Rebel Force Read online

  “Get the hell out of here,” Bolan said. “I know your face. If I see you again, I’ll assume you’re there to take me out. I don’t care if it’s Sunday Mass in a cathedral or Friday prayers in a mosque. I’ll come at you shooting. Now go.”

  The young man didn’t argue. He simply put the Audi into gear and drove off.

  Out of a habit of thoroughness Bolan used his phone-camera to snap a shot of the vehicle and its license plate. Quickly he e-mailed the pictures to a secure host source in his cellular network. The techs knew what to do. The digital information would be threaded and sent to a site accessed from secure servers by Barbara Price or Aaron Kurtzman.

  In the meantime, Bolan had some homework to do. He crossed the street and paid off the youths loitering protectively around the Mercedes. He pulled out into traffic and headed back across town toward the covert station at Meltzer’s Emporium.

  9

  Bolan left Kubrick’s keys with the receptionist. She assigned him an assistant who seemed anxious to ensure that Bolan saw as little of the building’s interior as possible. He brought Bolan the station files on both the institute and Sylvia Tan. The assistant politely refused Bolan’s request for the Agency files on Sable, stating that Kubrick directed access to all of those files personally and, as he was out, the assistant could not provide them. Bolan didn’t push the matter. Instead he sent the assistant to get him some food and an unending pot of black coffee.

  Bolan started with Sylvia Tan.

  A slow smile slid across the veteran’s face when he opened the file and saw the picture of the pretty Asian woman. It matched that of the woman he had seen earlier, engaged in the highly energetic tryst with the blonde in Sanders’s drop-point photographs. Part of the puzzle immediately fell into place. Bolan quickly digested the contents of her file.

  It was all as Kubrick had described it. Well educated, Sylvia Tan had grown up in a comfortable Taiwan household. Her own affluence had served to make her acutely conscious of the plight of the world’s poor. Meanwhile, her talent for mathematics had led to a career in the computer industry. As a young college student in the U.S., she’d joined several leftist organizations, and it was there, apparently, that KGB facilitators began taking advantage of her conscience to interest her in work as a Communist spy.

  Their appeals succeeded, and Tan had worked as a stringer agent for many years. In recent months an apparent reemergence of childhood spirituality had caused a rift with some of the more secular-orientated agendas.

  First Kubrick and then Sanders had kept her under observation, and it seemed Sanders had somehow managed to make contact with Sable through Tan. It was something that Kubrick had worked on for years. But then Sanders had made every attempt to remove Kubrick from the loop. If it was simply personal animosity between the two agents, then why hadn’t Sanders gone to Lich?

  Bolan leaned back in his chair. He drank the dregs of the coffee in his cup and put it down. He felt like a bloodhound tracker, following a trace to find the trail of his quarry. Instead of footprints and bent blades of grass, or scrapped tufts of fur, he was following conjecture, innuendo and rumor. The longer he took the colder the trail got.

  He pushed away Tan’s file and reached for the file on the institute itself. It was much thicker than Tan’s, and the chronology went back more than a decade. Bolan sighed. He’d been given a responsibility, a duty, and he fully intended to execute his warrant. He opened up the thick package before him and began to read.

  The Caucaus Data Institute both designed computers and performed computer work for highly advanced mathematical modeling. Its work included numerous defense projects. Kubrick himself had learned that the CDI was controlled by a business consortium out of Taiwan. Bolan was well-aware that the CIA controlled real-world businesses as covers, and that it was one of the better concealed facets of intelligence gathering. It also muddied the water when certain agents crossed the lines of propriety and used classified information in order to make decisions about personal stock portfolio options.

  Bolan continued reading. The current head of the CDI was Dieter Vesler. Further reports showed that for the past several years Vesler had struggled with a growing narcotics addiction. Bolan leafed through copies of Grozny police and intelligence reports stating that Vesler had several times been seen in the company of big league drug traffickers.

