Death Dealers

Anything goes, Lyons thought, sliding his fingers under his pillow and around the handle of Colt Python, feeling the diamond-checkered grips against the palm of his hand. Surrounded by enemies, dozens of whom Lyons recognized from their Interpol profiles accessed at Stony Man Farm, he and his partners were in deep.

There was a rap at the door and Lyons sat up. He looked over and saw that it was closing in on three in the morning. He hadn’t placed any orders with room service. By the same token, he couldn’t imagine why someone out to blow him away would knock politely at his door. Out in the hall, he heard more knocks on different doors and softly spoken words even as they were opened.

Lyons got out of bed, not bothering to put on pants or underwear. It was perfect weather for lying in bed, no covers, naked and enjoying the sea breeze wafting through the window. A pair of undershorts wouldn’t make him any less vulnerable to gunfire or a knife. Still, his cop training took hold as he stood behind the doorjamb while he turned the knob to his door. If a bullet were to cut through the door at his moment, it would slice into empty air, not his chest.

The door swung open, silent on well-oiled hinges, and Lyons caught a hint of jasmine in the air as he looked into the hall. It was lit, but not so bright that it made his eyes hurt as they adjusted. Instead of a killer in the hall, there was a woman standing there. He couldn’t tell her age as she stood in front of him in the doorway.

Her skin was deeply bronzed, bare shoulders in sharp contrast to the cream-hued cloth that looped around her neck and then came down to cradle her full, soft breasts. The fabric draped to one side and knotted over her hip, exposing the curve of silken flesh beneath. The light caught a glint of gold from a small ring that adorned her navel while that same light cast an undeniable silhouette, leaving no doubt that the filmy fabric was the only thing between her bare skin and the sultry evening air.

Once more, Lyons hated the skin he was forced to wear, the tattoos of white power with hateful slurs branded, if only for a month, on his flesh. However, as he returned his gaze to her face, he saw that she wasn’t a black woman. He tried to place her, either as Hispanic, or perhaps a Pacific Islander, but her large brown eyes and full sensual mouth were most definitely not Asian or Caucasian.

“Mr. Long, my name is Sanay,” she said. Her accent was as unidentifiable as her features, and Lyons couldn’t help but think that the branches of her family tree had roots in different parts of the forest. There was a hint of British in it, but her voice was as elusive in its origins as her appearance. “I am your gift for tonight from Master Jinan.”

“Master Jinan,” Lyons repeated, looking her up and down. Was this some kind of test? After all, Karl Long was an Aryan thug, an outlaw motorcyclist whose racist pedigree had been cemented with a violent assault on a La Sombra prisoner that had left him brain damaged and with an amputated arm. It wasn’t murder, which would have meant that Long could never leave prison, but it was a show of strength and unity among the Arrangement. “What makes your boss think that I’d have interest in a little brown thing like you?”

Lyons smirked, hating the words that poured from his lips but also knowing full well that Long was spending prison time for the assault and rapes of Filipino, Polynesian and Hispanic women. Even her age, a little north of thirty, and her diminutive five-foot height, matched Long’s taste in victims.

Abalisah’s researchers were good, uncannily so, to have pulled up those kinds of facts about him. So even as Lyons made his dismissive challenge to the girl, Sanay stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She glanced down to the cocked pistol in Lyons’s hand and then to the growing arousal obstinately making itself known despite his bravado. Her dark, slender fingers gave him a light brush, the tips of her nails tracing lines over his tightly packed abs before she cupped her palm over his pectoral muscle.

“Abalisah knows all the darkness in this hotel. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s,” Sanay whispered, pressing closer to him. Her other hand glided over Lyons’s hip and she explored his body in the darkness.

She was barefoot and she rose to the tips of her toes, lips barely able to press against his collarbone, brushing lightly, tongue darting out to taste his skin.

Lyons hooked his arm under hers, and he flexed, lifting her higher. He was able to hold her up with only one arm, bring her mouth to his, lips so soft and inviting that Lyons could easily forget himself as he carried her toward the bed. Sanay helped Lyons, bracing her thighs against his hips, her slender arms draped around his neck.

