"Your friends?" he asked.
She recognized the car and the people in it. She nodded, turning back to him to find his eyes on her.
"Will we... see each other again?" she asked.
He lifted a hand, touching a finger to her cheek. An intimate gesture, not unlike a lover's. "Maybe we'll be smuggled out of Russia together. For now, lady, it's goodbye."
"For now," she emphasized. "And for always. Mack, thank you for changing my life in Afghanistan and for saving my life in Moscow. God protect you."
"And you," he replied. "Now go, Katrina. Live large."
"First, kiss me," she said, touching his fingers where they caressed her face. "Kiss me as if it were the last time."
He smiled at that. "You're shameless."
"Kiss me."
He kissed her, touching his lips to hers just long enough for the exquisite tenderness of it to join between them.
There was no more to say.
No more time.
She retained her grip on the blanket wrapped tightly around her prison uniform and let herself out of the car.
* * *
0730 hours.
Bolan felt human again.
He pushed the cleaned plate away from him, put down the silverware, leaned back in his chair at Tanya Yesilov's kitchen table and emitted a lengthy, heartfelt sigh of contentment. He looked at the breathtaking blonde across the table from him. She wore a snappy tweed skirt and jacket ensemble that made her look like a model out of a high-fashion magazine.
"Thanks, Tanya. I needed that. The inner man has been satisfied."
He had driven directly to Tanya's after parting with Katrina but had not parked the Volvo in its designated parking space behind her building where he'd found it.
Groholski Street, where this lovely CIA "sleeper" maintained her living quarters, was a quiet residential street an hour since emptied of most respectable working Muscovites. He could not afford to take chances after what had gone down less than an hour before across town, after his bustout of Katrina from Lefortovo.
He had parked the Volvo a block away and had approached Tanya's apartment building from the opposite direction, feeling conspicuous walking down the snowy sidewalk, passing only an occasional woman with children on her way to market, a postman, a smattering of delivery men, but no one else.
He had reconnoitered the block as best he could without appearing to be idle, discerning no enemy presence, no men sitting in any of the cars parked along the curb, no one appearing to loiter about more than they should, as if on the lookout for him.
He had hurried along on foot through the back alley, letting himself in through the rear entrance of the building with one of the keys on the chain that Tanya had lent him to use her car.
He had carefully made his way up to her flat, and she had appeared very happy to see him. But she had not expressed this with the same physical contact as when he had been on his way from there to rescue Katrina.
Bolan thought again of the disparities between the cool sensuality of Tanya and the exuberant energy of Katrina and how he felt himself somehow drawn to them both.
Tanya cleared away the dishes from before him.
She had prepared a simple, delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and plenty of black coffee. Finished the meal, Bolan helped himself to another cup of coffee from the pot on the table.
Tanya crossed to the sink to rinse off the dishes with all the efficiency of a housewife about to send hubby and the seven kids off about their day's business. She turned when she had finished rinsing the dishes and looked at him across the table from where she stood, her back to the sink.
"It is a thirty-minute drive from here to Balashika. We should leave now."
He did not need to be told, but he had needed the brief respite from activity the past half hour had provided. He had not allowed himself to slow down since the dissident group, which had smuggled him to Moscow from the border, had left him to rendezvous with Katrina and her two unfortunate friends, Andrei and Vladimir.
He felt human again, yes, no small thanks to Tanya's hospitality and her womanly touch in the kitchen, reminding Bolan of the role she had played for her KGB bosses when he and Tanya had first encountered each other in Iran.
At that time the blonde had initially pretended to be Ellie Talbot, sassy American housewife stranded by circumstances in Teheran. He had learned something about her when they had taken fire together in Iran, and now he realized anew, with her cooking digesting comfortably in his stomach, what a tantalizing enigma the woman was.
She had touched his soul in Iran at a point in his life when he had started to think the loss of April, the loss of all those loved ones victimized along his bloody miles, had perhaps robbed him of that essential element in a normal man's makeup — feeling.
He and this CIA spy who called herself Tanya had been through a lot in a very short time in Teheran. And in Moscow, for that matter. He owed her.
It wasn't a flagging spirit that the scrubdown he had administered himself in her bathroom had revived — he didn't need that — but it had eased the muscular aches and it had recharged him.
He had not showered — the latex mask would not permit it — and Bolan had no wish to be caught naked in this city, this close to the showdown with archenemy Greb Strakhov.
There were many questions crowding his subconscious, and they now came into sharper focus. He found himself not sure what to think of the lovely across the table from him.
"It might be a good idea for you to sit this one out, Tanya," he said, setting down his empty coffee cup. "The trip to the Group Nord meeting, I mean. 'Sergei Fedorin' has enough authority to get in on his own."
She straightened, her beauty masked by surprise, concern. "Sit it out?" She repeated the colloquialism in Russian, the language they spoke to each other. "But my presence in Balashika is intended to furnish you with close-in support."
