His initial briefing had informed him that the hotel casino was a luxury resort with 125 rooms on nine floors, two conference halls booked solid for the ASEAN convention, two indoor restaurants, one outdoor poolside restaurant, three bars, a banquet hall and a shuttle bus service into the city, supplemented by limousines for more influential or privileged guests.
The taxicab pulled up on the semicircular driveway in front of the wide, palatial steps of carved stone set in front of the hotel's front doors. Even before he got out of the cab Bolan could see the security measures the Myanmar government had put in place for the ASEAN conference.
Armed Myanmar national police and army units patrolled the grounds. According to Barbara Price's intelligence estimate, for every uniformed security presence, there were two or even three plainclothes undercover police officers or internal-security agents. Beyond these Price had assured Bolan that he could count on at least one out of five of the hotel "guests" during the regional conference being an intelligence or security operative for their host nation.
Bolan paid the driver and took his own bags up the steps and through the entrance of the hotel. The lobby was a large open space, ornately decorated and accessorized as befitted an international destination of such caliber.
A lounge area with tables and chairs took up one side of the floor plan, balanced by numerous counters for various guest services. The main counter was flanked by lavatories with gilded patterns and bamboo plants beside the doors. People bustled about, and the conversation of patrons provided a loud background buzzing.
Bolan gave his name at the counter, took his key and was directed to the elevators after refusing the service of a bellman whom he tipped anyway to ease the rejection. Bolan rode up the elevator, key card in hand. If everything was proceeding to schedule then his contacts should already have set up their operation in the suite.
The hotel was crowded, and even without specific intelligence warnings Bolan would have been suspicious at the presence of so many fit, hard-eyed men. The resort was crawling with muscle for the ASEAN conference.
Bolan was in a lion's den.
The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. The Executioner stepped out into the hallway and immediately saw at least two doors with men standing guard outside them. He frowned as he gathered his luggage to himself. Unobtrusive movement was going to be nearly impossible in this sort of environment.
One wrong action and the entire place could become a deadly combat zone.
He began to walk down the hall. It was long and narrow, heavily ornate with gilded wallpaper and thick carpet. The men guarding the doors watched him with interest unimpeded by good manners. Bolan ignored them.
Bolan passed the sentries and walked up to his door. He inserted his key card, watched the indicator light shift from red to green and heard the electronically controlled lock cycle over with a well-oiled click. He turned the door handle and pushed inward.
The door opened two inches, then stopped short, bumping up against the inside safety latch. He grunted in surprise; the Stony Man team had alerted his contacts regarding his arrival.
"It's Cooper," he announced, using his code name. "Hold on," a female voice said from inside the room.
Bolan caught a brief flash of a pretty redhead through the gap in the door before it was pushed shut from the inside. After a moment the door opened and Bolan stepped through the doorway into the foyer of the suite. Immediately the redhead shut the door behind him and threw the dead bolt.
Bolan looked around the room. It was a plush suite filled with modern amenities. A slender young man with dark hair and glasses sat at a desk with three open laptops on it. He nodded curtly at Bolan, then immediately began typing again.
"I'm Jill Benson," the redhead said. She pointed to the agent preoccupied with the laptop. "And that's Mitchell Sparks. Forgive his rudeness but we're a bit distracted...."
Bolan turned a questioning eye toward the agent, and when he did he saw the body lying on the floor.
"He was here when we checked in," the statuesque redhead stated.
"Don't we need to get rid of it in case of a setup?"
"I'm monitoring both hotel security and local police channels," Sparks said. "Even with the lag of it going through my translation software I have picked up nothing, including cellular or landline communications, indicating a call has been placed." He picked up two test tubes from the table and held them up. Inside the sealed containers Bolan could identify two pinpoint microphones. "We landed here and we're already in the shit."
Bolan frowned. "What about parabolic mikes pointed at the window?"
"I'm using a counter sound generator," Sparks replied.
Bolan frowned. "Say again."
"This is a beauty. They're used in industrial models in large factories to dampen the white noise of machinery. They work by producing sounds waves with peaks where ambient sound waves have valleys and vice versa, canceling the organic noise patterns."
"I knew there was a reason you guys were sent." He was impressed though not surprised that Stony Man had accessed such competent equipment and personnel on short notice. Bolan turned toward Benson. "What did the body tell you?"
"Well, I don't have any crime-scene gear with me," she replied, then paused. "It wasn't exactly what we pгеррed for."
"I imagine not," Bolan allowed. "Just give me your impression."
Benson nodded, her eyes serious. She was a composed, capable agent and the sight of the corpse hadn't rattled her, Bolan judged. It made him feel reassured that he could still keep his team on top of things.
He followed her to the body and listened as Benson provided details.
"Asian male, twenties. One hundred thirty-five, one hundred forty pounds. Medium height and build for his ethnicity and regional norms. The reddish-purple discoloration in the dependent areas of the corpse indicates we found him at least thirty minutes after death. But look."
The American agent knelt and lifted the man's hand by his fingers. Bolan saw that they were unnaturally stiff. The skin of the dead man was ashen against the stark relief of Benson's hand.
