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  After crossing the field unscathed, MacEwan reached a pay phone on the wall of a gas station. She stabbed the buttons mechanically from the number Cooper had given her and ordered that she commit to memory. Within moments a deep, rich voice sounded a greeting in her ears—it was a strong voice.

  “Is this Bear?” she asked.

  “Yes. Is this who I think it is?” Aaron Kurtzman asked.

  “Right,” she said. “Listen, I think there could be trouble. I caught someone…Well, several someones, watching the house. Did you or your people order any type of protection?”

  “No,” Kurtzman replied firmly. “We believe the best way to protect people is not to draw attention to them. That’s why you don’t have six big dudes in suits and sunglasses walking around you every second.”

  “Well, then, I could have a problem.”

  “You recognize any of them?” Kurtzman asked.

  “No.”

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Not even two days.”

  “All right, then go about your business. Whoever it is doesn’t plan on harming you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because you’d already be dead,” he replied chillingly.

  MacEwan nodded at the phone; he was right and she knew it. There was no way she’d still be breathing if those men were supposed to kill her. They could have taken her at any time, especially on her drive into town on the virtually empty road that led from her parents sprawling ranch into the city.

  MacEwan trusted Cooper’s people, and she knew they were experts in their field. She only had to see the tall, dark-haired, icy-eyed war machine in action one time to know that much. “What are you going to do?” MacEwan asked.

  “I’m going to send help. Just sit tight and act normal. I’ll have someone at your place within twelve hours,” Kurtzman said confidently.

  “I understand.”

  There was a click and the line went dead. MacEwan knew all she could do was wait as Bear had told her. And pray that the promised help came soon.

  Boston, Massachusetts

  MACK BOLAN DIDN’T HAVE long to wait before he managed to find a nice, private spot in the corner in the menswear area on the second floor. The place was not all that busy; it seemed as if the store catered primarily to a female clientele. The odor of wool, denim and leather permeated everything.

  It was simultaneously puzzling and disconcerting to Bolan that someone could be onto him so quickly. It had been the same during his encounters with the NIF. He’d found MacEwan being tortured and beaten by terrorist thugs, and had subsequently joined the battle against NIF fanatics. MacEwan had worked with Kurtzman in the virtual world to match wits against the technical prowess of Sadiq Rhatib. And Jack Grimaldi had nearly lost his life. Through it all, it seemed like someone was onto him every minute, and he had no explanation as to why. Bolan was hoping this man might have some answers.

  The Executioner waited until the man—oblivious to the fact he was being followed in his intense search to find his lost quarry—was aligned with an open dressing room before making his move. He quickly stepped forward, shoved the guy into the dressing room and shut the door behind them. The Beretta was now clear of shoulder leather and Bolan had the man on his knees, the muzzle of the Beretta inches from his forehead. Bolan wasn’t surprised to find a gun when he frisked the guy, and he quickly relieved him of the weapon.

  “Talk,” the Executioner said.

  “About what?” the man asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Bolan replied nonchalantly. “How about the first thing that comes to your mind?”

  “Well, I’d like to know why you’ve got a gun to my head,” the man said calmly.

  Bolan showed him a frosty smile. “Maybe I can tell you that once you explain why you’re following me.”

  “Because I was ordered to.”

  “By who?”

  “By the federal government,” the man said.

  “Stop playing games with me,” Bolan replied, tapping the muzzle against the man’s forehead. “The federal government’s pretty broad. Get specific or get dead. I don’t care which, but decide now.”

  “All right, all right,” the man said, putting up his hands to demonstrate he’d cooperate. “I’m a special investigator with the Defense Department. I was ordered to follow you by Dr. Shurish. You were supposed to report to work more than two weeks ago, and he hasn’t heard from you. He was concerned, so he filed a missing persons report with the FBI. When some Washington transit cops spotted you boarding a train for Boston, Shurish called me and asked me to find out where you were going.”

  Bolan chewed on that for a moment. The story was probably true, although he didn’t completely understand it. Malcolm Shurish was head of the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA. Bolan had first met him while posing as a scientist intended to serve as a temporary replacement until the authorities located MacEwan. Of course, Shurish hadn’t known that Bolan was really looking for MacEwan himself. And after the NIF tried to blow him up—and take half the IPTO office with him—he hadn’t seen Shurish again.

  Shurish’s reaction seemed a bit much; Stony Man would have taken care of any questions about Bolan’s cover. It didn’t sound like the government was looking for him—Kurtzman’s systems would have immediately flagged and intercepted anything that came across official channels.

  No, Shurish had to be operating on his own. And Mack Bolan wanted to know why.

  “Here’s my advice to you,” Bolan snapped. “I would go back to your own business, disappear, whatever. But don’t follow me any more and don’t let on you found me.”

  “You’re kidding,” the agent interjected with an amused expression. “Right?”

  The warrior shook his head. “Just trust me when I tell you we’re working for the same side.”

  “What am I supposed to tell my people?”

  “Tell them you lost me. Tell them I gave you the slip, and you think I’m headed for Canada, so they’ll start looking for me everywhere but here. That will buy me some time to do what I have to do. And then I’ll be out of your life for good.”

