Bolan yanked Khan from the car.

Once he had dragged the man a safe distance from the vehicle, he stretched him along the ground. The soldier pulled a small flashlight from a pocket, clicked it on and ran it over Khan’s blood-soaked form. Three bullet holes had pierced the man’s chest.

Khan’s eyes fluttered open. Bolan noticed that the former ISI agent’s gaze looked unfocused. His breath came in shallow puffs. After a second, Bolan’s presence registered with him, and he turned his head slightly to look at the big American.

“Cooper,” Khan told him. “It’s not over.”

“It is for you,” Bolan growled.

“Not for you. Not even close.”

A shudder passed through Khan, and he was gone.

Treason Play

Mack Bolan ®

Don Pendleton’s

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I know that there are angry spirits

And turbulent mutterers of stifled treason,

Who lurk in narrow places, and walk out

Muffled to whisper curses to the night;

Disbanded soldiers, discontented ruffians…

—Lord Byron, 1788–1824

Conspirators lurk in the shadows, biding their time, hiding their faces. I’ll drag the criminals into the light of day and unmask them for all to see.

—Mack Bolan

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

PROLOGUE

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Terry Lang pretended not to notice the man following him.

In fact, it was the third man he’d pretended not to see in the past couple of hours. Whoever had taken it upon themselves to track his every move at least had shown enough sense to switch out the agents following him, a small attempt to hide that they were tailing him. But their skill had ended there. The first and the third had fallen all over themselves to not make eye contact with Lang, averting their gazes as if burned whenever he looked directly at them.

Lang stopped and bought a bottle of root beer from a street vendor. Unscrewing the cap, he brought the glass bottle to his lips, drained some of it and resumed walking. After two more blocks he spotted what he’d been looking for, an alley. Slipping inside, he advanced several yards. Along the way, he tipped the root beer bottle and drained its contents onto the cracked asphalt. It made a fizzing noise and welled up in a whitish foam. The odor of garbage cooking under Dubai’s midday heat registered with him and his nostrils wrinkled reflexively at the stench.

He found a recessed doorway and pressed himself inside its shade.

He switched the empty bottle to his other hand, his ears strained as he waited. Surely his tail hadn’t fallen back? He doubted it. They hadn’t followed him halfway across the city just to fall back when he disappeared into an alley. They didn’t strike him as particularly skilled, but they seemed committed.

Sweat beaded underneath his hairline, then rolled down his temples, cheeks and jawline. His pulse quickened. Moments later he heard the soft shuffling of shoe soles brushing against the pavement. The muscles of his legs, arms and torso bunched up as he prepared to pounce. A dark shadow stretched along the ground past his hiding place.

The sound of movement halted.

A small grunt telegraphed the guy’s next movement. By the time his pursuer rounded the doorway, a small, black automatic pistol clutched in his hand, Lang was prepared. He brought the bottle down in a wide arc. The fat end of the bottle exploded into a constellation of glass shards that glinted in the sunlight. Lang’s downward swing continued, the edges of the broken bottle raking flesh, opening crimson ravines in his face.

The man yelped in pain and surprise. He whipped his head away and covered the wound with his hand. Blood immediately seeped between his fingers. In the same instant he started to raise his shooting hand so he could get a bead on his mark.

Lang’s hand snaked out and he caught the guy’s wrist in his grip, squeezing hard. His other hand, the one clutching the neck of the bottle, came around in a horizontal arc. Lang buried the jagged end into his attacker’s eye socket.

The man screamed and wheeled away. His grip on his pistol loosened and the weapon fell to the ground. Lang gave the injured man a hard shove in the chest that sent him reeling.

Grinning, Lang tossed aside the remnants of the bottle. He scooped up the man’s discarded pistol and grabbed a handful of the man’s blood-soaked shirt and yanked him to his feet.

Shoving the guy into a wall, he pressed the gun’s muzzle into the man’s throat.

“Who sent you?” Lang asked, his voice barely a whisper.

The man, his face and neck streaked with blood, spit in Lang’s face. With the back of his fist, Lang wiped the glob of blood and saliva from his forehead.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” he said. “Who sent you? What do you want with me?”

The man’s lips curved outward as though he was ready to spit again. This time Lang drove a knee into the guy’s groin, eliciting a sharp draw of air, followed by a gut-churning moan.

“I can do this all day,” Lang said.

And to prove his point, he kneed the guy a second time. Groaning again, the man sagged and Lang let him crumple to the ground.

The squeal of tires on asphalt caused Lang to spin. A big midnight-blue sedan jerked to a stop at the mouth of the alley. Front and back doors snapped open and four men spilled from the vehicle’s interior, guns drawn, sites trained on him.

“Drop it!” someone yelled in English.

He guessed he could take out one, maybe two, before they killed him. More likely one. And then he’d end up on a slab. He still had no idea what this was all about and it was possible that, since he hadn’t killed anyone, he could talk his way out of this. He knelt and set the pistol on the asphalt. Raising his hands, he came back up to his full height.

A rail-thin man in navy-blue slacks and a white dress shirt broke from the group of shooters and approached Lang. Keeping his gun trained on the American, the small man scooped up the fallen pistol and shoved it into the waistband of his pants. He barked in Arabic—a language in which Lang was fluent—for someone to call an ambulance.

The guy gave Lang a murderous look. In return, he flipped the guy the middle finger.

“No ambulance,” a voice called in Arabic. “This one’s not worth the trouble.”

Lang turned and looked at the new speaker. A flash of recognition immediately morphed into dread.

A Caucasian man with sandy-brown hair, a wide face and flushed cheeks rounded the front of the sedan blocking the alley. He wore a blue polo shirt, tan slacks and brown loafers. If he carried a weapon, it wasn’t visible.

“Hello, Terry,” Daniel Masters said, his British accent obvious.

Lang nodded, but said nothing.

“You’ve caused us some problems,” Masters said.

“Sorry, Daniel,” Lang said. “I didn’t know you were in Dubai. Perhaps we can talk about this.”

If the Englishman was surprised Lang knew his name, he showed no outward signs. Instead, Masters nodded at the man on the ground. By now, the man was tucked into a fetal position, groaning, one hand clasped over his injured eye.

“Think I’ll pass,” Masters said. “I see how you talk.”

Lang shrugged. “Sorry about your man. I didn’t want to do it, but he pulled a gun on me.”

Masters made a dismissive gesture. “To hell with this idiot. You could kill fifty like him for all I care. Maim them, whatever. Best man won, as far as I can tell.”

“Very understanding.”

“You’re tough. For a reporter.”

“Special Forces. Army. Long time ago, but I still have a few tricks I can use. You probably already knew that, though.”

“I did. But I think it goes deeper than that.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.”

Lang knew where the conversation was going and he didn’t like it. Fear fluttered in his stomach and sweat slicked his palms. His hands closed into fists. Masters was close, but not close enough to take a swing at without taking a couple of steps forward, telegraphing the attack. Because it didn’t fit his cover, Lang didn’t carry a gun, though he thought longingly of the one hidden back in his apartment.

One of the men was moving in a wide circle around Lang, moving behind him. A third had broken away and was approaching from the side. All kept their distance, forcing him to lunge in any one direction if he wanted to strike first. That gave them ample time to put a bullet in his head before he could complete any attack.

Masters apparently sensed the calculations racing through Lang’s head.

“You can’t make it,” he said. “Even if you took one of us, the others would put you down in a heartbeat.”

Lang flashed what he hoped was his best disarming grin. He spread his hands wide. No threat here, his body language said.

“Hey, if this is about something I did, something I wrote, we can talk about it.”

A humorless laugh escaped Masters’s lips. “What you write in your shitty little newspaper isn’t the issue. It’s what you’re reporting elsewhere that’s giving us heartburn.”

“I don’t—”

“Khan tried to shut you down, tried to stop your snooping. It didn’t work. He tried to do it the easy way. Evidently, you’re too damn thick to get the message. So here we are.”

Lang put some steel in his voice. “Khan doesn’t tell me where to go, who to talk to. If he doesn’t like it, he can go to hell.”

“And aren’t you the crusader?” Masters said. “Playing the part to the very end. There’s a good lad.”

He nodded and the men who’d surrounded Lang closed in. Lang figured the charade was over. Lang hoped that because Masters had spent so much time jawboning and getting his men into position, that Masters wanted him alive. If that and Lang’s lack of a discernible weapon caused the men to hesitate even slightly, he’d exploit it as best he could.

If not, well, he probably wasn’t going to come out of this alive anyway. Given the choice of dying now or dying in captivity, he’d just as soon get it over with. The end result was the same.

The gunman closest to him brought his shooting hand up to shoulder level and locked his pistol on Lang. The CIA agent stepped sideways and brought the gleaming blade down in an arc, burying it in the soft tissue of the man’s neck. Yanking the blade, he brought it forward until steel burst through flesh in a spray of crimson. The man’s gun thundered, discharging a round within inches of Lang’s face. The close-range blast caused his ears to ring and disoriented him.

At the same instant something blunt, hard, punched the back of his skull. The impact caused a flash of white light to explode from behind his eyes. His legs turned rubbery and he crashed first to his knees, then to all fours.

Gasping, vision blurred, he only was vaguely aware of a shape that loomed overhead. When the second blow to the head was struck, his limbs went loose and he crashed to the ground. A black veil of unconsciousness settled over him.

CHAPTER ONE

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, was the last to arrive at the War Room. When he entered, he found Hal Brognola, his sleeves rolled up to the middle of his forearms, a tattered cigar clenched between his teeth, already seated at the table. Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s honey-blonde mission controller, was also seated at the table. She was setting a coffee carafe on the table, and judging from the steam wafting from her mug had just filled it with coffee. Her full lips turned up in a warm smile, which Bolan returned.

Brognola, who’d been staring into the contents of his coffee mug, his brow furrowed, looked up at Bolan and gave him a tight smile. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, head of Stony Man Farm’s cyberteam, shot the big Fed a look. When he spoke, he laced his voice with mock indignation.

“What the hell, Hal?” he said. “You’re looking at the coffee like you expect the Loch Ness monster to pop out of there.”

“I don’t think Nessie could survive in this swill,” Brognola retorted.

“Where is the love?” Kurtzman replied.

Bolan found his seat and, against his better judgment, poured himself of a cup of Kurtzman’s coffee. Once the soldier got settled in, Brognola turned to him, his face grim.

“We’ve got a lot to discuss, Striker,” the big Fed said.

“I expected as much.” Bolan leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. His old friend slid a folder across the tabletop and it came to rest inches away from Bolan. The soldier opened the folder and leafed through the contents, which included several top-secret intelligence reports, several printouts of news stories from newspaper websites and half a dozen or so pictures. Bolan picked up the pictures and scanned through them one at a time. The image of a Caucasian man with ruddy cheeks, blond hair and pale blue eyes stared back at him.

“His name’s Terry Lang,” Brognola said.

“The journalist?”

“Among other things. There’s more to this guy than meets the eye. Lots more.”

“Meaning?”

Brognola turned his gaze in Price’s direction. “You want to field this one?”

Price set down her coffee mug. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and scanned several papers arrayed in front of her before looking up and meeting Bolan’s gaze. “What Hal means is that Mr. Lang has one hell of a freelance gig going on the side.”

Bolan scowled. “You two aren’t making a lot of sense.”

“You’re right,” Price said. “We really aren’t. Sorry.”

“I know Lang is a reporter for the London Messenger. He writes mostly about energy and foreign policy. Occasionally he writes about nukes and nonproliferation issues, too. Works out of the Middle East a lot, I guess because of the energy coverage.”

Price seemed impressed. “When do you have time to read anything other than top-secret dossiers?”

“His articles have been in more than one of my mission packets,” Bolan said. “Occasionally he publishes a clunker or two. But most of his stuff seems to track with what I’ve seen. I always guessed he either had impeccable sources or he was a spook.”

“Give the man a cigar,” Brognola said.

“So he really is a spook?”

Price nodded.

“He works for the Central Intelligence Agency. He operates in a nonofficial cover capacity, and he tracks nuclear proliferation and smuggling for them. Or he did.”

