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A few more moments, and he would find out.
Crooked Island, Florida
ARMAND CASALE MET the first guard when he was still fifty yards from the house. He was surprised to find the middle-aged FBI agent at large after midnight, prowling the grounds while a chill breeze blew in from the gulf, but Casale supposed that even G-men got bored sometimes.
The agent had a riot-model shotgun, but he carried it in one hand, dangling beside his leg, its muzzle pointed toward the earth. Even if it was cocked, to fire the weapon Casale’s enemy would have to shift his hold, relocate his right hand to clutch the pistol grip and let his index finger slip inside the trigger guard.
Casale didn’t plan to give him time for that.
He crouched in shadow, perfectly immobile, scarcely breathing, as the roving sentry passed his hiding place. Casale saw the Kevlar vest his adversary wore, without a jacket to conceal it, and it didn’t worry him.
Ironically, while varied thicknesses of Kevlar could deflect most small-arms fire, they offered no significant protection against blades.
Casale gave his target three last strides, then rose from hiding, rushed upon him from behind and clamped his left hand tight against the agent’s mouth. His right hand drove the WASP’s blade through the Kevlar vest, which offered no more physical resistance than a heavy overcoat.
At once, Casale triggered the release of freezing CO2 into the G-man’s body cavity. The icy gas expanded instantly, traumatically displacing heart and lungs and arresting their performance in the time it took Casale to withdraw his blade. The dead man bucked and quivered in Casale’s grasp, then suddenly went limp and slumped facedown in the sand.
Casale reloaded the WASP, replacing its spent cartridge with a fresh one, then moved on. So far, his mission was on schedule, going off without a hitch.
He met no other lookouts between the killzone and the house. Approaching through the darkness, he saw lighted windows with their curtains drawn against the night, a television flickering from one room where the other lights had been extinguished.
No one saw Casale draw his silenced pistol from its plastic bag. No cameras scanned the house or yard, an oversight that would rebound against someone in Washington the next day, when the night’s news broke. Armand Casale circled the safehouse clockwise, searching curtained windows for a gap that would permit a glimpse inside.
He returned to his starting point without a break.
If nothing else, the FBI was good with drapes.
Casale didn’t know the walking sentry’s schedule, but he guessed that thirty minutes would be stretching it. How long had the G-man been prowling when they met? It was impossible to say.
Impossible, as well, for him to guess the knocks or other recognition signals that had been arranged between the agents guarding his primary target. Locating the safehouse had been difficult enough, and costly, but his sponsor didn’t have the juice to penetrate the local FBI itself and pick its brains.
No matter. Casale would make his way inside the house by any means required.
First he would try the doors.
They should be locked, of course. Locking the doors and windows was the most basic of all security precautions. Still, even the best-trained sentries sometimes made mistakes, and if the agents in the house expected their companion to return shortly…
Casale tried the back door first, considering it the more likely choice of sentries going out to search the woods and dunes. Like many seaside homes, the safehouse’s front door faced inland, while its back door and rear windows faced the sea.
Casale curled gloved fingers around the knob and tested it.
It turned.
Casale held his breath, expecting shrill alarms, a shouted warning, even gunfire.
Nothing happened.
Following the Walther’s lead, he stepped into a well-lit but empty kitchen.
He crossed the room, stepped into a darker corridor that branched left and right. The television sounds came from his left, presumably one of the bedrooms. Turning to his right, he followed the drone of voices speaking quietly but with no apparent effort at concealment.
Midnight was a quiet time, and Death was near.
Casale stepped into what would’ve been the living room and found two agents sprawled in easy chairs, debating some fine point of the derivative team sport Americans called football. One G-man faced the doorway where Casale stood; the other had his back turned toward his assassin.
The first man lurched forward, reaching for his gun. The sudden forward motion brought his face to meet Casale’s silent slug. Casale barely registered the splat of blood and brain against the chair’s upholstery.
