An answer was forming, but it was an answer that Mack Bolan did not wish to accept.
He was getting closer to that acceptance, though, with every snick of his tires against the lonely road in this Land of Enchantment … and of exotic weapons of war.
It was just a few miles north of Alamogordo where the track abruptly turned west and headed off into the boonie hills toward the White Sands forbidden zone. The path was a dirt road very quietly marked with a small handmade sign, which read: Rancho Jacundo.
Bolan slowed and went on past the exit, while keeping his eyes on the dust cloud created by the speeding station wagon. He pulled to the side and halted about a quarter-mile beyond. The target vehicle was no longer visible, but the cloud of dust was. He watched it until it disappeared behind the hills—marking that spot with an X in his mind—then he turned around and went back to town.
Rancho Jacundo, eh?
Okay. So okay. The rest would take care of the rest.
An older man who was sunning himself on the patio at Jordan’s apartment building smiled diffidently and nodded to him as he strolled past.
Bolan smiled back and the guy said, “Beautiful day, Mr. Jordan.”
So much for a clean sweep in role images and human perceptions.
“Depends on where you’re standing,” said Bolan-Jordan and went on before the guy could extend the conversation.
The phone rang as he stepped inside. He scooped it up and announced, “Philip Jordan here.”
“We’re sending a car for you,” declared a new voice. “Cap’n wants your help in analyzing this data.”
“Never mind the car,” Bolan clipped back. “I’ll deliver myself, thanks.”
“Not there,” said the voice. Meaning, probably, the house in town. “You don’t know this place. We’ll send—”
“You’re at Rancho Jacundo, aren’t you?” Bolan said, with a malicious twinkle in the voice.
That gave the guy a moment of pause. Finally he replied, “Pretty goddam cute, aren’t you, guy?”
Bolan brushed that aside with the cool response: “I have a couple of matters in town, first. You’ll see me within the hour.” He hung it up and turned quickly to the realization of another presence in that small apartment, the Beretta leaping forth and leading the way into the pivot.
But there was no valid target there.
And Doc Jordan was not quite the ascetic Bolan had imagined.
A very pretty young lady stood just inside the doorway to the bedroom. She had long black hair reaching almost to the waist, a pleasingly voluptuous torso, and legs enough to delight even an ascetic. She wore only a delicate negligee of lavender lace, open all the way down.
Luminous eyes were grappling with the gun in Bolan’s hand as she exclaimed, “Phil! What …?”
But then those magnificent eyes swept upward and traveled the face twice around.
“You’re not Phil,” she declared in a shaking voice.
No, indeed, he was not.
But the day had become a bit more beautiful, Just the same. Or a bit uglier … depending on where a guy was standing.
CHAPTER FIVE
PROJECTIONS
Her age was somewhere in that indeterminate zone between late-twenties and early-thirties, the eyes bright and expressive, skin like soft copper and about the same color—a very lovely woman.
Intelligent, too.
She smoothly backpedaled in quiet retreat, drawing the negligee firmly closed and holding it there with both hands.
Bolan told her, “We can do this the hard way or the easy way.”
That pert face was composed, but the voice was scared as hell as she replied, “Let’s try easy.”
He said, “Sit down.”
She stiffly lowered herself to the edge of the bed and perched there, as though ready for a quick flight. Bolan swung a chair around and straddled it, peering at her over clasped hands atop the backrest. “Who are you?” he asked in a mild tone.
“My name is Mary Valdez.”
“What are you to Philip Jordan?”
“Friend—we’re just friends. Good friends.”
“Very good friends,” Bolan said.
She looked down at the negligee. “That’s right.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Are you some kind of cop? Because if you are—”
“I thought we were taking it the easy way,” he said. “That means that I ask the questions. You supply the answers. Easy way. Okay?”
She shivered and replied, “Okay, sure.”
“How long have you known him?”
“About … five years, I guess.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Yes.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live here. In Alamogordo.”
“Since forever?”
“Since forever, yes,” she said.
“But Phil’s been here for only a few weeks,” Bolan pointed out. “How could you have known him for five years?”
“Well, he works for the Pentagon. I work at the test center. That’s where we met. At the center, I mean. He’s around there a lot.”
“A few days at a time, though,” Bolan suggested.
“Yes. Well, now, he’s been transferred out here.”
“To do what?”
“What?”
“Is he working at the center?”
“No. He’s …” Her eyes flared and worked at the door for a moment. “I don’t think I have to answer these questions. Where is Phil? Why are you made up to look like him? What’s going on here?”
Bolan said, “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I think he’s in big trouble. I’m here to find out what it is.”
She said, “Oh God,” in a miserable little voice and lost the stiff composure. After a moment of silence, she asked him, “Could you show me some credentials or something?”
He shook his head and firmly replied, “No way.”
The lady cried a little, then, and fussed with the negligee a lot.
Bolan went to the bathroom, wet the end of a towel, and gave it to her. She accepted with a grateful sweep of wet eyes and went to work on the face.
When she’d got it back together, she said, “You’re from Washington, aren’t you?”