“Did?” Bolan said. “I don’t like where this is going.”

“It gets even worse,” Brognola interjected. “Lang relocated to Dubai several months ago. It gave him a better perch to watch for any illicit shipping of nuclear technology or radioactive materials. Despite all the glitz, the country has become a hotbed for arms and drug smugglers and their fellow travelers. That’s included nuclear smuggling, too.”

Bolan nodded.

“Lang has lots of sources,” Brognola continued. “Some damn fine ones. White hats and black hats. And he could consort with them easily because of his cover. With all that information coming in, he had a lot of irons in the fire, a lot of cases working. The guy dug up loads of good information.”

Bolan arched an eyebrow. “And the problem is?”

“He went missing about forty-eight hours ago,” Brognola said. “Bam, just disappeared. That’s not necessarily a big deal, considering the nature of his cover. But he was supposed to check in with his handlers in Langley and never did. According to the CIA, Lang never, and I mean ever, misses a check-in call. He always made his contacts, except this time.”

“And now everyone’s worried.”

“Yes.”

“He clean?”

Brognola nodded. “Best we can tell. The counterintelligence people are poring over their files. They want to make sure they haven’t missed anything. According to what the President has told me, though, the Agency has yet to come up with anything bad on the guy.”

Bolan considered what he was being told. “You need what from me?”

“Go to Dubai,” Brognola said. “Find out whatever you can. Frankly, there doesn’t look to be any good outcomes here. If the guy has disappeared of his own accord, it’s probably because he’s gone rogue. If he’s vanished because he’s been kidnapped, that could be even worse. Regardless, we need to know what happened to him. You game?”

“How soon can Jack fire up a plane and fly me to Dubai?”

CHAPTER TWO

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The C-37 jet airplane stood on the tarmac at Dubai International Airport, parked near a hangar that housed government-owned planes. Heat rose from its engines and caused the air above them to shimmer. The craft’s side door popped open and a small stairwell dropped from the plane.

A tall figure, his eyes obscured behind aviator-style sunglasses, a large duffel bag slung over one shoulder, disembarked from the craft’s air-conditioned interior. He scowled involuntarily as he collided with a wall of scorching heat. A sheen of perspiration formed on his forehead almost immediately. Dry heat, my ass, he thought.

The Executioner descended the steps, walked onto the tarmac and swept his gaze over his surroundings. The soldier spotted a black sedan parked perhaps a dozen yards away. A short slender man, with hair trimmed down to stubble, stood next to the vehicle, his arms crossed over his chest. Light gleamed off the lenses of his mirrored sunglasses.

When Bolan reached the car, the man bent his head a bit and peered over the rims of his glasses at Bolan.

“You Cooper?” he asked Bolan, referring to the soldier’s Matt Cooper alias. Bolan nodded.

“You Carl Potts?”

“None other,” Potts said. He produced a black wallet, unfolded it and showed Bolan his FBI credentials.

“Special agent in charge,” Potts said. “That means I work ninety hours a week instead of seventy like the rest of my people do.”

“You probably have two alimony payments to prove it.”

“Three,” Potts said, holding up as many fingers. “Fortunately, I think this job will kill me before I get a fourth.”

“We all need a bright spot.”

Potts nodded over Bolan’s shoulder at the plane. “You got more gear?”

“The pilot can take care of it,” Bolan said. “You guys get us a rental?”

“Better,” Potts replied. He nodded toward a gleaming black Mercedes parked next to a terminal building. “Just remember to fill the tank and wash the windows before you bring it back.”

“Nice,” Bolan said.

“Just don’t say Carl Potts doesn’t take care of his friends. Or friends of friends. How’s Mr. Brognola doing these days?”

“Works like a dog.”

Potts shook his head. “Some things never change.” He tossed the soldier the keys for the car. Bolan caught them with his free hand.

“We appropriated it,” Potts said. He made air quotes with his fingers when he said appropriated. “Got it from some Russian gunrunner. He forfeited it.”

“I don’t have the greatest track record with cars,” Bolan said.

Potts scowled and shook his head. “Washington always sends me the prizes.”

THE FBI’S DUBAI OFFICE was located on the top floor of the U.S. Embassy. Bolan was in Potts’s office, seated across the desk from him. The Executioner studied the various certificates and awards on the office wall. He noted that Potts had a bachelor’s degree in international studies from Princeton University and a law degree from Harvard University.

“You didn’t strike me as an Ivy Leaguer,” Bolan said.

“You can see how far it’s gotten me,” Potts replied. “The second wife tried to take the law degree and divorce. She offered me a dog in return. Hell of a deal in retrospect. You want some coffee?”

Bolan nodded. Potts picked up a mug that stood next to the coffeemaker, peered inside it, wrinkled his nose as though he had seen something disgusting. Shrugging, he filled it with coffee and handed it to Bolan. The soldier waited while the federal agent rounded his desk and fell into his chair. Leaning forward, Potts reached into a side drawer, grabbed a folder and set it on his desk. He opened it and picked through the contents, his brows furrowed in concentration. From his vantage point, Bolan could see several pictures mixed in with the paperwork.

Finally, Potts stopped rooting through the dossier. He removed a picture and tossed it across the desk at Bolan, who studied it.

The picture depicted three men. The man closest to the lens, his head topped by a thick, gray mane, was scowling. Bolan pegged him in mid-fifties. The other two men looked younger, with full heads of hair, sunglasses covering their eyes. Bolan guessed they were the muscle even before Potts told him as much.

“The silver-haired devil’s the guy you want. That’s Khan. Just how you get to the guy, I can’t say. He moves around a lot both in this city and throughout the Middle East. There’s rumors that he has body doubles, but I have no idea whether that’s true. A lot of these gunrunners have massive egos. They like to lie to one an other, build legends about themselves. Seems pretty damn silly.”

“So what’s the best path to finding Khan?”

“Funny you should ask, my friend,” Potts said. Shuffling through the folder, he found another photo. This one contained three men. With what appeared to be a black permanent marker, someone had circled the face of a thickset bald man. The guy was cradling an FNC assault rifle and grinning from ear to ear.

“It’s a surveillance shot,” Potts said. “The moron in his natural habitat, I call it. Guy’s name is Adnan Shahi. He’s one of Khan’s lieutenants. If Khan passes gas, this guy probably can tell you what the old man’s been eating.”

Potts paused, sipping some coffee while Bolan studied the photo, memorizing the guy’s face.

“He doesn’t look like much,” Potts said. “That’s because he’s not. But he tends to travel very heavily guarded. He knows everything Khan does. If Khan took Lang, Shahi will know about it. He’ll know which doors to kick in.”

“You have a location for him?”

Potts nodded. “We’ve had him under surveillance for the past several hours, ever since I first got the call from Washington. Like I said, though, if the heat’s on, he’s not going to be calling his BFFs and talking about it. He’s going to stay quiet. He’s a bad human being, but he’s not a moron. Once I heard about Lang’s disappearance, and that Khan might be involved, I wanted to go in and shake down Shahi. Hal asked me to stay cool. Goes against my grain, but I did it anyway. He thought it best that you make the first contact.”

“That bothers you.”

Potts smirked. “Past tense, brother. Now that you’re here, I can see why Hal wanted me to wait.”

“Because?”

“Because you’re a spooky bastard. I can lean on them, but you’re going to break them. Every last one of them. And hopefully find Lang in the process.”

“Hopefully,” Bolan replied.

“YOU CAN DO THIS FOR me, can’t you?” Ahmed Haqqani asked.

“I’ll do it,” Nawaz Khan replied. He stood at one of his windows, his hands behind his back, the fingers of his left hand wrapped around his right wrist, and stared at the skyscrapers that surrounded the building.

He heard Haqqani take a step, saw the man’s reflection close in on his own.

“If you can’t do it, I need to know,” Haqqani stated.

Khan spun and faced the other man. “I said I will do it.”

Haqqani nodded. “I just know how hard it will be to get this. Some say it doesn’t even exist.”

“It exists. Trust me. I know for a fact it does.”

Haqqani shot Khan a curious look.

“When I was with the ISI, we had very good information that it existed. I never saw it personally, of course. But the intelligence was solid.”

“How solid?”

Khan ignored the question. “Just make sure you have the money. Leave the rest to me.”

“How soon can you have it?”

“Soon,” Khan replied. “How soon?”

“You ask too many questions, Ahmed. That makes me nervous.”

“I meant no offense.”

“I’m not offended, just suspicious.”

The other man apologized again, but Khan dismissed him with a wave. “Never mind. I know this is important to you. You want to do this for your father.”

“Yes,” Haqqani said.

“Leave it to me.”

CHAPTER THREE

Sometimes Adnan Shahi wondered whether it was worth all the bullshit.

He stood on the balcony of his penthouse and stared at Dubai’s skyline. At that elevation, the sound emanating from the traffic below was muted, broken only by the occasional honking of horns. He barely heard it. Instead, all he heard was the constant chatter of his thoughts as they relentlessly raced through his head. As Nawaz Khan’s second in command, he had plenty of worries and they never seemed to stop battering him, like waves hitting rocks, one after another.

Just running Khan’s business, what essentially was a massive logistics operation, and endless march of trucks and airplanes and ships, was a big enough task. Add to that the fact that every flight contained illegal contraband and the whole thing suddenly exploded into a mammoth pain in the ass. Just thinking about it caused the acid in his stomach to bubble and churn, like a witch’s brew in a cauldron, hot enough that he expected steam to shoot out from between his clenched teeth.

Then Khan decided to kidnap an American. And not just any American, but a damn CIA agent. Suddenly, Shahi found himself waking up in hell on a daily basis. Unconsciously his open hand drifted to his stomach and he patted it. He shook his head in disgust. An American spy. They’d snatched the damn guy off the street and Shahi knew that’d be the end of it. Where they were taking the American, he was as good as dead.

Shahi slid a hand into the right hip pocket of his pants and pulled from it a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Sliding a cigarette between his lips, he torched the end of it, took a long drag and blew tendrils of smoke through his nostrils. He returned the cigarettes and the lighter back into his pocket and turned his attention back to the traffic below.

There was just nothing good that could come of this, he thought. Normally he trusted Khan, in part because experience told him he could and in part because the guy called the shots. But this time Shahi couldn’t help but wonder whether Khan had miscalculated, whether he was going to walk them off a cliff. Khan’s decision to cozy up to the Russians made Shahi especially nervous.

But surely Khan had thought all this through? Sure, he could be ill-tempered and stubborn, but the man wasn’t a fool. He hadn’t become a major player in the ISI without being able to think strategically.

“He’s no fool,” Shahi muttered, as though saying it out loud would make it a fact.

The crash of glass shattering reached out from inside the apartment and yanked Shahi from his thoughts. That noise was followed by a man’s scream.

What was that? he wondered.

He stepped to the double doors that led from the balcony into the penthouse. He pulled open the door in time to see one of his gunmen stagger toward him. The guy had a hand clutched over his chest. Rivulets of blood seeped through his fingers and rolled down his forearms. He dropped to the ground and released a final death rattle before his body went limp.

A thrill of fear raced down Shahi’s spine. He dropped to one knee next to the fallen man, one of his guards, and rummaged beneath the man’s bloodied coat, looking for his gun. It was gone, as was his mobile phone.

Shahi didn’t want to go inside. But, if he was under attack, he also knew he couldn’t continue to hide on the balcony. If his attackers found him out there, he’d have no place to run. Swallowing hard, he slipped through the door and into his home. Another of his guards was curled up on the floor, his body still, blood pooling around him. Another was draped over the back of the couch, the shirt on his back soaked in blood, the top of his head pressing into a seat cushion.

He saw something else and froze.

A man dressed in black stood several yards away. A pistol was clutched in his hand and aimed directly at Shahi’s head. The Pakistani’s eyes darted to a pistol that lay several yards away on the floor, discarded. The man in black apparently read his intentions and shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said.

