Renegade Agent (6 page)

The black pointed with his chin.

"Downstairs. Only one door there." He spoke with a thick West Indian accent. "You gonna kill me too?"

"You're already dead, guy," Bolan said. He laid the suppressor against the black's temple, his hand moving fast as thought, and the guy went down like a sledge-hammered cow. Blood glistened along his hairline. No sound came from the chalet's bowels.

Bolan did not like leaving the bodies there in the open, even for a few minutes. But there was greater risk in not reconning. He did not want his upcoming chat with Corey James to be interrupted.

The second and third floors were occupied by rooms bisected by a single long corridor. Light shone under the door of one on the second floor, but when Bolan kicked into it he found it empty, although it was clearly someone's quarters. The name on an old envelope identified the someone as Corey James.

If the lobby and the upper floors had been left as they were when the place was a hotel, the basement had undergone some remodelling, for sure. Bolan cat-footed down carpeted stairs. At the bottom there was a short entryway passage that jogged hard right after a few steps. At its corner a video camera on a motor mount was sweeping the entryway.

Bolan put a slug into the lens.

Beyond the corner the featureless hallway ended ten feet farther on in a windowless door. The door swung open and an M-16-armed gunman came charging out.

He charged into a three-round swarm of 9mm stingers that stopped him cold. Behind the fresh corpse the door started to swing shut. Bolan's right shoulder hit it before the motion could be completed, and the door swung wide again. Someone grunted with pain and crashed into something.

Corey James turned and looked at the black-clad intruder without expression. Over shirtsleeves he wore an automatic in a shoulder holster, but he made no move toward it.

The efforts toward maintaining the chalet's original Old World elegance had been foregone down here in favor of modern expediency. The basement consisted of a single large windowless room, and it was obviously the nerve center of Edwards's Alpine base. One wall was lined with a control panel fronted by swivel chairs. There were keyboard terminals, video display tubes, two computer-tape transports, several radio transceivers and a couple of telephones.

And it looked like the guy was still in the process of outfitting the place. Along the adjacent wall were stacked a couple dozen crates of various sizes, most of them stenciled, "Fragile-Electronic Components-Avoid Extreme Heat or Cold." Corey James was standing at the console, next to a man who was seated in one of the swivel chairs.

Another technician lay behind the door that Bolan had slammed into him; a goulash of electronic parts was scattered on the floor around him. The guy was trying to shake off his daze, but he didn't look hurt.

Bolan wished he could say the same. The body blow he had taken coming in, even though he had tried to absorb it on his good side, had cost him more than pain. He thought he had felt the traumatized muscle tear a bit, and there was a warm wetness under the dressing on the left side of his chest. As he straightened, a sharp pinch of hurt darted across it.

The traitorous ex-CIA agent across the room coolly regarding him would have been enough to arouse Bolan's righteous anger. The wound enhanced it.

"They're dead, James," he snapped. "Your amateur bodyguards weren't good enough. You ought to do something about security."

James nodded toward the crates. "You were a week early."

"Too bad." Bolan holstered the Beretta; the necessity for silence was past. He held the Uzi by the pistol grip, letting the lanyard support its weight.

Yeah, one more week. One week, and this base would have been in full operation, with capacity as a safe house, communications center, data-retrieval facility. Not even a headquarters, but only one of many bases just like it, the foundation of a scheme unlike any Bolan had encountered in all the days of the New Terrorist Wars. Bolan had long been aware that most of the terrorist organizations were loosely linked in an informal network. But for the most part the ideological hate-mongers were poorly trained at best, underfinanced and unarmed, and too suspicious and jealous to fully trust their so-called allies.

But Frank Edwards, and the people like Corey James to whom he had chosen to delegate responsibility, were experts, trained in the black arts by the finest intelligence outfits on the globe, the training backed by years of experience. Their contacts in the shadow world of international intrigue were vast, and by dint of their one-time official sanction, they had access to the most advanced technology in the free world. Not only that, but Edwards apparently had the money to pay for it. But that was no surprise; illicit arms smuggling could be immensely profitable, with terrorists desperate for firepower willing to pay markups of several hundred percent. As a business, it was hard to beat. If you didn't mind trading in death.

