Dying Art Read online

  “Let me remind you that she’s here at the largess of the Bureau.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Bolan said. “What room is she in?”

  Webber’s mouth opened and closed twice without uttering a sound. He took a deep breath and was about to speak when the unmistakable sound of gunfire sounded from above.

  The elevator bell pinged and the doors opened. Webber immediately started to go inside, but Bolan grabbed his arm.

  “What room?”

  Webber froze, his lips sputtering.

  “What room?” Bolan said, with more force.

  “Room 257,” the FBI agent said. He pushed his suit jacket back and placed his hand on the grip of a Glock 23.

  Bolan and Grimaldi already had their guns out. The elevator doors started to close, and the Executioner pulled Webber out of the car.

  “You’ll be a sitting duck in that thing,” Bolan said, glancing at the room legend on the wall and estimating that room 257 would be on this side of the building, one floor up. “You two go up the stairs on that side. I’ll take this one.”

  “But—” Webber started to protest.

  “No buts,” Grimaldi said, grabbing the man’s arm. “Let’s move, and try not to shoot me or yourself.”

  Bolan ensured the fire selector switch on his Beretta 93-R was on single-shot and proceeded to the designated stairway, which was about twenty-five feet away. Once there he surveyed the line of light beneath the bottom of the door.

  A shadow moved slightly.

  Someone was on the other side.

  Bolan gripped the doorknob and twisted, then used his foot to give the door a fast kick. It flung backward, and he caught a glimpse of a figure clad in black and wearing a ski mask. The man’s visible eyes widened momentarily at the sudden movement, and then he brought up the barrel of an MP-5.

  The Executioner got off three quick shots. Two rounds in the chest seemed to only stun the man, but the third shot drilled him in the forehead. He collapsed to the floor, dead. Bolan did a quick visual sweep of the immediate area as he stepped forward and kicked the submachine gun out of the man’s hands. The dead man was wearing body armor—at least a Level 4. Heavy-duty protection. The two torso shots wouldn’t have stopped him. A door to the side entrance, about fifteen feet away, showed signs of having been forced open. More shots sounded from upstairs: automatic fire, punctuated by single shots, most likely from a handgun. Bolan felt an urgency to ascend the staircase and intervene, but knew he had to check the area outside the exit door first. It would be suicide to start up the stairs without first eliminating the possibility of being flanked by another assailant, and these guys were both crafty and prepared.

  Just like in Cancun, he thought as he kicked open the exit door. The van with the tinted windows was parked outside, apparently unoccupied. He took a quick look both ways, and seeing no one, reentered the stairwell and retrieved the dead man’s MP-5. Bolan slung the machine gun over his shoulder. Holding the Beretta up and ready, he took the stairs with steady, but cautious steps, edging forward quickly, reaching the midpoint landing, then proceeding to the top of the next flight. He stopped at the closed door and tried to estimate where room 257 would be.

  Another quick burst of rounds from an MP-5 caught his attention. Bolan opened the door and saw a black-clad figure standing over a prone male about twenty feet down the hallway to the left. The fallen man was Agent Louis. Romero stood next to them, and Diaz was on her knees a few feet away, screaming. The lieutenant reached out to grab her. Bolan leaned slightly beyond the doorjamb and fired two rounds into the black-clad gunner. The man jerked back a few steps, yelled to someone and fired a burst from his MP-5 in Bolan’s direction. The Executioner shouted at Diaz to get down, and ducked back. He caught a glimpse of Romero disappearing into the room.

  More shots rang out from his right. A quick glance confirmed that it was Grimaldi and Webber. Bolan leaned out again and fired, this time at the enemy’s legs. The black-clad gunner jerked noticeably and grabbed his thigh.

  The arm of another gunner snaked around the distant doorjamb and flattened against the wall, the gloved hand holding a semiauto pistol that fired several rounds.

  Bolan ducked back and squatted, coming out again at a different height, and fired three quick shots. The enemy shooter disappeared into the room. Diaz and Louis were in the hallway.

