by Sam Powers
“Hmmph,” Victor said.
“What?”
“I’ve been a thief my whole life,” the Frenchman said, “ever since I hit the street at age ten. Last time I checked, anyone with anything worth stealing usually took some type of steps to protect it. And I already know what the authorities think of you.”
“There’s no money in this.”
The Frenchman gave him a quick glare, then went back to watching the road.
Clouds obscured the waning moon just after one o’clock and the alley was shrouded in darkness, its only occupants a pair of rats that had been rummaging through an overturned trash can. The cobblestone was slick from rain during the day, the barest light stolen from the tall, ornate street lamp nearby, reflected in the windows of the adjacent buildings.
The Citroen backed into the alley slowly, its headlights out.
“Are you sure this is the best approach?” Victor asked as he gazed over his shoulder and steered the vehicle carefully into the dark. Both men were dressed head-to-toe in black clothing.
“We can’t be seen carrying a ladder down the street at this time of night without eliciting questions,” Joe said. He’d dyed his hair jet black and touched up two days’ worth of stubble. “There’s no other way in.”
“What about alarms? I guarantee you he’s got security and a system, if this guy is as important as you say.”
“Let me worry about that. Just keep the car in front of the ladder and yourself on that bus stop bench out on the street. If any police officers come along, you explain that you’ve broken down and are waiting for the tow but it will be up to forty-five minutes. I guarantee you he will have better things to do than to sit there and wait.”
“What if they have my description out?”
“We got out quickly, and there was a lot going down. Couple that with your new glasses and haircut and my new look and we should be okay. Just be cool.”
“And if something goes wrong…”
“You don’t owe me anything. Take the five thousand I’ve already paid you and get out. Just don’t shoot any cops.”
“You fuck this up, maybe I stay in Beziers for a few months, eh?”
“Nice work if you can get it.” Joe got out of the car. He opened the trunk and took out the collapsing ladder.
Victor followed suit. He looked at it curiously in the half-dark. “Is that high enough? He’s on the third storey.”
“This is only eighteen feet, but it will get me close enough to the roof to toss up a grappling hook. The edge up there is solid concrete. Then it’s twelve more feet to the window ledge.”
“And then?”
“And then I do what I do. Like I said, let me worry about it.”
Three minutes later, he was crouched on the edge of the wide stone window sill. Victor took the ladder down, as instructed.
Brennan looked the window over. As he’d expected, it was wired to the alarm via a silver contact strip that ran unobtrusively around its outside edge. Vanity was often the enemy of decent security; he’d noted. Had the strip run across the middle of the window pane, or had he carelessly shattered it, the effort might actually have done some good. He took the small bag from over his shoulder. He removed a plastic pouch, opened it, and withdrew a golf ball-sized piece of putty, which he placed in the center of the pane. Then he took out a thin metallic object, with a ball of plastic at one end and a stylus-like blade at the other. He placed the ball of plastic in the middle of the putty and settled it until it was right on the glass but also stuck to gummy material. Then he moved the tool in a circle, rotating it from the ball in the center like a giant compass, the industrial-diamond tipped blade at the other end cutting the glass in a large circle.
He pushed inwards, gently, holding onto the metal bar of the tool. The circle of glass separated cleanly from the rest of the window, the putty keeping the pane from dropping inwards. He leaned through the hole and scanned the room, looking for any sign of pressure trigger wiring. Then Brennan dropped into the room, which appeared to be a study. He placed the piece of glass on top of the nearby desk.
Outside, Victor sat on the bus bench in front of the house, staring out at the street and keeping lookout. He tapped the cordless earpiece. “You in?”
“Yeah. Looks like his study. Doors are all magnetic strip protected but that’s easy enough to get around.”
“I don’t understand why you don’t just grab this guy and we beat it out of him, eh?”
“There’s that famous French subtlety again,” Brennan said. “I’m going to see what he’s got in his desk and if there’s a safe in here. Just be cool for a few, tell me if anyone comes in the front door of the building. I don’t want any unexpected visitors waking this guy up.”
Brennan checked the desk hutches and tried the drawers but they were locked. He used the letter opened from the top hutch to pry each open, easily defeating the weak locks. There was a family photo on top. The drawers contained some banking information, some personal papers and mementos, but nothing incriminating. He scanned the room, looking for the least impressive piece of art. There was a small Dutch impressionist piece of a windmill on the exterior wall. He pulled it back and found a safe. But Brennan doubted it would contain anything related to the committee: wall safes were too easily physically removed from their housing.
He looked down at the floor. If Yoshi Funomora had anything of value in his Montpellier home, it would be anchored into concrete. Brennan surveyed the room again; there was a throw rug that curiously stuck out from under each side of the desk, too narrow to suit the position but long enough to cover up something else. He walked behind the desk and moved the chair aside, then pulled back the end of the rug.
