Critical Intelligence

“My favorite movie when I was growing up was Enter the Dragon,” Klegg explained, speaking fast as his breath continued coming harder and faster. “Nylon cord and teak wood. I walked right through airport security with this.”

He assumed the rear defense stance. Dramatic, almost cinematic in nature, with most of his weight resting on his outstretched forward leg while his torso was held back, arms up, nunchaku held along the outside of his right arm.

“W-what?” Confusion. The beginnings of fear.

“I’m not going to lie,” Klegg snorted. “I like this weapon ’cause it’s so fancy. Does a lot for my self-esteem.”

He exploded into motion, whipping the segmented clubs around through an intricate pattern of moves: reverse shoulder swing into a figure-eight swing, down into an underarm grip.

He was grinning so wildly now his smile threatened to split his face. He forcefully exhaled and performed a cross-back swing too fast for the eye to follow, and Svetlana, at last understanding what was about to happen, opened her mouth to scream.

The end of the nunchaku whipped around and slapped the woman across the jaw. Her head snapped to the side and her scream was cut short by the impact. Blood painted the dirty snow in stripes of scarlet. She stumbled back, long heels sliding on the icy ground, only the alley wall keeping her up.

Klegg, eyes burning, moved in, the nunchaku cycloning through its figure-eight pattern. He struck her again, then caught the stick under his arm on the rebound. Her head snapped back and this time teeth flew like tumbling dice.

She sagged to her knees and her ruined face poured blood out in a hot, sticky puddle beneath her.

Klegg lashed out again and again. His skill was not simply that of a choreographed dancer; he could swing the arcane weapon with deadly force. The teakwood handle made sickening crunching sounds like cracking ice as it slapped into Svetlana’s skull and jaws over and over.

Blood splatter painted the walls, painted the ground, soaked the woman until her face was a mask of it. She couldn’t find the strength to scream, couldn’t drag in enough air to cry out before she was struck again.

She could only whimper.

Klegg’s smile was a horrible rictus on his gleaming face. His breath came in short, hard pants like a man having sex. The concussive shock of each blow traveled back up his arm with each strike.

Finally one of the octagonal edges of the striking club caught the ravaged woman a glancing blow along her temple and she was knocked unconscious. She sagged face-first to the ground, still as a slaughtered carcass. Klegg struck the back of her head two hard snaps and more blood matted her once silky hair.

Gasping for breath, he moved around behind her and took each side of the nunchaku in an underhand grip. He bent and looped the nylon cord under her chin then twisted. He twisted until he felt her larynx crumple like an empty soda can under his heel and he rose, dropping the weapon to lie beside Svetlana’s rapidly cooling corpse.

He took off his gloves and ran a hand through his hair. He straightened and smoothed his overcoat. He reached down and adjusted his still prominent erection in his slacks.

Without hurry he lit a cigarette and blew smoke out in twin streams from his nostrils. Slowly his heart slowed and his breathing calmed. His erection began to fade.

He smoked half the cigarette down, then dropped it to the ground. It landed in a sludgy pool of snow and blood, instantly extinguished.

He turned and walked calmly from the alley to hail a taxicab. He had no fear of the police. Kiev was a wide-open, dirty city and he was under the protection of Milosevic, the biggest villain of them all.

Things were working out just right, he decided.

Stony Man Farm

BARBARA PRICE sat at her desk in the Annex.

She had three computer screens open in front of her, each with a spreadsheet showing expenditures for separate areas of the Stony Man operation. She had itemized ledgers for the armory, for Transportation and for Buck Greene’s security projects. Requisition forms for jet fuel alone were enough to make clerks from the Governmental Accountability Office gray with shock.

Price looked at the tally and shook her head as she typed in her authorization code.

The public was always in some outcry about thousand-dollar hammers or eight-hundred-dollar toilet seats. The truth was the number crunchers at the GAO would never have made such oversights. Those inflated purchase orders were designed to hide covert-action expenditures for clandestine units and projects just like Stony Man.

There was a knock on the office door and she looked up. Carmen Delahunt stood in the entrance, a tired look on her face and a manila file folder in her hand.

“Got a second?” the redhead asked.

