Chapter 1
Mack Bolan, a.k.a. the Executioner, rolled into the War Room at Stony Man Farm.
He wore blue denim jeans, a black turtleneck and black leather tennis shoes. Gathered around the room were Hal Brognola, Director of the Justice Department’s Special Operations Group, Barb Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, and Aaron the “Bear” Kurtzman, the head of the Farm’s cyber team. Brognola, shirt sleeves rolled up almost to his elbows, the top button of his dress shirt undone and his tie pulled loose, was seated at the head of the briefing table. Kurtzman sat to Brognola’s right, in his motorized wheelchair, a laptop computer open on the table in front of him. Price, her honey-blond hair pulled into a ponytail, saw Bolan first and flashed him a smile.
“Welcome back, Striker,” she said. “It’s good to have you back.”
Bolan nodded. “I have a feeling I won’t be here long. Am I right?”
“Very perceptive, Striker,” Brognola said. “As always, the choice is yours. But I think you’ll want a piece of the action on this, once you hear about it.”
The big Fed gestured at one of the high-backed chairs that ringed the table and Bolan settled into the nearest one. He set a brushed-steel travel mug filled with coffee on the table.
Kurtzman studied the cup for a couple of moments before giving Bolan a puzzled look.
“What’s that?”
“Coffee, last I checked.”
“I can see it’s coffee.”
“Then why ask?”
Kurtzman gestured with a nod at the drip coffeemaker that stood on a nearby counter.
“I made coffee.”
“I know.”
“You could have had some.”
“True.”
The creases in Kurtzman’s forehead deepened.
“But you didn’t want my coffee.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I just wanted this coffee, that’s all.”
“Because it’s better than mine.”
“I just wanted this coffee,” Bolan said. “That’s all.”
Brognola cleared his throat. “Seriously, I could listen to you clowns do this all day. But if you’ll indulge me.”
Kurtzman scowled. “This isn’t over,” he said, jabbing at the air between them with his forefinger.
Bolan nodded and gulped some coffee from his mug.
“Sorry to call you back in, Striker. Especially on the heels of another mission. But I wanted to give you first crack at this one.”
“I’m listening.”
Brognola pulled an unlit cigar from his mouth, set it in an ashtray.
“You ever heard of the Nightingale?”
“Assuming you don’t mean Florence or the bird, I’d have to say no.”
“You’re right. I don’t mean either of them. It’s a person, maybe several persons—we’ve not been able to nail it down. But there’s someone out there who’s been ripping people off for years, stealing money from their bank accounts.”
“White-collar cyber crime? Not exactly my area.”
“Agreed,” Brognola said. “But it’s not what you think. This—well, let’s assume it’s one person for the sake of argument—this individual targets a lot of the same people you do. Mobsters, terrorists, arms smugglers, even heads of corrupt states.”
“Steals their money?”
Brognola nodded. “Right from under their noses. He, she, whatever, is very good at this, too. Best we can tell the Nightingale steals pretty much with impunity.”
“From some very deserving people,” Bolan said. “Sorry, Hal, still trying to see how this applies to me.”
“Getting there, Striker. We don’t know what this individual does with the money. Rumor has it he or she has passed some of it along to crime victims, through a series of cutouts.”
“An altruistic thief,” Bolan said.
“Altruism or a big middle finger to her victims,” Brognola said, “we’re not really sure. Maybe both. Psychologists at Langley did a work-up and believe it’s as much as anything a way to salve this person’s guilt.”
“Guilt for?”
“For stealing,” Price answered.
“From scum,” Bolan countered. “Bad people.”
Price shrugged. “Good people, bad people. If you’re raised not to steal, you’re going to feel bad about it. Doesn’t matter if you know in your heart you’re doing the right thing. You’re still going to feel guilty.”
Bolan nodded his understanding. In his War Everlasting, he’d tried to maintain a few basic rules. Don’t harm police, even crooked ones. Don’t put innocent bystanders in harm’s way, even if it means letting a target escape. These rules had helped him maintain his humanity even when surrounded by hellfire and chaos. Though he’s killed countless times, he takes no joy from it.
“I can understand that,” he said.
“Thought you could,” Price replied.
“So, again, what does this have to do with me? And Stony Man Farm, for that matter?”
“We’re not one hundred percent sure ourselves. But we think the Nightingale may be in trouble,” Price said.
“Not that I’m unsympathetic,” Bolan said, “but there are a lot of people in the world who are in trouble.”
“We, that being the United States, have been tracking this person for a couple of years,” Brognola said, “ever since we confirmed their existence really. At first, we only caught small whiffs. Our intelligence agencies would hear a drug kingpin or a terrorist bitching because a bank account came up empty. The first few times, we wrote it off. We figured they were getting ripped off the old-fashioned way, either through an inside job or by a rival. The more analysts put the pieces together, though, the clearer it became that someone was picking their pockets.” A smile played on his lips. “And that someone was getting away with it.”
“How much did they get away with?”
