The Joe Brennan Spy Thrillers

by Sam Powers

  ‘Wait…’ Lee asked. ‘The other films; those containers…’

  ‘They are very old,’ Yip said. ‘They are my most prized possessions.’

  Brennan walked over to the drawer and opened it again, picking up one of the containers. ‘Who is ‘Lan Bing’?’

  Yip averted his eyes, staring rigidly at the floor.

  ‘Jiang Qing,’ Lee said. ‘It was the name she used before politics. You knew her in the west as ‘Madame Mao’.’

  ‘The wife of Mao Zedong?’ Brennan didn’t hide his surprise. ‘She was a film maker?’

  ‘An actress,’ Yip said, his gaze distant, reverent. ‘Our most talented and beautiful. An ideal mother to our nation.’

  ‘How old are they?’ Chu asked. ‘I thought her acting career was long ago.’

  Yip confirmed it. ‘They are from before the war. One, the reel marked ‘Doll’s House’ is the only known copy in existence.’

  ‘Oh yeah… I get it,’ Brennan said. ‘They’re made from an old material, very unstable and unsafe, so they had to be stored carefully.’ He nodded toward Yip, who held the flat carton in his arms. ‘What about that one?’

  ‘I watched this many times over the years, until my projector bulb broke. I did not wish to bother anyone for another. Now, I am afraid I could not see it well enough to watch, even if it was possible.

  He handed the reel to Lee. She was puzzled. ‘I don’t understand.’

  The old man took a deep, cleansing breath. ‘Legacy was our last hope,’ he said.

  ‘Our?’ Lee asked. ‘Who is ‘our’, exactly?’

  ‘The Followers of Jiang Qing and her crusade for pure Maoism. Those of us who wished not to reform Communism but to save it. To bring egalitarian oneness to all mankind. Those who foresaw humanity’s need for a perfect, communal order, led by its most brave and fervent.’ His voice became sturdier when he said her name, as if he’d gained a measure of strength and confidence just by uttering the words.’

  ‘What’s on the film?’ Brennan said. ‘What happened here, old man?’

  ‘At one point, there were many films, and tests, and reports. This was just one day, a picture of life when things were… better here.’

  June 19, 1985

  ‘PLENTY’, A spy town in Inner Mongolia.

  Dorian Fan rose to the morning sun streaming through the Taylor family’s guest bedroom window. He got up and looked out at Main Street.

  It was busy, people coming and going, cars parked further along, in front of the local businesses. He smiled. It was like something from a Jimmy Stewart movie, a slice of American pie.

  The Taylors drove him to the school to meet with Principal Anders and Mr. Shou, the administrator. The building sat at the end of Main, a white concrete bunker on one story, the size of a large supermarket. They found a parking space between the teachers’ cars, in front of the flagpole. The Star-Spangled Banner fluttered in the breeze.

  Anders met them at administration, just past the front doors. ‘Mr. Fan, sir! It’s so good to finally meet you!’ he gushed. ‘Mr. Shou has told us so much about you.’

  Fan sized the man up as he extended a handshake. He could’ve been the school head in any American television program, balding, conservatively dressed in tweed sports jacket, sweater, shirt and tie. ‘I understand I will have a chance to meet some of the recruits today?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir, yes! Come… let’s walk.’ Anders led them down the hallway toward the back of the building. They passed a flight of stairs to the basement, then three classrooms, a gym across the hall. It was small, but functional, and about what he’d expected for a town of a few hundred folks.

  ‘You’re going to be really pleased, I suspect,’ Anders said as they strolled. ‘We have seven remaining at this point. But there are three in particular we plan to use as the core of Legacy.’

  ‘And they’re ready?’

  ‘We believe so, yes. The process of stripping away their identity then rebuilding it to suit our ends has been psychologically devastating to most of the children. But we had nearly a dozen who placed in the final round of suitability, and these were the three that stood out, as you’d requested.’

