Critical Intelligence

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“So police have a hard time responding to incidents or giving their location for backup,” Lyons said.

“Hey,” Schwarz replied in his best faux-Hispanic accent, “this ain’t my first rodeo, Hefei.”

“You guys are assholes.”

Schwarz leaned forward and nudged Blancanales on his shoulder. When the ex-Green Beret turned he saw Schwarz grinning madly, hand up to his ear as he mimicked holding a phone.

“Bring-bring.” Schwarz giggled, then made his voice deep. “Kettle? Yes, this is Pot, um, you’re black.”

“I’m an asshole?” Lyons snapped. “I’m an asshole? On what grounds?”

“On the account of your warm and overly gregarious people skills.” Blancanales laughed.

“Hey,” Lyons snarled. “Some people are like Slinkies, not really good for anything…but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs.”

Outside the vehicle rows of dingy brick buildings from the Toronto Community Housing Corporation slid by in uniform ranks.

The city planners had originally visualized Regent Park as a transitional community, and it was Canada’s largest experiment with a social housing project where people on social assistance could find affordable housing until their circumstances improved.

That had turned out to be very few and the population had stagnated, then grown. Eventually it had also become an immigrant community neighborhood. Into this melting pot of urban squalor Jen Tsai had moved, establishing links with local street gangs and building a safe haven for himself.

Lyons turned onto Parliament Street and began driving north in the general direction of the more upscale, historical Cabbagetown.

“There,” he said. “On the right is Regent Park—that’s our primary landmark. See what the GPS is saying.”

“Already on it,” Schwarz acknowledged.

“Circle the tenement when we get there,” Blancanales said. “We’ll finish the three-sixty survey then I, not being so muy blanco, can hop out and cover the back door.”

“Hey,” Lyons said, “this isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Everyone’s a comedian in this crew.” Schwarz spoke up. Then he said, “There. On the right, facing the park, that’s our building.”

“Let me swing around back,” Lyons said. “You got anything on the police scanner?”

“Negative,” Schwarz replied. “I got one domestic-disturbance call as we rolled in but after that nothing.”

“There we go,” Blancanales said.

The Able Team warrior looked out their windows and into Regent Park.

A group of African-Canadian youths stood beside a children’s playground. They were dressed in typical hip-hop regalia and with openly hostile looks watched the SUV as it cruised slowly past.

The clique that ran Regent Park, and the one with whom Jen Tsai now made his deals, according to RCMP records, was the PBS, or the Point Blank Souljahs, the remnants of a much more powerful organization called the Regent Park Crew that had controlled cocaine traffic in the 1980s and ’90s and was now defunct.

“Good thing our windows are blacked out,” Schwarz said. “Or those Souljahs would think we were cops.”

“As it is now,” Blancanales pointed out drily, “they might decide we’re an enemy crew on a drive-by mission.”

“Then they wouldn’t be far wrong, would they?” Lyons grunted.

“Not really,” Blancanales agreed. “You want me to contact Wethers now?”

“Yeah, bring him up.” Lyons nodded. “Schwarz, you got the shotgun mike ready?”

“I’m on it like Blue Bonnet.”

Lyons nodded to Blancanales, who spoke into his own SME PED. “Able to Stony Bird,” he said, initiating contact.

“Copy,” Wethers answered immediately. “I have you up on my video display. I see your twenty.”

The camera feed to the video display Professor Wethers referred to was mounted into the nose of an RQ-7 Shadow, a light, compact tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Only thirty-six feet long and boasting a fourteen-foot wingspan with a weight of 375 pounds, the UAV was much smaller than its larger cousins, the MQ-9 and MQ-1 Reapers.

Able Team had launched the vehicle from a portable launcher they’d mounted on the roof of their SUV from the top of a deserted commercial parking garage. With a flight endurance of six hours, a sixty-eight-mile range and service ceiling of fifteen thousand feet, it was exactly the kind of tool they needed for the low-profile urban operation.

“Go ahead and give our boy Jen a call,” Schwarz said. “I’m up.”

Lyons and Schwarz cued up their headsets while Blancanales used his SME PED to dial Stony Man Farm. Waiting at a com station just outside the remote pilot setup Wethers ran the RQ-7 from, Kurtzman took the incoming call and shuffled it through his system to make it anonymous before routing it back to Toronto.

After three rings Jen Tsai answered. “Hello?” he said in English.

Blancanales lifted his arm and gave Schwarz a thumbs-up.

Lyons subvocalized into his throat mike to Wethers. “We’re on. Start triangulation.” Behind them Schwarz powered down the back window and pointed a compact directional mike at the building housing the Chinese gangster.

“Hello?” Tsai repeated, this time sounding pissed off.

“You fucked up the job on the lab,” Blancanales said. At Stony Man, Kurtzman was feeding his voice through a distorter so that it came out deep and gravelly. “You got made by Mounties.” He paused then added, “Seven is not pleased.”

“It’s not over yet!” Tsai shouted into the phone. “I can handle the cops here. I’m still going to get an in.”

“No denial, right to defensive begging, nice,” Lyons murmured into his throat mike.

“We’re getting everything,” Kurtzman assured him.

“Excuses don’t cut it,” Blancanales said.

Behind him Schwarz looked down at the scrolling screen of his SME PED.

