by Nick Carter
Nick stared at the burning bodies of the two men, and hatred coursed through every bone in his body — hatred for any system that could drive men to run, and stop them with such finality. Hatred for any man who could be a party to such a system. Hatred for the Dealer, the man who set it up.
The Death Dealer.
Cursing under his breath, Nick raised himself and made for the doors of the church. He hit them and flew through just as a barrage of bullets went to work on the stone facing of the entry.
* * *
"Aim higher, idiots! We are trying to put on a good show, not decimate the cast!"
The Dealer clicked off the button on the walkie-talkie and thrust it into Yuri's lap. His fingers came back to pinch at the bridge of his nose as he fought to regain control of his emotions.
Dogs, he thought, East German dogs! Tear down the bloody wall and let them all run to the West. It would have to be the most collectively destructive act ever perpetrated by the Eastern Alliance.
With a sigh, his fingers dropped and his eyes returned to the church entry. "He is in?" he murmured.
"Da," came the sniffled response.
"Then let us move in and complete the charade. Order the idiots to file through the breech. But no one, and I mean no one, is to fire unless I order it. Make that very clear, Yuri."
The Dealer pushed open the door and moved from the car. Behind came his associate, mimicking the orders into the two-way radio. The Dealer moved quickly, racing through the torn fencing and stopping only to stare at the twin fires that used to be men.
To the degree that they were dead, the mission had not been a disaster. The Dealer could even find room for some self-admiration. The fire launchers that had killed them were his own invention, one of the myriad ideas that had helped him rise on the competitive ladder of the KGB infrastructure. Lessen the explosive charges, he had told them. Not enough impact to breach the walls, but more than enough to blow up fragile human bodies. And fire, comrades; let them feel the terror of fire.
The rumbling of nearby troops brought him back from his reverie. He turned and gestured, guiding half the men around the far side of the building and the other half down the near side. He let the second group sprint past him. All of them moved like specters through the thick fog, with the Dealer close behind.
The soldiers cleared the side of the building and came up short. Rifles flew to their shoulders, crosshairs trained on something center and relatively high up. The Dealer turned the corner and saw what it was. High atop the last twelve-foot barrier, his arms stretched back to help the young artist, was Mercury himself.
With the sound of rifle bolts being thrown into readiness, the action on the wall came to a freeze.
"Halt!" came the Dealer's voice. "Do not fire!"
The Dealer gave a quick scan of the area below the wall. No Jacek! That could only mean that he was already over the wall. The Dealer could almost hear the young artist demanding that his loving friend be the first to climb. Such were the uses of friendship.
"Hit the floods!" the Dealer cried, his voice noticeably lower now, almost a growling rasp.
In an instant, the area around the figures on the wall was turned from night into day by powerful lights. The young artist dangled, his wrists in Mercury's grasp.
The Dealer's grip tightened on the butt of the Walther. Now, he thought, to play out the last act.
Jacek had demanded the boy's safety. It was part of the price for years of future dedication. It was a price that had to be met. As for Mercury, he, too, was needed on the other side. Needed to get Jacek to America, to tell of the narrow escape, to plant the mole where he would blossom and grow in the years ahead.
The Dealer pushed his way between two of the soldiers and marched up to the wall. Mercury responded with devious subtlety. His right hand slipped from the boy's wrist; in it, a pistol. The muzzle came to rest on what he could see of the Dealer's forehead. The Dealer merely ignored it, tucking his own pistol into his coat as he came to a halt in the shadow beneath the dangling man.
The Dealer did nothing more dramatic than grab the young man's leg, his eyes coming up to meet the burning gaze of the enemy agent. "The fourth one is on the other side, yes?"
Mercury held the other man's gaze and nodded.
"Then you have a portion of the victory tonight." said the Dealer. "That, and your life. Take both and go." Mercury did not move. "The boy will not be shot. You have my word on it. He will be spared."
"On whose authority," came the clipped reply.
"You have the word of the Dealer."
