FALLOUT ZONE (Joe Brennan Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  Below the balcony, just above street level, the nearest business’s awning broke the remainder of his fall, at least somewhat. He slammed into it, snapping its support poles and sending it crashing to the ground, his body hammered by the impact, the pain in his shoulder excruciating. He’d either torn something or partially dislocated it, the arm seemingly immobile from just below the shoulder. He got up slowly, the sound of the police yelling high above barely audible over the street noise; then Brennan crossed the street, disappearing into a busy pedestrian mall.

  He held his damaged arm up with his other hand and made his way cautiously through the crowds of shoppers, knowing full well other officers would be on route, that the mall could be cordoned off in short order. He found a side exit onto Boulevard Montmartre, one of the city’s busiest broad thoroughfares, and blended into the pedestrian traffic. After he’d gone a few blocks and was sure he’d lost the police, Brennan found a bar and used its washroom. Inside, he checked out the shoulder. It was starting to swell; he used his left hand to push it lower, so that the joint was in line again, then pushed in and up, as hard as he could, the dislocated joint popping back into place with a piercing pain that made him feel like screaming.

  They had his face; they knew what area of the city he was in. Avoiding the police wasn’t going to be easy. He needed an advantage. Brennan walked back out to the bar and asked the barman if there was a pharmacy nearby. The man nodded and gestured to the east. “A block or so,” he said. “You can’t miss it. Big sign.”

  At the pharmacy, he purchased hair dye, a tourist sweatshirt and a pair of oversized Ray Ban-style aviator sunglasses. He used a public washroom to apply it as cleanly as possible in the circumstance, then spent twenty minutes sitting in one of the washroom stalls, waiting for it to dry.

  He continued up the street, crossing the busy boulevard, up Passage Jouffray – little more than an alley with a few businesses along it, leading into the popular tourist zone, Montmartre, and parallel to the elegant Rue de Faubourg Montmartre. Every few blocks he would see another pair of policemen, avert his glance, try and keep cool.

  It took thirty-five minutes before he was within site of the train station. The Gard du Nord was grand, more grand perhaps even than the Whitehouse, Brennan thought, block after block of ornate white concrete and marble, glass, carved pillars, its name etched across the front in twenty-foot letters, the roof lined with classic statues of figures in gowns, each representing a different destination nation. Europe’s busiest station, with more than a half-million visitors every single day, it was likely to be crawling with police. But the sheer amount of foot traffic gave Brennan a chance; every airport in Europe, every ferry port, would have his picture. But most weren’t as busy as the Gare du Nord, nor as close to his destination. Outside the station, he used a ticket booth on the adjacent street corner to book a one-way trip on the Eurostar to London.

  Paris was nothing if not predictable: inside the station, each side of the main terminal was lined with businesses, mostly cafes and magazine shops. He kept his eyes on those to his left as took the escalator to the platform. He had a half-hour to kill before the train departed and Brennan’s gaze quickly sought out the men’s room. It wasn’t particularly dignified, but it was less risky than sitting out in the open. Getting on board would be more difficult; they would have his picture, but the dark hair and facial growth made him look dramatically different. It would take an attentive clerk – probably earning minimum wage and therefore not inclined to pay attention – to reconcile his appearance with the shot police had sent out. Besides, it had been several days; he was no longer a lead story, just another unexercised arrest warrant among thousands.

  The train trip was uneventful, with Brennan appearing to be just one more tourist among many. In London, his passport passed muster without a second glance, even though his hair was a different color. He used a prepaid Visa card to rent a car; then he began to the five-hour drive to Holyhead, Wales, an unplanned tour of England’s rural west, through aging stone villages and across country roads, avoiding the larger population centers. At Holyhead, he booked a ferry ticket to Dublin, leaving the rental behind and enduring the rolling, thrashing waves for two hours as the ferry crossed the Irish Sea to the port at Dún Laoghaire, an ancient harbor protected by a vast concrete sea wall. Dozens of yachts were moored to the ferry’s right in a smaller marina at it cruised up to the terminal.

