The Joe Brennan Spy Thrillers

by Sam Powers

  “No, that’s wrong. Right after.”

  “Why were you even there? Surely a speech on geopolitics in Russian could be of little interest to a suit salesman from …” He checked his notes quickly, “…Akron, Ohio.”

  “As I told the night shift version of you, I met Mr. Miskin at a political benefit in Washington. My company donates generously to the political parties. I thought he might be able to smooth the way for me here to become an official government supplier, to the military and other functions. Russia is big business these days.”

  “What were you yelling outside the auditorium?”

  “I saw the sniper on the roof. So I yelled ‘sniper’. I forgot about the language barrier in the excitement of it.

  “Why did you go outside in the first place, Mr. Taylor?”

  “Well… as you said, the subject matter was very dry. I knew I was going to get five minutes with Mr. Miskin after the session, and we chatted for a few minutes before…”

  “Some people in the audience confirmed seeing you talk with him.”

  “There you go.”

  The questions continued for another hour. At the end, the inquisitor excused himself.

  He came back about twenty minutes later. “We’ve contacted the American Embassy on your behalf. They will have someone around to pick you up later today or early tomorrow. While there is nothing to indicate your involvement in this matter goes beyond the cursory, Mr. Taylor, we admit to some suspicion based on your odd behavior. However, as we have no evidence in this matter to link you to Mr. Miskin’s death, we are obliged to release you. My helpful advice would be to head back to Montpellier, from whence you came, or perhaps even America.”

  “Was that supposed to substitute for an apology for holding me for three days?”

  The detective smiled. Then he walked back out of the examination room, followed closely by his silent, nameless friend.

  JUNE 2, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Myrna sat quietly drinking her coffee at the dining room table and watched Alex type. Her young friend had been working on the story for three hours, occasionally pausing to look something up in her notes or online. The apartment lights were muted, just a lamp near the couch and the short bank over the kitchen breakfast bar.

  “I just think it might be a mistake to tip your hand this early,” Myrna said. “At least if you could wait to talk to Joe…”

  Malone didn’t look up. “Nope. Miskin’s shooting might have been prevented if I’d have written something a month ago instead of being holed up here…”

  “But who knows how much work you’re jeopardizing,” Myrna said. “Joe might…”

  “Joe has been gone for two months. This thing is out there, other journalists are working on it. You can be sure of that. And I have a job to do. Look, you know I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. But I have to tell this story now, while most of those involved are still alive.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “That an international industrialist is running a star chamber, acting as judge, jury and executioner, and benefiting from it personally, using political contacts from at least a half-dozen nations. That other members of his ACF aided and abetted that behavior in Bosnia, East Timor and Harbin, China. That Khalidi tried to fund insurrections in Africa.”

  “He’ll deny everything, of course.”

  “Sure.”

  “And you’re okay with hanging this stuff on your anonymous federal source? How does your magazine feel about that?”

  “They trust me.” Malone got the sense Myrna would keep trying to talk her out of it. “Look, at some point this stuff has to go on the record. I mean, what if the botched Africa mission was what prompted the sniper? It could be a merc or the friend of a merc who was killed there. And in the meantime, whoever doesn’t want this published is trying to kill me. I think we can all pretty much figure out who that might be.”

  “They’re going to redouble their efforts to find you, you know,” Myrna said. “I just hope you realize what you’re wading into.”

  “I do.”

  Myrna smiled and got up to get them each a refill of coffee. “Then publish, and damn the rest,” she said. “The right people are on your side, Alex. But we do worry.”

  So did Malone. In fact, she wasn’t likely to tell Myrna, but the entire story was scaring her witless.

  JUNE 3, 2016, MONTPELLIER, FRANCE

  When she published and the story broke, the reaction was predictable outrage. Khalidi expressed immediate umbrage at any suggestion he was overextending his influence and called it fiction; the EU was outraged that various European diplomats had worked with the Jordanian on allegedly dubious projects; the British government was the only party on the first day with the audacity to demand an explanation from Khalidi about his funding of African insurgents, and of Fung to explain the gang issues in Harbin.

  The story even listed Kalispell as a dummy company, a fundraising front for PetroGlobal.

  Khalidi scheduled a press conference in Montpellier. The chairman railed against the story, calling it a “malicious work of fiction” that was “designed to destabilize companies that employ thousands. The ongoing attacks appear personally motivated by this reporter,” he said, “who I believe is an Islamophobe.”

  After the speech portion, reporters questioned the sheikh’s son for several minutes, but he was evasive. One asked whether he had any knowledge of Kalispell funneling money to Africa, and Khalidi claimed to not know he owned the company. “I have many holdings, you must understand,” he said. “This makes me vulnerable to the manipulations of the press.”

  But what about the allegations of involvement in domestic insurrections, a reporter asked. How did Khalidi justify such behavior?

  “The reporter, Ms. Malone, has drawn very tenuous and highly imaginative links between a handful of tragedies and their proximity at the time to business holdings of some of my associates. We feel these accusations are baseless and without merit. However, we will afford Ms. Malone the same courtesy as any other member of the press and we take her concerns seriously, with respect to internal process audits of our holdings.”