  “You don’t honestly think I’m going to go back and lie to my people on your word, just because you’ve got a gun to my head,” the man said.

  The Executioner nodded. “Think a minute, man. Do you honestly believe if I wasn’t playing for the same team that you’d walk out of here alive?”

  The man looked in Bolan’s eyes, and he saw two things: the truth was one, death was the other. Bolan could tell it was taking the agent some time to decide if he would buy anything he was being told.

  The soldier knew that if he didn’t meet with Lenzini’s crew soon, it was going to get ugly.

  “You’ve got five seconds left,” he said.

  “All right,” the agent replied. “I believe you.”

  “And you’ll do what I’ve told you to do?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bolan thought he could trust the man, so he handed back his pistol and stepped out of the dressing room. He looked across the store and immediately spotted a group of security officers led by a man dressed in plain clothes. Probably store security—obviously they had the dressing rooms under some type of surveillance. It was time to find a quick exit, which wouldn’t be an easy task under the circumstances. The whole store was probably under closed-circuit coverage.

  Yeah, it was time to leave. And the Executioner fully intended to make haste in his exit. As he descended the escalator to the first floor, he realized that the six, dark-skinned men entering the store toting AKSU machine pistols had other ideas. Mack Bolan knew the moment of choice had come: fight or die.

  The Executioner reached for his Beretta 93-R.

  4

  If the new arrivals were expecting trouble, they certainly weren’t expecting it to come from above.

  The Executioner decided to keep his advantage by leaping over the wide divider between the descending and ascending
escalators. As Bolan climbed back toward the second floor, he took the first gunman with two successive shots to the chest. The Beretta’s reports were not much louder than muted coughs as the twin 9 mm subsonic rounds punched holes in the guy’s torso and tossed him into a display.

  Bolan got the second one with a clean shot through the skull before the rest of the crew realized they were taking fire from above. Blood and brain matter splattered across a glass counter, followed a moment later by the gunner’s body. The frame collapsed under the weight of the corpse and glass shattered with the impact. The contents of the case—dozens of bottles of cologne and perfume—broke and spilled their odiferous contents onto the counter base and floor, mixing with a rapidly forming pool of blood.

  Bolan reached the second floor and started across the room, but he stopped short on seeing the government agent who’d tailed him surrounded by a cluster of security guards. The Executioner ducked between some racks of clothing and weighed his options as the numbers ticked off in his head. It was not likely the gunmen below were part of Lenzini’s crew, which left only one likelihood—they were NIF terrorists.

  It didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t much matter because he didn’t have the time or luxury to stop and think it through. Without question, the department store security guards were trained to handle shoplifters and riotous customers, but were hardly in a position to handle armed terrorists. Not to mention the chance of innocents getting hurt were a gun battle to ensue between the security officers and NIF gunmen. No, the Executioner would have to handle the terrorists himself.

  Bolan made his way back to the escalator. He dropped to his belly and crawled the remaining five feet to the descending stairway. He was betting the NIF crew would be headed up the escalator by now, and most likely they would move in pairs. He lay on his side, waiting until he was about three-quarters of the way down before jumping into view and picking targets. As Bolan suspected, the first pair of gunners were halfway up, crouched on the ascending stairway with their machine pistols held at the ready. The others were positioned to his immediate flank, and also positioned low.

  Bolan took them without hesitation, noting that customers were still making for the exits while several employees were clustered around the first two dead gunmen and a manager was screaming into the phone. The Executioner jumped onto the divider, thumbed the selector to 3-round bursts and squeezed the trigger. A trio of 115-grain hollowpoint rounds ripped through the base of one terrorist’s skull. The 9 mm bullets nearly decapitated him, and the suddenness of his attack startled the second terrorist. Bolan shot the surprised NIF gunner through the throat, and blood spurted from the terrorist’s gaping wounds.

  The remaining pair, almost reaching the top of the escalator, turned at the sound of the commotion. The looks on their faces told the story. They had made the worst mistake they could have in any battlefield scenario—they had severely underestimated the ingenuity of their enemy.

  Bolan ended the surprised looks with another volley, this one more controlled as the Beretta recoiled in the Weaver’s grip had adopted. Both 3-round salvos were true, the first punching through the lungs and stomach of one terrorist who rose and tried to outshoot Bolan. The second terrorist took two of the soldier’s shots in his chest and shoulder. He screamed with pain as his finger curled on the trigger of his AKSU and sent a cluster of 7.62 mm bullets into the ceiling above Bolan’s head.

  The falling debris missed the Executioner entirely, as he was already on the move and headed for the exit. The terrorist threat had been neutralized, and he saw no point in standing around and waiting for a slew of security guards to converge on him. He wouldn’t drop the hammer on a cop, whether a sworn peace officer or just a simple security guard. Those men and women had families, and they were simply doing their jobs.

  Bolan traded out clips as he left the chaos of the store unmolested. He quickly crossed the street through the logjam of traffic created by the swarm of people reacting to the gun battle. He easily got lost in the crowd. He stopped at a nearby bistro and politely requested use of their bathroom. He splashed cold water onto his face, straightened his clothing and headed for the café where Grano and Ape were supposed to be waiting. Bolan found the coffee shop without much trouble and found the hoods waiting for him, true to Grano’s word.

