Justice Run

“Good,” Bolan said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Bolan ushered her into the elevator, then followed her inside and they returned to the first floor. When the doors opened, Bolan gestured for her to remain inside and he left the car.

A ragged line of hardmen was scrambling to head Bolan off. The soldier scythed them down with a barrage of 9 mm rounds just as the MP-5 clicked dry. Ejecting the magazine, he slipped his last fresh one into the weapon and called for Rodriguez to come out of the elevator.

They made a beeline for the front door with Bolan still in the lead. As they stepped into the warm evening, the soldier heard sirens screaming. Keying the throat mike, he called for Turrin.

“Yeah?”

“Meet me at the Jag,” Bolan said.

“Roger that,” the retired Fed replied.

“Jag?” Rodriguez asked. “You have a Jaguar? What department are you with again?”

“It’s complicated,” Bolan said.

When they reached the car, Turrin was already there, tossing some of his gear into the trunk.

The Stony Man warriors claimed the front seats, with Bolan behind the wheel. Rodriguez slipped into the backseat as Bolan stomped on the Jaguar’s accelerator. The car’s engine responded with a growl and the vehicle lurched ahead, barreling toward the gates of Dumond’s estate. Rodriguez twisted at the waist and stared through the rear window.

Bolan looked into the rearview mirror and saw a couple of muzzle-flashes wink in the darkness. A bullet struck the trunk lid, sparked against the steel and angled off into the darkness.

As the Jaguar neared the gate, another of Dumond’s shooters ran into the vehicle’s path, a machine pistol tucked in close to his body.

Turrin stuck an arm through his side window to fire on the guy. Even over the roar of the engine, Bolan heard the dry crackle of autofire and saw jagged flames lash out from the shooter’s weapon. The bullet went low. The Executioner heard something thunk against the vehicle and he guessed the round had hammered into the vehicle’s engine block.

Turrin’s Beretta roared twice, just as the Jaguar rolled over a speed bump. The car shuddered. Bolan clenched his teeth and fought to keep control of the steering wheel, which wanted to jerk to the right.

The bullets from Turrin’s weapon went wild, leaving the guard untouched.

Headlights bathed the hardman in their white glow, making his face look deathly pale.

His mouth dropped open and he threw up an arm to protect himself. The vehicle’s right front fender smacked into the shooter, the force spinning his body and heaving it into the air all at once.

“Bull’s-eye,” Turrin muttered.

* * *

THEY’D DRIVEN LESS than a half mile when Bolan caught a whiff of the distinctive odor from a busted radiator. The needle on the temperature gauge was rising to the red quickly. The vehicle probably would overheat in a matter of minutes. Bolan knew they needed to do something.

He glanced at Turrin. “We’re going to have to ditch,” he said.

Turrin nodded.

“Ditch?” the woman said. “If Dumond sends his people after us, we can’t outrun them on foot.”

Bolan looked up into the rearview mirror and saw a reflection of her staring at him.

“We also can’t outrun them in a dead car,” he said. “Trust me. We’ll get you out of here.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but hesitated, seeming to consider his words. “Okay,” she said with a nod.

“Up there,” Turrin said, pointing at something beyond the windshield. Bolan followed where he was pointing and saw the mouth of an alley up ahead. The smell of antifreeze intermingled with overheated plastic, metal and oil had grown stronger. The soldier acknowledged Turrin with a nod.

A couple of seconds later when they reached their destination, he cut the wheel to the right and guided the car into the narrow alley. He killed the engine but left the headlights burning. “Wait here,” he growled.

Popping open the door, he stepped from the vehicle and walked up to the front end and checked the damage. Bullet holes pockmarked the grille in a ragged line.

Another slug had taken out one of the running lights. White plumes of steam curled up from around the edges of the hood. The car definitely was damaged goods.

Moving back to the driver’s door, Bolan leaned inside, pulled up on a floor switch that opened the trunk and switched off the headlights.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Turrin nodded and exited the car. The woman climbed from the backseat and, eyeing the two men cautiously, approached them. She stopped several feet away from them.

“We need another car,” she said.

“We’ll get one,” Bolan replied.

“What, are you going to steal one?” she asked, her voice incredulous.

“Yeah.”

“Wait! What?”

Turrin looked at her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The big guy does this shit all the time.”

“He’s a federal agent!”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”

“No time,” Bolan said.

The Executioner glided past her and moved to the trunk. He slid his fingertips into the seam between the edge of the trunk lid and the car and pulled. The lid sprang open. He tossed the MP-5 into the trunk. When Turrin saw what Bolan was doing, he reached into the car, pulled out his shotgun and tossed it into the compartment. Bolan slammed the lid.

He hated to leave the weapons behind, but he had little choice. They could conceal their sidearms under their jackets. But walking around a foreign city with shotguns and submachine guns would probably attract all the wrong kinds of attention.

For all intents and purposes, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, Stony Man Farm’s armorer, had rendered the weapons untraceable. If someone ran the prints on the weapons, they’d find nothing. Any prints the soldier had left behind as Mack Samuel Bolan or under his aliases Matt Cooper or, before that, Mike Belasko, had been scrubbed. Whenever he had any brushes with the authorities, the Farm’s cyber team hacked into the computers after the fact and erased any mug shots or fingerprints that might have been taken. As far as the world was concerned, Bolan was dead and had been for years. It was a fiction that Stony Man Farm went to great lengths to maintain.

