Authors: Kevin Wignall
Chapter Forty-two
“Are you going to kill me too? I hadn’t thought so, but it seems I’m not much good at reading your intentions.”
He looked older than in the pictures Dan had seen. He was carrying a little more weight, his hair greyer, but he looked healthy and relaxed, like a man who was comfortable with where he was in life and what lay ahead.
“Are you armed?”
Brabham responded by opening his jacket for Dan to see. Dan walked over and sat on the chesterfield.
Brabham stood and said, “Can I get you a drink? I usually treat myself to a single malt around this time of evening. You’ll join me?”
Dan could see the bottles and glasses on a small table near the desk. He nodded and watched as Brabham walked over and poured two hefty measures. He couldn’t see which brand it was. When Brabham came back he put the drinks on the table in front of the sofa, then moved his chair so that he was facing Dan.
He picked up his glass then and said, “Good health.” Dan followed suit and they both drank. “What’s the aim of all of this, Dan? I ask because, if you thought you were making yourself safe, you’ve wildly miscalculated. Even if you don’t kill me, what you’ve done here today will just make you an even higher priority.”
“That’ll be less of a problem if your operation’s shut down.”
Brabham looked incredulous, as if he were talking to a child, and said, “This operation won’t shut down. If I resign they’ll just replace me. There are people higher up the food chain who want this, who see a need to draw a line under the past excesses of people like Patrick White. Yes, I’m sure he’s painted himself to you as the sheriff, tidying up this town, but it’s his mess we’ve been trying to deal with.”
“Interesting way of going about it.” Dan put his gun on the sofa next to him and said, “But while we’re talking of excesses, you surely know this wasn’t just a response to your people coming after us. It’s about some of your own excesses, about why you sent someone up to Jack Redford’s place.” Brabham raised his eyebrows, feigning surprise, doing a good job of it. “You know what I’m talking about, Bill, I’m talking about your son murdering Sabine Merel and you covering it up.”
There was a flicker of something behind Brabham’s eyes at the mention of Sabine, panic or fear, but then he rallied and laughed, saying, “I don’t know what kind of line Patrick White has sold you, but—”
“We have the tape. Patrick has the tape. You thought you got hold of the only copy but there was another.”
Brabham didn’t respond at first, and in the silence Dan was pretty sure he could hear vehicles approaching outside, too many for it to be just a random car passing.
Brabham smiled weakly and said, “I’m still not doing very well at reading your thoughts, Dan, but I suspect you’ve miscalculated again if you think Patrick’s likely to go public with this tape of yours. He won’t. He’ll use it as leverage, to undermine me and the agency, to shore up his own position. He’ll never make it public because, if he does, he’ll lose that leveraging power.”
Dan nodded. There was a good chance Brabham was right about all of it.
“You still made a mistake when you tried to kill me, Bill. And you made a bigger mistake when you killed my friends.”
Brabham glanced over at the dead guy, and sounded bemused again as he said, “Yes, well, we can all be prone to miscalculations.”
He could definitely hear cars outside now, and said, “Did you call for backup?”
“Reluctantly, yes. We put a call in to the Berlin station. I expect that’s them now.”
Dan felt his phone vibrate and took it out. It was Patrick.
He answered and Patrick said, “Dan, we’re outside. What’s the situation in there? Is it secure?”
“It’s secure. I’m with Bill in his study upstairs. Everyone else is dead.”
“Then I’ll be up shortly. Try not to shoot me.”
Dan ended the call, and in response to Brabham’s look of expectancy, he said, “It’s Patrick. He’s on his way up.”
“What a pleasant surprise—I haven’t seen him in a few years. In fact, it’s been too long.”
Dan didn’t respond, but sipped at his drink and said, “Is this an Oban?”
A door slammed open somewhere down below, followed by the sound of many footsteps, the suggestion of urgency but not high alert.
Brabham looked pleased and said, “Yes, it is Oban. You know your whisky?”
“I know this one.”
“What a shame we couldn’t have shared a glass under different circumstances.”
“The circumstances wouldn’t matter. You’d still be Bill Brabham.”
“Touché.”
Dan looked to the door as footsteps approached and Patrick White appeared, still in his trademark heavy overcoat, looking none the worse for the amount of travel he must have put in over the last few days. He looked at Dan and shook his head, smiling as if at his own folly rather than Dan’s.
