Renegade Agent te-47 Read online

  If Gadgets Schwartz could get into Frederick Charon's office, into his computerized crucible there, if he could tap in to the DonCo president's personal terminal, if Charon's personal access data could somehow be divined, then Stony Man Farm would be in the equivalent position electronically of having a direct line to the man's innermost secrets. Just like that.

  Those are the secrets of a man actively involved in selling out his country to the Hounds of Hell.

  The drawers below the secretary's computer terminal were filled with pens, paper clips, stationery, a dictaphone, couple of unlabelled tapes, tools of a secretary's trade. The wastebasket beside the desk held a lipstick-stained butt from a mentholated filter cigarette, nothing else. It was the white leather-edged desk blotter that yielded pay-dirt. With the exception of a few weekend dates, nearly every box in the blotter's calendar insert held some sort of notation. At first glance they were hardly revelatory of DonCo's darkest corporate secret, "Semi-mon. rpts due" was penned in on the 15th; "Row pension-plan analysis" was scheduled for the 27th; a Middlesex County Commissioner had paid a courtesy call on the third; the purchasing agent for a major retail chain would be in to see about computers on the 30th.

  Just what one would expect on the calendar of an efficient executive secretary along with a careful note of the boss's absences. On the Saturday a week earlier, Bolan read, "FC dep." Two days from the present, "FC ret." That was the outline. Within the pages of the leather-bound appointment diary, Bolan found chapter and verse.

  On the previous Saturday, Charon had had reservations on Swissair, leaving Boston's Logan International Airport at four in the afternoon, arriving at Cointrin Airport in Geneva at 8:20 the next morning, local time. Beneath that was a memo: "European appointments by private arrangement, next eight days through Monday. No contact except per emer. procedure. Query FRANCOFILE, stand. acc. cod every." Bolan paged quickly through the next week. There was no further indication of Charon's activities or whereabouts until the page for the next Monday, little more than twenty-four hours from now. At 9:40 Monday morning, Charon was scheduled to depart Cointrin for Heathrow Airport via British Airways, arriving 10:10 London time.

  Exactly one hour and twenty minutes later, Charon was supposed to hop a TWA flight back home to Logan.

  On the same page of the appointment book, Bolan's penlight beam picked out the reminder, "Brunch with Sir Philip at airport, 10:25, vip lounge." For a guy headed from Switzerland to Massachusetts, London was a hell of a sidetrip for the sake of quick meal.

  Bolan scanned the page again, committed every word and number to memory, then flipped the book closed and positioned it exactly where he had found it.

  "Sarge!" Gadgets called softly from across the room.

  Bolan's chronometer read 0139:10.

  Gadgets had clipped one end of a jumper wire to the third terminal from the top of the left row. He held the other end in a steady hand. "Which one does it connect to?" Bolan asked reaching for it.

  Gadgets grinned in the dimness and shook his head.

  "This is my gig," he said softly.

  He clipped the wire's free end to the top terminal on the right. For a split second there was no sound at all.

  Then there was the click of a deadbolt being drawn back mechanically, and the soft rush of air as Gadgets exhaled his relief.

  It took him no more than thirty seconds to remove the jumper, replace the faceplate, return his tools to the chest pack.

  He stood up and gestured at the door, said: "We did it. You want the honors?"

  Bolan turned the knob without a sound and pushed open the door to Charon's office. Subliminal quivers tickled him.

  He smelled the snarl, the drooling, guttural, teeth bared snarl a heartbeat before his flashlight picked out the two blood-red eyes. Bolan's mind whistled, howled, he had only time enough to set himself for the attack.

  The satanic eyes rose up toward him and hit him full in the chest. Bolan went down but with both hands gripping the Doberman's shoulders. Fetid canine breath expelled into his face. Slavering jaws barked like a mad dog's at Bolan's throat. Teeth snapped shut on nothing but air, though they came so close that Bolan felt the animal's clammy muzzle brush his face. Hot anticipatory dog saliva soaked through the neck of the black suit.

  Bolan got his left arm around as he lay on the floor and clamped the dog's head against his chest to mobilize the slashing carnivorous teeth.

