“That was an interesting sensation,” Bolan said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have any distilled water or saline solution right here for you,” Hassan said. “I made do with what I could.”
“You did fine,” Bolan said. “Now I don’t feel like an ashtray was dumped inside my skull.”
He looked at the cup of water, mucus and rinsed-out ash. He coughed and spit into the toilet bowl. Just as his skull felt better, his throat also improved with the expulsion of more crusty ash and mucus.
Hassan took another sweep of his eyes. “Still no sign of concussion.”
She handed him another plastic cup, the bottom filled with mouthwash. “Rinse.”
Bolan followed her instructions. He was glad for the stinging power cleaning of his mouth in the wake of the smoke and the sinus discharge. Hassan leaned in and took a whiff of him.
“Nice and clean,” she pronounced.
Bolan grinned. “Tired.”
“You’re right. You need some rest,” she said. “Doctor’s orders.”
She took him by the hand and led him to the motel room bed. She pulled aside the covers and he stretched out on the mattress. His dark-tanned skin was in sharp contrast to the white linens he laid upon. Hassan’s lush lips turned up into a Mona Lisa smile as she admired the length of his form. He watched quietly as her fingers went to her blouse, opening buttons slowly, for his appreciation as much as she appreciated his form.
Unlike the Persians of Iran and subcontinental Pakistan, she wasn’t olive hued, but had a skin tone that nearly matched his lightly bronzed skin. As she exposed more of her cleavage, he could tell that this wasn’t a tan. He didn’t think she took the time to sunbathe nearly nude. Her blouse spilled to the floor as she released it from an outstretched arm. Her other hand slid behind her back and the bra that held her tautly hung loose on her shoulders.
No, she didn’t sunbathe, unless she spent time on the roof of her apartment building soaking in the rays, the delightful curves of her bosom evenly shaded. She stepped so that she was backlit by the bathroom, then flipped the switch and became a silhouette. Hassan wriggled her hips as she dug her thumbs into the waistline of her slacks. The rhythm as she slid out of her pants drew Bolan’s interest. In the light reflected from the wall across from the bathroom door, he could see her smile grow in proportion to his response to her shimmy.
“The doctor will see you now,” she whispered, her voice husky. “Tell me where it hurts, and I’ll kiss and make it all better.”
Bolan didn’t hurt where he said, but her ministrations certainly did make him feel much better...
* * *
The Executioner was up, recharged by heated sex and a catnap afterward.
Nolan Malone awaited. So he checked in on the survivor of the fight at the abandoned factory. Bolan had left the Alabaman hired gun blindfolded and gagged securely, as well as restrained with zip-ties. Noise-canceling headphones, hooked up to a phone playing hours of microwave buzzing, completed Malone’s utter isolation.
Bolan ripped off the duct tape and yanked the gag from inside the prisoner’s mouth.
“You...fucking...”
Bolan pulled off the headphones. “Be careful what you say.”
Above the blindfold, Malone’s forehead wrinkled at the low threat. The man’s receding hairline left a widow’s peak over the top wrinkle.
“Who are you?” The words were slurred, and poured over a bloody, swollen lip, cracked open by the harsh removal of duct tape.
“I am not your jury. I am not your judge. I am your judgment,” Bolan told him.
“Only God may judge me,” Malone said. There was very little confidence in his voice.
“I told you. I am not your judge. I am what your judge sent, in accordance to your sins.”
That elicited a tremor from the bound prisoner. The Executioner hated torture. Physical pain was just an easy method to cause a man to say whatever he thought his interrogator wanted to hear. That was why real interrogations took time and patience.
The force of the airbags had left Malone’s face purple and swollen. His lower lip had been split, smashed against his teeth by the explosively expanding nylon. Malone was hurt, but he’d also been left blind and deafened for hours. The inside of his skull, to say nothing of his ears, must have felt as if it had been used like a bongo drum by a gorilla on meth.
“Judged for what?” Malone asked.
