The Joe Brennan Spy Thrillers

by Sam Powers

  And so he invariably returned home alone. He’d never really minded much, and it afforded him privacy. He closed the door to his apartment and locked it behind him, then checked his messages. Only one mattered, from an overseas number. He took out his phone and dialed it immediately.

  The call was answered after a single ring. “Thank you for being so prompt,” said Faisal Mohammed. “We need you to perform an additional task, one the chairman does not wish to discuss with the rest of the board.”

  MARCH 16, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Myrna and Alex worked in near silence, each transfixed by the content of their monitor as they sat next to each other at Myrna’s twin computers, in her apartment study.

  The longtime former analyst had access to a series of decent databases, including most major newspapers. They’d been going through headline after headline, cover after cover, edition after edition, searching for any sign of the ACF’s unofficial activities. Bustamante had mentioned Bosnia and East Timor, and they made good starting points; they’d then expanded the hunt to include other nations in conflict over the past two decades.

  She was a fascinating person, Malone thought. Her complete focus was on the task, to the point that she’d joked about having to remind herself to go to the bathroom. It was no surprise that she’d impressed Walter. Myrna struck her as having been self-sufficient in the womb.

  The older woman broke the silence. “It’s probably what we should have expected, but even where there are battles or ambushes involving foreigners, there’s not a hint to connect them to the ACF. If there are connections here, they’re buried deeply beneath a surface that these stories barely scratch.”

  The headlines were beginning to blur together; Myrna didn’t want to admit it to young Alex but she was usually in bed by nine o’clock, and it was nearly eleven. She yawned deeply, then reached for her coffee and had a big sip. The mouse wheel rolled under her finger repetitively, the screen parsing by at a rate so uniform it was probably contributing to her growing sense of fatigue.

  And then she stopped abruptly. “Wait a minute now… what’s this?”

  Malone looked over at the screen. “It’s in Chinese. You speak Chinese?”

  “Mandarin and Cantonese, a couple of lesser-known dialects.” Myrna kept her eyes on the screen. “This is a story from eighteen months ago in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.” She read through it quickly. “An organized crime family of some note in the city of Harbin has ended a decade-long harassment and extortion racket targeting construction companies after a deadly gun battle that left sixteen of its members dead and more wounded. The remainder of the gang, which turned itself over to police last week, was said by police to have admitted their guilt in exchange for life sentences and not the death penalty. Police said there was no truth to the wild rumors that spread after the incident, in which hardened gang members claimed they were set upon in a warehouse by foreign devils and tortured.”

  It could be something, Malone thought, but there was no way to know for sure. “It’s not much,” she said.

  “Well, no – not until you consider that Harbin is also the home city of Fung So Dook, the vice-chairman of the committee.”

  She might have something, Malone thought. As a reporter, she’d never been a big believer in coincidences. “Let’s flag it for a deeper look. Is Walter coming around tonight?” She was curious to see them together again, see how much deference the agency man showed Myrna.

  “I don’t think so,” her host said. “He said he got called in for some work thing.”

  “He pushes himself too hard. Did you notice how pale and thin he’s been looking?”

  Myrna nodded. “I do worry about him. He’s a good soul, you know, even though he’s been in a dirty business for a long time. But he’s always been guarded and private. There was one point at which he and I…” She let the idea hang there.

  “What!” said Malone. “You and Walter, an item?”

  “Well, yeah… but it never went anywhere. Who knows, maybe we just weren’t attracted enough to each other. Or maybe we were frightened of alienating one of the few people either of us knew at the agency who could be trusted. Still, no regrets.” Myrna nodded towards Malone’s cup. “Would you like some more coffee?”

  “I should probably quit it for the night, if I want to sleep. But it was very nice.”

  “Speaking of very nice, did I get the impression correctly that you were enjoying being saved by our friend ‘Joe’?”

  She smiled ruefully. “You did, but Walter said he’s married. So that’s not going anywhere.”

