Rex Dalton Thrillers: Books 1-3 (The Rex Dalton Series Boxset Book 1)

by JC Ryan

  The one who’d taken charge gestured, and everyone opened their cargo doors. That was Rex’s cue to move farther away. His team was already long gone from the area. His motorcycle was ten blocks away, and it would take him far enough that no one would associate him with what was about to happen. He figured he had half an hour, but he kept his eye on the camera feed.

  He was still a block from his bike when the activities inside the warehouse told him the parties were done and about to go their separate ways.

  Out of time, he made a quick decision. Nine blocks were enough. When the explosion happened, everyone nearby would run in all directions, and he’d be covered. He kept walking and looking at his cell phone as he casually put his hand in his pocket and found the wake-up key. All the single-digit speed dials were set to dial the same number, which would activate the trigger.

  All he had to do was wake up the phone and hit anywhere on the screen.

  Three seconds later, the blast reached his ears. As he’d expected, screams filled the air and people started pouring out of the buildings around him, which were low-cost apartment buildings. The sidewalk filled with panicked people, and as he’d thought they would, they were running in all directions.

  He ran for his bike.

  As they all watched from Rex’s hotel room that evening, the news was of nothing but the explosion. The warehouse was reduced to dust and rubble, along with most of a block of what were reported as empty warehouses. Rex and company knew they were probably owned by the Camorra, and if not empty, they’d been packed with illicit merchandise. The explosion was blamed on a gas leak, which wasn’t so far from the truth.

  They laid low for the next three days, until authorities had stopped the stepped-up security over the incident. Strange how they spoke out of one side of their mouths claiming gas leak, while out of the other side they speculated about terrorist activity. But no one could explain what terrorists might have been hoping to accomplish, since there were relatively few casualties. Besides, Italy had the best security services in Europe, therefore no terrorist problems.

  Thirty were dead, including ‘prominent businessman’ Ricardo Lombardi, aka Grosso to Rex’s team. What he was doing in the warehouse with twenty-nine other men, half of whom were of Middle Eastern heritage, no one could or would or was allowed to explain.

  Media spokespeople refused to speculate.

  Rex couldn’t blame them – it was probably hazardous to their health.

  As the furor died down, each of the team members slipped out of the country by different means, leaving only Rex. He had one more errand before he headed home.

  The day after the last of his team left, Rex inspected his cache, now replenished for next time, and left his flashy Neapolitan clothing as well as the weapons and sat phone. He climbed on the motorcycle and set out for Rome, where he’d return the bike and check on Sophia.

  Then one more goodbye, and Catia would once again be part of his past.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The art of dealing in ancient artifacts London, 2012

  BETWEEN MISSIONS, REX took his turn at instruction, teaching the history of terrorism in the Middle East, Krav Maga, and an occasional language class in how to acquire a local accent, though he himself didn’t know how he did it. It just happened. He had, however, studied the problem, so he was competent to teach it anyway. Trainees were in awe of him, and those who got his dry humor loved him and wanted to be him when they ‘grew up’. He treated all equally – not coddling them or pulling any punches, either physical or mental.

  Each time he met a new group, he told them the same thing before beginning whatever lesson they were there to learn. “During your training, the instructors here will insult you, beat you bloody, put you through drills you never thought possible, even you Delta Force and SEAL bimbos. They’ll make you hate them and want to kill them. They will insult you and your family in ways and means you would not have heard of nor think humanly possible. And let me tell you, the day when you graduate, you’d better kiss each one of them on the mouth, because that treatment they gave you will someday save your life.

  “Oh, and before I forget, "I’d recommend kissing the Old Man, too, but be prepared for a lot of tongue.” It always brought the house down, especially if the Old Man was observing in the wings. His laugh was the loudest of all.

  Rex had lost count of his missions. He only knew that at some point, even HQ conceded he was most effective when he worked alone. Missions that might have taken two weeks with a team for surveillance and final execution took him a maximum of four days – one for insertion, one for observation, one for execution of the strike, and one for extraction. He’d mastered the art of disguising himself by means of changing his walk, his expression, how he combed his hair, and the language and accent he used. No elaborate plans were needed, only his stealth and ability to kill noiselessly, with no muss or fuss.