Brognola shrugged. “It’s hard to say. Estimates run into the tens of millions of dollars. But they’re just that, estimates. A lot of the countries where the thefts occurred, well, the record keeping is for shit. And in Switzerland and some of the Caribbean countries? Not exactly bastions of transparency.”
Bolan looked at Kurtzman and cocked an eyebrow. “Since when has that stopped you?”
“I’m working on it,” Kurtzman said. “I’m working on it.”
The Executioner turned back to Price.
“You said this person—”
“Or persons,” she said.
“—or persons, could be in trouble. What makes you think that?”
Brognola pushed a thin stack of photos across the table to Bolan. The big American picked up the pile and studied the one on top. It was a picture of a man sprawled on the floor. His face was so pale from blood loss it seemed to glow. Dead eyes stared skyward. The flesh of his torso was shredded. The soldier glanced up at Brognola.
“Bear mauling?”
“Shotgun blast, smart-ass,” Brognola said. “Very close range. Gutted the stupid bastard.”
Nodding, Bolan peeled the photo from the stack, set it facedown on the table and studied the next one. The next photo depicted a man laying in a hallway, his chest torn open. He glanced up at Brognola.
“Shotgun?”
“Bravo, Columbo. These two were found in a London residence, which based on the little evidence left behind, we think may have most recently been inhabited by Nightingale.”
“Any IDs on them?”
“Russian, both of them,” Brognola said. “The names are in the case file. Frankly, they’re inconsequential. Couple of hired hands. Interpol had listed them as suspects in a couple of murders, one in France, a second in the Netherlands. Not a cou
ple of Boy Scouts. But they’re hardly supervillains.”
“But you don’t know who they’re working for?”
Brognola shook his head.
“I’ll get to that. But, in short, we believe it’s someone Nightingale stole from. From what we’ve been able to scrape together, they flew into London a couple of days ago. Bought their airline tickets under false names, with fake credit cards. Nothing in their luggage was of any use. If they hadn’t been busted for petty crimes along the way, it’s possible we never would have made them.”
“They leave anything behind?”
“Couple of cell phones. The London authorities are tracking them. We’ll see how far it takes them. Their weapons, obviously. Night-vision goggles. A rental car.”
“Most likely they didn’t fly into London with all that stuff,” Bolan said. “They must have had someone on the ground supplying them.”
“We thought of that,” Brognola said. “Solid theory. We don’t have the intel to back it up, though. But we have someone working that angle.”
“That someone is?”
“David McCarter.”
“McCarter’s in London? My apologies to the queen.”
Brognola grinned. “David was already over there, buying a Jaguar that had been buried under some tarps in a garage somewhere. We thought it might help having someone on the ground to act as—” Brognola made quotation marks with his fingers “—a liaison between MI5, Scotland Yard and the U.S.”
“God help us.”
“Yeah, we needed a diplomat, but we got McCarter. Imagine.”
“The Brits will appreciate his deft touch.”
“Look,” Brognola said, “here’s the upshot of all this. As you can imagine, the U.S. government finds itself in a unique position here. Officially, the government doesn’t condone vigilantes. We don’t condone stealing money from people, even if they’re criminals and terrorists, unless it’s part of a sanctioned intelligence operation.”
“There’s a ‘but’ coming.”
Brognola downed some coffee and nodded. “Absolutely. What this person has accomplished is pretty damn amazing. As best we know, she or he has no governments backing her.”
“Which means no government-imposed constraints.”
“As I said, what Nightingale has been able to accomplish is nothing short of amazing,” Brognola said. “This person has acquired account numbers and pieced together complex financial networks. He or she knows lots of things, and we want to know how.”
Bolan’s eyes narrowed and he leaned forward. “Look, if you want someone to plug a leak.”
“Hardly,” Brognola replied, shaking his head vigorously. “Frankly, we want to recruit this person. Nightingale could fill in gaps in our knowledge. There’s a place for those skills.”
“Off the books, of course,” Price interjected. “But we can offer full legal protection, a new identity, the works.”
“What leads do we have?” Bolan asked.
Kurtzman gestured at the stack of photos in Bolan’s hand.
“Look through those,” he said, “stop when you find a picture of a white-haired guy.”
Bolan found a close-up of a round-faced man with pink cheeks, pale green eyes and white hair trimmed down to stubble. He studied the photo for a couple of seconds, then tossed it, face up, on the tabletop. “This the guy?”
“That’d be him,” Kurtzman said. “His name is Jonathan Salisbury. He’s British by birth, but moved to the United States in the early 1970s and eventually became a citizen. Did a lot of computer work for the Pentagon, all highly classified. Guy was a genius.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead,” Kurtzman said. “Poor bastard asphyxiated himself in a garage. Neighbors found him in the car while it still was running. Hadn’t been dead long. I have a file I’ll give you with some clips about him. It was big news in the Beltway when he died.”
“I’ve never heard of him. He famous in computer circles?”