Price pushed herself back from her desk. “Sure,” she said. “What’ve you got?”

“Multiples of Seven.”

“Really?” Price arced an eyebrow.

Delahunt entered the room and took a seat across from Price at the desk. She laid out her folder showing several computer printings and a couple of glossy jpg enlargements.

Delahunt began leafing through them, talking fast, the way she always did when she was onto something.

“I started cross indexing intelligence estimates and after-action reports like you’d asked,” she explained. “Looking to see if anything relating to Seven came up.”

“You found something?”

“I found a motherlode, Barb. I’ve got Seven cross-indexing things going back decades. Some of it can’t be related—the search is too broad, but you’ve tapped into some kind of thread here. Pieces from a thousand different puzzles that nobody realized they were even supposed to be looking at.”

Price leaned forward, caught up in her enthusiasm. She reached across the desk and pulled a codex Delahunt had printed up. Her vision swam as she saw some of the events and people highlighted.

Kabul urban police. Princess Diana. Baghdad Green Zone. Kiev. Israel, 1968. CERN. The Vatican. Charles Lindberg. Hangar 21. White Sands, New Mexico. Ho Chi Minh City. Aldrich Ames. There was such a collage of information it was impossible to make sense of.

The list went on.

“As interesting as these initial surveys are, they’re basically cold cases,” Delahunt continued. “Some much less cold than others, but for now, cold cases.” She paused. “Except for this.”

Price looked up from the codex. “What?”

“Canada.” Delahunt slid a paper-clipped report to Price. “Toronto.”

“Give me the through line.”

“Our Department of Energy runs a contract research facility there. Ostensibly to study alternative fuels. Green tech, stuff like that. From what I’ve gathered, though, much of the science is a little more experimental. A little more theoretical.”

“And?”

“And the DOE put in a request to the FBI last week to conduct a counterintelligence operation on the facility as internal security had started reporting recruitment approaches being made on their employees by unknown operatives looking to do pay-for-play deals. Also, electronic countermeasures had been tripped in the last forty-eight hours indicating someone was doing a hostile analysis of their hard site security.”

“Standard Bureau stuff.” Price nodded. “Could be anyone looking to see what goodies are being cooked up. Hell, it could be industrial even, not political.”

Delahunt nodded. “Still could be. Nothing’s been proven. However the FBI team they sent to Toronto managed to catch a glimpse of someone seen surveying the employee entrance.”

“Custody?”

“No.” Delahunt shook her head. “This wasn’t a joint op with the Canadians. They took his photo and requested RCMP help with digital analog forensics.”

“They ID the guy?”

“Sure. Man named Jen Duh sh Tyen Tsai.”

“If Schwarz were here you’d know he’d say—”

“Gesundheit,” Delahunt agreed. “He’s a funny man that Hermann.”

“Yeah, but looks aren’t everything.”

“You got that from him, didn’t you?”

Price took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “Sometimes he’s funny. Mostly he’s just funny ’cause he’s trying to be funny and fails.” She set the mug of coffee down. “But surely Mr. What’s-his-name doesn’t go by that handle.”

“Mostly just Jen.”

“What do we know about him?”

“We know he’s in Toronto. We know he’s a sort of free agent between Chinese Tong running underworld activities there. Part courier, part outside hit man, part information broker.”

“So a criminal mercenary with connections to Chinese syndicates is running a surveillance operation on a DOE private contractor facility. And you tied him in to Seven how?”

“Look at his sleeve.” Delahunt gestured toward a RCMP file photo. “His left arm, inside, above the elbow.”

A “sleeve” was a slang term used by tattoo enthusiasts to indicate an arm that was entirely covered by ink designs from deltoid to wrist. Jen Tsai’s was covered in swirling images of Chinese characters, mythological demons and iconography in bold reds, blues, yellows and black.

“Where? I don’t see…” Price trailed off as she scrutinized the photo. “Ah.”

Just above Jen Tsai’s elbow was a horned demon skull, screaming mouth lined with fangs. Flames swirled inside the gaping jaws, and in the center of the flames were the numerals 1+6=7.

