Renegade Agent te-47

by Don Pendleton

  This one was unlocked. Bolan stepped out onto a balcony facing off the rear corner of the building.

  Below him, the back of the villa's grounds continued the Old World European theme. There was a circular formal garden, cut into fourths by paths that led to a gazebo at its center. The gazebo was surrounded by a shallow moat that served as a fish pond; delicately arched foot-bridges connected it with the paths.

  To maintain this landscaping, to pipe in the desalinated water-precious as wine in this country needed for irrigation would be fabulously expensive. It was yet another emblem of Edwards's success at his chosen profession. The profession of betrayal.

  Now, the bill for all his lovely things was going to come due. Bolan quick scanned the grounds, but there was no one out yet at this early hour. Above, at the corner of the house, was a junction box where electric and telephone wires, mostly hidden along their path by the upper branches of strategically planted trees, came into the villa.

  From his inside pocket Bolan took a foil-wrapped rectangle the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes. Inside was a block of plastique explosive into which a mechanical spring-wound clock mechanism had been pre-embedded. He made it up on top of the balcony railing, holding the electric conduit for balance, keeping his left arm as close to his injured side as possible. But when he tried to reach up to place the plastique in position, even though he used his right arm, the wound screamed white-hot pain in protest. His mobility was deteriorating rapidly. The right was supposed to be unaffected, but perhaps the muscle tear had worsened under all the activity. The arm was extended only three-quarters of full, but that seemed to be its limit.

  The junction box was six inches farther up.

  Clutching the conduit with the left, Bolan rose on his toes. That yielded another three inches-and another brilliant explosion of hurt. Sweat dappled his forehead. Bolan gritted his teeth and reached. He closed his eyes instinctively against the tears of pain, molding the little brick of explosive to the bottom of the junction box by touch. By the time he was able to drop the arm and get back down to the balcony itself, he was breathing as hard as if he had just run a five-minute mile.

  Inside the empty bedroom, he gave himself a few beats of closed-eyed rest, breathing deeply but with control, willing the pain to lessen. By then it was time to move out again.

  15

  When Bolan came through the door of the communications room, a white-coated balding man seated at a console spun around in his swivel chair, his eyes wide.

  He wasn't alone.

  There was a guard there, dressed like the others, but he was faster. His gun was already out and coming up.

  Bolan was faster still. The Beretta spoke a soft word, and blood bloomed on the front of the guy's blouse as he slammed back against the wall and slumped to the floor, suddenly unseeing eyes staring witlessly at his Executioner.

  "The personnel file," Bolan said in a flat steely voice. "I want it."

  The bald technician did not move. Saliva flicked his trembling lips. Bolan crossed the room, let the guy look into the blackness of the Beretta's silencer.

  "The names of the ones who have signed on with Edwards. Now."

  This one was by the ear, yet again, but it was a short-odds gamble. Bolan was counting on Edwards's training and his affinity for hi-tech methods.

  They would dictate that records be kept, and the logical place for keeping them was in Edwards's mainframe computer at the Wheelus base. And according to Toby, it was tied in by phone link to the villa.

  Bolan lay the muzzle against the guy's high bald forehead. "I... I..."

  "Do it," Bolan said softly.

  The guy spun around in his chair. It took him a moment to get his trembling fingers under control. He tapped at a keyboard, moaned as he made an error. The video display in front of him went blank as he started over. A moment later a line printer in the corner started to chatter out copy.

  Bolan went over and glanced at it as it came up.

  It was all there: names, code names, aliases, service histories, affiliations, contracts.

  Nearly two dozen agents, some still active, some terminated for a variety of real and contrived reasons.

  Among them they represented every major country, free and communist, in the world. Bolan ripped off the printout, folded it and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. It was not his function to interfere in the workings of the intelligence services of other nations, but he would pass the list along, for sure. A lot of directors were going to be unpleasantly surprised to find out that some of their key people had traded loyalty for avarice. But they'd also be damned relieved to find out who they were. The precarious world balance would be that much more stabilized.

