by Sam Powers
They’d known each other so long and shared so much that the two men had a strange bond that Brennan’s wife had never quite understood. Carolyn looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m going to go see if Vicky needs a hand with the dishes,’ she said.
Mike waited until she was inside. ‘The question stands.’
‘There are a lot of different answers to that one.’ The drunker Mike got, the more bitter he got about the past. ‘I guess the one that suits me most is that I never really did anything for them, either. I did it out of a sense of responsibility.’
‘So... always in the wrong place, but for the right reasons?’
‘Yeah, something like that.’
The rancher slugged back half his beer in one long swallow. ‘You know that old line from the movies about spies never retiring? It’s only true if you let it be. If you let them, they’ll use you up and toss you out. You’re just a means to an end to the Agency, Joe. One regime ending today; another person’s life ending tomorrow. But where does it end for you?’
Brennan suppressed an urge to sigh. ‘You got out....’
‘I got a buyout from a full-time staff gig as a trainer, and only then because I’d been off for a year on stress leave.’
Brennan nodded. He didn’t want Mike to start debating health choices; his old friend was mentally fragile enough as it was. ‘How has that whole thing been going, anyway?’
Mike shrugged. ‘Before we invited you guys out for the week I told Vicky I was going to stop talking about it for a while; but with the date coming up...’
It was a big part of why Brennan had snapped up the invitation. He knew Mike needed comfort every August and had for a decade; his friend would fixate on Sara Evans, one of his most promising recruits. She’d thrown herself into the Potomac, or at least that was the official verdict. He’d never believed it, never see in her intense nature the strain that must have lain underneath the cool exterior, the pain that swept her away with the river’s current, never to be found. They’d located her belongings on the riverbank, along with a suicide note. The agency’s best experts had been unanimous that it couldn’t have been a forgery.
Eventually, Mike had had to face it, and the internal inquiry that said she’d pushed herself to dangerous levels of stress. All to score well in his training course and qualify for covert operations. And then the grief had kicked into high gear, and it had never really left. He’d gotten past denial to anger and occasional bargaining, his wallowing fed by self-loathing, a tragic attempt to keep an emotional connection to a girl who, in truth, he hardly knew, and in doing so, avoid thinking about her as being gone forever.
The self-loathing led to drink, to make the edges blurrier. The drink led to depression. The depression led to more self-loathing, and the cycle repeated itself. Worst of all, they all knew it, everyone staying at the house, an unspoken understanding that a man as smart and well-educated as Mike was either going to bottom out and deal with his demons, or...
And that was the road no one really wanted to go down; instead, they avoided the matter entirely. ‘Eventually,’ Brennan had told Carolyn on their first night there, as they talked in their guest room, ‘people are going to make their own damn fool decisions.’
But they all loved him; he’d been like an uncle to the kids and, along with the late Walter Lang, had been a fixture at their Annandale home over the years. They all felt the same anxiety, distress and guilt over his decision to slowly drink himself to death.
‘You’re still seeing someone about it?’
Mike snorted at that. ‘Doesn’t that just sum life up right there? We’re all so damn uncomfortable about our feelings that we have to make her death and me seeing a shrink sound like a trip to a specialist about a pesky mole.’
‘Avoiding the question. Was that interrogation training kicking in?’
‘No, I just genuinely find it ridiculous. That okay with you, Joe?’ He took another long pull, finishing off the can of beer.
He crushed the aluminum can with one hand and was about to toss it toward the corner of the deck when he saw the look of concern on Joe’s face. ‘Ah... give it a rest, will you?’ He put the crushed can down on the deck fence rail instead. ‘I mean, how many goddamn times can I cover the same awkward ground with another headshrinker? Just... just do me a favor, okay? When they give you that call to come in and see the old man and he offers you that hearty handshake, make damn sure you take it. Then turn around and walk out of there, and don’t ever look back. After everyone we’ve both lost, that’s the smart play, Joe. That’s the percentage that keeps you sane.’ He gestured toward the kids playing volleyball. ‘And you have two exceptional reasons. I hardly know my son and I’m lucky as hell that I get to see my grandkids twice a summer. All so that I could devote more time to...’
