Assassin's Tripwire

by Don Pendleton

  Brognola drew a deep breath and wished he hadn’t more or less given up actually smoking cigars. These days he chewed them more often than not…when he wasn’t chewing antacids to counteract the stress of his job. Today was worse than usual, because he had to steel himself for some of the most brutal work a man in his position was likely to supervise.

  It wasn’t called torture.

  And, honestly, it wasn’t torture, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t intensely uncomfortable for the subject. Brognola didn’t like it and didn’t enjoy watching it, but again, some things were necessary.

  And once more, there was that nasty little voice nagging at him. What was it? What was he missing? He looked at the file again as he walked, shuffling through the photos of Eidra, the description of his arrest and the appended analysis of the security flaw that had allowed him to get so close to the President.

  In theory, security at the meet and greet with Hahmir had been as tight as Wonderland got. There should have been no way for a random national to penetrate the concentric rings of the security cordon, but Eidra did. He’d posed as a member of the press. When it came time for the dog-and-pony show after the President and Hahmir had done a lot of talking for the television cameras, Eidra had stepped forward.

  On the table next to the media dais had been a cup of those stupid pens politicians used to sign bills one letter at a time. One of the Man’s people had scheduled a ceremony to sign some piece of legislation or other after the main diplomatic fanfare was over. Eidra had moved up to the microphone cluster, sidestepped as if he’d tripped and then dived for the pens, coming up with one in his fist like some kind of dagger.

  He’d been within three steps of the podium on which the President stood. Eidra had covered that distance in fractions of a second, diving for the Man as if he would bury that pen in his neck.

  Hahmir had stepped in front of the President.

  The Syrian leader had taken a stab to the shoulder before the Secret Service tackled Eidra. Still more operatives hustled all the dignitaries to separate armored safe rooms. The place had been utter chaos for the next hour, as the finger pointing and speculation began. That was when the talk of Hahmir-as-hero had started. The idea stuck, and by the time the President and Hahmir had called their joint press conference later that day, the two of them were pretty chummy.

  Hahmir’s wound was superficial and, as part of covering up the whole incident in the press, the Syrian leader had agreed not to speak of it. Much as the media loved a hero story, it would be far too ugly if word got out that an unauthorized individual had gotten so close to the President and visiting foreign dignitaries. It was that much worse that it all happened on White House property. And while the President was not stupid, he very much wanted to believe that Hahmir’s good faith was genuine.

  Which left only the mystery of Eidra.

  A lone nut sneaking into the media pool was not so far-fetched. Eidra need not be anything or anyone more sinister than a crazy person. After all, there was no shortage of nuts who wanted to take a poke at the President.

  But Eidra, at least at first glance, appeared anything but nuts…and their attempts to investigate his background had met with enough obstacles that Brognola was becoming very suspicious. Eidra was a ghost. Someone didn’t disappear that effectively unless a skilled cybertechnology team was backing him up, and that meant the involvement of some government or terrorist organization.

  Except for speaking his name, Eidra had not uttered another word. He’d given them nothing to go on. They didn’t know his nationality and they weren’t sure of the derivation of Eidra itself. So far, while imprisoned, he had eaten mechanically when food was put in front of him, slept when he was allowed to sleep, and made absolutely no comment, protest or action of any kind with regard to his incarceration.

  It wasn’t natural. Brognola was no stranger to conducting interviews and interrogations from within the deepest, darkest government holes imaginable. When a man dropped off the world and into a place like this, he went through predictable phases. Sure, those phases didn’t happen in the same order with everyone, and they weren’t always of the same duration, but you could count on some degree of defiance, bargaining, despair… There were a few other shifts, but what they all had in common was that the prisoners reacted. They made noise. They demanded to see someone in authority, perhaps to speak with their own governments. They pleaded. Sometimes they cried. To just sit, stand or eat without making any comment at all… It wasn’t natural.

  It all added up to a picture Brognola didn’t like. That was why he’d come here today. He wanted answers. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he got them. The President seemed to think the matter was over, with Eidra imprisoned and the Syrians now nominal allies. But the moment the weapons shipment had gone missing, Brognola knew there was more to it all than this simple narrative.