“Intolerance. Racism. Bigotry. Taking the words of the Devil and presenting them as the Lord’s,” Bolan said. If there was one thing that a religious zealot could be shaken by, it was the knowledge that their faith was all a lie.
“No. It said in the Bible—”
“In the Torah, for the rules of Moses’ army? An army that needed babies so that a dead husband’s brother would give seed to a wife so that new children may be born? An army allowed to rape slaves and conquered women once more to make new soldiers to conquer new lands? No.”
“But—”
“Slaves and widows, raped for the sake of new soldiers to conquer lands.”
“Every life is sacred.”
“The Bible says life begins at the first breath. Regardless, the Foster Portman Women’s Health Center has never performed a single abortion.”
“Devil, you are trying to blind me with lies.”
Bolan took off Malone’s blindfold. The guy winced as the glare of a naked light burned into his eyes. The Executioner was a mere shadow in the LED bulb’s super-bright glow. “The scales will fall from your eyes, Nolan Malone. They will fall, and you will learn. It will then be up to you whether you repent or you gnash your teeth for all of eternity.”
“No! No! I will not bend to your will!”
Bolan smirked.
The door behind him slammed violently open. Malone blinked, tried to see who had entered, but detected only a figure, wreathed in the same blue-fire glow of LED lighting, carrying what appeared to be a blazing sword.
“Nolan!” If Mack Bolan’s voice was loaded with low, grumbling menace, Carl Lyons’s bellow was stentorian, a bolt of thunder given the shape of a man’s name.
The blazing, angelic sword was nothing more than a dowel rod wrapped in LED lighting. His halo was the same string of lights wound around a headband, and his angel wings were more wrapped sticks tucked into his shoulder holster. However, thanks to sleep deprivation, a sonic assault and eyes unused to regular light, let alone the high-powered police flashlight-level illumination of the LEDs that Bolan and Lyons used, Malone was seeing things, was susceptible to the illusion and role play they had forced him into.
“Who...”
“Thou shalt not question the angel of the Lord!” Lyons didn’t need sound effects to enhance himself. They had toyed with the idea of a voice changer, but that would have been just too much more garbage for the Archangel Carl to drag around. Besides, the Able Team leader had a voice trained on the streets of Los Angeles to be booming, if necessary, and his time in covert operations had lent Lyons the knowledge of good psychological warfare.
“Who what?” Bolan asked. “What are you looking at?”
“Him. The guy who kicked in the door,” Malone said.
Bolan looked back. “The door’s shut.”
“No, it’s not,” Malone whispered.
“It is!” Lyons seized Bolan by the shoulder and, in a practiced move, seemed to heave the Executioner across the motel room, over the bed and down out of sight. Bolan’s leap concluded with a loud clatter. The two men had set up some noisy rubbish to enhance the effect.
“What do you want from me?” Malone whimpered.
Lyons rested his hand on the prisoner’s shoulder then tightened his grip. Karate-strengthened fingertips speared into soft muscle and skin, and Malone released a choked gag of pain. “I want Flyright.”
“But he’s a man of Go
d, of your master!” Malone answered.
Lyons’s eagle-talon grasp pulled Malone up from his seat. “Were Flyright doing the work of the Almighty, do you honestly believe I would be here?”
Bolan smelled the fear-sweat emanating from Malone. He didn’t envy the prisoner’s position. Even with the admonition of no torture beyond a hard grasp, Carl Lyons was a force to be reckoned with.
“How do you want me to give him to you?” Malone asked. “You could run over any man within his compound. You are an angel.”
Lyons sneered. “The lies. Someone must avow his lies to unfetter my hand so it may act.” Malone gulped. “The Lord has given me rules to abide by on this Earth. So without your confession, I cannot harm him.”
Malone frowned.
“And if I cannot strike down Flyright with my sword, I must find another target for the judgment of the Lord,” Lyons said.
He gave another squeeze. “Shall it be your soul forfeit? Or the false prophet?”
