Renegade Agent (7 page)

And in thirty seconds or less, that gunshot was going to bring a building full of people down on him. The numbers had just about run out. Bolan used the ones left to check out the rest of the apartment and came up empty.

From somewhere below on the fire stairs, Bolan heard excited voices and running footsteps. He went up instead. Between the fifth and sixth floors a man in a bathrobe grabbed his arm and said something in excited Italian. Bolan shook him off and continued on up.

The elevator was where he'd left it. The lobby was empty, although more agitated voices were audible from the open fire-stair door. Across the Via del Gladiatori Bolan stopped and lit a cigarette. The first police car was just pulling up.

The Italian cops had a pretty complete mug file of Red Brigades members. They would likely identify the two upstairs quickly, and after that the file would be closed. When someone did them the favor of killing off a couple of terrorists, the police were not about to waste a lot of time investigating.

The cigarette tasted stale, and Bolan ground it out. He had been close-damned close.

Now he was looking down a dead-end street that stopped in a brick wall.

Aaron Kurtzman punched a command into the computer terminal, and a line printer began chattering output at 80 characters per second. Kurtzman got up, absently brushing pipe ash from the front of his lab jacket, checked the first page, and smiled with satisfaction.

"It's all there," he said to the other two people in the Stony Man Farm War Room. "How Frederick Charon was going to juggle the inventory to replace the guidance-system prototype, how he was going to wash the money the Russians were supposed to pay him through Sir Philip Drummond, how he planned to peddle other items of interest." The Bear patted the terminal with his broad palm, as if it were a favorite pet. "Wonderful things, computers."

"What about the Frank Edwards angle, Aaron?" April Rose asked.

"Interesting and more involved than we figured at first. It turns out that when Frank Edwards was a legitimate CIA operative, he had professional contact with both Sir Philip and his Russian control, a guy named Tartikov, who was nominally a protocol officer at the Russian Embassy in London. Nothing unusual about that, actually. Our agents and the Soviets will collaborate once in a while, if it works to mutual advantage." Kurtzman fumbled his pipe out of his lab coat and began to stuff it with brown black tobacco. "Anyway, as it happened, Edwards found out, purely by chance, that Sir Philip was a mole. Don't forget, Edwards was an extremely competent agent and still is. Maybe Edwards was already thinking of selling out, but whatever, he kept the truth about Sir Philip under his hat. Then, when he went renegade, he used it to blackmail Sir Philip into siding with him."

"How did he use Sir Philip?"

"Primarily as an intelligence source. Having a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Defense in your pocket could be pretty handy for a guy like Edwards." Kurtzman patted absently at his pockets for matches, until April tossed a folder across the table to him. "Thanks. Okay, so Charon contacts the Russians. The Russians buy, and designate Sir Philip as the go-between. Then Sir Philip, recognizing a good deal when he sees one, tips off Edwards to Charon as a potential source of hi-tech gear-charging Edwards a hefty finder's fee, of course. Everyone is happy as larks."

"Did Edwards buy from Charon?"

Kurtzman nodded at the printout. "He put in one hell of an order — it's all right there, courtesy of the DonCo computer. Communications gear, sophisticated wiretaps and directional eavesdropping devices, computer hardware and software, weapons systems, cryptographics you name it. All of it state-of-the-art, all of it top secret, all of it restricted to military and official agency usage."

"But we were able to stop Charon before he shipped," April pointed out.

"Right," Kurtzman agreed. "But with the network Edwards has set up, he'll find someone to take Charon's place soon enough. The spokes are useful to us, but only as a way to find the hub. The way to kill this scheme once and for all is to stop Edwards."

"And that's where Mack comes in," April said.

"And Toby." The third person in the War Room lowered himself into the chair next to April, rubbed at the bridge of his nose with two fingers. Though it was early evening, local time, none of them had gotten much sleep of late, and all were weary.

He had been born Giuieppe Androsepitone, but to an international audience he was known as Tommy Anders, The Ethnician. He was one of the most popular stand-up comedians in the U.S. and Europe, deriving his humor from good-natured ribbing of people's ethnic prejudices and preconceptions.

He was also an undercover federal agent.

That was why he had been brought to the War Room.

Anders had been deceived, cruelly but necessarily.

For six months he had been made to believe that Toby Ranger, his partner all the way back to the days of Mack Bolan's War against the Mafia, had been cashiered for doubling.

"I'm not no ethnician," he said now — it was the signature line of his stand-up routine. "I knew the kid wasn't any kind of turncoat. Say, what kind of ethnic is Ranger, anyway? The kid probably had it fixed, just like everyone else. Probably it used to be Rangeropoulos, Rangarelli, something like that." It was a habit from childhood, one that had led to his cover profession; the wisecrack as a cover for nervousness and stress.