  Finally, they arrived at the door to Eidra’s cell. They were on the lowest level of the black site here. That was fitting, Brognola supposed. No one had ever escaped from this place. No one ever would. That was because the men who guarded it would kill Eidra, Brognola and even themselves if that was what it took to keep Wonderland secure from the monsters lurking behind these locked doors.

  “Open it,” said the man from Justice.

  The guards nodded. At Brognola’s order, they opened Eidra’s cell door. The interior was much like any cell in any prison across America, with one exception: this one had a cot, a stainless-steel toilet with no seat and a steel table with two steel chairs. The table and chairs were cemented to the floor. No amount of time and effort would set them free, not without power tools. The reason the cell boasted a table and chairs was because here, in the black prison, every cell was also an interrogation room.

  “Do you want him chained?” one of the guards asked. Eidra, sitting on his bunk, didn’t look up.

  “No,” Brognola said. He supposed he was being macho, proving to himself that a spindly punk like Eidra couldn’t take him barehanded. Brognola might be aging and he might spend his days riding a desk, but he’d be damned if he was going to shrink in fear behind these stevedores while a scarecrow like Eidra stared him down. The prisoner could not possibly weigh more than a hundred and thirty pounds. He was one of the thinnest men, for his height, that Brognola had ever seen.

  “I’ll get the bucket,” one of the guards said. He let himself out of the cell. Brognola nodded to the other one, then sat down at the table. The remaining guard went to the bunk, clamped one beefy hand on Eidra’s shoulder and guided him up and over to the interrogation table. Eidra sat across from Brognola without prompting.

  “You heard?” the big Fed said. “The bucket is for you. We’re going to waterboard you. ‘Enhanced interrogation,’ they call it. It’s going to feel like you’re drowning. You won’t be. You’ll stay alive and awake for as long as we keep you that way. And you’ll get to feel every excruciating moment of it, for as long as we say you do.”

  Eidra looked up at Brognola and actually met his eyes. Then the corners of his mouth turned up. He smiled. Brognola did his best to hide his surprise.

  “Eidra,” the prisoner said.

  “The name, rank and serial-number bit, eh?” Brognola said. “Okay. That’s fine. Nobody thinks they’re going to break the first time.”

  Eidra leaned forward on the table. Brognola told himself to be wary. If the man tried to head-butt him or bite him, he would be ready for that. He had seen people blinded, had seen them nearly lose noses, when victimized by similar maneuvers.

  “Eidra,” the prisoner said again. He leaned back and smiled even more smugly.

  The other guard returned with a cart containing the items necessary to get the job done. “It’s time,” Brognola said. “I just wanted to see if you had anything to say before we began.”

  Eidra shook his head, which was remarkable of itself. He crossed his arms, still defiant. And in that moment, in that second of familiarity, Brognola felt as if he’d been hit by ligh
tning.

  “Damn,” Brognola said.

  The guards looked at each other and then at Brognola. The man from Justice wasted no time explaining, however.

  “Secure the prisoner and escort me out. Now.”

  The guards were well trained. They didn’t ask questions or delay him. They just did as he ordered, discarding the notion of conducting the interrogation and making sure he got where he needed to go. A driver behind the wheel of a For Official Use Only Chevy Malibu raced him through the streets of Wonderland, and Brognola was soon shoving open the door of his own office.

  Once behind his desk, he opened his secured, scrambled laptop and fired up his connection to Stony Man Farm. The head of the Farm’s computer team, Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, appeared on the screen through the encrypted connection.

  “Hal?” he asked. “What’s wrong? You look like somebody just shot your dog.”

  “Bear,” Brognola said, “I need you to call up the Fafniyal file right now. I need to see our highest-resolution pictures of the Wolf. The ones I was looking at when we prepared Striker’s dossier for the mission.”

  “You got it,” Kurtzman said. His fingers flew across the keys, faster than Brognola would have thought possible if he hadn’t seen it many times before. The files began appearing on Brognola’s screen, served up by the computers at the Farm.

