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“Let’s rock, Pol.”
CHAPTER FIVE
James Lake knew the end of DYSAT would come, had to, in fact, and from the very beginning when he’d helped conceive it, put the pieces together and get it launched as part of the Pentagon’s Special Access Programs. It was designed to go down in flames on purpose, make certain an avalanche of badges and subpoenas came crashing down on DYSAT, all the sound and fury of the Justice Department, trumpeting out the intimidation, offering guys immunity in the Witness Protection Program and the like. But also in mind from the start would be the final conflagration, stoked and brewed to critical mass, while he skipped out the door, all the way to the bank.
The genius of it all was it had been worked out by his own cunning and the toil of spilled blood on his hand.
Everything in life ended. Everyone died. Survival was not necessarily for the fittest.
Survival was simply survival. They said that after the big one dropped, only the cockroach would inherit the earth. Mindful of that disgraceful tidbit, just how special could man be?
Not very, he thought.
If there was no hope for humankind, there was also no redemption, and certainly no salvation. Armageddon was inevitable; it just needed a decent shove in the right direction to ignite the fuse.
He sat in his large, deep-cushioned swivel chair, scanning the massive office suite, an amused smile tugging at his mouth. Beyond his teakwood desk, the size of three grand pianos, Grandahl and Preuter were busy on their secured cellulars, trying like hell but failing to dial up their hitters. He wanted to believe no news was good news, but the whole deal was unraveling fast. He could feel it, a noose dangling over his head, ready to drop and put the squeeze on.
It was time to clean up the garbage and bail.
Yes, he had wanted this whole venture to fail from the start. Failure, he once heard said, was often the measure of a man’s success, but he never bought into that loser’s philosophy. Granted, he had failed in three marriages, with seven children he never saw spread all over the country, but what could he say? Women were women, and a man needed far more in life than the comfort and stability of some suburban purgatory.
A man needed conquest, honor and respect. It was either the bliss of heaven or the agony of hell; nothing in between was acceptable. And, no mistake, never again would he fail at anything. DYSAT was his baby, and if he had given it life, he could most certainly take it away. He had always believed the real power in the world came from the left hand of darkness anyway, the true father of light. Even the devil, he believed, had real feelings and needs. It was simply a question of having those wishes honored by the legions of faithful subjects. Meaning they had to be prepared to not only sacrifice their lives for him, but also sell him their very souls.
Still, he often thought life would have been much simpler, easier if he had been, say, a biker. Riding in the wind. A big middle finger jammed in the eye of society at large. Wheeling and dealing guns and dope… Well, he could at least claim he was something of an arms dealer, an outlaw, to be sure.
And outlaws only had to care about and look out for number one, which was why his stint as an Air Force air commando had been brief to the point of ridiculous. Search-and-rescue missions didn’t mean much more than a gob of flying phlegm when a man didn’t care if human beings lived or died. On then to a number of years working as a special black operative, guarding classified Air Force installations where they were building the future of super high-tech. Grooming contacts and, of course, quietly removing any thorns in his side on his climb to the top.
Well, Jim Lake had finally arrived. His big deal was on the table, in the wings, ready to fly. The college kids had been nothing more than pawns, mere toilet paper, he thought. Bring them on board, unleash a few secrets, here and there, fat salaries so they could indulge their every whim and petty earthly desire. He always knew a couple of them would have cracked under the strain of uncovering knowledge of high-tech espionage, state-of-the-art goodies being delivered to so-called enemies of the United States. Truth was, he had counted on them to go running, pants wet, to the Feds. By the time the real law figured it out, he would be long gone, a whopping numbered account overseas, engineering grand schemes to bring on some doomsday from a remote tropical paradise. It would be a sort of in-their-face gesture, proving to every American man, woman and child, from the hallowed classified halls of the Pentagon all the way to Silicon Valley, that Jim Lake was just a little smarter, tougher and, yes, better looking than they were.
That Jim Lake wasn’t only his own man, but a god among mere mortals to be worshiped.
He was scanning the bank of security cameras hung from the ceiling over his desk when he spotted the two men in the lobby. The bigger one was haggling with the security guard, flashing a wallet packet, looking as if he were poised to fly over the desk and start slapping the man. A Fed, on the muscle, only if that guy was a Fed he was Gandhi.
“Gentlemen, I believe we’re about to have company.”
