Orange Alert

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Her eyes fell again on Bolan, who stood and extended his hand.

“Matt Cooper,” he said, using the cover name he’d recently acquired.

“Katey Adams.”

Her grip was firm, and the way she moved made Bolan suspect she probably had an athletic background.

She had, in fact, been one of the most ferocious field-hockey forwards ever to graduate from MIT, but her most significant athletic achievement during her four years at the institute—and the one that initially caught the interest of the CIA recruiters—was her performance on the school’s pistol team for which she earned All-Ivy honors her senior year.

“Katey is on loan to us from the White House Protocol Section,” Brognola said while everyone got settled. “Until last year, when Edmund Fontes took over, she was head of the CIA’s Irish operation, a post she held for eight years. As such, she’s their foremost expert on Ireland. Katey?”

She began by asking, “Have you all had time to read Agent Oxford’s transcript?”

There were nods around the table.

“Have Randolph’s agents been warned?” Bolan asked.

“Too late for that,” she answered. “Marie Johnston was killed this morning in Pamplona at about two o’clock our time. We just didn’t get the molar soon enough. Taylor and Buckley were both hit yesterday. Randolph has been warned. He’s back at his home base in Stuttgart after taking a few days of leave.”

Wethers emitted a low whistle. “Where were the other two killed?” he asked.

“Taylor in London, Buckley in Paris,” Adams replied.

“Is it possible the killings aren’t connected?” Tokaido asked. “A coincidence of three, even with the communiqué, doesn’t equate to zero probability.”

Bolan thought he could hear a tinny sound coming from the hacker’s earbuds and wondered how the man could follow a conversation above the racket.

“Ballistics confirmed that the same weapon killed all three,” Adams answered. “There was also an orange scarf left with each body.”

“They want us to know it’s them,” Brognola said. “Clearly, the group who sent Fontes the communiqué is the same one killing Randolph’s agents.”

“But are they really backed by the Orange Order?” Delahunt asked. Looking over the frame of her tortoiseshell glasses at Kurtzman, who sat directly across the table from her, she added, “Anyone can plant a few scarves.”

“The Orange Order denies involvement,” Adams said in support of Delahunt’s thought.

“But it would be good for them if the demands in the communiqué were met,” Kurtzman said.

“Of course it would. IRA disarmament and irrefutable establishment of Northern Ireland? It would end the conflict. But there’s no way it’ll happen like this. If terrorists attack the United States, we won’t negotiate with them. We’ll retaliate like we did against the Taliban in Afghanistan.” Adams paused for a moment, as if for emphasis, before saying, “As soon as we can reasonably link someone to these agent killings, we’re sending Fontes a strike force to wipe out their network.”

There was silence around the table for a few moments while the team considered the actual evidence they had. It wasn’t much.

Kurtzman took a sip of coffee, gazing from face to face above the rim of his cup as he did so. “There are two questions, in particular, we must answer. First, why kill Marie Johnston? Taylor and Buckley were field agents, but Johnston was nothing more than an interpreter.”

“Because it’s not about the mission,” Delahunt replied, her words eliciting nods of agreement.

“Secondly,” Kurtzman continued in his patient, thoughtful manner, “is it plausible that a terrorist cell in Northern Ireland would have the means to attack the United States? We’re not talking a global organization like al Qaeda here. What’s the worst thing a breakaway group of the Orange Order could do?”

“Dirty bomb,” Tokaido said.

Delahunt leaned forward, said, “Anthrax mailings,” and then added in a rush, “You bet your ass they have the means. Maybe not for something as dramatic as 9/11, but a subway explosion, a dirty bomb, biological attacks—you don’t need a global infrastructure to pull off any of those.”

“But there are always clues ahead of time if you know where to look,” Tokaido said.

Kurtzman smiled, the pride he felt for his team evident on his face.

“What do you think about these?” Brognola asked no one in particular while reaching into his shirt pocket and tossing onto the table the three chains Bolan had pulled from his would-be ambushers the previous night. “Scapular medals. They lead me to believe that the three men guarding Oxford’s body were Catholics. The Orange Order is a Protestant group.”

“They were thugs,” Bolan answered. “Local hired help. Most likely not part of the core organization. We can’t draw any conclusions from those medals. Not without more intel.”

Wethers suddenly said, “They’re going to hit Randolph tomorrow.”

Before his colleagues could ask him to elaborate, he eplained, “Taylor in London, Buckley in Paris, Johnston in Pamplona. Look at a map and the time between killings. Randolph in Stuttgart is the next element in an obviously clear progression. One killer is making a circular sweep. Plus, we have Oxford’s transcript that says it was all coming down this week.”

“Katey is going back to Ireland,” Brognola said, “and, while she’s there, Cooper will go to Stuttgart to debrief Randolph. If Hunt is right,” he added, looking straight at Bolan, “it will be good for you to be there regardless of anything Randolph can tell you about his previous missions. He’s used Ireland as a gateway for defectors three times. Maybe he stepped on some toes during one of them.”