  Malone wouldn’t lie to herself; she’d considered giving him a shot anyway, secure in the knowledge she was unlikely to ever meet Mrs. Joe. But then she’d remembered how she felt when her parents briefly separated, and wondered whether Joe and his wife had kids.

  “Oh, well… then I hope you have better luck in the New Year, dear,” Myrna said. She went back to her screen. “It says they targeted the Fei Long shopping market on the edge of the city initially then began to demand protection money from other grocers as well. This went on and grew over the course of several years, until they were receiving proceeds from almost every Harbin construction business.”

  “No mention of Fung?”

  “No, but I might be able to find a copy of the court proceedings on an Asian database I’ve used a few times before.” She typed and searched for a minute more. “Yes, here it is. There’s a list of the affected companies.”

  They searched the list of names one by one.

  “Nothing,” Myrna said after about ten minutes. “You?”

  Malone shook no. “Company directors?”

  “Why not?”

  It took another hour to build a list of directors for each firm then run their names.

  “Hang on,” Malone said. “Here we go: the Xi Jiansung Company has a director listed as Wen Mah Ling….”

  “… which also happens to be the name of Fung’s wife.” Myrna got up and took out her phone. “We need someone on the ground. I’ve got some contacts over there who owe me.”

  “You’re quite a marvel,” Malone suggested.

  Myrna smiled at that. “It has been so noted.”

  “Myrna…”

  “Hmm? Yes, dear?”

  “Do you think there’s any chance still that you and Walter could end up together?” She wasn’t just being nosy; Malone’s career had always seemed to get in the way of her own prospects. Maybe, she thought, being Myrna’s age and single made a person give up entirely, assume love was never in the cards.

  Myrna smiled and thought about her friend. She’d known Walter Lang for two decades; he was so dedicated to his job, so wrapped up in agency business; she’d thought she’d lost him after the Colombia incident. But Myrna had to admit – at least to herself – that she held out hope for the two of them. She’d been alone, awash in her need for control of every second of her own life, for far too long. She needed to open up to somebody, feel that affection and familiarity.

  “Maybe, dear. One never knows. Maybe.”

  25./

  MARCH 25, 2016, CABINDA, WEST AFRICA

  The flight got in early, which Brennan figured was a good thing; he needed at least a few extra hours to recover from it.

  They’d taken off from a private strip just north of Luanda in what could charitably be called a plane. It was an old junker of a twin prop from the late fifties, a yellow buckboard thing. One of the cabin doors was missing and the pilots spent the first half-hour arguing about flight procedures, one eventually grabbing a manual from under his chair, in full view of the handful of passengers, and using it to demonstrate to the other pilot how to properly fly it.

  Turbulence had beaten the plane around until everyone was green in the gills. Everyone except Francisco, who insisted he had an iron-clad stomach. “Wait until you taste funge with pirri pirri gindungo,” he’d said, his voice raised over the roar of the props. “It’s a corn paste log covered in
palm oil and pirri pirri peppers that have been picked in onions and garlic, usually with whisky or brandy. It’s Angola’s national dish and the hottest on the planet, yet also the blandest… an amazing and diabolical contradiction.”

  Cabinda’s airport was a lime-green concrete pillbox, its name scrawled in cartoonish paint letters, like something out of a 1960s daycare. From the air, Brennan noted, it sure looked a lot like Luanda; and it was technically Angolan territory, even though a sliver of the Democratic Republic of the Congo separated the two and a fair swath of Cabindans wanted independence, based on their cultural individuality. Their dialect of Bantu was even a different language from the tribal tongues used in the south. But their living conditions were similar, shrouded in poverty.

  The town had been around in one form or another for five hundred years, but only as Cabinda from the eighteen hundreds on. Like Benguela, it was a slave port for decades until the trade’s eventual demise. As was typical of the day, the king’s tribe sold his rival tribe’s members to the Portuguese and Belgians. A diary of one king of the Kikongo, as the land was then known, noted the sale of four thousand slaves through the area in one year.

