He had a country and a generation to save. He just knew it.
16
"What are you doing?" Bolan asked Mitchell Sparks over his Bluetooth.
"What do you need?" the electronics specialist responded.
"I'm still in the lobby. Can you scroll and get me?"
"One second."
Sparks began a complicated dance with his mouse pad on one of his open laptops. He cut through several streaming-video pages and found the overview of the lobby. He jumped from one security camera to another until he had Bolan up on his screen. He double-clicked and brought up the picture.
"I got you," he said. Bolan stood next to a potted fern chatting into his Bluetooth like any number of foreign reporters and businessmen in the crowded lobby.
"Over my right shoulder is a group of Myanmar soldiers."
"Hold on." Sparks's fingers flew over the keyboard until the screen had isolated a group of three soldiers armed with AKS folding-stock carbines. The trio stood in an ornate alcove watching the milling crowd with bored expressions. The sophisticated software in his laptop zoomed right in on the passive feeds coming from the resort security cameras that he had hacked into using the landline in the hotel room.
"I've got 'em," he said quietly.
"The guy on the left," Bolan directed.
Dutifully, Sparks worked his tech magic and captured the man's face. "I have him."
"Good. I think that's the soldier who looked over my papers at the border crossing."
"Understood," Sparks noted. "Coincidences usually aren't."
"More than that," Bolan said. "What's his rank?"
"I'm familiar with military insignia but I'm not expert..." He adjusted the resolution on his screen. "Captain?"
"Good copy, that," Bolan acknowledged. "The guy was a private when he checked my passport and now he's a captain."
"Uh-oh," Sparks muttered. "I'm sending his picture stateside to see if I can get a positive ID, but for now I'd say avoid him."
"Great, his post is right by the elevators."
"If he were on to you specifically, wouldn't he just be raiding the room?"
"He's an unanswered question," Bolan acknowledged. "If I'm not at the front of his mind at the moment, I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible."
Sparks turned in his seat and began typing on a second laptop. He pulled up the resort blueprint and began giving Bolan directions to circumvent the impromptu army checkpoint. Bolan grunted in response and began following his directions.
"By the way," Sparks told Bolan, "I'm getting Fox News feed here and a local station. It seems student protests are starting to gather steam."
"That's your tax dollars at work," Bolan answered.
His plan was simple, the way the best ones were. Increased crowd activity in the form of protest marches and perhaps even riots would force the security forces arrayed around and within the resort to turn their attention outward instead of inward. Not just outward, but outward to the west and the city side of the resort, away from the river edge to the east.
Following Sparks's directions, Bolan walked down a short hallway just off the main lobby that led away from the main elevator banks and toward one of the resort's many pools. He passed several guests and employees as he made his way down the carpeted corridor.
He opened a door set unobtrusively into the wall and entered a stairwell. Bolan moved up the stairs. On his way he passed a solemn-faced guard standing in front of one of the fire doors. His face was an impassive mask as Bolan walked passed him. The man was short and squat but with the neck and shoulders of a defensive back. His hair was short and parted on one side. There was silver at his temples, and his eyes were slanted slightly downward. His head swiveled to follow Bolan's progress, and Bolan spotted a tattoo of an Oriental ideogram along the thick neck muscle.
Bolan looked away and continued moving up the stairs, giving no indication of the sudden shock of recognition that had just created a starburst in his memory. At his floor he stepped through the heavy fire door and into the hallway. The two sentries posted outside the rooms there turned immediately in his direction. The one closer to Bolan let his right hand creep toward the inside of his suit jacket.
Bolan walked down the hall, his face nonchalant. The man recognized Bolan and slightly relaxed but kept the big Westerner under scrutiny. Bolan made it to his room and used his key card to unlock the door. Once inside he closed the door behind him and threw the dead bolt.
Mitchell Sparks looked up from his station. "Everything cool?" he asked.
"As cool as it can be," Bolan said.
He crossed to Sparks's desk, where he spotted a heavy, streamlined Mont Blanc pen next to a pad of vanilla writing sheets. Quickly Bolan sketched the tattoo he'd seen on the sentry's neck.
"That's not perfect," Bolan said. "But it should be close enough for you to find a match in the Interpol and Homeland Security databases, if it's there." Sparks looked at the paper. "I'll run this through the image encyclopedia. Where'd you get it?"
"It was a tattoo on the neck of a hard case standing in front of the fire door to the floor two levels below us. The joker could have been Vietnamese, but that ideogram jogged something in my memory. It's just a hunch."
"Well," Sparks allowed, "this is a target-rich environment."
The young cyber specialist took Bolan's drawing and fed it into a scanner. Immediately it appeared on the screen of one of his laptops. He scrutinized it closely, his ubiquitous headphones dangling around his neck. Sparks had a strong background in kanji from personal interest, and he was able to immediately dismiss the ideogram as not coming from a Japanese lineage.
Bolan picked up the bag containing the tape from the gift shop and headed for the bedroom.
"Hey, Jill," he said as he entered the bedroom.
"Hey, Cooper," Benson answered.
She had wrapped the corpse tightly in the shower curtain. The bedclothes lay on the floor, ready to be wrapped around the body once the shower curtain was secured with tape.