  The Executioner signaled that he was moving up. Grimaldi nodded. Webber’s face was a frozen mixture of astonishment and shock.

  Keeping his Beretta leveled in front of him and ready to fire as he strode forward, Bolan reached Diaz and the fallen FBI agent. He placed his hand on the woman’s back and gently, but firmly pushed her flat on the floor. Reaching over, he tried the door handle to room 257.

  Locked.

  Several bulges jutted on the surface of the wooden door, accompanied by the sound of rounds being fired. The wood had been substantial enough to stop what most likely had been 9 mm rounds fired from an MP-5. It was clear that the shooters didn’t want him to open that door, but it was basically a stalling tactic. But why? What were they planning?

  Bolan cocked his leg back and delivered a powerful kick to the door. It held. A second blow made it shudder in its frame, and it gave a little. More gunshots rang out from inside the room, but nothing impacted against the door this time. The wood showed no new damage. He delivered another powerful kick, and this time the door flew inward, hitting the wall and bouncing back toward him. Stopping it with his foot, he entered the room and did a quick sweep. A body lay on the floor—Romero. His face was canted to the left side, his wide-open, sightless right eye staring outward, as a crimson pool soaked into the carpet under his head. No one else was in the room, but the window had been smashed out.

  Or shot out, Bolan thought as he surmised that the second burst of rounds he’d heard had most likely been used to take out the glass... And Romero.

  As he advanced, Bolan continued checking the room. A blood trail wound toward the window, and more smears of red decorated the wall next to it.

  Bolan went to the broken glass and took a quick look over the edge.

  About twenty feet below, the black van revved its engine, then started to roar away from the scene, the rear door partially open. A hand holding an MP-5 jutted from the rear and sent another blast of rounds skittering off the side of the building. Bolan ducked back. By the time he’d assumed a cover position to return fire, the van was no longer in sight.

  Grimaldi came through the doorway.

  Bolan pointed downward and said, “They’re taking off.”

  “Damn!” He turned and headed out.

  The Executioner stepped back into the center of the room and made a perfunctory check of Romero.

  No pulse. The bullet had struck him in the back of the head, and exited through his left eye. Moving to the hallway, he saw Webber doing CPR on his wounded partner. Louis’s body jerked with each movement and more blood spurted from several wounds in his torso.

  Bolan grabbed Webber’s shoulder and told him to stop. Kneeling, the Executioner first checked the wounded man’s carotid. The pulse was weak, but regular. Next, he peeled back the white shirt, exposing Louis’s torso. At least two bullets had hit his chest and abdomen.

  “Put direct pressure here,” Bolan said, keeping his words slow and deliberate. “He doesn’t need CPR.”

  Webber seemed to be in shock, but slowly nodded. Bolan used his cell phone to call 9-1-1 as he checked Diaz. The woman was shaken, but all right. After giving the nature of the emergency and the location, Bolan got up and ran toward the stairwell, only to see Grimaldi trotting back up the stairs.

  He shook his head and frowned.

  “They left us a couple of going-away presents,” he said. “Shot up the Feds’ car and ours, too. Theirs has two flat tires. We lucked out with only one. How’s Louis?”

  Bolan held up a
hand and waggled it back and forth. His hearing had virtually returned to normal.

  “Consuelo okay?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Yeah. Get the first-aid kit from the Escalade.”

  Grimaldi disappeared down the stairway.

  Bolan turned and went back down the hall to where Webber was dutifully applying pressure to his partner’s wounds, then he strode into the room. The door of the hotel safe was hanging open with a ludicrous bend, its locking mechanism still extended.

  Whoever did that knew exactly where to look, Bolan thought. And what they were looking for.

  He checked it anyway and found it empty. Moving to Romero, he removed a pair of thin leather gloves from a pouch on his utility belt and went through the dead man’s pockets. He found a cheap disposable cell phone and pocketed it. He’d disable any tracking apps before he took it to the Farm.

