"You have broken one of our laws," the man began.
Bolan didn't answer.
"You had irregularities in your paperwork crossing our border. You were also seen in conversation with an individual of dubious reputation. You gave the inspector a bribe, and he in turn paid out something to his sergeant."
"Yes," Bolan answered. He narrowed his eyes. "Corruption is a horrible thing."
"I will of course need to see your paperwork and identification."
"In the men's room?"
"I prefer to see identification documents printed on U.S. paper."
Bolan removed a hand from his trousers pocket. It contained a thick wad of money. There was ten thousand more in the knapsack for operational expenses. It was easier to make the little man before him go away with money than it would be to commit murder in a men's room at the train station.
Bolan held out several hundred dollars. Eagerly the man reached for it. Bolan pulled it away, leaving him grasping at air. The man scowled.
"How do I know you are an official just because you have a gun?"
The man spit a curse and yanked out his wallet. Inside was a government identification card. Bolan scrutinized it quickly and his heart began to beat faster. The man before him was not a police officer or customs official. He was a member of the Office of Military Affairs Security, the state organization charged with counterintelligence.
His mission was too delicate to come under the scrutiny of a corrupt intelligence agent. His time frame in Myanmar was short, the window of opportunity narrow. It was one thing to bribe a crooked policeman. It was another thing to enter into a relationship with a representative of the very group whose plans he was attempting to foil.
"How do I know this is the end of it?" Bolan asked. His left foot slid forward slightly. "How do I know that once I pay you I won't be paying someone else and someone else after them?"
The man's cannibal grin spread so wide it threatened to split his narrow skull.
"I'll be sticking close, keeping a protective eye out on you. If anyone comes near I'll use my influence to keep them away." His tongue, like a twisting pink worm, worked at a gold tooth. "You were a lucky man when you found such a guardian angel in me."
Bolan extended the money. The man reached for it. Just as the Asian's fingers brushed the folded bank notes Bolan let them tumble to the floor. The greedy official's eyes followed it, tracking it like a hawk.
The man's own greed had sealed his fate. Bolan struck. He dropped his right shoulder and formed a hook in the bend of his arm. He lunged forward, placing his right leg behind the knee of the other man's leg and twisted hard from his hips.
His bent arm clotheslined the startled agent around the neck. Bolan followed through on his savage twisting motion, simultaneously tripping him backward with his positioned leg and rolling the unbalanced man over the fulcrum of his own hip.
The agent flew into the air, his eyes wide with shock at the sudden violence of Bolan's movement. He hit the hard tile of the rest room floor like a sack of loose meat, and his head snapped into the ground as the air was driven from his lungs.
He lay, stunned for a moment and fighting against the smothering shroud of unconsciousness. Bolan did not hesitate. Standing over him like a medieval headsman, Bolan finished the altercation.
His left leg swept up in a crescent sweep until his foot was even with his chin, then he snapped the heel of that foot straight down in an ax drop. Bolan's heel caught the stunned Asian squarely in his throat and crushed the trachea and larynx. The man shook as if jolted by electricity, and his eyes nearly bugged from his head.
He made gagging noises through his ruined throat as his face grew purple. Bolan placed a big foot across the crushed structure and pressed downward with his two-hundred-plus pounds, cutting off the blood flow to the man's head and starving the man's brain of oxygen even more quickly than by crushing the windpipe.
The crooked agent's hands flew ineffectually to Bolan's shoe, but his fingers had no strength. The Executioner watched the dying man's face transition from bright purple to ashen gray, and then the eyes slid shut in defeat. The man shuddered once then lay still, his hands sliding off Bolan's shoes and flopping like fish on the grimy floor.
Bolan dropped to kneel beside the copse and, moving with a quick economy of motion, stripped the man of his weapon and identification and then reclaimed the wad of money he had used as a lure.
He pocketed those items then grasped the body firmly by the lapels and rose smoothly. He ducked under the rising corpse and shouldered the weight. He took two steps and crossed the rest room to unceremoniously plop the corpse on a toilet bowl. He locked the stall door then climbed out of the narrow space over the divider.
He went to the mirror, washed his hands and fixed his hair and adjusted the fit of his clothes. He looked at himself in the mirror. His face was expressionless. Turning, he picked up his knapsack and crossed the floor and unlocked the rest room door. He moved through and out into the train station again.
He looked down at the hollow eyes of the male prostitute, who returned his gaze calmly, his face expressionless. Bolan remembered the possessive caress of the government agent on the youth's face, and his stomach tightened into an angry knot.
He felt overwhelmed for a moment, powerless and impotent in the face of all-pervasive and seemingly omnipotent evil. He couldn't save this youth, or thousands more just like him across the world; it was simply impossible. That was the truth, as undeniable as it was merciless.
But it didn't mean he wasn't going to try.
Bolan pulled the money from his pocket and held it out. The youth took the money automatically. It was a lot of money for a street urchin in a Third World country where the annual per capita income was just under 450 U. S. dollars. It was enough to change his life.
Maybe.
"Take it," Bolan said. "Take it and go. Get away from here. Now."