  Eighty pounds of steel-wire hound-muscle writhed and struggled to break the hold. The dog's forefoot caught Bolan in the chest, hard enough to take his breath away. A hind paw scrambled for purchase, narrowly missing Bolan's groin. Bolan held all the tighter, pulling the animal's head bone-to-bone against his chest. Then he squeezed with one arm only, at maximum strength.

  Fleet fingers from his free hand found the familiar shape of pistol grip. Bolan drew, lay the muzzle against the twisting animal's haunch, pulled the trigger.

  There was no recoil, no sound beyond a quick soft gasp. The dog's maddened snarl turned to a weak growl. He made one final feeble effort to jerk free, then lay still.

  Bolan got to his feet. The fight had taken fewer than ten seconds. Gadgets Schwarz stood over the dog, his own pistol drawn.

  The weapons were identical: Beemanst Webley Hurricane air pistols. The gun had only the most superficial relationship to the BB rifles that Mick Bolan roamed the woods with near Pittsfield in his youth. The B/W Hurricane was powered by a piston-charged compression chamber that produced 60 pounds of potential energy, enough to spit a .22 slug at better than 400 feet per second. True, this was significantly less energy and velocity than a traditional .22 pistol, but the airgun in the right hands was a potently lethal-and silent-machine.

  The Hurricanes that Bolan and Gadgets carried on this softprobe were not designed for killing. Stony Man armorer Andrzej Konzaki had modified them to shoot not slugs, but darts containing a powerful and fast-acting tranquilizer. Originally the guns were to be used only as a last resort, if confronted by a security officer.

  Bolan swept his light over the sedated animal. The devouring pinscher was long and lean, black as the blitzer himself. He would not kill an animal if he could help it, even a kill-trained one; it had no place in his war. Outside in the hallway, someone pounded on the anteroom door. Bolan flicked off the flash, froze in the darkness.

  Silence, then more pounding.

  The pounding stopped. The door eased open.

  "He's not here." The relief in the man's voice was obvious. "Of course the mutt's not here. He's in the bossman's office where he belongs. Let's get moving."

  "I say I heard him making strange noises."

  "Listen, we got two minutes till we have to punch in at Station Four. I'll go easy on you, you're new. The dog is making strange noises because any noise it makes is strange. You ever seen it? If you have, you never wanna see it again. That is a mean pooch, Edgar. I leave him alone, he leaves me alone, we're both happy."

  "I think there's something going on in there."

  "I tell you what, Edgar." The older guy was losing his patience. "You have a need to let that hound chew you up into Gainesburger, you go right ahead. Me, I'm gonna punch in at Four."

  There was a pause before Edgar said, "I'm going to check on him."

  Inside Charon's office, Bolan slipped another tranquilizer dart into the Hurricane's breech, cocked the pistol, leveled it on the door. Footsteps shuffled across the carpet in the outer office. They stopped in front of the access-control panel.

  Bolan's eyes etched the darkness as he waited for this non-notable to approach. But then the guard muttered, "Ah, the hell with it." Bolan gave him ten beats to get to the outer door and close it, then turned to Gadgets.

  "Let's get down to business."

  1

  Mack Bolan lit a cigarette and shifted restlessly in the padded leather swivel chair.

  April Rose, sitting across the conference table from him, caught his eye and flashed him a fast smile.

  His
ally during The Executioner's final Days of De-Creation with which the Mafia wars ended, the tall lush-bodied woman was now "housekeeper" at Stony Man Farm headquarters, overseeing every incredible aspect of the operation, providing logistics, back-up support, care to the few and mighty to Mack Bolan, Able Team, Phoenix Force, who deployed against the terrorist menace. This meeting in the War Room was a debriefing.

  "The Hurricane worked like a charm," Gadgets Schwarz was saying. "Then, just before we get, I shot the Doberman with the stimulant, and he was already waking up when Mack and I got the hell out of there. From one tinkerer to another, Andrzej, nice work." "Andrzej" was Andrzej Konzaki, and he was no more a tinkerer than Gadgets. Officially on staff with the CIA, unofficially detached as consultant to Stony Man, Konzaki was one of the most skilled and innovative armorers in the world. As a marine in Vietnam. he'd won a Silver Star and lost both legs above the knees. But like Mack Bolan, Konzaki saw no profit in living in the past.