"It's your decision to make," he conceded. "There's going to be a lot of killing on that base within the next hour."
"I understand, of course."
"There'll be bullets flying. I wouldn't want you to catch one."
"My orders are to go to that complex with you," she responded adamantly. "You know what I can do — my capabilities. Why do you say these things to me?"
"This is the time to take out the KGB bosses," he reminded her. "Their power politics are a mess. The timing for a hit like this couldn't be better. You and your CIA bunch stand to gain plenty if I pull this one off."
She eyed him without blinking. "All the more reason for me to be along. There is something else, is it not so?"
"There's plenty. There's that flare gun of Strakhov's, the one Petrovsky told us about."
"What can that have to do with anything?"
"I don't know. That's just it. That flare gun is just another wrinkle in the fabric. A question without an answer, and it could mean a lot. I don't like questions without answers."
"There has to be more," she insisted. "You are not telling me everything, Mack."
"I'm telling you what I want to tell you. Your cover for the Company will be crucially jeopardized by what's about to happen at Balashika if it doesn't go down right."
"Would my position, my work, not be far more jeopardized were I not to put in my scheduled appearance at the Group Nord briefing? My regular job is to transcribe the minutes of the meeting. It's a chance I shall have to take, going there with you, and in any event, judging by what you accomplished at Lefortovo, I must say I feel safer at your side than I would anywhere else in Moscow!"
"What do you know about what happened at Lefortovo?" he asked quietly. "It hasn't made the radio or television news, has it?"
"Of course not, darling. This is Russia, remember? It never will 'make the news' as in America."
"Then how do you know what happened there?"
Her anger flared, her eye contact with him a glare. "You are serious, are you not?"
"Always. I ran into beefed-up se
curity at the prison. They didn't increase the guard around the whole place, just around the building where Katrina was being held. As if they expected me."
"Are you implying that I told them?"
"Tell me you didn't."
She crossed the kitchen and came to where he rose from his chair. She stood less than six inches from him, looking squarely into his eyes.
"I am on your side, Mack. You can believe that or not, but it is true."
"Then we'll say no more about it."
"Perhaps you have fought alone for too long," she said.
She took hold of his right hand between both of her hands. She raised his arm and placed the palm of his hand on her chest above the heart, so that he could feel her heartbeat while the edge of his hand could feel the rise of her firm left breast beneath her clothing.
"Tanya..."
"Have you forgotten that others know in their hearts the same determination and devotion to duty that drives you? There are others in this world, Mack, trying to do something about it. I am one of them. Do not let what you go through blind you to this. Too much sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."
He withdrew his hand. "I expected a lot of things on this mission," he told her. "Having Yeats quoted to me by a beautiful spy wasn't one of them."
She smiled at his recognition of the quote. "You see, Executioner, we are two of a kind. I will not stay behind when you leave to take on the enemy. I would have thought you knew this about me, if nothing else."
"Maybe I just had to be sure. Okay, Tanya, you're in. Let's do it."
"Let me get my coat."
A minute later she rejoined Bolan in the kitchen where she picked up her purse and followed him to the doorway of the apartment. He motioned her to step aside, unleathering the Beretta from its shoulder rig with his right hand, his left reaching for the door handle. He stood on the opposite side of Tanya across the doorway.
She read the caution in his eyes and unsnapped her purse, reaching inside to withdraw a Walther PPK. It remained concealed from casual view of anyone passing by in the hallway as Bolan opened the door, but he saw her index finger curved around the Walther's trigger just in case.
He held his Beretta ready but out of sight against the wall, holding his position for a moment before filling the doorway. He motioned Tanya to stay with him, peered up and down the corridor and, seeing no one, holstered the Beretta and motioned her on through.
They scurried down to the stairway at the far end of the corridor, descending to the back alley entrance, retracing Bolan's approach to the building of an hour earlier. They made it to the Volvo without encountering or detecting any surveillance of the apartment building or of the neighborhood. When they reached the Volvo, Bolan took the steering wheel and they drove away.
Little had changed during his brief R & R spent in the apartment of Tanya Yesilov. Sunshine had turned the snow to dirty slush. This, too, being plowed and scooped by the city's efficient street crews. Traffic had thinned some, the morning rush hour over earlier than it would have been in any American city.
Bolan had a pretty good idea of Moscow's layout. He navigated the Volvo onto Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street, south of the river, and drove east past the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Science.
The boulevards and secondary streets were no longer clogged with office workers scurrying to their jobs; now it hummed with the general hubbub of any large city. There were students and citizens enjoying their time off, and a few tourists moved about gawking at the city, but notably lacking were any signs of the destitute, the poverty stricken, the "street people" one would see in an American city and not, Bolan knew, because such problems did not exist in the Soviet Union.
Far from it.
