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Bolan fixed his gaze on the figure on the bed, felt his stomach clench as he took in the horrible sight. Death’s rigor had caused the arms to curl up. Strips of skin, uniform in length and cut with precision, had been peeled from the chest, abdomen and forearms. The exposed tissue, still wet with blood, glistened beneath the big halogen lamps that burned overhead. Flesh seared by the soldering iron was black and puckered. Thick hair soaked with blood was matted against the skull. Blood had soaked the mattress beneath the man and pooled beneath the surgical bed.
The soldier marched around to the other side of the bed and studied the man’s profile. The crazy butcher responsible for this savagery had left the one side of the man’s face untouched. Bolan studied the man’s features so he could confirm his identity.
The soldier set his jaw to hold back the rage that boiled inside him.
He keyed his throat mike. “Eagle One,” he said.
“Eagle One,” Jack Grimaldi replied. “Go, Striker.”
“I found the package.”
“And?”
“Expired,” Bolan stated.
“Damn.”
“I took out multiple targets up here,” the soldier said. “We’re missing at least one. As best I can tell, these guys all are muscle. Whoever did this—” he snapped a look at Terry Lang, then looked away “—isn’t among them.”
“You know this how?”
“The muscle’s clothes weren’t bloody,” he replied. “I heard Lang’s last death screams, so whoever did this likely had no time to wash off. Keep an eye out. The sadistic bastard who did this may still be in the building or will be exiting it soon.”
Bolan found a discarded pile of clothes lying in one corner of the room. He guessed they were Lang’s and searched the pockets, but found nothing inside them. Exiting the torture room, the soldier returned to the hallway. From outside the building, he could hear the murmur of car traffic and the hum of an air conditioner.
He took a couple more steps and suddenly his combat senses screamed for his attention, followed by the grunt of someone exerting himself. The soldier whirled and glimpsed a large shape hurtling toward him. Metal glinted, a knife blade poised to fall on the soldier. Bolan reacted, taking a step back. The blade whistled through the air just an inch or so from his face. The attacker pressed his advantage and stabbed at Bolan twice more, the frenzied action forcing the soldier to take a couple of steps back.
The guy slashed wildly at the Executioner and continued to press forward. Bolan sidestepped the attack and drove his fist into the guy’s floating ribs. The man grunted and fell back, his eyes bulging with fear. His free hand flew up to cover his injured ribs. A scream of pain and fear exploded from his mouth as he renewed his attack. He lunged at Bolan, the tip of the knife hurtling at the Executioner’s midsection. The soldier stepped aside and the gleaming blade whooshed past his torso, slicing open the nylon windbreaker he wore, but leaving his flesh intact. The soldier drove another fist into the guy’s now-injured ribs and heard his opponent gasp with pain. The man dropped the knife and spun away.
Bolan drew the Beretta and leveled it at the man. The knife fell to the floor with a clatter and the man brought his hands up.
“You and I,” Bolan said, “are going to talk.”
BOLAN WENT TO THE stainless-steel sink in the torture room. He filled a white foam cup with cold water from the tap and returned to the hallway where Ayub Sharif lay in the hallway.
By now, Grimaldi had arrived. He leaned one shoulder into the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. Bolan stood over Sharif and threw the contents of the water into the guy’s face. Sharif’s eyes popped open and his expression quickly flashed through shock, fear and finally rage as he took in his surroundings and assessed his situation. He looked at Bolan, then at Grimaldi and finally back at the Executioner.
“Hello, Ayub,” Grimaldi said, his voice irritatingly bright. Sharif raised his forearm, dragged it across his face to wipe away the water that had been splashed on him.
“You know my name,” he said. Though Bolan knew from his intel that the guy was a native of Pakistan, he spoke English with no trace of an accent. “How do you know my name?”
“Big fans,” Grimaldi said.
“Your work speaks for itself,” Bolan said. “Best cutter this side of Jack the Ripper. Besides, we have a file on you.”
“Who are you?”
“Why don’t you let me ask the questions?” Bolan said. “That’s what I’d do if I were in your position.”
“My position. And just what position might that be?” Sharif asked.
“Royally fucked.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“Then you’re an idiot,” Bolan said. He jerked a thumb at the room where Lang had been tortured to death. “You killed Terrence Lang. Did it in cold blood. Kidnapped him. Tortured him. For God knows what reason. I could put a bullet in your head, dump your body in the river and celebrate with a steak dinner.”
Sharif licked his lips. A sheen of perspiration had formed on his forehead and had beaded on his upper lip. “You can’t prove I killed him.”
Bolan knelt in front of Sharif. He rubbed his chin and studied the guy for several seconds. Finally he shook his head slowly, as though overwhelmed with disbelief.