  A lot of bad apples were going to be shaken out of the tree. Next to the line printer was a radio transceiver. Bolan put three 9mm slugs into its face.

  The balding technician was staring at him, gap mouthed.

  "Turn around," Bolan ordered.

  The guy looked at the dead room-guard. Most of his upper torso was now greasy with blood. The guy began to sob, as if he had seen a vision of his destiny revealed.

  "Turn around," Bolan said again.

  The blubbering guy slowly put his back to Bolan. Bolan hit him behind the ear, just hard enough to stop the blubbering.

  He paused only long enough to reassure himself that the guy's pulse and breathing were steady, before following the declining numbers out of the room.

  He did not want to be late for breakfast.

  16

  The waiter wheeling the serving cart looked up at Bolan in surprise. Then he saw the Beretta, and the surprise turned to fright. In front of the cart were the double doors to the dining room. Bolan flattened himself against the wall to one side, gestured to the waiter with the pistol.

  The waiter slid the doors to either side and rolled the cart inside. Bolan spun around behind him, tracked down the Beretta, and said, "You're first, Edwards." He was counting on the other man's documented coolness under fire. For the moment it worked.

  "Don't anyone move," Edwards said softly.

  In all there were five men around the table.

  Edwards sat at the head. Bolan recognized the others from Toby's description. The two on Edwards's right hand were senior agents of the Russian KGB. Across from them was a colonel in the Cuban Direccion General de Inteligencia, and a ranking officer of the extremist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In front of each was the rind from a crescent of melon. "Hands flat on the table," the Man from Ice ordered.

  "Do what he says," Edwards echoed. "None of you are in any danger in this house."

  They were free to believe that if they wished. In fact, Bolan did not consider any of them as targets, unless it was their lives or his. Sure, they were enemies of everything Bolan cherished, but no war had been declared. Though Bolan might rue the fact, he knew that along with the official sanction he had accepted came limitations, restraints.

  Five pairs of arms framed the melon plates.

  Though he contained it, Bolan's righteous anger gnawed at him. These four were not renegades, not in the sense that Edwards was.

  Possibly they were here on their own initiatives; but just as possibly they were present on direct sanction of the governments they represented. It was common and confirmed knowledge that the Soviet Union and its client states were semi-supporters of international terrorism. Edwards's scheme would undoubtedly accrue to their benefits as well, and perhaps even attract their covert support.

  "What do you want?" Edwards said calmly, in the same tone he might use to offer more coffee.

  Bolan gave him no response but the implacable cold stare on which he had the guy skewered.

  There were two other men in the room, besides the waiter, who had retreated to a corner to cower.

  Kenneth Briggs, Edwards's full-time bodycock, stood behind his boss, his hands up at shoulder level, palms out. A Slavic-featured guy in an ill-fitting suit that was too heavy for the climate stood b
ehind the two KGB agents.

  Bolan kept Briggs within the field of his peripheral vision. "Take the gun out and drop it," he told the guy. "Two fingers will do the job." The heavy .45 thudded on the thick carpet.

  Briggs was the dangerous one. Toby had managed to cozy up to the head bodycock once, get him talking. Before he had gone bad he had won nearly every decoration in the manual. And his two consecutive tours in Nam had been underjungle foliage, not a tin roof.

  Like Bolan, Briggs was a survivor.

  "Against the far wall," Bolan told the men at the table. "Your backs to me. Keep your hands high and make sure I can see them. Not you, Edwards."

  The four men were professionals ( pro enough to recognize walking death when they saw it. None of them made any abrupt moves as chairs slid away from the table.

  Except for Briggs.

  The big man picked the moment for its distraction, his right hand flashing behind his neck and out again, the movement smooth as an athlete.

  And if Bolan had in fact been distracted, it might have worked. Bolan twisted sideways, dropped to a crouch. There was no time for anything but a body shot. It was enough. The 9mm flesh-mangler caught Briggs in the middle of his flat stomach.

