The Joe Brennan Spy Thrillers

by Sam Powers

  Tarrant smiled and Chan realized his intentions. He really did like the young American. He seemed devious and charming, both highly flexible skill sets.

  LOS ANGELES

  Det. Norm Drabek hesitated for a moment before rapping on the smoked-glass window, just above the gold-embossed words ‘Capt. Forrest Dean.’ Then he turned the doorknob and opened it a crack. ‘You wanted to see me, cap’n?’

  The heavyset Dean looked up from his iPad, then set it down on the desktop. ‘Yeah, come on in for a minute, Normie. Close the door there, too.’

  Drabek closed the door. That was never a good sign.

  ‘Am I in trouble, cap?’

  ‘Grab a seat there for a second, okay?’ He gestured to the two chairs ahead of the desk. Drabek sat down in the right-hand one.

  ‘Okay, what’s up?’

  ‘Normie, I’m placing you on leave for two weeks, effective immediately.’

  ‘What?! You’re suspending me!!?’

  ‘Norm! Now… just relax, okay? It’s not an official suspension, and you won’t get a knock on your file for health issues. It’s technically administrative…’

  ‘What the hell, Forrest!? Thirty-six years on the job, I get pulled?!? For what?!?’

  ‘I told you again and again, you had to stop interfering in homicide’s work on the Joseph case and give them what you had. But you’re obsessing about helping this young woman, and I think we both know it’s because of your daughter.’

  ‘Forrest, buddy…

  ‘No, no getting around this, no playing the ‘old friends’ card, Normie. You need a break, and you know it.’

  ‘But Captain, the suspect in this case, this Ben Levitt guy… I’m telling you, there’s something really weird about this guy…’

  ‘He left a man dissolving in lye in a bathtub. I was pretty damn sure there was something wrong with him before I called you in here.’

  ‘He yelled at someone in Chinese,’ Norm said. It was the weirdest factoid he had, and just throwing it out there, he figured, might give the senior man pause.

  It did, for a couple of seconds. The captain wasn’t sure what to make of that. ‘Chinese?’ Then he realized that if he didn’t know about it… ‘Have you passed this on to Terry Cummins yet?’

  Ah, hell, Drabek thought. ‘Not as of yet. I just found out about it.’

  ‘Uh huh. Just.’

  ‘A couple of days ago. Look, Forrest…’

  ‘Two weeks. Do I have to take your shield and your piece? And be honest with me, damn it! We’ve worked together for nearly thirty years.’

  Norm shook his head. ‘I’ll play it straight. No official business.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Captain Deen replied, unsure if the word ‘official’ should make him nervous.

  Drabek was eight feet out the division’s front doors when his phone rang and Zoey’s number came up. It gave him an immediate warm sensation.

  ‘Norm! I haven’t seen you in three days…’

  ‘I know, kid, I know. You’re not going to have to worry about that for a couple of weeks...’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I got suspended. Well… sorta. Anyway, they put me on leave. I think it was heat from Terry Cummins in Homicide….’

  ‘You’re kidding me. They didn’t…’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘But… what about Ben? What about us finding him first, finding out what happened to him? He could be hurt, Norm! He could have a head injury, or an aneurysm or something…’

  Drabek didn’t buy it. Levitt was working too deliberately, too purposefully. He couldn’t tell her that, not yet. She obviously hadn’t fully accepted yet that he was a bad guy. Or that she wouldn’t fix him. ‘Look… Just because I can’t work it officially doesn’t mean we can’t still make calls, chase a few things down. I’ll call you tonight and we’ll get together and go over everything again, okay?’

  She sniffed a little, like she’d been gently sobbing. ‘Okay, Norm.’

  After she hung up, Drabek headed to the small adjacent parking lot. His aging Chrysler Lebaron looked sad and unstylish, a twenty-year old boxy piece of reliable frugality. He sighed a little as he climbed into it, feeling the weight of his years on the job and the frustration of never being able to just give it a rest, to give up the threads of a case. He wondered just what it was that had made him that way.

  His phone rang again.

