Renegade Agent

5

"All right," Bolan said. He winced involuntarily as the sting of antiseptic bit into the wound in his shoulder.

The doctor was a slightly built youthful looking man with bright red hair cut in an old-fashioned crew cut. He wore the insignia of a major in the regular British Army, Surgeon's Corps. The security clearance card clipped to his breast pocket read "M. Goldstein, M.D."

Voorhis leaned against one white wall, watching the doctor work. "We contacted Whitehall," he went on. "We told them it was sensitive, that you'd have to go it alone after we collared Charon. They didn't like it, but they agreed."

Dr. Goldstein jabbed a hypodermic needle into the hard muscle of Bolan's thigh. "A synthetic antibiotic called Keflex," he informed his patient. "A precaution against blood infection."

"The bodyguard, Lemon, he'd been kept in the dark about Drummond, like most everyone," Voorhis said. "SOP for MI5, just like us. The one you're really keeping in the dark is the mole. But just before it went down, Whitehall was supposed to tip Lemon and no one did. Damned sorry, Colonel."

"Never mind," Bolan said blankly.

The agent mistook Bolan's tone. "Listen, Colonel, there'll be a complete report. Heads will roll, depend on it."

Bolan sighed. "A complete report" was the essence of every good bureaucracy. Why take direct action when you could dissect the problem from every angle in writing first? The only problem was that dissection never got you anywhere. But action sure as hell did.

In any case, there was no use dwelling on what was already irreversible. It was hardly the first time in all the years of warfare that Mack Bolan had been shot; it would likely not be the last. He would heal, and there would be other firefights to come.

The fighting man who tells you he has no belief whatsoever in luck is a liar. Mack Bolan was only thankful that so far in his good fight, little of his luck had been bad.

As for Lemon, the dedicated MI5 agent who risked his life to protect the man he believed to be his boss, Bolan held no rancor. In fact, his first inquiry had been about the guy, and he had been genuinely relieved to learn that the extent of Lemon's injuries was a bump on the head.

Wittingly or unwittingly, Bolan had never done harm to a soldier of the same side.

"Charon?" Bolan asked.

"He's here," Voorhis said quickly. "I think he's going to cooperate."

"I'll want to talk to him."

"I'll take care of it." Voorhis seemed happy at the chance to leave the room.

The doctor was taping gauze dressings over the two wounds. Cautiously, Bolan tried flexing the shoulder. It was possible, but it hurt. "You will want to take it easy for some time, sir." The pain had not escaped Dr. Goldstein's notice. "I'm going to immobilize your left arm with a simple sling, to promote healing."

That would be okay, Bolan figured at least until a new mission forced him to go hard again.

"Any bullet wound is serious," the doctor said, looping the sling over Bolan's right shoulder. "You were lucky, sir. Although both the trapezius and pectoral muscles are torn to some extent, there is no organ damage or bone fracture. As a unit, your left arm is entire and operative, but the muscle trauma will decrease your control over the arm and your general mobility as well." The doctor rummaged in a cabinet, came out with a vial of pills. "This is oral Keflex. Take them until they are gone. I'll also prescribe some painkillers."

"No thanks." It had nothing to do with being stoic; Bolan could simply never afford to dull his senses with any drug.

"I see," the doctor said, in tone that indicated he did not.

Bolan slid off the examining table and got his shirt a spare one of his own over his shoulders. "Thanks, Doc."

Dr. Goldstein flashed him a brisk salute.

Voorhis was waiting outside the infirmary. He led Bolan down a long white corridor, around a corner, and to an unmarked door. Bolan could hear the faint whirr of the ventilation that aired this underground London complex.

"Drummond?" Bolan said, palming the doorknob.

"Safe in the hands of MI5," Voorhis said.

"At least safer than he'd be with his Russki pals." Bolan nodded and went into the interrogation room.

Charon was composed, almost relaxed. He listened to what Bolan had to say, and offered neither objection nor defense. He seemed to view his defeat as simply another scientific phenomenon, a curiosity of life. Of course he would cooperate, if it meant the possibility of leniency, he told Bolan. It would be illogical to do otherwise.