From the corner of his eye he saw Rodriguez standing there, watching them. Bolan raised his right foot, set it on the bumper and pulled up the cuff of his pant leg. A small Glock pistol rode on his ankle in a holster. He drew the pistol. He sensed Rodriguez tensing, saw her back away a step. Turning toward her, he extended his hand and offered the weapon.

“You need a little something,” he said.

Nodding, she took the pistol from him, pulled back the slide and looked to see whether a round was in the chamber. Satisfied, she let the slide snap forward and slipped the pistol into her waistband.

“Thanks,” she said.

Spinning away from the car, the Executioner strode toward the mouth of the alley. When he reached it, he paused for a couple of heartbeats and glanced in both directions to see whether Dumond’s men had followed them. Men and women, tanned and fit, walked up and down the sidewalk, smiling and laughing.

Bolan slid the Beretta into the shoulder holster under his jacket and stepped from the alley, with the others moving behind him. As they moved up the street, he glanced at Rodriguez. The woman had plastered a smile on her face and was walking with a steady, confident gait, all of which took attention from her mussed hair and ripped jacket. In the distance, Bolan could hear sirens. He assumed police and emergency vehicles were speeding to Dumond’s estate. Once they arrived, they’d find the place littered with bodies.

And, if prowl cars weren’t already sweeping the area for Turrin and him, they soon would be. Once the police found the Jaguar, they’d realize whoever had driven the car had moved away on foot. They’d establish a perimeter that would make it harder for Bolan and the others to get away quickly.

They needed to move fast before that happened.

They’d put a couple of blocks between themselves and the Jaguar when Bolan spotted a police car halted at the intersection just ahead of them. The officer driving the car stared at them. Had Dumond or his people given the police a physical description? Bolan doubted it, but he felt himself tense up just the same.

“Is he looking at us?” Turrin asked, his voice low.

“Seems like it,” Bolan replied.

Rodriguez cast a glance at the soldier. “What if he is looking at us?” she asked.

“Let him look,” Bolan replied with a slight shrug.

“We can’t fight him.”

“You’re right. We can’t. And we won’t.”

One of the few rules Bolan had in his War Everlasting was that he never would draw his weapon on a police officer, even if the cop was about to shoot him. A second later, the traffic light changed and the squad car lurched forward and turned onto the street Bolan and the others were walking along. The officer at the wheel gave them one last look as he drove past, but kept going.

“Thank God,” Rodriguez said quietly.

“Yes and no,” Bolan said. “We just gained a couple of minutes. But if the guy’s instincts nag at him enough, he may turn around and want to talk to us. Look at us. We don’t exactly look like rich, carefree tourists.”

“True.”

When they reached the intersection, Bolan veered right down a side street and followed it away from the main drag for three blocks. An older-model blue Citroën parked along the curb caught the warrior’s eye. He walked up to it, peered through a side window, looking for blinking red lights that might signal an alarm, but saw nothing. Pulling his arm back, he shot forward and drove the point of his elbow into the glass. The window shattered on impact, glittering shards falling to the ground and into the car.

Bolan reached through the window, unlocked the door and within seconds was seated inside the vehicle, working to hotwire the starter while Turrin watched their surroundings. Once the engine growled to life, Turrin opened the passenger-side door and gestured for Rodriguez to climb into the backseat. As she settled inside, he stuck one leg into the car before the sound of yelling caught his attention. He turned and saw an elderly man, silver hair contrasting against deeply tanned skin, running down the street, yelling in French and shaking his fist.

Turrin folded himself into the car and slammed the door just as Bolan began wheeling it from its parking space. He gunned the engine. The Citroën gained speed as it hurtled away from its owner who was now standing in the street, shaking a fist at the thieves stealing his car. The soldier navigated the car out of the neighborhood and aimed it toward the safehouse.

CHAPTER SIX

“How did you screw this up?” the voice on the phone asked.

Seated in the helicopter, Dumond bit down on an angry reply and squelched a desire to heave his phone across the floor. He hated the son of a bitch on the other end of the line. He didn’t even know his name. Not his real name, anyway. But he knew he’d love to put a bullet in the bastard’s head.

“It’s complicated,” the Frenchman replied, regretting the words instantly.

“Perhaps you need an easier job,” the other man said.

“No.”

“You lost the woman.”

“We’ve been over this.”

“You lost her.”

Dumond heaved a sigh. “She got away. Yes.”

“Was she looking for me?”

“No.”

“No?”

Dumond squeezed his eyes closed. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

“She never asked about you.”

“Which means nothing.”

“I told you someone attacked us. I lost eighteen people today.”

“How many did they lose?”

“You bastard!”

“Well?”

“None,” he said.

“And how many men were there?”

“You know the answer!”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Two. It was just two men.”

The other man fell silent. Dumond thought he heard a lighter being worked, followed seconds later by the sound of a slow exhale. The pause only heightened Dumond’s anxiety.

