Renegade Agent

1

Mack Bolan lit a cigarette and shifted restlessly in the padded leather swivel chair.

April Rose, sitting across the conference table from him, caught his eye and flashed him a fast smile.

His ally during The Executioner's final Days of De-Creation with which the Mafia wars ended, the tall lush-bodied woman was now "housekeeper" at Stony Man Farm headquarters, overseeing every incredible aspect of the operation, providing logistics, back-up support, care to the few and mighty to Mack Bolan, Able Team, Phoenix Force, who deployed against the terrorist menace. This meeting in the War Room was a debriefing.

"The Hurricane worked like a charm," Gadgets Schwarz was saying. "Then, just before we get, I shot the Doberman with the stimulant, and he was already waking up when Mack and I got the hell out of there. From one tinkerer to another, Andrzej, nice work." "Andrzej" was Andrzej Konzaki, and he was no more a tinkerer than Gadgets. Officially on staff with the CIA, unofficially detached as consultant to Stony Man, Konzaki was one of the most skilled and innovative armorers in the world. As a marine in Vietnam. he'd won a Silver Star and lost both legs above the knees. But like Mack Bolan, Konzaki saw no profit in living in the past.

Now he had the torso of a weight-lifter, the hands and the imagination of an armorer master craftsman.

He was to be trusted as the expert in every small arm from pistol to heavy machine gun, as well as knife, small explosives, ever more lethally exotic devices.

"Gadgets," Bolan said, "you must brief Aaron on the set-up you rigged to Charon's computer. I want him ready to take over as backup."

Gadgets turned to the fifth person in the War Room, a big rumpled-looking guy hunched over the control board of a computer terminal console that was set up at one end of this operating heart of the Stony Man complex. "DonCo has an in-house mainframe computer. of course, addressable from any terminal in the place," Gadgets explained. "But on Charon's personal terminal, and probably on the terminals of his senior staff, there's a phone link. That allows him to "talk" to any other phone-linked computer to exchange data, place or accept orders, whatever over a regular phone line. You know the technology, Aaron, no point in rehashing the details. But the bottom line is that we're tapped into that phone line."

Bolan stubbed out his cigarette. "What kind of access does that give us?"

"Right now we can eavesdrop," Gadgets replied. "We can monitor and copy anything that is requested from the DonCo mainframe computer, or an computer with which it's linked, if the request comes from either Charon's terminal or his secretary's. Aaron, I've inserted the access protocol in your file."

The big man at the console nodded. His fingers danced over the keys. Lines of characters darted across the video display in front of him. He scanned them, typed again. This time, except for a couple of lines at the top, the screen was blank.

"No traffic," Aaron reported.

It was just after five, Sunday morning. The softprobe of DonCo had been completed only three hours earlier.

"So until someone uses one of those consoles, those taps don't do us any good," muttered Bolan.

"Not quite, Sarge," Gadgets said softly. "If we can figure out Charon's personal access protocol his users, his query codes and so on, we can duplicate them. From the computer's point of view, we'd be disguised as Charon."

"That's the nice thing about phone lines," Aaron nodded. "They work both ways."

"We already have one lead. That reference to "FRANCOFILE" you saw in the appointment book," said Gadgets. "It won't get us in by itself, but it's a point in the right direction."

"We'll get on it right away, Mack," Aaron declared. "But I can't predict time frame.

Aaron "the Bear" Kurtzman ruled over the Virginia headquarters' electronic library.

In addition to the Farm's own extensive data banks, Aaron could interface instantly with those of the National Security Council, the Justice Department, the CIA, DIA, the intelligence agencies of every major friendly nation. Kurtzman was not simply the operator of this expansive communication and information system; he seemed himself a grizzled, portly extension of it.

Gadgets and Kurtzman began to toss around ideas on how to decode Charon's computer domain.

April Rose joined them. Her advanced degrees in electronics and solid-state physics made her no stranger to the arcane mysteries of electronic computation.

In front of Mack on the polished surface of the War Room conference table, in an unmarked file folder, was a digest of the dossier of Frederick Charon. It occupied no more than three pages of sprocket-hole-edged computer paper. Bolan had no need to consult it. He knew the details on those pages well enough. And they told an old and familiar tale.

The salient points were simple: it was the American success story. To a point. Charon was the only son of Italian immigrant parents, his father a self-educated salesman and opera buff, his mother an elementary school teacher. They were dedicated, ambitious people, and they instilled ambition in their son. From Boston Latin High School, Charon went to MIT for his undergraduate work, then Stanford for graduate and post-doctoral programs. His first and only job as an employee was with the prestigious Rand Corporation think tank; when he was twenty-five he left that firm to form his own company, DonCo. In ten years he had built it into one of the most respected theoretical hi-tech firms in the country, and a repository for the country's most profound trust.

And then he chose to betray that trust.

Somewhere along the line, the ambition inculcated in Charon by his hard-working parents had been perverted-impulsion. A brilliant man, Charon was also brilliantly flawed. No matter whatever had achieved-intellectually, socially, financially — he had to have more of everything that fed his will.

Perhaps, Bolan mused, his downfall was preordained, as is the defeat of any man whose appetites forever exceed his reach.