‘Mike...’
‘Nah, skip it,’ he said. ‘You’re here on a family vacation, not to listen to my whiny bullshit. You want another one?’ He nodded toward Brennan’s beer. ‘Kids don’t look like they’re going to let up any time soon.’
Brennan shook his head. ‘I’m good for now.’ He wasn’t so sure the game would continue for much longer. The sky had gotten hazier, the clouds almost grey, a storm brewing.
6/
DAY 4
Brennan woke early, rose and showered, and pulled on his jeans and a sweater while Carolyn slept soundly, just a few feet away. He’d become an expert over their years of marriage at moving around the house without disturbing anyone, a necessity in his periods of insomnia. Maybe the same nervous itch that kept him alive in the field also kept him awake at home, he’d always figured. Maybe it was response to his addiction: as profoundly controlling as Mike’s issue, but adrenaline, rather than alcohol.
He watched his wife sleep, the sunlight of the new morning cutting across the dimly lit room and shining through the strands of her golden hair. She looked so peaceful and innocent just then; he was uncomfortable with how wrong that felt. He knew her as a force of nature, a rapidly rising star since transferring to the National Security Agency, still able to use her minimal time off to help raise their kids. But he had to admit to himself that the discomfort stemmed from his desire to be with her softer side, from before she had a career. He missed the woman he’d married, and he knew that was unfair. He’d brought her new life about, constantly exposing her to national interests, tension, the hint of excitement accompanying danger.
In the still of the morning, before life cast them onto the mouse wheel of daily routines and expectations, he wondered if he’d ever meet that person again, then wistfully realized that she no longer existed.
The sunbeam had stretched just enough to catch her barely fluttering eyelid, and she woke, using her left hand to shield her eyes as she turned toward him but went immediately back to sleep. He smiled at that. She could go on four hours a night for weeks, still, if needed. But when they had downtime, it was like trying to wake the dead.
There was a light tap on the door and Mike leaned his head through and into the room. ‘Everybody decent? Good.’ Then he saw Carolyn still sleeping and modulated to a whisper. ‘Oh, hell. Sorry about that! There’s a call for you, Joe. It sounded official. You want me to tell them to take a long walk off a short pier?’
‘No, that’s fine.’ Brennan was puzzled. He wasn’t expecting anything important; no one else knew he was there and he hadn’t had an assignment in eighteen months. He pulled on his sneakers and followed Mike out of the room and down the hall, to the large sitting room. The phone sat on the coffee table.
‘Joe Brennan.’
‘Joe, it’s Jonah Tarrant.’
There was silence between them for a few moments as Brennan collected his thoughts and tried to figure out what to say.
‘You know you’re a son of a bitch sometimes, right?’
‘I can understand why you’d feel that way, Joe...’
‘You left me in the middle of a hostile riot in Jakarta without any support.’
‘It was a
snafu, we’ve admitted that...’
‘Three broken bones. One bullet wound to my thigh -- thank God it didn’t nick an artery. My credit cards stolen from my room in the meantime and racked up before the embassy could get me out of that dung heap that passed for a hospital.’
‘Like I said... we’ve admitted mistakes were made, we paid an agreed upon settlement and you know I didn’t personally call off your support team...’
‘No, that was your lapdog Adrianne Hayes. To protect a deputy ambassador who’d flown out two hours earlier. Why in hell did the old man hire her for your old job, exactly? You weren’t qualified for it, and you make her seem like... well, no, scrap that, neither of you has a clue.’
This time, it was Tarrant’s turn to go silent. Brennan needed to vent. He’d expected that. It was human nature. ‘You about done? Are you remotely curious...’
‘Yes, damn it, of course. Why are you calling me, Jonah? You know I put my papers in, right?’
