Devil's Bargain

“What is he?”

“I don’t know, but he was dumped in my lap, damn near a suitcase load of official DOD papers telling me I was to step aside—that is if I wanted to finish my career with the FBI. There was nothing I could do.”

A sordid picture of what he was about to find downstairs already in mind, Bolan followed James across the room, the FBI man barking for the guard to step aside and open the door.

“I’ll leave you to introduce yourself,” James said, wheeled, then marched back for the nerve center.

Peering into the gloomy shadows below, he caught a whiff of the miasma, an invisible blow to his senses. It was a sickening mix of blood, cooked flesh, loosed body waste. He heard the sharp grunts, then a scream echoed up from the pit. He slipped off his shades, braced for the horror he knew was down there, waiting.

Then Mack Bolan, also known as the Executioner, began his descent.

HER NAME WAS Barbara Price, and it was rare when she left her post at Stony Man Farm. She was, after all, mission controller for the Justice Department’s ultra-covert Sensitive Operations Group, her time and expertise on demand nearly around the clock. It was both her present role in covert operations at the Farm, however, and her past employment at the National Security Agency that now found her moments away from rendezvousing with a former colleague.

She watched the numbers on the doors fall, striding down the hallway, looked at a couple pass her by through sunglasses, her low-heeled slip-ons padding over wall-to-wall carpet. She couldn’t shake the feeling something felt wrong about this setup. She hadn’t survived, nor claimed her current position with the Sensitive Operations Group, by taking anything in the spook world at face value.

Since being informed by cutouts she often used to gather intelligence that Max Geller sounded desperate in his attempts to reach her, a dark nagging had hounded her for days. She hadn’t seen, heard from or thought about the man in years, and there he was, hunting her down for undeclared reasons, popping up on the radar screen, out of nowhere.

Finally she returned his call through a series of back channels she arranged. It was the worst of times to leave the Farm, Able Team and Phoenix Force in the trenches, with Mack Bolan, the Farm’s lone-wolf operative and a man she was, on occasion, intimate with, in the field. But Geller claimed to have critical information about what the Stony Man warriors were up against, likewise alluding to a threat so grave to national security the entire world could be changed forever. No, he didn’t dare speak on any line, no matter how secure. They had to meet.

She had run it past Hal Brognola, the big Fed at the Justice Department who was director of the Farm and liaison to the President. He had given her three hours’ leave, but she was to call the time and place for the meet, give him the particulars before she set out. The chopper had ferried her from the Shenandoah Valley to Reagan National, where the Justice Department maintained a small hangar, kept its own vehicles on-site for quick personal access, instead of using “invented” credit cards for rentals. From there in the GMC, a short drive to the hotel in Crystal City, where the feeling she was being followed intensified. It was nothing she could put her finger on, though. Crystal City swarmed with the work force that early-morning hour, a lone blond woman sure to grab the attention of men. Taking extra precautions, just the same, she sat in the hotel lot for fifteen minutes, her instincts flaring so bad she almost called off the meet. A short drive around Crystal City, then she parked in an underground garage, wondered if she was being paranoid. Follow through, she decided. She’d come this far, maybe Geller had something worth hearing. She was grateful, just the same, that the Browning Hi-Power with 13-shot clip was shouldered beneath the windbreaker, two backup clips leathered on her right side.

She found the door to the room where he’d registered under James Wilcox. It had been years since she had worked with the man, both of them gathering signals intelligence and human intelligence for the NSA in a classified program that often involved her directing wet work. Geller was the best at what he did. Tagged the Sphinx, he still was, she knew, the NSA’s best code breaker.

She knocked, waited, glanced both ways down the empty hall, removed her sunglasses. The door opened so quickly that she wondered if he had X-ray eyes or had been standing on the foyer, waiting, listening.

“Thanks for coming.”

The whiskey fumes swarmed her senses, the first red flag warning her again this felt all wrong. He wasn’t the slim, sharply dressed, well-groomed man she remembered. He had aged terribly, gained weight, lost hair. But it was the eyes, sunken with dark circles, unable to focus on her, brimmed with so much anxiety she could smell the fear in the sweat soaked into the collar of his sports shirt. She almost turned, walked away, but he beckoned her to enter.

