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Bolan looked at the tickets. “Richmond,” he said, noting the gate numbers and times of departure. Checking his watch, he found they were due to leave in an hour, give or take. It stood to reason they had been en route to link up with another cell, in Richmond or beyond. He stuffed the tickets into a pocket.
“You have a plan, or are you here to profile, Cooper?”
“What are their names?” Bolan asked, produced a lighter, then put the flame to the end of the cigar.
“I was calling them Ali Baba, one through four.”
Bolan puffed on the cigar until the tip glowed. “I could have you arrested.”
“Not if you’re about to do what I think you are.”
“I still might cuff and stuff you.”
“You could try.”
“Telling me whoever you work for has clout.”
“This thing isn’t being run by the White House. You could have the President arrest me himself, and I’d be out and free in less than an hour. And, no, I won’t tell you who I work for. You do your own homework.”
Bolan blew smoke in Moctaw’s face. There was no time for the hassle of arresting the man, get mired in a pissing contest. Besides, the more he heard from Moctaw, the more the bells and whistles rang and blew louder. If he let the man remain at large, he decided, he might end up using him to churn the waters.
Bolan turned his attention to the prisoners. Sometimes, he knew, the threat of torture, especially if a man faced permanent mutilation, worked better than the act itself. One look at the terror bugging out the eyes, bodies quaking, limbs straining to break their bounds, and he knew Moctaw had brought them to the breaking point. They just needed another shove.
The Executioner showed them the glowing tip, then puffed, working the eye to cherry red, let the smoke drift over their faces, choking them. “What are your names?”
“Khariq…”
“Mah…moud…”
“You have two choices,” Bolan said. “Tell me everything you know about your end of the operation. If you do that, and we find you’re just foot soldiers, no previous track record of terrorism, no blood on your hands, there’s a chance you eventually will be sent home to your families. I have the power to be able to make your freedom happen.”
“Cooper, you do not have—”
“Shut up,” the Executioner growled over his shoulder. He put menace in his eyes and voice that would have even made Moctaw flinch, he believed, leaning closer to their faces, holding the end of the cigar inches from a bulging orb. He saw tears break from the eye as it felt the heat. “One eye at a time.” He flicked his lighter, waved the flame around. “While I work on your eyes, I’ll put this to your balls. This is not good cop-bad cop.”
“We talk…we talk….”
And they did. Bolan stepped back, listening as they babbled so fast he had to slow them down, one at a time. They were to meet three more Red Crescent operatives in Richmond. Bolan got a description of both their attire and the duffel bags with custom designs. Two would be attached to each half of the four-man cell, then they would split off at other depots along the way. The lone operative out was the question mark; they didn’t know what his role was. Bolan figured the odd terrorist out for the cell leader. Then the clincher. Enough explosives were going to be left behind in lockers it would be enough to bring down the building.
The Executioner had a critical call to make, but decided to do it in the air while choppering to Richmond. He ground the cigar out on the table. “I’ll have James take these prisoners off your hands. He’ll take their passports and secure the ordnance.”
“That’s it? I’m dismissed?”
“No. For your sake you better hope I never lay eyes on you again.”
Moctaw made some spitting noise, an expression hardening his face Bolan read as “We’ll see.” The Executioner put the ghoul out of mind, bounding up the steps. The doomsday clock, he feared, was ticking down to maybe a handful of minutes.
CHAPTER TWO
Barbara Price took the couch. Her back to the wall, she could watch the foyer, the main hall leading to the bedroom, alert to any sound the two of them weren’t alone. The Stony Man mission controller caught Geller throwing her a funny look, then the code breaker shrugged, claimed the chair he obviously arranged for his guest directly across the coffee table. Before he turned around his laptop and aluminum briefcase, Price spotted the Beretta 92-F resting on folders stamped Classified. That a lifelong deskbound super-cryptographer—who, to her knowledge, had never heard a shot fired in anger—would arm himself, tossed more fuel onto the fire of nagging suspicion. Was he afraid for his own life, trailed by shadow gunmen ready to silence him, aware of his meeting a former NSA mission controller to which he was prepared to divulge classified intelligence? If that was the case, she knew she had just been tossed into the equation.