“Yeah,” Delahunt agreed. “Little odd for a hardcore Chinese gangster to be sporting primary arithmetic in his colors, no?”

“Oh, yes,” Price answered.

“We have his probable twenty?”

“We most certainly do.”

Price picked up her coffee mug. “Good. I’ll call Hal have him pull the Bureau boys off surveillance. Then I’ll send Able Team around to knock on some doors.”

“Knowing Ironman, it’ll be heads that get knocked more than doors.”

Price shrugged. “Whatever…”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Toronto, Canada

Regent Park, 3:00 a.m., the streets were quiet.

From behind the wheel of the black Excursion SUV, Carl Lyons surveyed the neighborhood. The vehicle had been waiting for them at the airport.

Lyons watched the streets with the cynical, jaundiced eye of a veteran cop.

Regent Park’s reputation preceded it. Fifty percent of the people living in the urban area were teenagers and sixty-eight percent of all the people there were settled in well below the national poverty rate for the rest of Canada.

With poverty, the lack of aspiration, and the loss of hope came crime and most often violent crime. Regent Park was a tough neighborhood not unlike any other bad neighborhood in any other First World country. It wasn’t Islamabad or Caracas, but it could still kill you.

“Keep an eye out for gangbangers working as sentries for drug dealers,” Lyons muttered.

“This isn’t my first rodeo, Hefei,” Blancanales reminded him.

Lyons grunted and turned down Queen Street East. In the back Schwarz was using his CPDA to run a more sophisticated GPS unit than the one that had come with the big Excursion. The CPDA he had begun using was a SME PED, or Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device.

Barbara Price had managed to secure a crate of the high-end encrypted devices from her old bosses in the Puzzle Palace, the National Security Agency.

“You notice some bastards have torn down all the street markers?” Schwarz observed.

“So police have a hard time responding to incidents or giving their location for backup,” Lyons said.

“Hey,” Schwarz replied in his best faux-Hispanic accent, “this ain’t my first rodeo, Hefei.”

“You guys are assholes.”

Schwarz leaned forward and nudged Blancanales on his shoulder. When the ex-Green Beret turned he saw Schwarz grinning madly, hand up to his ear as he mimicked holding a phone.

“Bring-bring.” Schwarz giggled, then made his voice deep. “Kettle? Yes, this is Pot, um, you’re black.”

“I’m an asshole?” Lyons snapped. “I’m an asshole? On what grounds?”

“On the account of your warm and overly gregarious people skills.” Blancanales laughed.

“Hey,” Lyons snarled. “Some people are like Slinkies, not really good for anything…but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs.”

Outside the vehicle rows of dingy brick buildings from the Toronto Community Housing Corporation slid by in uniform ranks.

The city planners had originally visualized Regent Park as a transitional community, and it was Canada’s largest experiment with a social housing project where people on social assistance could find affordable housing until their circumstances improved.

That had turned out to be very few and the population had stagnated, then grown. Eventually it had also become an immigrant community neighborhood. Into this melting pot of urban squalor Jen Tsai had moved, establishing links with local street gangs and building a safe haven for himself.

Lyons turned onto Parliament Street and began driving north in the general direction of the more upscale, historical Cabbagetown.

“There,” he said. “On the right is Regent Park—that’s our primary landmark. See what the GPS is saying.”

“Already on it,” Schwarz acknowledged.

“Circle the tenement when we get there,” Blancanales said. “We’ll finish the three-sixty survey then I, not being so muy blanco, can hop out and cover the back door.”

“Hey,” Lyons said, “this isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Everyone’s a comedian in this crew.” Schwarz spoke up. Then he said, “There. On the right, facing the park, that’s our building.”

“Let me swing around back,” Lyons said. “You got anything on the police scanner?”

“Negative,” Schwarz replied. “I got one domestic-disturbance call as we rolled in but after that nothing.”

“There we go,” Blancanales said.

The Able Team warrior looked out their windows and into Regent Park.

A group of African-Canadian youths stood beside a children’s playground. They were dressed in typical hip-hop regalia and with openly hostile looks watched the SUV as it cruised slowly past.