Malone sang. He poured out details of his activities for Flyright and Lemmon: each act of arson, each rock thrown through a window or bullet put behind the ear of a gang member who would be an inconvenient contradiction to the property-value tanking sabotage of a community.
It took two hours, and Lyons hadn’t needed to say another word.
All of the confession was recorded, and Bolan was glad for recording straight to hard drive. In the old days, flipping audio tape would have meant that they’d miss vital moments of confession.
Back at Stony Man Farm, Aaron Kurtzman and his crew of cyberwarriors would not only have had the confession converted to transcript thanks to voice-recognition software, but Professor Huntington Wethers, Akira Tokaido and Carmen Delahunt would scour law-enforcement databases and news listings for corroboration of Malone’s statements.
“We’ve already cleared two unsolved murders,” Barbara Price told Bolan over his earpiece. “And most of the other suspected crimes police liked him for are already being given to them.”
“Theatrics and confusion are a lot more effective than agony and fear,” Bolan said.
Lyons moved his hand to the junction of Malone’s jaw and neck. With a hard squeeze of his thumb against the juncture of nerves and blood vessels, Malone’s eyes rolled up into his head, nerves misfired, blood supply to the brain tapered off to the point of unconsciousness. Bolan moved quickly to help get Malone get back to exactly where he’d been earlier. They also cleared out the rubbish-cluttered area that had made Lyons’s throw of Bolan sound louder and deadlier than it had been.
It was time to repeat the script, to start the loop again, but this time with the added confusion of no Lyons interruption. Then Bolan would proceed to feed Malone all of the details he had spilled about himself. Extra confusion. Extra emotional trauma. Extra destruction of Malone’s own certainty of his senses and his thoughts.
This continued two more times. It was long, hard and necessary work, but Lyons and Bolan were able to ensure that Malone was both sincere and forthcoming with his information.
Once done, they took Howard and Malone, with a recording of his last confession, to the police station where Annis Hassan had been interviewed after the shooting at the women’s health center. They left them in the parking lot, sitting in the back of a patrol cruiser. A sticky note was attached to Malone’s chest, addressing the two SALT terrorists to Detective Ethan Bradshaw.
With that, Lyons and Bolan disappeared. Stony Man Farm had hacked into the security cameras as they’d made their delivery, and both men looked so completely cop professional, right down to Mobile police uniforms, they didn’t draw a second glance from anyone.
Now, it was time to see what Morris Flyright Jr. had on hand.
Chapter Eleven
Bartleby “Bart” Lemmon looked at himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator. He was the son of Barry Lemmon, but he was half a head taller and not given to the portly manner of his father. Lemmon could see where he might have inherited his appearance and lean physique from his tall, blue-eyed fashion model mother, Barry Lemmon’s first wife. But, deep down, he knew that the only thing that made him the son of the current highest official in New Jersey was that the elder Lemmon prized the good-looking boy as much as a trophy son as he prized any of the women he wore on his arm as a bride.
Was he really bound by family to walk into Flyright’s religious-nut college? Did his father really need the super-evangelical vultures hovering around him, proclaiming him the best thing for Jersey since the Boardwalk?
“Hush, you brain weasels,” Lemmon told his reflection. “We’re here to make money.”
Bart Lemmon’s doubts of genetic lineage to Barry Lemmon might have been as ephemeral as gossamer, but his fortunes were intertwined with his father’s. Money was stronger than DNA, anyhow. Officially, Bart was there on behalf of the state of New Jersey, talking about the expansion of Birthright University into the state. Unofficially, he was there to look at the new neighborhoods that Flyright invested in.
The elevator dinged its final note and he stepped into a spacious, ornately decorated office. Morris Flyright’s desk was as wide as a limousine was long, and carved with scenes of the Passion of Christ. Bart wondered about the appeal of the brutal torture of the son of God that religious leaders plastered across the walls of churches or depicted in paintings. Maybe it was a display of the strength of their savior, but it seemed a grisly, horrifying endeavor. Bart found himself nauseated seeing the blood-and gore-spattered movie adaptation from a decade before.