Outside in the corridor, Bolan found himself shaking with anger. The bloodless detachment with which both Charon and Drummond seemed to view their treachery was awesome, and at the same time sad. The man who cannot understand treason, Bolan thought, neither can he understand patriotism. And the man without patriotism, without allegiance to the country of which he himself is an important part, is a lonely man indeed. According to the technicality of law, neither man was guilty of a capital crime. According to Mack Bolan's worldview — a worldview forged in contemplation and tempered in terrorist blood — both men were as good as murderers. The mercenary sale of a military or intelligence secret in times of peace can have only one result: to push a precariously balanced world that much closer to war and holocaust.

It was a direct subversion of a carefully created and mutually acceptable system of checks and balances, a subversion that could turn tension into violence.

Bolan had learned again and again that too often the right weapon in the wrong hand added up to bloodshed.

It was the terrorists who pulled the triggers. But it was the Frederick Charons and the Sir Philip Drummonds of the world who put the guns in the jackals hands.

Bolan got out a cigarette and lit a match one-handed. He hoped the smoke would clear the sour taste from his mouth.

Voorhis appeared at the corner of the hallway. "Communication from Washington, Colonel. Follow me, please." The room into which Voorhis led him contained a wooden desk with a chair and nothing else. In the exact center of the desk was a telephone.

Voorhis nodded in its direction and went out, shutting the door behind him.

Bolan picked up the handset. For several seconds there was a hash of electronic squeals and bursts of static, indicating that a scrambler was interfacing with the line. Then a deep familiar voice said, "Striker."

"Go ahead, Hal."

The satellite-transmitted voice of head fed Harold Brognola was thin and tinny, but the anxiety in its tone came through five-by. "What happened?"

"You've already checked that out, Hal," Bolan said patiently.

"Sure. An accident, they said."

"That's what it was. It happens that way in real life sometimes, Hal, no matter how clean you lay it out. I'll be all right. Give it time."

"Sure, Striker," Brognola said quickly. "With Frederick Donald Charon and Sir Philip Drummond neutralized, you're on R and R as of right now." Brognola paused, and the static rose up to fill the silence. But the message in Brognola's tone was as clear as if he had gone on talking. Mack Bolan had not lived this long by betting his life on other men, unless he felt he knew them damned well. But he had bet his life on Hal Brognola more than once, because that man he knew like his own brother. Right now, that knowledge told the wounded warrior what Brognola had not: Time had just run out. R and R was bullshit.

"Something has broken, hasn't it, Hal?"

"What about Charon?" Brognola asked, evading the question.

"He's agreed to talk. The computer boys are debriefing him right now. Aaron should have everything he needs to tap into the DonCo mainframe. The station here will send via scrambled telex within the hour."

"Aaron is standing by," Brognola said. "And he ought to be able to find enough bloody fingerprints in Charon's data banks to put the guy on ice for a long time. That's one leak plugged." Brognola sighed. "And two more are probably springing open as we're talking."

"We'll plug them as we find them, Hal," Bolan replied evenly. This man who had pledged his being to the good fight had long ago accepted the basic facts of life. Sure, the terrorist campaigns comprised a war of containment, a constant battle to beat down the brush fires of armed aggression whenever and wherever they flared. But it was spontaneous combustion, and it would go on forever, or until men no longer tried to dominate other men through intimidation, repression, terror. It was war everlasting, war that might never be won.

But Bolan knew it was worth the fight.

"Something else has broken, Hal," Bolan repeated. "I want to know what it is." Static crackled again, long enough to allow Bolan to get a cigarette lit.

This hesitation was characteristic of the Justice Department Fed. Hal Brognola was no by-the-book bureaucrat by any means, but a lifetime in government service molds a man, for sure, and he had never been entirely comfortable with Mack Bolan's free-lance status. As early as the Miami blitz against the Cosa Nostra, Brognola had extended a clandestine olive branch, what amounted to an official hunting license with the condition that the Executioner answer to, and take orders from, Justice. Bolan had refused. He wanted no sanction; in fact, he plainly acknowledged that by every rule of society he was an outlaw. The cop in Hal Brognola knew this as well.