“Sharif,” he said, “I can’t tell whether you’re brave or stupid. Truth be told, I don’t care which it is. You have blood under your fingernails. Your clothes and shoes are splattered with blood. Your file says that your best skills are torture and interrogation. So if you want to tell me you didn’t kill Terry Lang, fine. I can live with that.” Bolan slipped the Beretta from his shoulder holster. “I’m not here to put you on trial. The burden of proof I require before blowing your head off is light. I mean, life’s too short for heavy burdens. Am I right?”
“What’s in it for me?”
Bolan shook his head. “One breath, two breaths. Who knows?”
Grimaldi chimed in. “Best speak truth to power, Sharif.”
Sharif scowled. Bolan watched as the cutter stared at his lap, thumbnail of one hand digging under the other while he considered his situation.
“Maybe I need to clarify,” Bolan said. “I don’t like you. You’re a monster preying and profiting on the misery of others. You wore out my patience three minutes ago. If I had more time, or was a better interrogator, I’d establish a rapport with you, earn your trust, make you a lot of promises. I don’t have that kind of time. So answer my questions. What’s the game here?”
“He poked his nose into Khan’s affairs.”
“And?”
“Khan didn’t like it.”
“News flash.”
“I mean, he betrayed Khan.”
Bolan’s brow furrowed. “Betrayed. You mean, they were working together?”
“That’s what Khan thought. I mean, Lang was working through an intermediary, but Khan thought he had him, had leverage over him.”
“What kind of leverage?” Grimaldi asked.
“When Lang first started poking around Khan’s operations, Khan thought the guy was just another journalist sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. We tried to throw him off the trail. We sent a couple of people his way, ones who gave him bad information, tried to send him in the wrong direction.”
“And?” Bolan asked.
“And it didn’t work. Not for long, anyway. Sure, he might follow the lead for a little while, but then he always came back around, asking the right people the right questions, going to the right places. It was uncanny.”
“And Khan considered this a betrayal?”
Sharif shook his head. “No. After a while, Khan got tired of playing games with him and started having his people do their own digging, build their own case. Khan started to believe Lang was getting his information from an intelligence source or multiple sources.”
“You thought he was a spy.”
“Well, wasn’t he? I mean, look at you two. You’re not reporters, are you?”
Grimaldi looked at Bolan and grinned. “Pretty perceptive for a psychopath.”
He turned to Sharif. “So Khan decides Lang’s a spy and has him killed. And here we are. How’s that a betrayal?”
“I don’t know all the details.”
“But you know some,” the pilot replied.
“The way I understand it, Khan never knew for sure Lang was a spook or at least working with spooks. He made inquiries with his old ISI contacts, but they had nothing much on the guy. He’d been in Islamabad for a while, but their records had always pegged him as a journalist and nothing more. But Khan wasn’t convinced, so he decided to try recruiting him.”
“As a double agent,” Grimaldi said.
Sharif nodded. “He wanted to see just how much Western intelligence really knew about him and he figured that, if Lang knew something, he’d share it, maybe even take bad information back to his handlers. If the right pressure was applied.”
“Clever,” Bolan said. “Risky, but clever.”
“Too clever by half. Khan underestimated him. We thought we were turning him, but he was using us, penetrating the organization further all the time. He got what you Americans call the family jewels. Pieced together the organization’s structure, found out who Khan did business with, what he sells and where. Surely some of this information you’ve seen.”
Bolan gave a noncommittal shrug. “Khan knew all this stuff was going out the door?”
“Not at first, but he got the idea after a while. Hey, Khan had been an intelligence agent himself and had run operations against India while he was with the ISI. He knew the score. He’s no fool.”
“Not if he surrounds himself with top-shelf talent like you,” Bolan said. “Didn’t Khan think it was risky killing Lang? Who cares whether he was a reporter or a spy? Either way he’s dead, and now you have me and a bunch of other folks breathing down your neck. Seems like a bad trade to me.”
Sharif’s lips parted as he prepared to reply to Bolan. Before he could utter a sound, though, a small dark hole opened on his forehead, followed an instant later by the sound of glass breaking. Bolan whirled toward the sound and spotted the window behind him disintegrating in a waterfall of glass shards.
Grimaldi grabbed hold of Bolan’s windbreaker and gave it a hard yank, causing him to reel backward. A bullet sizzled through the air and pierced the space where he’d been standing only a moment before.
Once the Executioner hit the ground, he rolled across the floor and got out of direct site of the now-shattered window.
Grimaldi simultaneously was on the move, his hand filled with a Browning Hi-Power as he sought cover. Bolan saw from the corner of his eye that his friend was safe, which freed him to deal with the shooter. Three more rifle slugs lanced through the window and drilled into the floor and walls. None of them came close to hitting the Stony Man warriors, though the shooter did succeed in keeping them out of sight of the window.
The shooting was over in a matter of seconds.
“You okay?” Bolan asked his old friend.
“Yeah. You?”
