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The second Nigerian snatched the note. “I am convinced.” He pinched out his cigarette and carefully placed it back in the pack. “I’ll be back.”
His partner scowled after him as he disappeared into the service elevator.
Bolan smiled sympathetically. “I might have a job for you in a minute.”
The man peered at Bolan narrowly. “This is nothing illegal, then?”
Bolan was almost positive the two men were illegal immigrants. They were probably in desperate need of money but even more desperate to have no attention drawn to themselves. Bolan shrugged. The man clapped a hand to his forehead as if he had a migraine. “Oh, man…”
Ten minutes later Bolan’s scout returned. He shook his head. “This real James Bond shit, you know.”
Bolan nodded. “How many?”
“Two. One big. One little. Nasty-looking white men. Lounging about. I don’t know, but beneath their jackets I think they have guns.” He peered at Bolan in identical suspicion as his partner. “That your room?”
Bolan held up his key. “Can I ask you gentlemen a favor?”
They blinked in unison. “Oh?”
“I need a diversion.”
They stared at Bolan noncommittally.
The big American turned to his scout. “What’s your name?”
“Musa Balam.”
“Musa, nice to meet you.” He turned to the other man. “And you?”
He stared at Bolan defiantly. “Sheriff Modu.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Matt. What I want you to do is this. I want you both to go back up the elevator. When it opens, Musa, you run down the hall to the stairs, and you? You chase him, yelling in Hausa.”
Modu looked at Bolan as if he were insane. “Not for fifty pounds.”
“How about a hundred?” Bolan grinned. “Each, and another hundred once it’s done.”
Balam peered curiously. “And after it is done, what?”
“You’re better off not knowing. You just run for the stairs and keep going.”
A furious exchange in Hausa ensued. Balam apparently won. “Show us the money.”
Bolan peeled several bills from his money clip. Even the reticent Sheriff Modu’s eyes lit up. Bolan handed them a hundred each and followed them into the elevator. Modu took a wet towel from a bin and coiled it into a rat’s tail. The door pinged open on the fifth floor. Balam ran out screaming and Modu raced after him, shouting in scathing Hausa and snapping the towel like a whip. Bolan waited four seconds until he knew they had passed his door and then filled his hand with his Beretta 93-R and stepped out of the elevator.
As Balam had said, two men stood near his door. Both men had short, brush-cut blond hair and wore leather jackets. By the bulges under their left arms, his scout was right. They were packing substantial heat. The smaller man held a cell phone, obviously waiting for warning from the men watching the garage and the lobby. The two Nigerians were almost to the stairs at the end of the hall. The big man shook his head in disgust at their antics. “Agh, can you believe those bloody foreigners.”
The accent told Bolan that the man was a South African. Bolan strode up to him, the big man catching the movement a second too late. Bolan cracked the slide of his Beretta machine pistol across the side of the man’s face, laying the cheek open to the bone. He whipped the 93-R backhand across the bridge of the little man’s nose and shattered it. The big man had bent over with pain and clutched his face. The butt of the Beretta crunched into the back of his skull and dropped him unconscious to the ground. Bolan rammed the muzzle of the Beretta into the side of the little man’s neck and he fell to the carpet.
Bolan knelt over the big man and took his ID. Beneath his jacket he was wearing Threat Level II soft body armor. In a shoulder rig he was carrying a BXP submachine gun with the stock folded and a sound suppressor fitted over the barrel. The weapon was basically an American MAC-10 cleaned up and improved to South African specifications. Bolan took the weapon and checked the load. It was loaded with hollow point rounds. He took the little man’s BXP, as well, and checked his watch. Someone was still messing with his laptop. That laptop had been designed by Akira Tokaido, one of Stony Man Farm’s cybernetic experts. The Farm’s resident armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, had installed a number of security devices that had nothing to do with binary code. Bolan pumped the bezel of his watch three times and was rewarded with a scream as the right-hand speaker in the laptop’s monitor frame spewed a compressed stream of pepper spray into the operator’s eyes.
Bolan kicked open the door of his hotel room.
A redheaded woman was on the floor in front of Bolan’s laptop clutching her face. The man who had been in guard position looked up from where he bent over her. His BXP was in his hand but on the wrong side of his body. Bolan put the red-dot sight of his right-hand weapon on the man’s chest and squeezed the trigger. The BXP stuttered and twenty-two rounds of 9 mm hollowpoint ammo jackhammered into the gunner’s chest as Bolan held the trigger down on full-auto. The man’s armor held, but he still had to absorb the bullets’ energy and his body took a beating like he was being kicked to death by a mule. The BXP clacked open on empty, and Bolan helped the man onto his back and into unconsciousness by flinging the five and half pounds of smoking steel into his face.
The redhead squirmed across the carpet, her hands clawing for her own fallen submachine gun. Bolan pressed the muzzle of his second weapon against her cheek and pinned her head to the floor. “One more move and I’ll turn your head into applesauce. You understand?”
The woman nodded, her eyes streaming and wincing as her lower lip split beneath the pressure of the submachine gun.
Bolan backed the weapon off her mouth. “Who are you?”
She glared up at Bolan in red-eyed defiance. Bolan reached into his jacket and clicked open his phone. He pressed a preset number and Assistant Director Finch answered on the first ring. “You have reached MI-5. This is Assistant Director Finch.”
“We spoke earlier today.”
Her voice replied curtly. “Yes.”
“I have something for you. In my room.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, you should send a team down here. You have three suspects.”
