Critical Intelligence

“There,” the woman said.

Across the dance floor near where a phalanx of bouncers guarded the club’s entrance he saw Milosevic. The Russian lawyer came in like a visiting emperor, his entourage part Praetorian guard, part sycophantic toadies and part pleasure slaves.

Klegg reached down to where his attaché case rested against his leg. He took the not unsubstantial weight of the thing in his hand and stepped away from the bar. Across the room Milosevic was shown to a private area at the top of a short flight of stairs leading to a balcony over the dance floor.

A massive, impassive-faced thug with the body of a professional wrestler and an Armani suit stood sentry before the red-velvet rope dividing the stair and viewing lounge from the common dancers and general population.

As they approached, the man’s head turned on a bull neck like a 20 mm cannon on an APC gun turret. His eyes were cold chips of blue. Klegg felt an instant rising of his own hackles as he drew closer. It was an instinctual reaction to so much rival testosterone. The potential for conflict was intense. It wouldn’t pay to lose his head, and this was what Svetlana was earning her percentage for.

He let a small smile play across his face as the bodyguard’s eyes were drawn away from him, a man with a briefcase in a Ukrainian nightclub, to the slinky form of the icy blonde. The guy might be tough, Klegg mused, but he wasn’t a pro.

Behind the guard up the stairs Milosevic was opening a bottle of champagne. He said something and everyone in the group laughed like marionettes. A flamboyantly gay man with purple spiky hair and tight leather pants shrieked his giggles like a siren and dumped a copious amount of white powder down directly on the glass top of the low table set between the party’s couches.

“Dmitri,” Svetlana pouted. Her hand went to the mile-wide expanse of his chest. “You act like you don’t remember me.” Her chin came down, and her eyes looked up as she made coy into a seduction power play.

She was like a big-league power hitter, Klegg realized. Her technique wasn’t subtle; she’d either strike out completely or knock the ball out of the park. And like a high-paid baseball home-run specialist she’d knock more out of the park than she’d lose…until age and the drugs caught up with her.

Dmitri broke into an easy grin, his eyes trailing down her body like the laser guidance system of a jet fighter locking on to target. He replied in guttural, bass Russian, his chest rumbling like the engine of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

“I remember you, Svetlana. That time in Moscow—” he began.

“We stayed up all night,” she answered, and they laughed together.

Dmitri caught sight of Klegg standing behind her and his smile hardened. Catching the shift in him Svetlana put her hand on his chest again, drawing his attention back to her the way a tiger’s eyes will follow a piece of raw meat in the hands of a circus trainer.

“How is he?” she asked. “Does he ever talk about me?” She sounded so sincere Klegg, who had planned the ruse with her, was almost fooled despite himself. Dmitri grinned knowingly and Klegg could see he had bought into the act completely.

“Of course, baby,” the bodyguard purred. “Like anyone could ever forget you.” He shrugged his shoulders and the effect was like seeing tectonic plates shift. “But you know how he is. Everything, all the time—it’s hard to look back. Hard to keep track.”

“Let me talk to him,” she purred.

He started to shake his head no and she slid two crisp folded American hundred-dollar bills into his hand before he could speak. He made the money disappear and reached for the hook to the red rope strung between the stanchions in front of the short flight of stairs.

“Okay, ’Lana,” he growled. “But just you. I don’t know your boyfriend, and Milosevic doesn’t want to make any new buddies.”

He stared at Klegg as if daring him to argue.

Klegg said nothing. Everything was going according to plan. Svetlana reached up and kissed Dmitri quickly, leaving a lipstick mark so red on his pale skin it looked like a wound. Then she was up the stairs and being greeted like an old friend.

Klegg waited patiently, ignoring Dmitri’s hard stare. He waited while Svetlana passed kisses of greetings all around and hugged Milosevic. She laughed at something he said, then helped herself to a line of the coke and a glass of the expensive champagne. Milosevic seemed generally happy to see her and, having spent time with the lady himself, Klegg could understand why.

After a few moments, once she was comfortably ensconced next to the Russian syndicate lawyer, he saw her lean in close, hand on Milosevic’s thigh, and begin whispering in his ear.

Klegg, long attuned to these things, watched Milosevic’s body language change. The smile, a social mask, stayed in place, but when his eyes cut away from Svetlana and down the stairs to Klegg they glittered like a snake’s, sizing him up.