The Able Team commander still couldn’t get rid of a knot of dread in his stomach, even as he joined with Sanay, exploring her wonderful caramel skin, her dark, firm nipples, velvety soft lips and warm, tender tongue in her mouth.

* * *

THE LIGHT OF dawn would not pour through Lyons’s westward-facing balcony, but he did notice the graying skies as sunrise approached.

He lay still, Sanay, the exotic, beautiful woman entangled around him, a trickle of wet drool having dried and crusted on his chest. He couldn’t see her; his eyes were mere slits, only open enough to register the increasing light of day.

Lyons could feel her moving, stirring from his chest and crawling off him. He continued breathing deeply, as if asleep.

Maybe the women were sent to these rooms as spies.

Sanay quietly moved to the nightstand, where he’d placed his pistol the night before, and lifted the revolver. When Lyons heard her check to see if the weapon was loaded, he acted without thinking. He clamped his hand down hard over hers, pinning her finger inside the trigger guard. He heard the ugly pop of her index finger, but even as that happened, he drove the heel of his palm against her jaw in a Shotokan karate stroke.

The blow knocked her to the hardwood floor with a sharp crack. The revolver was locked now in Lyons’s left fist, and he watched as a trickle of blood seeped from her cheek onto the rug. Even as he looked down at the grisly damage he’d wrought in the space of a few moments, he noticed something else on the rug at his feet.

Sanay had removed the rounds from the revolver, rendering it useless even before she’d pointed it at him.

Lyons did a press check; the weapon’s barrel was empty. She’d made it seem as if she were about to attack him, but it had been a ruse. Once more, he had an uneasy feeling wash over him. The tattoos on his flesh seemed to come alive, their hints and promises of intolerance and rot audible in their gnawing on his soul.

“Why’d you let me almost kill you?” Lyons growled, taking her by the wrist and pulling her into a sitting position. His cold blue eyes must have flashed with lightning-bright anger because she winced, recoiling at his touch.

“Because...Jinan would not believe your story...” Sanay whispered. Blood now stained the side of her neck; there was a gash down one cheek. Her big brown eyes were glimmering with tears. “He would kill you.”

Lyons loosened his iron grasp on her wrist.

“No...don’t stop. He’ll kill you,” she whispered.

Lyons sat on the mattress. Karl Long was a rapist. He wouldn’t make gentle love to the kind of women he’d been in prison for violating. The Able Team commander had stumbled dead into a trap, dropping evidence that he was not the sexual predator, the destroying creature, whose identity he’d assumed.

Too many years on the LAPD had taught him that rape had very little to do with sex, with sensuality, with lovemaking. And yet, that tiny bit of information had failed him as he’d given in to his body’s normal, human sexual desires, bonding with Sanay, tending to her tender little form the way she’d explored his hard physique. Already, the lips of the laceration on her cheek puffed up, darkening. Her jaw was also deepening its hue, red and raw from where he’d punched her.

“I needed you to do that,” Sanay repeated softly. “He’ll kill you if you don’t.”

Lyons cupped the tip of her chin, looking into her eyes. “Why would you do this?”

“Because you’re kind. You’re a good man,” Sanay answered. She lowered her head, scrunching her shoulders up around her neck. “A man like that doesn’t deserve to be treated like...”

Lyons bit his lower lip. At once, he was ashamed of his violent reflexes, but at the same time, they’d intervened and protected him despite himself. The girl had leveled a gun at him.

“You took a damn chance,” Lyons growled. He helped her up, a hand under each armpit, then sat her beside him on the mattress. “What if I’d shot you? What if I beat you to death?”

“Then this would be over,” Sanay answered.

In the ever-growing light, Lyons could see that Sanay’s skin wore her years with nearly as much character as he’d earned in his years of battle. Cigarette burns, healed cuts and freckles were now visible as the concealer makeup she’d worn had been scrubbed away by their vigorous lovemaking. Her whole life was a wrought tale carved into her flesh, hidden by that caramel coating.

And Lyons hated himself for having gone full karate on her. He knew that his palm-heel stroke would leave hairline fractures along Sanay’s mandible, and she was still in pain right now. It would stay with her as a constant, sharp ache for months, acting up every time she bit down hard. He just knew that she’d be taking an extra painkiller or two to numb herself further against the lifetime of punishment she’d received.

