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Now it was Klegg’s turn to shrug. “Tie up the knots that can’t tie you back. Call it acceptable.”
Like a scene out of Faust, Milosevic leaned forward and extended his hand.
IT WAS COLD in the alley outside the Kiev nightclub.
Klegg’s and Svetlana’s breath plumed up between them as they kissed furiously. The American plunged his hands inside the woman’s ankle-length fur coat. Her eyes were glassy marbles as they kissed. He ran his hands over her body underneath her coat, stroking her up to a fever pitch of excitement.
She moaned as his fingers worked at her.
The back door to the nightclub was just a few yards away and the muted sound of the dance beat music rattled the blacked-out windows in their frames. The alley smelled strongly of the urine of drunk and stoned patrons. Garbage overflowed out of battered old cans and three giant green bins.
Rats, braving the frigid chill to get the remnants of greasy food, swarmed across the refuse and watched the humans with glittering eyes.
Though thousands of citizens of Kiev went about their lives within little distance of couple, it was as if they were alone in a vast, urban wasteland of empty windows, rubbish and deep shadows. It called to Klegg’s mind the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.
“I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust,” the lawyer thought idly. It made no sense but his mind was starting to click with adrenaline.
“Now,” Svetlana whispered in his ears. “I want it now.”
“Now?” Klegg asked, his heart starting to beat even faster.
“Yes, yes,” she breathed.
“Okay.” He laughed. “But remember, you asked for it.”
The American psychopath stepped back from the Russian woman, leaving her gasping. Her glassy, red-veined eyes opened in confusion.
Klegg grinned like a maniacal clown.
His hands went to the small of his back underneath his coat. He emerged with a pair of nunchaku.
The martial-arts weapon was designed from the width of a single, slightly thicker than average handle cut smoothly down the middle, allowing for more compact and thus easier surreptitious carrying. The handles on the thicker edges were octagonal, presenting a variety of sharp edges for contact when swung.
“My favorite movie when I was growing up was Enter the Dragon,” Klegg explained, speaking fast as his breath continued coming harder and faster. “Nylon cord and teak wood. I walked right through airport security with this.”
He assumed the rear defense stance. Dramatic, almost cinematic in nature, with most of his weight resting on his outstretched forward leg while his torso was held back, arms up, nunchaku held along the outside of his right arm.
“W-what?” Confusion. The beginnings of fear.
“I’m not going to lie,” Klegg snorted. “I like this weapon ’cause it’s so fancy. Does a lot for my self-esteem.”
He exploded into motion, whipping the segmented clubs around through an intricate pattern of moves: reverse shoulder swing into a figure-eight swing, down into an underarm grip.
He was grinning so wildly now his smile threatened to split his face. He forcefully exhaled and performed a cross-back swing too fast for the eye to follow, and Svetlana, at last understanding what was about to happen, opened her mouth to scream.
The end of the nunchaku whipped around and slapped the woman across the jaw. Her head snapped to the side and her scream was cut short by the impact. Blood painted the dirty snow in stripes of scarlet. She stumbled back, long heels sliding on the icy ground, only the alley wall keeping her up.
Klegg, eyes burning, moved in, the nunchaku cycloning through its figure-eight pattern. He struck her again, then caught the stick under his arm on the rebound. Her head snapped back and this time teeth flew like tumbling dice.
She sagged to her knees and her ruined face poured blood out in a hot, sticky puddle beneath her.
Klegg lashed out again and again. His skill was not simply that of a choreographed dancer; he could swing the arcane weapon with deadly force. The teakwood handle made sickening crunching sounds like cracking ice as it slapped into Svetlana’s skull and jaws over and over.
Blood splatter painted the walls, painted the ground, soaked the woman until her face was a mask of it. She couldn’t find the strength to scream, couldn’t drag in enough air to cry out before she was struck again.
She could only whimper.
Klegg’s smile was a horrible rictus on his gleaming face. His breath came in short, hard pants like a man having sex. The concussive shock of each blow traveled back up his arm with each strike.