  ‘Normie? It’s Pace.’

  His partner would’ve already been told, Norm knew. The captain did things by the book. ‘What’s up Jeff? You calling to commiserate or make fun of me?’

  ‘Never, partner, never! I figured while you’re off having your little vacation you’d be keeping an eye on that, uh, ‘other matter’ that has Terry so interested…’

  ‘Oh yeah? You got that right, I guess.’

  ‘So you’d probably be interested to know that Baltimore P.D. put an all-points out for a Homicide suspect this morning, some guy who killed a priest and tried to burn down a church.’

  ‘I would? I hate to tell you, young man, but I’ve never been that religious and the closest I’ve been to Baltimore was rewatching The Wire last year.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah… that’s not the interesting part.’

  ‘Feel free to skip right to it…’

  ‘Well, based on a somewhat odd witness description, I called the investigator, and the same guy is a person of interest in a homicide a day earlier in Detroit. The interesting part, Mr. Impatient, was that he yelled at a passerby in Chinese.’

  ‘That… sounds awful familiar.’

  ‘Uh huh. Too much so, given that he’s already shown up in two cities out there.’

  ‘I think you might be onto something there, young master Pace.’

  ‘I think I might.’

  ‘Give me the number,’ Norm said, feeling a surge of adrenaline. ‘Fuck Terry Cummins in his fat pedantic ass. I’m going to catch this fucking guy; I’m going to catch him if it’s the last damn thing I do.’

  37/

  THE ERGUN RIVER, Russia-China border

  The passenger train from Blagoveshchensk to Irkutsk operated under an ancient agreement that allowed it to save hours of travel time. It continued using tracks that had once belonged to the Soviet Union but now lay within Inner Mongolia, under a special agreement.

  There was a customs check at Daxing’anling Prefecture, then hours of uninterrupted mountain and valley scenery before it snaked its way to the bridge at Shiwei, the small village that spawned Genghis Khan and that had once been the center of a great Mongol empire, now just a sleepy river port and tourist stop.

  It had taken Brennan and Lee half a day to get to the town across backroads and through stretches of trail that cars hadn’t seen in years. But Chu’s Infiniti, though not built for it, had admirably handled the task. Now they were parked near the river, just out of sight of the customs office, waiting for the train to appear on the horizon.

  Lee was engrossed in something online, using a ‘burner’ phone purchased in Hulunbier.

  Brennan was taking in the scenery. The whole place reminded him of Alberta or Montana, foothills and rolling hummocks, and vast plains. Most of the locals were horsemen, it seemed, and there were majestic animals covered with bright blankets grazing in paddocks all around the village. Shiwei itself seemed sprung from a Rocky Mountain fairy tale, all log cabins and rustic designs. It was the kind of place he could see retiring in with Carolyn, having a small ranch…

  Carolyn. The kids.

  He hadn’t thought about them in days. That wasn’t a good sign. That was the business, typically, with everything external to the mission being set aside. But it had been so long, so many years of making everything else secondary. He knew how much she’d come to hate it, and wondered if she could still really love him.

  ‘Aiyah!’ Lee griped. ‘Who translates this stuff?’ She had the government’s official Shiwei tourism page open. ‘Later many Russians and Chinese inter-married, creating plentiful moving love stories.�
�� Huh? Who talks like that, outside of Japanese video games?’

  ‘If the lousy English is our biggest problem, this is all going to go just fine,’ Brennan said.

  ‘You still haven’t explained what we do after we get to Irkutsk and catch a plane,’ Lee said, breaking herself away from the phone. ‘Assuming we can get past customs…’

  ‘It’s a big enough center for Jonah to wire us the money and contacts I need. I get us the paperwork and we buy tickets. Russia’s free now, remember. As long as we have Russian passports, that’s not an issue. The question is what we do with you once we get there.’

  ‘And where is ‘there’, in this context?’

  ‘Home. D.C.’

  The notion surprised her. What was he suggesting? ‘I can’t do that,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? It seems like the sensible move. We need support, we need to get this information to the right people. And you know I didn’t understand half of what the old man said.’