  Behind Bolan the razor-sharp six-inch blade of the throwing knife quivered in the rococo woodwork.

  Briggs sat down hard. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Then he seemed to shudder, and his eyes closed as he toppled over to sprawl across the carpet, no movement of breath disturbing his perfect stillness.

  Bolan tracked onto the Russian bodycock and snapped, "Go ahead. But do it real slow." The Russian's left hand came back out from beneath the lapel of his suit, gingerly holding a 9mm stockless Stechkin machine pistol. He let it drop.

  Frank Edwards looked thoughtfully at the backs of the five men lined up against the wall across the table from Bolan. "Let me make a suggestion." The man's tone was normal, conversational. But to Bolan it grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. "I know who you are," Edwards went on. "Not your name, of course, but names don't mean that much." His open face broadened in a faint smile. "I hear things. About one man, doing a lot of damage to some of the people I, ah, associate with. In Panama, Turkey, across the frontier in Algeria." Edwards shifted very slightly in his chair.

  Bolan's grip on the Beretta tightened. The trigger yielded to soft pressure.

  "Hold on," Edwards said, his voice rising almost imperceptibly. "I could use someone like you." Edwards drummed two fingers on his fine linen tablecloth. "It's a business, friend. It's nothing but a business."

  Bolan stared at the guy. Over the length of his warrior years, he had pitted himself against many men.

  All of the enemy shared certain demonic qualities: a rapacious capability for self-enrichment and co-aggrandizement; a callous and selfish disregard for the rights of anyone else; a slavish devotion to the subjugation and control of whoever dared stand in the way; and a willingness, even an eagerness, to adopt the most brutally violent expedients for attaining their objectives.

  The Mafioso was a clannish beast, mobbing up to form a group strong enough to become the oppressor, because deep in his subconsciously held inferiority he knew that if he did not, he would become the oppressed. The terrorist professed to be driven by a greater cause, but neglected to inform you that the cause was generally a totalitarian regime of pure horror.

  And then there was Frank Edwards.

  Here was a man who professed no ideology at all, who took pride in his aloofness from the affairs of men and the fact that he sold his goods and services to any comer with the necessary cash. So what if the M-16 he sold would be used by some Palestinian maniac to spray a stream of 5.56mm death into a roomful of the elderly inhabitants of a Jewish nursing home in Germany? What was it to Edwards if he provided information enabling the kidnapping ( and, after the ransom was paid, the execution ( of an American executive whose only "crime" was to be a successful businessman? Why concern himself if a letter-bomb from his inventory blew up in the hands of a conservative British member of parliament?

  Edwards claimed to be simply a private businessman serving a need. In fact, he was morally anesthetized, a scavenger who renounced by his actions any kinship with the rest of human society. He was a parasite, sucking at the blood that terror spilled.

  "Think about it, friend," Edwards said now. "Think about what I could do for you." The man was a traitor. He had turned his back on ideals long before. All the years he had worked for his country, he had been storing away the knowledge and skills he'd picked up, to use against that country. When he had learned enough, he'd discarded his homeland like a pail of overripe garbage.

  The treasonous bastard's very existence was an affront to every notion of human decency.

  "Power, wealth, you name it," Edwards offered. "Whatever you want."

  "I've got what I want," the voice of death pronounced. "I've got you."

  Yet the law could not touch Frank Edwards. The rules that man had made to ensure order and justice were essential to that balance that Bolan walked the tightrope to preserve. But like any compromise they were not perfect.

  That was why Mack Bolan had chosen not to judge.

  Long ago, he had chosen to act.

  "You see how it is," Frank Edwards smiled.

  Bolan's caress of the Beretta's trigger became an embrace. The 9mm brain-scrambler plowed into the bridge of Edwards's nose, and the guy's face seemed to fold inward upon itself, the eyes drawing into each other and descending further into a glistening wetness of bone and blood and brain. The chair catapulted over, and Edwards flipped backward limply like the straw man he was and lay facedown, his life-essence turned to gore pooling in the deep nap of the carpet.