Now Edwards, along with other renegade agents of his ilk, were consolidating their resources to form a private intelligence agency. International in scope, wide-reaching in capacity, staffed by experienced men who still retained entree into most corners of the worldwide underground, it would rival the official bureaus of many free nations. And it would service those sworn to turn free nations into slave states. Mack Bolan was determined to see that would not happen. He owed it to the world and to one brave woman named Toby Ranger.

"Where's Edwards?" Bolan asked, his voice steel cold.

"I don't know," James said calmly.

The guy knew all the tricks, and he tried one now. With his right hand he adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, let the hand linger there. He held out his left, gestured with it vacantly, a protestation of innocence and a polished piece of misdirection of attention.

The hand at the glasses shot across the twelve inches that separated it from the shoulder holster, got fingers around gun butt. It was a good trick, sure. But Bolan had seen it before. The Uzi stuttered a four-shot burst into the smart guy's outstretched left hand.

The report was an eardrum-straining crack in the enclosed room, and it brought a ragged croak of pain from Corey James. The hollow-point 9mm fleshshredders had left nothing at the end of his left arm but a mangled stump of bone and gore.

The dazed technician on the floor turned deathly pale and lurched onto his hands and knees, whatever he'd had for supper spewing out of his mouth and nostrils. As Bolan had figured, before putting in with the turncoat network, the guy had been a desk jockey; the "wet" side of intelligence work was new to him. The other technician was a little cooler.

He shucked his lab coat and went to James.

The ex-agent was ghostly white himself, halfway into shock already. He sunk into one of the swivel chairs. The technician tore a long strip from his coat, wrapped the rest around the shreds of blood-soaked flesh that had been James's hand.

With the reserved strip he began to fashion a tourniquet around James's forearm. There was fear in the glance he gave the Uzi when Bolan poked James with its snout, but he continued his work.

"Where is Frank Edwards?" Bolan said, each word deliberate as a death knell.

The guy looked up at him, and Bolan could read the knowledge in his eyes. James was seeing a vision of his own death, and he knew that vision was a heartbeat from becoming reality.

"I'm not sure," James muttered, teeth clenched against the pain.

Bolan prodded him with the submachine gun.

"When you stop talking, you stop living."

"Edwards left yesterday evening. A while back, he took an apartment in Rome, rigged it up as a safehouse, a place where he could go to ground if he had to. He'd done some work for the Red Brigades — the Italian terrorist group — and some of their people housekeep, in exchange for using the place. That's where Frank said he was going." James's face was drawn with pain. "I don't know if he was leveling with me, and if he was, why he was going there. My guess is he was just trying to leave a hard-to-follow trail. He might be there. He might not. But that's all I can tell you." James's longish hair was damp with the sweat of hurt and fear. "That's the truth. Your killing me won't make it less true."

"What about the woman?"

"Ranger? She left with him."

"Was she all right?"

"Sure. Why wouldn't she...." Faint light cut the pain in James's eyes. He tried for a smile that came out a grimace instead. "So she was one of yours. Frank had an idea about that. Maybe that's why he headed for Rome. Those Red Brigades people specialize in kidnapping for ransom. They know a little about coercion."

"Where is the Rome place?" James's skin was the color of chalk, and his eyes were starting to glaze. Bolan jabbed the barrel of the Uzi into his chest, hard enough to hurt.

"Okay, okay." James's voice was weak and reedy, but he managed to mutter an address. He just got it out before his chin fell forward to his chest, and his eyes turned glassy.

"Get him away from there," Bolan told the technicians. The guy on the floor got shakily to his feet. The front of his lab coat was stained with his own vomit.

It took only seconds for Bolan to dig the goop from the hip pack, mold it to the console in a few strategic spots, and set sixty-second fuses. The two technicians recognized plastique, all right; Bolan had no trouble getting them to hoist James and drag him up the stairs and out of the chalet.

There were five-gallon jerricans of gasoline strapped to the backs of each of the 4WOULD rigs parked out front, which made things easier. Bolan uncapped them, splashed their contents over the inside of the three vehicles as well as the cab of the Toyota pickup.

From the bowels of the chalet there was a dull boom.

By the time Bolan had finished emptying the gas cans, he could see flames licking up the stairway into the chalet's lobby.

James and the two technicians backed away down the slope. But Bolan had lost interest in them.