“Hello, Bill.”
“Hello, Patrick. You’re looking well. Your new role obviously agrees with you.”
Patrick’s smile dropped and he walked into the room, glancing at the dead body before saying, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Bill, on so many levels? I don’t just mean Paris. I mean going after assets that served this agency, that served our country, and showed no signs of ever becoming a liability.” As he talked, Dan noticed someone else appear in the doorway behind him, a guy with dark hair, not much older than Dan, looking more like a movie mob boss than someone from the intelligence community. Neither of the other two could see him from there, and Patrick continued, saying, “You’re done, Bill, this is all finished.”
Brabham didn’t look fazed, and said only, “With all due respect, Patrick, you don’t have the authority to make that decision.”
“But I do,” said the other guy, who stepped into the room now. He’d been looking at the body all the time he’d been in the doorway, but now his gaze found Dan, and looked full of disgust. “How many of my officers have you killed today, Mr. Hendricks?”
“I haven’t been keeping count, but I guess around ten.”
“You guess?”
“I guess. And you know, there’s an easy way to ensure I don’t kill any more—just don’t have them try to kill me.”
Patrick said, “Dan, this is Associate Deputy Director Frank Canale. He flew out with me. And, Frank, whatever the rights and wrongs, Dan was working for the ODNI and his actions were a direct response to attacks made on him, and on me.”
Canale looked at him, but didn’t answer, his expression alone seeming to suggest he didn’t care. He nodded to himself then, looking around the room before he settled on Bill.
“There’ll be a full investigation into all of this. We need to look at the decisions made in recent months, and at the actions that followed those decisions. We also need to look at some of the questionable practices that took place in the past, and those responsible for them.” He threw a look at Patrick as he said this, before turning back to Brabham. “And we also need to look at people misusing agency resources to cover up past misdemeanors, because that’s something that can’t be tolerated.”
Dan laughed and said, “Misdemeanors?” All three of them stared at him, and he repeated, “
Misdemeanors
? His son tried to rape a student in the US ambassador’s residence in Paris.”
Brabham sounded outraged and said, “That’s ridiculous! You have no proof of that.”
“No, we don’t, because the one person who could have testified, is dead, murdered by your son.”
Brabham had clearly had enough time to think since Dan had mentioned the tape to him, and he said now, “We tried to suppress the tape, I’ll own up to that, and it was wrong, but any father would do the same. Because Harry didn’t kill that girl. She was alive and well when he left her. It’s as simple as that, and you can’t prove otherwise, with the tape or without it.”
Patrick looked at him and said, “The tape may not prove it categorically, Bill, but I’m sure you wouldn’t want it to come out, all the same.”
Canale sounded impatient, saying, “Enough. This isn’t the time to discuss what we do with the tape.”
Patrick smiled, probably taking satisfaction after the comments Canale had aimed at him, and said, “Actually, Frank,
we
won’t decide anything. The tape is in the hands of the ODNI.”
Giving ground, Canale said, “Very well, then we’ll have to come to some arrangement about what’s mutually beneficial.” Patrick gave a barely visible nod in response, something Dan understood all too well. “Bill, I think it best you come back to Washington with me.”
Bill nodded, downed the remainder of his whisky and stood. This was how easily things would be tied up, justice for the Merels and Redford and everyone between slipping through the cracks as they all jostled for influence and power.
Dan shook his head, laughing at the brazenness of it, and played nonchalantly with his phone as he said, “Oh, Frank, by the way, you asked how many of your officers I killed?”
His impatience growing, Canale said, “What of it?”
Knowing that it was riling him, Dan continued to sound distracted, pausing as he concentrated on the phone, saying, “Only, you didn’t ask . . . about the ones I didn’t kill. See . . . bear with me . . . y
eah, I cuffed a couple of them to the railings . . . in a building across from Bill’s office. They’re unharmed, but . . .”
Canale looked at Dan’s phone and said, “You think you could deal with that after you finish telling me whatever it is you’re telling me?”