Klegg smiled slightly back in acknowledgment.

It was time to make his play. He was a six plus one.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stony Man Farm

The Bronco pulled out of the dirt road emerging from the orchard and came to a stop at the foot of the hill. Doors were kicked open and the five members of Phoenix Force emerged from the vehicle. Gary Manning unwrapped a protein bar and began eating it.

“Good God, Manning,” Calvin James said. “Are you always eating?”

Still chewing, the massively muscled Manning looked at him and shrugged. “I’m in a bulking phase. I want to see how much weight I can put on and still keep my two-mile-run time under eleven and a half minutes.”

“Christ,” Rafael Encizo groused. “If you get any goddamn bigger we’ll never get the helicopter off the ground.”

“Then I’ll just leap to the target in a single bound,” Manning shot back.

Moments later a second SUV pulled up, this one containing Able Team and driven by John “Cowboy” Kissinger.

Kissinger had done time as a DEA agent before coming to work as armorer for the Stony Man operation. When it came to tactical equipment, firearms and explosives, he combined the creative insight of Akira Tokaido and the intense analytical skills of Professor Wethers.

McCarter took a sip of his coffee out of a cardboard cup and looked over at the armorer. Kissinger was laughing in response to something Hermann Schwarz was saying.

“Oh, Christ,” the Briton muttered as Manning strolled up beside him. “Schwarz is telling jokes again.”

The Canadian moaned in response as the two field teams converged. Schwarz kept right on talking, his eyes fairly dancing with delight as Carl Lyons, his favorite target for off-color humor, studiously ignored him.

“You think that’s bad, Cowboy?” Schwarz asked Kissinger. “One time after we got our operational bonuses we went in on a cattle ranch.”

“Oh, man,” Calvin James muttered to T. J. Hawkins, “this is going to be awful.”

“Usually,” Hawkins agreed. Then, momentarily taken back by the outlandishness, he turned toward James. “Wait, did they invest in property?”

“The only property Lyons ever invested in was the stripper pole he put up in his condo,” James replied.

“So we decide to buy this bull,” Schwarz continued. “You know, to increase our stock.”

“Please shut up,” Lyons said, his voice dull with hopelessness. “Can’t we just train?”

Schwarz continued as if he hadn’t heard. “So I go over there and Carl is all down, really bummed, says the bull just eats grass all day and won’t even look at the cows.” Schwarz stopped talking long enough to cut his eyes over to the burly ex-LAPD detective. The man looked resigned and Schwarz’s grin grew. “So I tell him to get a vet out quick to fix the problem. Two weeks later we get scrambled by Barb for a deployment.”

“Where I wished you’d suffered a horrific wound to your mouth,” Lyons added.

“And I ask Carl how things are going and he’s happy as hell! ‘The bull has taken care of all my cows, broke through the fence and has even serviced all the neighbor’s cows!’ I’m all like wow!” Schwarz laughed. “What the hell did the vet do to that bull? ‘Just gave him some pills,’ said Carl. So I’m like, what kind of pills? And Carl looks me straight in the eye—this is no bullshit—and says ‘I don’t know, but they sort of taste like peppermint.’”

Schwarz immediately began laughing at his own joke, folding almost in two with mirth as he guffawed. He looked up and saw the rest of the men from Stony looking at him with flat affects. “What?” he demanded. “He said ‘they taste like peppermint!’ See, he was eating the horny pills.” Out in the long grass, crickets chirped. Schwarz frowned. “These are the jokes, people.”

Rafael Encizo shook his head in pain. “You’ve got a real gift, man.”

“Yeah, he’s got a gift,” Blancanales replied. “He’s got such a gift Hal had to go to the freakin Oval Office to keep the CIA from stealing his jokes to use on the prisoners in Gitmo.”

“Oh, man.” McCarter shook his head. “If the ACLU thought sleep deprivation was torture they would have lost their minds if they’d ever heard Schwarz telling detainees jokes.”

Schwarz stood, his face holding a shocked expression. “You know Jesus said a prophet is never revered in his own land. Now I know what he meant.”

Kissinger burst out laughing in incredulous mirth. “Yeah, Hermann, whenever I think of Jesus I think of you, man.” The armorer stepped forward, shaking his head. “How ’bout I show you guys why I brought you out here before Carl picks up Blancanales and beats you to death with him?”