Aware it could go to hell at any moment, she watched her former colleague pour a drink from the bottle of Dewar’s, the cigarettes a new vice, ashtray overflowing with gnawed butts. Impatient, she waited while he swallowed his tranquilizer, topped up another round, fired up a cigarette with a silver lighter. Clearly, whatever was eating Geller, the booze and chain-smoking weren’t calming the storm. Professional that he was, though, she was grateful he skipped any trip down memory lane, awkward questions about what she’d been doing since leaving the agency. Or did he suspect something in regard to her missing years? she wondered. Was this a fishing expedition? If so, why? She might have worked for the most supersecret, high-tech, intelligence-gathering, black-ops group on the planet, but there was one absolute truth she knew existed in all the covert world. Only death—or the threat of death—ever truly kept a secret. And the longer she sat in Geller’s sweat and agitation, the more disturbed she grew.
If he didn’t know about the existence of Stony Man Farm outright, did he think he knew something about the Sensitive Operations Group? Then again, he could be clueless. She told herself to keep an open mind but proceed with all due caution. Truth number two—only those individuals with iron principles, she knew, feet planted in a solid base of integrity, never really changed, no matter how many years down the road. Max Geller, in her mind, had always been a question mark, and he had changed, for the worse, she suspected. Genius he might be, but she was aware of his duplicitous streak. Word around the agency had been that Geller was responsible for the careers of several promising cryptographers ending abruptly as he backstabbed his way up the pecking order. Now, like then, Price kept up her guard.
Down to business, rifling through a Classified packet, Geller fanned out six eight-by-eleven black-and-white pictures, rattled off each name. “Alpha Deep Six. What do you know about them?”
“Deep-cover black ops. I heard they were the best wet work specialists the CIA and the NSA ever cut loose,” Price told him. “Beyond that, I confess to having very little idea what they were actually involved in—other than rumor.”
“Such as?”
“They went renegade. And I heard they were dead.”
“What do you know about ‘slush funds’?”
“Ready cash for black ops.”
Geller worked on his smoke, bit his lip, appeared to dredge up the courage to continue or choose his words carefully. “Numbered accounts. They were created by the Department of Defense, which—very few people know—own entire banks, just to keep these slush funds secret from both the public and Congress. Manhattan, Switzerland, Frankfurt, Qatar, Tokyo, the numbers special ops could access in these banks were—are—staggering, so I’ve heard. In order to bypass normal channels, à la DOD going before a Senate subcommittee with its hand out, the slush funds were originally dollars siphoned from inflated military contracts. They were created for special or black ops to purchase arms, large and small, buy informants, even create and mobilize small paramilitary armies in whichever country our side felt should be working with a little more fervor toward our own interests— ‘them’ doing what ‘we’ want—but that’s not all the money was used for. Anyway, I’ll get to that.
“Okay, altogether, between the CIA and the agency, the slush funds totaled about twenty million, U.S. value, with a conversion system in place to switch to whatever currency was required. Of course, there were firewalls built into the system. An operative could only withdraw up to a hundred thousand in any six-month period, and the directors had to know in advance how much, and what it was being used for. Each time a withdrawal was made, access codes were changed in an attempt to circumvent repeated withdrawals or outright theft. They failed, miserably.”
Geller had a way of lapsing into stretched silences that struck Price as dramatic, irritating, but she waited him out.
“Alpha Deep Six found a hacker. Before DOD, the CIA or the NSA knew it, they cleaned out the bank. It was a theft so embarrassing that only a few people knew about it, and they were sworn to secrecy, mind you, under the penalty of termination—and I don’t mean a pink slip on your desk at the end of the day’s business. Conventional wisdom at the time thought this heist was supposed to be Alpha’s retirement fund, but it turned out they had no intention of whiling away their golden years on a beach in Tahiti. Shortly after the cyber-heist, they were allegedly killed, supposedly in a doublecross by field commanders who knew about the heist ahead of time—and what they were intending to do following the electronic bank job.”
Geller shook his head. “Who knows, maybe a few of them grew a patriotic conscience, I couldn’t say. Those in charge of handling ADS, I do know, ran for cover, basically denied everything, but the firestorm was already sweeping through the ranks on both sides of the tracks, bodies of CIA and NSA agents who had them smelled out turning up all over the globe, even here at home. As for Alpha, allegedly their remains were found in burned-out compounds, one outside Damascus, one in northern Sudan, during two ostensibly botched raids on Muslim terrorist strongholds. And the hacker? He was found in a Zurich hotel suite, two months later, sans legs and arms, and a few other body parts, one of which was shoved in his mouth. Supposedly what remained of Alpha Deep Six was identified by CIA and NSA forensics teams. Question is, how could they use DNA testing on dust?”
Price had a feeling where Geller was headed. “A cover-up.”
“So one would gather.”