  “No,” he said. “Next. Next. Not that one.” With each image, he asked for the next one.

  Then he saw it again.

  “That one!” Brognola said. On the screen, the Wolf was standing with his arms crossed, looking smugly at whatever his attention was focused on.

  “Hal?” Kurtzman asked.

  Brognola swore. “Bear, give me facial recognition on Eidra, the suspect in the attempted assassination in the Rose Garden.”

  “But we ran that,” Kurtzman said. “It didn’t match anything in our files or in the Intelligence databases.”

  “Not against the files. Run Eidra against Fafniyal. Give me points of similarity.”

  Kurtzman’s expression changed on the pop-up window on Brognola’s screen. He’d realized what the big Fed was after, and it had hit him as hard as it did Hal. “You’re not thinking…” he began.

  “I am,” Brognola said.

  “Give me five minutes. Maybe ten.”

  Brognola waited impatiently as the Stony Man team and computers worked their magic. He was on his third ant-acid pill, working his way through the pack in his jacket pocket, when Kurtzman came back on.

  “Well?” Brognola asked.

  “You were right. There’s a high probability that the two are siblings. And if the Wolf and this Eidra are, in fact, related…”

  “Then Striker is in big trouble,” Brognola said, “because the Wolf’s brother tried to attack the President in order to give Hahmir the chance to ‘save’ the Man.”

  “Striker’s radio-silent,” Kurtzman said. “That was your own mission parameter. We can’t reach him and he’s not going to call us.”

  “I know, damn it. Don’t you think I know? But we’ve got to find a way. We’ve got to get this information to him somehow.”

  “We’re on it,” Kurtzman said. “Farm, out.” The secure transmission ended.

  Brognola stood up and went to the window, feeling his stomach roil. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. But he was one of the few people in the Western world who’d actually seen a picture of the Wolf, not to mention the Wolf and his apparent brother. It was no wonder the connection hadn’t been made before. Now that they knew, however, they had to warn Mack Bolan.

  5

  Bolan ripped the Beretta from its shoulder holster and stroked the trigger repeatedly, spraying 3-round bursts across the surface of Khasky’s poker table. Confetti filled the air as bullets tore through the deck of cards. The fat man squealed and toppled over in his chair, dropping his machete. Seated behind the table, Khasky was never the real threat. That came from the guards. Bolan simply needed the distraction that targeting their leader would provide.

  Obviously, Yenni and Bolan had miscalculated. The loyalists wanted Hahmir’s regime to fall; they’d also suffered under the yoke of the Wolf. That meant the loyalists would want the stolen weapons to remain out of Hahmir’s hands for as long as possible, preventing the new Syrian government from asserting control over the nation.

  Khasky struck Bolan as the type of craven merchant who did whatever was necessary to stay in business. Clearly, he’d liked the old days of the previous Syrian regime better. Fragile as a new government could be in dictatorial hellholes like this one, it wasn’t a bad bet. If a roach like Khasky could outlive that government, he could survive to relive his glory days when things went back to how they had been.

  Bolan and Yenni would find nothing here unless they fought and killed for it. But the gunfire, in the midst of this loyalist outpost, would quickly summon others. Bolan felt his sixth sense for combat prickling the hairs at the back of his neck from the first pull of the Beretta’s trigger. They were on borrowed time, and that time was measured in seconds, not minutes.

  The man with the Skorpion was bringing his machine pistol up. The angle was bad for him. Time seemed to slow in the Executioner’s mind as he focused on the deadly ballet that was close-quarters combat. Every muscle, every cell of Bolan’s body fired in concert as adrenaline coursed through him. His vision narrowed on the threat, tunneling out. His hearing faded to auditory-exclusion levels. He experienced these things calmly, knowing them intimately.

  It was time, once more, to go to work.

  Bullets from the Skorpion singed the air to the left of Bolan’s face. Yenni dropped, spinning on one foot, rolling out of the way in a graceful move that he found impressive even in the heat of battle. As she cleared his line of fire, he spit out the last of the Beretta’s 20-round box magazine. There was no time to reload. He did not intend to try.

