Kettwig bit his tongue, feeling the familiar anger flame to life within him, but he knew better than to say anything about the way he felt.
"I don't want her harmed," Ris said. "I want you to make sure the men understand that."
"I know."
Ris pulled on the matching jacket and walked from the room without a backward glance.
Kettwig limped to the door and started to shut it, taking the time for a last glance at the bedroom. Nothing had been changed in the room from the time Ris's father had lived in it. Maps of old Prussia still adorned the walls. How did Ris feel about occupying the room? Could he feel the burning force that had driven his father, the desire for vengeance?
Kettwig could.
He had lived those feelings with the man and marveled at all he had been able to put together.
But the thing that drove Ris was somehow more darkly evil than just a need for revenge. His father had shaped, bent, broken and reshaped a tool that would change the face of the world. If it could cope with the internal forces that drove it.
Kettwig quietly closed the door and limped after Ris's broad back, wondering what would happen to those people around Ris when the floodgates holding back the lessons of his father proved to be more than he could stand.
* * *
Hal Brognola stood in the center of the bloodstained hallway and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. Teams of Justice investigators moved throughout the wreckage of the floor, taking samples of everything.
He watched Greg Bowen dodge out of the way of a team of medics carrying a body bag to the gaping hole that housed the elevator. The CIA section chief carried two Styrofoam cups of coffee.
"You like it black?" Bowen asked as he handed Brognola one of the cups.
"Yeah, thanks."
"How's it going?" Bowen asked.
"Slow. It'll be days before they get this sorted out."
"Got any prelims?"
"The medics have carried out twenty-three bodies so far."
"How many of them are ours?"
Brognola stepped out of the way of a coverall-clad guy digging bullets out of the wall behind him. "It's hard to tell with the way things went down here today. By the way, I didn't get the chance to thank you for saving my life earlier."
An easy grin split the CIA man's face. "Purely response of early development at the Agency. A result of believing that whenever something bad goes down around you and you're standing shoulder to shoulder with a Russian, watch the Russian."
"Maybe there were too many of your guys trained that way," Brognola said dryly. "The death rate on the Russians is running almost three to one higher than ours."
"Or maybe more of the Russian security team was infiltrated than any of our guys. Gorbachev's policies have divided Russia in a lot of ways. Most of the populace is behind his thinking, but a lot of the politicians and soldiers cut their teeth on Lenin's teachings and want to keep it that way."
"Yeah, I know, but it puts the United States in a hell of a spot. The news services have already picked this up, and the speculations are going crazy."
"The truth isn't so sane, either, Hal. You and I both know the kind of planning that would have to go into an operation like this. And the agents we had that turned — my God, some of those men have been around for years."
Brognola sipped the coffee. "Yeah, but the same prejudices you've labeled the Russians with easily applies to us, as well. I know a lot of guys in high places who aren't thrilled with the idea of the U.S. doing anything more with Russia than negotiating a way to get rid of some of the nuclear arms buildup. They still want wars between us over Third World countries. You'll find hawks on both sides of the iron curtain, Greg."
"I know. Hell, we both live it every day."
Brognola nodded.
"Where's Belasko?" Bowen asked.
Brognola checked the younger man's face for any sign of underlying emotion. He had noted the friction between the CIA section chief and Bolan during the evacuation of the hotel. "Following up on some new information he turned up."
"Anything interesting?"
"He thinks so."
"What?"
Brognola looked Bowen in the eye and lied through his teeth. "I haven't been briefed yet." Bolan would need as much time as he could get to pursue the almost intangible trail he had uncovered without any of the other agencies muddying the water.
"I thought Belasko was working through your department."
"He is, but he's also working on his own. He's had his own contacts working on this thing since he signed on."
"And they turned up something we haven't been able to?" Bowen seemed skeptical.
"Belasko is a specialist in things like this. I told you that earlier. Which is why the President gave him a free rein when it came to this operation. He's damn good at what he does."
"I still have problems believing there could be a guy like this who I haven't heard of."
A man down the hall called to Brognola, holding one of the confiscated M-16s above his head as he kneeled before a portable scrambler phone.
The big Fed walked away from Bowen, wishing there was some way to resolve the distrust the younger man felt for Bolan. But he couldn't blame the guy. After the fiasco at the hotel, who the hell could you trust?
"What have you got, Henderson?" Brognola asked as he took the assault rifle.
Henderson's eyes were narrowed in disgust. "I traced those weapons, sir, and you're not going to like it one damn bit."
A sinking feeling swirled in the big Fed's stomach. He had assumed the American weapons had been purchased on the black market, but the look in the Justice investigator's eyes told a different story. "Let's have it."
* * *
"Who is this man?" Ris tapped the photograph with a forefinger. It was an almost full-face shot of the same man in the dozen other pictures he had scanned through.
Kettwig sat on the other side of the desk in his office. They had met there because it was where the older man had assembled everything they had received so far and because Ris felt more comfortable there than in his own office. He smelled the minty aroma of the schnapps as Kettwig poured himself another glass.