Finally one of the octagonal edges of the striking club caught the ravaged woman a glancing blow along her temple and she was knocked unconscious. She sagged face-first to the ground, still as a slaughtered carcass. Klegg struck the back of her head two hard snaps and more blood matted her once silky hair.
Gasping for breath, he moved around behind her and took each side of the nunchaku in an underhand grip. He bent and looped the nylon cord under her chin then twisted. He twisted until he felt her larynx crumple like an empty soda can under his heel and he rose, dropping the weapon to lie beside Svetlana’s rapidly cooling corpse.
He took off his gloves and ran a hand through his hair. He straightened and smoothed his overcoat. He reached down and adjusted his still prominent erection in his slacks.
Without hurry he lit a cigarette and blew smoke out in twin streams from his nostrils. Slowly his heart slowed and his breathing calmed. His erection began to fade.
He smoked half the cigarette down, then dropped it to the ground. It landed in a sludgy pool of snow and blood, instantly extinguished.
He turned and walked calmly from the alley to hail a taxicab. He had no fear of the police. Kiev was a wide-open, dirty city and he was under the protection of Milosevic, the biggest villain of them all.
Things were working out just right, he decided.
Stony Man Farm
BARBARA PRICE sat at her desk in the Annex.
She had three computer screens open in front of her, each with a spreadsheet showing expenditures for separate areas of the Stony Man operation. She had itemized ledgers for the armory, for Transportation and for Buck Greene’s security projects. Requisition forms for jet fuel alone were enough to make clerks from the Governmental Accountability Office gray with shock.
Price looked at the tally and shook her head as she typed in her authorization code.
The public was always in some outcry about thousand-dollar hammers or eight-hundred-dollar toilet seats. The truth was the number crunchers at the GAO would never have made such oversights. Those inflated purchase orders were designed to hide covert-action expenditures for clandestine units and projects just like Stony Man.
There was a knock on the office door and she looked up. Carmen Delahunt stood in the entrance, a tired look on her face and a manila file folder in her hand.
“Got a second?” the redhead asked.
Price pushed herself back from her desk. “Sure,” she said. “What’ve you got?”
“Multiples of Seven.”
“Really?” Price arced an eyebrow.
Delahunt entered the room and took a seat across from Price at the desk. She laid out her folder showing several computer printings and a couple of glossy jpg enlargements.
Delahunt began leafing through them, talking fast, the way she always did when she was onto something.
“I started cross indexing intelligence estimates and after-action reports like you’d asked,” she explained. “Looking to see if anything relating to Seven came up.”
“You found something?”
“I found a motherlode, Barb. I’ve got Seven cross-indexing things going back decades. Some of it can’t be related—the search is too broad, but you’ve tapped into some kind of thread here. Pieces from a thousand different puzzles that nobody realized they were even supposed to be looking at.”
Price leaned forward, caught up in her enthusiasm. She reached across the desk and pulled a codex Delahunt had printed up. Her vision swam as she saw some of the events and people highlighted.
Kabul urban police. Princess Diana. Baghdad Green Zone. Kiev. Israel, 1968. CERN. The Vatican. Charles Lindberg. Hangar 21. White Sands, New Mexico. Ho Chi Minh City. Aldrich Ames. There was such a collage of information it was impossible to make sense of.
The list went on.
“As interesting as these initial surveys are, they’re basically cold cases,” Delahunt continued. “Some much less cold than others, but for now, cold cases.” She paused. “Except for this.”
Price looked up from the codex. “What?”
“Canada.” Delahunt slid a paper-clipped report to Price. “Toronto.”
“Give me the through line.”
“Our Department of Energy runs a contract research facility there. Ostensibly to study alternative fuels. Green tech, stuff like that. From what I’ve gathered, though, much of the science is a little more experimental. A little more theoretical.”
“And?”