  At the port, Brennan found a taxi and had it take him out of town, to the north, where the fields surrounding villages like Ballyboughal and Oldtown gave rise to the nickname Emerald Isle, the verdant landscape sparsely scattered with family farms and other rural fare. Just outside the coastal town of Balbriggan, the taxi dropped him off at a private airfield. Brennan paid the cabbie with his quickly dwindling cash supply.

  He was bone-weary from days of adrenaline, poor sleep and high-stress. As he sat on a fence outside the small private airstrip, he thought about how nice it would be to head home to Maryland, to Carolyn and the kids. The fatigue made the whole exercise seem futile; he was being hunted by his own government even as he tried to protect Americans from a nuclear threat; the man responsible – assuming it was Khalidi – seemed to be facing little more than public censure. He’d made no progress on the sniper or figuring out why a South Korean agent had made off with a nuke. Brennan rubbed the thickening stubble on his face. He hadn’t showered in two days and smelled ripe, and he rubbed both eyes with his thumb and forefinger, attempting to get his head straight and clear the sleep out.

  He took out his phone and dialed Myrna.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me. I’m at the pickup.”

  “Our lady friend knows about the package,” Myrna said. “She’s agreed to be delicate with it until there’s hard evidence.”

  “Have you had a chance to tell my better half everything’s cool?”

  “Not yet. I’ll do that this morning. You’re heading slightly north of the border, I understand. The west coast is lovely at this time of year.”

  Canada?

  “Okay. Why’s that? Sudden changes in the weather?”

  “Yes, or at least that’s what your friend from Moscow apparently said. He’s in the city and says the mountains are lovely.”

  “And our jet-set friend had no problem with this?” He’d asked Myrna to arrange the pickup before leaving Marseille but hadn’t had a chance until then to confirm.

  “He’s surprisingly happy about it,” she said. “Sort of digs your style.”

  Brennan smiled. That meant it had to be Eddie handling the pickup; they went way back. “Well okay then. What’s his ETA?”

  “He’s solid on twenty-one-twenty GMT,” she said.

  That meant he’d be there in a matter of an hour, Brennan realized. “Great. One last thing: I’m sending you a file for our friend. It’s audio of a conversation with an interested party from Japan. If she knows about the package, she may as well know our other old friend is involved.” The more quickly he could indict David, the more quickly they’d examine his orders; the video of the aquarium shooting would be investigated properly, the timing and splice job examined, and likely his name cleared.

  “Are you good for money?”

  “Almost out.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” she said. “And I’ll send you background on your new friend.”

  “Later,” he said, before disconnecting. Eddie would be along soon; Myrna would get the files to Alex, who would contact her intelligent source and burn Fenton-Wright for working with Khalidi. Finally, Brennan felt like he was making some progress.

  2./

  JUNE 25, 2016, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA.

  David Fenton-Wright’s stomach was in knots; he paced his office with a half-cup of coffee in one hand that was quickly getting cold. He’d been waiting for some word from either his European section chief on one of his local requests for an hour; he’d skipped an NSC briefing on the latest Libyan problems, risking heat from his
colleagues at state and the NSA. But all of that was meaningless, he knew, if he couldn’t shut down Brennan and Malone, head off their investigation before names came out.

  Before his name came out.

  His phone buzzed. He hit the hands-free button.

  “Talk to me.”

  “It’s Donald in Sig Int, sir. We have an interception on one of the names you forwarded. Shall I patch it through?”

  He tried to go through the Sig Int roster; Donald was a strange kid with ginger hair and a red beard. He was keen for a spot as a field agent, constantly trying to curry favor. His psych profile was sketchy and Fenton-Wright wondered how he’d even gotten security clearance. His background included a propensity for violence.

  But someone had obviously seen his potential uses.

  “Go ahead.”