  Did that mean there might be truth to the allegations, one reporter asked.

  “No, I do not think there is any truth to them. However, when vested with significant public responsibility, we must ensure due diligence.”

  There were multiple questions about the shooting of Miskin. Would the members of the ACF board all go into protective custody? Would they recommend the group’s dissolution?

  “Absolutely not, absolutely not,” Khalidi told the press. “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s not conflate this story into something it is not – strongly sourced, reliable material. The ACF is merely a business lobby group, nothing more. As I’ve said, let’s wait for the independent review, which we will establish in short order.”

  “But how should the international community react to such inflammatory allegations?” a reporter near the back asked.

  “I would hope with measured reason,” Khalidi said calmly. “There’s a reason all of our members are – or were – diplomats, people entrusted to represent entire nations. And I would urge political leaders to keep this in mind.”

  After the press conference, Khalidi returned to his suite at a local hotel. He excused all of his staff save for Faisal. “How are Fung and Funomora reacting to the increased security?” he asked, skipping any preamble and getting to business.

  “They are understandably upset, sir.”

  “And our EU friends?”

  “Also upset. The allegations regarding Africa…”

  “Are true. We are both aware that some of my subsidiaries engaged in… less than ethical behavior in their quest to expand. And we are aware that when discovered, my chief executive officer had them fired.”

  “Of course, sir,” Faisal said, finding the idea that the fastidious, paranoid Khalidi would have allowed it to take place without knowing absolutely absurd. Khalidi had
asked for solutions in Africa, Faisal had offered the advice, and his employer’s company had followed that advice. But now, dissonance was kicking in; with each passing day Khalidi judged himself to be less and less responsible.

  “What can I do about it now?” Khalidi continued. “Our agent in Washington failed to quell this at the source. Eventually, reporters will find other evidence linking Kalispell to the African issues. And then there is…”

  “I would not bring that up, sir.” Although he had come to loathe Khalidi, Faisal still found himself compelled to do his well-paid job efficiently; and discussing Borz Abubakar had no upside.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, you have two options. You can try again to have the reporter eliminated, which may yet work. Or you can pull some strings in America and see if you can convince her publisher that the material is both defamatory and irresponsible. Even just getting him to demand to know the reporter’s source might be enough. It appears much of the material has been leaked by someone with considerable state-level intelligence.”

  Khalidi smiled. “Faisal, you surprise me sometimes, you are so helpful.”

  Without me you’d probably be dead six times over, Faisal thought. “It is my pleasure to serve, sir,” he said.

  JUNE 3, 2016, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “PAGE SIX?!?” Alex was fuming. “Page freaking six, Ken? You must be kidding me!”

  Her aging editor cowered slightly behind his old honey maple typewriter desk, which he’d carted from paper to paper for years. It had a small name plate at the front that said “Ken Davis” in fading gold gilt. Its one other notable feature was that it was almost completely covered, every square inch occupied with an assembly of pens, paper, newspapers, notebooks, coffee cups, cutlery, a tub of change, three pop cans and, perhaps surprisingly given Ken’s midsection, a bottle of salad dressing.

  “It’s a follow, on a story nobody else is picking up much yet,” he mumbled.

  “Jesus H…. You remember that movie “Zoolander”? I feel like Will Farrell in that flick: I feel like I’ve taken crazy pills. Any reporter with half a brain should want on this.”

  “What did you expect?” he said. “You have a great story, but it has a lot working against it: your main source is anonymous, which means any reporter following it basically has to quote us; your overseas sources involving the Harbin incident are both nebulous and inconsistent in their accounts. You don’t find the guy from Africa – you know, the arms dealer who can tie Khalidi directly to Kalispell’s decisions. And that, incidentally, is the biggest reason the follow was on page six…”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But nothing!” He’d been an editor a long time, and Davis only put up with so much reporter bull before moving on. “Look, I’m not going to give you a line of shit here, but the publisher hated that story. Hated it. Told me his friends in the business community – you know, our advertisers – had the same questions he did about who our main source was and what axe that person had to grind. Then there’s the fact that outside of the African incident, all of the so-called “victims” of the ACF’s operations were scumbags in and of themselves; plus, they were overseas scumbags, and nobody here really gives too much of a rat’s ass, you know? So that’s why it was on six…”

  “Look, Kenny…”

  “Don’t Kenny me, Ms. Malone…” Then he softened for a moment. “Look, Alex, we all know how good you are. That’s why we printed the first piece and gave you the cover. The follows haven’t given us much more. I know if there’s more solid material out there, you’re the person who can dig it up. But it’s like anything big: you have to follow the paper and the money. Right now, you’ve got the African massacre, and that’s a huge piece. But the rest is mostly innuendo. You have to show intent, prove motivation, get someone to turn over on the right people. Get me something more solid that anonymous sources; get me a whistleblower on the ACF board, or in the background. Get me a line on who the hell is blowing these guys away. Get me anything! Just don’t file any more of this “sources say” stuff, because I’ve got a good goddamn sense that if we had to take this into court, your high-level source – entirely real though I’m sure he is – would run for the hills rather than testify.”