  He pushed open the rear door to the school and they walked back out into the sunshine. Behind the building, the field was filled with students lined up in three rows. An instructor in a black robe was teaching them wushu kung fu, the students precisely copying a series of stances. The three students who made up the front row moved in synchronicity as they negotiated each pose and stance. Fan recognized one immediately.

  ‘That’s the Taylor boy, Donny. Correct?’

  ‘Indeed. He is our blunt object. A muted intellect, angry, strong, fearless, lacking much in the way of empathy or remorse.’

  ‘His test?’

  ‘We had him rape and murder his mother.’ Anders said it perfunctorily, as someone might do assessing the speed of a mail room delivery. ‘He took to it with zeal while under our control and remembered nothing of it afterwards.’

  Fan turned and studied the man for a few moments. Anders was an interesting specimen himself, also the son of a missionary from the Midwest who’d spent years in China. He seemed utterly psychopathic, but quite functional and capable. ‘And the other two?’

  ‘The boy, Christopher, will be our technical specialist. He can already strip an engine down in no time, perform field medicine, pick a lock in seconds… Oh, and he is a ‘hacker’.’

  Fan frowned. ‘A what?’

  ‘He has been taught to write code for IBM and Apple personal computers, and how to break into protected government and university computer networks. He will be a digital thief, of sorts, as we predict rapid growth in this social area, particularly in America.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘Amelia Sawyer. She has an ingrained need to take control in the absence of good parenting for both her and her sibling; it makes her ideal as our handler. She’s receiving extensive tactical training and her loyalty while under sway is absolute. Our intent is for her to become an expert in surveillance, intelligence gathering and law enforcement. She will be our eyes and ears with the government, a double agent.’

  Fan felt his anxiety build. He rocked on his heels slightly, hands behind his back. ‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ he said. ‘Shou has led you well. Now… before we speak further, I must meet with Master Yip Po. Is he available?’

  ‘He looks forward to it, sir,’ the principal reported. ‘He is most proud of his students. Come…’ He motioned with his hand for them to head back into the building.

  They walked back toward administration, students passing them in the hallway as if it were any other day in the small town.

  The program had taken nearly three decades to establish and cost millions. Soon, more people would wonder about the diverted funds, the cooked books. Fan thought back to the encounter with Mah Xiao. He felt a genuine pang of remorse and regret. The young administrator had been a loyal public servant and a good man, outside of his perverted proclivities. It would take quite some time, if ever, for authorities to tie his murder to the missing funds and back to his more illustrious associate.

  By that time, Fan knew, Shou’s surgeon friend would do his work. Fan would be unrecognizable, as able to blend into the background as just about any kid from a town like Plenty.

  34/

  TODAY

  A single tear traced a lazy track down Master Yip’s cheek. ‘It has been some time since I watched the film. But, more concisely, it is a slice of what life was like here for the children. And for us, of course.’

  ‘You cared about them,’ Lee said.

  ‘Strangely, I did,’ Yip said. ‘I mastered such emotional distractions many years earlier, I believed.’

  Brennan didn’t care about the sentiment of the thing. ‘You mentioned there were eleven children left in the program when the film was shot…’

  He nodded. ‘But only three were selected from the eight who finally qualified, the three best: Amy
, and Christopher, and Donald.’

  ‘You remember their names?’ Brennan asked. He couldn’t believe their luck.

  But the old man frowned and shook his head. ‘Just their given names, their ‘Christian’ names.’

  ‘It’s something,’ Brennan said to Lee in English. ‘It’s not much but it’s something.’

  Daisy looked pensive. ‘That story doesn’t explain how this town came to be here, or the children and their parents.’

  Yip nodded sagely once more. ‘The parents themselves were the children of Missionaries. Once, until just after the Second World War, there were more than a thousand from the west in China, and they had many offspring, many of them illegitimate. Others were added from orphanages sympathetic to China after long-time missionary work. Once their children were separated from them, in the Fifties, many of the parents never returned to America; they were killed, their bodies disposed of, their children raised by proxies as the first generation in “Plenty.”

