Renegade Agent

16

The waiter wheeling the serving cart looked up at Bolan in surprise. Then he saw the Beretta, and the surprise turned to fright. In front of the cart were the double doors to the dining room. Bolan flattened himself against the wall to one side, gestured to the waiter with the pistol.

The waiter slid the doors to either side and rolled the cart inside. Bolan spun around behind him, tracked down the Beretta, and said, "You're first, Edwards." He was counting on the other man's documented coolness under fire. For the moment it worked.

"Don't anyone move," Edwards said softly.

In all there were five men around the table.

Edwards sat at the head. Bolan recognized the others from Toby's description. The two on Edwards's right hand were senior agents of the Russian KGB. Across from them was a colonel in the Cuban Direccion General de Inteligencia, and a ranking officer of the extremist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In front of each was the rind from a crescent of melon. "Hands flat on the table," the Man from Ice ordered.

"Do what he says," Edwards echoed. "None of you are in any danger in this house."

They were free to believe that if they wished. In fact, Bolan did not consider any of them as targets, unless it was their lives or his. Sure, they were enemies of everything Bolan cherished, but no war had been declared. Though Bolan might rue the fact, he knew that along with the official sanction he had accepted came limitations, restraints.

Five pairs of arms framed the melon plates.

Though he contained it, Bolan's righteous anger gnawed at him. These four were not renegades, not in the sense that Edwards was.

Possibly they were here on their own initiatives; but just as possibly they were present on direct sanction of the governments they represented. It was common and confirmed knowledge that the Soviet Union and its client states were semi-supporters of international terrorism. Edwards's scheme would undoubtedly accrue to their benefits as well, and perhaps even attract their covert support.

"What do you want?" Edwards said calmly, in the same tone he might use to offer more coffee.

Bolan gave him no response but the implacable cold stare on which he had the guy skewered.

There were two other men in the room, besides the waiter, who had retreated to a corner to cower.

Kenneth Briggs, Edwards's full-time bodycock, stood behind his boss, his hands up at shoulder level, palms out. A Slavic-featured guy in an ill-fitting suit that was too heavy for the climate stood behind the two KGB agents.

Bolan kept Briggs within the field of his peripheral vision. "Take the gun out and drop it," he told the guy. "Two fingers will do the job." The heavy .45 thudded on the thick carpet.

Briggs was the dangerous one. Toby had managed to cozy up to the head bodycock once, get him talking. Before he had gone bad he had won nearly every decoration in the manual. And his two consecutive tours in Nam had been underjungle foliage, not a tin roof.

Like Bolan, Briggs was a survivor.

"Against the far wall," Bolan told the men at the table. "Your backs to me. Keep your hands high and make sure I can see them. Not you, Edwards."

The four men were professionals ( pro enough to recognize walking death when they saw it. None of them made any abrupt moves as chairs slid away from the table.

Except for Briggs.

The big man picked the moment for its distraction, his right hand flashing behind his neck and out again, the movement smooth as an athlete.

And if Bolan had in fact been distracted, it might have worked. Bolan twisted sideways, dropped to a crouch. There was no time for anything but a body shot. It was enough. The 9mm flesh-mangler caught Briggs in the middle of his flat stomach.

Behind Bolan the razor-sharp six-inch blade of the throwing knife quivered in the rococo woodwork.

Briggs sat down hard. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Then he seemed to shudder, and his eyes closed as he toppled over to sprawl across the carpet, no movement of breath disturbing his perfect stillness.

Bolan tracked onto the Russian bodycock and snapped, "Go ahead. But do it real slow." The Russian's left hand came back out from beneath the lapel of his suit, gingerly holding a 9mm stockless Stechkin machine pistol. He let it drop.

Frank Edwards looked thoughtfully at the backs of the five men lined up against the wall across the table from Bolan. "Let me make a suggestion." The man's tone was normal, conversational. But to Bolan it grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. "I know who you are," Edwards went on. "Not your name, of course, but names don't mean that much." His open face broadened in a faint smile. "I hear things. About one man, doing a lot of damage to some of the people I, ah, associate with. In Panama, Turkey, across the frontier in Algeria." Edwards shifted very slightly in his chair.