Lyons gently dabbed the blood from her cheek, careful not to apply pressure to the swollen edges of her laceration. Sanay’s welling tears didn’t fill her eyes quite enough to trickle down her face, but Lyons could see into her dark, soulful eyes, spotting a small spark. A tint of hope gleamed in them. He could see that he was the first in a long time who had treated her like a human.

“Don’t,” Lyons told her, his deep voice having a slight crack in it. He’d been here before, with brave women, those who knew how to fight and survive.

“Don’t what?” Sanay asked.

“Don’t risk yourself for me,” Lyons ordered.

“Jinan said to expect to be raped, to be hurt, to be destroyed,” Sanay whispered. “But he said that if I made it, he would give me all the opium I needed. Enough to ride away into eternity.”

She looked down at herself, sinking her upper teeth into her soft, cushiony lower lip. “This...this isn’t enough. You’ll—”

A knock at the door cut her off. Sanay froze, her sadness-brimming eyes finally bursting like a dam as she shot a glance at the door. Lyons moved with the speed of a cobra, scooping up his Colt Python and readying it for action.

Still standing at the jamb, using it as a shield, he tore open the door. “What the hell do you want?”

Lyons was eye to eye with a man who looked too wide to even step through the hotel doorway. He could see brawny muscles rippling in the newcomer’s neck, shoulders, upper arms and chest. However the farther down he looked on the ever-broadening form, those muscles ebbed, slipping under a layer of fat that, at a distance, would have most fools thinking him to be a ball of blubber. Fortunately, Lyons had run into many of this type of man, as well. He called them “hard fat,” men who would never display a set of washboard abs, but had endless reserves of strength and endurance, capable of tossing around throngs of bodybuilders as if they were rag dolls. The Lump, as Lyons named the man, glowered in reaction to Lyons’s hostility.

“Picking up the bitches. Or what’s left of them.”

The man had no accent, though his features were solidly Polynesian. He also didn’t show the slightest bit of intimidation at the sight of the Colt in Lyons’s fist. He turned to Sanay and barked. “Here! Now!”

Sanay sprung to her tiny feet and darted from the bed to the doorway. She hadn’t bothered to pick up the folds of flimsy cloth that Lyons had torn off her the night before.

“Was expecting you a little more ripped up,” the Lump said.

Lyons glowered at him. “Jinan said not to kill the staff.”

The round ball of disguised muscle tugged Sanay into the hallway, looking at her closer, his gaze falling on the darkening bruises of her face.

“Well...” Lyons added, letting a little sheepishness creep into his voice. “I remembered that eventually.”

The Lump swiveled his head atop that tree trunk of a neck, ropes of tendon and sinew stretching from it and into his shoulders like the gnarled roots of a hideous tree. “She ain’t staff. She’s party favors.”

The Lump pulled on Sanay’s wrist. “Come on. I’ll get you some fresh...”

Lyons growled, cutting off the slab of humanity in the hallway. “Screw that. I want her back. The bitch sits up and begs when I cough. Don’t want to have to train something else like that.”

Lump glanced from Lyons to the frightened girl. Sanay looked like a rabbit caught between a wolf and a mountain lion. The slab glanced back to Lyons, standing there naked—the only thing he wore was a scowl of annoyance—accessorized with a menacing Colt.

“I’ll have her cleaned up, just like last night,” Lump told him.

Lyons nodded, standing by helplessly as Lump tugged Sanay after him. She looked at him, confused.

Lyons slammed the door shut, resting his head against the doorjamb. He looked at the reflection of his face in the chrome of the door chain’s slot.

He hated what he saw.

CHAPTER THREE

Barbara Price stood in the center of the Stony Man Farm Computer Room, looking between the touch-screen tablet device in her hand and the gigantic global map stretched out on the wall. Around her were the computer workstations of the four technological geniuses of the cyber crew: Aaron Kurtzman, Carmen Delahunt, Huntington Wethers and Akira Tokaido.