  But he’d had no down time except at the unit compound, and even that was sixteen-hour days of training, study, and instructing. The shrinks who evaluated each team after a mission thought he should take a vacation – a real one. Somewhere far from Arizona. They told him, “Go and relax, have some drinks on a beach, get a girl, have fun.”

  “Why?” he’d ask. “I'm living the dream right here, right now.”

  Finally, they insisted. But before they could enforce the order, a mission request came from MI6 via the CIA. They had a Russian problem. CRC determined Rex was the man for the job, except for one thing. He didn’t speak Russian. How fast could he learn it?

  The Old Man himself called Rex in to discuss the mission. The problem wasn’t urgent in the normal sense. It was ongoing, and it needed to stop, but if Rex could learn the language before a team that had a Russian-speaker became available…

  Rex shook his head. His uncanny ability with languages had fostered a legend that even he couldn’t keep up with. “Sir, with all due respect, I’m fast, but I’m not that fast. But what’s the fuss about having to speak Russian? I can make problems go away in any language.”

  The Old Man just grinned and shook his head. Dalton’s sense of humor was something one had to get used to. He handed him a slim folder. “This is what MI6 supplied. It’s bare-bones. Just his name, where he lives, and that they have adequate proof he’s not who he seems to be.”

  “And that is?” Rex prompted.

  “His name is Alexander Gordievsky.”

  “The art collector?” Rex asked. His eyebrows twitched, as if they wanted to express surprise, but Rex schooled his face to neutrality before the unruly eyebrows had a chance to express themselves.

  “That’s him.” The Old Man didn’t bother asking how Rex knew. Rex was like a walking encyclopedia when it came to history.

  Rex knew that London had become a mecca for Russian expats. There were so many in London, some referred to the British capital as a province of Russia. Many of them were unsavory characters, corrupt, cruel, and immoral, but they put up a good front. Generally, they were the rich ones who came by their wealth in all kinds of shady manner at the expense of the Russian citizens. Their presence, and even who they were, were an open secret and an embarrassment to the UK, especially MI5, Britain’s equivalent to the FBI, and MI6, the same to the CIA.

  Some expats had fallen out of favor with the Russian government, Vladimir Putin to be precise, and openly opposed him – from afar of course. Doing that almost guaranteed them residence in the UK, where at the expense of the British taxpayers they enjoyed the full protection of British law enforcement and security, provided they would go on the media every now and then and insult their former president and mother Russia.

  More than just a few of them, however, were using London as a base of operation for their vast and sometimes underhanded business empires. In many cases, they were just a front for Putin’s or other oligarchs’ criminal activities. So, they kept up the ruse of being dissidents, but behind the scenes they were still busy with proscribed dealings.

 
Rex knew of Gordievsky because of his interest in history. Gordievsky’s claim to fame was an astounding collection of ancient art, which he loaned to various museums and art galleries to display. He was also a vocal critic of Putin and his cronies. British media loved him and touted his generosity with his art collection as proof of his near-sainthood.

  MI5 and MI6, according to the file in Rex’s hands, had a distinctly different opinion. Gordievsky was crooked. But they couldn’t prove it, not in a court of law. Moreover, moving against him would leave them with the proverbial egg on their faces, and could even get their budgets slashed, so popular was the bastard with the British politicians.

  Recent Finint and Humint (human intelligence) had found the true nature of his business was not as aesthetic as his art pieces. Terrorist groups from the Middle East were filling their jihadi coffers by looting ancient sites and selling the antiquities to this Russian mobster. He, in turn, paid them with weapons. Weapons supplied by the Russian military.

  Bringing him to justice through the usual channels would expose delicate MI5 operations. MI6’s hands were tied because it would be considered a domestic operation, and they were not allowed to operate on domestic soil, the same barrier the CIA had in the US. They hated the guy. They wanted him out of their hair, and they wanted it done in such a way that others of his ilk got the message: ‘do your dirty deeds on our shores, and we’ll show you what dirty means’. Therefore, it had to look like a professional hit.