Bolan handed her the tape, and together they worked quickly. Finished with the tape, they encased the body in the bedclothes.
"I'm going to hunt down some hotel staff uniforms," Benson said crisply, "and some people who'll whisk this out of here."
Bolan opened his mouth to offer his help but Benson silenced him with a quick shake of her head. A tendril of red hair fell out from behind her ear and across her face. She used her hand to push impatiently back into place.
"You know it makes more sense for me to be the one," she said simply. "Besides, if something happens you have to be free to go after Lerekhov."
Bolan nodded and stepped back. They walked out into the hotel room and Benson made for the door.
There was a clatter of Sparks's fingers on his keyboard before he looked up. He turned his sharp chin and looked over his shoulder.
"Cooper, I got a match on that tat," he said.
"Good. Hold on," Bolan answered.
He turned toward Jill Benson and began to unlock the door to the room. "You have your Bluetooth?" he asked. "You need a pistol?"
Benson quickly patted her pockets but came up empty.
"My comm unit's over in my carry-on. Right there by the nightstand."
Bolan crossed the room and retrieved it for her. He handed it over and watched as she put it on and powered up the link.
"Pistol," he said.
"You think that's wise?" she countered. "I get busted with a pistol and it's over. I'm not getting in a shootout with cops to get away."
"What if the people who sent him..." Bolan pointed back to the bedroom "...decide to ask you some questions about how he got in that state? You get pinched, you go to plan B, dump and run, just maneuver till we can arrange extraction."
"This'll be a piece of cake," Benson said and offered a tight smile. "Back in a flash."
Bolan crossed the room and stood behind Sparks after Benson closed the door. He looked down at the image of the
tattoo he had drawn as it sat displayed on the laptop screen. A paragraph of text was located beneath the image.
"Vietnamese special forces?" He frowned.
"Not just special forces—naval commandos. The literal translation is 'Malevolent Frog-Dragon,'" Sparks specified.
"That seem like very good op-sec to you?" Bolan grunted.
"No, but it might not have been intended for covert action."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the unit is a group of amphibious scout raiders for the Vietnamese naval infantry divisions. The unit isn't classified or secret any more than our Rangers are secret. A young guy serving in the battalions might get a Ranger Scroll tattoo and no one would say boo—it's not like getting a tattoo saying Combat Applications Group," Sparks explained, referencing the correct terminology for what was commonly called Delta Force. "Now if that Ranger goes on to work in something not overtly clandestine like undercover espionage but as a diplomatic security operator or a Secret Service agent, then you have no op-sec issues."
"Well, that would tend to eliminate him as a candidate for our hit squad," Bolan said. "That would make him, probably, a security team member for the official Vietnamese delegation."
"I agree," Sparks said. "But it gives us a place to start—two floors down."
* * *
Jill Benson closed the door to the hotel room and began to walk down the hall. The sentries in the hall watched her with impassive gazes and intrinsic suspicion. She ignored them.
She approached the elevator banks and pushed the button to call a car. After a brief wait one arrived and a bell dinged loudly as the gilded doors slid open. The car was filled with three men. Benson's heart leaped up into her throat, but she kept her face neutral and forced a distracted smile. All three men were dressed in the uniforms of Myanmar national police.
The men broke off their conversations and regarded her. Their eyes scrutinized her, taking in every detail. After a moment the youngest man nodded and stepped back to give her enough room to enter the elevator. His partner, an overweight fortysomething with an Elvis pompadour, pushed the button to keep the elevator door open.
Jill Benson swallowed a lump out of her throat, froze her smile in place and entered the elevator.
17
Caine had his bags packed and sitting by the door. The apartment was empty and silent.
Stephanie had left without arguing when Caine told her it was time to go. There had been a moment at the door when she'd paused, as if she'd wanted to say something. Caine had frozen then and felt his throat suddenly constrict in some unnamed, misunderstood emotion. But both of them had been too broken to make the first move, and in the end Stephanie had slipped out the door and closed it gently behind her. Caine had locked the door.
Caine wandered over and picked up his cell phone, dialing the number from memory. He sank onto the couch while the phone at the other end of the line rang. There was a familiar pressure in his chest and behind his eyes. Again, it was a presence he couldn't put a name to, not anymore. It was there but it hardly even hurt.
"Hello?" Charisa answered.
Caine could tell by the curt tone of his ex-wife's voice that she knew it was him. He closed his eyes and his tongue felt too thick to form words, as if it were some animal he couldn't control filling up his mouth, choking him.
"Hello?" Charisa repeated.
Caine opened his mouth. I'm sorry, he tried to say but he couldn't force the words out.
"Goddammit," she finally snapped, "I know it's you. I have caller ID. What are you doing?" She paused. "If you want to talk to Emma, you can just forget it. You should have called on her birthday. Jesus, you're such a dick."
Tears welled up in Caine's eyes and his mouth was working and his hands started shaking so badly he could barely hold on to the phone. Despite this he could not will the words out, couldn't force himself to say what he needed to say.
"Don't call back!" Charisa shouted.