As mission controller, Price was staying on top of all open correspondence channels and keeping track of her field operations. Currently the cyber team was trying to locate Robert Baxter and Beatrice Chandler, scanning the world for their RFID chips. Given the ferocity of the attack, most people would have considered both scientists dead, but there had been a passive signal as leaving the perimeter of the base.

A global search would be much more difficult. One intruder had been located on the base, a disguised commando, Chinese in ethnicity, with forged identification papers, unit patches and dog tags that, if Stony Man looked really hard, could be traced back to Shanghai and the Ministry of State Security. This would have proved to be convincing evidence, if only for the fact that the intruder had been killed with the same U.S.-issue weapons and ammunition as the attacking commandos had likely carried. Indeed, that the man’s Beretta and rifle were found—and had been traced to stolen American arms lost in the Gulf War—only made Price more suspicious about the red herring dropped in the desert.

That was why Akira Tokaido was currently checking every ounce of digital traffic coming out of the People’s Republic of China, looking for incidents of a similar attack in-country. She didn’t know if there would have been enough coordination for two teams to make concurrent attacks, but there were signs that four days prior to the attack in the American Southwest there had been a similar missile misfire on a base in the Gobi Desert, 275 miles northwest of Beijing, 20 miles north of Hohhot. The detonation of a missile that should have been deactivated was given as the reason for the catastrophe that had left dozens dead and a hundred more injured.

Of course, that was merely the official story out of China. The truth, however, would be much more arcane, and naturally that is what Price assumed happened. Right now, the real facts were sketchy, which was why Tokaido was busy raiding PRC military databases.

Price turned her attention to her tablet, pulling up the information on the missing scientists, Baxter and Chandler. The Stony Man mission controller made careful note that there was evidence of a more than genial relationship between the two, and that it was likely that any effort at taking one might have been a guarantee of capturing the other. Price was well aware of the kind of emotional manipulation the peril to a loved one could hold over a person. Right now, there was an excellent chance of recovering the pair.

Baxter and Chandler were the only two missing from the base; other bodies had been uncovered, accounting for nearly a hundred murdered victims. Most had died at ground zero of one-thousand-kilogram-warhead detonations; others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, shot through the head while wounded. Even so, the commandos who’d made the attack had been careful not to damage still-operating security cameras, so that the U.S. government would get a good look at what appeared to be PRC soldiers disguised as Americans attacking a base in New Mexico.

Tokaido quickly sent a note to her tablet, the information showing up in a new panel.

Air Force dispatched, seeking out attackers. Searched one-thousand-mile radius utilizing AWACS, found no sign of assaulters’ helicopters. Missiles showed up on radar only moments before attack, again, launched from location unknown.

Price nodded to Tokaido, acknowledging the preliminary information. The youngest member of the cyber crew wouldn’t stop until he could deliver every detail necessary so the skills of the Stony Man action team could be applied with deadly laser focus. Indeed, though the cyber team was merely a support to the commandos in the field, it was with these keyboard rangers that Able Team and Phoenix Force could be deployed to locate and destroy threats to innocent lives and world peace.

It had been three days since the first incident in China, and only by the sheerest of luck had Able Team come across Kevin Reising and his compatriots. They’d been based in Los Angeles awaiting a message and a destination. This was the day before the American incident.

Hunt Wethers fired a report to Price’s tablet. It was from one of the Navy AWACS birds that regularly patrolled just outside Chinese airspace and over international waters. The craft had timed its patrol and observation of the Leizhou Peninsula specifically, knowing there was going to be a test firing of a new genus of the Dong-Feng 21 antiship ballistic missile.

Not coincidentally, the DF-21 variant was purported to possess a maximum velocity of Mach 10. At 35 feet long and 16 tons in weight, not only could it carry enough explosives to kill an aircraft carrier in one shot, it also had nuclear warhead capabilities and a range of 1100 miles.

Of course, the difference between a silo-launched ballistic missile and a more portable option such as the American design was phenomenal. Huge warhead capacities and high speeds were vital ingredients to altering a military balance. The Dong-Feng antiship variants were meant to provide the Chinese navy with utter superiority when it came time to reclaim the island nation of Taiwan. One missile could break an allied carrier apart; its nuclear variant could flash fry an entire carrier group.