Shahi swallowed hard, his mind racing through the numbers one final time as he brought up his hands in surrender. The math didn’t make sense. This son of a bitch had just knocked out three of his guards—and those were the ones he’d seen—and looked none the worse for it. No obvious injuries. No hesitation in his graveyard voice or his eyes.

Instinctively, Shahi knew he couldn’t bridge the distance between himself and the discarded pistol before the other man shot him. The only thing he’d get from that was the satisfaction of knowing he’d gone down fighting. He was too much of a pragmatist to consider that a fair trade for his life. He had to think of another way out.

BOLAN SIGHTED DOWN THE barrel at Shahi, the pistol’s snout locked dead center on the guy’s face.

As grim as hell, the soldier marched toward the Pakistani. Along the way, he bent and picked up the pistol that Shahi was eyeing, shoving it into his belt.

“Who the hell are you?” Shahi sputtered.

“Where’s Lang?”

Fear flickered in the guy’s eyes. He licked his lips.

“That’s what this is about? You’re looking for the reporter? You shoot my place up just to ask me about that?”

Bolan looked left, then right, surveying the carnage. “It appears so.”

“You can’t come in here and shoot my place up. Do you know who I am? I own the fucking police around here. They’ll string you up by your balls.”

“You talk too much, Shahi,” Bolan said, “about all the wrong things. Tell me something interesting.”

“What if I don’t know anything?”

“You do.”

Shahi’s eyes seemed to search Bolan’s face for several strained seconds. Bolan guessed the guy was running a cost-benefit analysis of turning on his boss versus taking a few extra breaths.

The change in Shahi’s expression was almost imperceptible. His eyes drifted from Bolan and looked over the American’s shoulder. Was it a trick?

Spurred by instinct, the soldier spun, the Beretta’s snout looking to acquire a target. He caught sight of a man in a navy-blue business suit, a small submachine gun clutched in both hands. The guy was trying to draw a bead on the Executioner.

Bolan triggered the Beretta and the pistol coughed a trio of 9 mm rounds, two of which drilled into the man’s chest. His legs suddenly went rubbery and he collapsed to the floor in a boneless heap, his hands clutching at the torn flesh of his torso. The SMG skittered across the floor.

A grunt of exertion spurred Bolan to whip back around. In the same motion he fisted the Desert Eagle and cocked back the hammer. By the time he’d come around, he found Shahi had sprung to his feet. The Desert Eagle’s muzzle hovered only inches from the guy’s nose. Shahi’s eyes bulged and he raised his hands in surrender.

“Can you tell how pissed I am?” Bolan asked.

The other man nodded.

“Good. Now, where’s Lang?”

Shahi opened his mouth as if to answer, but checked himself. He shook his head. “Forget it.”

“Loyal to the end, huh?”

“Not even close,” Shahi said. “I just know it’s not worth it. Not worth it for you to know.”

The guy paused. Bolan stayed quiet and stared, letting the uncomfortable silence expand.

“Wherever he is, he’s dead,” Shahi said. “Understand?”

“Where’d they take him?”

Shahi shook his head vigorously. “Forget it. Where he was going, he’s already dead or he will be by the time you get there. Quit wasting your time. Quit killing people for no reason. If you ever find him, he’ll be nothing but a sack of flesh and bones. And I’m not going to tell you anything. Take me to jail and Khan will have me out in twenty-four hours.”

“You have a good line of bullshit,” the soldier said. “But here’s some straight talk. Tell me where I can find Lang or I will fire this thing point-blank at your head. In case you haven’t realized it, I didn’t put handcuffs on any of your guys and they’re not going to jail. “

“You’ll kill me anyway.”

“Not if you answer my questions.”

Shahi heaved a sigh and his shoulders sagged. He muttered the address, which Bolan memorized.

“Why did Khan go after Lang?” Bolan asked.

“I don’t know. Lang had been looking into us, but that’s all I know.”

Bolan nodded. His finger tightened on the Desert Eagle’s trigger and a peal of thunder swelled in the room, then died out. A foot-long tongue of flame lashed from the hand cannon’s barrel. The slug drilled into a wall. Shahi screamed and crossed his forearms over his face protectively. Dropping to his knees, he cupped his hands over his eyes and sobbed.

“Apparently you take me for a saint or an idiot. Either way, you’re wrong. I’m not going to listen to your endless stream of bullshit.”

By now, the soldier was unsure whether the other man could even hear or understand him, having been exposed to the handgun’s roar at such close range. Bolan was used to the weapon, but even his ears rang. For someone exposed to a shot up close and personal, the noise could be disorienting.

“Tell your friend Khan I’m coming for him,” Bolan said. “I’ll dismantle his organization piece by piece and put him in the ground.”

Shahi nodded without looking at Bolan.

The soldier backed a few steps away from Shahi and holstered the Israeli-made handgun. He walked out past the indoor pool, through a massive sitting room filled with brightly colored rugs, a plasma-screen television and leather-upholstered furniture. When he reached the front door, he pushed it open and exited the apartment.

Message delivered.

HIS HANDS SHAKING, SHAHI picked himself up from the floor. His cheeks burned hot with shame and anger churned in his gut. The American had gotten the best of him. He became aware of a warm sensation in his crotch. Looking down, he saw that the fabric of the front of his pants was dark where he’d involuntarily urinated, guessed it had happened when the bastard had fired the gun at his head.

The carnage around him was stunning. Dead bodies were sprawled at different points on the floor. Shards of glass littered the floor. Through one of the doors, he saw a corpse bobbing facedown in the pool, blood clouding the water around the body.

His breath came fast as adrenaline raced through him, causing his hands to shake and his heart to pound in his chest until he swore it would explode.

He stumbled to one of the fallen guards, knelt next to him and reached beneath the guy’s sport coat. Shahi found a mobile phone on the guy’s belt, stored in a black leather clip-on case. Picking it up, Shahi pounded in a number. With each ring the anxiety and impatience grew in him.

Finally, on the fourth ring, someone answered the phone.

“Yes?” Khan asked.

“We have trouble,” Shahi replied.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bolan crept up the stairs of the three-story apartment building, screams still echoing in his ears.

He fisted the Beretta 93-R, raised it in front of him, let it lead the way. As he neared the top of the stairs, another scream—this one more frantic and agonized—stabbed into his ears, lingering.

The solider muttered a curse. He already was losing time and likely was at risk of blowing the mission. From the third-floor landing, he heard the rumble of a throat clearing. Hugging the wall, he crept about halfway up the final flight of stairs, stopped and listened for a couple of heartbeats. A throat cleared again and the sole of a shoe scraped against the floorboards.

Bolan surged up the final steps. As he crested the stairs, he spotted a beefy man, his hair slicked straight back, coughing into a clenched fist. The guy apparently sensed the motion and wheeled in Bolan’s direction. His hand grabbed for a pistol holstered on his hip.

The Beretta sighed and a trio of subsonic 9 mm rounds lanced from its barrel. The swarm of slugs stabbed into the man’s mouth and cheek and exploded from the back of his skull in a spray of crimson. The guard’s legs suddenly turned rubbery and his body collapsed to the floor in a boneless heap. A Glock slipped from the man’s lifeless fingers and thudded to the floor.

The soldier cursed under his breath, but continued to march toward the source of the agonized screams.

In a perfect world, he would have preferred to have caught the guard unaware and put him down soundlessly with a knife to the throat.

In a perfect world, yeah. As if the soldier had ever seen such a thing.

Here in the real world, there was every possibility that the noised had alerted the band of killers hiding out in the apartment, every possibility he’d lost the element of surprise. So, okay, it was time to try the direct approach. Kneeling next to the corpse, he dug through the man’s pockets until he found a wallet, which he pocketed, figuring he could comb through its contents for possible intel later, and a ring of keys. Stepping near the door, he pressed his ear against it and listened.

By now the screaming had stopped, but he heard murmurs of conversation. It was impossible to decipher the words or to discern the emotional state of the speaker. As best he could tell, Nawaz Khan or whoever had outfitted this slaughterhouse, had positioned a couple of security cameras on the building’s exterior, but nothing inside, at least nothing he could see. It was possible the guys inside had no idea their comrade had just been gunned down.

His fingers curled softly around the knob and he tried to turn it, but found it locked. His mind flitted back to the ring of keys he’d found on the dead guard, but he dismissed the notion immediately. He had no time to test half a dozen keys in the hope that one of them might open the door. To hell with it, he decided. He needed to move now.

The Executioner tapped the Beretta and set loose a trio of slugs that chewed into the doorknob and lock. The tattered lock only held the door closed barely and Bolan hammered it with a kick of his booted foot.

The door flew inward. Bolan followed right behind it. Icy-blue eyes took in his surroundings and he saw he was in a room furnished with a card table, a trio of metal folding chairs and a big blue plastic cooler. Two gunners, one seated, one standing, were also in the room.

A slender man in blue jeans and a red T-shirt who’d had his back turned when Bolan stormed the place, whirled. His hand snaked out, something black gripped in it. The Executioner’s Beretta coughed out a line of bullets that lanced into the thug’s chest, causing him to fall in a boneless heap. The hardman who’d been sitting on a chair simultaneously dived sideways and squeezed off a couple of shots from his automatic pistol. The slugs whistled within inches of Bolan’s skull. The soldier returned the favor with another triburst from the Beretta that pulverized the man’s chest and caused him to slump to the floor in a heap.

As the man hit the floor, the Executioner was in motion. First, he checked a small adjoining room and made sure it was empty. Then, retracing his steps, he returned to the entryway before veering into another corridor that branched off from the open area. Bolan took a step forward and a foul but not unfamiliar smell registered with him, causing his nose to wrinkle.

A pair of doors lined the right side of the corridor and another door stood to the left. Light spilled into the dark hallway from beneath the two doors to Bolan’s right. The soldier snapped a fresh clip into the Beretta and checked through the rooms, but found them unoccupied. He crossed the hallway and, with the Beretta leveled in front of him, and gave the third door a closer look. It had been pulled closed, but not latched.

Standing off to one side, Bolan nudged the door open with a toe. This time the smell smacked him like a sledgehammer. It was a mixture of excrement and charred flesh and God knew what else. The contents of Bolan’s stomach began to push at the top of his throat. He swallowed hard and pushed his way into the room. With a sweeping gaze, Bolan took in the room’s interior.

The plastic painting tarps that covered the floor crunched under the soles of his shoes. A hospital bed, side rails pulled up, stood in the middle of the room. Surgical instruments—scalpels, forceps, a small saw—stood on a wooden nightstand, the top covered with plastic sheeting. Next to the traditional surgical tools lay a soldering iron and a small torch.

Bolan fixed his gaze on the figure on the bed, felt his stomach clench as he took in the horrible sight. Death’s rigor had caused the arms to curl up. Strips of skin, uniform in length and cut with precision, had been peeled from the chest, abdomen and forearms. The exposed tissue, still wet with blood, glistened beneath the big halogen lamps that burned overhead. Flesh seared by the soldering iron was black and puckered. Thick hair soaked with blood was matted against the skull. Blood had soaked the mattress beneath the man and pooled beneath the surgical bed.

The soldier marched around to the other side of the bed and studied the man’s profile. The crazy butcher responsible for this savagery had left the one side of the man’s face untouched. Bolan studied the man’s features so he could confirm his identity.

The soldier set his jaw to hold back the rage that boiled inside him.

He keyed his throat mike. “Eagle One,” he said.

“Eagle One,” Jack Grimaldi replied. “Go, Striker.”

“I found the package.”

“And?”

“Expired,” Bolan stated.

“Damn.”

“I took out multiple targets up here,” the soldier said. “We’re missing at least one. As best I can tell, these guys all are muscle. Whoever did this—” he snapped a look at Terry Lang, then looked away “—isn’t among them.”

“You know this how?”

“The muscle’s clothes weren’t bloody,” he replied. “I heard Lang’s last death screams, so whoever did this likely had no time to wash off. Keep an eye out. The sadistic bastard who did this may still be in the building or will be exiting it soon.”

Bolan found a discarded pile of clothes lying in one corner of the room. He guessed they were Lang’s and searched the pockets, but found nothing inside them. Exiting the torture room, the soldier returned to the hallway. From outside the building, he could hear the murmur of car traffic and the hum of an air conditioner.