The signal from Jen Tsai’s phone was shown against a 3-D structural blueprint of the public housing building as it was triangulated between Schwarz’s parabolic mike and the sensory instruments in the nose of the RQ-7 Shadow controlled by Wethers.

There was a pause after Blancanales’s admonishment.

For several tense seconds the conversation was still. Lyons looked in his side mirror and immediately sat up. Approaching the idling SUV were four of the gang members they’d passed earlier. The gangsters’ hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of their hooded pullover sweatshirts.

Lyons swore softly; he knew what was happening immediately. The Point Blank Souljahs crew had noticed an unidentified SUV with blacked-out windows rolling slowly through disputed drug territory then parking in front of their housing unit.

They were coming to kill trespassers and once they got a good look at Able Team the lead would start flying all the sooner.

On the phone Tsai suddenly spoke again, voice rich with suspicion. “One plus six.”

Blancanales turned and looked at Lyons, then back over his shoulder at Schwarz, hand up and face questioning. “What do I say?” he mouthed silently.

Lyons cut his eyes back to the approaching gangsters. He saw the leader produce a TEC-9 machine pistol. He turned back toward Blancanales and pulled out his silenced Beretta 92 with extended magazine.

“One plus six!” Tsai barked into the phone.

“Fuck it!” Lyons snarled. “Hang up, we’ll roll hot. I’m tired of all this goddamn sneaking around anyway.”

“We just got here!” Schwarz protested.

“Hurry up,” Blancanales answered him. He caught sight of the approaching gangsters in the rearview mirror and snapped his cell phone shut, cutting off the angry Tsai. “If you don’t move fast, Schwarz, then Ironman is going to kill all the good ones.”

Stony Man Farm

BARBARA PRICE, hair still damp from her shower, finished dressing.

She was in the bedroom of the farmhouse where she kept toiletries and clothing for the times she spent overnight at Stony Man. Most weeks she spent more time sleeping here than she did at her D.C. town house.

The shower in the room’s bathroom was running as Mack Bolan rinsed off. He’d just returned from somewhere, doing something—Price had no idea what.

He’d smelled like gunpowder and had blood under his nails. The past half hour had been stolen moments, but stolen moments were the only moments the casual couple got.

She thought idly about perhaps stripping down again and joining him in the shower. What was another fifteen minutes if she was in a stealing mood?

The push-talk application on her SME PED broke squelch and she heard Kurtzman’s gruff voice call out to her from across the Farm in the Annex.

“You on, Barb?” the leader of the cyberteam asked.

Price sighed and rose off the rumpled bed. She felt a pang at the missed opportunity but by the time she reached the phone the feeling was gone. With practiced self-discipline she slammed her shields down, brought her discipline up and become once again mission controller.

“Go ahead, Bear.”

“Barb, Carmen has pulled something out possibly relating to Seven. I think you should take a look.”

“Copy. I’m en route to your twenty now.”

“I’ll have the coffee ready.”

“Don’t threaten me, Bear.”

Price turned to look in the mirror over the dresser and pushed a stray strand of her blond hair behind an ear. Pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together. Whoever this Seven was, Price could tell she was starting to get their scent in her nose now.

It’s only a matter of time, she thought. She left the room, mind completely absorbed in the problem now.

Bolan would figure out something had come up easily enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“What did you find?” Price asked.

The Annex was a flurry of activity. Akira Tokaido’s desk area looked as if a bomb had gone off. Red Bull cans and Snickers candy bar wrappers lay cast around like spillover from a landfill. His fingers hammered his keyboards while the Smiths cranked out of the earbuds of his iPod.

“I found more cases of Seven,” Delahunt said. “Bear is setting up the display right now.”

Across the room Kurtzman was plugging a flash drive into a media presentation station connected to a large flat-screen monitor set on the wall. The screen saver showed the actor Mel Gibson in his costume from the Road Warrior.

“How recent?” Price asked.

“I found some interesting links to both our old MERGE and TRIO operations, but that’s old, though it does raise all sorts of questions.”

MERGE had been a criminal network consisting of elements from the Mexican mafia, Corsican crime families and Colombian cartels. TRIO had proved to be an Asian counterpart to MERGE, formed by Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian organizations.

“Seven was behind both those unifications?” Price sounded incredulous. “That kind of global influence is insane.”

“It’s not definitive,” Delahunt admitted. “But now that I know what to look for, I’m linking things together that have no business being connected. It’s like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.”

“Ready,” Kurtzman announced.

The women turned toward the display screen.

A line of bodies lay in sequence on a green tarp. The corpses were bullet riddled and all black male adults. Standing around them were five Caucasian men in desert camouflage stripped of rank and identification, all holding American weapons.

Price didn’t recognize the men but she saw one was holding a Stoner M-63 light machine gun. “SEALs?” she asked.

“Yep, DevGru,” Kurtzman replied, using the shorthand for the unit that had replaced the legendary SEAL Team 6. “In Somalia, last year. Tag-and-bag mission of al Qaeda in Africa. Major communication node and his team of bodyguards.”

“What am I looking for?”

“There,” Delahunt said. “On the one with gray hair, the leader. Bear, blow up his left clavicle.”

Kurtzman grunted and worked the control pad on his automated wheelchair. A mouse drew a box around the indicated area, then blew up the resolution. A series of stars about the size of a dime were tattooed in blue ink.