The clique that ran Regent Park, and the one with whom Jen Tsai now made his deals, according to RCMP records, was the PBS, or the Point Blank Souljahs, the remnants of a much more powerful organization called the Regent Park Crew that had controlled cocaine traffic in the 1980s and ’90s and was now defunct.

“Good thing our windows are blacked out,” Schwarz said. “Or those Souljahs would think we were cops.”

“As it is now,” Blancanales pointed out drily, “they might decide we’re an enemy crew on a drive-by mission.”

“Then they wouldn’t be far wrong, would they?” Lyons grunted.

“Not really,” Blancanales agreed. “You want me to contact Wethers now?”

“Yeah, bring him up.” Lyons nodded. “Schwarz, you got the shotgun mike ready?”

“I’m on it like Blue Bonnet.”

Lyons nodded to Blancanales, who spoke into his own SME PED. “Able to Stony Bird,” he said, initiating contact.

“Copy,” Wethers answered immediately. “I have you up on my video display. I see your twenty.”

The camera feed to the video display Professor Wethers referred to was mounted into the nose of an RQ-7 Shadow, a light, compact tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Only thirty-six feet long and boasting a fourteen-foot wingspan with a weight of 375 pounds, the UAV was much smaller than its larger cousins, the MQ-9 and MQ-1 Reapers.

Able Team had launched the vehicle from a portable launcher they’d mounted on the roof of their SUV from the top of a deserted commercial parking garage. With a flight endurance of six hours, a sixty-eight-mile range and service ceiling of fifteen thousand feet, it was exactly the kind of tool they needed for the low-profile urban operation.

“Go ahead and give our boy Jen a call,” Schwarz said. “I’m up.”

Lyons and Schwarz cued up their headsets while Blancanales used his SME PED to dial Stony Man Farm. Waiting at a com station just outside the remote pilot setup Wethers ran the RQ-7 from, Kurtzman took the incoming call and shuffled it through his system to make it anonymous before routing it back to Toronto.

After three rings Jen Tsai answered. “Hello?” he said in English.

Blancanales lifted his arm and gave Schwarz a thumbs-up.

Lyons subvocalized into his throat mike to Wethers. “We’re on. Start triangulation.” Behind them Schwarz powered down the back window and pointed a compact directional mike at the building housing the Chinese gangster.

“Hello?” Tsai repeated, this time sounding pissed off.

“You fucked up the job on the lab,” Blancanales said. At Stony Man, Kurtzman was feeding his voice through a distorter so that it came out deep and gravelly. “You got made by Mounties.” He paused then added, “Seven is not pleased.”

“It’s not over yet!” Tsai shouted into the phone. “I can handle the cops here. I’m still going to get an in.”

“No denial, right to defensive begging, nice,” Lyons murmured into his throat mike.

“We’re getting everything,” Kurtzman assured him.

“Excuses don’t cut it,” Blancanales said.

Behind him Schwarz looked down at the scrolling screen of his SME PED.

The signal from Jen Tsai’s phone was shown against a 3-D structural blueprint of the public housing building as it was triangulated between Schwarz’s parabolic mike and the sensory instruments in the nose of the RQ-7 Shadow controlled by Wethers.

There was a pause after Blancanales’s admonishment.

For several tense seconds the conversation was still. Lyons looked in his side mirror and immediately sat up. Approaching the idling SUV were four of the gang members they’d passed earlier. The gangsters’ hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of their hooded pullover sweatshirts.

Lyons swore softly; he knew what was happening immediately. The Point Blank Souljahs crew had noticed an unidentified SUV with blacked-out windows rolling slowly through disputed drug territory then parking in front of their housing unit.

They were coming to kill trespassers and once they got a good look at Able Team the lead would start flying all the sooner.

On the phone Tsai suddenly spoke again, voice rich with suspicion. “One plus six.”

Blancanales turned and looked at Lyons, then back over his shoulder at Schwarz, hand up and face questioning. “What do I say?” he mouthed silently.

Lyons cut his eyes back to the approaching gangsters. He saw the leader produce a TEC-9 machine pistol. He turned back toward Blancanales and pulled out his silenced Beretta 92 with extended magazine.

“One plus six!” Tsai barked into the phone.