Bolan's grip on the Beretta tightened. The trigger yielded to soft pressure.

"Hold on," Edwards said, his voice rising almost imperceptibly. "I could use someone like you." Edwards drummed two fingers on his fine linen tablecloth. "It's a business, friend. It's nothing but a business."

Bolan stared at the guy. Over the length of his warrior years, he had pitted himself against many men.

All of the enemy shared certain demonic qualities: a rapacious capability for self-enrichment and co-aggrandizement; a callous and selfish disregard for the rights of anyone else; a slavish devotion to the subjugation and control of whoever dared stand in the way; and a willingness, even an eagerness, to adopt the most brutally violent expedients for attaining their objectives.

The Mafioso was a clannish beast, mobbing up to form a group strong enough to become the oppressor, because deep in his subconsciously held inferiority he knew that if he did not, he would become the oppressed. The terrorist professed to be driven by a greater cause, but neglected to inform you that the cause was generally a totalitarian regime of pure horror.

And then there was Frank Edwards.

Here was a man who professed no ideology at all, who took pride in his aloofness from the affairs of men and the fact that he sold his goods and services to any comer with the necessary cash. So what if the M-16 he sold would be used by some Palestinian maniac to spray a stream of 5.56mm death into a roomful of the elderly inhabitants of a Jewish nursing home in Germany? What was it to Edwards if he provided information enabling the kidnapping ( and, after the ransom was paid, the execution ( of an American executive whose only "crime" was to be a successful businessman? Why concern himself if a letter-bomb from his inventory blew up in the hands of a conservative British member of parliament?

Edwards claimed to be simply a private businessman serving a need. In fact, he was morally anesthetized, a scavenger who renounced by his actions any kinship with the rest of human society. He was a parasite, sucking at the blood that terror spilled.

"Think about it, friend," Edwards said now. "Think about what I could do for you." The man was a traitor. He had turned his back on ideals long before. All the years he had worked for his country, he had been storing away the knowledge and skills he'd picked up, to use against that country. When he had learned enough, he'd discarded his homeland like a pail of overripe garbage.

The treasonous bastard's very existence was an affront to every notion of human decency.

"Power, wealth, you name it," Edwards offered. "Whatever you want."

"I've got what I want," the voice of death pronounced. "I've got you."

Yet the law could not touch Frank Edwards. The rules that man had made to ensure order and justice were essential to that balance that Bolan walked the tightrope to preserve. But like any compromise they were not perfect.

That was why Mack Bolan had chosen not to judge.

Long ago, he had chosen to act.

"You see how it is," Frank Edwards smiled.

Bolan's caress of the Beretta's trigger became an embrace. The 9mm brain-scrambler plowed into the bridge of Edwards's nose, and the guy's face seemed to fold inward upon itself, the eyes drawing into each other and descending further into a glistening wetness of bone and blood and brain. The chair catapulted over, and Edwards flipped backward limply like the straw man he was and lay facedown, his life-essence turned to gore pooling in the deep nap of the carpet.

None of the five men at the wall moved a muscle.

Bolan dug the ring out of his pocket, wrenched off the key to the communications room. He tossed it into the lap of the cowering waiter. "It fits one of the rooms upstairs." He tried to modulate his voice, but it came out a ragged rasp. "Use it." The waiter stared down at the key like it was a live grenade, and he was paralyzed.

From toward the back of the house came the muffled explosion of the plastique. The lights of the chandelier blinked out. The junction box was gone.

The doorman was halfway down the hall .45 in hand, when Bolan came out of the dining room.

Bolan fired twice, and the doorman slid to the floor. Bolan stepped over him and out into the earlymorning sunshine. He divided the remaining rounds in the Beretta between the passenger-side windows of the two limousines, using the barrel to punch out the shattered glass.

From a satchel under the front seat of the Jaguar he took two HE grenades. He started the sedan, eased up beside the limos just long enough to pull pins, deposit the armed cans.

He was almost to the gate when the two vehicles went up in a swirling fountain of flame and twisted metal. The Berber guard's sullen expression turned to incredulity.

Bolan slewed out onto the street and pointed the Jag away from there.