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The computer wizard regarded Bolan dryly. “I gather you left a road map to your exact location.”
“Pretty much,” Bolan admitted. “You get anything on the bartender at the Claddagh?”
“Ronald Caron, former Irish wrestling champion, former military policeman in the Irish Defence Forces, suspected of gun trafficking, suspected of harboring fugitives, suspected of assault, twice arrested on conspiracy charges but released for lack of evidence and a ‘person of interest’ in nearly every alleged IRA action in London for the past two decades.”
Bolan nodded. The bartender might be a hundred pounds over his fighting weight, but underneath the jolly exterior he had given off the vibe of a very dangerous man.
Kurtzman pulled up MacGowan’s file again. “It’s of note that Liam MacGowan and Caron both served at the same time in the Irish Defence Forces. Though MacGowan was light infantry rather than an MP.”
That didn’t come as a surprise, either. The Irish Defence Forces were small by nature, generally equipped with obsolescent equipment due to budget constraints, and chronically short of manpower. English recruiting officers for the U.K.’s armed forces were only a ferry ride across the Irish Sea and offered better pay, better benefits, better terms of service and were always happy to enlist Irishmen. The only reason to join the Irish Army was that you were Irish and wanted to.
The Irish government denied it, but there had always been cells of the IRA within the Irish Defence Forces, who used the Irish military as an IRA recruiting and training ground, as well as using the military structure for networking. He had no doubt that Caron had probably recruited MacGowan. When it came to petty intrigues, strong-arming and IRA errand-running on the streets of London, Caron was MacGowan’s and O’Maonlai’s control officer.
Still, killing CIA agents seemed somewhat above their pay grade. There was something bigger happening, and bigger fish were involved. Bolan was sure of it.
His phone rang. “Just a sec, Bear.” Bolan picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
A basso profundo, distorted voice that had obviously been put through a voice scrambler spoke over the line. “You’re dead here.”
Bolan pushed a button on his electronic warfare suite. The trace started, but he doubted his caller would stay on the line. Bolan had his suspicions about the caller. “That you, fatso?”
“Get out of England or you’ll wind up like the other two.”
The line clicked dead.
“Well, that was pretty cut and dried,” Kurtzman commented. “So you think they have the hotel surrounded?”
“I’m sure they’ve got an eye on it.” Bolan checked his watch. It was 2:15 a.m. He doubted they would have an assassination attempt or a snatch set up this quickly. The call was more designed to egg him on rather than to warn him off.
Bolan decided to be egged. “Well, I’m going out for a ride.” He scooped up the shillelagh and took a few choice items out of a suitcase.
“You’re not going back to the pub.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll check back in a little later.” Bolan clicked off the satellite link, tested the security measures in the room, then took the elevator down to the garage. His Renault rental vehicle was nondescript, but had enough power to suit his needs. Bolan key-carded the gate and tore out into the night. There was little traffic in the late hour other than cabs, so he quickly arrived at Pub Claddagh. The light over the sign was off and the windows shuttered closed. The ancient, thick oak door would probably withstand minutes of abuse from a police handheld door ram.
Bolan exited his vehicle and pulled a short length of flexible charge out of his coat pocket. He peeled off the adhesive backing, inserted a detonator pin and pressed the charge against the door lock. He stepped back and pushed a preset cell phone number. Yellow fire cracked like a halo around the lock, and Bolan put his foot against the door and shoved.
The lights were on. The fire in the fireplace still crackled. Caron blinked in surprise from behind the bar. MacGowan and O’Maonlai looked up from their beers in horror. Two men sat with the thugs. Bolan didn’t know them, but he recognized their long, dark coats and the hoods they’d pushed back onto their shoulders.
The Executioner closed the distance in three strides. Both of O’Maonlai’s lower legs were in casts, and a pair of crutches leaned against the table. The left side of MacGowan’s face was swollen as if a rugby ball had grown under the skin. The bruising had turned an ugly black and his left eye was swollen shut. He was drinking his pint of stout through a straw. He winced and sputtered beer as Bolan advanced. He couldn’t work his jaw to speak.