The only answer was from the line printer, spewing out the information that would damn Frederick Charon. After a while it stopped as well. None of them spoke after that. There was nothing to talk about. There was nothing to do at all.

Except wait.

Kurtzman had gone to his billet for tobacco, and April Rose had managed to doze off in her chair, so it was Tommy Anders who spotted the red light flashing on the phone that sat alone on a table in the comer of the War Room. He leaped from his chair and reached it before it was able to flash twice more. Two tape recorders in the wall rack automatically started rolling, their "record" lights shining.

"Go," Anders said.

There was a pause, and then a woman's voice tinged with surprise said, "Tommy?"

"Hell God," Anders exploded. "Are you all right, Toby?"

"Yes. Listen." Composure, lost momentarily, returned. "I don't know how much time I've got."

Kurtzman came in, reshuffling his pipe. When he saw Anders on that special phone, he froze, as if movement would break the precious connection.

April Rose had come awake and sat staring at Anders as well.

"Edwards and I are in Tripoli. Libya, not Lebanon." She rapped out an address. "It's coming down, the big push for his international "black" intel net. The Valais meet was just the prelim. This one is the real thing."

"How are you fixed?" Electronic scrambler hash filled her pause.

"I... I think I'm blown, Tommy. Edwards hasn't done anything yet, but I think he knows."

"Get out, Toby."

"Don't worry about me. There's still a few things to take care of."

"Mack..."

"You tell Captain Hard to stay clear, Tommy. I'll take care of myself."

"Listen..."

"Can't. The numbers are up." The line noise came up again, and then went dead.

Slow as a sleepwalker, Tommy Anders replaced the handset. He turned, looked blankly from April to Kurtzman. It was good to have Anders back in the War Room, by God, but there was nothing he could do now. Kurtzman moved past him and began to rewind the tapes.

Mack Bolan did not know how many of the enemy had died at his hand. Though the men he had sent to their just reward probably numbered in the thousands, he was interested in results, not statistics. The Executioner did not "notch his gun." He was not out to prove something, to reaffirm some fragile notion of manhood; nor were his campaigns half-cocked ego trips. The act of killing surely held no personal satisfaction for the man.

But yeah, make no mistake, men had died by his good right hand. He had faced the Armies of the Beast, the men who believed that if they could get in position to lord it over others they could assure their own well-being and prosperity.

Mack Bolan had shown them that all they assured were their own deaths. There was blood on Bolan's hands, but his psyche was free of self-reproach.

Whatever his guilty prey had suffered, they had inflicted ten times as greatly upon the innocent. These people against whom Bolan had pledged his life were nominally human beings, sure. But their morals and instincts were those of the savage. The dark warrior did not rue the fate of any man who had died at his hand. No ghosts came back to haunt his conscience.

And yet there had been casualties in the Bolan wars that the man grieved with all his being.

From the earliest days of the Mafia blitzes, there were men and women who recognized the value of the Executioner's radical methods. Some of these insisted on becoming active allies, on picking up the gun to stand on Mack Bolan's right hand.

Some of them had died.

There was the Death Squad, a ruthless unit comprised of nine of Bolan's old Vietnam comrades. Though disillusioned and demoralized by their countrymen's ambiguous rejection of them on their return, still they rallied around their one-time sergeant to once again put their lives on the line against that country's enemies. Seven of the nine in fact made that supreme sacrifice.

In New York, a lovely young woman named Evie Clifford gave shelter to a wounded Mack Bolan, and died a hideous tortured death at Mafia hands for her act of mercy. In New Jersey, a Vietnam vet named Bruno Tassily suffered the same horrific fate.

Most recently, in Minneapolis, a lovely sensitive Mexican-American woman named Toni, sister to Bolan's Able Team comrade Rosario Blancanales, was savagely assaulted by a deranged rapist. But Toni, if badly scarred emotionally, at least remained among the living.

So Mack Bolan had come to accept that his simple presence could constitute the greatest danger to others. His war must be one of solitude, because for the man against whom a worldwide criminal organization was pitted, to make a friend was to create a potential victim.

It was any warrior's greatest vulnerability.

To care for someone meant a chink in one's armor. The enemy could reach you through the one for whom you cared. Yet caring was something Bolan could not and would not give up, because caring, true caring on the personal level, was what distinguished the man from the vandals lined up against him. In the cosmic sense, the man had to care to fight.

And there were people who would fight along with him, whether he wished it or not.

People like Schwarz, Carl Lyons, Pol Blancanales — his Able Team, fellow fighters for the true freedoms. Like April Rose, who in a baptism in blood had come to his side. Like Leo Turrin, who had tiptoed closer to the edge of the abyss than any of them, operating undercover from the very belly of the Mafia monster. Like Phoenix Force, five men of action and success. These were the good and the strong, and until they triumphed over the barbarians, Bolan would fight on. Each was a symbol, and a constant reminder of why his endless mile had to be walked. These people were with Mack Bolan always, the memories of those who had passed beyond, the spirit of those who lived to battle on.

