Hi folks, Rebecca here. Thought I would share this story on this platform as well if anyone would like to read it this way! Hope you enjoy the ride :)
After a car bomb destroys the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and kills her handler, "Leslie", CIA operative Elizabeth "Deadpan" Braider and her team race against time to discover vital evidence of a potential nuclear weapons conspiracy. It'll take all their skill and training if they want to find what they're looking for - and get out alive...
The overall plot of this story is based on "Last Rites" from Phantom Doctrine, © Good Shepherd Entertainment and CreativeForge Games. No copyright infringement intended. Elizabeth and all other characters are fictional, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is unintentional. Events, locations, and names are either fictional or used in a fictitious manner.
Officially, the events you are about to hear never happened.
April 20th, 1983
Beirut, Lebanon
The setting sun highlighted the whitewashed buildings and side streets of Beirut with a burnt orange light, casting long shadows from the telephone poles and taller businesses. At this hour, the streets were fairly quiet, though a sense of tension was still palpable in the air at times whenever armed policemen passed by. After all, it was only two days ago that sixty-three people were killed at the U.S. Embassy by a suicide bomber from a group calling itself the Islamic Jihad Organization, and security was high. Among the handful of late workers, travelers, and tourists still wandering the street tonight, a thoroughly ordinary woman in her thirties walked calmly down the sidewalk that led behind a small grocery store and the houses next to it. A loose green headscarf covered red-brown hair that was tied back in a no-frills bun, and based on the way she was dressed, she could have been a Western tourist or an office worker of some kind, with a simple tweed coat, knee-length gray skirt, and matching blouse.
In all visual respects, Elizabeth Braider was the archetypal nondescript girl-next-door and could have fit in on nearly any street in the United States or abroad with little effort. Slender, fair-skinned, and rather plain-faced, with a scattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, she had the bearing of a curious tourist as she surveyed her surroundings from behind round sunglasses that shaded her dark brown eyes from the sunset. Unlike a tourist, however, she knew exactly where she was going. It would have taken a very practiced eye to notice the slight bulge of a concealed handgun under the right side of her jacket or the lightweight bulletproof vest she wore under her blouse – or, for that matter, to figure out that Elizabeth Braider was no tourist at all (though she had visited her share of unique locations) but was rather a veteran CIA operative operating under the codename “Deadpan”.
Elizabeth leaned her head slightly into the left side of her headscarf as a voice came through the nearly invisible headset tucked behind her left ear. “Bolt to Deadpan, do you copy?” “I copy,” she said quietly, barely moving her lips. “What am I looking at here, Bolt?” “You’re one block east. The morgue should be just up ahead past that - a concrete frame building, painted white. Main entrance is on the north side, three windows on the front. You’ll be going in the east side alley entrance, or one of the windows there at ground level.” “Roger,” Elizabeth replied. “And the others?” “Tagalog’s in position, and Rostrum’s on his way.” said Bolt. “No sign yet of Aguirre or any other interested parties."
Elizabeth walked past street signs in Arabic, brushed past a vendor trying to make one last sale before closing, and immediately picked out the building Bolt had described from a distance, lights beginning to click on in its windows. “Got eyes on,” she said, adjusting her coat and blinking at the sun as it began to cross below the horizon, clouds obscuring the view. Looks like a rainy night, she thought as she eyed the low grey clouds closing in from the west. Could help with covering our exit if needed. She kept walking toward the building, then turned into the alley that flanked the heavy-framed structure. Once out of sight from the street, she leaned casually against the wall beside a ground level window, its shutters closed from the inside, and settled in to wait.
She didn’t have to wait for long. Two sharp raps on the window from the inside, followed by it swinging open, revealed the arrival of her fellow agent, Rostrum. A tanned, muscular man in a red leather jacket with a mop of bleached blonde hair looked cautiously out from the window, caught her eye, and nodded. He offered a hand to help her up into the window, and Elizabeth returned the nod, climbing up with his help and dropping into the room (a storage space, by the look of it, she noted). “I appreciate you not making me climb up the hard way while wearing a skirt,” she remarked dryly. “You know I aim to please,” replied Rostrum sarcastically, his slight Northern English accent giving away his former SAS background. “Mm-hmm,” Elizabeth murmured back, scanning the room and taking in the sight of boxes of cleaning supplies, medical equipment, scrubs, paper, and other dull items. “What’s the status?” she asked. “Place is mostly empty,” he said, gesturing at the door into the rest of the building. “Autopsy rooms are back this way.” “Let’s get a move on. Aguirre and company are probably not far behind,” she ordered, taking point and moving to the door.