Funomora’s floor safe was modern, a digital keypad set into the front next to the giant tumbler so that either or both could be used to secure it. Brennan suspected the latter, but it didn’t matter. He’d been cracking tougher safes for a long time, under war zone pressure sometimes. The tumbler would be no problem; the safe was small and thin enough that, while too difficult to cut through, the sound of the tumbler discs slotting into place could be picked up with a stethoscope.
The digital lock was another matter.
He moved back to the desk. In Brennan’s experience, men over fifty – particularly successful, busy ones – didn’t have the hardest passwords to crack, and they often wrote down a copy in case they forgot the sequence, usually somewhere in an office. He tried the drawers again, looking to see if it had been taped to the bottom on one side or the other. He reached in behind each to make sure there was no wadded up piece of paper. He checked the underside of the desk calendar/blotter, but found nothing.
The bookshelf along the left wall was a possibility and he looked for a book that had perhaps been pulled out more recently and was sticking out further than the rest. He checked the titles for something Funomora might find sentimental or ironic.
He sensed that he’d missed something, so Brennan moved back to the desk. There was a fountain pen on top, and he opened it up to check the cartridge container, but found it empty. What was he missing. He scanned the desk again. The hutches, the pen, the family photo…
The family photo. Funomora didn’t seem like the sentimental type and he spent most of the year away from his wife, who stayed in Japan. He grabbed the framed and opened it up to take out the print.
On the back, in pencil, it said “14-38-22.”
WICKFORD, RHODE ISLAND
The day was beginning to drag. The Rhode Island primary was just twenty-four hours away and Sen. John Younger had shaken so many hands in the prior six hours, he was beginning to develop calluses. And yet, there he was outside a local grocery store at four in the afternoon, cutting a “grand reopening” ribbon.”
He smiled for the cameras – the national press corps never took a day off during a campaign – then leaned over to whisper in an aide’s ear. “I swear, if I ever have to do this again, shoot me on the spot, okay?” he said.
“I know, I know,” Younger said, waving him off, irritated. “I’ve been doing this for a few years.”
After the ribbon cutting had concluded, hands were shaken and backs slapped; Younger took questions from the press informally. Most were about his immigration policy or -- as Addison March had been reminding everyone -- lack thereof. The incessant focus on one aspect of his platform didn’t upset Younger; he’d been around too long to expect context and depth from the daily media.
“Senator,” a reporter near the front asked, “you mentioned during the event this morning that you still… and I quote… ‘weren’t comfortable’ with Senator March’s business ties. He claimed during a speech this morning that it’s a drive-by slur campaign without foundation. Can you comment on that?”
Why would March have brought that issue up? Younger was surprised. They’d scored serious points over March’s old legal firm and there didn’t seem to be any percentage in him raising it again. What was he up to?
“While it’s hardly worthy of rebuttal, I suspect Mr. March is eager to do anything he can to appear more in touch with the American people, given his numbers. My advice to him is to spend more time working with American companies and less time kowtowing to his friends in the Middle East. I think it’s mind-boggling that my Republican opponent can simply push to the side the two decades his party has spent trying to destabilize that region – which just happens to have a lot of oil – for its own ends. Now, he’s the great conciliator, doing business with militant Islamists and sharing lawyers with Ahmed Khalidi.”
It was a gross exaggeration, but no one in the press corps was going to call him on it. The sound bites were too good, the reporters too cynical to think any of the campaign messages did much in the way of shifting the population from entrenched ideology and beliefs.
“Senator, Mr. Khalidi has appealed to the international community for calm with respect to the ongoing attacks on his business associates,” a reporter said. “Given the revelations of the past week, shouldn’t America be examining his businesses here?”
It was the first intelligent question he’d been asked in about ten days, Younger thought. “I would say, sir, that the revelations in News Now at the end of March about his involvement in African atrocities, or at the very least in funding them, indicate Mr. Khalidi still has a lot of explaining to do to win back the support of the international community.”
When the press conference had wrapped, he went back to his limousine with his handlers. His phone rang as soon as he’d sat down in the backseat. “Talk to me,” he said.
“Senator, it’s Mark Fitzpatrick. I just caught your press conference live on the news networks.”
“Mark,” Younger said. “Good to hear from you, as always. I assume you’re calling about the handful of questions at the end?”
“I am indeed, sir. I’m already working up a background on the reporter who asked them, to see if he has a personal axe to grind.”
“You heard about March’s speech?”
“I think he’s taking a strange approach,” Fitzpatrick said. “But maybe the strategy is just working extremely well. He seems obsessed with proving he’s not an Islamist sympathizer.”
Younger smiled at that. “Give a true believer a shot to the core of their belief, and they’ll move Heaven and Earth to prove it’s sacrosanct and unvarnished. It’s because they really believe it,” Younger said. “He’s so vehement in his belief that immigration is tarnishing this nation that he can’t see the reality, which is that it contributes much more than it costs. But that will work to our advantage, Mark.”
“The Latino vote is going to hate this guy.”
“Happy days, Mark,” Younger said. “Happy days.”