“You keep saying ‘allegedly,’ ‘supposedly.’ You’re not implying…”
Geller took a deep drag from his smoke. “Alpha Deep Six is back from the dead.”
Price narrowed her gaze at Geller. “How’s that?”
“Their violent demise was carefully orchestrated, and by their own hand. They knew the end was coming, so they arranged their deaths, and their resurrections. I’m surprised you never heard even a rumor about this.”
Price saw another red flag. Geller, she sensed, was doing an end run before getting to the point. Was he acting? Digging to try to discover what she knew about Alpha Deep Six? She decided it best to listen, no matter how much Geller blathered on, danced before dropping whatever his bomb.
“Well?”
“If I did,” she said, “I shrugged them off as wild gossip by lower-tier operatives with more time and imagination on their hands than substantive work to perform. Geller, what does all this have to do with the current threat to our nation’s transportation network by Red Crescent terrorists?”
“I’m getting there, bear with me. By the way, is the smoke bothering you?”
“I’ll manage.”
Another shot down the hatch. He glanced at the bottle, showed Price a weak smile. “Oh, please, forgive me my bad manners. Would you care for something to drink?”
“No. Go on.”
He smoked, coughed, drank, then laid the ace of spades with death’s-head on the coffee table. “That was their calling card back then, a mock tribute to their victims, or a warning to future casualties,” Geller said. “This was taken by NSA operatives last night from the crime scene at Clairmont Studios. They were there before the D.C. police arrived. Advance knowledge, but, I’m assuming, not until the play was in motion, the signature card left behind expressly for them, a middle finger to the agency and everyone else in the intelligence community, but I really couldn’t say.”
Couldn’t or wouldn’t? Price wondered. Whichever it was, though, if he was being truthful about the death’s-head ace of spades, then the agency knew about their meeting.
“Alpha is back, and they’re letting their former employers know their heads are on the chopping block. Do you watch the Josh Randall show?”
“I heard about the murders,” Price answered. “I know a former CIA paramilitary operative with more ego than good sense had his head blown off last night.”
“Live and in color, before a national audience. Now, if you watch the replay carefully there’s no mistaking, despite the hokey disguise, the killer was this one,” he said, stabbing a picture, third man in line.
Price looked at the grizzled face, bald dome, eyes hidden by shades, but she was struck by the ridges of bone hung over the sunglasses like some birth defect or grotesque plastic surgery. She looked at the other members of Alpha Deep Six, Geller remarking how the group apparently had no race problems, equal-opportunity brigands, two of them black. Price read their cold, pitiless eyes. She knew the type, men blinded to all but their own animal instincts and passions.
Sociopaths.
“Michael Mitchell was the shooter. He vanished without a trace, dumped two grenades on his way out of the studio to seal his exit. Like the others, he can kill, and is a veritable ghost in the night. Three tours of duty in Vietnam, like Richard Cramnon and Ryan Ramses, they were Special Forces. The stories about their roots are too many, too atrocious to bother repeating. They say you have to be a borderline psychopath to want to have done three tours in Vietnam to begin with. The others—Delta, Marine recon—saw action in Panama, Gulf I. The word is they maybe even had a hand in smuggling out a few top Iraqi officials and some WMD into Syria during Gulf II. All of them, no wife, no kids, no ties. With no past, no roots, no one who cares for them or they care about, they could have futures that would never exist be created to further the interests of certain parties who were reading the future of the world, and decades ago. They were the perfect deniable expendables. They were chosen to become the perfect assassination machines.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t do me any good to ask how you know all of this?”
Geller snorted, as if she’d asked a stupid question. “You know as well as I do how it works. In our business, information is bought or bartered. If not, you beg, borrow or steal. In Alpha’s case they had more extreme methods. Last night was payback on the Josh Randall show, a grandstand moment for Alpha to announce they’ve risen from the grave. The word I get from my sources is the late Captain Jack got cold feet at the last minute way back when over the real agenda behind the staged deaths of ADS. Either way, you could say he signed his own death warrant, promoting himself all over the cable talk shows, shooting off his mouth about things he had no business revealing for civilian consumption. I’m thinking if Acheron didn’t get him, the CIA or the NSA eventually would have yanked his ticket.”
“Acheron?”
She watched as Geller looked away, focused attention on the bottle, his hand trembling as he filled the glass. There was enough of a flicker in his eyes that told her Geller wished he could kick himself. He’d slipped. Accident, though, or act?