O’Maonlai shouted and pointed hysterically. “It’s him! He’s the man who—”
Bolan rammed his heel into the man’s chest and toppled him and his chair backward. MacGowan started to rise and Bolan lunged, thrusting his forefinger like a fencer into his opponent’s distorted left cheek. Liam let out a high, thin scream and fell backward over his chair.
Bolan grasped his new shillelagh. The two men Bolan didn’t know had recovered from their initial surprise. The closer man slapped a hand down on the table to push himself up and his other reached under his jacket. Bolan swung the club like a hammer and brought it down on the man’s hand. The man jerked and cringed with shock. The Executioner then swung the shillelagh in a tennis forehand and swatted the hand clawing beneath the coat. The man slid out of his chair, screaming and tucking his crushed hands against his sides.
The other man was up, his coat thrown back, and his silenced PB pistol had just cleared leather, but the combination of the long sound suppressor and a shoulder holster made for a slow draw. Bolan lunged again, ramming the brutal head of the shillelagh into his opponent’s solar plexus. The blood drained from the man’s face as his sternum cracked beneath the lead-loaded club. Bolan brought the weapon down across the gunman’s wrist. The ulna cracked and the pistol fell to the floor.
The assassin joined it a second later.
Ronald Caron leisurely came around the bar with his own shillelagh. He tapped the huge knob into a hand the size of a bunch of bananas and smiled at the weapon Bolan held. “Oh, boyo, you should have brought a gun.”
Bolan smiled back. “I did.”
Caron continued to advance, apparently without a care in the world. “You should’ve used it, then. When you had the chance.”
Bolan took a step back and put the table between them. He didn’t want to shoot Caron, but Cro-Magnon club fighting was the Irishman’s game, not his. Caron stepped over MacGowan’s mewling form and continued to advance. He tsked at the weapon in Bolan’s hand. “You know, I never much cared for the leaded ones. It ruins the balance.” He dropped his club to his side and began making small, lazy figure eights. “Of course some say it adds power. But as for me?”
Caron moved with speed belying a man of his age and bulk. He swung the shillelagh up and around, not like a man with a club but a man cracking a whip. The club crashed down and smashed the pub table between them in two. Caron recovered instantly and tapped the knob into his palm again, smiling at the carnage he’d wrought. “I say it’s the man behind the shillelagh that matters.” He stepped forward, wood crunching beneath his feet and his smile going ugly. “What d’you have behind yours, boyo?”
Crossing clubs with the big man was suicide.
Bolan flung his shillelagh. He threw it down like a game of mumblety-peg being played with sledgehammers. Caron should have had polycarbonate Lexan inserts in his shoes. The giant Irishman grimaced and tottered with his first two toes broken. “Oh, you’ll—”
Bolan was already airborne. He sailed across the broken table and delivered a flying side kick into Caron’s chest. It was like kicking a beer keg. Caron grunted and budged half a step back. Bolan pistoned his right fist into exactly the same spot over Caron’s heart, and for the first time the man’s face registered genuine pain. His left hand shot out and covered Bolan’s face like a catcher’s mitt, his fingers vising down in an iron claw. It wasn’t quite the facial neuralgia he’d induced in MacGowan, but it felt like cold chisels were attempting to crash through his facial bones.
Bolan thrust his thumbs into Caron’s carotids, but the bull-like neck resisted the blow.
The giant Irishman yanked the soldier into his embrace by the face and rammed it with his hip. A second later he’d spun Bolan and stood behind him, the huge shillelagh pressed against one side of his throat, a brawny arm squeezed against the other. The huge hand had slid from Bolan’s face to the back of his head and shoved his face forward into the strangle. It was the figure-four choke out, aided and abetted by three feet of Irish firewood.