  Bolan went back to the hallway and found Grimaldi kneeling next to Louis applying some combat bandages over the FBI man’s wounds. Webber was on his knees watching.

  Bolan squatted next to him.

  “An ambulance is on the way,” he said. “Jack’s pretty good at patching people up.”

  Webber nodded, his face still vacuous.

  “Romero?” he managed to say.

  The Executioner shook his head.

  “Who were those guys?”

  Bolan remained silent.

  Grimaldi was still tending to Louis, but said, “The enemy.”

  Chapter Six

  Midway International Airport

  Chicago, Illinois

  Tragg had just finished going through the TSA checkpoint when his burner cell phone rang. Glancing at the screen, he saw it was the number for Dean. He grabbed the carefully padded metal case that contained The Lion and the Lioness Attacking the Nubian, then pressed the button and said, “Let me call you back.”

  Dean terminated the call.

  Tragg reset the locks on the case and went to the bench to tie his shoes, put on his belt and restock his pockets. He silently cursed terrorists for causing these ridiculous rituals of present-day air travel, and then felt a gratification that his flight tomorrow would be on a private aircraft, courtesy of Don Fernando’s organization.

  Covertly, of course, he thought.

  After he finished tying his shoes, Tragg pressed the thin cardboard envelope that contained the safe-deposit box key for reassurance. As he put on his watch, he checked the time: 11:20 a.m. Without any luggage to check, Tragg had allowed himself only an hour to get through security and catch his flight. The plane would be boarding shortly so he headed for his gate. The three-hour flight to Arizona would leave him with lots of time to get to the bank in Phoenix and drop off one half of the artifact in the safe-deposit box, and then catch his small plane to Lucien Technologies in Temptation.

  Temptation... An appropriate name for the task at hand.

  Tragg mentally reviewed the plan to take one half of the lion or the lioness to show to Lucien Bruns. Don Fernando felt that given Bruns’s obsession with the item, being able to hold only one portion of the pair would be all the impetus needed to assure his compliance.

  Tragg began walking toward his gate as he hit the redial button on his burner phone.

  Dean answered and Tragg replied with one word. “Sitrep.”

  “Good news and bad news.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Dean sighed. “Okay, we got the flash drive, but not the woman.”

  Tragg said nothing.

  “We hit them in the hallway, as they were opening the door. An agent managed to pull his piece, and things went downhill from there.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad,” Dean said. “Two TMKIA.” That was their code for two Team Members Killed in Action. “Myers and Garcia. We came under fire. Had to evac through a window.”

  “Two FBI agents did all that?”

  “Hardly. Remember those wild cards I told you about?”

  Tragg grunted, recalling Dean’s report of the Escalade.

  “They showed up in spades,” Dean said. “Like gangbusters and took out Myers. Hit Garcia in the leg during a firefight. Had to have picked up on us wearing body armor and aimed low. Must have hit an artery. Garcia bled out in the van.”

  Tragg was silent. He’d assumed their ballistic protection would give the team a distinct tactical advantage and ensure success. Obviously, he’d been wrong.

  “The one guy moved like a superninja, or something,” Dean said. “Never saw anything like it, at least not on this continent. I’m betting they were the same guys from Cancun.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Tentiente?” Tragg asked, referring to Romero.

  “TN,” Dean said, using the code for Tactically neutralized.

  At least that part went down as planned, Tragg thought. Romero had served his purpose and was quickly becoming more of a liability than an asset. It would have been only a matter of time before his complicity was discovered, if it hadn’t been already. Don Fernando would be pleased to have that loose end taken care of, as he’d instructed.

  “You have the item, correct?”

  “Affirmative. What do you want me to do with it?”

  Tragg stepped onto the moving walkway and stayed to the right, allowing anyone walking behind him to pass.