“And the DOE put in a request to the FBI last week to conduct a counterintelligence operation on the facility as internal security had started reporting recruitment approaches being made on their employees by unknown operatives looking to do pay-for-play deals. Also, electronic countermeasures had been tripped in the last forty-eight hours indicating someone was doing a hostile analysis of their hard site security.”
“Standard Bureau stuff.” Price nodded. “Could be anyone looking to see what goodies are being cooked up. Hell, it could be industrial even, not political.”
Delahunt nodded. “Still could be. Nothing’s been proven. However the FBI team they sent to Toronto managed to catch a glimpse of someone seen surveying the employee entrance.”
“Custody?”
“No.” Delahunt shook her head. “This wasn’t a joint op with the Canadians. They took his photo and requested RCMP help with digital analog forensics.”
“They ID the guy?”
“Sure. Man named Jen Duh sh Tyen Tsai.”
“If Schwarz were here you’d know he’d say—”
“Gesundheit,” Delahunt agreed. “He’s a funny man that Hermann.”
“Yeah, but looks aren’t everything.”
“You got that from him, didn’t you?”
Price took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “Sometimes he’s funny. Mostly he’s just funny ’cause he’s trying to be funny and fails.” She set the mug of coffee down. “But surely Mr. What’s-his-name doesn’t go by that handle.”
“Mostly just Jen.”
“What do we know about him?”
“We know he’s in Toronto. We know he’s a sort of free agent between Chinese Tong running underworld activities there. Part courier, part outside hit man, part information broker.”
“So a criminal mercenary with connections to Chinese syndicates is running a surveillance operation on a DOE private contractor facility. And you tied him in to Seven how?”
“Look at his sleeve.” Delahunt gestured toward a RCMP file photo. “His left arm, inside, above the elbow.”
A “sleeve” was a slang term used by tattoo enthusiasts to indicate an arm that was entirely covered by ink designs from deltoid to wrist. Jen Tsai’s was covered in swirling images of Chinese characters, mythological demons and iconography in bold reds, blues, yellows and black.
“Where? I don’t see…” Price trailed off as she scrutinized the photo. “Ah.”
Just above Jen Tsai’s elbow was a horned demon skull, screaming mouth lined with fangs. Flames swirled inside the gaping jaws, and in the center of the flames were the numerals 1+6=7.
“Yeah,” Delahunt agreed. “Little odd for a hardcore Chinese gangster to be sporting primary arithmetic in his colors, no?”
“Oh, yes,” Price answered.
“We have his probable twenty?”
“We most certainly do.”
Price picked up her coffee mug. “Good. I’ll call Hal have him pull the Bureau boys off surveillance. Then I’ll send Able Team around to knock on some doors.”
“Knowing Ironman, it’ll be heads that get knocked more than doors.”
Price shrugged. “Whatever…”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Toronto, Canada
Regent Park, 3:00 a.m., the streets were quiet.
From behind the wheel of the black Excursion SUV, Carl Lyons surveyed the neighborhood. The vehicle had been waiting for them at the airport.
Lyons watched the streets with the cynical, jaundiced eye of a veteran cop.
Regent Park’s reputation preceded it. Fifty percent of the people living in the urban area were teenagers and sixty-eight percent of all the people there were settled in well below the national poverty rate for the rest of Canada.
With poverty, the lack of aspiration, and the loss of hope came crime and most often violent crime. Regent Park was a tough neighborhood not unlike any other bad neighborhood in any other First World country. It wasn’t Islamabad or Caracas, but it could still kill you.
“Keep an eye out for gangbangers working as sentries for drug dealers,” Lyons muttered.
“This isn’t my first rodeo, Hefei,” Blancanales reminded him.
Lyons grunted and turned down Queen Street East. In the back Schwarz was using his CPDA to run a more sophisticated GPS unit than the one that had come with the big Excursion. The CPDA he had begun using was a SME PED, or Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device.
Barbara Price had managed to secure a crate of the high-end encrypted devices from her old bosses in the Puzzle Palace, the National Security Agency.
“You notice some bastards have torn down all the street markers?” Schwarz observed.