“Sure.” Schwarz shrugged. “I like new toys as much as the next electronics genius.”

“You can see,” Lyons observed, “he’s as modest as he is funny.”

“Please tell us what you brought,” Manning begged Kissinger.

“Let me introduce you boys to a little bit of gear I appropriated from DARPA by way of our good friends at Lockheed Martin.”

“Jet pack?” McCarter, a pilot, asked, only half joking.

“Close.” Kissinger nodded and led the teams around to the rear of his SUV where he lowered the back hatch. “Exoskeletons.”

“Exoskeletons?” Encizo asked.

Kissinger nodded. “Yep. Called HULC.” He began handing out surprisingly compact packages. “We do the first trial out here on a few hill runs, then I had Hal go through Justice and get us some time at the Marine Corps obstacle course down in Quantico. We’re going to put these mothers through a workout, then see if they’d be any use to you shooters out in the field.”

Hawkins looked at his package. “They call it the Hulk?” he asked.

“No,” Kissinger replied. “Not the Hulk, but HULC, or Human Universal Load Carrier. Just stretch out the legs, then step into the open foot pads. Secure the straps at thighs, waist and shoulders. Supposedly they’ve got it spec’ed out for two hundred pounds at a top speed of ten miles per hour. But you’re supposed to be able to crawl, jump, kneel, squat in it.”

“How does it work?” Schwarz asked, all humor gone as the prospect of new tech was put in front of him.

“Four lithium-ion batteries go into that pouch at the small of your back. They power sensors in the footpads, the microprocessors that read them and move the hydraulic system.”

Lyons frowned while the others began putting on their units. “How quick can we unass ’em if we need to?”

“Once you get the hang of it, the contractor told me under thirty seconds,” Kissinger replied.

“Oh, that’s good,” Schwarz said. He began doing deep knee bends in his combat apparatus. “You see, since he took that medicine I told you about, Ironman’s been real, real concerned with getting his clothes off in a hurry.”

“You got one of these things with a dog muzzle?” Lyons asked. “That could help me out.”

“I’ll see what the boys at DARPA have to say.” Kissinger nodded.

The Stony Man tactical teams secured themselves into the exoskeletons and began warming up the gear. First they paired up and ran a series of sprints up the hill. There was no improved performance, but the HULC tactical system provided surprisingly little hindrance to their speeds.

“What’s DARPA tell you so far, Cowboy?” Manning asked. “It look like Lockheed is going to get the contract?”

Kissinger nodded. “Yep, the boys at JSOC loved ’em. They’re talking that if the test results hold up, they’ll go beyond Rangers and maybe deploy them to general infantry units in the Marines and Army.”

Kissinger lowered the rear gate of the SUV where he had loaded a pallet with training weapons and prepacked rucksacks filled with sandbags. “Let’s start loading you supermen up and see what these bad boys can really do.”

Farmhouse

BARBARA PRICE SAT in the kitchen of the old farmhouse and slowly drank a cup of coffee. In front of her she had a stack of satellite images, an encrypted Kindle DX and a PowerBook logged into A-Space.

A-Space, or Analytic Space, was a social networking and common collaborative workspace for all the members of the USIC, or United States Intelligence Community.

The Stony Man mission controller was using the site to search through the Library of National Intelligence for seemingly unrelated links that formed a pattern.

As a dedicated part of her counterintelligence security measures, Kurtzman’s cybernetic team had been tasked with searching the browser on a rotating basis, making sure no evidence, concrete or oblique, about Stony Man Farm made it onto the site.

Once upon a time in America, great firewalls of competition and compartmentalization mindsets had kept the disparate fiefdoms of the USIC separate from each other. In those days Stony Man Farm had been the main off-the-books weapon of choice by the Executive Branch looking to battle terrorism.

Post 9/11 many things had changed in America. Compartmentalization had gone out of vogue with a vengeance. Other “tip of the spear” organizations like the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA’s Special Activities Division had seen themselves refocused into areas traditionally deemed off the books and thus the province of Stony Man.

Also intelligence activity oversight committees in the House and Senate had started looking into corners and under rocks that before had remained unmolested. Several high-profile scandals had already rocked the espionage and military communities.