  Perhaps this wasn’t as bad as he’d first thought. The info they had suggested that Consuelo Diaz was unable to decode the device, and it was dubious that the Feds had either at this juncture. In all probability, the woman’s father had kept her out of the loop for the most part out of concern for her safety. And if she did know anything, by now the Feds most likely knew it, as well. That they’d been so intent on getting their hands on that flash drive suggested that whatever she’d told them, whatever they knew, it couldn’t be very much. They certainly wouldn’t suspect Don Fernando’s involvement or know about the op the following day, otherwise they’d already be taking precautions and canceling Sergio’s court appearance.

  “Hold on to it,” Tragg said. “You follow SOP for the remainder?”

  “Affirmative. Water landing.”

  From that coded statement Tragg knew Dean had ditched the van and deep-sixed the weapons and the bodies.

  “I’m heading west now,” Tragg said, telling Dean that he was on the way to Arizona to meet with Bruns. “Catching the red-eye back tonight.”

  “The party still set for tomorrow?”

  “Yes, it is,” Tragg said, switching to normal, nonmilitary terminology as two flight attendants moved by him on the walkway.

  “We’re en route back also. See you tonight, then.”

  “Roger that,” Tragg said. He was alone on the moving walkway now and was back in operations mode. “You’ll be back before I will, so start running them through the drills. We can’t afford any slipups on this one.”

  “Roger wilco,” Dean said and hung up.

  Alone with his thoughts now, Tragg mulled over the prospect of these new players in the game. Wild cards... Who were they and how were they tracking them? This was the second time they’d suddenly come on the scene and messed things up.

  Hopefully, it would be the last. Whoever they were, with their failure to retrieve the flash drive, the trail had hopefully grown cold.

  Alexandria, Virginia

  Bolan had waited long enough at the hotel to make sure that both Webber and Louis were taken away in the ambulance. Before the paramedics and the local PD had arrived, he’d given the recovered MP-5 to Grimaldi, and told him to take Consuelo across the street in the damaged Escalade and wait at the fast food restaurant.

  “It’ll be slow going until we change that flat,” Grimaldi said.

  “I’m sure you can handle it,” Bolan said.

  Webber was completely depleted, and had offered no resistance to Bolan’s instructions to accompany
his wounded partner to the hospital after they put Louis into the ambulance. Without waiting for the responding officers to complete their sweep of the hotel, Bolan hopped the fence to the adjacent property and watched as more responding units from the local PD arrived and sized up the situation.

  Grimaldi called, saying that the flat was now changed and asked for further instructions.

  “The ambulance looks about ready to take off,” Bolan said. “They’ve finished checking the building. The supervisor’s on scene now, so they’ll probably be calling out their detectives and crime scene people.”

  “Sounds like a good time for you to beat feet. Want me to swing by and pick you up?”

  Bolan didn’t want to be caught up in answering a lot of questions about the shootout, nor did he want to take the chance of the police wanting to seize his weapon, which would be standard procedure.

  “Negative,” he said. “How’s Consuelo?”

  “She’s still kind of shaken up.”

  “I’m on my way over now.”

  He watched through the fence as the police immediately sealed the area off and began putting up the yellow crime scene tape. Bolan strolled leisurely across the highway to the restaurant. Diaz and Grimaldi sat side by side in the booth watching a news broadcast describing the president’s upcoming trip to Nogales, Arizona, to meet the Mexican president for a Unity Day meeting. Two coffee cups sat on the table between them. Bolan slid in across from them. Grimaldi pointed to the television.

  “How is Agent Louis?” she asked.

  “They took him to the hospital,” Bolan said. “Hopefully, he’ll make it.”

  “I pray that he does. He was so brave. He shielded me with his body.”

  “Yeah,” Grimaldi said. “He was a stand-up guy.”

  “They brought you here to retrieve the flash drive?” Bolan asked.

  She nodded. “They said they were listening when I called you. Said that I had to give it to them or I’d be charged with obstruction of justice.”

  “Leave it to the FBI to overstate things,” Grimaldi said. “But don’t worry. We’re here to take you away from all that.”