“Fuck it!” Lyons snarled. “Hang up, we’ll roll hot. I’m tired of all this goddamn sneaking around anyway.”

“We just got here!” Schwarz protested.

“Hurry up,” Blancanales answered him. He caught sight of the approaching gangsters in the rearview mirror and snapped his cell phone shut, cutting off the angry Tsai. “If you don’t move fast, Schwarz, then Ironman is going to kill all the good ones.”

Stony Man Farm

BARBARA PRICE, hair still damp from her shower, finished dressing.

She was in the bedroom of the farmhouse where she kept toiletries and clothing for the times she spent overnight at Stony Man. Most weeks she spent more time sleeping here than she did at her D.C. town house.

The shower in the room’s bathroom was running as Mack Bolan rinsed off. He’d just returned from somewhere, doing something—Price had no idea what.

He’d smelled like gunpowder and had blood under his nails. The past half hour had been stolen moments, but stolen moments were the only moments the casual couple got.

She thought idly about perhaps stripping down again and joining him in the shower. What was another fifteen minutes if she was in a stealing mood?

The push-talk application on her SME PED broke squelch and she heard Kurtzman’s gruff voice call out to her from across the Farm in the Annex.

“You on, Barb?” the leader of the cyberteam asked.

Price sighed and rose off the rumpled bed. She felt a pang at the missed opportunity but by the time she reached the phone the feeling was gone. With practiced self-discipline she slammed her shields down, brought her discipline up and become once again mission controller.

“Go ahead, Bear.”

“Barb, Carmen has pulled something out possibly relating to Seven. I think you should take a look.”

“Copy. I’m en route to your twenty now.”

“I’ll have the coffee ready.”

“Don’t threaten me, Bear.”

Price turned to look in the mirror over the dresser and pushed a stray strand of her blond hair behind an ear. Pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together. Whoever this Seven was, Price could tell she was starting to get their scent in her nose now.

It’s only a matter of time, she thought. She left the room, mind completely absorbed in the problem now.

Bolan would figure out something had come up easily enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“What did you find?” Price asked.

The Annex was a flurry of activity. Akira Tokaido’s desk area looked as if a bomb had gone off. Red Bull cans and Snickers candy bar wrappers lay cast around like spillover from a landfill. His fingers hammered his keyboards while the Smiths cranked out of the earbuds of his iPod.

“I found more cases of Seven,” Delahunt said. “Bear is setting up the display right now.”

Across the room Kurtzman was plugging a flash drive into a media presentation station connected to a large flat-screen monitor set on the wall. The screen saver showed the actor Mel Gibson in his costume from the Road Warrior.

“How recent?” Price asked.

“I found some interesting links to both our old MERGE and TRIO operations, but that’s old, though it does raise all sorts of questions.”

MERGE had been a criminal network consisting of elements from the Mexican mafia, Corsican crime families and Colombian cartels. TRIO had proved to be an Asian counterpart to MERGE, formed by Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian organizations.

“Seven was behind both those unifications?” Price sounded incredulous. “That kind of global influence is insane.”

“It’s not definitive,” Delahunt admitted. “But now that I know what to look for, I’m linking things together that have no business being connected. It’s like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.”

“Ready,” Kurtzman announced.

The women turned toward the display screen.

A line of bodies lay in sequence on a green tarp. The corpses were bullet riddled and all black male adults. Standing around them were five Caucasian men in desert camouflage stripped of rank and identification, all holding American weapons.

Price didn’t recognize the men but she saw one was holding a Stoner M-63 light machine gun. “SEALs?” she asked.

“Yep, DevGru,” Kurtzman replied, using the shorthand for the unit that had replaced the legendary SEAL Team 6. “In Somalia, last year. Tag-and-bag mission of al Qaeda in Africa. Major communication node and his team of bodyguards.”

“What am I looking for?”

“There,” Delahunt said. “On the one with gray hair, the leader. Bear, blow up his left clavicle.”

Kurtzman grunted and worked the control pad on his automated wheelchair. A mouse drew a box around the indicated area, then blew up the resolution. A series of stars about the size of a dime were tattooed in blue ink.

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