  So life there had always been difficult, while its proximity to oil and minerals made the nation valuable. Brennan was glad Francisco had come along for the first leg, at least, and brought a couple of men with him. “We’ll take you as far as your man’s camp and I will arrange a meet. After that you are definitely on your own,” he said as they waited inside the airport for their driver, a handful of passengers and locals milling around, not moving much due to the heat. “He lives nearly eighty kilometers north of here, near the other border with the DRC.”

  “Why so far out of town?” Brennan asked. “You’d think his customers …

  “Wouldn’t mind going to him. Kovacic is not exactly a lightweight – and he’s going by ‘Anders Kallstrom’ now, by the way. Before he starting running guns out of Cabinda, the rumor is he was fighting with a group of neo-Marxists in the Russian republics. He had a client based immediately on reputation alone.”

  “So his threat level…”

  “… is considerable. Your guy went to impressive lengths to disappear up here and set himself up as a supplier to the Cabindan resistance movement; it’s only by virtue of us doing business with the same people that I even know he exists. Come on, let’s go wait outside for the car.”

  As remote and broken down as Cabinda was, the vehicle turned out to be a Land Rover, which made it the safest car Brennan had seen since arriving in Africa. They had minimal gear, just an overnight bag each. Francisco’s plan was to set up camp in the bush near Kovacic/Kallstrom’s base and be available if Brennan needed a quick escape, and he’d brought along a pair of beefy helpers, along with tents and mosquito nets. They loaded everything up. In short order, they were heading west out of town, towards a perfectly paved two-lane road that ran through the center of the tiny province, cut from the dense jungle that surrounded it and layered in immaculate tarmac that seemed to have never been driven upon.

  “Where are we going?” Brennan yelled to Francisco over the road noise.

  “Your man’s operations base is just south of a place called Massabi Lagoon. It’s right out in the jungle in the middle of nowhere. The nearest village doesn’t even have a name. They make a living by selling crocodiles caught in the lagoon and the small lakes.”

  Though the lagoon should have been just a half-hour from the city, the sole road ran a circular path around the Cabinda interior, through thick, dense jungle. Small shanty villages had popped up along the route every ten kilometers or so. Like Luanda, the heat wasn’t blistering but the humidity made the air so wet Brennan could taste it.

  Just five kilometers from the turnoff to a second dirt road – this one just a track slashed out of the foliage by enterprising machete owners – an old colonial-style two-story building stood near the side of the road, nearly overgrown by the jungle and dilapidated, its once-salmon pink paint job almost completely worn off. Francisco nodded towards it. “We set up camp there. At one point in the nineteen thirties, someone thought it might be worth developing up here. Not sure why. The locals don’t seem to have any more background on it than that.”

  They parked the car just off the track and got out. The building was being reclaimed by the jungle, Brennan thought, vines twisting around its porch columns, the thick grass almost up to its side windows. It probably had dry rot throughout. He tried the steps up to the porch slowly, putting weight down one foot at a time to make sure he didn’t go through the wood.

  It held. “I wouldn’t worry so much,” Francisco said from behind him. “People have been camping at this place for decades. And anyway, it’s probably safer in there with a bit of rotten wood and the insects than it is out here; there are things in this jungle that would happily eat you, my friend, if you strayed out too late at night.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Lang wondered if he could transfer.

  If he beat the cancer, he thought as he followed David Fenton-Wright down the street from the restaurant, he’d put in for a move to a lower pay grade or even a different agency, maybe something in Florida helping out customs and immigration. Lying around the pool was starting to hold a certain allure, and it had everything to do with age.

  Who knew, maybe Myrna would agree to go with him. He doubted it, but maybe.

  Fenton-Wright had been talking about some nonsense, something about a television show he’d been watching. “… and then he just shoots her. I mean, who sees that coming? And where do they get this stuff?”

  “You’ve got me,” Lang said. “TV these days is crap.”

