The Joe Brennan Spy Thrillers

by Sam Powers

  It was all a bit of a joke really, Brennan thought. He’d read Miskin’s file; he was no entrepreneur, just another robber baron with the right number of soldiers and firepower at the time that the Soviet Union fell to make himself one of the top dogs. After establishing a vast petrochemical empire from communist assets bought at pennies on the dollar, he’d become ambassador to the U.S. for a decade, before fading into private life; he’d joined several large company boards, taken an official title as a cultural attaché, and spent his time looking utterly unlike the good party member he’d once been.

  Brennan called down to room service for a twenty-dollar burger, before unscrewing the back of the phone and its cradle, checking inside both for listening devices. Then he went through the room one item at a time, methodically looking for more bugs. It wasn’t that he necessarily expected to find them; back in the Soviet days, the unit would have been rife with fiber optic imaging and good old fashioned audio pickups. These days, Russia was supposed to be more open and respectful of its visitors. But Brennan knew their intelligence guys were just as well trained, just as good as they’d ever been. There was a chance his passport had been made as a forgery at the airport; but in Russia, that didn’t mean they’d automatically arrest him. They’d be interested, instead, to find out why he was there. And if they had identified him, the room would be tapped.

  He swept the room twice, checking for loose furniture buttons, under the edges of furniture, under the desk and table tops, inside the lamps and the overhead fixture. But he found nothing. That didn’t mean there was nothing there, just potentially that whoever hid it did a good job. It was largely irrelevant, as he had no plans to discuss anything sensitive out loud. He didn’t do that in America, and he wasn’t going to start in Moscow.

  The phone rang.

  “Good, you’re there.” It was Fenton-Wright.

  “As advertised.”

  “Yes… well, I’m calling you off. Head back to D.C.”

  “What? Why? I’m already here. I just got here. What harm can there be in…”

  “We’ll discuss this later. Right now, I’m of the opinion that you’re wasting time and resources with Miskin. There have been a dozen other opportunities in recent months for someone to take him out if they so wished, and yet nothing.”

  “But today is the first time he’s spoken on his home turf,” Brennan argued. “I thought we’d agreed these were statement killings. It’s the first opportunity…”

  “Look, this isn’t a debate or a discussion,” Fenton-Wright said. “Come home.” The ACF was convinced Bustamante had been behind the attacks. The last thing Fenton-Wright needed was someone pestering Miskin on his own turf, where he had domestic political considerations to take into account. The ACF members expected him to keep that kind of heat off of their backs. “That’s an order. Get out of there, now.”

  Click.

  Brennan stared at the phone. When David hung up on someone, it meant the conversation wasn’t just over, but that it was never supposed to be a discussion to begin with. Any chance Brennan had of extricating himself from the agency’s blacklist would go right out of the window if he disobeyed.

  He walked over to the window and looked out. He could see the university, across the adjacent river. Miskin was slated to speak in just over an hour. Brennan wasn’t as worried about the sniper – who seemed to have gone to ground for months – as he was about the intended use of the South African nuclear device. And if an associate of Miskin’s had brokered that deal, Brennan needed to talk to him, regardless of what David said.

  Ignoring Fenton-Wright was becoming a bit of a hobby.

  The auditorium was in an uncharacteristically new building, a brownstone-and-glass addition to the university’s aging character. The property was littered with police and security when the asset arrived; he covered the short distance from the train station on foot, guitar case in hand, non-descript once again in dark jeans, casual dress shoes and a blue winter coat. He took the broad stone stairs up to the main doors, passing among the heavy campus foot traffic, students and professors and visitors alike. Then he stopped before entering and surveyed the area.