Since Khrushchev's time Soviet leaders had been staking their legitimacy on promises to raise the standard of living. But endless shortages of consumer goods and housing, not to mention a decaying health care system, had brought about a severe loss of public faith and a decline in "civic morale." This state of affairs gave rise, Bolan was well aware, to statistics of rising corruption, crime and alcoholism, the latter being prevalent throughout Soviet society.
The streets of Moscow are clean of "street people," because anyone unemployed is considered a parasite of the state and sent to the work camps, so that the nation's capital can be held out to the West as a showplace glowing with the success of the Soviet system.
Before long the mishmash of sleek, modern and cuppolaed historical architecture gave way to suburban sprawl, which eventually yielded to open countryside. Bolan navigated the Volvo on course toward the Balashika complex fifteen kilometers east of the Moscow city limits.
No conversation passed between Bolan and Tanya during the drive, as if by mutual consent each desired to be alone with their thoughts this close to tackling the mission objective.
It was almost impossible for even Bolan to believe that it had been less than twenty-four hours since Hal Brognola had apprised him of the situation inside the KGB, of the scheme suggested through CIA channels by the woman who now sat beside him.
"Anton Petrovsky" was in place, and as Brognola had explained to Bolan, and which Bolan had told Tanya, the timing could not be better to mount this command strike at the hierarchy, the bosses, the nachalstvo, of the KGB.
It had brought Bolan back to Stony Man Farm and the grave, the memory, of April Rose. Then the flight to Helsinki and the dissident underground railway into the USSR. To Moscow, where just about everything about this mission started going to hell except for the rescue of Katrina.
Bolan took satisfaction in that, but it did not take away the sadness when he thought of the fate of two dissidents named Vladimir and Andrei, of Niktov, and most especially of a large-living woman named Zara who lived no more.
The objective lay dead ahead.
As did, maybe, answers to those questions without answers, like a flare gun that could mean anything and the enigma of a beautiful blonde named Tanya.
The only thing on his side was the fact that he was Sergei Fedorin of the Sixteenth Directorate, and the life mask he wore would prevent witnesses at Lefortovo from identifying Mack Bolan as the attacker who had freed Katrina.
And there was comfort in knowing that after this hit, if he survived, he was set up to be whisked out of Russia immediately upon his withdrawal from the KGB complex.
He steered the Volvo to within half a kilometer of the KGB complex, closing the distance across forest-bordered, lightly traveled secondary roads.
This was it.
Strakhov.
The KGB high command.
The mission.
This one's for you, April.
13
"Excuse me, but could either of you gentlemen spare a cigarette?" the President of the United States asked.
The two Secret Service men had maintained a discreet visible shadow of the Man while he had strolled deep in thought for the preceding thirty minutes.
The agents — the President knew their names: Jim Brewster and Larry Togota, men whose orders included laying down their lives for the safety of the Chief Executive if necessary — reacted with startled expressions from alert young faces that would not have blinked at anything, including weapons spitting death.
"Sir?" Brewster asked blankly.
The President had earned a well-known reputation as a militantly reformed ex-smoker.
Togota produced a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, extending them.
"There you are, sir."
"Thanks, Larry."
He took a cigarette and a light, proffered by the bodyguard of Japanese descent, then turned from them to continue his seemingly aimless stroll, thinking about Bolan and what he, the President of these United States, should do about the Executioner.
The early-evening air carried a nip that contrasted with the warmth of the preceding spring day. Traffic sounds carried from Pennsylvania Avenue, but except for that a sense of seclusion permeated the heavily foliaged walkways through and
near the Rose Garden.
He took two puffs of the cigarette and felt distaste pull his facial muscles at the unpleasant bite of tobacco irritating his throat, lungs and sinuses.
He extinguished the cigarette with the heel of his shoe and pocketed the butt for later disposal, wondering how he could ever have enjoyed the foul things for thirty years.
He also wondered why the human, one-on-one problems that came his way were always the ones to cause him to lose more sleep, get more upset stomachs, take the longest time to mentally wrestle with.
Like the Bolan problem.
Oh, he worried plenty about the state of this sad old world, he reminded himself.
There were the arms race, the Middle East, Latin America; every day brought new lines to the once distinguished campaign poster visage, giving the President a far more haggard appearance than he cared to admit.
He had the best minds in the country, in the western world, sharing the burden of those problems, though, aiding him with their collective expertise.
The one-on-ones could only be grappled with in the torment of his private soul.
Like the Bolan problem.
He had inherited Stony Man Farm and the Executioner from a previous administration, yet there was scant precedent for dealing with a man like Bolan because, quite simply, in this President's estimation, despite past differences there never had been a man like Bolan.
The Executioner was one of a kind and so was his loyalty to a government that had done nothing but complicate what the modern warrior was trying to do with skills, values and a sense of honor.
The President made his decision.
He turned to the executive mansion, the Secret Service men maintaining their distance, allowing the Man the privacy of his thoughts.
Brewster and Togota followed him into the White House. They drew up, taking their posts in the corridor outside the office.
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