The Beretta leveled in front of him in a two-handed grip, Bolan was up on one knee, looking through the window and scanning the rooftops of nearby buildings. A trained sniper himself, his mind was running through a rough series of calculations, trying to determine the angle from which the shots had come so he could best identify the building from which the shooter had attacked. He saw no movement on any of the nearby rooftops, but within a couple of seconds thought he’d identified the sniper’s perch.
He shot to his feet and moved toward the window. By the time he’d reached it, he heard tires squeal from the street below. He looked down in time to see a forest-green sedan rocket out of a nearby alley, cutting off an oncoming car before disappearing in traffic.
“There goes our shooter,” Grimaldi said.
Bolan nodded. He stowed his weapon, ran outside and crossed the street to the alley from where the green sedan had shot into traffic. He searched the building’s perimeter while Grimaldi continued to watch from above.
Minutes later Bolan keyed his throat mike. “I got nothing,” he said. “But I do hear sirens. I guess it’s time we made our exit.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“What about the other two men?” Nawaz Khan asked.
Daniel Masters shook his head. “Couldn’t get them,” he said. “Never got a clear shot.”
Seated behind his wide mahogany desk, Khan leaned back in his chair and scowled. He pressed his fingertips together, his hands forming a steeple, and stared over them at Daniel Masters.
“This is not good,” he said.
“Thanks for the bloody understatement,” Masters snapped back. “These two men stormed the building, killed some of our best and brightest without breaking a sweat, and interrogated someone familiar with our plans. So, yeah, I’d say this is not good.”
Khan fixed a hard stare on the Englishman as he pondered the words. If his glowering bothered Masters, he gave no outward sign of it. Instead the Englishman downed a Scotch whiskey on the rocks, wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and rose to make himself another.
“Who were they?” Khan asked.
Masters shrugged. “CIA. Delta Force. Who the hell can say? You were in intelligence before you went to the dark side. You know the players as well as I do. They could be private security contractors hired by the newspaper to rescue their guy. I mean, right? What we do know is that they are here, and they just tore a big damn hole in your operation.”
“It can be dealt with.”
“Can it? Look, first Lang infiltrates your organization. You kidnap him, hold him for a couple of days and kill him. Now you’ve probably brought the righteous wrath of the U.S. government down on our necks and you think it can be dealt with. You have the operational security of a toy store. My people are getting very nervous, Khan. They were before all this happened, which is why they sent me here in the first place.”
An angry knot formed in Khan’s gut as he listened to the Englishman vent. When he spoke, an edge had crept into his voice. “Your people need to leave this to me.”
The corners of Masters’s lips turned up in a mirthless grin. “Because leaving it to you has worked so well so far,” Masters said.
“No. I have the contacts. I can make things happen. If you want to pull this off without me—” he made a sweeping gesture with his hand “—then be my guest. Otherwise, leave this in my hands.”
“Which are so capable.”
Khan leaned forward.
“I tolerate you because you can supply the things I need. Not because I think you bring anything else to this operation.”
Undeterred, Masters leaned forward, too, rested his elbows on the top of Khan’s desk and locked eyes with the guy. His face was perhaps a foot or so from Khan’s, well within striking distance should he decide to take a swing at the arrogant prick’s jaw, he thought.
“Tell you what, Nawaz. Tell me to pound sand, please. I’ll catch a damn flight back to Moscow and tell Mr. Lebed that you’ve decided to cut short our little partnership, that you’ve decided you need your own space. My guess is he’ll send five more guys back here within twenty-four hours that’ll make our little American friends look like cream puffs. And they’ll wipe out your whole gang. As for this arms sale of yours, we’d be happy to bow out, take the product back with us and be done with your silliness once and for all. Maybe you can hop on the internet and buy some radioactive material there. What do you say, lad? That sound like a fine plan to you?”
By now Khan had let his hand slip off the desk. He reached beneath the desktop and his fingers encircled the pistol grip on a 12-gauge sawed-off Ithaca shotgun that was suspended underneath the desk. Khan knew that one stroke of the trigger and the Ithaca would unleash a blast that would tear through the desk’s modesty panel and spray this limey fuck’s insides all over the walls of his office. He’d have the place scrubbed down, repainted and refurnished in twenty-four hours or less.
Just enough time for Lebed to realize he’d strayed off the reservation and for him to dispatch a hit team to Dubai, just like the Englishman had suggested. Maybe he and his people would be able to fend off the Russian’s army of mercenaries and spies. Maybe.
He loosened his grip on the shotgun and forced himself to smile at Masters, who’d hardly stopped to take a damn breath since he’d first launched into his tirade. The former English spy uncoiled from his chair and walked to the bar to make another drink.
“You have the item then?”
Masters nodded without bothering to look at him. Instead he focused on his bartending pursuits. “It’s nasty stuff, you know. It’s not like highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Just a little bit of this stuff and—poof—you’ve got a mini Armageddon on your hands. And it’s hard as hell to come by. Most people don’t think it exists, but it does.”