  None of the five men at the wall moved a muscle.

  Bolan dug the ring out of his pocket, wrenched off the key to the communications room. He tossed it into the lap of the cowering waiter. "It fits one of the rooms upstairs." He tried to modulate his voice, but it came out a ragged rasp. "Use it." The waiter stared down at the key like it was a live grenade, and he was paralyzed.

  From toward the back of the house came the muffled explosion of the plastique. The lights of the chandelier blinked out. The junction box was gone.

  The doorman was halfway down the hall .45 in hand, when Bolan came out of the dining room.

  Bolan fired twice, and the doorman slid to the floor. Bolan stepped over him and out into the earlymorning sunshine. He divided the remaining rounds in the Beretta between the passenger-side windows of the two limousines, using the barrel to punch out the shattered glass.

  From a satchel under the front seat of the Jaguar he took two HE grenades. He started the sedan, eased up beside the limos just long enough to pull pins, deposit the armed cans.

  He was almost to the gate when the two vehicles went up in a swirling fountain of flame and twisted metal. The Berber guard's sullen expression turned to incredulity.

  Bolan slewed out onto the street and pointed the Jag away from there.

  17

  Bolan was actually slightly ahead of the numbers as he pulled the Jag to the side of the straight two-lane blacktop access road to Wheelus.

  In the scrub grass to either side lay the wreckage of the boxy Mercedes and the sleek Saab Turbo, along with the bodies of the men who had been taking Toby Ranger on her last long ride.

  He slid out from behind the wheel, opened the trunk, and began to rig for hard combat.

  The fashionable threads that had been part of the Sid Bryant role camouflage were doffed. Underneath the compress, the twin punctures in his shoulder were an angry red. Bolan squeezed on more antibiotic salve, rebandaged them.

  He could no longer move the left arm more than a few inches away from his side before the pain's protest overcame free will. From here on he was essentially a one-armed fighter; even pulling on the blacksuit became too difficult for the expenditure of the energy required. Bolan used the Fairbairon stiletto to cut off the suit's left sleeve, slitting down t
he left side to the waist. After that he was able to struggle into it. The customized Beretta 93Rather machine pistol nestled in leather on his right hip, primed for one-handed firing. The powerful little Uzi hung from a lanyard around his neck. Bolan could not afford to be without full-automatic fire capability, and though it cost him more pain, he found when he experimented that he could get his left arm out far enough to support the submachine gun's barrel. He seated an L-shaped double magazine in the well and charged the weapon. Extra speed-loaders, as well as an assortment of grenades and other small armament, went into the utility belt. In a specially designed case on his left hip were the Litton Night Vision Goggles.

  He was patting down the suit, rechecking and memorizing positions and placements, when the sound of approaching vehicles came from beyond the rise that hid him from the Wheelus gate. Bolan slid back inside the Jag. There were two of them, a 15-seater Mercedes minibus and a square-bodied Rover with two people up front, four passengers facing each other on the rear benches. Slumped in the Jag, Bolan caught glimpses of figures, faces. He saw mechanics coveralls white lab coats, well-worn American-style baseball caps. No one gave more than a passing glance at the Jag or the two wrecks in the field. The faces were etched with fear of what had just been left behind, and concentration on getting as far away as possible, as quickly as they could.

  These were the noncombatants, routed moments earlier by Toby, sent fleeing into the glare of the early morning sunshine. Judging from their expressions, roby had convinced them beyond doubt that they did not want to be caught in the firestorm about to come. They were the scientists, the mechanics, the hi-tech gurus — the wizards of the arcane lore that was at the heart of Edwards's grand scheme.

  Perhaps, Bolan contemplated, the world was becoming a technocracy, a society managed by the technical experts. Certainly the indications were there.

  They existed on the personal level, in the form of television systems allowing the viewer to talk back, or banks replaced by machines that swallowed or spewed out cash. It was just another way of hamstringing people's capability for direct action, by distancing them. Communication with or through a machine was not really communication; it was conveyance. The technocrats held far greater power than that, however.