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“Terry? Bullshit. That guy always was on an even keel.”
“Not this time. Seriously, he was worried. Scared. I never saw anything like it. And now these guys show up looking for him. That worries me.”
“What had him so scared?” Kellogg asked.
“I don’t know for sure.”
“For sure?”
“I mean, I don’t know,” she lied.
“Maybe he just overreacted. The guy was working his ass off. Maybe he just got edgy, a little paranoid. Could happen to anyone.”
“Sure,” Gillen replied, not at all convinced.
“Look, you sound pretty shook up. You at the apartment? How about I come over? It’s no trouble.”
She thought about the two men waiting outside the building for her. On the one hand, it seemed an attractive proposition. Maybe if they saw her leave the building with someone instead of by herself, they’d keep their distance from her. Maybe. Or perhaps they’d just come after Kellogg, too. And that assumed that they’d be content to wait outside until Kellogg arrived, which wasn’t a certainty in and of itself. No, she needed to take care of herself and do it right now.
“I’m fine.”
“Really, it’s no trouble,” Kellogg stated.
“I’m fine,” she repeated, this time in a no-nonsense tone.
“Hey, I can take a hint,” Kellogg said. The good-natured tone of his voice sounded forced. Was he angry or just trying to cover for his wounded ego? At this point, she had no time to worry about such a thing. She needed to act.
“Look,” she said, “I’ll call later. Is that okay?”
“So you’re staying put?”
The question struck her as odd. “Sure,” she said.
They said their goodbyes and hung up.
BOLAN ROLLED UP THE SIDEWALK toward Gillen’s apartment building, a glass-and-steel monstrosity that jutted toward Dubai’s clear, blue skies. He’d been watching the place, getting a feel for the property and its surroundings for an hour. Almost from the moment he’d arrived, he’d been struck by the neighborhood’s Western feel. Gleaming apartment and office buildings lined either side of the street. Restaurants and shops, many of them the same fast-food restaurants and department stores found in the United States, lined the streets. If it wasn’t for traffic and other signs written in Arabic or an occasional group of women, their features obscured behind veils, Bolan could just have easily been in any major U.S. city.
Beneath his black nylon windbreaker, which he wore unzipped, as a small concession to the heat, the soldier carried the Beretta 93-R in a shoulder rig. The Desert Eagle rode on his hip, obscured by the tails of his windbreaker.
It was his second trip around the block now. The two men who’d initially caught his attention still stood in the recessed doorway of a nearby men’s clothing store, both trying to look like they hadn’t noticed Bolan. The bigger of the two men used a handkerchief to dab at the sweat beading on his forehead, then tugged at the collar of his shirt with his index finger to allow some heat to escape from inside his clothing. The man looked miserable.
Though Bolan couldn’t say for sure whether he posed a danger, the man definitely seemed out of place. A second man stood on the corner decked out in blue jeans, a baseball cap and a Hawaiian-style shirt, having an animated conversation on his cell phone. He shot a glance in Bolan’s direction, turned and stared into a glass window behind him, allowing him to monitor the soldier’s approach without looking directly at him.
Two more men, both wearing tan coveralls, with heavy leather tool belts wrapped around their waists, stood next to a panel van parked on the street. A casual glance would peg them as telephone or cable television repairman. But Bolan’s trained eye could see the telltale bulges of a handgun holstered in their armpits beneath their coveralls. One of the fake repairmen, a slender man with bushy muttonchop sideburns, carried an empty canvas satchel over one shoulder.
The soldier took a couple of steps and angled himself so he could get a better look at the van. Behind the wheel, he saw a silhouette with only a part profile visible from his vantage point. Bolan took out a pack of smokes, tapped one into his palm and pocketed the rest. With his other hand, he pulled out his lighter, clicked it open and torched the end of the cigarette. He didn’t smoke much these days, but a cigarette was a convenient prop. Tucking the lighter away, he pulled his baseball cap farther over his eyes and started for Gillen’s building.