  They rose without a word and led him to a back alley where a midsized luxury sedan was waiting for them, engine running under the watchful eyes of a pair of large bulls. Ape climbed behind the wheel, and Grano ordered Bolan to take shotgun. He could feel Grano staring at the back of his head, and he knew the house boss wanted him up front where he could keep an eye on him. Yeah, “Loyal” or not, they didn’t trust him—at least not completely.

  “So?” Grano asked, once Ape had gotten them out of the downtown area and merged with highway traffic leading toward the Boston suburbs. “What happened?”

  “Not much, boss,” Bolan replied, trying to immediately settle back into his role. “I don’t know who the guy was, but I managed to lose him.”

  “That right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure you weren’t followed?”

  Bolan nodded. “I’m sure, Mr. Grano.”

  “Good.” Grano settled back in his seat, and in the reflection of the front windshield Bolan could make out enough of his expression to tell the guy was satisfied. “And you can skip the formalities, Loyal. Call me Serge.”

  “I’d like to, boss,” Bolan replied easily, “but it just doesn’t seem natural yet.”

  “All right,” Grano said, slapping Bolan’s shoulder. “I guess I can understand that. Let’s just give it some time.” Then he added, “You’re gonna fit right in with us, eh? What do you think, Ape?”

  “I think he’s pretty square so far,” Ape mumbled.

  Bolan glanced at Ape’s profile a moment, and noticed the guy’s eyes hadn’t shifted from the road and his fingers were tightening on the steering wheel. Obviously, he thought of Bolan as a threat to his own place in the hierarchy. Bolan had met Ape’s kind before. They never went very high in the organization because they were big on brawn, but had little going on upstairs.

  These days, mobsters were much more educated than in days gone by; in fact, many of them were college graduates holding a master’s degree and even a doctorate. It was a different kind of organized crime, called by the same name but doing its dirty deeds in a very different fashion. New mobsters came from the halls of places like William and Mary, Yale, Harvard and Stanford. They made their mark in the business world, and after they had amassed enough wealth, or reached positions on corporate boards, they struck like the venomous snakes they really were.

  Yeah, the days of public hits in the downtown sandwich shops or dumping bodies into rivers were long gone. Now the Mafia controlled much of their business through legal means such as contracts, hostile takeovers, and mergers and acquisitions. Instead of moving their money through backroom laundering operations, they fronted high-dollar investments through pyramid schemes and paper companies. They were like catfish: bottom feeders. They made their move while the political focus shifted to corporate CEOs running once-legitimate companies before letting greed get the better of them. As political action groups and attorneys battled with Senate hearing committees over the ethics of big business, the syndicate continued its activities right under everyone’s noses.

  As Bolan rode with the mobsters, he planned to insure the Lenzini clan didn’t continue operating. They had allied themselves with one of America’s greatest enemies, and the Executioner was going to sever the alliance. First he would amputate the hand of organized crime that had soiled itself by an offer of friendship with the New Islamic Front.

  Bolan smiled briefly at the irony of it. In some of the Arab countries, when someone stole something, the punishment was to amputate one of the thief’s hands, thus teaching him a lesson while simultaneously marking him for life. And that’s exactly what Mack Bolan planned to do; the Mafia had stolen from the Am
erican people. Once the Executioner had finished marking the Lenzini crime syndicate as thieves, he would turn to their terrorist allies.

  Except it wasn’t their hands he’d cut off, but their heads.

  Washington, D.C.

  COLONEL UMAR ABDALRAHMAN arrived in America without fanfare or celebration.

  The former Afghanistani guerrilla whose military rank had been an honorarium bestowed upon him by the former Iraqi regime watched his troops take up a perimeter to protect him as he stepped from the yacht.

  The transfer from the submarine to the sixty-five-foot yacht had gone off without a hitch. The crew had had a tense but brief run-in with the U.S. Coast Guard, but they quickly lost interest in inspecting the yacht when a call came through from a plane’s distress beacon. Abdalrahman was pleased with the decoy his men had created, and the fact he’d made it to American shores with relative ease didn’t really surprise him much. Despite the alleged additional precautions taken by the American government to protect themselves from the jihad, it wasn’t enough, and it would never be enough. It was a holy war now, and the New Islamic Front would continue to operate within the United States. They were on the brink of making history, and proclaiming victory against America for all of the blood it had shed. In one sense Abdalrahman felt there was justice in the thought that this country and people, whom he hated with every fiber of his being, had given birth to some of Islam’s greatest martyrs.

  As Abdalrahman moved down the gangplank and stepped onto the dock, careful not to lose his balance on the slippery wood, he caught his first sight of Dr. Malcolm Shurish. He wasn’t sure if he was happy to see the man, or if he wished to strangle him. In some ways, he held Shurish personally responsible for the capture of his nephew. In fact, it was Shurish who managed to send word to Abdalrahman and let him know of Sadiq’s imprisonment. Abdalrahman had come to America immediately, bringing a crew of his best and most talented soldiers.