  During the height of those activities, internal security reports had filtered their way to company offices that CDI employees were complaining of propositions by mysterious recruiters. All of this in clear violation of postglasnost diplomatic agreements.

  In early 2000, the CDI had been tasked to perform a study of marine-based aerodynamic design and radar profiles for use in Russian naval quick-insertion fast boats. The institute had executed the commission well, discovering several useful engineering techniques.

  The innovations soon began appearing in Chinese surveillance watercraft used to observe Taiwan. Red flags throughout both Moscow and Washington intelligence communities had resulted in Kubrick leading an above table security project to clean up the institute. The problems seemed to have cleared up after that.

  It was during that time Sylvia Tan first came under suspicion by Grozny Station. Kubrick had made the decision to use her as a stalking horse in order to strike out at her handler, Sable. All available information pointed to Sable having gone rogue from the SVD and turned mercenary.

  Bolan sat back, thinking.

  How did that fit in with the information he had gained at Sanders’s drop?

  Sylvia Tan is a dupe. Break all contact.

  Why would someone warn Sanders that Tan was a dupe? They knew she was cooperating for adversarial intelligence, so how was she a dupe? Bolan closed the file. He knew what it was time to do. It was time to go see Tan.

  He strolled out of the offices without telling anyone that he was leaving, but he knew no move of his had gone unmonitored. He decided to go back to the safehouse. He was going to pay Tan a visit at her home, but she wouldn’t get off work from the institute until later in the afternoon.

  The woman had resisted Kubrick but had aligned herself with Sanders. Now Sanders was missing. As far as Bolan was concerned the woman was a hostile agent who had bitten the hand that fed her.

  Bringing bad dogs back into line was one of the things Bolan did best.

  OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS of Sylvia Tan’s upscale apartment in the International District the night sounds of Grozny began to stir. Streetlights clicked on and neon signs flickered. Brothels and trendy bistros began to see an upswing in business as citizens put the day’s work behind them. Traffic first thickened, punctuated by the blare of horns, and then thinned as the main arterials bled off the human excess. At various points bored Russian soldiers manned security checkpoints.

  A slight breeze brought the smell of the river with it as it flowed in through Tan’s open apartment windows. The aroma was pungent but muted and in the background. The air hinted rain as the sun slid down out of the sky.

  Bolan set his cell phone on the table beside his chair and sat in the growing dark. The report on his photos had come back in text format while he waited. The operator had been an unknown. The Audi license plate had come back as nonexistent.

  Bolan took out a Victor High Standard .22-caliber pistol and began to methodically screw a sound suppressor into place. Someone hadn’t stolen an existing plate from some other vehicle in an effort to throw off research. Someone had printed a clean plate out of whole cloth. The ramifications of that kind of logistical support were troubling.

  Bolan looked up as he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock. He lowered the pistol until the muzzle covered the doorway. He breathed out through his nose, releasing his pent-up tension as the door swung open. He could see a female outline framed against the hallway light.

  From deep shadow Bolan watched, weapon ready, as the figure fumbled with the light switch inside the door. He heard an exasperated sigh after the switch was flipped several times
with no effect. Earlier, Bolan had simply unscrewed all the light bulbs connected to the electrical switch.

  The figure entered the room carrying an attaché case and a purse as well as a jangle of keys. As she moved farther into the room, Bolan could make out the femininity of her form more closely. He took in the sweep of brunette hair, the angle of a cheekbone, certain before he moved, that this was Sylvia Tan.

  Bolan moved in quickly to close the door. He swept behind Tan, overpowering her easily. The door closed with a bang, cutting off the source of light from the hallway. He spun the woman and put her face against the wall.

  He pressed the fat muzzle of the pistol suppressor against her skull, down low where it met the spine. The feeling would be unmistakable. Tan gasped in surprise and then horror. Her bags and keys tumbled from her hands and fell to the floor.

  “Move and I splatter your brains on this wall,” Bolan said, using vivid language to assault his quarry’s psyche. It wasn’t pretty, but it was brutally effective.