She did.

“AND JUST WHO the fuck might you be?”

Bolan looked at the ghoul, said, “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

The soldier found it was every bit as messy down there as James warned, and then some. Bolan felt a ball of cold anger lodge in his belly at what he saw in the bastard’s torture chamber. It was gruesome devil’s work to the extreme, and he couldn’t even begin to tally how many laws the butcher had broken. He was fairly certain, though, whichever agency the man pledged allegiance to had given him the green light to do whatever it took to break the prisoners, that he was backed and covered by superiors who would, most likely, wash their hands of this horror show. Yes, Bolan knew the argument—extreme times demanding extreme measures and so forth—but torture in his mind only reduced a man to the same soulless animal level as the enemy. It sickened him to know Moctaw worked for the same government he did. Then again, it occurred to him Moctaw had bulled ahead, aware someone else was on the way to take the reins, the butcher running some personal agenda. Gain information, or threaten the prisoners about talking to the Feds? Every instinct Bolan had earned over the years—fighting every ilk of backstabbing homegrown traitor—warned him something didn’t jibe with the man or his methods. Something else lurked behind the mask, he was sure. Any front Moctaw would put on that this was all done in the name of national security was a ruse. Whom was he protecting? What was he hiding? Or was this simply an extreme solution to the dilemma of fighting terrorism on American soil?

Bolan looked at the prisoners. Naked, they were strapped to thick wooden chairs, which were bolted down to the concrete floor. There were two bodies, a dark hole between their eyes. The soldier figured they were the lucky ones. The other two prisoners had some sort of steel vise holding their heads erect, clamps fastened to their eyebrows, their eyes bulging with terror, flicking around like pinballs at their tormentor. Whoever this Moctaw was, Bolan saw he was good with the Gestapo tactics. The black bag, opened on the table, had been emptied of a series of shiny surgical instruments, one of which was a bloody pair of shears. Tourniquets, Bolan saw, were wound around the wrists and ankles of the dead men, all of their fingers and toes strewed in the blood still pooling on the floor. At some point, the bastard had castrated his first two victims, genitals adding to the gory mess at the stumps of their feet. It was obvious where the cigar in the butcher’s hand would have gone next. One glance at Moctaw, and Bolan pegged him as little more than a thug. Six-six at least, the muscled Goliath swelled out the black leather apron, blood speckling his craggy features, red drops still falling from a dark mane of disheveled hair. In the tight confines of mildewed brick the stench alone was damn near enough to make even a battle-hardened soldier like Bolan gag. Then he saw the series of oozing burn holes running up the torsos, necks, cheeks, the bastard working his way up, letting them know they were seconds away from having their eyes seared out.

Bolan produced his credentials, thrust them in Moctaw’s face. The butcher grunted, unimpressed, or disappointed, the soldier couldn’t tell. “Your fun’s over.”

“Special Agent Matt Cooper, uh-huh. I heard about you.”

“Then you heard I’m in charge. That’s straight from the White House. You’re out of it.”

“Out of it? This one here,” he snarled, shoving the glowing end of the cigar toward the prisoner at the far end, “was just about to talk.”

“I’ll handle it from here.”

“You’ll handle it? What—you going to bring them some cookies and milk? Sweet-talk ’em? Maybe offer them some all-expenses-paid deal if they sing?”

Bolan stepped around the table, saw the Beretta 92-F within easy reach of the butcher. “Give me the cigar.”

It was a dangerous moment, Bolan watching as Moctaw wrestled with some decision, the soldier braced for the butcher to make a grab for the weapon. Moctaw bared his teeth, dumped the cigar on the table.

“It’s your party, G-boy. I hope you’re not just some six-pack of asskick, all show, no go, since you’re the man of the hour now. Maybe you don’t know it, but this country’s entire transportation system is on the verge of being shut down, I’m talking 9/11 five, maybe ten times over, depending on how many of these scumbags are out there. This is no time for ‘pretty please.’”

Bolan made his own decision right then, picked up the cigar. “I’m aware of what’s at stake.”

“Really? These Red Crescent terrorists pull off their big event, shit, we’re going to need Iraqi oil revenue ourselves to help put it all back together. This country will never be the same, they light up even one train or a couple of Greyhounds.”