Caron whispered in Bolan’s ear like a lover. “Yer going to go to sleep now, boyo, and when you wake? It’ll be me standing over you. Not with my pride and joy, now—” Caron cinched the strangle deeper with a practiced shrug of his shoulders “—but with a knife from the kitchen. We’ll have a long talk you and I, before I send you to the Old Place, at the bottom of the Thames.”
Bolan couldn’t break the hold. His trachea compressed and sparkly things danced in his vision. He regretted not having drawn his pistol. The Beretta was in a small-of-the-back holster and wedged against Caron’s massive middle. He was swiftly running out of air and options. Caron knew what Bolan was thinking from long practice, and he buried his face into Bolan’s back to prevent any eye gouging.
The Executioner lifted his knee to his chest and stomped down with all of his might on the Irishman’s two broken digits, breaking a third in the bargain. Caron groaned, and Bolan raised his foot and stomped his heel down again. The Irishman couldn’t help himself. He instinctively lifted his mangled foot from the floor to protect it. Tottering on one leg, he lost all his leverage. Bolan grabbed the club pressed against his neck, dropped to one knee and heaved.
The three-hundred-pounder flew over Bolan’s shoulder in a textbook judo “flying-mare” throw.
O’Maonlai screamed as the giant beached like a whale across his broken legs. Bolan gasped air into his lungs. Caron was already struggling to rise. The soldier strode forward and kicked the Irishman in the side of the neck. The blow had far more power than a karate chop, and the bartender went limp. The shooter with the broken sternum lay gasping weakly and staring up into the lights. His gun hand lay like a broken bird protectively between his legs. MacGowan was reaching through the rubble for Bolan’s fallen shillelagh. His open eye widened in terror as Bolan loomed over him. The soldier gave him another finger poke in the swollen hinge of his jaw. The thug passed out without even screaming.
The remaining shooter had risen to his knees and elbows and was making an admirable attempt to wrap his broken hands around his silenced pistol. He looked up just in time to receive Bolan’s foot in his teeth. He fell onto his back and took the soldier’s second kick between the legs. He curled fetal, spitting teeth and vomiting up stout.
Bolan relieved both shooters of their pistols. He shot out the overhead lights, blew out the mirror behind the bar and with a twinge of conscience expended the remaining bullets on the vintage ports and the decades-aged single malts on the top shelf. It was a shame to shoot up a historic pub like this, but it had become a nest of serpents, and it was a calculated affront. He wanted the IRA enraged. He wanted the hotheads among them to search him out for payback.
Bolan tossed the spent pistols onto pile of humanity on the floor. He tucked his shillelagh back up his sleeve and scooped up Caron’s, as well.
Now he had two.
CHAPTER THREE
“Well, Bear—” Bolan held up wood in each hand for the satellite camera “—now I have two.”
Kurtzman grinned. “That’s very nice, Striker, but did you really have to go back and beat up everyone a second time?”
Bolan considered. “No, but I felt like it.”
Kurtzman’s faced showed what he thought of that, and Bolan knew he was right. It had been close. Two CIA field agents were dead, and so far all Bolan had to show for it were two pub brawls and a couple of bludgeons. He just had to hope he’d stirred things up enough that someone higher up the food chain would reveal himself. “Have Shane, Caron or any of the boys showed up in any hospitals?”
Kurtzman shook his head.
It was a long shot. The IRA would have some doctors in London to take care of these kinds of things on the quiet. Bolan considered all they had, which wasn’t much. The Pentagon had gotten hold of some pretty wild chatter about the IRA getting its hands on weapons of mass destruction. Britain’s MI-5 had put the vague rumors on their very low order of probability list and continued with much more promising lines of investigation of terrorism in the U.K. However, the CIA had a sleeper asset in place with the IRA. That asset had gone active, quietly investigating the rumor, and he had swiftly wound up dead. So had his replacement. Despite their losses, MI-5 seemed to consider the matter a nonissue. At least they did not appear to be assigning any of their own assets to it.