  “Are you armed?” he asked, his lips pressed hard up against her ear.

  “No, no.” The woman shuddered, and she seemed close to sobbing.

  His hand roamed across her body at will, insulting her, enforcing the feeling of powerlessness as he acted. He had no feelings of revulsion at his actions. He was a mechanic fixing an engine, a surgeon excising sick flesh from healthy. She had chosen to put herself in this most precarious of situations.

  Satisfied, Bolan slid his rear foot back and changed his point of balance. He replaced the end of the sound suppressor with the cruel grip of his free hand. He squeezed her neck hard enough to make her gasp. Bolan spun her off to the side, throwing her into the deep cushions of a large living room chair almost the size of a small sofa.

  “Stay,” he snarled.

  He trained his gun on the woman and reached for the dead bolt with his free hand, never taking his eyes off Tan. He found the bolt and twisted it shut. He turned fully and regarded the frightened woman. The room was still dark and he stood in shadow. Bolan had positioned the chair where Tan sat so that a bar of light from a streetlight outside ran across her face.

  She looked scared and confused, and beneath that a growing anger smoldered. She was more than pretty, Bolan decided. Her clothes were tasteful and upscale. Her allegiance to leftist ideals hadn’t prevented her from enjoying the fruits of her capitalistic society.

  “Nice legs,” Bolan said.

  Tan went pale. The compliment introduced an element of fear that was new. She had a lot of things to answer for, a lot of things to be afraid of. The compliment made the situation more insidious. She crossed her legs self-consciously under the weight of Bolan’s gaze.

  “On th-the hall shelf there’s money,” she stammered.

  “Yes,” Bolan replied. “And in your office there are a load of diagrams from CDI that I’m sure you’re not supposed to have.”

  Tan pressed her lips together, holding her tongue.

  “We on the same page now?” Bolan asked.

  Tan nodded, her pretty features unreadable.

  “Good. Now I presume you understand that if you scream I will kill you. If you fail to answer my questions quickly and honestly, then I promise you will pay the price. You are a foreign national who has betrayed my government and that of its ally. This has put the lives of my fellow soldiers in jeopardy. I give not one ounce of concern about your ‘human rights’ in that context.”

  Tan’s face set into a sullen frown.

  “Have I impressed upon you that my intentions are serious?” the Executioner asked.

  The woman’s black eyes flickered to where Bolan stood, cloaked in shadow. Bright points of hate burned in her eyes.

  “What is it you want to know?” she demanded.

  “How long have you been a lesbian?”

  Again Bolan caught Tan off balance. Her face reddened at the unexpected question, and Bolan began having serious doubts about the level of any training Tan might have had beyond her role as carrier pigeon.

  “How did—what difference does that make?”

  Bolan picked up one of the photos showing Tan engaged in her acrobatic tryst with the blonde.

  “Are you faking that for God and country? ’Cause, wow, good work—”

  “Fuck you!” Tan snapped, enraged.

  “Did you turn for Sable in order to sleep with her, or sleep with her because you turned?”

  “It wasn’t like that!” Tan shouted.

  “Oh, so this is Sable.” Bolan said mildly.

  Realizing she’d been had, Tan drew her mouth shut into the same tight line again. Bolan’s methods were as subtle as haymakers but like haymakers, when they worked, they brought the other man down.

  Bolan moved slowly around until he was behind the sitting Tan. He stood where she was unable to see him, where she had no idea of his posture or intention. He waited for a moment, listening to the ragged sound of her breathing. When he spoke next his voice was a soft monotone, absent of threat or innuendo.

  “I had your phone records ran before I came over, Sylvia. You spend quite a bit of your free time talking to home.”

  “What’s your point, you son of a bitch?”

  “Do your parents know, Sylvia? About your alternative lifestyle, I mean. And if they do, do you think they’d like to see the truth right under their noses in color photos?”

  Tan sat stiffly, her spine ramrod straight, her body quivering with the energy of her indignation.