Mercury's head moved slowly from side to side. "No. Not the Dealer. The Death Dealer!"
A faint sparkle of surprise gleamed in the Russian's eyes. The Death Dealer! It had a ring to it, a sound that brought a certain joy to the man at the base of the wall. "Yes," he muttered. "I suppose so. To some. But not to this one. That I can promise you."
Nick narrowed his eyes into slits. No matter how he concentrated his stare, he couldn't evade the glare of the searchlights. And even if he could, he doubted that he would be able to see much more of the Dealer's face than a flash of beard and the glowing coals of his eyes.
Nick debated a moment longer and then released his grip on the young man's wrist. The boy slid to the ground, the Dealer's arm snaking across his shoulder in a gesture that was faintly paternal. His charge firmly in hand, the Dealer's eyes returned to Nick.
"Till the next time, my friend," he said.
"Till the next time," echoed Nick, backing himself off the wall and dropping down to safety.
* * *
The dream was quite vivid. The young artist was hanging, cold hands holding him from above, cold eyes grabbing at him from below. There were rumbling sounds, like talking, but none of it intelligible. All the dreamer knew was that the sounds held his fate in the balance.
And then the rumbling stopped and the hands were gone, and he was falling — miles and miles of falling. He waited for the cold eyes to catch him, but they never did. He looked down, ready to greet his tormentor, but the eyes were gone.
Instead, there was only infinite nothingness.
Stefan screamed out in his sleep, doing his utmost to rouse himself in the bed. He blinked his eyes in a habitual effort to clear them, but there was nothing to clear them for. Around him was nothing but inky blackness, as though the dream had risen with him.
He lifted his hand and stuck it in front of his eyes. Nothing. At best, a faint image of fingers moving, an image that could owe as much to imagination as it could to any fragments of reflected light.
Then Stefan sighed.
Sensory deprivation, he thought. The first thing they tell you of. If you are caught, they warned, they will interrogate. They will try to find out names and places. But first, they will break you down, destroy your will to resist. You will spend hours, days, in the black box. There will be no sounds, nothing to see, nothing to touch or smell. Just the interminable blackness that will tear at your soul.
Stefan let his hand drop. He was ready for it — ready for them. He would fight them all, spurred on by the knowledge that Jacek, at least, had made it. "Have a beer for me," he whispered into the darkness. "'And a woman too, my friend."
"No doubt he is doing that right now."
The voice startled Stefan. His head spun in the direction from which it had come, his hands tightening on the bedclothes beneath him. It was a familiar voice, the voice of betrayal. Somewhere in the blackness, maybe only a few feet away, was the Dealer.
Stefan moved with deliberateness. It was pitch black in the room, but it was the same for both men. There was a score to settle. Stefan leaped toward the spot from which the voice had come, his hands outstretched to grip the throat of the man who peddled death.
His only reward was a stabbing pain in the belly as his enemy sunk a fist deep into his midsection. Stefan staggered, but refused to crumple. He stood a moment, fighting for breath, listening for the slightest rustle that would tell hi
m where the Dealer had moved. He heard a voice instead.
"You are angry. You should not be. You are alive when you could be dead. That should carry some gratitude, I would think."
Stefan moved again, rushing at the voice, determined to reach his tormentor. But again his only reward was pain, another crippling blow to the belly that no amount of determination could shake off. And then a second blow, the sharp contact of a cupped hand slapped against his ear.
Stefan went down, bowing to his knees, his brain screaming from the pain inside his head. There were a few seconds as the ringing in his ears settled, seconds in which he wondered at the man's ability to function in the dark. But questions subsided with the pain. What was left was hatred.
"Turn on the lights," Stefan hissed. "Meet me as an equal. I will kill you, I swear it. Kill you with my bare hands."
There was only a mirthless chuckle for response. "But there are lights. Light is everywhere. Surely you know that."