“I don’t like the looks of those two,” Grandahl said, craning his neck some to stare up at the camera bank. He was fingering his goatee, running a nervous hand over his shiny dome. “I can’t raise Morton or Roswell. We should have heard from them by now. We know the Justice Department was set to bag—”
Lake sounded a long deep chuckle, a hollow knell that seemed to swell up the suite with the sound. “Relax. We’ll deal with them. It’s time we wrapped this up anyway. We have one more pigeon out there on the run to take care of. We have a backup security force in town, which you just put out the call to, on standby.” He leaned up, smoothed out the arms of his silk jacket, punched a button on his phone. “Giddell, I’ve got company on the way. They look rather unpleasant.”
“Yes, sir, I saw them, too.”
“Stand by but make yourself available next door. There’s going to be some noise, then we’re bailing.”
“Understood, sir.”
Lake wheeled back a few inches, reached under his desk and slid the Uzi submachine gun from out of its special mounting. He checked the load, cocked the bolt, then took a peek at the Beretta 92-F in shoulder rigging. If it wasn’t enough, there was an arms cache in a hidden wall panel, twelve paces to his right.
“When we’re finished here,” Lake told his hitters, “we go pay this little snip Godwin a visit. I’m hearing he got his filthy paws on the Ramrod Intercept microchips and data manual. Without those, gentlemen, my deal may fall through. If I can’t retrieve them, our whole timetable will be altered.”
“Meaning?” Grandahl asked.
“Meaning we’ll have to go the lab in Idaho and pick up another batch. I had planned to do that anyway. One last shipment has already been arranged through a CMF.”
“A classified military flight,” Grandahl said, nodding. “Sweet.”
“Standard procedure. Look alive, they just hit the elevator.”
Of course, he took the obligatory alerting phone call from the security guard.
“They had badges, Mr. Lake, looked official, meaning they looked real enough to me. Special Agents from the Justice Department, they’re telling me. Carl Lemmon and Rosario Bocales. I—”
“Not a problem, there was nothing you could do. I’ll handle it. Thank you.”
Jim Lake leaned back and sounded off another death knell chuckle. Life, he thought, was just about to get real interesting.
And what was real gain, true triumph on the way to glory without risk?
WHEN LYONS AND BLANCANALES stepped off the elevator to the DYSAT floor, they found yet more cameras monitoring their every step.
Lyons led the march toward the mammoth teak doors with the gold-plated Jim Lake, President hung as large as a Vegas neon sign. He could feel Pol’s nerves mounting as they closed on the doors, the mirrored walls reflecting their grim looks, the cameras catching them on the roll. Lyons felt his own personal time bomb ticking away in his gut.
It was time to start spreading the misery around, kick a few of the top dogs in the teeth.
“How come I feel like raising a middle finger salute to one of those?” Lyons growled.
“How do you want to play this?”
“Straight and to the point. Just follow my lead.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
They reached the DYSAT gates to the inner sanctum. Lyons was about to bang on the door when a chuckle that sounded as if it came from the bowels of hell filtered out the small intercom beside the doors.
“It’s open, ‘Agents’ Lemmon and Bocales. Please, enter. Please, fear not.”
Lyons considered going through the door with his Colt Python out so they could get quickly beyond any friendly preamble. He opted to leave the big piece where it was for the moment, until he got a firm read on what was what. He led Blancanales through the door and found himself moving into a sprawling suite fit for a king. Big leather couches. Wet bar, giant-screen TV. Two inches of white carpet, wall to wall. Long black marble conference table. Soft white light fell from the ceiling, framing a handsome face he recognized from the Farm’s intel pac on Jim Lake. As he moved deeper into the suite, he was somewhat curious why a former Air Force colonel would wear his jet-black hair down to his shoulders, like some wanna-be hippie or biker. Go figure how the mind of a traitor, or an insane demon worked, he thought.
He took a measure of the two other men standing off to the side of the desk. One was a Van Gogh–type gunslinger, goatee, but no hair on his head, the face gaunt and weathered, the eyes sunken black pieces of coal. The other guy was a buzz-cut issue like the men he’d gunned down in the alley. The eyes of both men warned Lyons they had itchy trigger fingers.
Lyons took up turf in front of the desk, hauled out his Justice credentials. And Lake gave him that deep chuckle, in his face.
“Please, don’t insult me.”
“How’s that?” Lyons growled.
“Okay, we’ll play it your way for the moment. What can I do for you, Agent Lemmon and Agent Bocales?”