He took a couple more steps and suddenly his combat senses screamed for his attention, followed by the grunt of someone exerting himself. The soldier whirled and glimpsed a large shape hurtling toward him. Metal glinted, a knife blade poised to fall on the soldier. Bolan reacted, taking a step back. The blade whistled through the air just an inch or so from his face. The attacker pressed his advantage and stabbed at Bolan twice more, the frenzied action forcing the soldier to take a couple of steps back.

The guy slashed wildly at the Executioner and continued to press forward. Bolan sidestepped the attack and drove his fist into the guy’s floating ribs. The man grunted and fell back, his eyes bulging with fear. His free hand flew up to cover his injured ribs. A scream of pain and fear exploded from his mouth as he renewed his attack. He lunged at Bolan, the tip of the knife hurtling at the Executioner’s midsection. The soldier stepped aside and the gleaming blade whooshed past his torso, slicing open the nylon windbreaker he wore, but leaving his flesh intact. The soldier drove another fist into the guy’s now-injured ribs and heard his opponent gasp with pain. The man dropped the knife and spun away.

Bolan drew the Beretta and leveled it at the man. The knife fell to the floor with a clatter and the man brought his hands up.

“You and I,” Bolan said, “are going to talk.”

BOLAN WENT TO THE stainless-steel sink in the torture room. He filled a white foam cup with cold water from the tap and returned to the hallway where Ayub Sharif lay in the hallway.

By now, Grimaldi had arrived. He leaned one shoulder into the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. Bolan stood over Sharif and threw the contents of the water into the guy’s face. Sharif’s eyes popped open and his expression quickly flashed through shock, fear and finally rage as he took in his surroundings and assessed his situation. He looked at Bolan, then at Grimaldi and finally back at the Executioner.

“Hello, Ayub,” Grimaldi said, his voice irritatingly bright. Sharif raised his forearm, dragged it across his face to wipe away the water that had been splashed on him.

“You know my name,” he said. Though Bolan knew from his intel that the guy was a native of Pakistan, he spoke English with no trace of an accent. “How do you know my name?”

“Big fans,” Grimaldi said.

“Your work speaks for itself,” Bolan said. “Best cutter this side of Jack the Ripper. Besides, we have a file on you.”

“Who are you?”

“Why don’t you let me ask the questions?” Bolan said. “That’s what I’d do if I were in your position.”

“My position. And just what position might that be?” Sharif asked.

“Royally fucked.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Bolan said. He jerked a thumb at the room where Lang had been tortured to death. “You killed Terrence Lang. Did it in cold blood. Kidnapped him. Tortured him. For God knows what reason. I could put a bullet in your head, dump your body in the river and celebrate with a steak dinner.”

Sharif licked his lips. A sheen of perspiration had formed on his forehead and had beaded on his upper lip. “You can’t prove I killed him.”

Bolan knelt in front of Sharif. He rubbed his chin and studied the guy for several seconds. Finally he shook his head slowly, as though overwhelmed with disbelief.

“Sharif,” he said, “I can’t tell whether you’re brave or stupid. Truth be told, I don’t care which it is. You have blood under your fingernails. Your clothes and shoes are splattered with blood. Your file says that your best skills are torture and interrogation. So if you want to tell me you didn’t kill Terry Lang, fine. I can live with that.” Bolan slipped the Beretta from his shoulder holster. “I’m not here to put you on trial. The burden of proof I require before blowing your head off is light. I mean, life’s too short for heavy burdens. Am I right?”

“What’s in it for me?”

Bolan shook his head. “One breath, two breaths. Who knows?”

Grimaldi chimed in. “Best speak truth to power, Sharif.”

Sharif scowled. Bolan watched as the cutter stared at his lap, thumbnail of one hand digging under the other while he considered his situation.

“Maybe I need to clarify,” Bolan said. “I don’t like you. You’re a monster preying and profiting on the misery of others. You wore out my patience three minutes ago. If I had more time, or was a better interrogator, I’d establish a rapport with you, earn your trust, make you a lot of promises. I don’t have that kind of time. So answer my questions. What’s the game here?”

“He poked his nose into Khan’s affairs.”

“And?”

“Khan didn’t like it.”

“News flash.”

“I mean, he betrayed Khan.”

Bolan’s brow furrowed. “Betrayed. You mean, they were working together?”

“That’s what Khan thought. I mean, Lang was working through an intermediary, but Khan thought he had him, had leverage over him.”

“What kind of leverage?” Grimaldi asked.

“When Lang first started poking around Khan’s operations, Khan thought the guy was just another journalist sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. We tried to throw him off the trail. We sent a couple of people his way, ones who gave him bad information, tried to send him in the wrong direction.”

“And?” Bolan asked.

“And it didn’t work. Not for long, anyway. Sure, he might follow the lead for a little while, but then he always came back around, asking the right people the right questions, going to the right places. It was uncanny.”

“And Khan considered this a betrayal?”

Sharif shook his head. “No. After a while, Khan got tired of playing games with him and started having his people do their own digging, build their own case. Khan started to believe Lang was getting his information from an intelligence source or multiple sources.”

“You thought he was a spy.”

“Well, wasn’t he? I mean, look at you two. You’re not reporters, are you?”

Grimaldi looked at Bolan and grinned. “Pretty perceptive for a psychopath.”

He turned to Sharif. “So Khan decides Lang’s a spy and has him killed. And here we are. How’s that a betrayal?”

“I don’t know all the details.”

“But you know some,” the pilot replied.

“The way I understand it, Khan never knew for sure Lang was a spook or at least working with spooks. He made inquiries with his old ISI contacts, but they had nothing much on the guy. He’d been in Islamabad for a while, but their records had always pegged him as a journalist and nothing more. But Khan wasn’t convinced, so he decided to try recruiting him.”

“As a double agent,” Grimaldi said.

Sharif nodded. “He wanted to see just how much Western intelligence really knew about him and he figured that, if Lang knew something, he’d share it, maybe even take bad information back to his handlers. If the right pressure was applied.”

“Clever,” Bolan said. “Risky, but clever.”

“Too clever by half. Khan underestimated him. We thought we were turning him, but he was using us, penetrating the organization further all the time. He got what you Americans call the family jewels. Pieced together the organization’s structure, found out who Khan did business with, what he sells and where. Surely some of this information you’ve seen.”

Bolan gave a noncommittal shrug. “Khan knew all this stuff was going out the door?”

“Not at first, but he got the idea after a while. Hey, Khan had been an intelligence agent himself and had run operations against India while he was with the ISI. He knew the score. He’s no fool.”

“Not if he surrounds himself with top-shelf talent like you,” Bolan said. “Didn’t Khan think it was risky killing Lang? Who cares whether he was a reporter or a spy? Either way he’s dead, and now you have me and a bunch of other folks breathing down your neck. Seems like a bad trade to me.”

Sharif’s lips parted as he prepared to reply to Bolan. Before he could utter a sound, though, a small dark hole opened on his forehead, followed an instant later by the sound of glass breaking. Bolan whirled toward the sound and spotted the window behind him disintegrating in a waterfall of glass shards.

Grimaldi grabbed hold of Bolan’s windbreaker and gave it a hard yank, causing him to reel backward. A bullet sizzled through the air and pierced the space where he’d been standing only a moment before.

Once the Executioner hit the ground, he rolled across the floor and got out of direct site of the now-shattered window.

Grimaldi simultaneously was on the move, his hand filled with a Browning Hi-Power as he sought cover. Bolan saw from the corner of his eye that his friend was safe, which freed him to deal with the shooter. Three more rifle slugs lanced through the window and drilled into the floor and walls. None of them came close to hitting the Stony Man warriors, though the shooter did succeed in keeping them out of sight of the window.

The shooting was over in a matter of seconds.

“You okay?” Bolan asked his old friend.

“Yeah. You?”

The Beretta leveled in front of him in a two-handed grip, Bolan was up on one knee, looking through the window and scanning the rooftops of nearby buildings. A trained sniper himself, his mind was running through a rough series of calculations, trying to determine the angle from which the shots had come so he could best identify the building from which the shooter had attacked. He saw no movement on any of the nearby rooftops, but within a couple of seconds thought he’d identified the sniper’s perch.

He shot to his feet and moved toward the window. By the time he’d reached it, he heard tires squeal from the street below. He looked down in time to see a forest-green sedan rocket out of a nearby alley, cutting off an oncoming car before disappearing in traffic.

“There goes our shooter,” Grimaldi said.

Bolan nodded. He stowed his weapon, ran outside and crossed the street to the alley from where the green sedan had shot into traffic. He searched the building’s perimeter while Grimaldi continued to watch from above.

Minutes later Bolan keyed his throat mike. “I got nothing,” he said. “But I do hear sirens. I guess it’s time we made our exit.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“What about the other two men?” Nawaz Khan asked.

Daniel Masters shook his head. “Couldn’t get them,” he said. “Never got a clear shot.”

Seated behind his wide mahogany desk, Khan leaned back in his chair and scowled. He pressed his fingertips together, his hands forming a steeple, and stared over them at Daniel Masters.

“This is not good,” he said.

“Thanks for the bloody understatement,” Masters snapped back. “These two men stormed the building, killed some of our best and brightest without breaking a sweat, and interrogated someone familiar with our plans. So, yeah, I’d say this is not good.”

Khan fixed a hard stare on the Englishman as he pondered the words. If his glowering bothered Masters, he gave no outward sign of it. Instead the Englishman downed a Scotch whiskey on the rocks, wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and rose to make himself another.

“Who were they?” Khan asked.

Masters shrugged. “CIA. Delta Force. Who the hell can say? You were in intelligence before you went to the dark side. You know the players as well as I do. They could be private security contractors hired by the newspaper to rescue their guy. I mean, right? What we do know is that they are here, and they just tore a big damn hole in your operation.”

“It can be dealt with.”

“Can it? Look, first Lang infiltrates your organization. You kidnap him, hold him for a couple of days and kill him. Now you’ve probably brought the righteous wrath of the U.S. government down on our necks and you think it can be dealt with. You have the operational security of a toy store. My people are getting very nervous, Khan. They were before all this happened, which is why they sent me here in the first place.”

An angry knot formed in Khan’s gut as he listened to the Englishman vent. When he spoke, an edge had crept into his voice. “Your people need to leave this to me.”

The corners of Masters’s lips turned up in a mirthless grin. “Because leaving it to you has worked so well so far,” Masters said.

“No. I have the contacts. I can make things happen. If you want to pull this off without me—” he made a sweeping gesture with his hand “—then be my guest. Otherwise, leave this in my hands.”

“Which are so capable.”

Khan leaned forward.

“I tolerate you because you can supply the things I need. Not because I think you bring anything else to this operation.”

Undeterred, Masters leaned forward, too, rested his elbows on the top of Khan’s desk and locked eyes with the guy. His face was perhaps a foot or so from Khan’s, well within striking distance should he decide to take a swing at the arrogant prick’s jaw, he thought.

“Tell you what, Nawaz. Tell me to pound sand, please. I’ll catch a damn flight back to Moscow and tell Mr. Lebed that you’ve decided to cut short our little partnership, that you’ve decided you need your own space. My guess is he’ll send five more guys back here within twenty-four hours that’ll make our little American friends look like cream puffs. And they’ll wipe out your whole gang. As for this arms sale of yours, we’d be happy to bow out, take the product back with us and be done with your silliness once and for all. Maybe you can hop on the internet and buy some radioactive material there. What do you say, lad? That sound like a fine plan to you?”

By now Khan had let his hand slip off the desk. He reached beneath the desktop and his fingers encircled the pistol grip on a 12-gauge sawed-off Ithaca shotgun that was suspended underneath the desk. Khan knew that one stroke of the trigger and the Ithaca would unleash a blast that would tear through the desk’s modesty panel and spray this limey fuck’s insides all over the walls of his office. He’d have the place scrubbed down, repainted and refurnished in twenty-four hours or less.