  ‘But it’s Washington, D.C., your capitol. Langley, Virginia is not far away. The optics…’

  ‘You’re not exactly in your superiors’ good books as it is, Daisy. Am I wrong?’

  It wasn’t that simple, she knew. There was the longer term to consider, if she even had one. ‘I can’t go with you. It would be tantamount to defecting. Or it would be seen as such, given that someone in the ministry has a kill order on me. I have to find a way to clear this up with my paymasters, first.’

  Brennan knew he wouldn’t convince her otherwise, not without Jonah demanding he try to turn her. And that was a task he most definitely did not want. ‘Fine. But from here to Irkutsk, you fill me in on what the old man told you. When we get there, I’ll get you a new Chinese passport…’

  ‘And an Australian one, also,’ she said. ‘I may need to keep moving in the region for some time before this is resolved.’

  ‘You realize there’s a good chance they’ll just send a hit squad after you, to make sure the next time?’

  She’d told him about Hong Kong during the drive. ‘I know. But they may have yet more information, and I have managed to take care of myself in the past. If someone in the ministry has this much desire to keep me from ‘Legacy’, it is possible the entire plan continues to have government support, in some respect, despite the passage of time and the changing of our culture. Perhaps uncovering that link would be sufficient to restore my honor.’ The contempt in her tone was considerable, Brennan noticed, and understandable.

  ‘Do you have some way to be reached, in case we need to fill each other in? There’s no telling what you’re going to stumble across…’

  She nodded. ‘The Venetian Macau casino. There’s a pit boss there, Nancy Tong. She has an emergency dead drop for me.’

  A dead drop was old school spy craft, a bin or box or other quiet public location where something could be dropped and, typically, the drop marked in some way to show there was a delivery. With no contact between the two parties and complex signalling sometimes used to disguise locations, Brennan had used a few of his own over the years. ‘Fine. Look, Lee…’

  ‘Don’t! Don’t get all sentimental on me, Brennan. You saved me from that hitman, I saved you from the Black Cranes. We’ll call it even.’

  ‘Well…’ Brennan said, counting back with his index finger as he thought it through, ‘technically the film strips were my idea, so I saved you again back at Plenty. And I’m providing you the paperwork. So that’s two…’

  ‘Brennan:’

  ‘Yes, Lee?’

  ‘Shut up and enjoy this lovely sunrise. The train will be along any minute.’

  They would hop it when it slowed on the bridge, ride it past the tiny, understaffed and disinterested customs post, and then stow away or, if necessary… buy a ticket.

  Once in Russia, everything would become easier, Brennan knew. Well… aside from preventing a major assassination and diplomatic disaster, of course.

  A few miles away, the train’s whistle sounded loudly across the river valley.

  MANHATTAN, New York

  Agent Jennifer Parnell stood next to the veteran Secret Service liaison Lloyd Dobler, as he gestured at the busy city street beside them. He’d been going over the same point for twenty minutes and it was getting frustrating, because she knew she didn’t have the authority to override her bosses, any more than he had the President’s ear.

  ‘It’s a bad route, Jen,’ he whined.

  Jesus H, dude, shut up. He’d been calling her by her first name, truncated, for five days and it was driving her crazy. But Parnell insisted on keeping her cool and remaining professional.

  ‘The president stands to be exposed to potential crossfire from one of these alleys or adjacent tall buildings on at least five separate occasions between leaving the conference centre and Chinatown. It’s just unacceptable when we aren’t even being given a rationale for this route by the Chinese…’

  He kept droning and Parnell tuned him out. She couldn’t help it; the week had been a whirlwind and she was mentally fatigued.

  A limousine pulled up to the curb, a long, square, navy blue Lincoln. It had diplomatic plates and an American flag on a front-headlight stanchion. The back door opened and CIA assistant deputy director Adrianne Hayes leaned out. ‘Agent Parnell: a few moments of your time, if you please.’

  Hayes made Parnell more nervous than all the men in the agency combined. She was a ferociously political animal who’d managed to claw her way to the top of the CIA from virtually nowhere, a state school graduate with no Washington connections who’d nonetheless taken to the intelligence game like a big cat in a field of drowsy gazelles.