  The man with the Skorpion was swinging the muzzle of his weapon toward him. In the tachypsychia of the gunfight, Bolan watched the barrel move. The stream of small-caliber bullets squirting from that gun would kill him just as certainly as rounds from a larger one. The trauma of multiple bullets striking simultaneously would induce shock that could take him out even if the bullets themselves missed his most critical organs.

  Bolan threw the Beretta.

  The Farm’s armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, would be mortified, but in the thick of battle, Bolan did whatever he needed to do. The Beretta struck the man with the Skorpion, hitting him right at the bridge of his nose.

  Bolan’s hand was already moving back toward his belt. He brought up the Desert Eagle and shoved it forward, letting it fire itself, pressing the trigger by instinct. The .44 Magnum round exploded in a gout of fire, rocketed through the air and dug a tunnel through the Skorpion gunner’s left eyeball. It kept going when it reached the back of his skull, spraying his brain across the already damaged poker table.

  The dead body swayed on its feet for an impossibly long time before it finally collapsed.

  The deafening roar of the Desert Eagle momentarily paralyzed the other two guards. They were, for a split second, both looking at the sudden corpse of their comrade. When the body hit the ground, they scrambled to bring their own weapons into play.

  The machete man raised his long blade, perhaps thinking to sink it into Bolan’s skull. He was big enough to manage it, certainly. But in the blood spatter and noise of the gunfight, everyone but Bolan had forgotten about Yenni. She popped up behind the guard, drew the Jordanian military knife from her belt and rammed it over and over again into his kidneys. He screamed and dropped his weapon, crumpling to his knees.

  Yenni kept stabbing him until he went all the way to the ground. She never made a sound while doing it.

  The big guard, the one with the bone-crushing hands, was rounding on Bolan now, but the nose of the Desert Eagle was already tracking him. Bolan fired and fired, emptying his weapon, punching .44 Magnum holes into the giant. He went down like a felled t
ree. Bolan’s ears rang from the roar of his weapon.

  “Behind you!” Yenni shouted.

  Bolan spun just in time to feel Khasky’s machete cut an icy path down his flank. The blade embedded itself in the much-abused poker table as the soldier spun clear.

  He held only the empty Desert Eagle, so he clouted Khasky across the face with it. The weapons dealer rocked back, but was not stunned. Bolan let the gun go and, as it fell, slipped his combat knife from its sheath. The blade went into Khasky easily, plunging deep.

  The man screamed.

  Bolan didn’t have time to dig around in Khasky’s guts until he managed to get to something important. Instead, he brought up his combat boot and smashed first one knee, then the other, chopping his opponent’s legs out from under him. The fat man collapsed, blubbering and cursing, and Bolan slammed his blade into the junction of Khasky’s head and neck. It was like throwing Khasky’s off switch.

  “We must flee,” Yenni said.

  Bolan nodded and stepped over the corpse, wiping his blade on the dead man’s clothes. He sheathed the knife, retrieved his pistols and reloaded them before reholstering them. The Skorpion guard’s machine pistol was lying there for the taking, so Bolan did. The dead guard’s body yielded several magazines.

  “Let’s go,” Bolan said. “Back the way we came in. To the truck.”

  “Yes.”

  The sound of a siren, like a hand-cranked air-raid warning, began to wail throughout the bazaar and the surrounding town.

  “Uh-oh,” Bolan said.

  They ran, picking their way through Khasky’s building and then through the stalls of the market outside.

  Bolan saw the gunmen before Yenni did. He threw himself left, knocking her over and pushing her to the ground. At the other end of the bazaar, men wearing mismatched paramilitary garb and bearing the red scarves or arm ties of the loyalists raised Kalashnikov rifles and opened fire.

  Bullets tore through Khasky’s bazaar, striking people and merchandise with equal indifference. Bolan smelled coffee again. Whatever brewing apparatus was stationed in the stalls had probably been ripped open by gunfire.