The youth nodded, though Bolan had no way of telling if he truly understood his words. The young man turned and took his friend by the hand and pulled him into the crowd.
Men began to push past Bolan and into the rest room. The rhythm of the platform at the Yangon station remained unchanged in its frantic pace. There was no blood to betray the killing, no smell of cordite on the air. People minded their own business in Yangon.
Bolan began cutting his way through the crowd. His hands found the face of his wristwatch. He was still on schedule and had plenty of time to make his meet. Standing head and shoulders above the milling people, he pushed his way through the crowd and out of the building where he hailed a cab. He gave the address to the Mandalay Resort and settled down into the back seat as the driver navigated the chaotic streets.
The streets were lined with people and the lanes jammed with rickshaws, bicycles, tiny passenger cars, mopeds and delivery trucks. Caucasian faces were uncommon, and there was a ready mixture of peasant garb and business suits. At intersections and in front of important buildings military police armed with long wooden batons and AKM assault rifles eyed the pushing crowds with bored faces and reflexive suspicion.
In the rearview mirror the cabdriver's eyes, yellowed and bloodshot, flicked up and the unshaved man regarded Bolan.
"English?" the driver asked, his voice heavily accented.
"American," Bolan answered.
"Ah, good. First time in Yangon?" he asked.
"Yep," Bolan answered.
"Welcome to Myanmar," the driver said.
13
Stephanie worked on Caine with the mechanical intensity of a locomotive piston. He looked down at her and saw the top of her head bobbing in a smooth, professional rhythm. He felt every nerve alive through his body, and he sucked in air through clenched teeth and squeezed his eyes tight shut while she worked in his lap.
His mind screamed at him to hold on, and he knew if he didn't think about something else quick he was going to spend his three hundred dollars in under three minutes. His mind spun like the
wheels of an old-fashioned slot machine.
Stephanie took his mind off of what he had sworn to do, but his mind was never really off what he'd sworn to do. Maybe he thought Stephanie could save him. But no one on the outside could ever save a man from himself.
The presidential motorcade pattern was set. Caine knew there would be in the neighborhood of thirty vehicles. For his purposes his timing needed to be simple. Initial detonation would occur at vehicle number four followed by a secondary detonation at approximately cars nine or ten. This would put the presidential vehicle inside a tight kill box. If the explosion was large enough, the vehicles in the immediate vicinity of both target cars would blow, as well.
The main problem would be the electronic countermeasures placed in the lead car, the bomb-sweep vehicle. He had to...
Caine groaned deep in his chest as he lost control. Stephanie didn't miss a beat, and he felt the muscles of her throat working until he almost screamed out loud.
Stephanie locked her mouth in place as he shivered and calmed. Only when she was finished did she did raise her head. She touched the corner of her mouth where her lipstick had smeared. She seemed demure and poised. Caine's breath was as ragged as a running animal's.
"Can I use your bathroom?" she asked.
Caine could only nod in reply as he fought to gather himself. His mind was relaxed. The biggest factor was the bomb-sweep car. His plan would succeed or fail based on whether the first cache was noticed. If they missed the first one, it didn't matter if they discovered the second one; they'd already be in the kill box.
Which means the first device must be smaller, he reasoned. With cell-phone detonation codes he was susceptible to radio frequency jammers. The devices, called Warlock Green and Warlock Red, intercepted the signals sent from remote trigger locations to the IED, instructing it to detonate. The Warlocks prevented the signal from making contact. Without connection there was no detonation; the call was initiated but it was never received.
Despite that, Warlocks were not golden panaceas, even the advanced models likely used by the U.S. Secret Service. You needed to find the right frequency in order to stop it, Caine realized. That could not be easy, not with all of those cell phones and garage door openers out there being used to trigger the IEDs.
And just like that Caine knew what he had to do: prepaid cell phones. The chance for interception was still possible, but reduced. Redundancy—he had to build redundancy into the system. Two cell phones. Two triggers. If one was blocked, if jammers were used, then he'd have a second opportunity. The chance that the Warlock-style jammers would select two separate prepaid frequencies seemed an acceptable risk.
It wasn't foolproof, but it was plausible.
* * *
Later, lying next to Stephanie in the dark, he didn't feel so alone.
It was an illusion and Caine knew it, but it kept him from plunging fully into the abyss. He knew where he was headed, knew well the path he'd been on.
Maybe if Charisa hadn't left, things would be different. Hell, he knew that if Charisa hadn't left his life would be different. But then he'd done everything he could to drive Charisa away, and the truth was that if he'd wanted to keep her Mr. Esquire never would have had her, BMW or not.
Women hurt you and that was the truth, he realized. But then men hurt women, too. People hurt people until nothing was left of relationships but vindictive words and crushed emotions. In Mogadishu, to live he had killed, but to live with his killing Caine had pushed away everything he loved. He couldn't live with the decisions he'd made, so he pushed those closest to him away until he was left with nothing but a woman he didn't love and a future he couldn't avoid.