  Now he had the torso of a weight-lifter, the hands and the imagination of an armorer master craftsman.

  He was to be trusted as the expert in every small arm from pistol to heavy machine gun, as well as knife, small explosives, ever more lethally exotic devices.

  "Gadgets," Bolan said, "you must brief Aaron on the set-up you rigged to Charon's computer. I want him ready to take over as backup."

  Gadgets turned to the fifth person in the War Room, a big rumpled-looking guy hunched over the control board of a computer terminal console that was set up at one end of this operating heart of the Stony Man complex. "DonCo has an in-house mainframe computer. of course, addressable from any terminal in the place," Gadgets explained. "But on Charon's personal terminal, and probably on the terminals of his senior staff, there's a phone link. That allows him to "talk" to any other phone-linked computer to exchange data, place or accept orders, whatever over a regular phone line. You know the technology, Aaron, no point in rehashing the details. But the bottom line is that we're tapped into that phone line."

  Bolan stubbed out his cigarette. "What kind of access does that give us?"

  "Right now we can eavesdrop," Gadgets replied. "We can monitor and copy anything that is requested from the DonCo mainframe computer, or an computer with which it's linked, if the request comes from either Charon's terminal or his secretary's. Aaron, I've inserted the access protocol in your file."

  The big man at the console nodded. His fingers danced over the keys. Lines of characters darted across the video display in front of him. He scanned them, typed again. This time, except for a couple of lines at the top, the screen was blank.

  "No traffic," Aaron reported.

  It was just after five, Sunday morning. The softprobe of DonCo had been completed only three hours earlier.

  "So until someone uses one of those consoles, those taps don't do us any good," muttered Bolan.

  "Not quite, Sarge," Gadgets said softly. "If we can figure out Charon's personal access protocol his users, his query codes and so on, we can duplicate them. From the computer's point of view, we'd be disguised as Charon."

  "That's the nice thing about phone lines," Aaron nodded. "They work both ways."

  "We already have one lead. That reference to "FRANCOFILE" you saw in the appointment book," said Gadgets. "It won't get us in by itself, but it's a point in the right direction."

  "We'll get on it right away, Mack," Aaron declared. "But I can't predict time frame.

  Aaron "the Bear" Kurtzman ruled over the Virginia headquarters' electronic library.

  In addition to the Farm's own extensive data banks, Aaron could interface instantly with those of the National Security Council, the Justice Department, the CIA, DIA, the intelligence agencies of every major friendly nation. Kurtzman was not simply the operator of this expansive communication and information system; he seemed himself a grizzled, portly extension of it.

  Gadgets and Kurtzman began to toss around ideas on how to decode Charon's computer domain.

  April Rose joined them. Her advanced degrees in electronics and solid-state physics made her no stranger to the arcane mysteries of electronic computation.

  In front of Mack on the polished surface of the War Room conference table, in an unmarked file folder, was a digest of the dossier of Frederick Charon. It occupied no more than three pages of sprocket-hole-edged computer paper. Bolan had no need to consult it. He knew the details on those pages well enough. And they told an old and familiar tale.

  The salient points were simple: it was the American success story. To a point. Charon was the only son of Italian immigrant parents, his father a self-educated salesman and opera buff, his mother an elementary school teacher. They were dedicated, ambitious people, and they instilled ambition in their son. From Boston Latin High School, Charon went to MIT for his undergraduate work, then Stanford for graduate and post-doctoral programs. His first and only job as an employee was with the prestigious Rand Corporation think tank; when he was twenty-five he left that firm to form his own company, DonCo. In ten years he had built it into one of the most respected theoretical hi-tech firms in the country, and a repository for the country's most profound trust.

  And then he chose to betray that trust.

  Somewhere along the line, the ambition inculcated in Charon by his hard-working parents had been perverted-impulsion. A brilliant man, Charon was also brilliantly flawed. No matter whatever had achieved-intellectually, socially, financially — he had to have more of everything that fed his will.