“It’s believed they have chosen handles—from Greek mythology, ancient Hebrew, various playwrights and mystics—all in reference to Hell, the gates of Hell, eternal damnation, beasts from the pit who unleash death and destruction on the earth. It’s gathered that’s their warped idea of dark humor.” He waved a hand. “I know, you want me to get to the point.”
She shrugged, no hurry, not willing to concede she was on any clock. Geller bobbed his head, sucked down another shot, Price watching as some intense, near fanatic fire lit his eyes.
“Bottom line, these men not only helped create the global arms race, they were the global arms race. They were the original shadow merchants of death, the negotiators for the United States military-industrial complex, the real movers and shakers who sold far more than just fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Allow me to run some numbers by you. Out of the 169 countries on Earth, fifty are presently at war.”
“And you’re telling me Alpha Deep Six is responsible for all these conflicts?”
“The United States is the number-one arms exporter to Third World countries, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to where the rest of the hardware goes. Someone has to do the legwork, make the deals happen with countries with leaders most rational, civilized people find detestable but who are willing to spend the cash. Are you aware 130 billion in weapons and military assistance has been shipped to 125 countries in the past decade alone by the United States, and the numbers are going up every year? America’s yearly arms export sales eclipse the GNP of Russia. It’s easy enough to verify, if you care to.”
“The enemy is us?”
Geller ignored the remark, working on his smoke with renewed fury. “I always believed you were something of the altruistic sort, a lady of principle. I admired that in you when we worked together, but I always admire the virtue in others I know I can never possess.”
“Careful, Max. Whatever you’ve heard about flattery does not apply here.”
“Sure, sorry.” He took a moment with his smoke. “You want to know how much of an upside-down world we live in? Just look at what the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund say about loans they are practically forced by the United States to make to African dictators, what the international community has called ‘the crocodile rulers.’ Broken down to basics the price of one helicopter equals twelve thousand school-teachers in Africa, a one-million-dollar modern tank the equivalent of a thousand classrooms for thirty thousand children. In terms of comparing the gross discrepancy between arms to food, the numbers are beyond astronomical. In a perfect world I suppose there wouldn’t be this immoral madness, but it’s a madness that is man-made. I’m telling you this nation is involved in the deliberate worldwide proliferation of arms. You see, what the voting public does not know is that the military-industrial complex of this country—or rather a shadow group that have knighted themselves the inheritors of the Earth—is seeking to create wars, unleash whole campaigns of genocide, perhaps even drive the human race into World War III. Three reasons. One, the military contractors need to keep the plants running, or, simply put, there would be a lot of people out of work, likewise some heavy brass at the Pentagon. Two, since Vietnam, there are certain circles within the intelligence and military communities who saw the creation of future conflicts around the globe as a means to justify their existence, gain personal glory in history, albeit a shadow note.”
“And they would get rich in the process.”
“Obscenely rich. Three, by 2020 it’s believed by our top scientists there will be fifteen to eighteen billion mouths on this planet to feed. Simply stated, these powers want the strong—themselves—to survive, whatever masses crawl out of the rubble and the ashes of a holocaust to serve them. They believe if something isn’t done to contain the swelling numbers on this planet, there’ll be mass starvation, natural resources depleted, nations swept up in anarchy with the collapse of the global economy. Plague, famine, pestilence, death, they’re seeking to accelerate what they see as the natural process of evolution to weed out the weak before they devour the strong.”
“The lions eating the lambs.”
“Precisely. That’s why Alpha Deep Six was created in the first place.”
“To bring on Armageddon.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
Price had listened with a neutral expression, suspected there was a lot more Geller wished to tell her, but wouldn’t. He was dangling bait, but why? She knew no institution was above corruption, and she could accept what the man said about the military-industrial conspiracy, up to a point. True, there were bad seeds in the U.S. military and intelligence communities, but she knew the rot wasn’t endemic. Still, she knew enough about the grim realities of the world to be wary once the genie of power and greed was let out of the bottle.