Just enough time for Lebed to realize he’d strayed off the reservation and for him to dispatch a hit team to Dubai, just like the Englishman had suggested. Maybe he and his people would be able to fend off the Russian’s army of mercenaries and spies. Maybe.

He loosened his grip on the shotgun and forced himself to smile at Masters, who’d hardly stopped to take a damn breath since he’d first launched into his tirade. The former English spy uncoiled from his chair and walked to the bar to make another drink.

“You have the item then?”

Masters nodded without bothering to look at him. Instead he focused on his bartending pursuits. “It’s nasty stuff, you know. It’s not like highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Just a little bit of this stuff and—poof—you’ve got a mini Armageddon on your hands. And it’s hard as hell to come by. Most people don’t think it exists, but it does.”

Khan considered pointing out that Masters talked too damn much for a spy, but thought better of it and instead absorbed what he was being told.

“I will get it, though?” he asked when Masters stopped to take a breath.

“You will.”

“And I will make sure you get your money.”

Masters raised his glass and toasted Khan. “Even better. In the meantime, you need to deal with our new friends. We need them gone as soon as possible.”

“Don’t worry,” Khan replied. “I’m already working on that.”

CHAPTER SIX

“The Man isn’t going to like this,” Brognola said. “Hell, I don’t like it.”

“None of us do, Hal,” Bolan said. “It is what it is.”

“Hell of a time to get philosophical on me, Striker.”

Bolan allowed himself a smile, his first since he and Grimaldi had returned to a safehouse owned and operated by the U.S. government inside a walled community located in suburban Dubai. The place was three stories high, stuffed with luxurious furniture, surrounded by iron gates and bristling with tall iron fences topped with concertina wire. It was surrounded by other, similarly luxurious homes, most occupied by foreign executives working inside Dubai who made tempting targets for Islamic terrorists.

“Where’s Jack?” Brognola asked.

“In the shower,” Bolan replied. “Or maybe one of the pools. I’m not sure.”

Brognola laughed. “How is it to sit in the lap of luxury?”

“Not a bad place as far as safehouses go,” Bolan said. “I’ve definitely slept in worse. Did you send a clean-up crew to the address I gave you? I’d like it if we could recover Lang’s body and send it home.”

“We’re on it. We have guys from the local FBI office on detail there. The local police are none too happy with us, obviously. First, we pull a covert move in their town and then we lock them out of a crime scene. But they are cooperating, which is about the best we can hope for. You already met Potts?”

“I did.”

“He’s handling things on our end. He’s really got the touch with the locals.”

“What about Lang? At least in some circles, he was a high-profile figure. He can’t just disappear.”

“Right. Fortunately he was a private pilot. According to a press release that should be going out within the next few hours, he died in an accident. His plane crashed while he was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv to conduct an interview.”

“Sounds plausible.”

“The family will issue a press release, too. Because he worked in a nonofficial cover capacity, his family has no idea that he was an espionage agent. They think he was just a reporter, which is just as well for all involved. I guess everyone is sitting on the story until the next of kin are notified. Once that happens, the story goes out, runs a couple of days and should disappear after the family has a funeral for him.”

“And since the plane was lost at sea, there’s no need for them to ever see his body so they’ll never need to know that he was tortured to death.”

“If everything goes to plan,” the big Fed said.

“We’ve had such good luck so far.”

“Cynic. Look, I’ll stress to Potts that if he or any of his crew find anything, they should pass it along to you.”

“Good,” Bolan replied. “I may need him to dig up some other information, too.”

Bolan paused and tried to gather his thoughts. “Let me ask you something, Hal. What else do we know about Lang? I mean, about the guy.”

“What are you driving at? Do you think he’s dirty?”

“Not necessarily. Frankly, I’m not sure what to think. But I do wonder how the guy got so over his head in this whole thing. And I have to wonder whether everyone’s telling us everything we need to know, including our friends in Washington.”

“Do they ever? Brognola replied.

“Think about it. You have an experienced agent who goes up against Nawaz Khan, a major weapons dealer. And he does it all by himself? No support? Nothing? I have an arms-length relationship with the government and can do that stuff. But I can’t envision Lang doing the same thing. I’m sure he wasn’t stupid. But was he enough of a cowboy to go out and get himself killed? And he took important information with him to the grave.”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this,” Brognola said. “But damn it, I also can’t refute it. Let me rattle some cages here and see what else I can learn.”

“Thanks.” Bolan raised his mug to his lips and slurped some coffee.

“Look, Bear has been looking through Lang’s phone records, trying to chart out who the guy was talking to and when. The rest of the cyberteam is working through the guy’s bank records and whatever else they can get their hands on. Maybe we’ll know more later.”

“Keep me posted,” Bolan said before terminating the call.

SEVERAL MINUTES LATER Bolan’s cell phone rang again. He took the call.

“Go.”

“Jesus, Cooper, that’s how you answer the phone?” It was Potts.

“You get the building cleaned out?”

“About fifty percent. Not too bad, considering the mess you left behind. It was like the Valentine’s Day massacre on steroids. The harder part was convincing the state security forces that they needed to let you go about your business and ignore the death of an American journalist and several Pakistani nationals. But I think we’re in the clear, at least for the moment.”

“How’d you manage it?”

“Would you believe I’m a good diplomat?”

“No.”

“Would you believe I dropped some names of people in Washington? The kind who approve arms sales to the United Arab Emirates?”

“That I believe. You have that kind of clout?”

“Nah, I just said I dropped names. I didn’t say I knew them.”

“Just the same, thanks for sticking your neck out.”

“Don’t mention it. Hey, the real reason I called was to let you know a couple of things. First, I got a phone call from a reporter, a lady named Tamara Gillen. She left me a message, said she’d heard through the rumor mill that Terry Lang may have been lost in an airplane crash. She said she might have some important information about that.”

“I guess I don’t need to tell you to ignore the call.”

“Aren’t you a genius? Thanks for the tip. Maybe if the bottom falls out of the paramilitary business, you can jump over to public relations.”

Bolan grinned.

“Anyway,” Potts continued, “she said she thought that the whole notion that Terry died in a plane wreck was bullshit.”

“She say why?”

“Negative. Probably because she doesn’t want to believe the guy’s dead.”

“That a theory?” Bolan asked.

“Call it an educated guess.”

“Based on?”

“On the fact that Terry boned everything in a skirt in Dubai. You call five people who knew him, and they’d tell you the same thing. The bastard couldn’t keep it in his pants to save his life. I barely knew him, but he was notorious among the reporters, politicians and government people for screwing everything he could get his hands on,” Potts said.

“Good to know,” Bolan said. “You know anything about this reporter?”

“She’s little more than a name to me. I went back through my Rolodex and I had a card in there from her. She probably interviewed me at a press conference or some such. I try to avoid the press like the plague, but sometimes it just can’t be helped.”

“You think she knows anything about Lang?”

“She probably knows a lot about him. Whether any of it’s useful is another matter.”

“Maybe it’s time I checked.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I can’t stay here! The thought boomed in Tamara Gillen’s head and jolted her into action. She stepped away from her window and grabbed a handful of the curtain, ready to pull it closed. She stopped herself.

React and they’ll know you’re on to them, she thought. If they know that, they’ll move and be on you in a heartbeat. Then what?

She glided away from the window, and made her way down the hall to her bedroom. Inhaling deeply, she held the breath for a couple of seconds, exhaled heavily, hoping it would calm her racing mind and equally rapid heartbeat. It did neither.

Concentrate on what you know, she told herself. When she’d arrived home earlier, she’d spotted two men positioned on the sidewalk across the street from her building. She’d recognized the bigger of the two immediately. She’d seen him skulking around Lang’s building on at least one occasion. The man looked like he’d come straight from central casting for a thug—wide shoulders and chest, thick hair gleaming from hair gel, and a white scar that bisected his forehead.

“He shouldn’t be here,” Lang had told her at the time.

“Who is he?”

“Never mind,” Lang had replied through clenched teeth. “Just take my word for it, he shouldn’t be here.”

But her instincts had told her to press him. “What do you mean, Terry? Who is he?”

“Just trust me and stop with the Q&A.” His voice had sounded strange to Gillen, a quiet menace tinged with fear. Uncharacteristically, he’d avoided looking into her eyes. The memory caused a shiver to travel down her spine. She’d heard Lang angry before. In fact, he often seemed to swing between a boisterous charm that attracted people to him and a righteous anger that made him an unwavering opponent in an argument, even when he was dead wrong.

But the fear, that was seared into her memory. Lang never, ever, showed fear. Sure, a shrink may have argued that his in-your-face confidence masked a hurt, vulnerable little boy, provided a bandage for his wounded psyche. And Gillen would have told that shrink he was full of it, right up until she’d heard the fear and the distress in Lang’s voice.

So, yeah, she’d dropped the discussion at the time. Now she regretted it.

Lang was long gone and this creep had found her. She had no idea who he was, what he was capable of or why he wanted anything to do with her.

“Thanks, Terry,” she muttered.

Inside her bedroom, she made her way to the dresser, yanked open the top drawer and rummaged through bras, panties and socks stuffed inside. Where the hell was it? Finally her fingertips grazed smooth, cold steel. She hesitated for a moment, but then used her fingers to rake back the clothing until she could see the gray metal box at the bottom of the drawer. Taking the box from the drawer, she carried it over to her unmade bed, swept aside the wadded sheets to clear herself a spot and sat on the edge of the mattress. Perching the box on her knees, she used her thumb and index finger to work the dial on the combination lock until the final tumbler fell.

The lid came up and she studied the contents of the box. A small stack of bills—mostly U.S. dollars—secured with a rubber band lay at a forty-five-degree angle on top of her passport. She removed both items and set them next to her thigh on the mattress. A .25-caliber automatic pistol was the next item she took out, along with two clips for the weapon. She balanced the gun in her palm and scowled. It wasn’t much, but it fit her hand well and was easily hidden. Finally she removed a silver key and slipped it into the hip pocket of her snug jeans. Sealing the box, she set it on the bed and stood.

The cash, gun and passport all were items she’d started keeping years ago, a ritual that began when she’d been a foreign correspondent in Sierra Leone and again while covering clashes between the Israelis and Hezbollah. When she’d been a green reporter, an editor had told her to carry enough cash to bribe public officials or to buy an airline ticket. And if that didn’t work, well, that was why she’d carried the gun, though she’d never used it on anything except tin cans, paper targets and an occasional watermelon.

She scanned the room. Should she pack her clothes? No time. It was best for her to simply get the hell out of the apartment, get out into the open where people would see if something happened to her. She could take a cab to the Messenger’s office and surround herself with colleagues and friends. It may not make her safer, but it at least would make her feel safer, which was no small thing. And she might be able to dig up some more information. Maybe someone had heard from Terry or they might know something about the key.

Her cell phone beeped and the sudden, sharp noise in the midst of silence caused her heart to skip a beat. By the third ring, she’d regained her breath and shook her head disgustedly at her edginess.

“Tammy, it’s Kellogg.”

It was Mike Kellogg, the Messenger’s bureau chief. The sound of a familiar voice should have relaxed her. But she heard the tension in his voice and it only stoked more fear in her.

“Mike, what’s going on?”

“Terry’s gone.”

She hesitated for a moment and said, “I know.”

“You knew? What the hell. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What’s the big deal? You know Terry. He’s like a cat. He disappears, and you don’t see him for a few days and then he resurfaces.”

“This is different,” Kellogg said.

“Different how?”

“Couple of guys came around looking for him. They asked a lot of questions.”

“Questions? Like?”

“Like, had we heard from him? Did we know who he’d been talking to? Where had he gone? They took Bonham into his office for a while and grilled him. He came out of there red-faced and sweating, like he’d run a damn marathon with these bastards.”

“They didn’t identify themselves?”

“Not to me they didn’t. I’m sure they told Bonham who they were, but he wasn’t in the mood to talk after they left. He shut his door and turned on the Do Not Disturb light on his phone. But he looked pretty shook up when it was all said and done.”

“Damn,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Last I saw Terry, it was two days ago. He was acting nervous, almost scared.”