  She climbed into the limo, Hayes shuffling across the seat. Deputy director Jonah Tarrant occupied one of the jump seats opposite them. ‘Jennifer,’ he said.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘You’ve had a chance to speak with the Chinese?’

  She’d been about to glance at Hayes, wondering why she was suddenly in the loop. But she managed to hold off. Hayes had no role or interest in the security detail in the weeks prior. Now she was in Manhattan in person?

  ‘Yes sir, ma’am. The head of the Chinese security detail, Po Lei Wei, insists they have had no credible threats other than what we’ve already been told of Legacy. We’ve kept a close eye on him, and he has spent minimal time in contact with the traveling delegation, who are in… I believe… Nigeria this morning.’

  Hayes’ gaze burned a hole through her, reading her every expression. ‘The guy on the curb, the secret service liaison…’

  ‘Dobler.’

  ‘He seemed pretty upset by something…’

  ‘With good reason,’ she said. ‘This route is a nightmare to defend, let alone pass off as relatively secure.’

  ‘Where are the worst spots?’ Hayes asked. She leaned in as she said it, as if she was genuinely curious, and not just senior management being patronizing. ‘Say… the side streets either way? Chinatown? The route from the conference center?’

  ‘More likely the buildings downtown, if you’re talking about a sniper,’ Parnell said. ‘For anything bigger like a grenade launcher or RPG, they’d want some space around them. So… yes, the side streets are a considerable risk. We’ve had some help to block them off…’

  ‘Jennifer was trying to reach an agreement with city police and fire,’ Jonah noted. ‘They want to take part anyway, but we need them on call. This way, they can do both.’

  ‘And ideally station a man at every one of them?’ Parnell asked. She knew the additional request would seem extreme on top of a half-dozen fire trucks and a dozen police vehicles.

  ‘Not a chance,’ Jonah said. ‘They’re not even staffing the trucks, for the most part, just giving us drivers, spotters, some extra hands if necessary. We’ve already leaned on the NYPD hard for route help.’

  ‘What about asking the state police to kick in…?’ Parnell suggested. ‘After all, our involvement is already saving them…’

  ‘Again, not a chan
ce,’ Adrianne interjected. ‘We’ve already racked up too many favors owed and the budget can’t sustain that sort of prolonged additional manpower. Not over a parade, even with a perceived threat like Legacy.’

  ‘Perceived?’ Parnell sounded surprised.

  Jonah shrugged. ‘We still have very little other than a fifty-year-old rumor about a plot by a woman who’s been dead for twenty-five. We haven’t heard from Brennan in nearly a week…’

  Hayes could see the younger woman worrying. ‘Don’t sweat the details too much, Parnell,’ she counselled. ‘This is what we do. The Asians… they have their own ways. Even though they’re visiting us, we’re still sort of just along for the ride.’

  ANNANDALE, Virginia

  The drive from the airport to Annandale was quiet, although after being away for so long, Brennan was happy to let the car radio and a few familiar voices on NPR fill the void.

  He was happy. Not ecstatic, or joyful, or anything quite so out of character; but he was finally getting to see the kids. It had only been two weeks, but it felt endless, not knowing how they were doing. He knew it was just instinct, that Carolyn would never allow anything to happen to them.

  But that didn’t prevent his sense of disappointment and guilt at not being there, again.

  He pulled the car into the driveway of their modest bungalow. Carolyn wanted something bigger, in town. She was willing to wait until the kids were grown, because as sleepy as the suburbs were, they were also safer and generally healthier. But then, she insisted, they were moving to the Beltway proper.

  He pushed the negative thought away, filing it for the future under arguments that could wait until much later.

  At least for now, he was home.

  He opened the front door on the second try, then picked up his suitcase and walked in. Carolyn had installed a keypad lock but kept cycling three different codes. It irritated him way more than it should, he knew. There was near zero chance that in the in-filled, upgraded subdivision any crook would bother targeting their modest property.