The redhead stared up in alarm. She was part of a four-man team.
“They’re suffering from various broken bones and contusions,” Bolan continued. “One at least appears to be of South African extraction.”
“South African?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” Finch registered genuine surprise. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“I’ll have a team there in ten minutes.”
“I won’t be here.”
“I’m not entirely surprised.”
Bolan was about to hang up when Finch spoke. “You’re to be arrested on sight.”
“I’ll call you later.” Bolan clicked off. He didn’t have much time. “You.” He pointed the BXP back at the woman’s head. “You’re coming with me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CIA safe house, London
“Running the prints now, Striker.”
Bolan had taken the woman’s fingerprints and faxed them to Kurtzman. She sat on a chair with her hands cuffed together in front of her and her ankles bound to the front chair legs with plastic zip restraints. The gun Bolan had held in his hand during the ten-minute drive to the safe house had kept the woman docile. Bolan had washed out her eyes with water. They were still red-veined from the gas and still glared bloody murder at Bolan.
Kurtzman got back to him almost instantly. “I have a hit on the Interpol database.”
The woman went rigid on the chair.
“What have you got?”
The computer whiz hit a key and a police photo of the woman popped up on the screen. “Sylvette MacJory, born in Aberdeen, Scotland. Attended Strathclyde University and received her degree in computer science. In 2005 she was accused and convicted of cybernetic crimes in the U.K., including identity theft and criminal hacking into the databases of several major U.K. financial institutions. Sentenced to five years, sentence reduced to two years probation and public service. Current residence in London. No further criminal record.”
Sylvette’s face clouded with rage.
“So who are your South African friends?” Bolan asked.
“Piss off, Yank!”
“You should try to come up with something more original than that.”
“You’re no cop, then.” The woman’s eyes narrowed. “You’re holding me illegally. I want my lawyer.”
“You’re right. I’m not a cop, and you’re not being held.” Bolan clicked open his phone and punched a button. “You’ve been abducted.”
MacJory swallowed with difficulty as her position became more clear to her.
Assistant Director Finch answered on the first ring. “Where are you?”
“Did you get the package I left you?”
“Yes,” Finch admitted.
“I have another.”
There followed an appalled silence. “Listen to me. You really must—”
“Her name is Sylvette MacJory. You’ll have her in your files. Felony computer hacker. She was attempting to get into my laptop.”
“Did you know we detected pepper spray within the room?”
“She tried to get into my laptop,” Bolan reiterated.
Finch tried a different tack. “You shot one of the suspects twenty-two times. He survived only because he was wearing body armor.”
“I shot him twenty-two times precisely because he was wearing body armor and I knew you would want him alive.”
“Mr.—”
“The large one out in the hall is South African. Did you get an ID on the other two?”
Bolan was pretty sure she would have hung up had she not been attempting to trace the call. The NSA satellite Bolan was bouncing his signal through made that a losing proposition, but it would take the MI-5 communications people a little while to figure that out. Finch let out a long, grudging breath. “You’re correct. The large one is Ruud Heitinga, South African citizen, as is the other, one Kew Timmer.”
“You get a bead on the man inside?”
“He was a bit of an anomaly. His papers say he is a French citizen named Guy Diddier. All of them have clammed up, however, call it a hunch, but I found Monsieur Diddier most un-Gallic in his behavior.”
Bolan was swiftly coming to the conclusion that Assistant Director Heloise Finch had earned her hunches the hard way. “So what did you do?”
“I called in a favor with French intelligence and ran the name. Diddier is a French citizen, but not by birth.”
Bolan’s intuition spoke to him. “He served a tour in the French Foreign Legion.”
Finch seemed pleased. “That is correct. He was originally an American citizen by the name of Gary Pope. He served four years in the California National Guard’s 223rd Infantry Regiment. Somewhere along the line, he got the romantic notion of joining the Legion. Once he’d been accepted, he took advantage of the Legion’s opportunity of identity change and after serving his tour successfully he accepted French citizenship.”
“Any line on the two South Africans?”
“Not yet, but I have every faith they are veterans of the South African Defense Force.”
Bolan agreed. “Ms. Finch, these individuals are mercenaries.”
“So it would seem, and how do you believe the girl fits in?”
Bolan glanced over at the hacker. “She may use a computer rather than a silenced submachine gun, but she’s a hired gun, nonetheless.”
“I agree.”
“Director, I find it very strange that the IRA is employing mercenaries.”
MacJory stared at Bolan strangely and then snapped her poker face back on. Bolan pretended to ignore the slip as Finch continued.
“It is indeed odd. It goes completely against their method of operation. By nature, mercenaries work for money and historically are notorious for switching sides. The terrorist wing of the IRA chooses its members for their absolute loyalty. They would never entrust any kind of sensitive operation to outsiders.”
“So someone else is in the game.”
“So it would appear.”
“Any ideas?”
“None whatsoever. The appearance of mercenaries in this situation is positively anomalous.”
“What’s their legal status, currently?”
“Well, their visas and passports are in order, and while they weren’t guests of the hotel there is currently no law in England against being beaten to a pulp in a hallway. However, we did find three automatic weapons on the premises. They are currently being held on suspicion and possible weapons charges.” Finch’s voice went slightly dry with sarcasm. “Since you took the liberty of kidnapping Miss MacJory, I suspect any evidence concerning her will be inadmissible in an English court of law.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“So what do you intend to do with her?”
Bolan raised the BXP. “Shoot her.”