Of course MI-5 probably wasn’t pleased that the U.S. had gone ahead and staged an operation on U.K. soil without telling them. Intelligence agencies, even those of staunch allies, were extremely territorial. There would be directors in MI-5 who on some level were secretly pleased and felt the “Yanks” had gotten a deserved comeuppance for playing cowboy games on British soil. Still, two dead CIA agents should have merited some attention. Hard-won instincts told Bolan that there was something wrong with the situation. He couldn’t say why, but to him it felt like the whole matter was being swept under the rug.
“Bear, who would have the power to hush this up?”
“A whole lot of people, but you also have to factor that the CIA blundered and got a bloody nose. It’s causing quite a little stink between our intelligence communities. There’s every reason to suspect that MI-5 is running its own operation on the matter right now and feels no compunction at all to inform the U.S. about it much less involve us.” Kurtzman pointed a condemning finger. “For that matter, once the Brits find out that you’re running your own gambit over there, which they will, considering how you’re leaving a trail of broken Irishmen everywhere you go, things are going to get downright frosty across the pond.”
Bolan knew that all too well. “Well, I guess I’m just going to have to pay MI-5 a visit.”
Kurtzman just stared. “Really.”
“Like you said, they’re going to find out about me sooner or later. I might as well give them a courtesy call.”
“They’re going to read you the riot act and have you shipped home, and that’s best-case scenario.”
“Probably, but there’s something going on here. Something more than the CIA failing to penetrate the IRA. So if I take out some low-level thugs and then go to MI-5, I think my cache as a target will increase. I have to rattle some more cages.”
“You know, Striker, I’d be real careful rattling MI-5’s cage. They’re some of the best in the world, and they don’t mess around.”
Bolan knew that, too. In fact he was banking on it.
MI-5 London Headquarters
BOLAN SAT ON A FOLDING CHAIR in a “white” or interview room. It was actually a neutral beige. There were no furnishings other than a table and two chairs. Several cameras were positioned in the ceiling and a CD recording device sat on the table. The gray-haired woman sitting across from Bolan looked like a stereotypical British grandmother right down to her horn-rimmed glasses, frumpy tweed jacket and gray wool skirt. Bolan had not been offered any coffee, tea or sherry. He sat, maintaining a professional and calm demeanor while Assistant Director Heloise Finch quietly and, with a British upper-class politeness so stiff it was insulting, lit into him.
Phrases like “poor spirit of cooperation,” “endangering a relationship that had thrived since World War II” and Bolan’s own “temerity” were tripping off her tongue forward, backward and sideways. It appeared that the director was finally winding down.
“…and while I do appreciate the courtesy of your taking the time to call upon us, I’m really not sure in what capacity I or my department can be of any assistance to you.”
Finch didn’t appreciate the visit at all. She was clearly appalled by the whole situation. Bolan smiled winningly. “Would it be shabby of me if I asked for your help anyway?”
Finch steepled her hands and stared at Bolan for long moments. “You know, I believe it would.”
“I can see how you’d feel that way.”
“The CIA has—”
Bolan cut in before she could work up a fresh head of steam. “Director Finch, I don’t work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“You know—” Finch flipped open a thin manila folder “—I have something of a file on you, or at least someone matching your description. Much of the intel is above my pay grade and security clearance. Barely a pamphlet, actually, but it appears you have operated within the United Kingdom before, sometimes in what can loosely be described as cooperation with British Intelligence and apparently sometimes without the permission of Her Majesty’s government.”
Bolan saw no reason to lie. “That’s essentially correct.”
Finch was somewhat taken aback by Bolan’s directness. “I have received a report of a disturbance over at Pub Claddagh last night.”
Bolan shrugged.
“May I state that Her Majesty’s government does not appreciate American citizens coming to her shores and engaging in donnybrooks and shillelagh battles in her pubs.”
MI-5 clearly had informants in the London IRA infrastructure. Bolan maintained his poker face.
