never went well, he knew. Not that it would’ve made a difference whether he’d been there or not. Either way, the police were going to show up. Either way, that bullet was going to find…
She’d been defiant up until the end. The Colonel tried to face her down and she’d barked right back at him, fierce and proud. But he didn’t want to remember her like that, lying face down.
Mike was right. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have gotten involved.
***
By the time he got back to his hotel room, Brennan was morose, feeling useless. Inadequate. He told himself that perhaps leaving the service had been a mistake. Perhaps he should’ve stayed on like his friend Callum McLean, taken a promotion, landed a training role.
He threw the bag on the bed.
“It could have been worse.” The man was sitting in the far corner of the room, in one of the two armchairs.
Brennan sighed, exasperated. “My pistol’s in the bag I just threw onto the bed. I’m too goddamned tired to go after it, so just do whatever you’re going to do.”
The man held up both palms in a show of submission. “I’m not here to take another shot at you, Mr. Brennan. My understanding is you’ve had a difficult night already.” He rose from the chair, a middle-aged white guy with square-framed glasses, in a grey suit. He looked like an accountant.
“Look, whatever it is you want, now is not the time…”
“Mr. Brennan, my name is Walter Lang. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
He’d known a few spooks in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike the movie ideal, they were generally cautious guys, fixers and manipulators who stayed in the background. “You’re keeping tabs on me?”
“We have. For a couple of years now, as a matter of fact…”
“Years?” His surprise was obvious.
“When we’re considering recruiting someone for my division, we pay very careful attention to them for quite some time. It’s important to know exactly who we’re dealing with.”
He didn’t like that. It felt invasive. It’s the CIA, dumbass. That’s what they do. “Why me? There are any number of other former Navy guys out there who need something to keep them busy.”
“We asked the Navy to provide us with operational details of your assignments.” Walter took a box of matches of his pocket, took one out and chewed on the wooden stem. “Excuse me; I just quit smoking and it’s a coping thing. Anyway, we studied your performances. You showed an exceptional proficiency in finding and eliminating targets with DEVGRU…”
“So does any member of Team Six; it goes with the job. And there have been plenty of guys through there. So again: why me?”
“The work we do, it’s just not a matter of the task at hand. There are long-term consequences to everything; it doesn’t pay to have personal attachments, considerations back in our own worlds that might take priority over an assignment.”
“In other words, my family is dead and I’m single.”
“And you’re a good man. The lengths you’ve gone to, putting your own neck on the line multiple times to support your brothers in arms, staying in the field when it was prohibitively dangerous, because you knew eliminating one key target could save civilian lives. We need people of a certain mettle, Mr. Brennan, a certain character. It’s not a profile most people possess, the ability to combine ruthless pragmatism with compassion in equal measure. But the reality is that most of the time, we’d rather not kill someone if it’s not necessary to the task at hand. Most of the time, we’ll want you to talk to them.”
“But when you do want someone dead… you want me to do it?”
“Something like that, yes.”
His timing couldn’t have been worse. Aside from the fact that Brennan had spent a decade having to kill people already, there was the sizeable problem that he’d just seen someone he cared about murdered. “Look, mister…”
“Lang. Walter Lang…”
“Mr. Lang, I appreciate the compliments and all, but I just saw a friend of mine, someone I felt very deeply about, shot in front of me. I need to get out of this town, and maybe out of Thailand, before I do something very unsanctioned and perhaps regrettable.”
“Like killing Col. Tep Dham, for example?”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Ours too. Unfortunately, he’s not the priority right now, and he’s not responsible for your friend being shot.”
He couldn’t know something like that unless… “You had eyes in that warehouse tonight.”
Lang nodded. “A confidential informant on the Colonel’s side.”
“And he’s not your priority? If I was being more foolish than I’ve already been, he’d sure as Hell be mine.”
“He didn’t cause that debacle tonight, though he was holding your friend. That raid was…”
“The police. I know. I was there…”
“… I was going to say bought and paid for. The police could’ve raided or arrested the Colonel many times. He pays the right people to make sure that doesn’t happen. But this time…’
“Someone else paid more.”
“Exactly. New players in international narcotics cause us extreme national security headaches. Their trade helps prop up other criminal organizations and they, in turn, help to prop up terrorists, by selling them papers, weapons, supplies. There’s a new player competing for the opium trade up here, a dealer called The Apsonsi.”
“I’ve heard it before. What is it?”
“A mythical Thai creature with the body of a person and the hind quarters of a lion, like a sphynx.”
“Charming.”
“The Apsonsi has rapidly absorbed a series of smaller players and now rivals the Colonel for size. The operation is sophisticated, international and growing. Soon, it will have the resources to wipe out the Colonel. And The Apsonsi does not worry about his business partners’ interests.”