One of the men looked up as Bolan approached. The soldier felt his muscles tense, but he didn’t break stride. Instead he continued walking right toward them. The man carrying the satchel looked at his partner and nodded politely as the other man spoke at a rapid tempo, occasionally punctuating the phrase with excited gestures from his hands. Bolan took a drag from the cigarette as he passed. He caught Mr. Sideburns’ eye, gave him a nod and kept moving until he reached the nearest intersection.
The Executioner turned right and rolled down the street, passing the panel van, which now stood to his left, ignoring the driver. Then he walked past the front of Gillen’s apartment building and kept going until he reached a nearby intersection, turned right and headed along the side of the building.
The building had a two-level parking garage beneath it that was accessible from the street. Bolan slipped into the parking garage. As he approached a glass door that led from the ground level of the garage, a woman was exiting the building. Smiling, she held the door open for Bolan. He thanked her and passed through it, stepping into the building’s air-conditioned interior.
He keyed the throat mike.
“Jack?”
“Go, Sarge.”
“There was a phone company van parked outside when I entered the building. How about now?”
“Gone, baby, gone.”
“You see it move?” Bolan asked.
“Yeah. It turned the corner a couple of minutes ago, just after the repair guys disappeared into the building.”
Bolan scowled. “You got it in sight?”
“Affirmative. It’s pulling into the parking garage.”
The soldier stopped and drew the Beretta from beneath his jacket. “Okay, my guess is it’s heading for the sixth floor to pick up the two guys and Gillen.”
“I’ll head that way,” the Stony Man pilot stated.
“Don’t engage unless you have to. They may already know they’ve been identified. Until then, let’s play it cool.”
“Clear. By the way—”
“What?” By now he was on the move again, hugging the walls in the hallway, pressing the Beretta against his thigh to keep it out of sight.
“Couple more guys came in after the chumps in the repair outfits. Maybe two minutes later. Both had been standing on the opposite side of the street, but they converged on the building in unison.”
“Sloppy.”
“Probably,” Grimaldi said. “But they’re probably headed your way.”
Bolan reached the end of the corridor. It branched off in two opposing directions, like the top of a T. Flattening against the wall, he peered around the corner and saw the two repairmen exit the elevator and turn in the direction of Gillen’s apartment. Bolan kept the Beretta low at his side and rounded the corner. He started for the men as they came to a stop in front of Gillen’s apartment.
THE SHARP KNOCK ON THE door startled Tamara Gillen. Who the hell could that be? she wondered. Kellogg? No way. There hadn’t been enough time for him to have traveled from the bureau to her apartment. Uncoiling from the chair, she moved to the door. The .22-caliber pistol was tucked into the waistband of her pants and covered by her shirttails.
“Who is it?” she called before reaching the door.
“Phone company,” a male voice replied.
Reaching the door, she peered through the peephole and saw two men in telephone company uniforms standing outside her door.
“I didn’t call you.”
“Of course you didn’t,” the man said with a laugh, “the phones are down.”
Gillen scowled and walked over to the cordless telephone that stood on a small table in her kitchen that doubled as a desk when she worked from home or paid bills. She returned the phone to its charging base and stared at it for a moment. Her pulse quickened. None of this made sense, she thought. If all the phones were down, why check each apartment? She reached underneath her shirt and drew the small pistol. She began backing away from the door, figuring she should find her bag and leave via the fire escape if these guys became too insistent.
“Hang on,” she said. “I need to put on a robe.”
Something thudded against the door, striking it just above the knob. She took in a sharp breath of air and backed away from the door, then brought the pistol up in a two-handed grip.
A second thud registered with her and the wood around the latch exploded into splinters before the door swung inward. One of the men surged into the apartment. In his hand, he gripped he a pistol and he was moving it around, looking for a target. The second man barreled through the door just a couple of steps behind the first.
So little space separated them that Gillen didn’t bother to yell for the men to stop. Her pistol popped twice and one of the intruders grunted as bullets drilled into him. However, his body continued to hurtle forward, powered by sheer momentum. She sidestepped him as a matador might move from the path of an angry bull, and he stumbled past her.