“Besides your gift for stating the obvious, exactly what have you learned?”

Moctaw hesitated, then picked up one of four small square black boxes from the table. The clips-on gave Bolan a good idea of what they were, then Moctaw confirmed it, saying, “These are satellite-relay pagers. Far as we know, only the Russians and the Israelis, and maybe the Chinese and North Koreans, have this sort of technology.”

“And the NSA and the CIA.”

Moctaw hesitated. “Right. There are no markings, no serial numbers on these. I couldn’t tell you where they came from. They house computer chips that can tie into military communications satellites. Punch in your personal code, hooks you into the principal user, you can beep or be beeped, send or be sent a vibrating signal anywhere from three to five thousand miles. That’s how they knew to move.”

“Which means whoever’s running the operation is still out there.”

“That would be a good assumption. We’ve learned they were communicating by courier when they set up shop, or used P.O. boxes. Basic, keep it simple. For the most part they stayed off the phone, e-mail, Internet, but a couple of them got antsy, even made some overseas calls back home to their loved ones to say goodbye and they were on their way to Paradise. Not real smart. We were able to intercept—”

“I know all that.”

Moctaw scowled, then continued, “The usual bogus passports, only they come to America as Europeans, dyed hair, clean-shaved, perfect English. Never know they were camel jockeys. Two of them,” he said, nodding at the corpses, “were Iraqis, former fedayeen, to be exact. Made a point of letting me know they were going to blow up some buses and trains, jihad for Gulf II, standard Muslim-fanatic tirade. The two still breathing are Moroccan, recruited, they tell me, in Casablanca by Red Crescent about a year ago.” Moctaw pulled the Greyhound tickets from his bag, slapped them on the table. “Four one-way tickets. Two heading north, Port Authority. The other two were westbound, final stop Houston. I’ve got their ordnance upstairs. Three hundred pounds of Semtex between them, wired and ready to be activated by radio remote.”

Bolan looked at the tickets. “Richmond,” he said, noting the gate numbers and times of departure. Checking his watch, he found they were due to leave in an hour, give or take. It stood to reason they had been en route to link up with another cell, in Richmond or beyond. He stuffed the tickets into a pocket.

“You have a plan, or are you here to profile, Cooper?”

“What are their names?” Bolan asked, produced a lighter, then put the flame to the end of the cigar.

“I was calling them Ali Baba, one through four.”

Bolan puffed on the cigar until the tip glowed. “I could have you arrested.”

“Not if you’re about to do what I think you are.”

“I still might cuff and stuff you.”

“You could try.”

“Telling me whoever you work for has clout.”

“This thing isn’t being run by the White House. You could have the President arrest me himself, and I’d be out and free in less than an hour. And, no, I won’t tell you who I work for. You do your own homework.”

Bolan blew smoke in Moctaw’s face. There was no time for the hassle of arresting the man, get mired in a pissing contest. Besides, the more he heard from Moctaw, the more the bells and whistles rang and blew louder. If he let the man remain at large, he decided, he might end up using him to churn the waters.

Bolan turned his attention to the prisoners. Sometimes, he knew, the threat of torture, especially if a man faced permanent mutilation, worked better than the act itself. One look at the terror bugging out the eyes, bodies quaking, limbs straining to break their bounds, and he knew Moctaw had brought them to the breaking point. They just needed another shove.

The Executioner showed them the glowing tip, then puffed, working the eye to cherry red, let the smoke drift over their faces, choking them. “What are your names?”

“Khariq…”

“Mah…moud…”

“You have two choices,” Bolan said. “Tell me everything you know about your end of the operation. If you do that, and we find you’re just foot soldiers, no previous track record of terrorism, no blood on your hands, there’s a chance you eventually will be sent home to your families. I have the power to be able to make your freedom happen.”

“Cooper, you do not have—”

“Shut up,” the Executioner growled over his shoulder. He put menace in his eyes and voice that would have even made Moctaw flinch, he believed, leaning closer to their faces, holding the end of the cigar inches from a bulging orb. He saw tears break from the eye as it felt the heat. “One eye at a time.” He flicked his lighter, waved the flame around. “While I work on your eyes, I’ll put this to your balls. This is not good cop-bad cop.”