“This… doesn’t sound like my fight,” Brennan said.
“That raid tonight? Your friend would not have been harmed had the police not been bribed to kick in the door. How many more will this individual place in the crosshairs? How many already?”
Brennan sat down on the end of the bed. He was exhausted. “What kind of parameters are we talking about? Because I’m so damned tired right now, I don’t think I could take out dinner.”
“Which is why we’d wait a few days. We’d need you to infiltrate, eliminate and move on. We’ll worry about fallout and cleanup. There may be an opportunity to grab intel, depending on how the assignment proceeds.”
“And then…?”
“And then we would debrief, as per your DEVGRU assignments. The process isn’t that different. The targets aren’t military, that’s all.”
That’s all? He acted like there was no difference between a civilian and a soldier.
Lang must’ve sensed his resistance. “Mr. Brennan, the people I’m talking about are near universally loathsome individuals, dangerous people who put their self-interest above the safety and health of others, people who use, abuse and murder their fellow citizens. In an ideal world, common law would be enough. The system would always be fair, and just, and accurate. But we live in a decidedl
y imperfect world, where each country’s system differs, where politics and power and social status often trump decency, fairness and the rule of law.”
Brennan was more than curious, he had to admit. He’d felt that emptiness again, after the shooting, when he’d been sitting there at that café absorbing what had happened. He felt the need to act, to take a team in and… then remembered, again, that that life was behind him.
But it didn’t have to be.
“What kind of support would you offer?”
Lang smiled. When he heard an answer like that, he knew he had his man.
Lang rented a private home to rest and prepare, a modern glass-and-hardwood cube with a high-fenced backyard and a pool. It was just north of the town, looking down on the small city’s lights as they cut through the mid-evening darkness.
Brennan showered and changed into shorts, a t-shirt and sandals, then went down to the rectangular living room. Lang had the sliding door open and was standing on the balcony, the sound of the cicadas and crickets filling the air. He had what looked like a scotch in one hand and wore a distant expression. In the living room, he’d put a CD on the stereo, Dave Brubeck’s Quartet, not too loud, playing some deep cool jazz, Paul Desmond’s tenor sax reinforcing the smooth groove.
“Are you hungry?” Lang said, once he’d noticed Brennan come down the stairs. “There’s some pad thai in the fridge, along with the fruit basket they dropped off. I’m having some proper groceries delivered tomorrow.”
Brennan walked over to the balcony. “How long are you planning on us being here?”
“Not long. A few days. But we limit problems if we limit exposure, so we’ll be here until we go green.”
The younger man nodded toward the file folder on the coffee table, just ahead of the big fireplace. “That for me?”
“Uh huh.” He downed the last swallow of scotch then walked back to the small sideboard against the living room’s interior wall to pour another. “You want one?”
“I’m good.”
“Probably for the best.”
Brennan sat down on the leather couch and picked up the folder.
Unlike the Colonel, The Apsonsi was a mystery to everyone at Lang’s division, the National Clandestine Service. They weren’t just lacking another identity; they didn’t even know if it referred to a person or group. They just knew that in less than eighteen months, The Apsonsi had murdered, intimidated and blackmailed its way to a controlling interest in the Thai opium trade. Its rapid establishment of a supply contract for the Sicilian mafia’s European interests suggested serious resources. But its people, picked up very rarely, had one unified response to any questioning: nobody talks about The Apsonsi.
No one who wants to live.
The rumors were terrible, that anyone who spoke out against The Apsonsi would be hung from meathooks, flayed, have their skin turned inside out, then be dipped in acid. Another said its enemies were fed to pigs. The details were so sketchy that the stories could have been completely apocryphal, but they’d done their job: the Thai drug trade was terrified.
A confidential informant managed to get close to one of The Apsonsi’s suppliers and confirmed a shipment that was on its way to Marseille, in France, was loaded with refined heroin. He was found a week later. Or, his torso was found a week later, washed up on shore near Narathiwat, in the far south of the country, by the Malaysian border. His head, arms and legs were never recovered.
After the hard intel, Lang had included another series of pictures. They were morgue shots, dead people, their lifeless eyes staring up out of partially unzipped body bags.
Lang had wandered over and was watching him sift through the prints. “The last series are of people who overdosed on The Apsonsi’s product in the last month alone. In one European city. Worse, we believe the same heroin was purchased in bulk by Al Mamaru, an extremist organization with roots in Egypt’s Vanguards of Conquest terror cell. The damage a group like that could do with millions of dollars flowing in is damn near incalculable.”
Brennan threw the pictures back down on the rest of the file. “Is the sob story at the end supposed to make me overlook the fact that you don’t seem to even know where to start? This isn’t intel, Mr. Lang…”
“Please… it’s Walter.”