“I’m almost done.” He finished up on the phone, then looked up with a smile. “Done. Yeah, they’re okay, unharmed. As for the phone, it’s something I set up earlier, because you people are all the same. Maybe the tape doesn’t prove he killed her, but even so, that tape, and the whole story, and contact details for the people who can back it up, has just been emailed to around thirty news agencies around the world. The
Washington Post
,
New York Times
, Reuters, CNN, the BBC,
Le Monde
—
they’ll
be interested. You craven cowards, all of you. You’d rather have an attempted rapist and murderer serving in the US Congress than upset the apple cart. Well, shame on you, because it’s out there now, so deal with it.”
Dan held up his phone and smiled.
Brabham looked rattled for the first time, the color leaching from his face. He reached a hand out to the back of the chair, steadying himself.
He looked at Dan, full of hatred as he said, “You bastard. His wife’s just had a baby, for God’s sake.”
“Two words, Bill—
Sabine Merel
.”
Bill shook his head, as if he hadn’t heard or understood. He started to walk without conviction towards the door, but there was a strange quality about his movements, as if he might collapse. And then he went, his leg appearing to buckle, and too late Dan saw it was a feint—within seconds, Brabham had scooped up the dead man’s gun and had it leveled now at Dan’s face.
Dan didn’t have time to react, only to take in the hatred and agitation in Brabham’s expression. Patrick and Canale both flinched in response but stopped, seeing the same volatility Dan could see.
Dan had pushed him too far, and with an odd feeling of resignation, he knew this was it. He’d often wondered how he’d feel when he finally faced certain death, and here it was, an almost out-of-body acceptance that the time had come and he could simply stop trying.
Brabham wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger, though, and said again now, “You bastard! He was a good kid and he’s a good man, and he doesn’t deserve this, people like you . . .”
Canale said, “Bill . . .”
“No! You know the script, Frank—he broke in here, killed a load of people before we took him down. It’s what he deserves.”
“I’ll testify to that not being true,” said Patrick.
Without taking his eyes off Dan, he said, “What makes you think you’ll testify to anything?” He stepped forward now, as if wanting more certainty. His hand was shaking slightly but the aim was true, the barrel of the gun oddly compelling from Dan’s perspective. “You lowlife piece of scum.”
Dan braced himself. The shot exploded, the room breaking apart. Patrick fell backwards, almost losing his footing. Brabham’s face distorted and crumpled and he seemed to dive sideways to the floor, gun-hand flailing like a last desperate wave.
It took Dan a moment to take in that he hadn’t been shot himself, another to make sense of the scene, the blood, the wound to the side of Brabham’s head, Canale’s own outstretched arm. Dan looked at him, still not entirely certain that this meant he was out of danger.
Maybe Patrick was just as unsure because he spoke first, saying simply, “Frank?”
Canale holstered his gun, looking remarkably calm considering he’d just shot someone in the head at close to point-blank range. And Dan wasn’t naïve enough to think he’d done it to save
his
life—there had been some other calculation, perhaps just a realization that Bill had become a liability.
Now Canale said, “It’s a different script, that’s all—it’ll be easier to tidy up this way.” His phone started to ring and when he took it out and looked at it, a flash of anger crossed his face. He looked with contempt at Dan and put the phone back in his pocket.
“We’ll talk, Patrick.” He pointed at Dan, then, and said, “I hope for your sake, Mr. Hendricks, that we never cross paths again.”
Dan didn’t respond, the last couple of minutes having convinced him that he didn’t want to make any more an enemy of Frank Canale than he already had. Besides, he was still too surprised at being alive to throw it away on a quip.
Canale took one more look at Brabham, bloodied and twisted, and strode out of the room, leaving Dan and Patrick with the corpses and a whole load of uncertainty. The only thing Dan really knew for sure was that he’d done what was right. Maybe it wouldn’t prove to be the right thing for his own future, but it had been right all the same, and perhaps against the odds, he was still alive, for the time being at least.
Chapter Forty-three
Patrick looked down at Brabham and said, “What have you done, Dan?”
“You were gonna sit on it, weren’t you?”
“I was going to use it to rein in Harry Brabham, and to bring an end to all of this.” He gestured at the room around them, as if that encompassed Bill Brabham’s entire operation. “And yes, with the tape public . . . I don’t know, who can say what might happen now.”
“You’re saying I might not be safe?”
“I’ve no idea, frankly. I’ll try to keep you safe and, chances are, you will be. I’m just saying, releasing that tape makes everything more volatile.” He gestured towards Brabham as if to demonstrate that point. “Why did you do it?”