“However, MI-5 has received rather veiled suggestions from some very strange quarters that it would not be ‘unappreciated’ were my department to show you whatever professional courtesy seems appropriate.” Finch leaned forward and peered over the rims of her glasses. “I have taken this to mean I should not have you immediately detained and deported.”
“That would be preferable.”
“However, to reiterate, I am not sure what if any assistance I am willing to provide you.”
Bolan smiled.
Assistant Director Finch’s cool reserve broke as she smiled resignedly. “Of course, I have already been of assistance to you. You are sticking your nose into the IRA doings, and your taking a meeting at MI-5 HQ ups your market value.”
Bolan didn’t bother to deny it.
“I will be blunt with you. My superiors and members of the government concerned with this organization consider this rumor of the IRA acquiring weapons of mass destruction rather something of a wild-goose chase, and your government’s dogged pursuit of it puzzling if not downright ridiculous, as well as a strain on the relationship between our two countries.”
“Director Finch, the fact remains that two CIA intelligence agents have been killed.”
“The CIA agents in question were trying to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army’s London infrastructure, and that, and I say this in all modesty, if it is attempted without the help of my department is an excellent way to commit suicide. Their loss is indeed regrettable, however, it is not totally surprising.”
“I appreciate your candor. Let me blunt, as well.” Bolan’s smile fell away from his face. “There is something very wrong going on here, and you know it.”
Finch sighed. “Other than your two dead CIA agents, what proof do you have that the IRA is up to anything worse than usual?”
“Nothing. Just a hunch. Just like you.”
Finch stared at Bolan for long moments. He knew he’d read the woman correctly. Finch knew something was wrong, as well. MI-5 was one of the top internal intelligence agencies on the planet, second only perhaps to the FBI. Like all internal intelligence agencies they had civilian oversight. The FBI was responsible to congress. MI-5 was responsible to the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Throughout their illustrious history, MI-5 was known far and wide for spending almost as much time battling English bureaucracy as they did enemies of the United Kingdom.
“You are playing a very dangerous game, and I cannot even begin to describe my feelings toward yet another U.S. citizen engaging in rogue intelligence operations under my nose.”
“However,” Bolan countered, “you know there is something bigger going on here, and for whatever reason your department has been told to low priority the situation or ignore it completely.”
Finch’s face set in stone. “For the record, you are not to engage in any intelligence operations against the IRA on English soil. For that matter, you are not to ‘operate’ on English soil in any capacity at all unless directly requested to by Her Majesty’s government. If you are caught doing so, it would be my duty to have you at the very least detained and deported if not brought up on criminal charges.”
Bolan nodded. “I understand.” He glanced at the recorder on the table and Finch clicked it off. “For the record, any and all intelligence I might gather if I engaged in such a questionable activity would be immediately shared with Her Majesty’s government, and done so through your offices exclusively.”
“I believe we understand each other.” Finch placed her business card on the table and pressed the intercom button. “Security, please have our guest escorted off the premises.”
BOLAN GLANCED at his watch as he drove through traffic. His modified wristwatch was blinking at him, which meant that someone had gone into his hotel room without deactivating the security suite. Bolan drove an extra block past his hotel and then circled around to approach from the back, heading into the hotel loading dock. A man in a purple hotel jacket looked at his vehicle askance. Bolan exited the vehicle and handed him a fifty-pound note, and the man went back to overseeing the off-loading of towels from a linen truck. Bolan followed the pallets of towels into the laundry.
His watch peeped at him again. Someone had opened his laptop.
Bolan approached two men in white uniforms speaking what Bolan was pretty sure was a Nigerian dialect and smoking cigarettes. “Say, can I ask you a favor? Could you go up to the fifth floor and see if anyone strange is lurking around outside room 502?”
One of the men grinned. “Sorry. We’re on break.”
Bolan peeled off another fifty-pound note. “There’s no way I can convince you?”