But the patriot in him knew that Bolan was getting results. The Mafia was falling over like so many ducks in a carnival shooting gallery, and the nation Brognola was sworn to protect was growing stronger daily for the Executioner's efforts.

In the end, Brognola and Bolan struck a compromise. The new war against terrorism was too broad, too awesome, and too great a threat to the future of this globe. No one man could take it on alone, but if one man existed who could spearhead the campaign, that man was Mack Bolan. When the complete backing of the Sensitive Operations Group of the Department of Justice were offered, Bolan accepted.

With conditions.

The Stony Man Farm command complex, nestled in the shadow of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, was Bolan's domain. The Stony Man team — April Rose, Aaron Kurtzman, Able Team, Phoenix Force, and all the rest of them — were his people, personally hand-picked, answerable to no one but him. Bolan would operate as he always had.

With responsibility. And with direct and effective action. Yeah, effective it had been.

From the jungles of Panama and the high-mountain country of eastern Turkey, to the Algerian desert and beyond, the terrorist cadres had gotten a taste of something the Mafia had grown to know and hate.

It was called the Bolan Effect. And it worked.

Hal Brognola thanked God that it was working for their side. If all Bolan required in exchange was a free hand, he'd damn well have it.

"What do you remember about Frank Edwards?" Brognola said. Edwards had been a back-burner project of the Stony Team for some time, and Bolan was familiar with the broad outlines of the man's dossier.

"Ex-CIA," Bolan said. "Suspected of freelancing for various Arab radical factions in the Middle East. He's also been fingered as having worked in an advisory capacity for Amin in Uganda and Khaddafi in Libya, training and tradecraft, if I remember correctly."

"You do, Striker," Brognola confirmed. "Add to that gun-running, we believe he's been acting as the middleman in the illegal shipment of American armament ultimately destined for terrorist hands. But he's beyond our official reach, and even if he weren't, we couldn't put him on trial, because we'd have to make top-secret intelligence public in order to present the evidence against him."

"But we would like to see him take a fall."

"He's got to take a fall, Striker," Brognola said. "New intelligence has just come in on the guy, and if I read it right, he's got his finger in a far bigger pie than we ever suspected. Not only that, but it ties in with Charon. Edwards has to be interdicted, and now..."

Bolan ground out his cigarette butt on the concrete floor of the barren underground room. "Take it from the top, Hal."

"Right. We're telexing you Edwards's updated dossier and a data package, but here's the bare bones of it. Edwards's personal staff, the half dozen or so he employs for security, communications, liaison with his terrorist clients, and other "housekeeping" duties, are all Americans. They're either ex-Special Forces, or ex-Agency, like him."

Like him, for sure. Another nest of treasonous vipers, men in whose lexicon words like "loyalty" and "patriotism" had been replaced by "power-lust" and "self-interest." Yeah, Edwards needed to take a fall, and Bolan would be more than happy to give him the push.

"More than six months ago, we infiltrated one of our people into Edwards's organization. Because Edwards is a highly trained operative himself and still maintains a vast network of clandestine contacts within the international intelligence community, we had to make it look absolutely authentic. Only three people knew the truth: the agent, myself, and the commander in chief. That'll give you an idea how badly we want Edwards. Following orders, the agent sold some factual but outdated information to a KGB counter-intel operator, was caught, and was cashiered of course. As far as the agency knows — and her files support this — she was drummed out after a long and valued career because she turned rotten. Even her closest colleagues believe it. It had to be that way, because we believe it's possible that Edwards may even have a pipeline into the agency. It worked. Within a week the approach to Edwards was made, and within a month she was in."

Bolan had not missed the feminine pronoun. An idea started to take shape in his mind and he did not like the look of it.