  “It was a phone call to Carolyn Brennan-Boyle from a D.C. number,” Donald said. An address popped up automatically on Fenton-Wright’s desktop. It was an apartment; the phone records went to a ‘Sarah Smith’.

  He double-clicked the associated audio file. The caller was a woman, older, her voice husky. She sounded familiar, but Fenton-Wright couldn’t place it immediately.

  “Carolyn? I’m a friend of Joe’s.”

  “Oh. Oh am I’m glad you’re calling! I haven’t heard a thing now in weeks…”

  “He’s okay. He’s dealing with some big issues, as you probably know…’

  “You must be Walter’s friend Myrna,” Carolyn said.

  Myrna? David thought about it. Wasn’t there a Myrna in Sig Int and Research, a dozen years ago? He remembered her vaguely; a broad-shouldered woman, efficient, a solid analyst but perennially shunted into the background. What was her name again? Verbal? Something like that. Verbish. That was it: Myrna Verbish.

  “It’s better if we don’t use names,” the caller said.

  Fenton-Wright’s smile was faint and self-satisfied. Brennan had tried to contact his wife; that moment of weakness and sentiment would be a fatal mistake.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “No more stories about Ahmed Khalidi.”

  Kenny Davis wasn’t even looking at her when he said it. The News Now editor had never been great at confrontation, and he figured if he avoided her gaze, Alex would cool off more quickly.

  Her head dropped slightly, her mouth dropped open. “What?”

  His office always smelled musty and his desk, as usual, was a pile of litter of gargantuan complexity and depth. He turned briefly and rifled through it as if needing to find something important quickly, but continued to avoid eye contact. “You have nothing hard to support any of this nuke stuff, just your anonymous sources. It’s not good enough this time, Alex,” he said. “This stuff is scary, scary material. Jesus, I’ve been a journalist thirty-two years, and even I’m tempted to call the feds and turn this over to them. We either create a panic or we slow down an investigation. But we’re not indicting a man as powerful as Ahmed Khalidi on this little evidence.”

  Malone blew out a lungful of air. “You know, I’ve risked a lot just by coming in today to discuss this…”

  “So you say,” Kenny said. She gave him a harsh look and he backpedalled. “Don’t get me wrong, okay? You’re a great reporter and if you say the bad guys are gunning for you, well, you’ve got bigger balls than I do. But I can’t be responsible for us potentially terrifying thousands of readers and getting the magazine sued out of existence.”

  “I spent three hours writing this…” she said. “What more…”

  “Evidence,” he said preemptively. “Hard paper showing me someone in authority believes a nuke might be on its way into the country. In other words, anything you get requires official corroboration and reaction before we’ll even consider another piece. You’ve got a lonely desk out there in the newsroom, Alex; you’re already here. You might as well spend a few hours before the end of the work day making calls to your other federal sources – you know, the ones you can publicly name. See if anyone’s heard this stuff. Then maybe we can move ahead.”

  Malone left his office feeling stung; Kenny had always backed her in the past, but increasingly he seemed more worried about his pension than her stories. Which probably made sense; the lawyers would rip any follow-up to shreds anyway. Maybe he was right; maybe she could put in a couple of hours before she headed back to Myrna’s and the safety of anonymity.

  She thought about the older woman and smiled. She had a good heart, and she’d understand if Alex was a few hours later for dinner.

  Myrna’s front door buzzer sounded, which immediately made her nervous. Her personal circle was limited and the timing was bad.

  Maybe Alex had just lost her key.

  She pushed the button on the ancient intercom system by her front door. It had been sloppily painted a light tan/orange, to match the walls of the entrance hallway.

  “Who is it?”

  “I have a package delivery here for a Myrna Verbish, ma’am.” The voice was young. “Would that be you?”

  “Just leave it outside the front door and I’ll come down and get it. I’m not decent right now.”

  “Can’t do that, ma’am,” the young man said. “You need to sign for it.”

  “Who’s it from? I’m not expecting anything.”