He fired again before the second man could rise and turn, his neck and torso twisted as he tried to draw his pistol, strained to glimpse his enemy.
Too late.
The second bullet drilled his temple and kept going, spilling any final thoughts across the cheap rust-colored carpet. When he fell, the impact of his body was a solid, final sound.
Two left.
Casale doubled back along the hallway, slightly worried that some noise might have alerted the safehouse survivors. He tried the first bedroom and caught the last G-man asleep, blinking defensively against the spill of light before a bullet sent him to dreamland forever.
That left one.
Casale knew his primary target wouldn’t have a weapon. That was strictly, fatally forbidden by the WITSEC code. Only the guardians were armed, trusted to sacrifice themselves on the behalf of those they were assigned to watch.
Now, with the sacrifice complete, the target was defenseless.
He half expected that the last door would be locked, some vestige of a challenge for his effort, but the knob turned easily. Casale stepped across the threshold, recognized his target instantly from photos he had memorized.
The man lay on his back in bed. At the intrusion, he sat up.
“Vincent Onofre,” Casale said. Not a question, simply making sure.
The target’s mouth sagged open. “Who the hell are you?”
“Friend of a friend,” Casale said, and shot the traitor twice. One bullet through the forehead, and another through the temple as he slumped back dead, against his stack of pillows.
Done.
It was a good night’s work, with one last swim ahead of him before Casale made for home.
Hyder, Arizona
THREE MEN COULD NOT surround a house, per se, but they could cover it sufficiently by staking out three corners of the building. Each shooter thus had unobstructed views of two sides, cutting off any attempt by occupants to flee unseen.
Haroun al-Rachid claimed the northeast corner for himself, watching the north—or front—and east sides of the safehouse. Umarah, his driver, had the southeast corner, covering the east and south sides, while Tabari—on the southwest corner—watched the west and south.
Perfect.
Two lights were burning in the safehouse. One gleamed dully through a smallish frosted pane that had to have been the bathroom window, while another shone through crooked drapes and offered sliver glimpses of the kitchen. There were no signs of movement, but al-Rachid assumed that one or two guards had to still be awake.
His plan lacked subtlety, but had the virtue of surprise and overwhelming force. He would not give his enemies a chance to fight or run. Alert or dreaming, they were bound to die.
Besides the Armalite AR-18s, al-Rachid’s small arsenal included three LAW rockets, disposable bazookas featuring a lightweight plastic launching tube that held a 66 mm armor-piercing rocket with a high-explosive payload in its nose. Deemed obsolete against most modern tanks, the rockets still served well enough against civilian vehicles and homes.
As in the present case.
Al-Rachid’s companions had been trained to use the LAWs, advised that they would each have one shot only and had to make it count. Thermite grenades would follow the initial blasts, and they would stay to watch the house burn to its foundation, greeting any stunned survivors with their Armalites.
Al-Rachid released his launcher’s safety pin and drew it out to full length, balanced it across his shoulder as he aimed. The AR-18 rifle lay beside his right foot, in the sand, with the white-phosphorus grenade.
He armed the LAW, sighted on the window he had chosen for his target, six feet to the left of the front door, and pressed the trigger. Simultaneously, his two men released their rockets, warheads speeding toward the house with tails of fire.
Glass offered no significant resistance to the rockets. They were set to detonate on impact only with a solid wall, inside the house, where their explosive power would demolish timber, plaster, furniture and flesh.
The rockets detonated like a string of giant firecrackers, expelling smoke and shrapnel from their points of entry. Other windows of the safehouse shattered, front and back doors trembling in their frames but holding fast.
So far.
Before the echoes of the triple blast had time to fade, al-Rachid had palmed his Thermite canister, armed it, stepped closer to the stricken house and pitched it through the aperture where flames were visible already, spreading, feeding on the rubble, generating toxic smoke.
After the rockets, the grenades were relatively quiet. They made muffled whumping sounds inside the house, immediately spewing white-hot chemicals that would incinerate on contact virtually any man-made substance. Thermite would burn through tempered steel and concrete. Flesh and bone were nothing, in the scheme of things.