“Terry? Bullshit. That guy always was on an even keel.”

“Not this time. Seriously, he was worried. Scared. I never saw anything like it. And now these guys show up looking for him. That worries me.”

“What had him so scared?” Kellogg asked.

“I don’t know for sure.”

“For sure?”

“I mean, I don’t know,” she lied.

“Maybe he just overreacted. The guy was working his ass off. Maybe he just got edgy, a little paranoid. Could happen to anyone.”

“Sure,” Gillen replied, not at all convinced.

“Look, you sound pretty shook up. You at the apartment? How about I come over? It’s no trouble.”

She thought about the two men waiting outside the building for her. On the one hand, it seemed an attractive proposition. Maybe if they saw her leave the building with someone instead of by herself, they’d keep their distance from her. Maybe. Or perhaps they’d just come after Kellogg, too. And that assumed that they’d be content to wait outside until Kellogg arrived, which wasn’t a certainty in and of itself. No, she needed to take care of herself and do it right now.

“I’m fine.”

“Really, it’s no trouble,” Kellogg stated.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, this time in a no-nonsense tone.

“Hey, I can take a hint,” Kellogg said. The good-natured tone of his voice sounded forced. Was he angry or just trying to cover for his wounded ego? At this point, she had no time to worry about such a thing. She needed to act.

“Look,” she said, “I’ll call later. Is that okay?”

“So you’re staying put?”

The question struck her as odd. “Sure,” she said.

They said their goodbyes and hung up.

BOLAN ROLLED UP THE SIDEWALK toward Gillen’s apartment building, a glass-and-steel monstrosity that jutted toward Dubai’s clear, blue skies. He’d been watching the place, getting a feel for the property and its surroundings for an hour. Almost from the moment he’d arrived, he’d been struck by the neighborhood’s Western feel. Gleaming apartment and office buildings lined either side of the street. Restaurants and shops, many of them the same fast-food restaurants and department stores found in the United States, lined the streets. If it wasn’t for traffic and other signs written in Arabic or an occasional group of women, their features obscured behind veils, Bolan could just have easily been in any major U.S. city.

Beneath his black nylon windbreaker, which he wore unzipped, as a small concession to the heat, the soldier carried the Beretta 93-R in a shoulder rig. The Desert Eagle rode on his hip, obscured by the tails of his windbreaker.

It was his second trip around the block now. The two men who’d initially caught his attention still stood in the recessed doorway of a nearby men’s clothing store, both trying to look like they hadn’t noticed Bolan. The bigger of the two men used a handkerchief to dab at the sweat beading on his forehead, then tugged at the collar of his shirt with his index finger to allow some heat to escape from inside his clothing. The man looked miserable.

Though Bolan couldn’t say for sure whether he posed a danger, the man definitely seemed out of place. A second man stood on the corner decked out in blue jeans, a baseball cap and a Hawaiian-style shirt, having an animated conversation on his cell phone. He shot a glance in Bolan’s direction, turned and stared into a glass window behind him, allowing him to monitor the soldier’s approach without looking directly at him.

Two more men, both wearing tan coveralls, with heavy leather tool belts wrapped around their waists, stood next to a panel van parked on the street. A casual glance would peg them as telephone or cable television repairman. But Bolan’s trained eye could see the telltale bulges of a handgun holstered in their armpits beneath their coveralls. One of the fake repairmen, a slender man with bushy muttonchop sideburns, carried an empty canvas satchel over one shoulder.

The soldier took a couple of steps and angled himself so he could get a better look at the van. Behind the wheel, he saw a silhouette with only a part profile visible from his vantage point. Bolan took out a pack of smokes, tapped one into his palm and pocketed the rest. With his other hand, he pulled out his lighter, clicked it open and torched the end of the cigarette. He didn’t smoke much these days, but a cigarette was a convenient prop. Tucking the lighter away, he pulled his baseball cap farther over his eyes and started for Gillen’s building.

One of the men looked up as Bolan approached. The soldier felt his muscles tense, but he didn’t break stride. Instead he continued walking right toward them. The man carrying the satchel looked at his partner and nodded politely as the other man spoke at a rapid tempo, occasionally punctuating the phrase with excited gestures from his hands. Bolan took a drag from the cigarette as he passed. He caught Mr. Sideburns’ eye, gave him a nod and kept moving until he reached the nearest intersection.

The Executioner turned right and rolled down the street, passing the panel van, which now stood to his left, ignoring the driver. Then he walked past the front of Gillen’s apartment building and kept going until he reached a nearby intersection, turned right and headed along the side of the building.

The building had a two-level parking garage beneath it that was accessible from the street. Bolan slipped into the parking garage. As he approached a glass door that led from the ground level of the garage, a woman was exiting the building. Smiling, she held the door open for Bolan. He thanked her and passed through it, stepping into the building’s air-conditioned interior.

He keyed the throat mike.

“Jack?”

“Go, Sarge.”

“There was a phone company van parked outside when I entered the building. How about now?”

“Gone, baby, gone.”

“You see it move?” Bolan asked.

“Yeah. It turned the corner a couple of minutes ago, just after the repair guys disappeared into the building.”

Bolan scowled. “You got it in sight?”

“Affirmative. It’s pulling into the parking garage.”

The soldier stopped and drew the Beretta from beneath his jacket. “Okay, my guess is it’s heading for the sixth floor to pick up the two guys and Gillen.”

“I’ll head that way,” the Stony Man pilot stated.

“Don’t engage unless you have to. They may already know they’ve been identified. Until then, let’s play it cool.”

“Clear. By the way—”

“What?” By now he was on the move again, hugging the walls in the hallway, pressing the Beretta against his thigh to keep it out of sight.

“Couple more guys came in after the chumps in the repair outfits. Maybe two minutes later. Both had been standing on the opposite side of the street, but they converged on the building in unison.”

“Sloppy.”

“Probably,” Grimaldi said. “But they’re probably headed your way.”

Bolan reached the end of the corridor. It branched off in two opposing directions, like the top of a T. Flattening against the wall, he peered around the corner and saw the two repairmen exit the elevator and turn in the direction of Gillen’s apartment. Bolan kept the Beretta low at his side and rounded the corner. He started for the men as they came to a stop in front of Gillen’s apartment.

THE SHARP KNOCK ON THE door startled Tamara Gillen. Who the hell could that be? she wondered. Kellogg? No way. There hadn’t been enough time for him to have traveled from the bureau to her apartment. Uncoiling from the chair, she moved to the door. The .22-caliber pistol was tucked into the waistband of her pants and covered by her shirttails.

“Who is it?” she called before reaching the door.

“Phone company,” a male voice replied.

Reaching the door, she peered through the peephole and saw two men in telephone company uniforms standing outside her door.

“I didn’t call you.”

“Of course you didn’t,” the man said with a laugh, “the phones are down.”

Gillen scowled and walked over to the cordless telephone that stood on a small table in her kitchen that doubled as a desk when she worked from home or paid bills. She returned the phone to its charging base and stared at it for a moment. Her pulse quickened. None of this made sense, she thought. If all the phones were down, why check each apartment? She reached underneath her shirt and drew the small pistol. She began backing away from the door, figuring she should find her bag and leave via the fire escape if these guys became too insistent.

“Hang on,” she said. “I need to put on a robe.”

Something thudded against the door, striking it just above the knob. She took in a sharp breath of air and backed away from the door, then brought the pistol up in a two-handed grip.

A second thud registered with her and the wood around the latch exploded into splinters before the door swung inward. One of the men surged into the apartment. In his hand, he gripped he a pistol and he was moving it around, looking for a target. The second man barreled through the door just a couple of steps behind the first.

So little space separated them that Gillen didn’t bother to yell for the men to stop. Her pistol popped twice and one of the intruders grunted as bullets drilled into him. However, his body continued to hurtle forward, powered by sheer momentum. She sidestepped him as a matador might move from the path of an angry bull, and he stumbled past her.

A dark blur flashed into her vision and something hard struck her wrist. She yelped, and the gun slipped from her fingers and hit the floor. Her attacker moved in close, grabbing a fistful of the fabric of her shirt, then hitting her in the ribs, hard, to knock her off balance. She stumbled back toward the wall. Her attacker grinned and stepped forward.

Then his head exploded in a fine red mist. His suddenly decapitated body lurched forward one more step before collapsing.

A big man stood behind the dead man’s former position, a pistol in his outstretched hand. Smoke curled up from the handgun’s barrel. The weapon coughed once more, sending a bullet into the man she’d shot a moment ago.

She saw the newcomer’s lips move, thought she heard noise, but the words didn’t register with her.

“Ms. Gillen. Tamara, we need to go,” he said.

The sound of her own name jarred her from the shock that had startled to settle over her. His words sank in as he pulled her to her feet. She jerked her arm from his grip. He didn’t resist.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No time.”

She stayed rooted to the spot. “Who are you?” she repeated.

“I’m a U.S. federal agent. I’m here because of Terry Lang.”

“Terry?”

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

When they stepped into the hallway, the man stopped.

She noticed that even while standing still, he radiated an energy as though he were coiled, ready to strike. He wheeled ninety degrees, his gun coming up at the same time. Gillen stared after him and saw the cause of his consternation. A man was stepping into view from an adjoining hallway, an assault rifle clutched in his arms, the barrel tracking in on her and her companion.

BOLAN SENSED THE FIRST attacker before he came into view. He wheeled around, the Beretta’s snout zeroing in on his target, a man toting an AK-47. The Executioner squeezed the trigger and the Beretta spit a triburst of 9 mm manglers. The slugs hammered into the man’s chest and caused him to freeze in midstride before he collapsed to the floor.

A second shooter moved in on Bolan and Gillen. The hardman’s machine pistol spewed fire and lead. Bullets sliced through the air inches above the soldier’s head. A double tap of the Beretta’s trigger and the gun coughed out a flurry of six rounds that didn’t strike flesh, but drilled into the wall just behind his attacker, forcing him to take cover.

Bolan whipped his head toward Gillen.

“Move,” he shouted, gesturing at the mouth of a nearby hallway.

Nodding, she turned and sprinted for the corridor.

The Executioner squeezed off two more bursts from the Beretta. The cover fire put his enemies on the defensive. He ejected the handgun’s magazine and slammed another into the weapon’s grip. In the same instant, another gunner mistook the lull in firing as a chance to catch his opponent by surprise. He came around the corner. The move exposed the shooter’s face and his gun hand. Bolan’s Beretta chugged out a volley of 9 mm rounds. Simultaneously the other man’s own weapon cracked, spitting jagged tongues of flame from its muzzle. A couple of bullets from the AK ripped through the fabric of Bolan’s windbreaker while other rounds slammed into plasterboard or ripped through carpet and wood.

The 9 mm slugs from the Beretta drilled into the gunner’s face. The impact spun him violently. Even as the guy slammed to the floor, Bolan heard metal clicking on metal behind him. He wheeled and saw that Gillen had disappeared from view. Moving through the mouth of the corridor into which she’d just disappeared, he spotted a metal door with an exit sign fixed above it at the end of the hallway. The soldier marched toward the door, hoping he could catch up with the woman before Nawaz Khan and his people found her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Aleksander Mazorov knew he needed to move fast.

The big Russian raced up the stairs with a stealth that belied his size. In his right hand, he clutched a Browning Hi-Power. He heard a door snap closed from a couple of flights of stairs above. A smile ghosted his lips. He guessed, hoped, that the woman was coming his way, perhaps with the bastard who’d shot his men right at her side. His grip on the Browning tightened, but he kept it flat against his thigh while he continued to climb the steps. He needed to grab the woman and get the hell out of the building as soon as possible, before the local police arrived and he either got scooped up by them or had to shoot his way out of the situation.

From above, he could see a shadow moving over the wall, could hear the slap of her feet against the stairs as she rushed down.

He raised the Browning. A heartbeat later he saw calves clad in dark slacks fall across his line of sight. When the woman came into view, her eyes seemed to look first at the gun barrel and widen with surprise and terror as she realized what she’d come up against. She froze. Mazorov guessed her mind was racing, ticking through her options, weighing whether to pivot and run or to perhaps rush him. Or she could just be frozen with terror, though he somehow doubted it. Considering that she’d met her initial attackers with a pistol, he guessed she wasn’t the shrinking violet type.