All of those would seem like the high jinks of a naughty PTA president in comparison if the full scope of Stony Man’s operation ever came to light.

The list was endless: extrajudicial killings of foreign nationals and American citizens; violations of federal, state and local laws and statues by the truckload; operations conceived, designed and executed in full and complete violation of the Posse Commitatus Act; war crimes as defined by the Geneva Convention and Uniformed Code of Military Justice. The list stretched out and led up the chain of command all the way to the Oval Office.

Theoretically at least, in several ways the Stony Man operation was many a U.S. lawmaker’s and citizen’s ultimate big brother nightmare. In practicality it was the best defense the nation had ever instituted.

In theory, Price thought wryly of the old axiom, theory and practice were the same. In practice they never are.

She dialed down the Kindle DX screen, scrolling through the digital display of the after-action report CIA interrogators at a black site camp on the island of Diego Garcia had sent back. It continued the results of the interrogation of the North Korean, Sin-Bok.

Most of the information was unspectacular. The agent hadn’t been taken as an investigation tool but rather as a behind-the-scenes warning to Kim Jong-il to not play his brand of lunatic hardball in the Western Hemisphere.

However, something odd had caught Price’s eye. While under a modest dose of sodium thiopenal and slight measures of the euphoric agent lysergic acid diethylamide, the North Korean had babbled merrily on but his answers had been incoherent, often shifting from language to language and even into the random, including rattling off simple mathematical problems.

“‘Three plus four. I’m three plus four,’” Price quoted to herself.

It was abnormal even for a person tripping on LSD. She leaned back in her chair and smelled the fresh air of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She picked up her Montblanc pen, a gift from Hal Brognola, and tapped her chin in a reflexive motion.

On a whim she typed “three plus four” into the search option on A-Space. Found nothing. She shrugged. It had been a wild shot anyway. Perhaps Hunt or Akira could…

“Stupid!” She laughed suddenly.

Leaning forward, she put her pen down with a click next to her ceramic mug of coffee. The keys on the PowerBook tapped rapidly as she typed in the word and hit Enter: “Seven.”

CHAPTER SIX

Kiev, Ukraine

Klegg sat. He didn’t offer to shake hands. Milosevic regarded him with a reptile stare, eyes bloodshot. He watched as the American set the attaché case carefully between them.

Milosevic cocked an eyebrow in question. Klegg smiled slightly and held his hands out in a welcoming gesture. Beside him on the couch Svetlana was completely ignoring him now that her job was done.

She giggled madly as another girl in a brilliant couture dress pulled out a water bong of thin-cut crystal and splashed vodka from a bottle out of an ice bucket into the main chamber. The entourage around them chattered in Russian under the watchful eyes of Milosevic’s bodyguards.

Kiev made Klegg think of what Dodge City had been like during the cattle days or San Francisco during the gold rush; a wide-open frontier town where the law didn’t apply to anyone with money.

Beside him another loose pile of cocaine was casually split across the table as a laughing twentysomething with dragon tattoos on his scrawny arms and a diamond stud in his nose opened a velvet drawstring pouch and dropped buds of deep green colored marijuana into the mix.

“I’m supposed to ask what you want, I know,” Milosevic said in English. “But I don’t like playing twenty questions.”

“Twenty-two pounds,” Klegg supplied for him.

“Twenty-two pounds?”

“Twenty-two pounds,” Klegg confirmed.

“For what?”

“Call it earnest money, for a conversation.”

“Which conversation?”

“The one we’re about to have.”

“Why would you bring me twenty-two pounds to have a conversation? This conversation—” Milosevic leaned forward “—which is starting to become ludicrous.”

Twenty-two pounds was the exact weight of one million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills.

Beside Klegg, Svetlana had taken a fat, sticky bud and coated it liberally with powdered cocaine and then thumbed it into the bowl of the vodka-filled bong. The giggling mad man with the nose diamond provided a pocket lighter that seemed closer to a butane torch, and the coven huddled around the implement.

“There’s nothing ludicrous here,” Klegg assured him, not without a sense of irony. “I’m giving you that money to listen to my proposal. To consider it seriously. If you say no to what I’m suggesting, fine—you take the money and we part on good terms. But I’m not here to talk real estate or banking or oil futures out of Chechnya.”