But the demagogue was different, wasn't it? He hadn't asked for that; he indeed had asked for just the opposite. Then someone he hadn't wanted as President had gone and made a bunch of decisions that had hurt him and those closest to him when he was already down. People didn't get to do that, shouldn't be allowed to do. People were dying—six a day, the TV voice told him—and now that son of a bitch in D.C. was making decisions that would get more people killed.
More people like Justin and Angel Ramos. Or decisions that would leave the world filled with more people just like him and his father. Men who pushed away the women they loved and didn't know their own children.
The politician son of a bitch had been wrong and his mistakes set things into motion, and the man was wrong so many times he would have been fired out of any other job. Incompetence. Incompetence was negligence and negligence was criminal, but nobody was doing anything to stop it. The system hadn't worked, and the demagogue had slithered through the failure and people were just going to keep on dying.
Caine cared. He wanted to elevate himself. He wanted to elevate himself beyond the limitations of his own past decisions. A man was the sum of his mistakes as surely as he was the sum of his victories.
But the truth was one man with a gun could change the course of history.
It didn't have to be right to be right. Truth was often like that, clumsy with ideals and long on practical realities.
Caine spooned in closer to Stephanie, feeling her warmth and sucking it up like a salve for what ailed him. Isolation, loneliness, despair. In the back of his mind he knew it was a lie, bought and paid for. Seen in that light it wasn't even much of a lie. But it was all he had.
"Steph," he whispered.
"Hmm," she murmured.
She seemed pretty sedated, which meant she would be willing to let him talk. That was good because he needed to get around to what he was going to ask her in his own way. What he was about to say didn't just have to do with her; it had to do with his plan and he needed to hear his reasoning out loud.
He was stoned and knew his conversation would seem disjointed and nonlinear. That matched his frame of mind, however, and part of what he was paying for after all—though he liked to pretend he wasn't—was for Stephanie to listen.
"I want you to stay with me for a while. Not to work anymore. Let me pay you to stay with me."
"You got that kind of money?" Her voice was its usual soft slur. He didn't even notice anymore.
"Yeah. I will. I have a little now, but come tomorrow I'm going to start having a lot more, enough for you to stay here."
"Three grand a week," she said.
She didn't ask why, probably didn't want to know, or hadn't even thought to ask. Men wanted her. They always had, and they found enough to pay for it. She had reduced her relationships to that. It was enough for her and she didn't want it to be more than that, even if it could have been.
Caine sighed. He could hear in her voice that Stephanie didn't care why he wanted her, only that the price was paid. He'd been fooling himself, and he hadn't been careful about how he'd proposed the offer. His bruised feelings were his own fault, he decided. He felt desperate to excuse her.
Life was tough, and if he'd ever thought differently then he hadn't listened to his father.
"Shit rolls down hill," the old man had said over the phone when Caine had gotten the government letter, "but blood, blood flows up the chain of command."
Caine would take Stephanie, he decided, even if she was bought and paid for.
* * *
The President looked up at the discreet knock on the door. He set down the casualty reports. He read them every day, though he hated it. The numbers kept him rooted. He had to be strong enough to make their sacrifice worth it.
"Come in," he said.
His press secretary entered the office. A thin, calm man with thick hair and an unflappable manner.
"I had an idea, thought it might work to our advantage."
The President leaned back in his chair and lifted his reading glasses up onto his forehead. "What about?"
"You know the Syrian foreign minister, al-Kassar, is coming next week to speak before the Senate Oversight Committee to protest our recent activities against Iran."
"Yes, I imagine our 'recent activities,' as you put it, have caused the
m some discomfort," the President noted.
"Well, al-Kassar is on record at a French university several months ago denying the Holocaust. Then he reiterated that opinion again for an interview with an English-language magazine."
"I'm falling out of my chair in shock," the President said.
"I think I may have found a way to kill two birds with one stone, sir. Embarrass and denounce al-Kassar, stealing his headlines while at the same time shoring up some drift from the Jewish American League."
The President sat forward, sharply interested. Voting demographics carried elections. In addition, active campaigning carried elections. Active campaigning in key voting demographics cost money. Money came from wealthy donors. JAL was all of those things wrapped up into a single tidy present. Embarrassing the Syrians would make for a very pretty bow on such a large present.
"Go ahead."
"The National Holocaust Museum is holding a fund-raiser the night before al-Kassar speaks. Topics include modern anti-Semite trends in international academia. With your presence at the event it'll get full coverage. We won't even have to spoon-feed the comparison to al-Kassar to the press—they'll just run with it."
The President eased back into his seat again and the press secretary could tell he liked the idea. The President liked synergy, believed in daisy-cutter chains of political thought, acting always through a combination, never a single punch. Since the aide to the secretary of state was already engaged in quiet discussions with the al-Kassar delegation, the energy created by such a public challenge of ideals and ideologies could only help to make the Syrians, and the Iranians through them, defensive.
"Set it up," the President ordered. "Then get Hal Brognola on the horn."
14
The driver crossed the bridge over the Irrawaddy River and took the exit leading onto the island and its resort. The Mandalay Hotel Casino was located on the north end of the river between different sections of Yangon. Bolan noticed the presence of heavy security almost immediately.
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