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“Hey!” Miller snapped. When he realized that she wasn’t going to blow his head off, an angry expression flashed across his pudgy features, replacing the terror that had been there a moment before.
She stowed the weapon and stepped out of the car.
“Lord, woman,” he said in anger-tinged whisper, “you damn near blew my head off.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“Just be careful,” he said. He scratched at the exposed skin on the crown of his head and composed himself. From what she knew, Miller wasn’t a field agent. Rather, he worked in Colombia’s main station as a political analyst where he studied opinion-poll results, newspaper stories and think-tank reports.
As she came around the vehicle, she thumbed a button on her keyfob and the trunk lid popped up. She reached inside the trunk, grabbed her bags by their handles and jerked them free from the compartment.
“Need help?” Miller asked.
She shook her head.
“Suit yourself,” he said. He walked away from the car and gestured ahead of himself. “Car’s two rows from here,” he said. “It’s the red Jeep Liberty.”
“Fine.”
Minutes later, her luggage stored in the rear of the vehicle, they sped from the garage. Miller punched the gas to make a yellow light. Serrano saw the shadows cast by the choppers that flew overhead.
“You were supposed to ditch the gun,” Miller groused.
“Go to hell,” she snapped. “Last thing I need is some fucking analyst telling me how to conduct myself.”
“No skin off my nose,” he said. “You want to buck the boss, that’s your business.”
“Then why are you even talking about it?” Serrano said.
“Just making conversation,” he replied.
“Then talk about the weather. Besides, why do you know anything about my orders?”
He grinned. “Because they told me you’d disobey them. The gun part, anyway. Listen, I’m cleared to know the conditions of this transfer, okay? I don’t know why you’re leaving, why you were here or where you’re going. But I do know that you were supposed to ditch the gun.”
“You didn’t say anything back there about it.”
“You almost blew my damn head off!”
“Occupational hazard,” she replied.
A stream of cigarette smoke wafted into her eyes, stung them. She waved a hand in front of her face to clear some of the smoke. When that didn’t work, she cracked a window to let in some fresh air.
“Damn it!” he yelled. With his left index finger, he jabbed a button to raise the window. “They stay closed. That was an order.”
Serrano started to say something but held her tongue. She could tell he was anxious, and agitating him would probably just make him worse.
Serrano stared through the windshield at the sunbaked stretch of road. Within an hour, they left behind the city limits and continued to follow the road to a small military airport that lay several miles outside Bogotá. Heat rose from the road, shimmering like water as it wafted up and eventually disappeared. On either side, they passed a few shacks, but eventually those structures became fewer until they disappeared altogether.
The road sloped downward. Serrano saw a trough at the end of the decline was blotted out by an impenetrable shadow that looked like a puddle of oil, but actually was a trick of the light.
Something on the road glinted, catching Serrano’s attention.
She opened her mouth to say something, but Miller stomped the brakes before she uttered a word. Hot rubber squealed beneath the car, but the tires grabbed hold of the road. The car slowed.
Serrano felt herself forced back in her seat by the sudden braking.
They hurtled several more yards and the objects in the road became visible. The SUV rolled over the road spikes and the tires were shredded. Farther up the road, a line of vans rolled across their path and blocked them.
“What the hell?” Serrano yelled.
Why weren’t the helicopters doing anything? The question raced through her mind. The answer came almost the same instant, and it made her stomach clench.
She looked at Miller, whose eyes were riveted on the road. He stomped the brakes again and the SUV launched into a sidelong slide at the vans. A panel van mushroomed up against the passenger side of the Jeep and the vehicles collided. The force of the crash tossed Serrano side to side. Her teeth clamped down. A side-impact air bag burst from the door panel and kept her head from slamming against the window. In the same instant, the front air bag exploded from the dashboard.
Her ears rang, and powder from the air bag deployment burned her eyes.
Your gun, Maria! her mind screamed. Grab it! Now!
Working her way around the air bag, she slipped her hand inside her jacket. Her fingers scrambled for the SIG-Sauer’s butt, found it and jerked the weapon free.
With her thumb, she turned off the safety.
A sidelong glance at Miller showed his limp body hanging forward against the seat belt harness. Blood streamed from his nose, over the curve of his upper lip, down his chin before it dripped onto his white dress shirt. She saw that his chest continued to rise and fall. Thank God, she thought.
She released her seat belt and leaned across the console. Her arms strained to reach the door handle. The whipping of the helicopter’s propeller blades grew louder. She opened the door and shoved it hard enough to keep it from swinging closed again. A glance over the seat showed her that the helicopter was landing on the road behind her, its blades kicking up boiling clouds of dust.
She released Miller’s seat belt. To get free of the vehicle, she figured she’d have to climb over him, then drag him free of the vehicle. Without knowing what kinds of injuries he’d suffered she couldn’t risk pushing him from the car first and making them worse.
Figures decked out in black SWAT-style uniforms ran up on either side of the Jeep, guns held high. They formed a ring around the vehicle. One of them, his submachine gun poised at shoulder level closed in on the wrecked vehicle.