  The asset knew where he would set up. The original speech location, outside the students’ services building, had clearer lines of sight and would have made egress much easier. The auditorium only had a back balcony, above the entryway, as a possible hiding place for a shooter. He ignored it. When the time came and he squeezed the trigger, the investigation would be immediate and would start there. Instead, he’d traced the angles of the side windows to the podium then drawn an imaginary line back from them. One went directly to a two-story sciences building some two hundred yards away. The windows were open perhaps two inches, a difficult shot at the best of times, due to wind shear.

  Difficult, but doable.

  He crossed the two hundred yards and checked around to ensure no one was watching as he walked behind the building. On the back wall, the asset found a black metal ladder that went up to the roof. He climbed it quickly, hard-sided case in one hand, and when he reached the top he stayed low, out of sight, moving to the wall where the angle to the target intersected its ledge.

  He knelt and undid the case’s fasteners, then withdrew the components and assembled the weapon. He placed the sight, then used it to locate nearby trees, watching the branch movement so that he could properly gauge wind speed and direction. Then he swung the sight back to the window, through the tiny gap between it and the window frame, the crosshairs coming to rest just above the podium. Once he’d focused in, he lay the rifle down against the edge of the rooftop in the precise position. Then he backtracked across the roof, staying low. He climbed down the ladder and surveyed the area. There was a parking lot across the road that ran behind the sciences building and he crossed to it casually, hands in pockets, just another Muscovite out for a walk.

  The lot was full of cars, empty of drivers; the asset moved from vehicle to vehicle. At each, he quickly knelt and looked underneath. Moscow is enshrouded in winter for seven months of the year and the asset knew from his intel that people sometimes used magnetic key boxes to store a spare under their car, in case they got locked out in dangerously cold weather. He would have simply hotwired a car, but most were new and built with engine arrest to defeat just such a theft.

  It took twenty-three cars before his search bore fruit. He checked the parking slip; the person had paid for a full day and it was still morning. That meant it would still be there in two hours, more than likely, and would be his first exit choice.

  He had plenty of time. An alternative would present itself, he decided, if he searched the area properly. And then he would be ready.

  Brennan was waiting at the auditorium when people began to arrive, getting through the doors to the free event early so that he could look them over as they entered. He was standing to one side of the stage, a policeman eyeing him suspiciously, when Miskin was ushered in by handlers. The Russian’s eyes widened when he saw him. Miskin looked across the room briefly to see if anyone was paying attention as they seated him behind the front table.

  When he was comfortable that his handlers had left for a few moments, he got up and walked over to Brennan’s seat in the second row, taking the empty perch next to him at the end of the row.

  “To say it is a surprise to see you here, my friend, would be a large understatement.”

  Brennan extended a hand and Miskin shook it warily. “My apologies, Boris Mikhailovich, for the nature of our last meeting. It was rude of me to drop in unannounced.”

  Miskin looked at his bandaged fingers. “You have accident with stove, perhaps?”

  “Not my own, unfortunately.”

  “And today? Though my ego could use the stroking, I suspect you did not fly all the way from Washington to Moscow on a whim.”

  “No, no I didn’t,” Brennan said. “I need to talk to you about a certain missing South African package.”

  Miskin’s face drained of color.
“How do you …”

  “It is a long story. But I believe that package still exists.”

  “Impossible. It was lost a long time ago.”

  “No. Those interested were duped by Borz Abubakar.”

  The Russian wagged a finger. “This I know is incorrect; Abubakar the Chechen died in a bus explosion in Peru…”

  Brennan shook his head. “A dupe. A double.”

  “Polnyi Pizdets…” Miskin muttered. “You are certain?”

  “I talked to him not six weeks ago, right before a South Korean agent put a bullet through his head and stole the item in question from his Angolan headquarters.”

  A handler came over to the stage and whispered in Miskin’s ear. “We must begin soon, my American friend, but we will talk after the speech, yes? We can discuss how best to go forward from here.”

  Brennan kept the bluff going. “Fine, but we need to talk about your friend Dmitri Konyshenko, as well. He may have brokered a deal between Abubakar and the South Korean – I’m not sure who she represents.”