  “They didn’t try to leave, constantly?” Chu wondered.

  “They were being brainwashed, using isolation techniques and hallucinogens. An early core belief was that the town was in a quarantined nuclear test zone, and unsafe to leave.” Master Yip’s head dipped once more in silent shame. ‘Times… they were very different then. We had a naïve desire to repair the world.’

  ‘By taking choice from children and turning them into killers,’ Brennan reminded. ‘No amount of time will make up for that. What happened to the others?’

  Yip pursed both lips, fighting off more tears. ‘When the program was dissolved, there was no reason to keep them here. And there was no more money to come. I was instructed to… remedy the situation.’

  ‘By Dorian Fan?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘And how were you expected to do that?’

  The old man said nothing, but his unease was obvious. ‘This was very long ago…’

  Chu sounded worried. ‘Master?’

  Yip continued to avert his gaze. Then he sighed once and placed the film carton on his desk before motioning toward the door. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘follow me.’

  He led them to the end of the main corridor, propping open the rear exit so that it would not close after them. He led them out behind the school, where two large, overgrown fields of wild grass preceded the hill that overlooked Plenty. But just ahead one field had been kept neatly mowed. There were no gravestones, or crosses. Just a series of rocks, evenly spaced. Brennan began to count them mentally, pursing his lips anxiously and blowing out a slow whistle. ‘There are…’

  ‘Four hundred and seven,’ Daisy said. ‘Four hundred and seven markers.’

  Yip nodded gently. ‘One hundred and eighty-two adults… two hundred and twenty-seven children. The markers were… for respect. They are not each buried there. There… there was a pit…’

  Brennan felt the anger welling inside. He tried to push it down. He’d seen bad things, in tinpot dictatorships where mass graves spotted the countryside, and in industrial zone disasters, where corporations ran roughshod over local health and dignity. But the idea of the frail old man callously executing so many kids? He thought of his own kids, playing.

  He drew the pistol from Chu’s belt before the other man could react, placing it against Yip’s temple. ‘Say your last, you sonuva…’

  ‘No!’ Chu demanded. ‘Don’t shoot him, please!’

  ‘You heard what he did! And he’s told us all he can. Tell me: explain to me how something like this deserves to exist, to call itself human!?’

  ‘You owe me a life!’ Chu barked. ‘Master Yip helped raise me…’

  ‘One life for four hundred and seven?’ Brennan spat.

  Lee had been silent until then. ‘He’s right, Brennan. You cannot shoot this man; you cannot just perpetuate the violence here.’

  Brennan stared at the withered, tired old face. Then he shifted his gaze to the nearby field. They didn’t even get proper burials… He cocked the pistol. ‘Kiss your ass goodbye, you psychopathic…’

  They heard the shot a moment after the bullet whistled by Brennan’s head and buried itself in the wall behind them. Brennan looked up toward the hill.

  ‘Sniper!’ Lee yelled. They ran for the back door… but the elderly trainer dropped to his knees behind them.

  Chu was about to go through the door when he turned and saw him. ‘Master Yip!’ he yelled. ‘Please…’

  Instead, the elderly man remained on his knees. Then he looked back at the young gangster, a placid look upon his face. The bullet caught him square, entering through one temple and blowing out the other side of his skull, the venerable master pitching forward, dead instantly.

  ‘No!’ Chu exclaimed.

  Brennan grabbed his arm and pulled him inside. ‘We’re sitting ducks out there,’ he said, slamming the door behind them. ‘Do you have any more weapons?’

  ‘Other than the gun you took from me?’ the distraught criminal asked.

  ‘After what he did, the old man got off lightly,’ Lee interjected. ‘And if there is any life after this one, you know he will not be judged kindly. Weapons, Chu! The sniper won’t be alone.’

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just the gun.’

  ‘Daisy, check the front, see what we’re dealing with,’ Brennan said, bolting the back doors. ‘Jackson, come with me.’