MONTPELLIER, FRANCE
Brennan worked quickly. Inside the safe were bills, denominations large and small, each neatly bound in a bundle; there was also a file folder and a memory stick, and Brennan withdrew both.
The lights in the room went on, the door flying open. The two security guards were both beefy, bodybuilder types, dressed sharply in a grey suit and a black one, respectively, both Japanese, their pistols extended in the expectation of immediate trouble. Brennan rolled sideways before quickly diving forward to within a few feet of them, both men unable to track the movement rapidly enough to get a shot off. They were leery, as Brennan had expected, of actually opening fire inside the apartment, and that moment of hesitation was all he needed.
He locked up the wrist and forearm of the guard to his right and swung him around so that he was between Brennan and the other guard, then slammed his elbow into the middle man’s temple, the force stunning the guard and unbalancing his colleague, who stumbled sideways and dropped his gun as he attempted to use the wall for support. Brennan drove a sideways elbow into the side of the first guard’s head one more time, dropping him to the ground, dazed; he kept the rotating motion going, his spinning back kick catching the second guard flush, just as he reached down to pick up his gun.
Both men were down, but the noise had been considerable. There was little to no reason, that he knew of, for Funomora to not simply call the local police, and Brennan had to act quickly. He took the suppressed Glock out of his waistband holster and moved to the door, checking the outside hallway quickly then exiting the study.
He’d taken a half-step forward when the figure emerged at the other end of the corridor, from a doorway to the right; he was a young man, lithe and smaller, dressed in black. He took a quarter-turn to his right then quickly flung both arms forward. Brennan’s training kicked in before he’d even realized the throwing stars were arcing through the air towards him; he bent over backwards, arching his spine like a curved letter ‘c’ and dropping into a reverse crab position, the ground’s impact slamming into his hands, his weight shifting back towards his shoulders so that he could push forward with all his force and kick back into an upright position as the throwing stars sank into the wooden door behind him.
And then the younger man was on him, the first blow a snapping kick that knocked his gun away, behind him; the man’s style was karate, but one of the outliers, more closely related to Kung Fu than Shotokan, a hybrid of thrusts and punches from Shorin Ryu and Fujian White Crane style, his feet wide apart in Three Battles Stance, weight on his rear arch, one hand poised to strike in a coiled punch, the other extended to defend; he drove forward, a rapid series of strikes, punches flashing through the air between them; Brennan backed up at pace, frantically blocking the blows, years of training countering the motions based on an imprinted pattern, both men moving too quickly to be considering each action. The young karateka threw himself forward, a head-over-heels sideways flip, a pirouetted cartwheel in mid-air, his heel striking Brennan hard across the jaw, sending him reeling.
He sprang to his feet, shaking off the blow, wiping the blood away from the corner of his mouth. He’d misread the style, which was Five Ancestors Kung Fu, a blend of White Crane’s karate-like strikes and the athletic mimicry of a monkey’s leaps and kicks, the motions more fluid, controlled. The young man charged him down, a leaping sidekick intending to finish the job; Brennan ducked at the last possible second and his attacker flew overhead, rolling into a standing position and twisting as he stood so that he was facing Brennan again.
But he’d miscalculated. The first shot to Brennan’s jaw had put him down, but right next to his Glock. And as the young martial artist turned around, he came face to face with the suppressor. The young man’s eyes were wide as he realized Brennan had the drop on him, and his mouth dropped open in that inevitable moment of terror, when a man realizes he is about to die.
“NO!”
The bellow came from behind Brennan, at the far end of the hallway. He kept his eye on the youth and backed up a step, then snapped a quick look over his shoulder, before returning his attention to his t
arget. It was Funomora, dressed in a bath robe.
“Please,” he said in French. “I’ll give you whatever you want. Please don’t shoot my son.”
Five minutes later, Brennan had secured all four men in the study using plastic restraint ties. He’d gagged the two security guards and the youth, and sat Funomora up in his desk chair.
“May I take it that you are Joseph Brennan, the rogue American agent?”
“You find that funny?” Brennan asked. “Your boy Fenton-Wright did an amazing job with that video at the mall.”
“He has significant resources behind him,” Funomora said. “And might I ask how you knew…”
“It could only have been him,” Brennan said. “And besides, it’s in his character.”
“Yes,” Funomora said with a wry smile. “On that we would agree.”
“What was his reward?”
Funomora shrugged. “You would have to ask the chairman about that.”
Brennan took the memory stick out of his pocket. “Or crack this little number?”
The Japanese delegate couldn’t hide his shock. “If you take that, my life may be forfeit.”
“Are you asking me for compassion?”
“You spared my son. So, yes, that is what I am asking for. That memory stick contains a great many secrets that would be of no real intelligence value to the U.S., but help prevent certain associates in my home country from acting against me.”
Brennan looked at the stick. “I’m going to guess Yakuza? You have dirt on them. But if they know what it is, they might be able to neutralize any attempts you make to use it against them.”
“Or they may just act pre-emptively.”
“What else?”