The two agents scanned the next room quickly, the facility’s pre-autopsy chamber. The staff, it would seem, had already done their cleaning up for the night, and the pre-autopsy chamber was devoid of both living people and dead bodies. No sign of Leslie here, Elizabeth thought. Must have already done the autopsy, as expected. Stopping at the swinging double doors into the next room, she risked a cautious peek through the windows. The main autopsy room was much larger, with rows of drawers along the side wall that were likely the temporary resting places of most of the victims from the embassy bombing. Two people in exam coats, scrubs, and surgical caps stood inside toward the center of the room, on either side of what looked like a body bag lying on a slab, which currently was capturing all of their attention. Several other matching body bags were laid out on open drawers and exam tables throughout the space, all closed with a small tag at the end of the table.
“This is probably our place,” she whispered to Rostrum, inclining her head to the doors. “Two people inside, but they seem occupied. Let’s move, quietly.” She pushed one door open silently and held it while Rostrum entered, then shut it silently behind her. Quickly, they proceeded to the first body bag and read the tag. “No dice,” Rostrum said, shaking his head. “Lebanese national, clerical worker at the embassy.” “Next one,” Elizabeth said quietly, eyeing the two people at the table. Both still seemed engaged in their work, fortunately. The closer one had his back to them, a tall man with a neatly trimmed beard covered by a hair net. Opposite him, she could see a woman with tanned olive skin and a few strands of dark hair escaping from a surgical cap, busily writing notes. “Embassy security guard,” Rostrum mouthed, pointing at the card. Elizabeth nodded and turned her attention to the closed drawers. Not this one, either.
Her peripheral vision just caught a flicker of movement from the exam table, as the male mortician reached behind him for a set of surgical tweezers and made direct eye contact with Rostrum. Shit. The mortician froze in his tracks, staring at Rostrum and then at her as well. Taking a step towards them, he started speaking in Arabic, demanding to know what they were doing there, which caught the attention of the woman next to him. Rostrum started a stilted reply in Arabic, just as Elizabeth saw the phone on the wall beside the table where the mortician was standing. Can’t let him get to that phone, she thought, and right on cue as he reached toward the handset, the woman in scrubs grabbed him from behind, arm across his throat, and took him down to the ground, releasing him once he stopped struggling and slumped to the floor. “Excellent timing as always, Tagalog,” Elizabeth said with a tight smile. “You got it, boss,” said the ex-Mossad agent with a smile of her own.
“So where’s our man?” Elizabeth asked. “Is that him?” she said, pointing at the body on the table where Tagalog had been standing. “No,” the Israeli agent said grimly. “That was Janet Lee Stevens, American journalist. Got caught in the bombing as well. Leslie’s in the third drawer over,” she explained, pointing at the wall of storage trays. The three agents proceeded to the wall and checked the tag – sure enough, there he was: “DAVID XIE, U.S. EMBASSY INTELLIGENCE ATTACHE”. “Deadpan to Bolt. We found him,” Elizabeth said into her headset as Rostrum and Tagalog slid out the tray all the way and opened the top flap of the bag to reveal the face of a mid-forties Asian man. “That’s Leslie, all right,” said Rostrum grimly. Elizabeth looked over to confirm for herself, and there was no doubt about it.
A month ago, Leslie (who was her handler at the CIA at the time) and Deadpan/Elizabeth had begun an investigation into how Pakistan had obtained nuclear material for their initial cold test of a nuclear bomb. The two of them had a hunch that someone had leaked information about the U.S. nuclear program to the Pakistanis, which Deadpan and her team had evaluated in an unsanctioned infiltration job. They found evidence that a man codenamed Aguirre who was nominally an employee of a little-known U.S. Middle Eastern charity organization had been frequenting contacts in Islamabad as well as prominent DoD contractors, while simultaneously working on something that Aguirre had dubbed “Operation Walther Poon”. This was troubling news to the agents, as Walther Poon was one of Leslie’s previous fake identities. Right when Leslie said he had made a breakthrough about Aguirre’s operation, the embassy he was working at was bombed, and he was killed with sixteen other Americans.
Deadpan and her team were promptly reassigned to a new handler by the name of Fender, who wanted nothing to do with their exploits in Pakistan and made it clear he would not be supporting any future unsanctioned seat-of-the-pants operations, as well as expressing his displeasure with Deadpan’s unorthodox choice of colleagues (members and former members of allied intelligence agencies). However, Deadpan remembered that Leslie had a false molar on the right side of his mouth that he had used in the past to conceal microfilm, and realized that whether Fender approved it or not, Aguirre would probably be onto Leslie’s secret soon enough. So, in defiance of Fender’s orders, she had ordered this raid anyway, only asking for volunteers. The entire squad had voluntarily joined in, since they all wanted a way to get even for whatever happened to Leslie, anyway.