Milosevic snapped his fingers and settled back in his lounge chair. The music in the club was deafening but the ballistic plastic surrounding the deck landing muted the sound to a tolerable level.

A muscle-heavy thug with a crew cut and fifty-five-inch chest bent down and picked up Klegg’s briefcase. Beside him Svetlana coughed and a cloud of cocaine-laced marijuana smoke rolled out like smog from a chimney. Immediately, Klegg felt light-headed and he instantly wondered if that wasn’t part of Milosevic’s plan.

“Talk,” the ex-KGB operative said. “You have purchased five minutes in which to interest me.” He lit a cigar. “Frankly, I don’t expect you to succeed.”

“I came here on certain assumptions.”

“Dangerous.”

“It can be,” Klegg conceded. “But risk preempts reward. For example…six plus one equals seven.”

The Russian made a face. If he was surprised he didn’t show it. “Just as five plus two equals seven,” he replied.

“Even my assumptions are grounded in certain…continuities,” Klegg smiled.

Milosevic waved his free hand in a “come on” gesture. Svetlana passed the bong to the girl in the red couture dress.

“The first assumption,” Klegg continued, “is that you retained your contacts from your time in a KGB station house in eastern Africa. That you could, if properly motivated, reach out and reactivate stringers, cells and networks across the region.”

“You must have these kinds of contacts among your own community,” Milosevic countered. “Why come to Ukraine to get what you could get in London or New York?”

On the couches the entourage exploded into laughter and applause as Svetlana and the girl in the red dress began making out.

“Because,” Klegg said slowly, “I need contractors and operatives who don’t mind pulling down on Westerners. I want businessmen, not ideology. For that, it was come here or go to Palermo.”

“Rio, Caracas,” the Russian offered. “Even Uruguay.”

“I go to the cartels, I might as well go to the fucking monkey house at the zoo.” Klegg paused. “Though for what I have in mind, an outer circle of cannon fodder might be appropriate, given an inner cadre capable of dealing with them afterward.”

“A fixer who exercises total unit closure on his field talent tends to have an abbreviated career,” Milosevic countered.

“You’ll land on your feet, I’m sure.”

Milosevic released cigar smoke in a huge plume and settled back comfortably in his chair. His eyes cut over to where Svetlana was making out with the girl from his entourage. The Russian oligarch looked back at Klegg.

“You start tying up loose ends, it can sometimes be hard to know when to stop.”

Now it was Klegg’s turn to shrug. “Tie up the knots that can’t tie you back. Call it acceptable.”

Like a scene out of Faust, Milosevic leaned forward and extended his hand.

IT WAS COLD in the alley outside the Kiev nightclub.

Klegg’s and Svetlana’s breath plumed up between them as they kissed furiously. The American plunged his hands inside the woman’s ankle-length fur coat. Her eyes were glassy marbles as they kissed. He ran his hands over her body underneath her coat, stroking her up to a fever pitch of excitement.

She moaned as his fingers worked at her.

The back door to the nightclub was just a few yards away and the muted sound of the dance beat music rattled the blacked-out windows in their frames. The alley smelled strongly of the urine of drunk and stoned patrons. Garbage overflowed out of battered old cans and three giant green bins.

Rats, braving the frigid chill to get the remnants of greasy food, swarmed across the refuse and watched the humans with glittering eyes.

Though thousands of citizens of Kiev went about their lives within little distance of couple, it was as if they were alone in a vast, urban wasteland of empty windows, rubbish and deep shadows. It called to Klegg’s mind the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.

“I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust,” the lawyer thought idly. It made no sense but his mind was starting to click with adrenaline.

“Now,” Svetlana whispered in his ears. “I want it now.”

“Now?” Klegg asked, his heart starting to beat even faster.

“Yes, yes,” she breathed.

“Okay.” He laughed. “But remember, you asked for it.”

The American psychopath stepped back from the Russian woman, leaving her gasping. Her glassy, red-veined eyes opened in confusion.

Klegg grinned like a maniacal clown.

His hands went to the small of his back underneath his coat. He emerged with a pair of nunchaku.

The martial-arts weapon was designed from the width of a single, slightly thicker than average handle cut smoothly down the middle, allowing for more compact and thus easier surreptitious carrying. The handles on the thicker edges were octagonal, presenting a variety of sharp edges for contact when swung.