  “Incorrect, Walter,” Fenton-Wright said. “There’s some great stuff out there; but it’s like sig ints: you have to wade through piles of crap before you get to it. Hmmm…” He pulled his buzzing phone from his pocket. “… I’ve got to make a stop. You know the old safe house two blocks from here?”

  “Chuck Merrill’s old apartment?” Lang said. “We still own that?”

  “Yeah. It mostly sits vacant except for when someone in senior management needs … private time, if you get my drift.”

  Lobotomized monkeys could get your drift. “Sure.”

  “Yeah, well I left my jacket there last night. It’ll only take us a second, okay?”

  “Not a problem,” Lang said. He’d learned that with David, the right answer was whatever David wanted to hear.

  The apartment was above a Korean grocery store, a second-floor walkup. They trudged up slowly to its landing. It was the first apartment on the floor, at the very front of the building. Fenton-Wright produced a key and let them in. They walked inside, and Fenton-Wright began scanning the room. The small radio that rested on a window frame overlooking the street was on quietly, Julio Iglesias singing “La Mer,” the original French version of “Somewhere Beyond the Sea,” to a funkier seventies beat.

  “Hmm… must’ve left that on,” Fenton-Wright said. “Where the hell did I put it? I’ll check the bedrooms. Do me a favor, look in the kitchen would you?”

  Lang nodded and went into the kitchen, to their right. He took two steps in and realized he was stepping on a large sheet of plastic. He looked down at his feet. It covered the kitchen floor completely, doubled over.

  Behind him, Fenton-Wright held the silenced pistol to the back of Lang’s head. “I need the reporter’s location, Walter,” he said matter-of-factly. “Although, I’m only asking out of obligation, on behalf of our mutual friend. I know you’re a better man than to actually tell me.”

  Walter knew what the drop sheet meant. It really didn’t matter how he answered. Faisal had decided to make good on his threat. Colombia hadn’t beaten him, and neither had cancer. But some streaks, Walter figured, were just bound to end eventually.

  “Go fuck yourself, you officious little prick,” he said.

  “If it were up to me… well, let’s not even go there. Sorry about this, Walter, really I am,” said F
enton-Wright.

  “If you knew what I thought of you, you wouldn’t be,” Walter said.

  Walter closed his eyes. The pistol recoiled twice, the silencer reducing the end of his life to two quick decompressions of air, small bangs like firecrackers. The first one made him drop to his knees, and the second ensured that Walter pitched forward onto the plastic sheet.

  26./

  MARCH 26, 2016, NORTHERN CABINDA

  Andraz Kovacic’s camp bordered the Massabi Lagoon, a sixty-mile long giant coiled snake that wound its way from fat to thin, from the interior where it resembled nothing less than an enormous lake, to the coast, where its narrow tributary rediscovered the Atlantic Ocean.

  At the very edge of the body of water, a dirt road cut back into the jungle, heading east. They followed it in the rented Land Rover. The foliage on both sides of the road was dense, seemingly impenetrable to light. It reminded Brennan of parts of Sri Lanka, the sense that something dark and foreboding lay beyond the wall of leaves, branches and vines, the humidity that much heavier in the moment. The trail ended after about two miles and they came to a wire fence gate supported by two tall, thick wooden posts, the size of tree trunks. “No trespassing” signs were posted on it in four languages.

  “Your guy really doesn’t like company,” Francisco said. “You would think just being located Hell-and-gone from anywhere would be dissuasion enough.”

  “Now what?” Brennan said.

  “Now we ring the bell and wait for instructions.” Francisco got out of the vehicle and started pulling the gate open, swinging it wide across the road as Brennan watched. “That was a joke, by the way. There’s no electricity out here unless you have generators and your own power lines to transmit the stuff.”

  The Land Rover rolled on for another kilometer before it reached a checkpoint, where a pair of gunmen in olive soldier fatigues manned a small hut and a red-and-white barricade. One walked over to the Land Rover’s driver, finger on the trigger of his AK47. He rattled off something in a language Brennan didn’t recognize; Francisco’s driver associate answered in kind.