  Perhaps, Bolan mused, his downfall was preordained, as is the defeat of any man whose appetites forever exceed his reach.

  Just a few hours before, as he and Gadgets had withdrawn from the DonCo headquarters along the predetermined route that evaded the unblinking TV surveillance cameras, Bolan had stopped to look back at Charon's building. Sleek, low-slung, all tinted glass and polished steel glinting in the starlight, set majestic amid manicured lawns edged with stately woods, it was a monument to the man and a symbol of his failure all in one. As a scientist, businessman, theoretician, Charon was an extraordinary success, and here were housed the fruits he had nurtured and picked. As a would-be jet-setter, playboy, gambler, profligate, Charon was a failure. His failure was forever compounded by a decision to turn to treachery, perhaps in a vain attempt to salvage the hell-bent part of the life he had made for himself.

  There was an irony there in which Bolan saw no humor. Charon had achieved the American Dream, in the only country in the world where that dream could still become reality. Then he had turned about and sold out the country, had turned the dream into nightmare.

  Damned cold-eyed thing to do, alchemy in reverse, altogether of the devil's empire, vile, malicious.

  A prophecy of terror.

  "Mack." Aaron Kurtzman's voice broke in. "Communication coming, NSC. It's Hal."

  Bolan caught April Rose's gaze, and this time there was no hint of a smile. Communications from head fed Hal Brognola near dawn on a Sunday morning meant only one thing.

  In the rare and precious moments they could snatch together, April had made her feelings clear to him.

  She acknowledged her dedication to the responsibilities that that man had willingly taken on, and confirmed it with her own lifetime commitment to the same cause.

  And yet, as she had told Mack Bolan, she was a woman and she was human. Every time he stepped into that arena, she felt woefully incomplete until his safe return.

  April nodded slightly, as if in response to his thoughts, and broke the eye contact. Bolan turned to Kurtzman. "Scramble it, Aaron, SOP."

  "Already done."

  "Thanks. Put it upon video."

  "Give me a minute, Mack." Kurtzman went back to his keyboard. There was more to Bolan's mood than the restlessness of inactivity, plus the anger at a man's betrayal of the country that had given him every opportunity The brief visit to Massachusetts had awakened other memories as well, memories that Mack Bolan the man could never banish, would never wish to banish.


  They were of a time when the wrong people were winning.

  Strategists used to refer to a "domino theory" in discussing the Asian war in which Bolan had fought.

  But in a town in the shadows of the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, other dominoes had fallen.

  Bolan had seen his personal domino theory quite clearly: there was still, back then, one domino left to fall. And it was he who tipped it over, single-handedly wiping out the gluttonous criminal vipers who had been directly responsible for his personal tragedy.

  Earlier in the siege against the bloody Cosa Nostra, Bolan had become aware that, like Vietnam, this would be a war of attrition. The strategy was to annihilate the enemy, first as a means of neutralization, ultimately as a means of destruction of the criminal edifice.

  Bolan understood that the war of attrition was now, for John Phoenix, a war of containment. He had no delusions about his own capabilities; Mack Bolan, a.k.a. John Phoenix, was one man, and no one man was going to save a vast impersonal world. But one man, sure, could aspire to fight to keep corners of that world free and green, could push back the corrosive advance of those who would replace freedom with fear, democracy with domination. The Mafia was a clear and present evil, an entity motivated solely by greed, by the dark side of the herding instinct, in which men mobbed up to commit evil far beyond the capacities of themselves as individuals. Among the ranks of the terrorist brigades, however, there were some who were motivated by misplaced idealism. However inexcusably wrong-headed their ideas of how they would run society, however vicious their damfool methods of imposing their will, Bolan recognized that one in a hundred of these tagmen were dedicated warriors. They just goddamned put themselves in the cross fire. He would have to be careful. But for the Frederick, Charons of the world, Bolan felt no reluctance to curb his blazing powers of attrition whatsoever. He knew that, to the core of his soldier's heart.

  "I've got Hal," Aaron Kurtzman called.

  On the opposite wall was mounted an oversized 5by-5 TV screen. It could be used to display computer-generated graphics, maps, charts, photos, or in conjunction with the communication system.