“More like infamous,” Kurtzman said. “Technically, he was in deep shit with the Feds.”
Bolan sipped his coffee. “Isn’t that like being a little pregnant?”
“I knew the guy,” Kurtzman said. “We weren’t friends, but I knew him. I knew his work. To say he was brilliant would be an understatement. His depth of knowledge when it came to computers and cybersecurity was nearly unmatched.”
“Except by you.”
“There are maybe three dozen people with this guy’s chops. Me and thirty-five others.” Kurtzman allowed himself a grin, though it faded almost immediately. “That said, the guy was branded a traitor.”
“Because?”
“He tapped into the Defense Intelligence Agency’s computers, dug up some records on a Russian guy, Mikhail Yezhov, and passed it along.”
“Passed it along to whom?”
Kurtzman shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure,” he said.
“That’s a pretty big deal.”
“Sure,” Kurtzman said. “I’m not saying otherwise. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But there were extenuating circumstances. His wife was killed. Not by Yezhov, but a couple of his shooters. At least that was the working theory of the Russian investigators. Not a far-fetched theory, either. But the Russians didn’t want to go after Yezhov, so they let the whole thing go. Salisbury’s wife was a criminal justice professor and taught at Georgetown University. She’d written a couple of papers on Yezhov’s network and then she turned up dead.”
“The Justice Department tried to get the Russians off the dime on this thing,” Brognola added, “but they wouldn’t budge. Apparently, Yezhov rates top-level protection in his country.”
“You think Salisbury got pissed off enough to steal information?” Bolan asked.
“And pass it along to Nightingale? Yeah, I do. That’s the theory. And our two dead friends have links to Yezhov, too.”
“Clearly,” Brognola said, “we think Salisbury killed himself. The forensic evidence says so. His coworkers and friends confirmed that he was despondent after his wife’s murder. That he couldn’t at least get a little closure likely only made things worse.”
“So he takes matters into his own hands,” Bolan said. “He gets caught and loses his security clearance and his reputation. And kills himself.”
“Right,” Brognola said.
“A month before the ceiling fell in on the guy, he took a trip to London,” Kurtzman said. “We’re assuming he took the intelligence he stole to England and passed it to someone else.”
“But we don’t know who for sure?” Bolan asked.
“No,” Kurtzman said, “we don’t. But we are hedging our bets that it was Nightingale. Yezhov likely sent these two thugs out to exact a little revenge, but they obviously underestimated Nightingale’s skill.”
“Will you take the assignment, Striker?” Brognola asked.
“What if I find Nightingale and he or she tells me to go to hell?”
“Then they do,” Brognola said. “Technically, the Nightingale is a fugitive. But you’re not a cop. Besides, I am guessing you have no interest in strong-arming someone just because Washington wants a chat with them.”
“Good guess.”
“You can say no,” Brognola said.
Bolan nodded. He’d always kept an arm’s-length relationship with the federal government and could turn down assignments that came his way. But his gut told him this one was important. He agreed to take it.
Chapter 2
Mikhail Yezhov wanted to smash something.
The man who stood before him, armpits of his shirt darkened with perspiration, breathing audible, seemed to sense it. Yezhov, fists clenched, a deep scarlet coloring his neck, circled the man, staring at him. The occasional flinch, or flicker of fear in the man’s eye
s, caused a warm sense of satisfaction to well up inside Yezhov.
Decked out in a five-thousand-dollar suit, surrounded by shelves of leather-bound books, and mahogany wood-paneled walls, Yezhov looked like a Wall Street investment banker or a shipping magnate. He was neither. Though he had once posed as a stockbroker in London as an agent with Soviet intelligence during the waning days of the Cold War. But his background wasn’t in business; he’d been a Soviet soldier and a military intelligence officer during his brief career. Once the Communist state went belly up, he’d moved into the private sector, where he could use his talents as a spy to whip up mayhem for his clients against their competitors. He always guaranteed results and, on the rare occasions when he couldn’t deliver, it made him see red.
Like the present.
Like Yezhov, the man who stood before him was Russian. That was where the similarities ended as far as Yezhov was concerned. This foot soldier—was his name Josef or Dmitri?—had a slight frame compared to Yezhov’s bulk, big eyes that made him look surprised even in the calmest moments and acne that would embarrass a fourteen-year-old boy. His suit jacket hung limply from his narrow shoulders and beads of sweat had formed on his upper lip. All this only intensified his air of akwardness, in Yezhov’s opinion. When the man swallowed, his Adam’s apple popped audibly in the deathly quiet room.
Yezhov moved in front of the man, stopped circling. He pinned the guy under his gaze.
“What now?”
“Our sources in Scotland Yard said they identified the two bodies,” the man said.
“Hardly a surprise.”
“Sir?”
“You hired known criminals to kill this woman. Neither was high-profile, but both had criminal records. It’s no surprise the police identified them. It was only a matter of time.”
The man opened his mouth to protest, apparently thought better of it, and slammed his jaw shut.
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