‘Sure. Of course, officially you don’t exist, so that’s a pretty flexible situation...’
‘Jonah...’
‘Your country needs you, Joe.’
‘My country has had twenty-two years of me.’
‘A lot of lives may be at stake.’
‘Probably so. And they always will be. Let the next guy handle it. I have to think about my family.’
‘I don’t see Carolyn scaling back her time at the NSA.’ Tarrant knew it was a low blow, but it was true. Plus, she’d stabbed the old man in the back by leaving.
‘That’s none of your business. I put in my time.’
‘I need you specifically. We’ve got a witness we need debriefed in Macau.’
Brennan frowned. ‘I only know one guy in Macau and he cheats at poker. Plus, I have to figure he’d be dead by now.’
‘If you’re talking about Stanley Lawson, he is seventy-eight years old. From your vetting, your file suggests you first met him when you were still in the navy, then used him a decade later to transfer a message for you to the daughter of a Tong boss. Sort of ‘off the reservation’ on that one again, weren’t you?’
‘The job got done,’ Brennan said. ‘What does Stanley have that you want?’
‘We have no idea,’ Tarrant said. ‘But we know it’s something big. The intel says it’s an operation that will ‘strike at America’s heart’. It may be the Chinese; or it may be the North Koreans. Or it may be both.’
‘That’s pretty goddamn vague, Jonah, even for you.’
‘And we know someone put out a call yesterday to several freelancers in the region, a contract on Stanley Lawson’s life. The problem is, he doesn’t believe us. He has information he knows we need, and he thinks this is a negotiating tactic. Now, as far as we know, no one has accepted the contract yet. So maybe we can get to him first. You do this, you might save a man’s life and prevent a catastrophe.’
Brennan stewed gently on the other end of the phone line, cooking like a grenade with the pin pulled. Goddamn you, Jonah, he thought. Training gave him the restraint to keep it to himself, but just barely. Goddamn you, Stanley Lawson may be a poker cheat but he has grandkids, a daughter who loves him, and you know that.
‘You know,’ he said calmly, ‘if I were in DC right now, I would punch you really hard in the face, right?’
‘Yeah,’ Tarrant said, ‘Yeah, I get that. There’s a ticket booked for you on a commuter shuttle out of Jackson this morning. Call me when you get back to D.C. and we’ll go from there, okay?’
The line went dead. Brennan stared at the phone for a moment, then at Mike, who was standing a few feet away with an uneasy look. ‘My wife’s going to kill me; you know that, right?’
He shrugged. ‘And I keep telling her divorce is so much easier.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re most welcome. You going to tell her now?’
‘Why?’
‘I want to get out of range.’
7/
MACAU AUTONOMOUS REGION, People’s Republic of China
Tommy Wong was crestfallen. He looked at himself in the public washroom’s mirror. The white linen suit and black dress shirt were custom tailored and ideal for a stylish day at the races; but to Wong, the image that reflected back at him was cheap and tawdry.
‘You are a coward, Wong,’ he told the reflection. ‘The tip was good. You could have won a fortune. And instead, you bet the favorite.’
What had his grandfather always said? ‘Let luck be with you, and you shall turn iron to gold.’ Instead, his cynical nature had gotten the better of him.
It wasn’t that he needed the money, of course. His bank accounts were flush with cash. And his lifestyle in the Chinese gambling mecca was under no constraint; he had all the good food and women he could shake a dollar at. He had an elegant condominium apartment up above the city, overlooking Nam Van Lake. By all of his typical markers, Wong’s life was idyllic.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. Perhaps, he told himself, it was just the boredom of having gone for so long without having to work. He’d made more than four million dollars in the year prior, and suddenly found himself battling laziness, a desire to sit back and relax on his well-earned laurels. Wong cursed his own indolence and vowed to stop taking it so easy.
He turned on the tap and splashed his face with cold water. The day was moist, with humidity tipping ninety-six percent, and the racetrack was busy. Even in the open air, all of those people increased the sweltering temperatures that much more. He pulled a long sheet of paper towel from the dispenser and dried his face and hands, then balled it up and tossed it into the trash can.