“Hands up,” he shouted. Fear swelled inside Serrano, caused her throat to tighten until she swore she’d suffocate. She weighed the situation and realized she was boxed in. Setting the handgun on the dashboard, she raised her hands. The man who’d yelled at her stepped aside and allowed a second man to approach the vehicle. He reached inside, grabbed Miller by the arm and dragged him from the SUV.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” the lead gunner shouted. Serrano climbed over the console. Another thug stepped forward, grabbed her by the bicep and dragged her from the vehicle. He ordered her to lay facedown on the ground. She complied and almost immediately regretted it when the heat from the asphalt burned her skin. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sunlight.
Someone from the swarm of black-suited men searched her, but found no weapons.
A shadow fell over her. She opened her eyes, looked up and saw a thick-bodied man stalking toward her.
“Sit up,” he said.
She did. She looked him over and saw he had a ruddy complexion and dull green eyes that emitted a thousand-yard stare, as though he was human in form only. A portion of a tattoo—a scorpion’s tail—peeked out from beneath his shirt collar. He nodded at one of the men beside her. The man knelt.
A small sting in her left arm caught her attention. She jerked her arm away, but it was too late. The man next to her was back on his feet, a syringe in his grip. Within seconds, she began to feel light-headed. Black spots swirled in her vision and noises began to sound far away. Darkness fell over her.
S EVERAL MILES AWAY , Albert Bly stood at the edge of the clearing and stared at the smoking remains of a body. A satisfied smirk played over his lips. The smell of burned flesh filled his nostrils. He welcomed it, inhaling deeply.
The camouflage fatigues Bly wore hung loosely from his thin body. His black hair was combed straight back from his forehead, exposing a sharp widow’s peak. His skin was red, as though blood might burst from his pores at any moment.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the man next to him shake his head vigorously, heard him make a disgusted noise. “My God,” Milt Krotnic said, “that smells terrible, like cooked garbage or something.”
Bly turned his head and looked at the other man. His lips peeled back into a smile. “It’s the smell of money, Krotnic,” he said, scolding the other man. “You remember that.”
The other man shrugged. “Sure.”
Two men brushed past Bly. Surgical masks covered the lower halves of their faces. Their hands were sheathed in rubber gloves that stretched well up their forearms, but stopped short of their elbows. They angled toward the corpse, knelt beside it and stretched it out on a black plastic body bag on the ground. One of the men reached gingerly for one of the dead man’s ankles. With a pair of scissors, he began cutting at the fabric of the man’s trouser leg and peeled back the fabric. Bly caught a flash of the charred flesh and felt a surge of excitement.
“Hold it,” Bly shouted.
As he advanced on the two men, he withdrew a digital camera from his pants pocket. When he reached the body, they rose and moved away to give him ample room to perform his grisly ritual. He aimed the camera at the remains and snapped several pictures, making sure to zoom in on the puckered black flesh that still clung to the bones. When he finished, he lowered the camera a foot or so from his face and, using his thumbnail, manipulated the dial that advanced the pictures. Satisfied with the results, he turned and headed back to Krotnic, who was talking into a two-way radio, while the two medics resumed their work. Bly pocketed the camera.
“Sure,” Krotnic said into his radio. “He’ll be glad to hear that. You know where to put her? Good, then do it.”
The former colonel in the Serb military clipped the radio to his belt and nodded at his boss.
“They found her,” he said. “They have her back in Bogotá.”
“Good,” Bly said.
“She put up a hell of a fight from what I understand,” Krotnic said. “We’ve got a couple of casualties.”
“The laptop?”
Krotnic shook his head. “No, she was empty-handed. Couldn’t get her to say shit, either.”
“A temporary condition,” Bly replied.
“Of course.”
1
Mack Bolan was seated at the conference table in Stony Man Farm’s War Room. The soldier was freshly showered and clad in blue jeans, a flannel shirt and black sneakers. Even within the secure confines of the Farm, America’s ultra-secret counterterrorism center, he wore his sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R in a leather shoulder rig. His eyes felt gritty and sore from lack of sleep.
Hal Brognola sat across the table from him, a laptop positioned before him. The director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group snatched the unlit cigar from his mouth. His forehead creased with concern, he rolled the cigar between his index finger and thumb, studied it while Bolan waited for him to speak. The Executioner set his coffee on the table.
“You look old,” Bolan said finally.
Brognola snapped his head up as though he’d suddenly sat on a thumbtack. He glared at Bolan. After a couple of seconds, his dark expression melted and a grin tugged at the corners of his lips. “It’s the company I keep,” he said.
“Speaking of which, it’s five a.m. It’s Sunday. You’re wearing Saturday’s suit and tie. Hell, it may be Friday’s clothes for all I know. You need a shave. And probably a shower, though I’m not going to get close enough to find out.”
“In other words, why’d I drag your ass of bed at this hour?”
“Something like that.”
“Fair enough,” Brognola said.