Al-Rachid stood waiting with his Armalite in hand, watching the safehouse burn. He felt the heat from where he stood and knew it had to be hell in there, almost beyond imagining. Still, traitors who abandoned sacred oaths of loyalty deserved no less. The Thermite blaze would give his target a foretaste of hell.
Justice.
Another job well done.
Al-Rachid was starting to relax when bullets churned the sandy soil around his feet, making him skip and dance away. He found cover behind a nearby Joshua tree, amazed that anyone was still alive inside the house, much less in any shape to fight.
Al-Rachid first told himself it might be ammunition cooking off inside the fire, but it defied the laws of physics that a clutch of random cartridges exploding could produce the pattern that had nearly cut his legs from under him.
Those shots were aimed by someone who had managed to survive both rockets and grenades.
So be it. They had planned for this.
Al-Rachid waited, resisted the impulse to fire back at the winking muzzle-flash he glimpsed sporadically. The raging fire would either eat his enemy alive or drive the man from cover where he could be shot at leisure.
All Haroun al-Rachid had to do was watch and wait.
Five minutes later, just when he’d begun to listen for the wail of sirens in the distance, al-Rachid saw a shadow figure move against the background of the flames. It lurched and staggered, nearly doubled over as the sole survivor of the holocaust hacked smoke and other fumes out of his lungs. Al-Rachid could not identify the weapon in his adversary’s hands and didn’t care to try.
He fired a long burst from the Armalite, expending half a magazine when two or three rounds would have sufficed. Al-Rachid was angry at his target, recognized the feeling as irrational and still allowed himself the luxury of overkill. His bullets dropped the man, then set his corpse to twitching, jerking on the arid soil.
When it was truly finished, when the safehouse had collapsed into itself and every part of it was totally engulfed by fire, al-Rachid beckoned his soldiers and they walked back toward their waiting vehicle.
1
San José, Costa Rica
June 19
Mack Bolan held the rented Ford at a nerve-racking fifty miles per hour, staying with the flow of traffic that jammed Avenida Central without ever seeming to slow its pace or stop for red lights. He kept a sharp eye on the drivers around him, many of them seemingly intent on suicide, while flicking hasty glances toward his rearview mirror, watching for police cars.
Bolan didn’t even want to think about what local law enforcement might say about a gringo driving through their capital with military hardware piled up in the backseat of his rental car.
“How much farther?” Bolan asked his navigator.
Blanca Herrera was a thirty-something knockout, her angel face framed by a fall of glossy jet-black hair, above a body that could grace a calendar.
Herrera checked the city street map, measuring with slender fingers. “Two kilometers, perhaps,” she said at last. “Turn right on Calle Quarenta—or Fortieth Street, you would say—then drive north to Avenida Cinco.”
“Right.”
Fifth Avenue. Unfortunately, they weren’t going to a fashion show at Sachs.
“If I may say again—”
He cut her off. “No calls. No warnings.”
“But I wouldn’t have to speak.”
“Hang-ups are worse. We can’t do anything to spook him now.”
The lazy shrug did interesting things inside her clinging blouse. “Ah, you know best. But if he is not home when we arrive…”
“We wait,” he finished for her. “Find a vantage point and settle in.”
“However long it takes?”
“Unless you know some way to read his mind and tell me where he’s gone.”
“No,” Herrera replied. “I can’t do that.”
“Well, then.”
“This gringo is muy importante, yes?”
“Muy importante, right.”
“But you expect to find him home alone? No bodyguards?”
“Gil Favor likes his privacy,” Bolan replied. “Besides, he’s paid your government for years to keep him safe and sound.”
“Some individuals, perhaps,” she answered somewhat stiffly.
“The police, the prosecutors and at least one president.”
“Ex-president,” the sultry woman corrected him.
“Whose squeaky-clean successor hasn’t made a move to change the status quo where Favor is concerned.”