  Miskin looked worried. “Konyshenko… he always spells trouble for me. But we’ll talk about it soon. Now, I must talk about economics, unfortunately.” Miskin turned and headed back to the head table.

  Brennan began to walk to the back of the room. He noticed the small window in the upper balcony, doubtless where a movie projector was set up. If a sniper needed a great shot, he reasoned, that would be the spot.

  But…

  He looked around the room. There were only two exits: the main set of double doors and a fire exit to the left of the stage. It meant a difficult egress or evac if things went wrong. The shooter in France had been careful.

  Perhaps Fenton-Wright was correct for a change; perhaps Miskin was relatively safe in the confines of the auditorium. Brennan made his way to the back of the room and found a seat on the aisle, and waited.

  When the asset arrived in Russia, he knew that at some point in the following days, he might have been hunted by the authorities. And so he took a precaution: he became a local, using Russian papers to enter the country, growing a full beard, and dyeing his hair brown. With glasses added, a false paunch and a slow, wide walking gait, he looked entirely like he might be Evgeny Fyodor Anteropov, as his documents suggested.

  On the following morning, he’d left his modest hotel to walk to a coffee shop near the speech, ordering a herbal tea. A man walked by his table and bent slightly at the knees as he passed, putting the long, hard-sided case down before moving on. The delivery was precise, as his associates had suggested would be the case.

  Fifteen minutes before Miskin’s speech was scheduled to start, the asset was climbing the ladder back up to the rooftop, the case attached to his back. This time, there were enough people within sight of the building that he had to crawl over to the rifle, or risk questions. He reached the rifle and sighted through the scope. The lectern was still empty, but people were moving about inside.

  He checked his watch. It was still light, and sunset wasn’t until six forty-five, another hour away. He rechecked the wind and readjusted his scope in tiny increments. He checked the room again; people had sat down, but the lectern was still…

  There. A man he didn’t recognize was speaking. For a moment, the asset wondered if something had gone wrong. He waited, conscious that his breath was heavy. He breathed in through his nose then out through his mouth, slowing his heart rate and calming down. He re-sighted the podium, just as the stranger finished introducing Miskin. The beefy Russian delegate placed a speech or reference sheet of some sort onto the podium, smiled and waved to the audience. The asset could hear the cheers clean through the old building’s brick walls and nearly two hundred yards away, a dull roar. He sighted through the scope again, and Miskin was holding up both hands, trying to get the crowd to calm down so that he could begin.

  Brennan had waited nervously for a half hour, watching the people file into the auditorium, as well as keeping an eye on Miskin’s security detail to ensure they were paying attention. At the last second, just minutes before the Russian delegate’s speech was slated to begin, he decided to obey his instincts and check out the movie projection room, to be sure it was empty. It was. Brennan went back to his seat to wait for the beginning of the address.

  He scanned the room again; now that everyone was sitting down, it was easier to get a good look. It was always possible the shooter would try for something close range – Brennan sure as heck didn’t believe that Hans-Karl Wilhelm’s death had been an accident, which mean a sniper MO wasn’t guaranteed.

  He didn’t see anyone out of the ordinary or untoward; mostly, it was college students and instructors. But he had that nervous tension again, that feeling that he was missing something vital.

  Miskin was being introduced, the Dean of Political Science praising his political and commercial acumen. He made a polite joke and everyone chuckled, Miskin included. Brennan turned his head to the left slightly and saw the last light of the day cutting through the cracks in the barely open windows, thin beams of light just visible at the edge of the window frame, like a subtle glow.

  The windows. He looked at the lectern, then at the windows. He got up and made his way outside quickly; he glanced back at the auditorium then followed the line of sight back across the campus. It would take a hell of a shot, but… there was a two-story building a few hundred yards away. He followed the edge of the rooftop looking for anything that broke the even line of the brick.