"His name is Michael Belasko," Kettwig said. "From what we have been able to find out about him, the man is some kind of free-lance security consultant who has the uncanny ability to drop off the face of the world for months at a time."
"How did he become involved with protecting the Russians?" Ris studied the face with interest. There was a kinship there, lying just under the surface of the craggy features. Belasko had been marked by close-up views of the blitzkrieg even as Ris's father had marked him.
"The American President requested he be on hand for the meeting." Kettwig sipped the schnapps. "So far Belasko has preempted a strike against one of the Witness Protection people we've been liquidating in an attempt to divide the attention of the Washington, D.C., law-enforcement agencies. And he terminated a three-man team we had watching one of the Mafia dons who hired our assassination team. He uncovered the man we had planted on the Washington police force and left the agent no choice but to take his own life. He was also the man who led the Russian leader to safety after the hotel assassination attempt."
"This man is no simple security consultant," Ris concluded as he laid the photograph on Kettwig's desk with the others.
"No. But he is the man you'll have to go through in order to complete the assassinations."
"It will be this man's mistake to get in my way." Ris pushed himself up out of the swivel chair in front of the desk, wishing there was a window in the office so that he could look out over the desert. He loved it most at night, when the sun was beginning to fall and life truly began to move across the shifting sands. He and Kettwig had completed their short talk with their constituents more than an hour ago, when he had announced he would be seeing to the deaths of the American and Soviet leaders himself. It had been a contingency on the original plan he and Kettwig had advanced
to them, but one that would bring them a larger following after the war that would surely follow.
So now, following the plan his father had given birth to long before he had a son, Ris would be stepping into the position of power his father had coveted so fiercely. Maybe, if it hadn't been for the promise he had given his father, he would have walked away from it all at this point. Now that the time was here, there seemed to be nothing grand at all about it. He was surprised that the prospect of success left him feeling so empty. Perhaps, had his father remained alive, there would be some thrill in the undertaking. But, for now, there was only the mechanics of the assassinations to double-check. There would be those fleeting moments of pleasure when he stroked the trigger of the assassination weapon and sent death winging into the two world leaders. But that wouldn't last long. It never did.
* * *
Bolan gave up trying to follow the progression of documents Kurtzman was showing him. It was making his head hurt.
Kurtzman looked over his shoulder with an apologetic look on his face. "I know this is pretty dry stuff, Mack, but I wanted you to see what you were facing. The parent company for Spraggue Industries goes back at least forty years. Maybe more. They had connections and holdings in several countries. Whoever has been helming this operation during those years has had a lot of capital to invest. And still has a lot of bucks to spread around."
"Enough to buy off security people in America and the Soviet Union," Turrin observed.
Bolan shook his head. "There's more to it than that, Leo," he said, remembering the fanaticism that had shone from Dwight Hooker's eyes. "Remember the guy who blew himself up in the arcade?"
"Yeah."
"These guys don't mind sacrificing themselves if it comes down to it, as long as they can take somebody with them."
"Like terrorists."
"Or like they were fighting a war," Bolan said. He readjusted himself on the edge of Kurtzman's desk, wishing Brognola would hurry up and call in with the report on the hotel hit. They were on the edge of something; he could feel it humming in his bones.
"But why do the Witness hits?" asked Leo Turrin, who was sitting in on the briefing.
"For effect," Bolan replied. "As a diversion it served to pull attention away from the main issue we were covering. Yet it failed in one aspect because it let us identify the fact that the two operations were connected. Of course whoever set this up hadn't planned on my tagging Wayne Hermann or noticing Hooker plant the bug on my car in D.C."
"How did you figure the two situations were related?" Turrin asked.
"Hooker put the tracer on my car before I got involved with you. Which meant the guy was trying to get a fix on me concerning the security for the armament talks. At the time he didn't know I was going to be involved in your end of things. The tattoo made the final connection between the two."
"Hal said they only found a couple of guys with the tattoo at the hotel," Kurtzman said.
Bolan nodded. "And when we get the skinny on those guys and are able to identify them, I'll bet we find out they were connected in some way to Spraggue Industries. I'd guess those guys to be some kind of elite corps that guided the smaller operations."
"All the while the real target has been the Prez and Gorbachev," Kurtzman said.
"Right," Bolan replied.
"Meaning the Witness hits had no real bearing on the mission at all," Turrin concluded.
"Only as a diversionary tactic," Bolan said honestly. He sensed the anger Turrin was keeping locked in, and it fed the flames burning within his own body. "If you hadn't picked up the thread when you did, Leo, we might not have been able to tumble to this as soon as we did."
"That's cold comfort, Mack."
"I know."
Bolan stood and walked behind Kurtzman, studying the information on the screen against the far wall, as if the new position would add a perspective he hadn't used before. "You're sure that Spraggue Industries has a home base in Cairo, Aaron?"