“We talk…we talk….”

And they did. Bolan stepped back, listening as they babbled so fast he had to slow them down, one at a time. They were to meet three more Red Crescent operatives in Richmond. Bolan got a description of both their attire and the duffel bags with custom designs. Two would be attached to each half of the four-man cell, then they would split off at other depots along the way. The lone operative out was the question mark; they didn’t know what his role was. Bolan figured the odd terrorist out for the cell leader. Then the clincher. Enough explosives were going to be left behind in lockers it would be enough to bring down the building.

The Executioner had a critical call to make, but decided to do it in the air while choppering to Richmond. He ground the cigar out on the table. “I’ll have James take these prisoners off your hands. He’ll take their passports and secure the ordnance.”

“That’s it? I’m dismissed?”

“No. For your sake you better hope I never lay eyes on you again.”

Moctaw made some spitting noise, an expression hardening his face Bolan read as “We’ll see.” The Executioner put the ghoul out of mind, bounding up the steps. The doomsday clock, he feared, was ticking down to maybe a handful of minutes.

CHAPTER TWO

Barbara Price took the couch. Her back to the wall, she could watch the foyer, the main hall leading to the bedroom, alert to any sound the two of them weren’t alone. The Stony Man mission controller caught Geller throwing her a funny look, then the code breaker shrugged, claimed the chair he obviously arranged for his guest directly across the coffee table. Before he turned around his laptop and aluminum briefcase, Price spotted the Beretta 92-F resting on folders stamped Classified. That a lifelong deskbound super-cryptographer—who, to her knowledge, had never heard a shot fired in anger—would arm himself, tossed more fuel onto the fire of nagging suspicion. Was he afraid for his own life, trailed by shadow gunmen ready to silence him, aware of his meeting a former NSA mission controller to which he was prepared to divulge classified intelligence? If that was the case, she knew she had just been tossed into the equation.

Aware it could go to hell at any moment, she watched her former colleague pour a drink from the bottle of Dewar’s, the cigarettes a new vice, ashtray overflowing with gnawed butts. Impatient, she waited while he swallowed his tranquilizer, topped up another round, fired up a cigarette with a silver lighter. Clearly, whatever was eating Geller, the booze and chain-smoking weren’t calming the storm. Professional that he was, though, she was grateful he skipped any trip down memory lane, awkward questions about what she’d been doing since leaving the agency. Or did he suspect something in regard to her missing years? she wondered. Was this a fishing expedition? If so, why? She might have worked for the most supersecret, high-tech, intelligence-gathering, black-ops group on the planet, but there was one absolute truth she knew existed in all the covert world. Only death—or the threat of death—ever truly kept a secret. And the longer she sat in Geller’s sweat and agitation, the more disturbed she grew.

If he didn’t know about the existence of Stony Man Farm outright, did he think he knew something about the Sensitive Operations Group? Then again, he could be clueless. She told herself to keep an open mind but proceed with all due caution. Truth number two—only those individuals with iron principles, she knew, feet planted in a solid base of integrity, never really changed, no matter how many years down the road. Max Geller, in her mind, had always been a question mark, and he had changed, for the worse, she suspected. Genius he might be, but she was aware of his duplicitous streak. Word around the agency had been that Geller was responsible for the careers of several promising cryptographers ending abruptly as he backstabbed his way up the pecking order. Now, like then, Price kept up her guard.

Down to business, rifling through a Classified packet, Geller fanned out six eight-by-eleven black-and-white pictures, rattled off each name. “Alpha Deep Six. What do you know about them?”

“Deep-cover black ops. I heard they were the best wet work specialists the CIA and the NSA ever cut loose,” Price told him. “Beyond that, I confess to having very little idea what they were actually involved in—other than rumor.”

“Such as?”

“They went renegade. And I heard they were dead.”

“What do you know about ‘slush funds’?”

“Ready cash for black ops.”