“You’re not suggesting someone other than Cypher is behind these hits,” Bolan said, more a statement than a question. “I agree with Hunt. Oxford’s message is clear. Cypher is the enemy. The question is, who is he? Oxford was undercover for more than a year, but Cypher doesn’t show up in his reports until three months ago. Where did this guy come from?”

Brognola had been involved with Bolan long enough to know that the man’s question was not rhetorical. The Executioner was on the hunt and there would be no rest until he found his answer. More likely than not, along the way, there would be hell to pay.

TEN HOURS AFTER HER MEETING with the team at Stony Man Farm, Katey Adams looked away from the window of the Hawker Horizon as it shot across the night sky. There was nothing outside for her to see. Ireland’s southwest shoreline was still almost an hour away. When they landed, it would be four in the morning, local time.

Adams sighed and turned toward the man napping in the oversized leather seat across the tiny aisle from her.

The first thing she had noticed about him when she’d stepped off the elevator at Stony Man Farm was how broad his shoulders were. And he was tall, easily six-three or -four. But the trait that had kept her looking back—and, if truth be told, she had fought the urge to stare throughout the entire meeting—was the intelligence that burned in his eyes so intensely that she wondered if they could peer straight into her soul.

He stirred and turned toward her in his sleep. His hair was cut short, but there was a lock in front that had slipped out of place, and Adams wanted very much to reach over and push it back.

His eyes snapped open, making her jump.

“We’re almost there. About an hour,” she said, recovering from having been caught staring. “I’ve always hated this flight.”

He pushed himself upright in the chair and rubbed his face with his hands.

“It’s not a problem for you to leave your job?” he asked as if there had been no break in the hour-long conversation they had shared upon takeoff.

“Actually, it is. The President wants his cabinet to hit the campaign trail, and I’m in charge of planning some of the trips. Daniel Foley’s visiting West Point next month. That’ll be a biggie, and I do have to get back to finish the advance work. I can’t stay in Ireland for more than a few days.”

“There’s no one you can give your work to?”

Adams shrugged. “I guess I could, but ever since 9/11, we’ve kept the specifics of cabinet trips secret until the very last moment. I’m the only one who knows the details of Foley’s and a few other itineraries, and passing them off at this point and trying to bring someone else up to speed might actually be harder than just getting them done myself. Especially in light of these new threats.”

“Tell me about the guy you’re going to visit.”

Adams smiled as she thought of Bryan McGuinness, the fiery editor of the Irish Independent, who had all but adopted her during her first year as CIA section chief in Dublin.

“We go way back, me and Bryan. When I was new in Ireland, he went out of his way to show me the good places to eat, to introduce me to the right people and just to make me feel at home. He did a lot of favors for me in those eight years.”

“Never asked anything in return?”

Adams shook her head. “I know what you’re thinking. I had him checked out when he kept pushing himself on me, and he is a member of the IRA, but we already knew that from his editorials. He never asked me to compromise myself in any way.”

The copilot spread the curtain separating the cockpit from the cabin and, without getting up from his seat, announced, “We’re starting our descent. After landing, we’ll take a two-hour break to refuel and get something to eat before going on to Stuttgart.”

“Okay,” Adams answered as the man turned back to the controls and said something into his headset mike that made the pilot next to him nod and grin.

“Good luck in Ireland,” Bolan said while fastening his seat belt.

Adams responded in kind, and then they were silent, each lost in his or her own thoughts about the upcoming assignments, until the plane touched down at Shannon airport.

4

Stuttgart, Germany

The sun was low in the east, throwing the life-sized chessmen into stark relief against a bright green background of closely cropped lawns. Long, straight shadows cast by the chess pieces stretched across the marble chessboard, some reaching beyond the board’s sandstone border to touch manicured edges of grass. From behind the secluded bench on which Mack Bolan sat, Asian day lilies in well-tended beds filled the early-morning air with a cloying fragrance.

Bolan’s position gave him a good view of the rolling lawns with their flower-lined walkways meandering like serpentine tributaries through randomly spaced clumps of trees toward a stand of thick pines about a quarter of a mile away. Except for a small flock of sparrows pecking the ground under a few benches and three maintenance men off to his left, cultivating a clump of short azaleas, the park was deserted.

Brognola had told Bolan that Peter Randolph’s daily routine included a walk to work through the commons and, despite the field agent’s flat refusal of his offer to provide protection, Bolan was sitting out of sight behind a clump of birches about thirty yards from the huge chessboard, watching for Randolph’s approach.

He unzipped his lightweight golf jacket so he could touch-check the fire-selector switch on his Beretta 93-R. Brognola had arranged for it to pass through customs. Unlike France and all of Scandinavia, Germany was one of the easier European countries to enter with weapons. Counting the 20-round magazine, already locked into the high-performance pistol, and the four spare clips he carried in his jacket pockets, Bolan was packing one hundred rounds of 9 mm parabellum ammunition.