  Rex preferred a less showy message, but the customer was always right. There was just one problem. Neither MI5 nor MI6 would be involved, he would get no support from them, not even a weapon. In fact, the MI6 message was unambiguous. “Make sure your agent(s) don’t sign the guestbook on arrival.” Which Rex understood to mean, ‘make sure you are not seen, recognized, or arrested by British law enforcement, because we can’t help you if it happens’.

  He was okay with that. It was not his first rodeo.

  In Britain it was near impossible to buy a gun, and ammunition even more so, not to mention being a foreigner trying to get it.

  The obvious solution was to have the wherewithal sent to the American embassy in a diplomatic bag and delivered to an undercover agent openly within the sacrosanct doors of the embassy. However, Rex, and in fact CRC, was so deep undercover that their own countrymen couldn’t even know of their existence. The embassy, therefore, was out. They couldn’t even know there was an operation, so a dead drop was out as well.

  By the same token, asking either of the Brit units to supply a weapon by dead drop exposed Rex to observation on their part. Under the terms of the Five Eye agreement, a multilateral agreement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US, automatic sharing of intelligence among the five nations, Rex’s identity, if discovered, would be shared to each country. Considering the sieve-like nature of some of the agencies who’d receive it, Rex might not even get out of the country without a price on his head.

  There was, however, a curious loophole in British law that he could exploit. Give him a week, he suggested, and he’d take down two Russians for the price of one. He only needed to locate one he’d been after for a while, who owned an ‘antique’ pistol and corresponding deactivated ammunition. The latter would have been emptied of its powder and had the primer deactivated. He’d have no problem ‘reactivating’ the ammunition with a little ingenuity and the supplies brought to merry old England’s shores on his person or in his kit.

  The use of the weapon would implicate the owner and land him in a British prison for long enough to have a serious ‘accident’, ridding the good taxpayers of two leeches. More importantly, his arch-enemies in al Qaeda and ISIS would have to find a new place to shop for their weapons.

  Rex took a day to exercise his growing ease in navigating dark places where information could be found. Some called it the Dark Web, but Rex knew that was only the tip of the iceberg. The Deep Web was his fishing ground, and in it he found the information he needed. He was ready. The next day, he used one of several passports he owned, provided by CRC, to fly from LA International to Paris, with a return ticket for the following week. His purported reason for visiting was tourism.

  In Paris, Rex transformed himself from an American citizen to French. He purchased French-label clothing at a second-hand store, obtained a new passport from a safety deposit box CRC kept at BNB Paribas, and then boarded a Eurostar train to London via the Chunnel. Within three hours of landing in Paris, Rex was in an alley in London to observe the comings and goings of one Anatoly Vasiliev, respected Russian expat, well-known antique gun collector, and, to Rex’s certain knowledge, child pornographer.

  He was not there to kill Vasiliev, though he would have been more than happy to dispatch the slime ball. The murder of two Russian expats in as many days would attract too much attention. Therefore, he stuck to his original plan. Vasiliev’s collection was a matter of public knowledge, though Rex had no doubt he owned weapons that didn’t make it into the catalog. The item Rex was interested in, however, was. It was a Mauser C96, a semi-automatic pistol that had been manufactured in Russia between 1896 and 1937, a genuine antique. It was not particularly rare, but its presence in gun-shy England was tolerated because of its antique status.

  Nicknamed the ‘Red 9’, the Mauser C96 was a peculiar-looking but efficient personal weapon. The grip, round and wooden, had earned it the additional nickname ‘Broomhandle’ in the English-speaking world. In China, it was called the ‘box cannon’ because of its rectangular internal magazine, and as a double-entendre, because it had a wooden, box-like detachable stock that doubled as a holster. Rex had no use for the stock, but he did want the rare 9x25mm Mauser ‘Export’ cartridges that were also catalogued as part of the collection. The only drawback to those cartridges was what famed big-game hunter of the twentieth century, W.D.M. Bell, referred to as its “particularly vicious bang”.