Among them was one pure and large woman named Toby Ranger.

Fate had decreed that the path of Toby Ranger first intersect that of Mack Bolan during the early days of the Mafia wars. A need to replenish his campaign treasury had brought the man already referred to by the mob as "that bastard Bolan" to the desert mecca of Las Vegas, where he planned to liberate a quarter of a million dollars in cash illegally skimmed from the resort's gaming tables.

What better way to finance the destruction of the criminal octopus than with the enemy's own dirty funds? But as so often happened, the relatively simple mission quickly turned complex. The original strike, on a Mafia mountain hardsite above Lake Mead, turned up an unexpected dividend: the rescue of Carl Lyons, then an undercover cop on loan to the Justice Department.

Lyons in turn led Bolan to Tommy Anders, not yet a federal agent, then playing his comedy act in a Vegas clubroom. Anders had refused to toe the mark for syndicate promoters and booking agents, and had paid for it with a beating and the promise of treatment far worse-until Mack Bolan took a hand.

Anders's back-up act was the Ranger Girls, a quartet of lovelies who took their name from their leader. The first time Bolan laid eyes on Toby Ranger he found it hard to pull them away. She was tall and blond and wide-eyed, and built like something out of a centerfold-the last part was apparent, since she wore peekaboo hot pants and a plunging see-through top that left little doubt about her vital statistics.

With her three partners-Georgette Chebleu, Smiley Dublin, and Sally Palmer, Toby and the Ranger Girls sang, danced, snapped out one-liners, and played fifteen different instruments. Toby Ranger was the kind of dazzling combination of looks and talent that made any man, Mack Bolan included, sit up and take notice. The Ranger Girls were good, damned good, and not only as show-biz performers.

Only at the tag end of his Vegas vendetta, when Toby risked her cover and her life to help him out of what would have otherwise been an impossible situation, did Bolan get an inkling of the truth about the four women: they were soldiers of the same side as he. Under the showgirl cover, each was a federal agent. In fact, the gorgeous brunette French Canadian, Georgette, was fated to give up her life to her adopted country, reduced to something less than human through the insane torture of Fat Sal, the Mafia turkey doctor.

Toby Ranger remained a special memory to Mack Bolan. In those days the blitzer was doubly a wanted man, with a Mafia price on his head, and a federal warrant sworn against him. From this isolation, Toby became someone to whom he could turn, with whom he could even merge, however briefly. She was an agent of reaffirmation, that his fight and his survival were worthwhile. She enabled him to see beyond himself into that cosmic sprawl of uncommon magic.

When the theater of operations moved on to Detroit, Toby reentered the nightfighter's life. At first wary adversary, then reluctant ally, she became ardent, passionate lover. The life Bolan had created for himself, a life of war everlasting, contained little space for R and R. But he did relent to the extent of allowing the lady Fed to share his life for the few all too short days it took to travel to New Orleans, the next hellground. And for those days, Mack Bolan — the complex man within the soldier — was entire and complete and, yeah, human once again.

They were not destined to come together again, not in that way.

Yet Toby Ranger would always be a special leaf in Mack Bolan's epic book of life. He had known the woman in various roles, had appreciated and respected her in each. Perhaps he had even been a bit in love with her. But Bolan knew with perfect clarity that there was no room for love in the knife— edge world of a living dead man.

To ignore that reality would be to deceive her-and himself as well.

They worked together again when the Executioner paid a visit to Hawaii, teaming with Lyons, Anders, and Smiley Dublin, all by that time SOG-ERS, agents of the Sensitive Operations Group. When they were done, a proposed Mafia-Red Chinese link had died aborning. The five of them again combined talents in Nashville to bust up the music city drug operation of one Nick Copa. Finally, Toby's deep-cover penetration of Mafioso Tom Santelli's Maryland headquarters played a crucial role in Bolan's blitz on Baltimore, on the penultimate day of his one-week mop-up campaign that had ended the war on the mob.

But neither Bolan nor Toby had attempted to rekindle the physical closeness they had shared in Detroit. Yeah, they had been lovers, and always would be lovers, in the largest sense of the word. And maybe someday, in the best of all possible worlds toward which both of them had pledged their fighting that world, maybe, they could be lovers in a personal sense as well.

But the future would see to itself. Mack Bolan was concerned only with the Now.

Now Toby Ranger was in the maw of the carnivore, and those rapacious jaws were about to clamp shut.

That she remained alive and entire was the merest hope. But it was hope he would not relinquish.

He would get to her in time. He would redeem the life now forfeit to terrorist whim.

And then he would unleash his own reign of terror, would leave the kingdom of the traitor Frank Edwards a scorched wasteland.