Behind the words came a sound, the familiar rustle of curtains opening. Stefan rose and followed the sound, stopping only when his hands collided with glass. He moved them around, feeling the smooth surface, testing it, absorbing with growing horror the sensation of heat radiating off the panes.
And the heat followed him, pursuing him relentlessly as he fell to his knees, tears brimming in his eyes.
The only coldness in that room was the voice of the Dealer.
"You see, my boy — sunlight. Rich, golden sunlight." There was a moment's pause as the voice grew quieter. "But then you can't see, can you. No, you can't. Nor will you ever — ever again."
Chapter One
SPRING 1983
THE AUSTRIAN-CZECHOSLOVAK FRONTIER
Ghosts! Nick mused. All around me, ghosts.
He gave a slight shiver and ran the hood up on his assault parka. It was less a concession to the eerie twists of thought than it was to the very earthly spring winds that gusted down the mountain, breezes that carried strong remembrances of their origin in the snow-capped peaks behind.
The landscape possessed its own ghostly ambience; there was no denying that. Behind Nick were the Sumava Mountains, mottled in shadow and moonlight. Around him, the thick, dark carpet of spruce and larch that constituted the Bohemian Forest. Below, the Vltava River, arching its way toward the distant capital of Prague, its waters churning beneath the volume of spring thaw, the first faint tendrils of fog drifting out to engulf the landscape.
It was an environment that invited fantasy. Bohemia had authored more than its share of childhood terrors. It was a land peopled by werewolves and vampires and castles that echoed with the sound of human screaming.
But that was the stuff of cinema.
Nick Carter could ignore those flights of imagination. He was, after all, an agent — a Killmaster. And there were rituals that accompanied any mission, rituals designed to prepare, and divert: the occasional surveillance of the terrain, guaranteeing one's aloneness; the methodical checks on the Skorpion 61 submachine gun; the retracing in one's mind of the escape route back to the safety of Austria. All these, designed to keep the mission in clear focus.
But ghosts are persistent entities, especially when divorced from landscape and shadow. The ghosts that haunted Nick were his own, born of memory and history. He glanced at his watch, noting the lateness. Then he returned his eyes to the trail and clearing below. In his mind, the spectral haunting of history, the curse of a photographic memory.
You are restive, Herr Mercury. We have been running our little railroad for many years now — trust us. You cannot run on schedules, ja? You will learn… you will learn… you will learn.
Words from a dead man. Words from a defection that ended in bitter disappointment — a defection not unlike the one that Nick was now awaiting. There were differences, to be sure. Differences of venue, of intent, of accumulated experience. But there were similarities, too, one very big one in particular. And it was this that teased at the corners of Nick's imagination.
As defections go, this one was a motley array. Seven Poles were making their bid for freedom, running from the iron hand of martial law. Four were complete unknowns, and two possessed only moderate acclaim: poets whose concepts were not nearly as irritating to the Russians as was their verse. All in all, a routine transit operation that even the clowns at Central Intelligence could manage. Hardly a job for AXE.
No, it was the one remaining who had cried out for Nick's attendance, a ghostly voice pleading for Mercury to attend him. It was a cry that implicated other apparitions. It hinted of information, of possibilities, of elimination.
It spoke of the Death Dealer.
And Nick responded, dusting off the ancient alias of Mercury, and wending his way into the Bohemian heartland. And he was waiting, praying that one living ghost could indeed point a bony finger at the other. There was a debt to settle, a thirteen-year-old promise to be fulfilled. The Death Dealer was already dead; he just needed Nick Carter to escort him to the grave.
From off in the distance came a fitting counterpoint to Nick's reveries. It was the cry, made hollow by the vast expanse of valley, of a night hawk. Nick sat up, staring at a moon growing ever more hazy, hoping to glimpse the bird's distant silhouette. He spotted it, circling in the air, its predatory wings outstretched — a death dealer by nature.