Maybe, he decided, she just needed some prompting.

“Hands up,” he said. “Or I’ll kill you.”

She brought her hands up slowly, elbows cocked at nearly ninety-degree angles. He stepped to one side and motioned for her to move down the stairs. She brushed past him and continued down the steps.

He allowed himself a tight smile. Mission accomplished.

GRIMALDI CROUCHED BETWEEN a pair of parked cars. Peering around the rear of one of the cars, a red BMW, he watched as the panel van’s rear door fanned open and four shooters piled from the vehicle onto the concrete. He keyed his throat mike.

“Striker?”

“Go.”

“The van has more hostiles unloading. I count four.”

“They coming my way?”

“Not if I can help it,” Grimaldi said.

“Clear. Thanks.”

With the Colt Commando leading the way, the lanky Stony Man pilot came up in a crouch and closed the distance between himself and the group of shooters. As he neared them, he heard snatches of muttered conversation. He recognized a couple of words as Russian. What the hell was going on? he wondered. What did the Russians have to do with this? Where they Russian mafiya?

One of the gunners gestured at the door leading from the garage into the apartment building. The others stood by, listening to his orders. Grimaldi listened just long enough to realize he’d garner no good information from them as long as they continued to speak Russian. He came up from the shadows, raised the Commando to his shoulder, the retractable buttstock snug against his body.

One of the hardmen saw him. The Russian simultaneously opened his mouth to shout a warning and brought up his hand, which clutched a submachine gun. Grimaldi triggered the Commando and unleashed a swarm of 5.56 mm rippers from the weapon that drilled into the guy’s chest. His target jerked in place for a moment under the onslaught of autofire. Grimaldi turned slightly and caught a second hardman under a withering hail of fiery death.

Simultaneously the man who’d been handing out orders moved into action. He spun in Grimaldi’s direction, dropped into a crouch and loosed a burst of autofire from an Uzi. The rounds hammered into the concrete just in front of Grimaldi. While the guy tried to improve his aim, the Stony Man pilot returned the favor with another burst from the Commando. The bullets sliced the air just past the man’s face. Though they missed flesh, the guy jerked back hard to get out of the line of fire, and the motion caused him to lose his balance and stumble back a couple of steps. In the same instant Grimaldi triggered his weapon again. The ensuing burst stitched across the guy’s torso, causing a trail of crimson geysers to explode from his chest before he collapsed to the ground.

Tires squealed, and Grimaldi responded by wheeling around toward the noise. The van was hurtling toward him, quickly gaining speed. The pilot dived sideways, throwing his body between a pair of cars. He grunted when his body hit the concrete, and bolts of pain shot out from his shoulder where it collided with the ground. The van roared by, just missing him.

Pulling himself to his feet, Grimaldi caught sight of the van. Brake lights glowed red and rubber squealed against concrete as the vehicle slowed. He rested the Commando on the roof of the parked car in front of him and tapped the trigger. The 5.56 mm slugs hammered into the van, sparking off its steel skin.

The weapon ran dry, and Grimaldi let the weapon hang on its strap while he replaced it with the Beretta 92 that rode in a shoulder holster. He raised the weapon and tried to draw a bead on the van. Before he could line up a good shot, the vehicle had turned a corner and was rolling down a ramp to a lower floor.

The pilot sprinted forward, but by the time he reached the ramp, the van had disappeared. He heard tires squealing from the floor below him. Whoever was driving obviously wanted to get the hell out of the garage and put some distance between themselves and the firefight.

Grimaldi ran to the nearest stairwell and sprinted down to the ground floor. Hitting the release bar on the door, he burst through the doorway, into another level of parking. He arrived in time to see the van hurtling out of the garage.

BOLAN GLIDED DOWN THE steps, the Beretta in a two-handed grip. A voice rose up from the floors below and the soldier froze, straining to hear. The voice definitely sounded female, and he guessed it was Gillen.

He had to descend another flight of steps before the voices gained more clarity.

“I told you,” he heard Gillen say, “I don’t know where Lang is.”

“And I told you, I don’t care. You’re coming with me.”

“Damn it!”

A sharp slapping sound reached Bolan’s ears. Gillen yelped in surprise and pain. Bolan felt his face and neck flush hot with anger and his jaw clenched tight. By now, he had moved about one floor above Gillen and her captor. He deliberately slowed his pace so he could monitor the situation without alarming the gunman and putting Gillen in greater danger. They were continuing to descend the stairwell.

The sound of someone pressing on a door’s release bar reached Bolan. He walked around the landing, spotted the man pushing open the door with one hand and motioning Gillen to go through it with the hand holding a gun. The Executioner stood fast for a couple of seconds to give Gillen enough time to pass through the door.

In the meantime, the big American locked the Beretta’s barrel on Gillen’s captor. Bolan cleared his throat.

The man spun, his pistol hunting for a target. Bolan tapped the Beretta’s trigger and a triburst lanced into the guy’s ribs, breaking bone and drilling into his torso. The hardman staggered back a step, hitting the wall behind him, then raised his weapon and snapped off a wild shot that sounded like a thunderclap in the cramped confines of the stairwell.

The Beretta sighed again. This time, the slugs punched into the man’s heart and killed him. His body slammed against the wall, leaving a crimson smear as it slid to the floor.

Bolan raced down the steps and was through the door in seconds. He found himself on the bottom floor of the garage. The sound of footfalls thudding against the concrete reached him. He looked forty-five degrees to the right and saw Gillen moving at a dead run to get away from him. Before he could call out to her, she stole a glance over her shoulder, saw him standing there and kicked the speed up another notch.

The soldier muttered a curse and raced after her. He couldn’t blame her for running. Despite his assurances that he was there to help, he was a complete stranger and she’d watched several people die violently at his hands in a short span of time. She’d also almost gotten kidnapped while under his “protection.”

So, no, he couldn’t blame her for running away. But it made his job much harder. The soldier poured on the speed to try to bridge the distance between them. He also holstered the Beretta, guessing that the sight of a gun wasn’t helping matters, either. He began to gain on her, the distance between them shrinking to about ten yards. He could hear her breathing, loud, but measured, as though she’d trained as a runner.

She turned right and ran for an exit. The turn cost her some speed and she took it wide, providing Bolan a chance to pivot and head after her diagonally. She stopped to pull open the door and he was able to close in on her, wrapping his arms around her upper body and pinning her arms against her.

“Let me go,” she shouted as she struggled.

“Gillen,” Bolan said, “I’m here to help.”

She continued to struggle. Raising her foot, she stomped down hard on the ground, just missing Bolan’s foot.

“Damn it. Stop!”

Sirens wailed in the distance. From his peripheral vision, Bolan saw someone approaching. He whipped his head around, anticipating trouble. He found Grimaldi walking toward them, the Colt Commando slung over his shoulder, a wide grin playing on his lips.

“Unhand her, knave,” Grimaldi said.

Bolan figured the struggle wasn’t helping and he let her go. She’d been straining to break his grip and her suddenly free body hurtled forward, causing her to stumble a couple of steps before she stopped.

She wheeled around, her cheeks and neck scarlet with exertion and anger. She took a step forward and raised an open hand to deliver a hard slap at Bolan. The soldier noticed her hand was shaking and he guessed it was because of the adrenaline coursing through her. She didn’t take another step, but the anger and fear didn’t drain from her face, either.

“What the hell is the matter with you? You come into my apartment, my home, and start shooting people? Manhandle me?”

Bolan held up his hands, palms forward, in a placating gesturing. The sound of the sirens continued to grow louder.

“We need to go,” he said. “You’re in danger.”

“Yeah, from you! I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”

Bolan shook his head. “Not now. Not here. You need to trust me.”

She threw up her hands in frustration. “I don’t even know you.”

“If we stay here, we’ll get picked up by the police. If my friend and I end up in jail, we can’t help you. We lose valuable time. And Terry Lang died for nothing.”

She opened her mouth to reply, hesitated. Her mouth closed and she shook her head slowly.

“Fine, damn it. Let’s go.”

“You won’t regret this,” Bolan said.

“Too late.”

BOLAN WAS PACING THE hallway in the safehouse, speaking to Potts by cell phone.

“You realize you’re giving me an ulcer,” Potts said.

“Sorry.”

“Oh, problem solved then.”

“Look,” Bolan replied, “just smooth things over with the locals. The last thing I need is them breathing down my neck while I’m trying to work on this. Will you handle it?”

Potts paused a couple of seconds. “Okay.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re going to give me a heart attack. You know that? A big fat, fucking coronary. Which one of my ex-wives sent you here, anyway?”

“I thought I was giving you an ulcer,” Bolan said, ending the call and slipping the phone into his pocket.

He walked to the kitchen, where he found Grimaldi and Gillen seated at a table. She’d pulled her long hair back into a ponytail and secured it with a rubber band. Her face looked freshly scrubbed, and she wore a white T-shirt that was too big for her. Flecks of blood had spattered on her other clothes and her exposed arms during the altercation at her apartment building.

A cup of coffee sat on the table in front of her. She’d wrapped her fingers around it and was staring glumly into the cup. When Bolan entered the room, she peered up at him, her expression stony.

“I gave her one of your extra shirts,” Grimaldi said. “And some coffee.”

Bolan pulled one of the chairs out from the table, spun it and sat on it. He rested his forearms on the top of the chair’s back and looked at Gillen.

“Say it,” she said.

“What?”

“Whatever the hell you’re thinking, just spit it out.”

“How well did you know Terry Lang?”

She thought about it for a couple of seconds, then shrugged. “We knew each other two years, maybe three. Worked together off and on during that time.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Her eyes dipped toward her coffee cup again. “We spent a lot of time together,” she said.

Bolan detected something in her voice, maybe sadness, though he couldn’t be sure.

“Were you sleeping together?”

Anger flashed in her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something, but the soldier cut her off.

“You’re hiding something,” he said. “If your big secret is that you two were lovers, then please spare me the modesty. I’m not a priest.”

She pressed her lips together, forming a bloodless line.

“I feel violated,” she said.

“I don’t care,” Bolan said.

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

Bolan said nothing. Grimaldi kept his mouth shut, but turned his gaze from one to the other, as though he was watching a tennis match.

Finally she heaved a sigh and her shoulders sagged.

“We were sleeping together.”

“And?”

She looked up a him. “And what?”

“What else? I mean, that’s the big confession? What else is going on?”

Her face flushed and she crossed her arms over her chest.

“Look, he was married. Sleeping with him isn’t something I’m proud of. We worked together, collaborated on a few things. It just happened.”

“Maybe you weren’t looking for it,” Bolan said. “But Terry apparently was looking for it all over. Now some people are trying to kill you. Maybe it was because he was your bunk mate. Maybe not. Regardless, Terry’s dead and someone apparently wants to kill you, too.”

“Or at least capture you,” Grimaldi added. “That wouldn’t be pleasant, either.”

“Did he tell you anything?” Bolan asked. “Say he was worried for his life?”

She hesitated. “The man, the one you shot on the stairs. We saw him a couple of days ago at a hotel. It really bothered Terry, unnerved him like I’d never seen before.”

“He say why?” Bolan asked.

She shook her head. “No. I just noticed the change in him once he saw the guy. He got nervous, edgy. In retrospect, I can see why. The guy back there was a killer. He would have killed me.”

Bolan nodded his agreement.

She raised her coffee mug to her lips, took a deep swallow and returned it to the table. Bolan noticed a small shudder pass through her and she hugged herself again.

“That’s not the first close call,” she said. “I was in Iraq, working for the wire services. The unit I was embedded with got ambushed. The soldiers I was with were killed, shot by a sniper. I was pinned down and scared out of my mind. Fortunately, another unit rolled in at the last minute and killed the snipers. I almost died that day.”

“You were fortunate,” Bolan said.

Nodding, she reached into the pocket of her jeans, fished around a couple of seconds and pulled her hand back out. She set a silver key on the table.