  “You gave Sable to Sanders,” Bolan demanded. “Why?”

  “Because she wanted me to.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t tell her lover?”

  “She’d gone freelance since the Soviet bloc crumbled. I think she’d gone completely mercenary and didn’t want to tell me.”

  “So you sold her out,” Bolan guessed. It was imperative that he keep the questions coming in as rapid a pace as he could manage to take advantage of the momentum of her mental state.

  Tan didn’t answer.

  “Where is she? Is Sanders with her?”

  Tan didn’t answer.

  “Sylvia,” Bolan prodded gently, “don’t make me use drugs.”

  “She’s holed up in a hotel with Sanders,” Tan said.

  “You’ve already told your control, given them a heads-up that she’s gone rogue.”

  “No. She was my only contact. I have no way of knowing who to go to now that Sanders is with her.”

  “Write the address down.”

  Bolan watched as the quietly crying woman got pen and paper and wrote down the address. She was an untrained operative, treated with kid gloves by her handlers and stunned by Bolan’s crude, brutal methods. Subjected to field interrogation, fearful for her life and future, Bolan was unsurprised that she had broken quickly. But Bolan did not trust easy. Easy got people killed.

  He took the paper from her shaking hand.

  “Take it,” she spit.

  “You want to live, Sylvia?”

  The fear was naked in the woman’s eyes. A hand went to her mouth. A low moan escaped her. Tan shut her eyes tightly and seemed to steel herself. She straightened and opened her eyes, staring straight into the shadowed face of the Executioner.

  “Go ahead, kill me then,” she said quietly.

  “Nope.” Bolan shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. You cooperated, Sylvia. I’ll follow this lead. If it pans out, if you’ve told the truth, if you’ve not tried to warn them, then things will go well,” Bolan said.

  “You’ll leave me alone?”

  “You’ll be able to go on with your life,” Bolan said. “But if this falls through in any way—even if there’s some freak of nature earthquake, I’ll blame you and I’ll come back.”

  “Go to the address,” Tan said. “Go, you’ll see.”

  10

  Bolan sat across the street from the address Tan had given him. He was in a poor neighborhood on the southeast side of
the city, nearing the countryside. Tan’s lead was a run-down motel set in an old industrial area. Obviously built on the cheap, the place looked shabby. Made up of fifteen single-story units running from the office in an L-shape, the entire establishment looked dark and deserted. Three cars sat in the otherwise empty parking lot.

  Bolan was alone, without support, working on his own terms, following his own personal rules of engagement. This was how he worked best. He could be a leader, or work flawlessly as a member of a team, but in the end, Mack Bolan was a loner. He was built that way and the forging of his personal will into a steel sword of determination had only served to accentuate those natural tendencies in himself.

  Danger was something the Executioner preferred to face alone. It was his way, his chosen environment and, within the confines of that violent world, he operated at a level of excellence far beyond the norm. He saw his abilities as gifts, and he knew that having such powerful, dangerous gifts brought with them great responsibilities. Responsibility was both honor and burden. In most cases, whenever possible, Bolan preferred to bear his burdens himself.

  Bolan got out of the car, sliding the Glock into the small of his back. He wasn’t calling Kubrick or Lich. If Sanders had wanted them out of the loop, that was good enough for Bolan. Sanders had failed to make an important contact in the middle of a delicate operation. As far as Bolan knew, he was the man’s only chance at survival—if he was still alive.

  Bolan crossed the street, avoiding the sparse traffic. He could smell rain on the horizon, and the moon hung obscured by thick, low clouds. Bolan could see his own breath in the crisp, damp air. Reaching the other side of the street, the soldier turned left.

  Hugging the fence line, Bolan circled toward the rear of the property. On either side of the motel, dilapidated warehouses sat empty. In the distance an overpass led deeper into the city. Behind the motel the Chechen countryside stretched out beyond the fence. Once at the rear of the property, Bolan stopped in a patch of shadow, broken hills to his back, and surveyed the run-down motel.