“Walter, this isn’t intel, it’s a fairy tale. Or a nightmare, maybe. You have nothing! No contacts, no assessment of strengths or vulnerabilities other than, apparently, ‘they seem to have none’.”
“You found the colonel’s home quickly enough.”
“About that: why did he come after me in the first place? All I did was visit a coffee plantation…”
“… which is a front for one of his crops. The cheerful Australian you met, Gwendolyn Keith, is a ruthless taskmaster believed responsible for the disappearances of at least a half-dozen of their workers. How did you end up talking to her?”
“A photographer named Larry Nguyen recommended her.”
“Ah. I’d say I wasn’t a believer in bad luck, but Mr. Nguyen is, rather unluckily for you, exactly who he says he is. His taste in tour guides leaves something to be desired. Ms. Keith was an arms and drug dealer in her home country before the Colonel recruited her.”
“She makes a heck of a cup of coffee, mind…”
“We have a pair of eyes in Ban Doi. Your sudden appearance scared the hell out of her. The only reason she didn’t shoot you was probably that she wanted the Colonel’s okay first. Unfortunately, he’d already sent a pair of gunmen up here for a target we have yet to identify…”
“My friend, I suspect. Her family is wealthy. She’d have made a worthwhile hostage.”
“My commiserations. Our local law enforcement sources weren’t able to determine what occurred with her after…”
“It’s not an issue. We didn’t know each other long, and I hadn’t met her family. It would’ve been awkward to have had to explain myself.”
“Your intentions were good.”
“There were valueless. I helped nothing.”
“Then now you get a chance to make amends. We need a way in, someone who knows the organization. We can’t turn to informants and any methods we’d use as an organization back home to extract what we need are off limits here. Officially.”
“Officially. Then what am I?”
“Officially, you won’t exist. Your paycheck will go into an account already set up in your name in Switzerland. Your expenses will go into a series of accounts, accessible from any geographic location that has banks or money transfer. Assignments will usually be forwarded as encrypted mail but may also be done by phone. Either way, contact with anyone from the agency will be minimal. And, this is key, if you are caught…”
“Let me guess: you’ve never heard of me.”
“Some of the time. Other times, when things are less politically sensitive, we can work something out through diplomatic channels. But for the most part, yes, you are a deniable asset. Though it may not seem important, the embarrassment from an international incident can have tragic fallout, both economically and personally. The people who allegedly lead us may seem like a bunch of self-interested sociopaths…”
“But…”
“No buts. Just a heads up that the agenda won’t always be clear. But we don’t get to question why. It’s just like the service…”
“You were Navy?”
“Marines. But the principle is the same. We serve the interests of our nation. We don’t decide what those interests are. That’s above our pay grade.”
“Yeah… yeah, I expected that.”
“For now, we need to focus on finding a way in. As I said, our legitimate efforts haven’t yielded any fruit. We may need you to lean on people a little more. Over to you on that front. But first you need to find someone with a contact.”
“Done and done,” Brennan said.
“You’re kidding. No… you’re serious. How…?”
“A biker I ran into. We had a… difference of opinion. It got w
orked out.”
“How soon…?”
“A night of rest would help. Let’s say the night after tomorrow?”
CHAPTER 7
Silpin Jo’s double life would have astounded, amused and perhaps outraged the cohort of Chiang Mai bikers who knew him as the toughest guy for miles around. When he wasn’t at the pool hall selling methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, he rode his Harley to a whitewashed two-bedroom house in the suburbs, where he lived with his schoolteacher wife and three small kids.
He didn’t advertise being a family man, for fear of them becoming a rival’s targets. But the truth was, in his decade of dealing in the small northern Thai city, there had never really been any rivals, any dealer wars. That kind of thing was a level above the street, giving him a sort of insulation by virtue of insignificance. He made good money, and he liked it that way. In another decade, he would retire, buy a farm in the South of France and retire to grow grapes.
But in the meantime, his reputation as the one guy in the bar still standing after any trouble helped deflect potential hitches in the plan.
It was late evening, and he sat on a rocking chair in the backyard, watching sparks from the firepit arc up into the night sky, then disappear. His wife was at her cousin Lulu’s with the kids, there was a football match on television in a half-hour and he didn’t have to re-up product for another two days, having sold out early for the month.
He lit the bowl of his hash pipe and took another puff of the thick, spicy smoke. Despite the interruption earlier in the week, life was once again good.
“You know that stuff will give you lung cancer, right?”
He recognized the voice immediately. Even after the demonstration at the pool hall, he didn’t want the man thinking he was frightened. So he kept rocking the chair gently, and puffing on the pipe, without even looking up. “A very western perspective on something people here have used for health benefits for centuries. You know aspirin comes from tree bark, right? Same thing, farang.”