  Brennan wouldn’t have seen it but for the slight recoil of the rifle as the shooter squeezed the trigger. The barrel kicked upwards slightly. A moment later, people inside the auditorium began to scream.

  “No!” Brennan said. He sprinted towards the two-story building. There were people passing by on the campus paths, their heads already craning towards the auditorium because of the muffled cries from that direction. Brennan pointed towards the building across the way. “Shooter on the roof !” he yelled, pointing that way but not slowing down. “On the roof!” Caught in the adrenaline of the moment, the warning was useless: he’d yelled it in English.

  He made it to the building, but the front doors were locked. He ran around to the back and saw the ladder immediately. He glanced away from the building, scanning the area for anyone moving. He spotted the sprinting figure a moment later as he entered the parking lot.

  Brennan gave chase, but the man was several hundred yards ahead already. He got into a parked car and for a moment, Brennan got a slight glance: brown hair, a beard, glasses, heavyset. The car backed out of its spot in a screech of rubber, before gunning forward and out onto the street, taking a hard left and disappearing from Brennan’s field of view behind taller buildings.

  Brennan backtracked to the building. It was possible the shooter had left something useful behind, maybe an ejected casing or a boot print, or …

  A police officer ran out from cover on the building’s right side. He had his sidearm drawn and leveled at Brennan. “Get down!” he yelled in Russian. “Get down now!”

  MAY 29, 2016, MOSCOW

  Brennan was surprised; he’d heard horror stories from other guys in intelligence about Russian jail cells but so far, it was beating the hell out of Angola. It was clean, the cot was bug-free and he was getting two solid meals a day. He sat on the cot, stared at the bars, and waited.

  On the downside, they hadn’t shown any inclination after seventy-two hours to afford him his consular rights and a visit from the embassy, or legal counsel. If they were planning on letting him go any time soon, the Moscow Police weren’t dropping hints. But he wondered why they were still holding him at all; if his papers hadn’t held up to scrutiny, surely they’d have come down harder, he told himself.

  Eventually, a guard approached his cell door. “You,” he said in Russian. “Up.”

  He went through the same routine for three straight days. He would be directed to a soundproof room, and would sit across a plain steel table from a nicely dressed detective name
d Victor Semenov, and a man whom nobody identified nor questioned, and who reminded Brennan vaguely of David Fenton-Wright.

  “Mr. Taylor,” Semenov said. He had a thin neck and bony skull, his hairline almost gone. “I trust you slept well last night.”

  “They left the lights on in my cell, so no,” Brennan said. In fact, he’d slept just fine. He was trained to undergo far worse than a bright room. But if they hadn’t cracked his phony papers, he was a clothing salesman with some sort of penchant for danger, not someone who stayed cool under pressure.

  “My apologies,” Semenov said. “I will speak to the warden and ensure it does not happen again tonight.”

  “So you’re not letting me out?”

  “Unfortunately, that is not up to me.”

  “I should be allowed to contact my embassy; I should be allowed to contact a lawyer.”

  “It is true, you most definitely should,” Semenov said. “Should this become a formal inquiry instead of mere friendly questioning, we will ensure your representatives are contacted.”

  “You can’t hold me indefinitely…”

  “Oh, but under Russian law, when someone is suspected of being a terrorist or in league with a terrorist, we most certainly can, Mr. Taylor.” In the other chair, the silent observer betrayed a hint of a smile and crossed his legs. “Now perhaps you can dissuade us of that notion,” Semenov demanded, “by telling us how you knew there was a sniper on the roof of the university science building? We know you did not pull the trigger, as you were adjacent to the building when caught, and had no gloves on. Yet the rifle – American made, I might add – was free of fingerprints or identifying marks of any sort beyond the barrel rifling.”

  Brennan squinted at him. “The what?”

  “Never mind,” the inquisitor said. “It’s not important. People who were in the square, they said you were yelling in English right before Miskin was shot…”