"There were a lot of circles, Mack, like I said earlier, but I'm sure. Everything leads back to Cairo. At least forty years ago a plan was laid down to build a company, Phoenix Enterprises — guess we're not the only ones who rose from the ashes. The people running the company stayed in business long enough to turn a large profit from the war recovery in Egypt, as building contractors and the like. They did a lot of reconstruction on the city and helped draw up plans for a lot more things."
"An American company?" Bolan asked.
"All the paperwork was handled in English," Kurtzman affirmed, "but I couldn't find a listing for the founder of the company. It gives his name as William Thomas, but, hell, Sarge, I could turn up hundreds of William Thomases from the 1940s. It would take weeks to research all of them, even if I had a full staff engaged in doing nothing but that."
"How long did Phoenix Enterprises stay in business?"
"Almost ten years," Kurtzman replied as he checked his notes. "Then they dissolved and moved on. At least superficially."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean whoever was running this company took the money they made and invested it in several different businesses around the world. And they were smart about it. The businessmen and legal guys I consulted on this were amazed. The paperwork involved in moving this money around would fill a couple of rooms, and most of this was done before computers were invented. If the buying and trading of businesses hadn't slowed down around the 1970s before home computers became prevalent, I don't think I would have been able to get you the information I have so quickly."
"Why did they slow down?"
"It had been thirty years since the inception of Phoenix Enterprises. These guys were getting old. Maybe they thought they had covered their tracks well enough. And even at that, if I didn't have access to some of the files I can get into through Interpol and other European agencies, I think I could have been thrown off the track."
"What happened in the 1970s?"
"Phoenix Enterprises, Incorporated took up residence in one of the buildings the old Phoenix Enterprises had built back in the 1940s."
"Who had the building before them?"
Kurtzman grinned. "That's an interesting point, because, according to the files I've gone through, the building made the trip with a lot of the businesses that were lost over the years. From what I gathered from an Egyptian real estate broker I talked with earlier, the building had been constructed in a proposed business park south of Old Cairo that never made it."
"And Spraggue Industries is connected with them?"
"Yes. Also the subsidiary company I told you about. But you won't find that information easily."
"What kind of business ventures has Phoenix Enterprises, Incorporated been involved in?"
"It's a parent company that owns majority interests in several businesses. Travel, import-export, munitions, a little bit of a lot of things."
"Sounds as if they can get their hands on pretty much what they want and have a way to move it," Turrin said.
"That's the way it is," Kurtzman agreed. The phone rang and he picked it up.
Bolan stared at the picture of the building that housed Phoenix Enterprises, Incorporated in Cairo.
"Hey, Mack," Kurtzman said in an excited voice.
The warrior switched his attention to Kurtzman, watching as the big man tapped the computer keys and the screen changed obediently.
"I got some information on that tattoo." Kurtzman punched a button by the phone and laid the receiver on the desk. "The guy on the line is Joachim Koltzer, a West German contact in the BND I've used as a resource before. He was a German officer in the Second World War."
Bolan digested the information. Kurtzman had said the connections on Spraggue Industries ran back forty years, and here was another bit of the puzzle that reaffirmed that. "Is this man reliable, Aaron?"
Kurtzman met Bolan's gaze. "I'd trust Joachim with my life. I knew him back when I was working for the Company, and we've always been straight with each other."
<
br /> Bolan nodded.
Kurtzman hit another button by the phone. "Joachim, it's Aaron. I've got company with me, so I put you on the intercom. These are the men who discovered the tattoo, and they're friends of mine."
"There's not much I have to say at this point, my friends, but I do have something to show you. If your friends feel it's interesting enough, I'll meet with them."
Bolan sensed the hesitation in the thin, reedy voice, heard the age in it, as well. He watched as the monitor screen presented the tattoo in its large dimensions. Then, before he could blink, the picture altered, still showing the bird, but this time overlaid by a huge swastika. The swimming wings formed two of the four hooked ends of the emblem, the profiled head another, the askew tail feathers, with only a little stretch of the imagination, made up the fourth.
"And the bird?" Bolan asked, his voice tight.
"A phoenix," Koltzer said. "Deliberately chosen and stylized the way you see it now before the end of the Second World War."
"Where do you want to meet?" Bolan asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Cairo. Where it was scheduled to be reborn."
11
The Cairo sun beat down on the marketplace, glinting off the shiny trinkets offered for sale at many of the stands and shops. Bolan lounged in the welcome shade of a silversmith's waiting for contact with the Company informer Kurtzman had turned up for the operation. Across the cobbled street filled with tourists and bazaar workers, be could see Leo Turrin lingering over a Coke at a soft drink stand. If the little Fed noticed him, he didn't show it.
Mossad had been called on to lend support, and the three agents who had accompanied Bolan on the flight to Cairo had vanished somewhere in the packed aisles. But Bolan knew they would be near. The commanding officer, Benjamin Tsurnick, was a brief acquaintance the Executioner had made during a previous mission.
In Bolan's analytical mind, it made more sense to go into the present situation with the Israelis as backups since American teams were out of the question. Mossad also had more help sequestered inside Egypt than American forces ever had. Which was how a cache of weapons had come to be waiting for him before he set foot on Egyptian soil.
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