He lied a little. “Yes. But if you want to help me, then let’s pretend I’m totally dumb. I know nothing. Tell me what I ought to know.”
“What can I tell you?”
“Where has Phil been working these past few weeks?”
“I don’t know if I can tell you that.”
“There’s no choice, lady. You have to tell me that.”
She dabbed at her face some more, then said, “Well, I sort of believe he’s on some special assignment.”
“You mean like, maybe, for the CIA.”
Those expressive eyes jumped at that. She said, “Maybe. He did some field work for the CIA a few years ago. But that was overseas. The CIA doesn’t work—I was thinking maybe G-Two or something.”
“He’s done field intelligence for the army before?”
“Oh yeah. Sure. Lots of that.”
Bolan told her, “That’s fine, Mary. That’s very good. We have a start. Now let’s keep it on this level. Has he been spending any time out at the test center lately?”
“Not much. He was at Fort Bliss for a couple of days. That was … two weeks ago. Then he went … I think he went to Los Alamos once. And he was at Holloman. He’s been very busy. I’ve actually seen very little of him this time.”
“But you were expecting him to be here today.”
“Yes. We—he said—we had a date.” She plucked at the negligee and pitched her voice to a near whisper. “He said I should come on in and make myself comfortable. He’d be here about ten—about ten o’clock.”
Bolan observed, “You’re pretty early, then.”
“Yes, well, I thought—I wanted to make myself pretty and—and surprise him.”
Bolan said,
“Congratulations. You look very pretty. And you surprised the hell out of me.”
The lady actually smiled a little as she told him, “You scared it out of me!”
He grinned and offered her a cigarette. She declined. He started to light one for himself, then changed his mind and quietly asked her, “You know nothing about Phil’s assignment? I mean, the real assignment, not the cover.”
She sucked in her breath and shook the pretty head. “Just what I told you. I knew something was off key, though. But he didn’t—we aren’t—Phil and I are not all that tight. You know what I mean.”
“Just friends,” Bolan said, smiling.
She smiled back. “Right. That’s right.”
“When was he at the center last?”
“That would be … Monday, I guess. This is Wednesday? Monday, right.”
“His executive clearance is still in force, then,” Bolan said casually.
“Well, sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”
He stood up and twirled his chair about, dropped back onto it, and leaned toward the bed with elbows on his knees. The voice was pitched low and confidential when he said, “This is—I shouldn’t tell you this. Can I tell you this?”
The lady solemnly nodded her head and bent forward until their heads were almost touching. “I’m cleared all the way,” she assured him.
He took one of her hands and massaged it gently as he told her, “Department of Defense fired Phil two years ago. He isn’t even cleared for the janitor’s mop bucket.”
“That is not possible,” she whispered furiously. “I should know. My job is administrative security.”
He said, “Right, that’s just the point. You should know.”
She hissed, “What the hell is going on here?”
Bolan said, “You’ve been had.”
“You’re crazy! What are you saying?”
“I’m saying the guy has been with the CIA for the past two years. Right now he’s with nobody. He’s a free agent.”
The lady was scared as hell. And too stunned to function. She whispered, “But how … how …?”
“You say his clearance is intact. You’re sure of that.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” she replied woodenly. “He’s still executive DOD in my book. You say—two years? My God. No, it couldn’t be. You’re wrong. If you’re not, then it’s some kind of cover operation. I’ll bet it’s G-Two. He’s a security fink. My God, he’s set me up! I don’t believe—I can’t …”
“Forget all that crap!” Bolan snarled, trying to snap her out of the fuzzies. “The guy isn’t checking security, dammit, he’s waltzing it. What has he been doing out there at the missile test center?”
“He’s been auditing my records,” she replied, the voice all hollow and dead.
“Meaning exactly what?”
“I’m the security administrator,” she said listlessly. “My branch handles all the clearance data. We coordinate the inter-agency security checks, issue personnel badges, all that. All that.”
Bolan said, “Which means he has had complete access to the security clearance system.”
She replied, in a faint whisper, “That’s what it means.”
Bolan stood up and said, “Well, that’s just dandy.”
The lady began to cry again. Bolan let her. After about forty seconds of that, she started getting mad. “Well, I’m in a hell of a mess, aren’t I!” she yelled.
“Is that all that’s bothering you?” he said disgustedly.
“Is that all that …!” She leapt to her feet and let go with a haymaker from far right field. Bolan caught the wrist and held on. She tried to knee him and that was too much. He tossed her back onto the bed and went to a neutral corner, arms folded across the chest, glaring at her with genuine anger.
“You guys are setting me up!” she cried.
He said, “Nuts. You set yourself up. You allowed friendship to override the security routine. You let a guy with two years off the job keep on—”
“What’s going on here?” she screamed. “I think I’m going crazy! What the hell kind of—I’m not buying any of this shit! You guys aren’t going to …” She bounced off the bed, ripped the negligee from that luscious body, and flung it at Bolan. “I scream rape in just five seconds if you’re still here! We’ll see who gets the final shaft in this lousy, damn—”
Bolan gritted his teeth and let her have it once, with an open palm, not hard but just hard enough to lay her back onto the bed. Then he covered her with the torn negligee and told her, “We were going to do this the easy way, Mary.”