He selected an HE grenade from a belt pouch, pulled the pin, and rolled it into the back of the nearest 4WOULD, then dogtrotted down the slope.

Behind him the grenade's explosion shattered the night.

A moment later the vehicles gas tanks began to blow, like a string of gigantic firecrackers.

Bolan paused at the tree-line perimeter. A huge ball of gasoline-fed fire was eating into the canopy, moving to meet the flame now consuming the chalet's first floor. Windows began to implode.

As Bolan watched, the canopy creaked and collapsed, tearing framing from the building's facade. James and the technicians stood halfway down the slope, looking small and helpless in the fire's hellish glow.

One small part of Frank Edwards's "black" CIA was destroyed, but the guy himself was still at large, somewhere.

And somewhere a woman's life hung by a thread a thread tied to that same Frank Edwards.

It had been on the heartbeat. Now it was in the hands of fate.

The street was called the Via del Gladiatori, the Way of the Gladiator. It was an appropriate reminder to Mack Bolan of the cosmic scheme, and his own small role in it.

Today, most people saw the ancient gladiator of this city of Rome as a figure of courage and romance.

In fact, he was neither. True, a few did choose to step into the bloody arena of the Roman Colosseum of their own free will; one was the second-century Roman emperor, Commodus. But most gladiators were slaves or criminals, forced to fight on threat of death. There was no romance to it at all, and whatever courage the gladiator brought to his combat was generated through the will to survive. Few did. In victory, the gladiator won only the right to fight again. Defeat was usually synonymous with death. In the rare case in which the losing gladiator survived the combat, his fate was given over to the paying spectators. If they waved their handkerchiefs, he was given clemency; if they turned down their thumbs, he was executed.

In the long sordid history of mankind, few spectacles rivaled the gladiatorial combat before tens of thousands of bloodthirsty citizens for the sheer savagery of which Animal Man was capable.

Now Mack Bolan stood against another manifestation of that savagery, the bestiality of international terrorism. Its perpetrators existed outside of law, society, or civilization.

Though they sometimes carried on about "liberation, power to the people," and "democratic revolution," their creed was control, suffocation, and the eradication of anyone standing in their way.

The Red Brigades, the "housekeepers" of Frank Edwards's Rome safe-apartment, were a prime example. The best known of the groups that made up the loose-knit Italian terrorist coalition known as The Organization, the Brigades depicted themselves as noble crusaders for freedom and human rights. However, one way they chose to demonstrate this high-minded commitment was with the kidnapping of statesman Aldo Moro, leader of the Italian Christian Democratic Party, in 1978. Five of Moro's bodyguards were ruthlessly cut down in a barrage of gunfire.

Fifty-five days later, Moro was found in the trunk of a car, his body riddled with bullets.

If undeterred, the terrorists would replace freedom with repression, tolerance with persecution, initiative with intimidation, independence with enslavement. Their principal weapon was mindless violence. They recognized no order except anarchy and chaos. The world they wanted to build would be created for them alone.

That was why Mack Bolan had chosen to stand between them and that damnable goal.

The tireless warrior was no gladiator. He had not been forced into this fight but had chosen it of his own free will. Nor was he kin to those ancient Romans who had crowded the stadiums to see the sands flow red; he took no pleasure in battle for its own sake, had no deranged need to wash his hands in his enemies gore.

It was far more simple than that. Mack Bolan knew that passive lip service to the desirability of a better world would never be enough. As the statesman Edmund Burke had written, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." It was as elemental as that. And Mack Bolan could no more do nothing than stop breathing.

He did not know how the long war would end, but of one thing he was certain: it would not end in surrender.

The only ultimate failure was the failure to act.

Sometimes a man had to be willing to die for what was right. And sometimes a man had to be willing to kill.

When Bolan had removed the dressing that Dr. Goldstein had applied to the bullet wound, it was spotted with fresh blood. Now the pain was a constant presence. He pushed it to the back of his mind and concentrated on the building across the Via del Gladiatori.

It was a modern nondescript cube, a six-story apartment building, not fancy but probably far from cheap, especially in this city where housing was perpetually at a premium.

Balconies hung from the front and the right side; their arrangement indicated there were four apartments to a floor.