"This was projected as a long-term operation, to be conducted with absolute minimum risk of error. For that reason, our agent has contacted us exactly twice in those six months. In the first instance, she informed us that Edwards was just as professional as we believed. He was treating her as what she was: a highly trained and proficient operative. No grab-ass bullshit or anything like that. She had been given a few assignments, nothing very sensitive-courier duty, surveillance, intelligence analysis, and so forth. Edwards was testing her out, and she was passing with flying colors. He was convinced that she was what she professed to be: a fellow professional and a fellow traitor."

"Hal," Bolan interrupted. "Who is she?"

"You know her, Striker. The name is Toby Ranger."

Bolan leaned back in the straight-backed wooden chair and let out breath. Yeah, he knew Toby Ranger.

In that other lifetime, when the Mafia menace took him the length and breadth of the country, fate had engineered the intersection of his path with that of Toby Ranger more than once. He had fought at the woman's side. He had saved her life.

And she had saved his.

So maybe "know" wasn't quite the right word. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the lives of Mack Bolan and Toby Ranger were bonded, in a way few men and women could ever hope to know.

"Striker, listen..." Hal began.

"You said Toby made two contacts," Bolan broke in, his voice betraying no emotion. "Brief me on the second."

"It's fresh, Striker — came in while you were airborne en route to Heathrow. Last week, Edwards held some kind of big meet at a chalet he owns in the Swiss Alps, in the canton of Valais. Nominally, Edwards now holds Swiss citizenship. Anyway, this chalet is apparently one of his permanent bases. He maintains a full-time security force there, multinational, recruited from the terrorists he serves as opposed to his handpicked inner-circle force that Toby became a part of. The chalet also has a communications facility. Probably Edwards has other bases like it, but he's never domiciled in one place for long.

As near as Toby could make out, something damned big was being hatched at this meet. Those people weren't terrorists, at least not what we usually think of as terrorists. Toby was pretty sure they were intelligence agents, representing nearly every freeworld nation. Some of them were "retired" like Edwards, but some of them were still active, we think.

Besides the agents, there were a few others offering "specialized services." One of them was Frederick Charon." Brognola's voice had gone harsh with tension and suppressed rage. "Do you have any guesses as to what this could mean, Striker?"

"An international underground intelligence network," Bolan said evenly. "A "black" CIA, run by men trained by the top legit agencies in the world, serving the needs of the terrorist network. With state-of-the-art technology provided by traitors like Charon."

"That's the way it shapes up," Brognola agreed. "And it has to be stopped."

So the mission wasn't over after all; in fact, it had hardly begun. The Charon penetration, the cutting of the Charon-Drummond-KGB chain, was only a foot in the door of a major infrastructure of deceit, treason, and terror. Somewhere in the bowels of that infrastructure sat Frank Edwards, renegade agent, death merchant.

And it was up to Mack Bolan to bring that temple of terror crashing down on him, burying him forever.

"Where is Edwards, Hal?"

"Striker, you're in no shape to take him on, not now. That bullet wound..."

"Where is he?"

Brognola's sigh cut through the static. "We don't know." Bolan waited. The idea in his mind was getting uglier. "Toby was only able to pass what I've told you. She was leaving the Valais chalet, but she wasn't sure for where." Another pause. "I'll level, Striker. She suspects her cover might be blown." The ugly idea was clear as a photograph now.

Frank Edwards operated in a grim dark world, and the realities of that world were overwhelmingly lethal.

Toby Ranger would remain among the living only until she had revealed everything she knew to Frank Edwards. And Edwards and his men would know every vicious method for encouraging her to talk.

The odds that Toby was alive were short. The odds that she was entire were almost nil.

"We're not even sure where the Valais chalet is located, Striker," Brognola said bleakly.

The phone handset cradled against his shoulder, Bolan was using his right hand to undo the sling. The pain was down to a dull ache, and the arm itself would serve if he could control it.

"I know how to find out," Bolan said grimly.

"Striker?

"What?"

Brognola started to say something, seemed to change his mind.

"Live large," he murmured, and Bolan heard the connection break.

The sound of the chair legs on the floor seemed unnaturally loud in the bare room, and the door creaked when Bolan went out.

It was time for one last conversation with Frederick Charon.