Both ways were means of overwhelming any defense against Chinese military expansion.

The American missile system could be mounted on cruisers and fast-attack crafts, land-launched or carried on fighter-bombers. Just because both weapons systems had the ability to break Mach 10 was no reason to try to combine them. DF-2Xs reached Mach 10 because they rode on midrange ballistic missiles, rocket engines that were more than capable of launching satellites into orbit or delivering an MRV warhead. The American design was meant to deliver its warhead at such a high speed, and with such agility and accuracy, that the mass of the missile would provide penetration through even the thickest of hulls.

Of course, with the presence of an auction promising the latest and deadliest hardware, including just the things necessary to take out enemy fleets, Price couldn’t help but feel that more than coincidence was at work here. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

“Quoting Ian Fleming?” Aaron Kurtzman mused.

“Just trying to make certain I did the right thing allotting a Stony Man crew to this auction,” Price said.

“Two separate styles of carrier-killer test programs are attacked, and then someone advertises it?” Kurtzman asked. “You’ve got good instincts on this, Barb.”

She nodded, looking down at the screen of her tablet. So far, Stony Man had been fully capable of gathering all the information they could about the New Mexico attack, if only because the Sensitive Operations Group had many federal connections, both inside and outside conventional channels. China, however, was a very different situation, and tapping into their information had taken effort and penetration of high-security government systems. That Tokaido had located so much thus far was a sign of his skill and the power of the Farm’s cyber systems.

The auction had been confirmed through multiple sources, as well. Not only did Kevin Reising have his invitation, but there had been a rise in digital currency exchanges—peer-to-peer payments that didn’t pass through legitimate banking functions. That data-cash was being funneled to a website called the Arsenal Europa, which had been touting the auction. Discovering the auction had been the combined efforts of Wethers and Delahunt, both of whom utilized their particular, individual instincts to narrow the search to its confirmed presence.

They’d also managed to home in on a large supply of data-cash in storage under Reising’s accounts. The sums were substantial, well over fifty million dollars, allowing for more than a few high-tech, high-impact weapons. What a soldier for the Heathens outlaw motorcycle club would do with such a supply of cash made Price shudder.

Of course, a previous Able Team operation had established links between the Heathens and the Aryan Right Coalition, a white supremacist group that was actually the action arm of an even more shadowed organization that called itself the Arrangement.

The Arrangement had lost scores of men and millions of dollars in that conflict, but apparently that hadn’t been enough to set back the mystery group. Not if they could pony up that amount of funding to rearm and rebuild their shattered army.

“Hunt, do you have any more information about where Reising’s money came from or where it’s sitting right now?” Price asked.

The tall, slender, black professor looked up from his workstation. “Negative. Trying to dig into this data-cash network utilized by Reising is difficult, which is precisely why he chose it.”

“How so?” Price asked.

“Normally, I’d hope to find a centralized store of information, but the network itself is decentralized. It’s a mobile, mercurial entity. You need to have proper keys to locate your own money and allow transfer of funds. However, even going through those particular encryptions, you cannot access anything else. It’s like sticking your head into a disconnected pond and hoping to find a river to the nearest ocean,” Wethers explained.

“So, we’re up against, essentially, the Mississippi River Delta rather than looking for Lake Michigan,” Price said. “Instead of a box, we’re stuck with just a tube, which in itself doesn’t necessarily lead to another tube, even though it’s all one ever-increasing, ever-branching main artery.”

“Correct. This is the capillary system, which is useless without the arteries and veins, but while we can see an individual capillary, there’s no direct link, so we’re not even certain there is a heart. We could be in any organism,” Wethers explained.

Price winced. “Keep trying. This is the best we’ve got. I want to be able to figure out who Reising wanted to pay, but I also want to know where the money came from.”

“You will find no more tireless crusader and seeker of this information than I,” Wethers told Price.

Price looked at the clock in the corner of her tablet display. It was almost time to talk to Hal Brognola, the big Fed who’d helped to assemble the Sensitive Operations Group, alongside Mack Bolan, and who gave the Farm its legitimacy thanks to his high rank at the Department of Justice. Though not a cabinet secretary, Brognola often had the advantage of the President’s ear.