It was around midnight, and traffic was light. The Via del Gladiatori was part of the belt highway that ringed Rome about six miles out from its center; this district was called the Esposizione Universale di Roma. A block north, the glass face of a slab like skyscraper rose to dominate the area; it was the headquarters of an international corporation.

Behind it flowed the Tiber River, and on the other side Bolan could make out the dome of the covered stadium that had been built for the 1960 Olympic Games.

Movement caught Bolan's eye.

The apartment he had been watching was on the fourth floor, toward the back. Light shone faintly beyond drawn curtains faced by a sliding glass door and opening on the balcony. Someone was moving through it.

Bolan set the zoom lens of the Litton Night Vision Pocket Scope to full 4It, and the upper half of a woman's figure swam into view. For a moment he felt a tightness across his chest that had nothing to do with the bullet wound, but then he saw that the woman looked nothing like Toby Ranger, even if the female Fed had taken on a disguise.

The woman framed in the NVD'S lens was short and very slim, almost scrawny; she looked like a good gust of wind would sweep her off the balcony. She had straight dark hair that fell over her shoulders, and a bored expression on her face. She wore a blousy khaki shirt and matching trousers. The woman took a last drag from a cigarette and flipped the butt over the balcony railing, leaning out to watch it wink down to the lawn below. Then she turned back to the sliding door. Before she went through it, Bolan got a good look at the little automatic pistol in the belt holster at the small of her back. It was a partial confirmation, and for now it would have to do.

Still, he would have to go in soft, for a couple of reasons. First, he was not about to bust into the apartment with guns blazing on nothing but Corey James's information. Second, there was a possibility that Toby Ranger actually was inside, and Bolan would want to know her position before opening any fire.

Third, this was civilian territory. If James's tip was good, Bolan could not risk the possibility of any innocent bystanders and the apartment building was full of them getting in the way of random lead. Anticipating the situation, he had rigged soft. He wore an open-collar shirt under a stylishly cut sports jacket, and aviator-style glasses with slightly tinted lenses. The play might depend on a bit of role camouflage, the role of an American Intelligence agent gone bad.

Except that what was really going to go bad was some Italian terrorists spring evening.

The inner door of the apartment building's entrance foyer was locked. On the wall to one side was a double-row of call buttons; the label on the one for apartment 4-D said "G. Feltrinelli." Bolan pushed four of the other buttons at random. After a few seconds, a man's voice said something angry in Italian. Bolan tried the buttons again. This time the door buzzer sounded, and Bolan pushed through. He took the elevator to the sixth floor and wedged a sand-filled ashtray in its door before taking the fire stairs back down two flights. The door to 4-D was at the end of the hall, offset maybe five feet from its neighbor opposite. That would provide slightly more privacy.

The bell was set into the middle of the door, and above it was the glass bead of a security peephole.

Bolan pressed the bell, then put his thumb over the viewer.

He heard the noise of someone approaching the door, then silence. He pressed the bell again, heard it chime inside.

"Who is that?" It was the woman, speaking in elegant Italian.

Bolan rang the bell a third time.

Inside, a man's voice said something in Italian. The woman answered, and the man's voice rose in annoyance.

Bolan rang the bell once more, and this time the door opened a crack. It was held by a security chain.

The woman was shorter than Bolan had first thought, no more than five feet. She turned her dark face up to him, and scowled.

"I don't know you," she muttered.

"You know my boss."

"This boss, he has a name?"

"You know his name, too," he said in English.

The woman looked Bolan over, seemed uncertain. Behind her the man snapped out something. The woman tried to shut the door, but Bolan's foot was already wedged in it.

"What you want?" the woman said.

"Information."

"Go away."

Bolan laughed politely. "We can play this nice and quiet, like pros," he said pleasantly, "or we can wake tip the neighbors. It's all the same to me. I don't have to live here."

The man said something else.

"Okay," the woman said quickly.

Bolan moved his foot, and the door shut, then reopened a second later.

The apartment's furnishings were as impersonal as the building's design. There was a convertible sofa, all metal and vinyl, a couple of matching chairs, a few severe-looking coffee tables. On the other side of a counter top there was a pantry, and down a short hallway, off of which Bolan figured bedrooms opened, was the open door of a bathroom. The guy was sitting in one of the chairs. He wore a sleeveless undershirt, and over it a shoulder holster containing a large pistol. On the table next to him was an ashtray full of butts and a water tumbler half full of red wine. In front of him some old movie was showing on a black-and-white television, the sound barely audible.