A dark blur flashed into her vision and something hard struck her wrist. She yelped, and the gun slipped from her fingers and hit the floor. Her attacker moved in close, grabbing a fistful of the fabric of her shirt, then hitting her in the ribs, hard, to knock her off balance. She stumbled back toward the wall. Her attacker grinned and stepped forward.
Then his head exploded in a fine red mist. His suddenly decapitated body lurched forward one more step before collapsing.
A big man stood behind the dead man’s former position, a pistol in his outstretched hand. Smoke curled up from the handgun’s barrel. The weapon coughed once more, sending a bullet into the man she’d shot a moment ago.
She saw the newcomer’s lips move, thought she heard noise, but the words didn’t register with her.
“Ms. Gillen. Tamara, we need to go,” he said.
The sound of her own name jarred her from the shock that had startled to settle over her. His words sank in as he pulled her to her feet. She jerked her arm from his grip. He didn’t resist.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No time.”
She stayed rooted to the spot. “Who are you?” she repeated.
“I’m a U.S. federal agent. I’m here because of Terry Lang.”
“Terry?”
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
When they stepped into the hallway, the man stopped.
She noticed that even while standing still, he radiated an energy as though he were coiled, ready to strike. He wheeled ninety degrees, his gun coming up at the same time. Gillen stared after him and saw the cause of his consternation. A man was stepping into view from an adjoining hallway, an assault rifle clutched in his arms, the barrel tracking in on her and her companion.
BOLAN SENSED THE FIRST attacker before he came into view. He wheeled around, the Beretta’s snout zeroing in on his target, a man toting an AK-47. The Executioner squeezed the trigger and the Beretta spit a triburst of 9 mm manglers. The slugs hammered into the man’s chest and caused him to freeze in midstride before he collapsed to the floor.
A second shooter moved in on Bolan and Gillen. The hardman’s machine pistol spewed fire and lead. Bullets sliced through the air inches above the soldier’s head. A double tap of the Beretta’s trigger and the gun coughed out a flurry of six rounds that didn’t strike flesh, but drilled into the wall just behind his attacker, forcing him to take cover.
Bolan whipped his head toward Gillen.
“Move,” he shouted, gesturing at the mouth of a nearby hallway.
Nodding, she turned and sprinted for the corridor.
The Executioner squeezed off two more bursts from the Beretta. The cover fire put his enemies on the defensive. He ejected the handgun’s magazine and slammed another into the weapon’s grip. In the same instant, another gunner mistook the lull in firing as a chance to catch his opponent by surprise. He came around the corner. The move exposed the shooter’s face and his gun hand. Bolan’s Beretta chugged out a volley of 9 mm rounds. Simultaneously the other man’s own weapon cracked, spitting jagged tongues of flame from its muzzle. A couple of bullets from the AK ripped through the fabric of Bolan’s windbreaker while other rounds slammed into plasterboard or ripped through carpet and wood.
The 9 mm slugs from the Beretta drilled into the gunner’s face. The impact spun him violently. Even as the guy slammed to the floor, Bolan heard metal clicking on metal behind him. He wheeled and saw that Gillen had disappeared from view. Moving through the mouth of the corridor into which she’d just disappeared, he spotted a metal door with an exit sign fixed above it at the end of the hallway. The soldier marched toward the door, hoping he could catch up with the woman before Nawaz Khan and his people found her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Aleksander Mazorov knew he needed to move fast.
The big Russian raced up the stairs with a stealth that belied his size. In his right hand, he clutched a Browning Hi-Power. He heard a door snap closed from a couple of flights of stairs above. A smile ghosted his lips. He guessed, hoped, that the woman was coming his way, perhaps with the bastard who’d shot his men right at her side. His grip on the Browning tightened, but he kept it flat against his thigh while he continued to climb the steps. He needed to grab the woman and get the hell out of the building as soon as possible, before the local police arrived and he either got scooped up by them or had to shoot his way out of the situation.