Just a few hours before, as he and Gadgets had withdrawn from the DonCo headquarters along the predetermined route that evaded the unblinking TV surveillance cameras, Bolan had stopped to look back at Charon's building. Sleek, low-slung, all tinted glass and polished steel glinting in the starlight, set majestic amid manicured lawns edged with stately woods, it was a monument to the man and a symbol of his failure all in one. As a scientist, businessman, theoretician, Charon was an extraordinary success, and here were housed the fruits he had nurtured and picked. As a would-be jet-setter, playboy, gambler, profligate, Charon was a failure. His failure was forever compounded by a decision to turn to treachery, perhaps in a vain attempt to salvage the hell-bent part of the life he had made for himself.

There was an irony there in which Bolan saw no humor. Charon had achieved the American Dream, in the only country in the world where that dream could still become reality. Then he had turned about and sold out the country, had turned the dream into nightmare.

Damned cold-eyed thing to do, alchemy in reverse, altogether of the devil's empire, vile, malicious.

A prophecy of terror.

"Mack." Aaron Kurtzman's voice broke in. "Communication coming, NSC. It's Hal."

Bolan caught April Rose's gaze, and this time there was no hint of a smile. Communications from head fed Hal Brognola near dawn on a Sunday morning meant only one thing.

In the rare and precious moments they could snatch together, April had made her feelings clear to him.

She acknowledged her dedication to the responsibilities that that man had willingly taken on, and confirmed it with her own lifetime commitment to the same cause.

And yet, as she had told Mack Bolan, she was a woman and she was human. Every time he stepped into that arena, she felt woefully incomplete until his safe return.

April nodded slightly, as if in response to his thoughts, and broke the eye contact. Bolan turned to Kurtzman. "Scramble it, Aaron, SOP."

"Already done."

"Thanks. Put it upon video."

"Give me a minute, Mack." Kurtzman went back to his keyboard. There was more to Bolan's mood than the restlessness of inactivity, plus the anger at a man's betrayal of the country that had given him every opportunity The brief visit to Massachusetts had awakened other memories as well, memories that Mack Bolan the man could never banish, would never wish to banish.

They were of a time when the wrong people were winning.

Strategists used to refer to a "domino theory" in discussing the Asian war in which Bolan had fought.

But in a town in the shadows of the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, other dominoes had fallen.

Bolan had seen his personal domino theory quite clearly: there was still, back then, one domino left to fall. And it was he who tipped it over, single-handedly wiping out the gluttonous criminal vipers who had been directly responsible for his personal tragedy.

Earlier in the siege against the bloody Cosa Nostra, Bolan had become aware that, like Vietnam, this would be a war of attrition. The strategy was to annihilate the enemy, first as a means of neutralization, ultimately as a means of destruction of the criminal edifice.

Bolan understood that the war of attrition was now, for John Phoenix, a war of containment. He had no delusions about his own capabilities; Mack Bolan, a.k.a. John Phoenix, was one man, and no one man was going to save a vast impersonal world. But one man, sure, could aspire to fight to keep corners of that world free and green, could push back the corrosive advance of those who would replace freedom with fear, democracy with domination. The Mafia was a clear and present evil, an entity motivated solely by greed, by the dark side of the herding instinct, in which men mobbed up to commit evil far beyond the capacities of themselves as individuals. Among the ranks of the terrorist brigades, however, there were some who were motivated by misplaced idealism. However inexcusably wrong-headed their ideas of how they would run society, however vicious their damfool methods of imposing their will, Bolan recognized that one in a hundred of these tagmen were dedicated warriors. They just goddamned put themselves in the cross fire. He would have to be careful. But for the Frederick, Charons of the world, Bolan felt no reluctance to curb his blazing powers of attrition whatsoever. He knew that, to the core of his soldier's heart.

"I've got Hal," Aaron Kurtzman called.

On the opposite wall was mounted an oversized 5by-5 TV screen. It could be used to display computer-generated graphics, maps, charts, photos, or in conjunction with the communication system.

On it now, there appeared the imposing, graying figure of Harold Brognola, twice as big as life, slightly distorted by the screen's curvature, and looking grim. There had been a time when Bolan and Brognola had been adversaries-unwillingly so, but adversaries nevertheless. In that other lifetime of the Executioner, Brognola had been pledged to bring his head in on a pike, even though he was aware that this man had done more to hobble the Mafia hyena in a few years than Brognola's Org Crime unit had done in decades. After the Las Vegas campaign, however, Brognola the pragmatist took over from Brognola the man, and though cop to the core, he could no longer pursue such a death hunt. By the latter days of the Mafia wars, Brognola was lending active support to the blitzing fighter, and it was he who made the president know that the country needed Mack Bolan in the new wars against the terror-brokers.

Brognola nodded and said, "Hello, Striker." He paused, pinching at the bridge of his nose. Bolan could see the weariness in that good face. "Frederick Charon," Brognola said finally. "It turns out he was only the tip of an iceberg."

"If you find the tip, you find the iceberg."

"That's right," Brognola grinned wanly. "And this is one iceberg we ought a blow right out of the water."