"Rigor mortis in the extremities, indicating the body has been dead for at least two hours."
"How was he killed?" Bolan asked.
Benson let the hand drop unceremoniously. She reached out and snagged a finger on the man's collar and pulled it down. Red welts stood out in livid detail around the man's throat, and Bolan could easily spot the concave instability under the Adam's apple indicating the larynx had been crushed, more than likely by a garrote.
"Strangulation."
Benson nodded. "I'm working on the theory that he surprised whoever was planting those bugs Mitchell found when he swept the room."
"Then they left the body?"
"Time might have been a factor," Benson suggested. "There's no identification on the body. Whether he came in clean or was stripped after the murder, I have no idea. I took his prints and a face-shot to run back through your people to see if we get lucky."
"Any luck?"
"Not so far," she answered.
"That's not all of our problems," Sparks announced from his station.
Bolan looked up from the corpse to where Sparks worked his cybernetic magic. It was a testimony to Stony Man's expertise that they'd been able to slide the gear through customs masquerading as television camera and editing communications gear.
"What else we got?" Bolan demanded.
Sparks removed his glasses and sat back to look squarely at Bolan. "If we want our op to go off like planned in six hours, we'd better make some decisions. On the plus side both your professor and the Red Sox fan have reported they're in position."
"Show me what you've got," Bolan prompted as he rose from beside the corpse and crossed the room to stand next to Sparks. He was running through a list of contingency plans he'd made while conceiving the operation. Finding a corpse in his hotel room hadn't been one of them.
"I've tapped into the hotel's communications
switchboard through our telephone line. I simply followed the signals to allow me to access the closed-circuit television system, the landline and alarm network. That part was easy. The hard part was not alerting all the other taps I already found in place there.
"This is a van Eck monitor." Sparks pointed at one of his open laptop screens. The laptop was attached to a small electronics box outfitted with an antenna similar to the one used on sat phones. "Computer equipment, especially monitors, emit radio waves when in use. I can intercept these signals and recover the data displayed on the screen. It's entirely passive and undetectable and reliable out to a range of three hundred yards."
"If we can do it, can't they do it to us?"
"I'm using fourth-generation TEMPEST gear," Sparks replied. "It was sent over through Justice via some contacts in the NSA. I'm also using the countersound generator."
"Is that why it sounds slightly tinny in here?" Bolan asked.
Sparks nodded. "Yeah, this hotel is a flipping cesspool of listening devices, so I'm running it kind of rich. But here's our problem." The tech whiz pointed toward one screen. "Our target has a hit team here for him."
"What?" Bolan snarled.
"I snatched some IMs being traded on a laptop near our room. It included some dates and conference times that correspond with our boy, so I got suspicious and ran it through my translator software. Chinese intelligence is apparently a little miffed."
"Miffed enough to murder a Vietnamese agent?"
"Since the border war in the early 1980s, things have remained strained," Sparks pointed out. "An ex-Soviet technology expert butting his nose into signal communications operations along that disputed border is probably the last thing Tiananmen Square wants."
"They put up with it for a while," Bolan pointed out. "LerekhoVs been in Vietnam for some time."
"I don't have all the answers," Sparks admitted. "All I know is that in a hotel room very close to us there's a team of Chinese government hitters here to put the squash on our target."
"Sometimes why isn't important—just knowing you have to act is enough," Bolan muttered.
"Speaking of that," Jill Benson broke in, "how do you want to handle our guest?"
Bolan nodded toward the redhead, then turned back to Mitchell Sparks. "Give me something to figure out a plan to pinpoint the location of the Chinese team," he said. "Just get me a name, a room number, a floor, hell, a compass direction if that's all you can manage."
Sparks nodded and turned back to scrutinize his computer screens. Bolan crossed the room to the cadaver and squatted by the dead man's shoulders. He jerked his chin toward Benson.
"Grab his legs," he said. "We'll move him onto the bed for now."
Immediately the redhead moved to help Bolan. Together they rose and lifted the man onto the bed. Bolan quickly scanned the carpet where the man had lain to see if any blood or other bodily fluids had made a stain. As far as he could tell with a cursory inspection, there was nothing.
"We can't keep him here," Bolan said.
"I know," Benson admitted. Her voice was steady but Bolan could tell by the strained look around her eyes that she wasn't happy at the prospect of dealing with a corpse.
"I can do it," he offered.
Benson shook her head. "Mitchell's doing his magic. You're going to need to do a reconnaissance. It makes the most sense for me to take care of disposal. I'll wrap him up before he's too stiff, then get some locals to pose as maintenance staff and cast the body out. I'll get the necessary uniforms and talk to my contacts later, but first I need you to get me rope and tape," the calm redhead told Bolan.
"I'll get the tape from the gift shop. There's rope and a knife in my equipment package in the knapsack." Bolan nodded. "Let's get started, then."
* * *
Bolan stepped out of the hotel room and into the hallway, closing the door carefully behind him. He looked up and down the hall, placing the bodyguards he'd seen earlier. He straightened his shirt and smoothed down the front before casually starting for the elevators. He felt the sentries' gazes on him as he passed them.