  ‘What are we doing, exactly?’ he said as Brennan led them back to the administration office.

  ‘Getting ready.’

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  10:22 p.m.

  Water would not be there, Gessler knew.

  He parked on the rear side of the Denny’s restaurant just outside the city, among the overflow of vehicles from the patrons gathered for breakfast. Then he rolled down his passenger window to get a better look at the rest of the lot.

  The rear door to the restaurant opened and Air walked out. He was shorter than Gessler imagined. He was certain they knew each other well, that once they had been close. But he couldn’t recall why. That part of the past was gone now. He flashed his headlights once, then turned off the engine. His contact looked both ways then crossed the lot and opened the passenger door to climb in.

  ‘We have a complication,’ Air said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A witness, in Detroit. He called the police. I’ve been monitoring their channels and feeds. They have an all-points bulletin out for your arrest.’

  The man on the sidewalk. He didn’t recall what happened, but Gessler knew there had been a confrontation. ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘This was anticipated as a potential challenge and will change little. We stay on plan, but we travel separately. I’ll handle the issue in Mexico and meet you in New Jersey. You drop in on your internet associate. Obviously if you’re compromised at any time…’

  ‘I have my capsule,’ Gessler said. ‘Water is ready?’

  ‘Water is already on scene, taking care of the preliminary approach. The plan comports perfectly to our requirements. Great favor has been passed to her by our handler, Master Fan, who wishes us the best of luck.’

  Gessler’s expression shifted at the mention of Fan’s name, a sense of wonder settling in, an unreserved enthusiasm. ‘He said that?’

  Ben nodded. ‘She said to tell you that he mentioned you personally and his great appreciation for your efforts.’

  It had been many years since he’d even heard Master Fan’s name, years of lying in the dark, hearing but unheard, empowered but powerless, waiting to shed the illusion that swaddled his presence in shadows and half-truths, waiting for his purpose. But the feeling of pride was still there, the feeling that there was nothing else on Earth quite so important as fulfilling Master Fan’s wishes. His pride swelled and he felt a confidence that had been absent since his awakening, a certainty that soon Jiang Qing’s Legacy would seed a new dawn.

  A new world.

  BEIJING

  DAY 15

  The State Security Committee had been
fully gathered for more than ten minutes but the meeting still had not come to order. Instead, the low murmurs of tested allegiances filled the room, as allies conferred and tried to get a sense of what their opponents were thinking.

  Yan watched them stoically. The only opinions that mattered at the end of the day were those of the two faction leaders: the chairman, David Chan, and his opposite number, Wen Xiu. Both were back in the capitol for just two days, then scheduled to fly to New York with the premier. But the committee meeting was unavoidable; word had filtered across the agencies that an American was loose and operating somewhere in Helionjiang Province.

  It took two more minutes before Chan banged the gavel and called the meeting to order. ‘Gentlemen, we face a crisis of confidence at the worst possible moment.’ Around the semi-circular conference table, the murmurs renewed with abandon. ‘Gentlemen, order!’ Chan demanded, banging the gavel twice. When it had quieted, he continued. ‘It does us no good to ignore the reality that we have an unwelcome presence in China, in the form of an American intelligence agent working on Legacy. Unfortunately, it appears he is receiving aid from one of our own, as the briefing Undersecretary Yan distributed indicates.’

  ‘Perhaps if the Chairman had followed the initial recommendation…’ Wen Xiu began to interject.

  But Chan cut him off, banging the gavel again. ‘Order! If the Interior Minister would be so kind as to follow the rules of the committee and wait to be recognized, it would be most appreciated. Now… as I said, we must address this situation; but we must do so delicately, and without leaving the Americans any suggestion that Legacy is a Paramount issue. The talks next week in New York offer us a rare opportunity to help directly shift the course of American policy with respect to North Korea and the United States’ role in patrolling the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea. I am open to suggestions.’