JIM LAKE KNEW a bulldog when he saw one. In fact, wildmen were the only kind he wanted to hire on as security. Guys, yes, who could go through a door loud or quiet, in search of blood and wearing somebody’s guts for a necklace, either way they charged in. No fear, just do it. To even consider losing made a man a loser before the proverbial feces even hit the fan.
The one called Lemmon wasn’t the kind to tap dance or dream of losing. “Here it is, Colonel,” the big guy said, with a contemptuous note dropped on “Colonel.” “Three of your buzz-cut Dirty Harrys were eighty-sixed. They tend to want to shoot people on sight to make their day. They tend to seem to not care if they’re civilian or like us, with the Justice Department, which already dumps you in a world of feces. This is what we know, and this is what we’re going to do. We know you’re running a scam to unload high-tech weapons and technology overseas somewhere. We know you were using your executives and think tankers to draw out the wolves, my guess is so they could be scapegoats when you left Dodge. You’ve gone for broke, and you lost. Now we have two of your employees who want to turn songbird under our care and protection.”
Lake knew what had to be done. He steepled his fingers, rubbed his eyes and blew out a long breath.
“What? Am I boring you assholes?”
“Uh, Agent Lemmon, let me speak frankly, so we can get past all this macho posturing and palavering.”
LYONS SENSED the whole mood change around him. It was as if a dark veil had dropped over Mr. Chuckles, some rage clamped down on before then, churning over now, building heat, the pot of his black soul simmering. Van Gogh and Buzz-cut Issue had to have been clued in to the sudden shift in Lake’s demeanor, and Lyons read the squaring of the shoulders for what it meant.
It was set to blow, loud and hot. It was going to get messy, and the mere fact Lake was prepared to go for it told Lyons the guy had backup somewhere, ready to bolt town to pick up the pace on whatever his dark agenda.
“Well, Agent Lemmon, I guess there’s not much left to say, except I can’t recall the last time I saw a G-man walking around in rubber-soled combat boots. I didn’t know government issues, the official kind, trooped around with compact submachine guns in special swivel rigging beneath oversize windbreakers. To answer your suspicions, yes, I have a deal, a major deal in the works that could change the entire destiny of the world. Yes, my employees were nothing more than human chess pieces to be moved around at my wish, to take the fall, as you put it, while I fly off into the sunset. You know what my problem is—”
“I’m not your shrink, Colonel. I didn’t come here to listen to how you were an abused child and all you need is a little love.”
The big chuckle again. “My problem is I don’t like wrinkles in my plans, large or small. My problem is, when I don’t get my way or what I want, I become extremely agitated.”
And Lyons was already searching out some immediate cover, aware he and Pol were caught in the coming cross fire. It was something in Lake’s look and voice, a new darkness sinking to still lower depths, that warned Lyons to make a scramble to save his skin.
The Able Team leader was in the air, flying over a couch as the Uzi appeared, like some sorcerer’s trick, in Lake’s hands.
CHAPTER SIX
The Uzi subgun was out and flaming 9 mm parabellum rounds before either Blancanales or Lyons could free his own hardware. Lake beat them to the punch. Instead of standing his ground in some grandstand suicide play, pulling iron and blasting back at the face of death where he stood his ground, he opted to take a running dive over the conference table. The sprint and flight stole him a few precious moments. Only pistols were barking now, chiming in the deafening symphony of weapons fire, hot lead scorching the air, seeking out his scalp like angry hornets.
“You’re fucking with the wrong air commandos, ladies!”
Lake, bellowing like some fire-and-brimstone preacher hungover on Sunday morning, the long-haired crazy man pounding out the lead, marking his turf behind the desk, defying to be shot. Blancanales skidded off the table, hot slipstreams of lead tearing past his scalp, tugging at his shoulders. On the way down he unleathered both the Beretta 92-F and the stubby Ingram machine pistol, and got busy dishing it back before all was lost. A shaved head with goatee came shooting around the corner of the table when Blancanales cut loose with a double burst. The Van Gogh shooter was capping off rounds from his own Beretta when Blancanales was rewarded by a scream of pain. Van Gogh lurched back, out of sight, grabbing at the red smear on his upper thigh, cursing up a storm.
“If you’re Feds, I’m the prince of darkness!”
The way the madman was pumping out the lead, screaming in berserker fury, Blancanales didn’t find the statement a stretch.
Lake was stone-cold insane.