  Rex had brought with him smokeless powder, manufactured on-site at the CRC base so that it did not contain markers that would make it detectable in airport security checks. It was the only thing he needed to make the antique gun and cartridges usable that he couldn’t obtain in London. The rest, a box of strike-on-box matches, a couple of hand tools, paper, and an ordinary soda straw, he quickly acquired in several stops at different locations.

  That night found him concealed in the lengthening shadows of the alleyway behind Vasiliev’s residence. If he’d been in Moscow, Vasiliev would have had a few bodyguards posted, but in London they would have been more a liability than a protection. After all, law-abiding citizens didn’t require bodyguards. Vasiliev’s protection consisted of an extra pass or two per night from local Metropolitan police. They didn’t bother to peer into the alley, since Vasiliev’s presence had never caused trouble in the five years he’d been there.

  After establishing the pattern of law enforcement interest, Rex waited until the normal deep-sleep hour of three a.m. before carefully picking the lock on Vasiliev’s back door. He thought the man’s housekeeper, who had left around eight p.m., was the only household staff he normally employed. Nevertheless, Rex was as silent as the grave when he cleared each room, affirming that no one was there but the snoring Russian.

  Once he knew that, he let himself into the collection room, which he was surprised to find unlocked. He found the Mauser, and in an antique newsprint type cabinet, he found the cartridges, a few complete with bullets. Of course, they had all been properly deactivated, but that didn’t concern him. He’d been careful not to touch surfaces. He pulled on a pair of disposable poly gloves, and over them a pair of thin, supple, leather gloves. Then he carefully lifted the pistol from its brackets on the display wall and selected five cartridges with undamaged bullets.

  As he started to leave, he had another thought. In an office he’d seen earlier, when he cleared the rooms, he’d seen a computer, and he suspected there was evidence of Vasiliev’s more depraved hobby to be found. He slipped back into the room and searched it, finding
glossy photos he couldn’t bear to look at and a collection of flash drives with single names on them. The man was a fool for keeping this stuff where it could so easily be found, and Rex had every intention of making sure it was. He risked turning on a lamp and, with gloved hands, shifted one of the photos back and forth until he found what he’d hoped he would – fingerprints. He pocketed the photo and left.

  ***

  THE NEXT DAY, after a few hours of sleep, Rex painstakingly reactivated the cartridges. To do so, he placed a hex nut he’d acquired at a hardware store on the credenza in his hotel room, first protecting it with a pillowcase he’d liberated of its pillow to make sure the surface wasn’t marred by his actions. On the hex nut, he placed a cartridge from which he’d pried the bullet, open end upright. Using a nail he’d pocketed with the hex nut and a hammer he’d purchased legally, he inserted the nail into the open end of the cartridge through the flash hole and tapped it gently. The primer, empty of its fuel, dropped into the center of the hex nut.

  Next, he pried the anvil out of the primer cup and set it aside. The old primer powder had already been thoroughly scraped from it. On a small square of the notepad paper the hotel had so generously provided, he gently tapped the head of one of his matches until the coating flaked off. Using the back of a spoon, he pressed the flakes until he’d ground them into a fine powder.

  With a cheap pocket knife he’d bought at a department store, he then scraped some of the red powder from the box where the matches could be scraped to ignite them. About half the amount of red powder as matchhead powder was the right amount. This he also ground with the spoon. The next bit was risky if done with a tool, so Rex gently folded the two powders together by manipulating the paper from each side until they were thoroughly mixed. With the same knife, he cut the straw from yesterday’s takeaway soda at an angle, making a small scoop.

  Now he was ready to rearm the cartridges. Into the primer cups, he carefully scooped the primer powder he’d manufactured from matches, tamping it down gently with the end of the match he’d beheaded. To be extra sure it fired properly, he added more and tamped it down again. With a pair of tweezers from his dopp kit, he picked up the tiny anvil and set it atop the primer powder. He didn’t bother to press that down, as it would happen easily when he pressed the primer cup back into the cartridge’s primer pocket. To seat it properly, he set it upright again, this time open end down, and rocked the hammer head over it until it was flush with the bottom of the cartridge.