A fat bumblebee hovered close, its heavy drone filling the air like electricity under high-tension wires. As Bolan waved the insect away, he noticed movement between two clumps of waist-high zinnias about a hundred yards down one of the walkways. Even from that distance, he could tell it was Randolph, hands in his pockets, strolling casually through the multicolored flowers.

Realizing that the three gardeners he had noticed minutes earlier were nowhere in sight, Bolan eased himself off the bench while drawing his Beretta from its shoulder holster. Eyes sweeping the park, he stepped forward into the cover offered by the small grove of birches.

The scent of freshly mowed grass filled his nostrils and the air seemed almost crisp enough to touch. The memory of sitting next to a photographer in a Maui bar flashed through Bolan’s mind. The man had told him that early-morning and late-afternoon light, when the rays were coming in soft and low to the horizon, was the best for shooting intense, saturated colors. With his senses on full alert, registering the flower beds, the lawns and Randolph drawing closer to the chessmen, Bolan understood what the photographer had meant.

The flock of sparrows took to flight with a ruffling sound a split second before the air was filled with the abrupt stutter of automatic fire. The birds gave Randolph—whose carefree demeanor had obviously been a ruse—the alarm he needed, and he threw himself to the ground without a moment’s hesitation as the first flurry of rounds zipped above him. Two of the gardeners had taken cover behind outcroppings and the third had settled himself among a group of small moguls that dotted a section of lawn like baby mountains. Their positions created a lazy triangle allowing them to pin Randolph with intersecting fire.

Bolan rushed to the edge of the birches, firing his Beretta in 3-round bursts. His presence caught the gunmen by surprise and, before his first magazine was half spent, he drilled a hole through the jaw of the closest gardener who was on one knee hosing the area around Randolph with 9 mm rounds blazing from the business end of a Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine pistol. The man opened his lips as if to scream, but any final sound he intended to make was blocked by the scarlet geyser erupting through his mouth and nose. He toppled sideways to the ground, where his body convulsed for a few seconds with bone-rattling shudders before coming to rest.

The two remaining gunmen redirected their fire at Bolan, shredding the brittle birch branches above him into thousands of pieces that rained onto his back and shoulders like black confetti. He dived into a bed of mulch behind a tight trio of trees, inhaling a nostril full of redwood dust that puffed up around his face in a dirty cloud when he landed.

While the gunmen were busy throwing a reciprocating wall of lead at Bolan, Randolph took the opportunity to scramble on all fours to a safer spot behind a small mound of bloodred calla lilies in full bloom. He quickly entered the fray with a series of single shots from his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. His action was met with a responsive barrage of fire that sent him ducking for cover behind the mound.

Bolan ejected his spent magazine and rammed a fresh one home. Realizing that the thin trees affording him cover could not withstand a prolonged assault of automatic fire, he searched for a better position. The chessmen were approxiately six seconds away—an eternity when rounds were snapping the air all around you—but he couldn’t stay where he was. He pushed himself to his feet and rushed toward the life-sized pieces, firing his Beretta as he ran. When he reached a point about ten yards from the row of pawns, he launched himself into a horizontal dive, squeezing the trigger of his Beretta as rapidly as he could. A round creased his back just below his shoulder blades and he felt the hot sting of a flesh wound milliseconds before he landed hard on the chessboard. The space immediately surrounding him was filled with the sickening whine of ricochets as fist-sized chunks of granite exploded from the black king’s chest, clattering onto the marble squares next to where he lay.

When Bolan chanced a look around the edge of the tombstone-high pawn giving him the cover he needed, he discovered that the man positioned among the moguls was out of his line of fire, obscured from sight by the gentle mounds of grass-covered earth that Bolan’s new spot placed between them. Lowering the Beretta’s front grip and loading a full magazine, he prepared to take on the gunman he could see, hoping to eliminate him before his partner came to his aid.

As if in concert with Bolan’s thoughts, Randolph began laying down covering fire. Bolan rose to one knee behind the chess piece, firing. Sizzling hot brass poured from the smoking ejector port in a parabolic arc that shone gold in the early-morning light.

The gunman under fire made an ill-timed decision to dash for a better spot, and the Executioner caught him first in the thigh, then stitched him from waist to neck with six fatal rounds.

A round screamed past Bolan’s head less than an arm’s length away, the tone of the snap as the bullet sped by telling him it had come from behind. He threw himself prone, searching for the new gunman. There was open space all the way to the clump of pines.

The park suddenly became deathly silent. In the distance, the sound of police sirens signaled the imminent arrival of German law-enforcement personnel.

“Randolph!” Bolan shouted.

“Yeah.”

“Can you see them?”

“I think they’re gone.”

Randolph sprinted from his position behind the lilies to the chessboard, where he dived behind the black pawns, then crawled his way to Bolan’s spot. The dash behind the pawn had drawn no gunfire from either direction.

Randolph remained focused to the front, Bolan to the rear. A full thirty seconds passed, with the sirens drawing closer.

“I think they’re gone,” Randolph repeated.

Bolan nodded.