There was the sound of rustling on the other end of the line and suddenly Mr. Esquire's voice was on the phone. His voice was calm and reasoned, a courtroom voice, but Caine could hear the strain of the man's fear as clear as church bells.
"Look, Caine," he said, "if you love Emma, if you give a damn at all about Charisa, you'll just leave us alone." The man drew a breath and when he released it he sounded almost as tired as Caine felt. "We're a family now. You... you had your chance. Just leave us alone."
The line went dead. So did Caine.
He hung up the phone and rose. He wandered into the bathroom and began shoving prescription pills into his shaving kit, then stuffed his shaving kit into the side pocket of his suitcase. His tears evaporated. He walked over to the apartment door and picked up the rest of his luggage.
He chewed a pill chosen at random from his pocket and began to feel better.
He'd always been good at grand gestures; it was the minutiae of daily living that continually tripped him up. But what was minutiae, anyway? One man with a gun could change history, and that was the truth.
Caine opened his door and walked into the hall. He didn't bother closing the door behind him.
18
Jill Benson turned her back to the men in the elevator and watched the doors slide closed. The enclosed space was deathly silent, and she could feel the weight of the three men's stares on her. It made her skin crawl.
She swallowed hard and forced herself to remain calm. Her wireless communicator was a comforting weight in her ear. The line was open, the circuit modified to be voice activated. It was the only bit of solace she had.
The elevator slid to a smooth stop two floors down, still way up above the main lobby. An Asian couple, the woman in an evening gown and the man in a well-fitting tuxedo, stepped forward to enter the elevator car.
From over Benson's shoulder one of the uniformed men held up a hand barring entry, and the couple stopped immediately. Their eyes went to Benson and they watched impassively as the doors closed.
The elevator started with a slight jerk.
There had been plenty of room in the elevator compartment for the couple, Benson realized. It could have been too crowded for one of the men, personally, though, she tried to reason. Everything was still fine. The hotel was crawling with security forces; it was hardly unlikely that she would find herself sharing an elevator with a group of policemen.
There was no way for them to suspect she had a corpse in her room.
The elevator slid down another two floors.
The man on her right leaned forward, reaching around her. He was close enough that she could smell what he'd had for lunch—buk-sak, fish paste mixed with rice and drenched in a hot Thai-style sauce. The officer brushed his arm past her shoulder as he pushed a floor button and then stood straight.
The elevator slid to a halt, the doors opened with the familiar, subdued ding. The landing was deserted. Benson made to step out of the way of the three men and let them exit the elevator.
Hard hands grabbed her under her arms and propelled her forward. The heel of someone's palm struck her in the back and she stumbled, almost falling and the hands on her arms tightened into vises.
"No!" she snapped. The wireless communicator was still in her ear. "I don't want to get off on floor number eight, I don't want to go with you!"
* * *
Mitchell Sparks came up out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box on speed.
Bolan looked up, slightly startled.
"Jill just got nabbed!" Sparks said.
"Where was she?" Bolan asked.
"She was forced off the elevator on the eighth floor."
"Set up," Bolan snapped.
Sparks's hand went to the headphone on his right ear as he listened. "She just told them she didn't want to go into room 8014."
"It's over," Bolan said. "We're going now. We don't have time to take out the hit squad beforehand. Call my contact the organizer—have him get his student protesters into the street. Call the Red Sox fan and tell h
im we go now. I want all military posts around this resort under fire five minutes ago."
Sparks nodded. "Understood."
"Crash the hotel security system. Get Jack on the boat and in the river—I'm jerking Lerekhov out. I want you to burn this gear in place and get the hell out. Once I'm through this door, lock it and block it. You hear a knock, I want you out the window on the climbing rope. Get to Grimaldi, get into the river. Once I get Jill out I'm sending her after you, so keep our cell walkie-talkie modes up."
"Understood." Sparks paused. "This wasn't the way we planned it to go down."
Bolan nodded, understanding the agent's dismay. "It seldom does. Now let's roll."
* * *
A hard masculine hand grabbed Jill Benson's breast and squeezed it cruelly through her blouse as she was manhandled into the room. Two hard-faced men in plainclothes stood sentry in front of the door as she was issued through.
She was thrown into a chair and her head yanked back by the hair when she tried to rise. She looked toward the man who was holding her and saw a pistol inches from her face. Instinctively she froze and felt handcuffs slide around her wrists, locking her hands into place behind her back.
She was stung by a slap that snapped her head around, and she felt blood in her mouth. Again the cruel fingers twisted into her hair and wrenched her head back.
This time she found herself looking into black, laughing eyes, and she felt fear.
"Did you think you could kill a man in our country and get away with it?"
"I killed no one," Benson stated in a clear, calm tone.
She had to stall, had to command their attention until Cooper arrived. She would tell them any lie just to eat up time. She looked away and spit blood out of her mouth onto the carpet.
The officer laughed. "I am a magic man. I know things." He leaned in close and leered. "It's my job to know things. People tell me things." He paused. "Now you'll tell me things, too."
Benson struggled to maintain a neutral look on her face. She could still feel the sting of the slap and knew her lips were puffing up.
Collision Course Page 10