After several seconds the voice said, “Go to Tunisia.”

The line went dead.

* * *

VOGELSGANG SLAMMED DOWN the receiver of his secure phone. The sound of someone chuckling to his right caught his attention and prompted him to spin his chair in that direction. Friedhelm Geiger was leaning against a wall, his arms crossed over his chest, staring at him. No, more to the point, Geiger was smirking at him.

“What the hell are you laughing at?” Vogelsgang demanded.

“The Frenchman screwed it up, right?” Geiger said. “Did I not say this would happen?”

Vogelsgang ignored the question and instead studied the smoke curling up from the end of his cigarette. After several seconds he nodded slowly.

“You were right,” he said. “The Frenchman was a complete washout.”

Vogelsgang quickly repeated Dumond’s account of what had happened, breaking off occasionally to puff from his cigarette. When he finished, he looked over at Geiger, who was rubbing his clean-shaved chin with his thumb and forefinger. The smirk had morphed into a scowl and his brow furrowed.

“Two men took out eighteen of Dumond’s people?”

“That’s what Dumond said. What? You don’t believe it?”

Geiger pushed himself off the wall and started across the office toward a small bar located in the corner. Opening a bottle of spiced rum, he poured some into a short glass, sealed the bottle and, drink in hand, headed back to Vogelsgang.

“Dumond’s a pussy,” Geiger said. “But his security team’s another matter entirely. I can’t believe two men took out the whole team.”

“You think he’s lying?”

“Not necessarily,” Geiger replied, shaking his head. “He may have counted wrong. Fog of war and all that bullshit. Dumond’s not a soldier. Perhaps he’s been shot at before. I don’t know. But under that sort of stress, it’s easy to get things wrong.”

Vogelsgang nodded once. “But we still have eighteen men dead. That much we can be sure of.”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask the obvious question, then,” Vogelsgang said. “What if he got it right? What if it was just two people?”

Geiger drank more rum. Staring into the glass, he swirled the liquid around. “They’d have to be damn capable,” he said.

“Indeed.”

“Especially to do this with little or no visible support. No special vehicles. Nothing but small arms. I’d say Dumond was lucky to escape with his skin intact.”

“How many people in the world could do this?”

Geiger considered the question and shrugged. “Not many. I could do it. Not too many others. A handful, maybe.”

“Exactly. That means we’ve drawn the attention of someone quite formidable. And now we should assume they’re following Dumond. They won’t let him just walk away from all this. They’ll want to arrest him.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad as long as Dumond would keep his mouth shut. But we know better. If it’d buy him another ten seconds of breathing, he’d blurt out everything he knows.”

“So deal with him. And, if someone’s tracking him, take them out, too.”

“With pleasure,” Geiger said.

He set his empty glass on a nearby table, turned and headed for the door.

* * *

VOGELSGANG WAITED UNTIL the other man had exited the room before allowing himself a small chuckle and a pitying shake of his head. Geiger was a good soldier, a true believer, resourceful and smart. His mistake was in believing they were in this thing together.

He was wrong. Geiger indeed was a formidable soldier. The former intelligence officer was, at best, a pawn, an attack dog. Like any dog, he could be useful and loyal. But, if Geiger forgot his place, Vogelsgang had people available who could deal with him.

Vogelsgang had a small army waiting in the wings and he was sitting on a storehouse of cash. That made him unstoppable.

His thoughts went back to the situation in Monaco. Whether it was two people or four who attacked Dumond was an interesting question. The more important question was their identity. Vogelsgang had to assume it was the Americans coming to help one of their own, or another country working on behalf of the United States, an ally such as Britain.

Either way it now meant they’d attracted unwanted attention. Or, more to the point, Dumond had attracted attention.

Geiger had been right. The man was a clown. Vogelsgang had hoped to use the Frenchman’s greed and stupidity to an advantage. Even so, he’d also been careful to build firewalls between Dumond and himself. Dumond didn’t know his real name or his location. Vogelsgang spoke letter-perfect English with no trace of an accent, and his secure phone processed his voice through a distortion device. He was sure the man had no idea of his nationality. Vogelsgang also paid the man with funds from a bank in the British Virgin Islands. Though Geiger had helped pick several members of Dumond’s security team, the two men had never met directly. Even if someone hunted down Dumond, chances were slim he could betray Vogelsgang and his associates. Just to be on the safe side, though, Vogelsgang would feel better once Geiger killed the man and closed that hole.

Vogelsgang didn’t need the distractions.

Not now.

He was on the edge of changing history. He’d spent a life working hard. A son of working-class parents, he’d never been satisfied when he’d looked at their way of life, stressing over mortgage payments and other bills. Vogelsgang had started work in the same machine shop that had once employed his parents. Unlike them, he’d had a head for numbers and a willingness to stick a knife in someone else’s back. Within a few years he was working on the administrative side of the business. In another ten years he’d bought the place from its original owner, using blackmail to force the owner to sell for next to nothing. From there Vogelsgang had begun the slow process of building an industrial empire, one with its roots in Germany, but with factories in India, Bangladesh and other developing countries.

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