“You want one example of what Alpha Deep Six has done?” Geller said. “Right before Gulf I the former Iraqi regime nearly got its hands on krytons, or nuclear weapon triggers, along with ‘skull furnaces,’ which are used to melt plutonium for nuclear bomb cores. ADS arranged the deal with the Iraqis, but again, someone got nervous at DOD, probably saw far worse than just their careers circling the bowl. Before the ship sailed out of the Delaware River it was boarded and seized. A cover-up ensued, generated by the same people who don’t want anyone to know 1.5 billion in dual-use technology was sold and delivered to Baghdad right up to the eve of Gulf I. Alpha Deep Six created that regime, kept it in power, I kid you not. You want maraging steel for making centrifuges? Alpha delivered tons of it among weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, fuel rods, light water reactors, the whole sorcerer nuke package to the Pakistanis, thus insuring their nuclear weapons program. Same thing with the North Koreans. Likewise they have kept the Khartoum government flourishing in guns and money, fomenting the unrest on the Horn of Africa, were even in the process of helping Khartoum go nuclear before their purported end. Further, they were involved in training and arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and they were instrumental in creating both the Taliban and al-Qaeda during that ten-year conflict.”
“Busy boys.”
“This isn’t funny, Barbara. Do you hear me laughing?”
“And you have proof of all this?”
“Nothing in writing. If you don’t trust my word, I can send you to sources who can back me up, men so high up in the intelligence and military communities they’re the next closest thing to talking to God. They’ll also tell you that Alpha Deep Six is responsible for creating and landing the Red Crescent in this country, that they trained, funded and armed them for what could be the biggest catastrophe to ever hit American soil. One from which this country may never recover.”
She stiffened, braced to grab her Browning as he suddenly reached into his briefcase. She stayed on edge, even as Geller produced a CD-ROM.
“It’s all here,” he said, placing the disk on the table.
“All what?”
“Dates, places, times, people, the entire alphabet, the who’s who on Alpha Deep Six and the shadow world that created them. There are decoded messages, intercepts about who they know, what they’ve done and what they are doing. Red Crescent is their creation, their vision of the gates of Hell unleashed. Do you know anything about them?”
“Only what I’ve heard on CNN,” she lied.
“Well, here are a few facts you won’t get from the media. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, a few other marquee terror groups were, so to speak, read the tea leaves by ADS in the late eighties, but it took until the early nineties until they became believers in the ADS infidels and their vision of the future. Osama and his top lieutenants knew that if the United States declared all-out war against them, they would go down hard, disfigured, dismantled, captured or killed. They knew their money would be the first target. Thus Alpha mapped out a contingency plan to keep their jihad afloat, but it was only a small part to their own big event.
“Before our government froze the first million, the major terror orgs were cleaning out their banks, transferring every asset they could get their hands on into ready cash. They began buying up diamonds from West Africa, precious gemstones from India, Myanmar, Indonesia. They invested heavily in narcotics, aligning themselves with the South American drug cartels, but most of their investing went with heroin to the east. Financially, able to remain solvent with gemstones and dope, if all else fails, they are far from bankrupt. And they would have no problem getting funds, from what we’ve learned, if the well began to dry. Every radical sheikh, imam and mullah from Algeria to Indonesia gave the Red Crescent their blessing during what we know was the Grand Islamic Council just before the outbreak of Gulf II.
“As for Alpha, they personally recruited RC operatives, before and after their ‘demise.’ After Afghanistan and Gulf II we know there was a huge influx into RC of al-Qaeda and Taliban and the former Iraqi regime’s fedayeen who were willing to come under the new umbrella, even if it was hung over them by infidels. The Red Crescent received help principally from Jordan, Syria and Turkey. But, when Syria fell onto the radar screen for helping Iraq, our supposed allies, the Turks and Jordanians held out their hands—for a price. Now, from various methods of surveillance and intercepts of chatter between Red Crescent operatives and other terror orgs, we believe but cannot verify that somewhere in the neighborhood of one to two billion dollars—hard currency, jewels, diamonds, narcotics—is stashed in underground armed fortresses they call the Bank of Islam. We believe Alpha Deep Six marshaled a small army of fanatics to invade and wreak death and destruction on this country’s ground-transportation networks for payback, and to take all intelligence eyes off their violent resurrection, and vanishing act two.”
Price watched Geller nod at the disk. The list of questions she could put to him was too long, an instinctive fear mounting, warning her to get out of here. He pushed the disk across the coffee table.
“Take it.”
Price picked up the subtle note of insistence. If she took the disk, it might confirm whatever suspicions he had that she was still actively involved in covert work. If she didn’t, the Farm and its warriors might lose out on invaluable intelligence.
“I told you, Max, I’m retired.”
“Really? Is that why I had to go through about six cutouts from every intelligence and law-enforcement agency we know of? Then you finally get back to me, using about four different back channels not even the almighty NSA know exist?”
“Say I take it. What is it you expect me to do with the information?”
“It would appear you still have friends and sources in very high places. Pass it on. You still believe in freedom, truth and justice, don’t you?”