Elizabeth looked again at Leslie’s body on the slab, remembering how the half-Chinese handler used to quiz her on her Cantonese, chiding her for sloppy grammar. Shaking her head, she brought herself back to the present, put on a pair of latex gloves, took a deep breath, and opened the body’s mouth. She bit her lip in concentration as she found the false tooth and started to unscrew it, until finally she had a small plastic molar in one hand. “Nice work, Deadpan,” Rostrum said, tapping the subtle seam that ran the diameter of the tooth. “We always knew Leslie had it in him – literally.” “Bolt, Deadpan,” Elizabeth said, smiling in reply to the joke and pocketing the tooth. “We’ve got the tooth. Let’s get out of here.”
“He didn’t hide anything in any…other cavities, did he?” asked Bolt. “Not that I know of or feel like checking for,” she responded with a trace of amusement. “Though Leslie once told me about a guy who had a microfilm case up his –“ but just as the joke began, it was cut off: “Deadpan, this is Zenith,” another voice cut in, that of the other outside observer. “We got trouble from the west side. Three men and a woman just showed up in the other alley. Looks like they might be private security types. Don’t recognize them from this distance, though. If I was a betting man, I’d say that’s Aguirre and his friends. You might want to get a move on.”
“You heard him, people,” Elizabeth said, snapping back to business. “Let’s move out. Benson, this is Deadpan - how soon can you be here?” The smooth voice of their go-to exfiltration driver, Benson, responded: “Give me five, I’ll be there. Where do you want pickup?” Bolt cut in: “Boss, we got police pulling up on the east side. Recommend you exit through a window on the south end of the building.” “Let’s do that,” Elizabeth said decisively, signaling for the other two to follow. “Back to the windows.” “Meet you there, ma’am,” said Benson as the three agents cautiously retraced their steps out the room.
The three of them drew their weapons and proceeded down the hallway toward the pre-autopsy chamber, intending to cross the building from there, but were stopped by a raised fist from Rostrum as he looked into the room. He held up one finger and indicated the figure scanning the room, rifle in hand. One of Aguirre’s men. We’re going to have to go around. Elizabeth signaled for the group to form up and zig-zag around the room, proceeding to another way over.
Instead, the trio went back down the hall and entered a break room, with scattered furniture, a set of cabinets, a coffee maker, and a fridge, as well as several large glass windows in the wall separating it from what seemed to be the morgue’s records room. A moment later, the silence that had defined their exfiltration so far was shattered, along with the glass windows, by a hail of gunfire from the records room. Looks like we found the other private security types, Elizabeth thought fleetingly as she dove for cover, though not fast enough to avoid a grazing blow from one of the bullets down her left side. When she caught her breath behind the table in the break room, which Rostrum had upended to provide shelter, she was able to tell that thanks to her vest, the bullet had not drawn blood, but merely left a long tear in her jacket and blouse. It’ll bruise later but I’ll live, she thought as she put the injury out of her mind and settled into cover.
Beside her, Tagalog cursed through gritted teeth and said: “Guess they’re not interested in talking,” as she leaned against the table, her face pale. “Guess not,” Elizabeth grimaced back, then noticed the substantial trail of blood from Tagalog’s left leg. “Get some pressure on that, it looks nasty,” she said, handing the other woman the green headscarf she’d been wearing. Tagalog didn’t need to be told twice, and promptly wrapped the fabric around her leg and tied it tightly. “At this point they’re obviously on to us. Shoot to kill,” Elizabeth called to the other two. “Benson, any chance you could get here any faster? Tagalog’s hurt.” “On my way now,” came the voice over her headset. “ETA three minutes.”
Fortunately for Elizabeth and company, they had good cover behind the break room furniture. Unfortunately, they also were effectively pinned down as long as they stayed in place. We have to move, now. “Think you can run for it?” she asked Tagalog as another shot whizzed by overhead. “It’ll work,” replied the other tersely. Okay. Here goes nothing. Elizabeth gave a silent countdown to her two companions, then, as they opened fire behind her, rushed to the door, keeping her head down. As soon as she got to the comparative safety of the door frame, she covered for the other two, watching for any sign of Aguirre’s hired guns. The downside of this plan, as she rapidly discovered, was that her attention was entirely fixed on the rooms she had just left, and not on the room she had rushed into.
The slide clicked back on her pistol, and she reached into a pocket for a magazine to reload it with. As she brought the metal magazine out, she was slammed into the wall of what she belatedly realized was an office, as another unfamiliar figure hit her from behind with the butt end of a rifle. Narrowly avoiding sprawling on the floor by catching herself at the last minute (causing her to drop the still-empty pistol), she was unable to prevent her head smacking against the wall painfully, making spots dance before her eyes. She didn’t have time to clear her head, though, as the figure was all but on top of her already.