  A pause. “The return to sender is for a Walter Lang.”

  Walter? Had he sent her something before he was shot? Why delay it and then use a courier service? What would he have been playing at?

  Outside the building, the young man in the brown cap and shirt with the ginger hair and red beard waited. After a few seconds had passed, the buzzer sounded.

  Inside the building, the delivery man took the two short flights of stairs to the third floor, second from the top, where Myrna’s apartment was situated at the end of the hall, on the right hand side. He checked the hallway both ways and listened for any sounds before proceeding to the door to knock. “UPS ma’am,” he said, using his free left hand to take the silenced pistol out of the back waistband of his shorts. He was nervous, on his first real assignment, a chance to impress the big boss.

  There was no sound. He knocked again. “Ma’am?” He leaned in to see if she was using the spy hole to check him out. The glass exploded outward, the .22 caliber bullet passing through his left eye and lodging in his brain. He collapsed to the ground, spasmodic, the brain damage not killing him immediately but rendering him beyond repair.

  Myrna opened the door slowly. The man was lying right outside it and she leaned down to see if he had any identification on him. She heard a slight noise to her left and looked up, for just long enough to see David Fenton-Wright’s silenced pistol.

  The two shots were quick and precise, and Myrna slumped to the floor next to the delivery man.

  He’d been right to follow the young man in, he decided, and that a veteran like Myrna Verbish would see right through the delivery ruse. But she was never a field agent, not inclined to check other angles of attack, or for backup. He walked over to the bodies and took the pistol from his own gloved hand, placing it in that of the fake delivery man. Then he picked up the delivery man’s own pistol and put it in his pocket. Police would be occupied for days trying to figure out who Myrna really was, or why a senior citizen would shoot it out with a man of no apparent employ, dressed in a fake delivery costume. Eventually, he might have to worry about a tie between Donald’s current job and Myrna’s past. But he had bigger problems to clean up in the immediate.

  Myrna was still twitching, trying to overcome the inevitable, her foot shaking and her body shuddering slightly, blood entering her lungs, her breath sputtering. He stepped over her and entered the apartment quickly, looking around for her computer; it was on, her email open and unprotected. There was an audio file in the inbox from a French email address. He forwarded it to his own address, deleted the original, and flushed the computer’s garbage and cache folders.

  Whoever Myrna’s contacts in intelligence were, Fenton-Wright decided, she wouldn’
t be helping Alex Malone out, or anyone else, any longer.

  Malone got back to Myrna’s building from the office later than she’d planned. She was still irritated by the whole argument with Kenny – and her lack of progress on named sources -- when she pulled into the parking garage. She got out of the old red Miata and crossed the parking garage to the stairwell, taking them up to the third floor.

  She turned the corner and saw Myrna and another person laying in the hallway, a man. She gasped inwardly, shocked by the sight of the blood pooling around them. Before she could react, she heard a noise from the apartment, its door still wide open. She quickly turned the corner of the stairwell and moved up to the fourth floor landing, peering just over the edge of the bannister rail to watch the hallway. A moment later, a man passed by quickly, older, with sandy red hair.

  She recognized him right away. She’d tried to do a profile on him once, back before it had all started.

  David Fenton Wright.

  And he’d just killed Myrna, that seemed certain. She waited until she heard his footsteps go down all three flights, and the front door open and close behind him. Then she rushed down and ran to Myrna. Malone turned her over. She was still breathing, clutching a hole through her neck, gurgling through the blood.

  “Myrna! It’s Alex, sweetie. Hold on! I’m going to call an ambulance.”

  She gently shook her head, smiling even as she choked slightly on blood. “No… too late.”

  “No! Don’t you quit, goddamn you Myrna! Stay with me! Be tough for me!”

  “Too late,” Myrna said, her eyes wandering slightly. “My phone… call Bernie…”

  Malone fumbled through Myrna’s shawl pocket and found the phone. “I’ve got it…”