Outside, the long boardwalk that headed to the main grandstand at the Macau Jockey Club teemed with people; he looked both ways, trying to decide where to go. He could head for the parking lot, instead of likely throwing good money after bad. Or he could head back to the ticket windows and stay for the sixth and seventh races; he didn’t know any of the horses on the card, but there were two heavy favorites.
They wouldn’t make up for the forty-to-one shot he’d just blown, a tip from a friend in Hong Kong.
Wong had a love-hate relationship with gambling. He loved the risk and the rush of a reward but hated that it conflicted with his generally cautious nature. You couldn’t live in the world’s gambling capital without some self-restraint, it was true. But he had concluded that as he got older, the risk of losing some of his nest-egg seemed to outweigh any potential reward. It made him feel cowardly, but secure, and he was torn.
His phone rang and he immediately hoped it was something that would take him away from having to decide. He took out his phone. The number was unfamiliar but that was typical.
‘Tommy,’ he said.
‘Good morning, Mr. Wong.’
The voice was synthetic, a computer simulacrum. It still managed to be familiar, and strangely comforting. Each time it called, the number was different, part of its exceptional misdirection security that bounced the original signal point around digital phone systems around the world. It stated a single number and if Wong replied in the affirmative, it sent an email to his laptop; the email, in turn, was honey-trap encrypted with a version of the software Twofish that split the message into more than a dozen 256- and 128-bit strings of data. If someone tried to crack the data strings, any failed attempt would spring the "honey trap", a data dump that included thousands of pages of illegal pornography and a particularly nasty root kit virus. The virus lay dormant until the individual’s computer was rebooted. Then it would wipe and rewrite the target drive and flash the individual computer’s bios, changing its power settings and causing a motherboard overload.
As far as Wong knew, it had never been triggered, or defeated. If it had, he assumed, the hacker in question probably deserved whatever they could figure out from his messages. Typically, they included a name, a photo headshot, and a date.
‘One million U.S.,’ the computer voice intoned.
‘Yes,’ Wong said. He ended th
e call and returned the phone to his breast pocket, then walked the boardwalk back toward the parking lot at a brisk, even pace. The track was always busy, even when the mercury climbed. He tried to avoid bumping anyone with his shoulders. It wasn’t that he was particularly large or wide at a fit, trim five-foot-nine inches. He was just excited and inclined to rush as a result.
A few minutes later he was ensconced in the light-tan leather driving seat of his Aston Martin DB9, a low-slung sports sedan in battleship grey. He reached under the passenger seat and pressed a fingerprint-encoded button. The tray drawer released and slid out. Wong withdrew his laptop and opened it. It booted to his mail and he placed his thumb on the pad by the keys while entering the twelve-digit string. The screen went black for a split-second. His email browser opened and he clicked on the new message.
The photo was of an elderly white man with a silver-grey bowl cut and a shaggy grey-and-black beard. He wore steel rimmed glasses. Behind them, the skin under his eyes was wrinkled and bagged from age.
‘Stanley David Lawson, Local.’
‘ASAP.’
He deleted the email and shutdown the laptop before returning it to the drawer. He would wait until he got back to his apartment. He could get out of his three-piece suit and into a martini, relax before planning how to kill the old man.
8/
DAY 5
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It had taken some rapid-fire diplomacy to arrange a video conference call so quickly with his Chinese counterpart. Now Jonah Tarrant just had to convince the man that whatever they were hearing from Asian listening posts was important enough for them to co-operate.
‘Thank you for your time, Chairman Chan,’ he said. David Chan was a well-known entity in the capital. Tarrant supposed they’d chosen him because he would make an unfamiliar American more comfortable; but he knew there could be any number of reasons. Chan wasn’t exactly a lightweight. Perhaps they knew something serious was afoot; or maybe they just wanted to impress him.