“Two reasons. Firstly, Sabine Merel. She was murdered, Patrick, and her family and friends have a right to know what happened, to have peace of mind, and they deserve justice.”
“I wouldn’t bank on justice, even now, and if you think this’ll give them peace of mind, you’re fooling yourself.”
“Maybe, but I know I would want to know, if she’d been my daughter.”
Patrick seemed to accept that, then said, “You said there were two reasons.”
“Yeah, the other’s Jack Redford. I don’t know what kind of affinity I had with the guy, but he was up there in the middle of nowhere, working towards this, and he couldn’t come out of hiding, so he never tracked down the copy. It just felt right to finish his work for him. I didn’t know the guy, but I felt I owed him that much.”
Patrick took in what he said, not passing comment, and said finally, “Well, whatever else happens, you did the job I asked, so I’m grateful for that, even if the denouement proved a little excessive.”
“You gave me their contact details—you must have known I’d come to Berlin at some point.”
“Sure, I thought you’d spy on them. I didn’t honestly anticipate that you’d come and wipe them out.” He laughed a little and Dan laughed too. “So what’s next? You’re done with this?”
“Not quite. I met a guy called Eliot Carter, and he gave me the details for someone called Tom Crossley. You know either of them?”
“I knew Eliot years ago. Tom Crossley, I’m not familiar with. What’s his part in it?”
“They were friends. Carter thinks he might know more about Redford’s disappearance. I hope so, anyway. Like I said, the guy got under my skin in some way—don’t know why.”
“Don’t you? Isn’t it because you look at him and wonder if you’re looking at your own future?”
“Maybe.” They fell into a brief silence, the continuing sounds of the team going through the house around them, doing whatever it was they did in this kind of situation. “What about you? What’s your next move?”
“I carry on. As long as you’re not too hot to handle, I might even have some more work for you if you’re interested.”
Dan suddenly became aware of how strange it was to be talking in such a measured way, surrounded by the visceral wreckage of all this violence.
He stood and said, “We’ll have to see about that, but come on, let’s get out of here.” They made for the door and out onto the landing, looking down at the people coming and going in the hall below them. “By the way, one of the guys I cuffed over in Charlottenburg, a tech guy called Josh, he could be a real asset to you, and I think he’d willingly jump ship, if you make him an offer.”
“I’ll bear that in mind—what about the other guy?”
“The other guy would be a real asset too, but I’m less certain about her jumping ship.”
“I see.” They walked down the stairs, ignored by most of the people moving about, some of them in regular clothes, some of them in combats. “I do wish you hadn’t killed quite so many people. I had a feeling you would as soon as I told you about Charlie, but even so . . .”
“Yeah, and ironically, the guy who tortured Charlie wasn’t even here—he’d flown home for an operation on his leg.”
“The guy Charlie shot in the woods?”
“The same. One Alex Robinson. And I have to warn you, Patrick, whether or not I work for you again, whether or not I want to cross swords with Frank Canale, if I ever encounter Robinson, there’ll only be one outcome.”
He smiled at Dan and said, “Then let’s hope you don’t bump into him.”
They crossed the hall and out through the front doors, which were wide open. The grounds were still floodlit and the snow was falling heavier now. The various vehicles parked randomly in front of the house were already snow-capped.
Patrick looked around, and for a moment Dan thought he was about to say something about how beautiful it was, but he said, “Damn it, I came with Frank and it looks like he’s already gone. I’m not sure how I’ll get back.”
“I’ll drive you back. I stole one of their cars—it’s parked out on the street.”
“Oh. Well great, I appreciate that.” They walked along the drive, beyond the reach of the floodlights and out into the darker street. “The Swedes are very happy, by the way. I think I’ll be able to rely on their assistance again in the future, not that I envisage much call for it.”
Dan thought of Inger, wanted to call her, wanted to board a plane that night and land in Stockholm, become a new person. It would have to wait a few more days though, at the very least.
“I don’t suppose you much envisaged working with them this time.”
“How very true.” He walked for a few paces, before adding, “One thing I’ll say about Jack Redford, he really knew how to disappear.”
Dan nodded, again thinking of his own future, and of the day when he might need to do the same. For all he knew, that day was today, and with that thought he walked on with Patrick White, back into the snow and shadows.