A folder rested on the table at the big Fed’s right elbow. He pinned it beneath one of his big hands and thrust it at Bolan. The soldier opened it and began to examine its contents. A picture of a woman was held to the left side of the folder by a paper clip. Blond hair framed an oval-shaped face. Her complexion was dusky, her eyes dark, lips full. “She is?”
“Maria Serrano,” Brognola replied. “CIA agent. She holds double majors in forensic accounting and international business. And, from what I understand, she’s one hell of an undercover operative.”
Bolan nodded and leafed through the papers in the folder, skimming them. It contained a few government memos—from the CIA, National Security Agency and the State Department—as well as documents he recognized as presidential daily briefings and classified executive orders signed by the President detailing the kidnapping and murder of several CIA operatives.
Brognola continued, “Six months ago, the NSA picked up some noise from an American company’s operation in Bogotá, Colombia. The various bits of chatter indicated someone in Garrison Industries executive suites was breaking arms embargoes with Iran and China, along with some nonstate groups. Specifically, the company was shipping high-resolution camera components we use in our satellite program. They kept listening but took no immediate action. And, the more they heard, the more concerned they became. Two months ago, they discovered that the company was acting as an intermediary between a Chinese group that produces cylinders and other parts used in centrifuges and a group in Iran.”
“For the country’s nuclear program,” Bolan said. He closed the folder and set it on the tabletop. He’d have plenty of time to look at it later.
“Right,” Brognola said. “As far as the satellite components go, the Iranians say they want satellites to track weather and such. Needless to say, we don’t believe them. And we don’t like the notion of them having aerial-surveillance capabilities. The consensus is that the longer we can keep them blind from space, the better off we are.”
“Sure,” Bolan said.
While he took a sip of coffee, the door leading into the conference room swung open. Bolan cast a glance in that direction and saw Barbara Price enter. Stony Man’s mission controller held several file folders in one arm and a closed laptop in the other.
She flashed Bolan a warm smile, which he returned. The two often spent time together when Bolan was at the Farm. He’d left her room only minutes before the meeting, after he’d received Brognola’s page, to get cleaned up and change clothes.
She leaned against the door, holding it open for Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman, the head of the counterterrorism facility’s cyberteam. The computer expert guided his wheelchair into the room and exchanged greetings with the other two men.
On the arm of his wheelchair, he balanced a carafe that Bolan assumed contained coffee. Kurtzman buzzed up to the table, set the carafe on the tabletop and pushed it toward Bolan.
“Top off your cup,” Kurtzman said, nodding at Bolan’s coffee.
For several seconds, the soldier stared at the carafe. Finally he unscrewed the cap and poured some of the steaming liquid into his cup. The coffee’s color looked like dirty motor oil mixed with black shoe polish.
Price moved around the room, distributing folders to everyone. When she finished, Brognola, anxious to continue the briefing, waved her to her seat. In the meantime, the big Fed poured himself some coffee.
“Initially, the NSA wasn’t sure what to make of the deals. Garrison’s people had a history of being approached by unsavory people. Occasionally, it cut deals, but did so at our behest, as a way for us to gather intelligence on various countries and terrorist groups. But it never passed along any cutting-edge technology or items related to nuclear proliferation.”
“Back up,” Bolan said. “These guys have sold weapons to our enemies before? And did so with government consent?”
Brognola nodded.
“Most Garrison employees have no idea that this goes on. But, yes, they do exactly that. They have a few agents who essentially work as hard as they can to hook up with the bad guys. Word gets around, usually through some cutouts. Pretty soon, the bad guys come to them. They fork over bribes, ask for stuff they’re banned from having. The Garrison people nod their heads, and go along with the gag.”
“And feed whatever information they collect back into the intelligence network,” Bolan said.
Brognola nodded. “The Garrison agents almost never hand over anything of consequence, at least not on a global scale. The thinking has been that it’s better to hand these jerks a couple of RPGs and know they have them than allow them to buy weapons from some freelancer in South Africa, Libya or Iraq. And, historically, the Company—I mean the CIA, not Garrison—always kept close tabs on the weapons. That’s why these particular transactions set off alarm bells. But we’ll cover that in a minute.”
“What’s the breakdown on what they sell?” Bolan asked.
“They have a network of soldiers, intelligence people and support personnel they contract out, mostly to our government. We’ve used their people for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. The majority are top-knotch soldiers, not rogues. They do on-the-ground fighting, security and training so that we don’t tie up too many people in overseas operations.”
“What about their weapons design and development operations?” Bolan asked. “I assume most of their R&D work also is for the United States.”
Price leaned forward on the table. “Mostly,” she said. “About seventy-five percent of it is for us and another twenty-four-and-a-half percent is performed for our allies.”
The Executioner set his coffee on the table. “Which leaves a half percent unaccounted for. Give me that list.”
Brognola sighed. “It’s the countries that keep us up at night—North Korea, Iran, Syria. And some bad elements in allied countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have also been known to tap Garrison for equipment.”