At a second look, she recognized him (though she’d never seen an ungarbled picture of him before). This was clearly Aguirre, based on his hairline and jaw profile that she’d seen in snippets of surveillance photos. He was, however, bigger in person, nearly a foot taller than her and with a lot more muscle mass, which explained why she felt like she’d had the wind taken out of her. To prevent Aguirre from filling her with a burst of rounds from his rifle, she launched her smaller form at him from the wall, trying to grapple him before he could aim. It worked, but not quite as she had hoped – while it got his rifle away from her, it also set her up for an off-hand jab to the face that she did a poor job of blocking. Reflex allowed her to roll away from the punch that followed, and in a flash of memory, she put two and two together. I know this style. He’s about to try for an armlock to pin me down. Right on cue, Aguirre tried to use the rifle to force her arm backwards, and she resisted it.
Something was starting to click for her, although it wasn’t complete yet. The fighting style he was using against her was familiar, like she’d fought it a dozen times before. In training at Langley, maybe? Even still, her strength and size disadvantages were not doing her any favors, as Aguirre slammed her into the side of a cubicle and she felt something strain painfully in her shoulder. I have one more trick up my sleeve he doesn’t know about, she thought through a growing haze of pain, trying to wrench herself free and keep her focus. With her right hand, she reached for the back of her left thigh and found the knife hidden there under her skirt, and got it in hand just in time to put Aguirre’s attempt to push her down to a stop, as her knife landed in his upper chest. With reflexes borne from years of training, she kept pressure on him and forced him down as blood spilled over both of them, before yanking the knife out and grabbing her pistol from the ground.
Looking over, she saw Tagalog unevenly running past, firing over her shoulder, and Rostrum lining up a shot on one of the late agent Aguirre’s men. “Let’s go!” she shouted hoarsely, looking back at Aguirre’s body. On a hunch, she knelt down momentarily and felt through his jacket pockets, coming up with a small wallet of some kind. Could come in handy. Maybe it’ll tell us who hired this clown. “Benson, Deadpan,” she called into the headset. “Please tell me you have some good news,” she continued as she ran for the back window that Tagalog was heading towards. “I’m here,” he said, matching her tone of urgency. “Blue van, right outside.” Not waiting for any other confirmation, Elizabeth ran for the window, tucked her head down, and shoulder-smacked into it, shattering the pane of glass. She rolled with the impact painfully, feeling the scratches of shards of glass as she landed, but didn’t have too much time to complain as she hurried out into what was now a pouring rainstorm.
“Get in!” shouted Benson from the van, which had its back doors open. Elizabeth ushered Rostrum in, who continued returning fire all the way out, and helped Tagalog into the back before finally diving in herself. “Go!” she shouted forward, and Benson punched it. A few blocks away, once a few double-backs and moments of waiting had assured that they weren’t being followed, Elizabeth finally breathed a sigh of relief. “How’s everyone doing?” she asked, as calmly as she could. “Been worse,” said Tagalog, gesturing to her injured leg. “I’m good,” said Rostrum, giving Elizabeth a look. “You okay, boss?” Realizing that she was covered in blood (most of it Aguirre’s, but at least some of it her own), Elizabeth nodded, gingerly wiping a smear of blood from her face. “Yeah, I’m okay. Got the tooth, too.”
“Deadpan, this is Bolt. Heard your last. How was it with Aguirre’s men?” “I think I got one or two of them,” said Rostrum in his typically understated, calm British manner. Tagalog snorted. “You probably tagged all three except Aguirre,” she said with a smirk. “That was good shooting back there.” “Thanks,” he responded, caught off guard by the compliment. “And Deadpan over here took care of Aguirre personally, looks like,” he continued, gesturing to Elizabeth’s messy appearance and the wallet she was still holding. Elizabeth grinned back, though it probably looked more like a grimace. “What can I say? I don’t like being pushed around.”
The radio clicked as Bolt sighed for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “I’m glad to hear it went okay, but you know Fender won’t like this. There’s going to be hell to pay when he finds out.” “Well, it’s a good thing I don’t plan on telling him we were here,” Elizabeth said with a more obvious smile this time. “Me neither,” Rostrum replied, watching her open the wallet. Her face fell immediately, and despite herself, Elizabeth couldn’t deny her shock. “Actually…we may have bigger problems than Fender,” she said, holding up the badge in the wallet that said “Defense Intelligence Agency – United States of America”. “Looks like we’re in for a long week, folks,” she said darkly, as the van sped away from one mission and into their next.
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