She rolled onto her belly and began bawling again. Bolan felt like a bastard, and he was. But a bastard he had to be. It was that kind of game.
He pulled the weeping beauty from the bed and into his arms, cuddling and comforting that soft nudity and making reassuring noises in her ear.
After a little of that she began responding to the attention, her sobs becoming soft sighs and quiet little protests.
“I’m your friend,” he told her.
“I believe you,” she whispered. “I want to believe you.”
“I have to go out. Will you stay for a couple of hours? Will you cover for me?”
“Cover what?” she sighed.
“For a little while,” he explained, “my name is Philip Jordan. I may need some verification of that. For just a little while.”
“I guess I could do that,” the aroused woman whispered. “Then what?”
“Then I’ll scratch your back,” he told her.
“That’s what friends are for,” she said.
“That’s what I always say.”
“What about Phil?”
“Phil is dead,” he said quietly.
The woman stiffened in his arms, pushed herself clear, and sank back onto the bed. “Well, I am very confused,” she wearily admitted.
“Welcome to the game,” Bolan said. “I’m trying to clear the confusion. But I have to be straight with you, Mary. More is going down here than a security glitch … and there’s a hell of a lot more to be lost than pride and jobs. You could end up dead. But I do need your help.”
She stared at the ceiling and said, “Okay. You’ve got it. Now get the hell out of here, will you? I need some time. I need more than that. I must look like hell.”
“You don’t look like hell to me, kid,” Bolan truthfully told her. He paused at the door to say, “If you haven’t heard from me in a couple of hours, forget it. Everything is off. Get out to the center and pull your own audit on those files. Clean up the act. And blow every damn whistle you can find. Okay?”
She raised herself on an elbow and showed him a wan smile. “Who the hell are you?” she asked solemnly.
“A friend,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” she replied.
Bolan winked at her and went out of there. He had a date with an unknown entity at Rancho Jacundo. And at least now he had a bit more feel for what he was moving into.
And it was, yeah, getting to be an almost beautiful day.
CHAPTER SIX
INTERPRETATIONS
It really was a ranch—or had been, once. But the corrals and cattle chutes were victims of dry rot and had long ago ceased to have any function. Off in the distance, a huddle of adobelike huts could be seen with human figures moving slowly about in some unimaginable mid-morning activity.
The whole place looked like a shot from some Hollywood western—as a hideout for Apache renegades or for a robber band from south of the border. It would be eminently defensible, with natural ramparts of rock formations encircling a small valley in the hills, a zigzag access route through stone canyons.
A movie set, yeah. Bolan would not have been too surprised to find John Wayne standing at the gate.
But this was the late twentieth century—and what he found was a military jeep bristling with antennae, manned by a GI with MP decals adorning his helmet liner.
Bolan would have been more comfortable with John Wayne. He told the guard,
“I’m Dr. Philip Jordan. The captain is expecting me.”
The guy responded to that with eyes only and reported the arrival via radio. He then told Bolan, “Park your car at the turnout, sir. Your escort will be here in a minute.”
The “escort” was there in less than a minute—another “GI” and another jeep. Nobody requested identification or credentials, though both men wore the standard ID badge and the place was duly posted for “Authorized Access Only.”
The ride into the interior was conducted in silence. They skirted south of the adobe huts and ascended a washboard road, which dropped abruptly into a second small valley. This one seemed considerably higher in elevation than the first and technically was not a valley at all but a scooped-out hollow in the shape of a spoon. And that was not the only difference. Here, the motif was strictly military. Large equipment vans and trailers bearing huge dish-antennas were scattered about. These and other installations were concealed from aerial view by a system of camouflage nets. Off to the rear, nestled along the rock walls, were parked a half-dozen or so house trailers of the expandable type, painted in standard camouflage designs. At the center of all that was a large pad for helicopter operations. Two Hueys and several smaller craft now occupied the pad and there was room for considerably more.
Bolan, the warrior, was entertaining a strange sensation at the base of his spine. It was all so damned authentic. Any soldier would feel right at home here. So who was saying that it was not authentic? The feeling lingered that he had blundered into some offbeat official operation. Were it not for the constant presence of the mob …
He clamped off the spinal shivers and stepped to the ground. The driver had halted the jeep at one of the expanded trailers. The guy had hardly looked at him, but now he smiled almost shyly and tossed his passenger a limp salute as he drove away.
A guy in desert khakis and wearing lieutenant’s bars stepped outside to greet him. “Doctor Jordan?” They were a friendly crew. This one, too, grinned as he asked, “How does it look?”
Bolan went up and shook the guy’s hand. “Looks great,” he said cordially. “Who are you?”
“I’m Thompson, sir.”
Bolan said, “Of course,” and went inside.
Two young men in military fatigues sat at desks. Neither showed any interest in the visitor. They were fussing with some sort of mathematical data and feeding entries into small computer terminals. The trailer was otherwise stuffed with electronic gear, except for a small office partition at one end.
Wednesday’s Wrath Page 3