Geller worked on his smoke, bit his lip, appeared to dredge up the courage to continue or choose his words carefully. “Numbered accounts. They were created by the Department of Defense, which—very few people know—own entire banks, just to keep these slush funds secret from both the public and Congress. Manhattan, Switzerland, Frankfurt, Qatar, Tokyo, the numbers special ops could access in these banks were—are—staggering, so I’ve heard. In order to bypass normal channels, à la DOD going before a Senate subcommittee with its hand out, the slush funds were originally dollars siphoned from inflated military contracts. They were created for special or black ops to purchase arms, large and small, buy informants, even create and mobilize small paramilitary armies in whichever country our side felt should be working with a little more fervor toward our own interests— ‘them’ doing what ‘we’ want—but that’s not all the money was used for. Anyway, I’ll get to that.

“Okay, altogether, between the CIA and the agency, the slush funds totaled about twenty million, U.S. value, with a conversion system in place to switch to whatever currency was required. Of course, there were firewalls built into the system. An operative could only withdraw up to a hundred thousand in any six-month period, and the directors had to know in advance how much, and what it was being used for. Each time a withdrawal was made, access codes were changed in an attempt to circumvent repeated withdrawals or outright theft. They failed, miserably.”

Geller had a way of lapsing into stretched silences that struck Price as dramatic, irritating, but she waited him out.

“Alpha Deep Six found a hacker. Before DOD, the CIA or the NSA knew it, they cleaned out the bank. It was a theft so embarrassing that only a few people knew about it, and they were sworn to secrecy, mind you, under the penalty of termination—and I don’t mean a pink slip on your desk at the end of the day’s business. Conventional wisdom at the time thought this heist was supposed to be Alpha’s retirement fund, but it turned out they had no intention of whiling away their golden years on a beach in Tahiti. Shortly after the cyber-heist, they were allegedly killed, supposedly in a doublecross by field commanders who knew about the heist ahead of time—and what they were intending to do following the electronic bank job.”

Geller shook his head. “Who knows, maybe a few of them grew a patriotic conscience, I couldn’t say. Those in charge of handling ADS, I do know, ran for cover, basically denied everything, but the firestorm was already sweeping through the ranks on both sides of the tracks, bodies of CIA and NSA agents who had them smelled out turning up all over the globe, even here at home. As for Alpha, allegedly their remains were found in burned-out compounds, one outside Damascus, one in northern Sudan, during two ostensibly botched raids on Muslim terrorist strongholds. And the hacker? He was found in a Zurich hotel suite, two months later, sans legs and arms, and a few other body parts, one of which was shoved in his mouth. Supposedly what remained of Alpha Deep Six was identified by CIA and NSA forensics teams. Question is, how could they use DNA testing on dust?”

Price had a feeling where Geller was headed. “A cover-up.”

“So one would gather.”

“You keep saying ‘allegedly,’ ‘supposedly.’ You’re not implying…”

Geller took a deep drag from his smoke. “Alpha Deep Six is back from the dead.”

Price narrowed her gaze at Geller. “How’s that?”

“Their violent demise was carefully orchestrated, and by their own hand. They knew the end was coming, so they arranged their deaths, and their resurrections. I’m surprised you never heard even a rumor about this.”

Price saw another red flag. Geller, she sensed, was doing an end run before getting to the point. Was he acting? Digging to try to discover what she knew about Alpha Deep Six? She decided it best to listen, no matter how much Geller blathered on, danced before dropping whatever his bomb.

“Well?”

“If I did,” she said, “I shrugged them off as wild gossip by lower-tier operatives with more time and imagination on their hands than substantive work to perform. Geller, what does all this have to do with the current threat to our nation’s transportation network by Red Crescent terrorists?”

“I’m getting there, bear with me. By the way, is the smoke bothering you?”

“I’ll manage.”

Another shot down the hatch. He glanced at the bottle, showed Price a weak smile. “Oh, please, forgive me my bad manners. Would you care for something to drink?”

“No. Go on.”

He smoked, coughed, drank, then laid the ace of spades with death’s-head on the coffee table. “That was their calling card back then, a mock tribute to their victims, or a warning to future casualties,” Geller said. “This was taken by NSA operatives last night from the crime scene at Clairmont Studios. They were there before the D.C. police arrived. Advance knowledge, but, I’m assuming, not until the play was in motion, the signature card left behind expressly for them, a middle finger to the agency and everyone else in the intelligence community, but I really couldn’t say.”