From above, he could see a shadow moving over the wall, could hear the slap of her feet against the stairs as she rushed down.
He raised the Browning. A heartbeat later he saw calves clad in dark slacks fall across his line of sight. When the woman came into view, her eyes seemed to look first at the gun barrel and widen with surprise and terror as she realized what she’d come up against. She froze. Mazorov guessed her mind was racing, ticking through her options, weighing whether to pivot and run or to perhaps rush him. Or she could just be frozen with terror, though he somehow doubted it. Considering that she’d met her initial attackers with a pistol, he guessed she wasn’t the shrinking violet type.
Maybe, he decided, she just needed some prompting.
“Hands up,” he said. “Or I’ll kill you.”
She brought her hands up slowly, elbows cocked at nearly ninety-degree angles. He stepped to one side and motioned for her to move down the stairs. She brushed past him and continued down the steps.
He allowed himself a tight smile. Mission accomplished.
GRIMALDI CROUCHED BETWEEN a pair of parked cars. Peering around the rear of one of the cars, a red BMW, he watched as the panel van’s rear door fanned open and four shooters piled from the vehicle onto the concrete. He keyed his throat mike.
“Striker?”
“Go.”
“The van has more hostiles unloading. I count four.”
“They coming my way?”
“Not if I can help it,” Grimaldi said.
“Clear. Thanks.”
With the Colt Commando leading the way, the lanky Stony Man pilot came up in a crouch and closed the distance between himself and the group of shooters. As he neared them, he heard snatches of muttered conversation. He recognized a couple of words as Russian. What the hell was going on? he wondered. What did the Russians have to do with this? Where they Russian mafiya?
One of the gunners gestured at the door leading from the garage into the apartment building. The others stood by, listening to his orders. Grimaldi listened just long enough to realize he’d garner no good information from them as long as they continued to speak Russian. He came up from the shadows, raised the Commando to his shoulder, the retractable buttstock snug against his body.
One of the hardmen saw him. The Russian simultaneously opened his mouth to shout a warning and brought up his hand, which clutched a submachine gun. Grimaldi triggered the Commando and unleashed a swarm of 5.56 mm rippers from the weapon that drilled into the guy’s chest. His target jerked in place for a moment under the onslaught of autofire. Grimaldi turned slightly and caught a second hardman under a withering hail of fiery death.
Simultaneously the man who’d been handing out orders moved into action. He spun in Grimaldi’s direction, dropped into a crouch and loosed a burst of autofire from an Uzi. The rounds hammered into the concrete just in front of Grimaldi. While the guy tried to improve his aim, the Stony Man pilot returned the favor with another burst from the Commando. The bullets sliced the air just past the man’s face. Though they missed flesh, the guy jerked back hard to get out of the line of fire, and the motion caused him to lose his balance and stumble back a couple of steps. In the same instant Grimaldi triggered his weapon again. The ensuing burst stitched across the guy’s torso, causing a trail of crimson geysers to explode from his chest before he collapsed to the ground.
Tires squealed, and Grimaldi responded by wheeling around toward the noise. The van was hurtling toward him, quickly gaining speed. The pilot dived sideways, throwing his body between a pair of cars. He grunted when his body hit the concrete, and bolts of pain shot out from his shoulder where it collided with the ground. The van roared by, just missing him.
Pulling himself to his feet, Grimaldi caught sight of the van. Brake lights glowed red and rubber squealed against concrete as the vehicle slowed. He rested the Commando on the roof of the parked car in front of him and tapped the trigger. The 5.56 mm slugs hammered into the van, sparking off its steel skin.
The weapon ran dry, and Grimaldi let the weapon hang on its strap while he replaced it with the Beretta 92 that rode in a shoulder holster. He raised the weapon and tried to draw a bead on the van. Before he could line up a good shot, the vehicle had turned a corner and was rolling down a ramp to a lower floor.