A swivel chair was absorbing a flurry of 9 mm rounds when he popped up, and let it once more rip with twin lead barrages. It was luck, more than skill, winging the rounds out when he tagged the buzz-cut gunner, sent him crashing down on Lake’s desk, bleeding and flopping all over polished teakwood surface like some giant gutted salmon.
“Nice shot, son!”
And Lake seemed to slap home a fresh clip in a nanosecond, not missing a beat.
“You want the best, you’ve got the best! The hottest Colonel in the land. Jim Lake!”
THE GUY WAS hung out there but good, off in some land of insanity that even caused Lyons to balk for a full second or two. He was shooting up his own office, which told Lyons he didn’t plan on coming back here. Whatever Lake’s personal vision of greener pastures, Lyons didn’t intend to let it become reality.
Not on his watch.
Not this night.
The mini-Uzi and Colt Python out, Lyons skirted on a hunch away from the tracking line of autofire that was eating up the couch, a storm of insatiable lead locusts buzzing in his ears. He came up, just in time to find Blancanales nailing the buzz-cut gunner and cut free with hand cannon and subgun to give his friend a much needed helping hand. The mini-Uzi hosed the desk, but Lake was already ducking, the curtained window behind him, drawn to block out some bird’s eye view of the city skyline, taking a few hits. It fluttered a little as holes were punched through the window to let some traffic noise filter in from far below.
On his two o’clock Lyons found Van Gogh was shooting on the move for the wet bar when he assisted Blancanales in waxing the guy off his feet. Four converging points of fire turned Van Gogh into a bursting sieve, painting him crimson from the neck down to his crotch. He was airborne next, snarling out the pain and rage, before he sailed over the wet bar and brought down the top-shelf booze.
Lake jumped back into the game, back on the trigger, screaming out something about abortion pills marking the end of civilization, how civilians were all too willing to serve bastards and whores.
What the hell? Lyons thought.
The Able Team leader was going down behind the couch when the ex-colonel fired another long burst his way, then shifted his aim and drove Blancanales down behind the conference table.
Then a shadow with a massive autoshotgun whirled around the corner where some slat appeared in the wall near Lake’s desk.
The cavalry, riding onto the scene, out of nowhere.
The curse was choked off in Lyons’s throat as he flung himself away from the couch on the peal of thunder. Lake’s subgun spray came back and helped chase Lyons to cover behind a wooden cabinet, the expensive teak scarred as tracking rounds began eating up the facing. A roaring boom and half of the cabinet vanished in Ironman’s face in razoring wood splinters.
“See you around, ladies!”
The dark hole swallowed up Lake and Mr. Autoshotgun as Lyons broke cover. The slat was closing and Lyons, jacked up on adrenaline, hit the area with a .357 round and a half-dozen 9 mm projectiles from his mini-Uzi.
Wasted effort and ammo.
Lake was gone.
Lyons was feeling the wall for some button or latch that would open the slat. Nothing. There was no space either where he could dig his fingers in to force the slat open.
“Time to boogie, Ironman. Something tells me the cavalry’s going to be waiting when we hit the hall.”
Lyons grabbed up his handheld radio and patched through to Schwarz.
“WHAT MORE CAN we tell you? We’ve given you directions to where Godwin is holed up. I put the call through, like you asked. You know he’s there, and he has the package you want.”
They were sweating out the unknown, worried about little more than saving whatever might be left of their dicey futures, wanting nothing else but for their party to go on. Schwarz didn’t have the time or the inclination to put their fears to rest, nor did he much care about their desire to keep the good times rolling. The more they found out about DYSAT and the goons who ran it, the more he felt the killing heat was only just getting turned up.
And DYSAT needed to go down the toilet.
“Hey, come on, mister. Cut us some slack here. We’re cooperating. We didn’t know what we’re getting involved in. Hey, we came to you people. That should count for something.”
Schwarz was watching the lot through the windshield and the monitor. He heard Lyons coming on his handheld radio, as gruff as usual, but now there was a definite edge of urgency in his voice.
“Gadgets!”
“Yeah.”
“Round two’s just started. Lake tried to turn me and Pol into human sushi with an Uzi he had stashed under his desktop. Two more of his shooters are down for the count. Lake and another goon with a SPAS-12 are probably headed your way. Maybe he’ll pick up reinforcements on the way down. We’re on the way. Look alive.”
“I copy.”
And Lyons was gone off the air, in pursuit.