  Alex sighed. She had a sense of dread, and considered for a moment that Myrna might have been right; she might have gotten ahead of her own story, ahead of the evidence – at least inasmuch as she could prove. Chances were good that her source was dead on, and that she was protected by the legal “absence of malice” clause. But it wasn’t her job to just duck legal issues. She needed the whole story.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” he said, having known her for years and assuming there was a catch. “Really?”

  “Really,” she said, pained at having to be contrite. “I’ll make sure anything I give you on this from now on is ironclad. But I’m telling you, Ken – these people have already tried to kill me. There’s a reason I’ve been laying low.”

  “Duly noted, princess,” he said, highly doubting anyone was paying attention to who’d even written the piece. “Now get your ass out there and find us something solid.”

  31./

  JUNE 4, 2016, MONTPELLIER, FRANCE

  The conversation was succinct. Brennan’s objections had been noted and discarded.

  “Just don’t go anywhere,” David Fenton-Wright had said before he’d hung up.

  Brennan wanted to tell him where to go … but instead, he considered his eventual chances of extracting himself from the agency permanently and without fuss, and let the matter rest.

  He’d tried to get an audience with the chairman about his dealings with Abubakar; he was beginning to suspect the committee might have had a role in the bus crash. But he’d been rebuffed twice.

  Now David was effectively preventing him from following up the tip about Dmitri Konyshenko, who was scheduled to be at an international shipping conference in Copenhagen in a day’s time. The press had almost completely lost interest in Alex’s revelatory story after two days, and it almost felt as if it had had no impact at all.

  He sat at his hotel room desk, checking his notes on his laptop and going over what Myrna had told him, reconciling it with what he’d learned in Angola and from Miskin.

  The phone rang.

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Brennan?”

  He was registered under Peter Taylor. “I think you have the wrong…”

  “Mr. Brennan, I know who you are. I have information for you, information I believe will be very useful in your investigation.”

  “Okay. Well… you know where I am...”

  “Your hotel is much too public. We need to go somewhere quiet.”

  “We’re outside of my usual stomping grounds,” Brennan said. “You have something in mind? And consider that, if it’s too private and I think you’re setting me up, I just won’t show.”

  “Understood. But I’m sure you will want to see this.”

  “Name the time and place.”

  “La Place Royale de Peyrou; it is a monument, the city’s highest point and very public. Completely open.”

  Brennan had seen it mentioned in a local tour guide. “No, I don’t think so. Completely open puts me potentially in someone’s sights. If we meet, it’s somewhere public but protected.”

  “Fine. There is a large aquarium in the northeast of the city…”

  “I’ve seen the listings.”

  “In front of the penguin exhibit on the upper level, this afternoon at five?”

  Brennan arrived early to survey the area, parking his rental in one of the handful of adjacent lots. It was as if an entire neighborhood had been set up just to deal with parents and their kids: a giant pedestrian mall, fronted by restaurants and tourism attractions that included a skating rink, a planetarium and the aquarium itself, which was housed in a state-of-the-art facility, a grey-and-blue architectural mish-mash of circles within circles. Its front was made up of thirty feet of windows looki
ng out onto a pedestrian concourse. Surrounding the businesses was a series of restaurants, mostly family friendly. The kids would love it, Brennan thought, and Carolyn even more for the relief factor.

  He scoured the skyline, tracing over the tops of buildings, looking for easy access points for a shooter. It was probably a futile effort; if someone really wanted him dead, he knew, they’d eventually succeed so long as he was in public, in alien territory. It wouldn’t necessarily be a bullet; the sniper had little access to the delegates, so a bullet from distance made sense. It might just have been the short, quick stab from the end of an umbrella, like Myrna’s Paris source, or the pointy tip of a shoe, dosed in a lethal concentration of toxins. If done right, he’d hardly even notice it; and by the time he went into cardiac arrest, it would be too late.

  He took the middle of several doors into the building and, almost immediately, a set of semi-spiral stairs to the upper level. It only took Brennan a minute to become anxious about the meeting location: once up the stairs, a corridor followed the contours of the building in a near-perfect oval, channeling traffic in just two directions around a central giant, multi-story tank. That limited escape routes if the meet proved to be some sort of trap.

  There were multiple exhibits to the left as Brennan followed the corridor, the open tops of tanks behind iron railings. From the lower level people could see the interior of each tank through a glass wall, the entire undersea environment of artificial reefs for hundreds of fish species.

  To his right, the central hub of the building contained a giant shark enclosure, though it was sensibly built right up to the ceiling, the public’s view limited to a series of large round windows, like portcullises from some monstrously large vessel.

  At the corridor’s midway point, near the back of the building, was the penguin habitat. Rocks were carved in angular fashion into short artificial cliffs, a perfect diving off point for the penguins as they plumbed the depths of the tank. Brennan checked both directions; the place was quiet on a Monday afternoon, just a handful of tourists and some locals with their kids.