Then he looked back down the trail, searching the distance for the faintest hint of headlights. There would be no flatbed truck this time, no squabbling of chickens. Just a minibus filled with frightened men. And there would be no disappointments. Spotting no lights, Nick shifted his gaze to the terrain, assuring himself once more of his solitude. It was a rendezvous well chosen, devoid of humanity and government scrutiny.
Content, Nick settled back into his niche, his tiny corner of the shadowed forest, and let his thoughts wander for a brief moment. He tried to imagine what his ghostly summoner must look like today. Memory offered an image blurred somewhat by the circumstances of their previous meeting. There was the boyish smile laden with optimism and the shock of sandy hair. There were the delicate fingers, painter's fingers, jamming home clips with a flourish, and hands that clung deftly and tenaciously to his own. There was youth, there was bravado, and finally, there was resignation.
Those were the things that Nick recalled the most about Stefan Borczak. But he had spent too many years in the field to fool himself into thinking that those were the features he would shortly confront. What had been a boy in his twenties, only thirteen years ago, would now be a man far older in appearance. They all were, these runaways from oppression. The Dealer had promised a life, not a lifetime. The Soviet system could take the gift of life and make it a sentence far crueler than its alternative.
No, Nick thought, the man I greet shortly will be a far cry from the boy I dropped at the wall. A ghost, no more.
That night came back to him, and with it, another image. The Dealer, the man he had rechristened in the gloom of the red-bricked church. And, photographic memory or not, it was an image that refused to crystallize with any clarity. Other details were far clearer the wail of sirens, the clatter of rifles readied and pointed in his direction, the flickering glow of firelight playing up and down the Dealer's side; those images were very clear.
But the face had eluded him, burying itself in the shadow of the hat, the shadow of the church, the shadow of the wall. All, that is, but the eyes. Those had somehow found their own light, radiating from the depths of shadow to print themselves forever in Nick's memory. It was the hateful light of those eyes, cold and possessive, that Nick was committed to seeing extinguished.
And it was not a commitment built on one night alone. In thirteen years, there had been other encounters. The night at the wall had been a minor victory for Nick. The scientists had been lost, but the network had been exposed. The Dealer found himself out of the freedom market.
But the Dealer was a climber of the first order. He had apparently taken Nick's christening to heart, making the switch from ag
ent to assassin with ease. The Death Dealer became more than just an accusation, it became a reality, a meteoric career built on the bones of any who incurred the wrath, or envy, of the Soviet system. It was a ghostly reality that had returned to haunt Nick more than once.
Six times, to be exact. Four had resulted in victories for the Dealer, two in victories for Nick. And the last time? A draw, for lack of a better word: two lives retained, but at the cost of very sensitive information. Four disappointments, two celebrations, and one near confrontation that almost brought the man within Nick's sights.
"Next time," Nick muttered, "there will be no 'almost. I'll have you. I'll put out those lights forever."
Loud squawking from the night hawk population drew his attention skyward. He craned his neck, again seeking out the moon, again seeking silhouettes in the thickening fog. This time the hawks were much closer, and many more strong in numbers. In spite of the hazy overgrowth, Nick saw what he needed. There were five birds circling in a wild dance.
But at no point in the parade of shadows that passed through the lunar spotlight was there even the dimmest hint of quarry. No rabbits gripped in the viselike press of talons, no squirrels lifting off the forest floor in feathered balloons. Just movement, and confusion, and the clarion cry of warning.
Nick was no longer alone.
He jerked up in place, his eyes flying back down the landscape below. In the distance he could make out the faintest glow of headlights. It was scarcely a glimmer, an aura transmitted through the reflective curtain of fog, far too distant to stir the local avian population into such disturbance.
No, it was the foreground that held the answer, and Nick searched with eyes as deadly as any hawk's. It took a second or two, but slowly a picture began to emerge, a picture which caused grave concern. Dimly at first, and then with nearing accuracy, Nick could see a small column of Czech soldiers picking its way through the night. They cleared the forest's edge, about two dozen of them, and then hustled their way to the clearing below. It was here that they halted, one man stepping away to note the distant glow of headlights.