“What’s it for?” Grimaldi asked.

“Not sure,” she said with a shrug. “After we saw the Russians back at the hotel, Terry gave it to me. He told me to hang on to it, but that was all he said. He could be like that.”

“And you didn’t press him?” Grimaldi asked.

“No. Terry and I have known each other for a while. When he wasn’t going to explain something, he made it obvious. You didn’t force him to talk about something until he was ready.”

Bolan nodded his understanding, though his gut told him the woman was still holding something back. He decided to take another stab in the dark.

“What are you working on right now?”

“Excuse me?” Gillen said.

“Stories. What stories are you working on.”

Her eyes narrowed. “None of your business.”

“Right now, it is. Were you collaborating on anything with Lang?” Bolan pressed.

She shook her head no.

“Working on any crime stories?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” she replied. “Since I’m in a bureau, it has to be a big deal for me to cover a crime. If some guy gets mad and kills his brother-in-law, readers in London or Washington, D.C., don’t want to know about it. Occasionally, some money guy or someone with a charity may get busted for shipping money to al Qaeda. When that happens, my editors want it. Over here, though, most of what I write about is commercial real estate and growth. The financial stuff, that’s what people in London and Washington want to know about.”

“Sure. How about Terry? What was he working on?”

Again, she shook her head. “Not sure,” she replied. “We never talked about work.”

“Bullshit.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said. You can’t tell me that you two never talked shop, ever. You can’t put two reporters in a room together for thirty seconds without them talking about work.”

She’d been hugging herself, fingers encircling biceps. Bolan noticed her hands tighten and she leaned farther back in her chair.

“We didn’t do that.”

The soldier exhaled loudly. With his forefinger and thumb, he pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. Pulling his hand away, he opened his eyes and looked at the reporter.

“You must think you’re extremely clever or I’m extremely stupid,” he said. “Whatever. Either way, you’re lying to me.”

She licked her lips and stared at Bolan, her eyes not bulging, but wide enough to tell Bolan something was wrong. “I’m telling the truth.”

The soldier nodded. Standing, he walked over to the coffee machine and poured himself a cup of coffee. He brought the cup to his lips, blew on it and stared ahead, studying the swirls in the wood grain of the cabinet doors.

“They peeled his skin off,” Bolan said.

“What?”

“The people who took Terry, they peeled his skin off, while he was alive. They stabbed him more times than I can count. Not fatal wounds, mind you. Just enough and in the right spots to put him through agony. I’d guess he was miserable his last hours on Earth.”

She turned in her seat and gave Bolan a look of shock and horror. “Why are you telling me this? What’s wrong with you?”

Bolan set the coffee on the counter and turned slowly to face the woman.

“I’m not sure what your game is,” he said. “But I know you’re not being straight with me. Why, is anybody’s guess. You haven’t told me anything useful. Apparently you don’t care that Lang’s dead. So I figured why not share a few more details? You don’t give a shit anyway.”

“You’re a bastard!”

“Sure I am,” the soldier said. “Here’s the thing, though. I’m trying to figure out what happened to Terry, find out who killed him and why. It bothers me that he died the way he did. You, on the other hand, seem at peace with the whole thing. So I thought I’d unburden myself. It worked. I feel better already.”

With his hands, Bolan pushed off the counter and started across the room.

“Wait!” she called after him. “You can’t keep me here. Am I under arrest? If not, then you can’t keep me here.”

His hand on the doorknob, Bolan paused, then shrugged. “So leave.”

He opened the door, stepped out into the hallway and kept on walking. Grimaldi followed behind him a couple of heartbeats later.

“Wow,” the pilot said, “which nugget of information should we follow up on first?”

“I’d send her packing,” Bolan said. “But I think that’d be like putting a bullet in her head. Whoever tried to find her earlier, is going to come for her again. I’m sure of it.”

“So what next?”

“You stay here,” Bolan said. He handed Grimaldi the key that the woman reporter had provided him. “If you can get her to spill her guts, great. In the meantime, I need to keep looking for Khan.”

CHAPTER NINE

Yuri Sokolov sat in the cabin of his Gulfstream executive jet. He listened to the engine’s whine as the craft cut through the air over Asia. Thoughts of what lay ahead rolled through his mind. It comforted him to think of such things, distracting him from the horrible thing sealed in a special smuggling compartment built into the aircraft, one normally reserved for weapons or drugs.

Absently he grabbed at the cloth napkin folded over his left thigh, dabbed imaginary beads of sweat from his upper lip and returned the napkin to his lap. He’d meet Haqqani in Karachi in a matter of hours, at the airport, where he could pass along the horrible substance the plane carried.

Then he’d get back on the plane and get his ass back out of Karachi. Fast.

He noticed his left foot tapping out a rapid-fire beat and willed himself to stop. What the hell is the matter with you? he wondered. Quit acting like a damn child and do this.

A tumbler of vodka was clutched in his right hand. Bringing it to his lips, he drained it, thankful he was alone. If the others—the ones who signed his paychecks—saw him acting this way, jumping at shadows that existed only in his mind, they’d kill him.

A rueful smile crossed his lips. Rising to his feet, he crossed the cabin to a wet bar and poured more vodka. After ten years with the KGB and then with the FSB, you’d think you’d be used to danger, he told himself. And used to bad bosses. He’d had more than his share of both through the years.

But these people, the ones with the Seven, were the worst. It’d all seemed so good up front. They’d showered him with money. And with women, lots and lots of women, he thought, allowing himself another smile. And it’d all seemed pretty easy. Carry a couple of suitcases filled with the money to Sunnis insurgents in Iraq. Ferry precision-machined centrifuge parts to Iran. He essentially was a well-paid delivery man. Very well paid.

But this…

This could start a war. Start many wars.

Enough, he told himself. His job was to deliver, not to worry about consequences. He was a foot soldier and foot soldiers, in his view, did what they were told. They let smarter people worry about the consequences.

He sank back into one of the jet’s plush seats. Besides, they’d assured him all this was temporary, essentially a ruse. He’d pass along the materials. They’d take them back later—by force if necessary. Sokolov ran his fingers through his thinning, reddish-brown hair. He didn’t trust Daniel Masters as far as he could throw the little British fuck. Didn’t trust any Englishman, for that matter, especially not one willing to undercut his homeland. But even that oily bastard wouldn’t lie about something so important.

No, he told himself, Masters wouldn’t lie about this.

And, if he did, frankly, it wouldn’t matter. Masters had the Council of Seven convinced he knew what he was talking about. Therefore, he held all the cards. In Sokolov’s little world that meant shutting up and doing as he was told.

And he’d do that.

Even if it brought Armageddon down on the whole world.

SOKOLOV WATCHED NAWAZ Khan push his way through the door of the aircraft, followed by an entourage of maybe a half dozen men.

The Russian made no effort to hide his disgust at the Pakistani. Sokolov’s brother, a Spetsnaz soldier, had been killed in Afghanistan, the personnel carrier he was traveling in pulverized by a Stinger missile, one presumably supplied by the United States. In light of that, he had little use for the Pakistanis, or the United States, for that matter.

Nawaz Khan marched up to within a foot of the Russian and stood, his fists cocked on his hips, and stared at Sokolov.

“You have it?” Khan asked finally.

“Yes.”

Khan nodded approvingly. “And you can show us how to use this material?”

“Of course,” Sokolov replied.

“Good.”

A phone trilled from somewhere in the knot of men positioned behind Khan. From the corner of his eye, Sokolov saw one of the men bring a phone to his ear and heard him utter what the Russian assumed was a greeting, though he didn’t understand the language. The man paused and listened. When he spoke again, the volume of his voice rose. Though Sokolov couldn’t understand what the man was saying, he easily recognized the distress in the man’s voice. By now Khan had turned to look at his assistant. The arch of the Pakistani’s eyebrows, the ripple of his cheek muscles as he clenched and unclenched his jaw betrayed his worry, Sokolov thought.

When the man hung up the phone, he looked at Khan.

Khan gestured at Sokolov with an open palm. “Excuse me,” he said. He turned and walked with his assistant to another section of the cabin, out of earshot of Sokolov, at least at first. As the conversation progressed, Khan’s voice rose to a point where Sokolov could hear the conversation even though he couldn’t interpret the words spoken. Khan occasionally punctuated his statements by jabbing his index finger into the man’s chest. When the conversation ended, the man turned and exited the airplane while Khan came back to Sokolov, a strained smile plastered across his lips.

The Russian flashed a smile of his own. “Trouble?”

Khan shook his head. “Nothing we can’t handle. This business we’re in, it occasionally yields some surprises, yes?”

“Expect the unexpected,” Sokolov replied.

“Certainly.”

Sokolov stepped forward, bent his head until his face hovered within inches of Khan’s own. The former KGB agent’s smile faded. “If you have trouble on your hands,” he growled through clenched teeth, “you better damn well deal with it before it becomes our trouble, too. You understand me, yes?”

Khan swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes.”

“Good, I feel better already,” Sokolov said.

Khan nodded in the direction of his entourage. “You can supervise them as they unload the cargo? You know better than they do how to handle the material.”

“Damn straight I do.”

CHAPTER TEN

Binoculars pressed to his eyes, Bolan studied the warehouse. He was on the roof of a neighboring building, crouched next to a large chiller unit, his body enveloped by shadows.

He’d been situated there for hours, studying the number of guards, their patterns of movement, their weaponry, making note of it all in his mind.

Thus far, he’d logged two trucks within the past hour rolling into the warehouse. Both were nondescript, large tractor-trailer rigs, engines growling, pipes belching smoke into the air. He’d been unable to get a good look at the drivers, though that mattered little to him, either.

He was more concerned with what lay inside the warehouse than anything else.

According to intelligence gathered by Stony Man Farm, Khan owned the warehouse through a web of shell companies, and it was believed to be a transit point for some of the weapons the Pakistani shipped to conflict zones worldwide.

Hitting the facility would accomplish two goals as far as Bolan was concerned. One, he could hobble Khan’s weapons-smuggling ring and—at least temporarily—prevent deadly weapons from getting into the hands of killers. Second, since Khan had submerged out of sight, Bolan figured his best tack was to drop some depth charges and bring the guy back to the surface. Sort of like fishing with hand grenades.

But first he wanted to make sure he had the right spot.

The intel he had was good, but he wanted to make sure it was right. The only way to do that was to check out the place himself.

He had changed into his combat blacksuit and smeared black camo paint on his cheeks, nose and forehead. The sun had fallen hours ago, taking down the heat considerably, making the surveillance gig more tolerable.

Grabbing his gear, the soldier got to his feet. He carried with him the usual handguns and also had brought along a Heckler & Koch MP-5 K. He looped the SMG’s strap over his head and right shoulder, then pulled on a lightweight black trench coat to hide his weapons and other gear.

Walking up to the edge of the roof, he set both palms on the ledge, swung first one leg, then the other over the side and lowered himself slowly until he hung from his fingertips. Releasing his grip, he dropped to the top landing of the fire escape below, folding into a crouch. He scrambled down the stairs until he reached the final landing and, releasing the ladder, dropped to the alley below. Light in the alley was limited. Bolan glided along the wall of the building he’d just left. He stopped at the corner, flattened his back against the wall and stole a glance around the edge and saw that the target warehouse remained busy. A tractor-trailer idled outside the building.

The soldier surged across the street to the outer perimeter of the warehouse, using the big truck for cover.

From his surveillance, he’d gathered that one or two guards patrolled the exterior at any given time. They didn’t wear uniforms, but instead dressed in khakis and royal-blue polo shirts. They looked as much like insurance salesmen as anything else, except for the pistols clipped to their belts. They appeared to communicate via mobile telephone rather than with radios. Both guards had deep brown skin and jet-black hair, and Bolan guessed they were of south Asian extraction.

One of the men was tall, wide and thick, built like a weightlifter. He wore his hair cut close to the scalp and rested the palm of his right hand on the butt of his pistol. The second guard was big, too, but soft, dumpy. A lit cigarette dangled from his lower lip.

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