Surreptitiously he inventoried the hard-faced men as he passed them. He had to admit to himself that it would be impossible to identify the men's ethnicity. Even if he had been able to spot them as Chinese, it was no guarantee they were the ones sent to kill his target. Bolan wasn't about to gun down a party of government bureaucrats just to be safe.
When he struck—and as he entered the elevator he knew that without a doubt he would have to strike—he would be absolutely sure of his target. As the elevator started down, Mitchell Sparks's voice bled into his ear through the Bluetooth he had set to walkie-talkie mode.
"I'm up, and I can see you," Sparks said. "There are CCTV cameras in the elevators but not the landings or halls. I'm hooked in passive to the video feeds, so I can cruise through the system and receive the images, but if I try to cut a feed or control a camera I'll give the surveillance crew evidence that I'm there."
"Can you zoom and pan if I need?" Bolan asked.
"Yes. I can freeze the images on my screen then toy with them from my console, not from the camera. If something bad happens I can hijack controls until they run a diagnostic and spot the hack. They'll know someone has jumped the system but not from where."
"Audio?"
"I've hooked into the resort security comm channels. It feeds into a dedicated laptop with a transcription and translation program. I can see it scrolling down in English as they talk back and forth."
"I'm glad you're here, wizard," Bolan said.
"Don't make me blush," Sparks replied.
"You be ready to ditch and run if I give the word," Bolan warned. "When the deal goes down, I need to know you and Jill are headed toward safety."
Bolan signed off just as the elevator doors slid open in the lobby, which was just as crowded as it had been earlier. He moved through the crowd toward the gift shop. There were more Occidentals at the resort than there had been at the train station, and he didn't feel as if he stood out quite so much. Hopefully he'd been mistaken for a reporter covering the ASEAN conference; there seemed plenty of them.
There were also plenty of fit-looking men wearing suit coats and blank expressions, he noticed. In the gift shop he used a clean Visa card to purchase two rolls of clear tape.
He turned to head back upstairs to their suite when things began to go wrong.
15
Caine entered his apartment. His knuckles were scraped raw, and his shirt was splattered with blood. In one hand he carried a gym bag filled with money. A lot of money. It was the third such bag he had been able to obtain working as a collector for a local criminal network that welcomed the skills of disenchanted Rangers.
He entered the kitchen and saw Stephanie standing over by the counter next to his computer.
"Hey, Steph."
She looked up at him, her face expressionless. Her eyes were glassy. She had a small pile of cocaine on a makeup compact sitting next to her.
"Hey, sugar, how'd it go?"
He could tell by the distracted air of her voice that it wasn't really a question because she didn't really care about the answer. He answered anyway. He was paying dearly for the charade.
"It goes like it always does," he said. "Heads get cracked, money gets made and nobody goes to the police because everybody is dirty."
Stephanie snorted a bump off the compact mirror by way of reply. She was standing in heels and lingerie. It was an obvious, even ostentatious display. It lacked class and was all the more effective for it. One didn't have to approve of getting hit by a baseball bat for it to hurt.
To see Stephanie was to want her. She smelled like lavender and Caine felt a tug in his crotch, a reptile-brain response hardwired to respond to large eyes, full lips, heavy breasts and the smooth curve of a feminine ass, whether it was wise or correct or proper or tasteful.
He unbuttoned his shirt and went to the bathroom sink, where he left the door open. He stripped down to his wais
t and began to try to scrub the bloodstains out of his shirt.
"Why do you do that?" Stephanie asked.
He looked up and saw her leaning in the doorway. Her bra was crimson and her French-cut underwear was the same color above sheer, thigh-high stockings. She was impersonally beautiful, like a painting locked behind glass.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean just throw the shirt away, Caine. It's ruined. Buy another one. You can more than afford it. Christ, how much cash you got already?"
"Enough to keep you." He carefully scrubbed at the bloodstains. It was important to clean up the blood. He didn't know why; it just was.
"You wanna fuck?"
Her eyes were heavy lidded and as bright as steel in the sun. Caine looked down at the bloody shirt. The water in the sink was hot and had turned pink. Blood red, money green, he thought. He looked up into his eyes in the mirror. His erection was apparent in the reflection.
He looked at Stephanie and she smirked at him. The sociopathic glint should have been enough to turn him off, but he wasn't wired that way. She turned like a dancer on four-inch heels and bent over slowly at the waist, like a cat arcing her back to a friendly hand.
The movement showed her sex and Caine's eyes unfocused slightly. He forgot about cleaning the shirt. He'd buy another. He undid his pants with one hand and moved forward.
* * *
Later on, while Stephanie did more drugs, Caine mentally reviewed the section he had read in a library book on psychology.
He evaluated the information and understood that he had evolved through the crucible of his experiences to an understanding above and beyond laws. He was sure of it. He acted in accordance with his own moral guideposts. In the end that was all anyone could do because everyone was alone. If Stephanie had taught him anything it was this. His moral guideposts dictated that he could kill the one to save the many.
It meant leaving Stephanie, but sacrifice accompanied commitment. The right thing to do was often the most painful.
He had enough money. It was time to marry motivation to opportunity. Time to stop fooling himself into thinking he wasn't going to get his payback.
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