"Who else is here?" If Bolan could keep the initiative, he might be able to make his play without guns coming into it. His jacket hid a silenced 9mm Beretta Brigadier in shoulder leather, but he hoped to keep it there. The weaponry that neither of these two were making much effort to conceal was a pretty clear signal as to who they were, but that did not give Bolan license to punish them for their crimes, real or imagined. He was here for information, not blood.

"Just us." The woman held up two fingers, unsure of her English.

The guy said something, and followed it with a healthy slug of the wine. His hand was unsteady.

"He wants to know who you are," the woman said.

"I work for Frank Edwards. That's all you have to know."

The woman translated. The guy frowned.

"Listen, there was a woman here yesterday, with Edwards. Taller than you, well built. Right?"

The woman nodded.

"Did she leave with him?"

The woman nodded again.

"Where did they go?"

The guy in the chair interrupted with a rapid burst of Italian. The woman started to answer, but he cut her off. Bolan tried to look uninterested.

There was a magazine on one of the coffee tables, printed on cheap newsprint. It was in Italian, but on one side of the masthead was a hammer and sickle, and on the other a clenched fist raised in defiance. A photograph on the front page showed a fire-gutted automobile on a city street. Bolan leafed through it, feigning interest.

"He says you are not from Edwards," the woman said suddenly. She took a step back from Bolan. He says if you are from Edwards, you not have to ask where he is."

"We had a meet set up," Bolan said patiently. "Who do you think gave me this address? I got held up, and now I have to know where he's moved on to."

The guy snapped out something, then drained the rest of the wine.

"He wants to know why you come the way you come, why you do not use the... what do you call it, the recognition code."

"Look." Bolan let anger color his voice. "I don't have time to play your little revolutionary games. I want to know where the hell Edwards is, and I want to know now."

The guy might not have understood, but he heard the tone. He slammed down his empty glass, hard enough to shatter it. Blood oozed from his palm, but he didn't seem to notice.

The guy was drunk, and that made him unpredictably dangerous. Bolan had to put him down, or the play would go right to hell. He took a step toward the guy.

The guy snarled something at Bolan, shifted his weight in the chair, and went for his gun.

Bolan threw the magazine in the guy's face.

The guy clawed at it, but by the time he'd gotten clear Bolan's own pistol was in his hand and leveled.

Bolan did not want to shoot, nor did he want to get shot.

"Tell him to take it out with two fingers," Bolan said, not looking at the woman. "Tell him to drop it, and nobody gets hurt."

She never got it out.

The guy rolled out of the chair and came up on hands and knees, the pistol in his hand. He barked something, wine-red saliva spraying from his mouth, and drew a bead on Bolan.

The Beretta whispered, and a 9mm tumbler tore into the guy's right shoulder and tumbled him over on his side, the gun dropping from his nerveless fingers. He moaned once and lay still.

The woman's mouth formed a silent O, her eyes wild as a frightened doe's. Sure, she had just seen the difference between revolutionary theory and reality.

Reality was the red fluid leaking over the unconscious guy's dirty T-shirt.

The woman sunk into a chair, her eyes fixed on her partner's inert form. Bolan leaned over, grabbed her shoulders and shook her insistently.

He could not afford to lose her now.

"Where did they go? Where did Edwards and the woman go?"

The girl stared at him through her wide eyes and shook her head.

"Do you know where they went?"

She nodded like a child.

"Tell me," Bolan said, his voice as even as he could make it.

"Yes." But she did not go on.

Bolan shook her again, gently.

"Water," the woman said. "Please."

He had just turned on the tap in the pantry when the gunshot exploded behind him.

Bolan twisted and the Beretta came back into his hand. The guy on the floor was sitting up, tracking his gun onto Bolan.

Bolan fired first, the Beretta sounding a soft murmur of death. A third eye appeared in the middle of the guy's forehead, and the guy lay down on his back again. A semiliquid mess of red and white and gray began to flow into the carpet beneath the back of his head.

The woman was slumped back in the chair. A dark stain was spreading on the khaki shirt between her small breasts. Her eyes were still open wide, as if imprinted in death with that final image of her own partner killing her to keep her from talking.