Flyright’s ghoulish desk was either faux wood or someone had uprooted ancient redwoods to give a sense of classical Gothic cathedrals to the office. A massive crucifix stood behind Flyright’s high-backed chair. That meant that while Flyright sat in the deep, cushioned leather chair, a carved image of a dying man hung near him, his downward-tilted eyes staring sightlessly at Flyright’s back.
“Welcome, Bartleby,” Flyright boomed.
Lemmon sneered at the deep, powerful speaking voice. Flyright had inherited his father’s stadium-commanding voice, his ability to project without the need for a microphone and to sweep up the adoration of thousands.
“I hope this fine town has welcomed you sufficiently.”
Lemmon thought about the women who’d come to the executive suite at his hotel. They’d obviously been sent by the evangelist, and they’d most definitely had not been chaste virgins. Flyright knew exactly what he needed behind his wife’s back. Lemmon didn’t want to think of why such a man of God had access to such fine whores, and why he’d use them to appease the son of his business partner.
“Bart,” Lemmon corrected him.
“As you wish,” Flyright returned. “Has your father found a new way to increase his profits?”
Lemmon kept his face unaffected by Flyright’s accusation. It was true, but he had no intention of betraying that bit of knowledge. It was likely a hole that Flyright had seen coming since they’d first talked. Whereas Morris Flyright Senior was an adequate businessman whose charisma was the cornerstone of a fledgling evangelical empire, Junior was more worldly, more savvy, which seemed to be why he’d spent so much time rubbing elbows with powerful figures in real estate.
“You’re not in this purely for cash purposes,” Lemmon stated.
Flyright smirked. “Astute.”
“So all of the real estate you’re sniping, using Dad’s money, what are you going to do with the smaller returns you’ll get from it?”
“Power by association,” Flyright said. “My father was internationally loved. I’ve only got a national handle on the people he used to preach to, but my word is spreading among others.”
“The redneck militiamen who have been getting their asses handed to them of late?” Lemmon asked.
“You know about that?” Flyright asked.
“It’s not like a nightclub full of gays got blasted
,” Lemmon returned. “But I have been paying attention to all of the news in town. I thought this stuff was related to your attempt to bring down the Foster Portman Women’s Health Center. Then it turns out the stuff at the doctor’s apartment was some kind of Islamic terrorist action?”
“The heathens piggybacked upon the failure of my operatives,” Flyright said.
Lemmon nodded. “And the rest of your corpses? Where did you get them?”
“Are you some kind of a spy?” Flyright asked. “Sit down. You look as if you’re about to jump out of the window from tension.”
Lemmon sat. He put his briefcase on Flyright’s desk and opened it. Rewritten contracts nestled inside.
“My nerves should be understandable. We had a straightforward campaign to acquire these neighborhoods,” Lemmon stated. “Now, we’ve got white supremacists and Islamic madmen shooting everyone. How in the hell are we going to shut this mess down without the Feds coming after us?”
“It seems as if there’s forces at work that I’d hoped to tap,” Flyright replied.
“What forces?” Lemmon asked.
“Someone annihilated a small army of mine at an abandoned factory. A gas station in the suburbs of the city was literally blown to hell, with more than a dozen corpses within,” Flyright said. “These were not the acts of any official agency, and Dr. Annis Hassan is still missing. Off the grid, you would say.”
“This isn’t giving me any reassurance,” Lemmon growled. “You’re saying someone else is out there in this war?”
Flyright nodded. “A vigilante, spoken of only in whispers. A man who utilizes military hardware and tactics against decidedly urban threats.”
“A vigilante. And you’re smiling about his interference?” Lemmon asked.
“He seems a man driven by righteousness. Which means that I can appeal to his better angels,” Flyright responded.
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