makes less noise,” Spring-blade said, but he traded his empty handle for a more standard blade, a wickedly curved jambiya Arab-style knife.
The gunman grunted and triggered his handgun, bullets chasing after Laserka as she kept low, scrambling along the aisle of abandoned tables. “Stand still, Off-duty! It won’t hurt so much!”
The off-duty RIA agent flipped a table on its side as a barricade against the pistol-toting killer. Robbed of power by the suppressor they passed through, the slowed bullets plunked limply against the aluminum tabletop. The shield gave her the time to pull her Makarov from her purse. With a flick of her thumb, the pistol was live and ready to fire. She rolled out into the open and sighted on the gun-toting assassin. The gunman hadn’t expected Laserka to take the low road, firing from prone. He had been waiting for her to pop over the top of her barricade.
The Makarov barked twice, bullets punching into the would-be murderer’s center of mass. The hot little 9 mm rounds cracked the big man’s sternum, but their impact only seemed to stagger him. Laserka swung her aim up to the middle of the stunned thug’s face and cranked off two more shots that obliterated the goon’s face.
The table barricade rattled loudly as it was slapped aside by the burly knife man.
“You’re supposed to die, bitch!” the thug roared, lunging at her.
Laserka rolled, firing one shot at the blade-wielding killer as her Makarov passed across him. She was rewarded by a cry of pain from the raging slasher. The big killer landed on the concrete floor, the jambiya jarred from his fingers as he landed. Laserka was struggling to her feet when a massive paw wrapped around her gun hand.
Training took over and Laserka let herself be pulled in closer to her large opponent. With his strength adding to her momentum, she powered an elbow into the hollow of the burly assassin’s throat. The jolt was enough to shock him into releasing her arm. Laserka stumbled back, raising the Makarov again.
The pistol barked three times, recoil trying to wrest her off target, but Laserka held on tightly, punching the last of her magazine through her opponent’s face.
Panting, Laserka denied a wave of relief that wanted to pass through her. She reloaded her gun quickly.
Batroykin and Vladimir had set her up to be murdered.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bolan slapped the cheek of his prisoner, trying to get him to wake up. It was a relatively gentle action, but the assassination team leader bit down hard. The head killer had only started to blink with returning consciousness when something crunched in his back teeth. The sound of the breaking capsule, combined with a sudden fit of convulsions had Bolan rushing to pry the man’s mouth open. It was too late, almond-smelling foam bubbling out of the dead man’s mouth.
The corpse’s eyes rolled up in his head, and Bolan cursed that he didn’t have time to retrieve the other unconscious death squad member that he had left behind the bar. Taking a paper towel, Bolan cleaned up the dead man’s mouth, wiping bubbling drool from his lips. Pulling out his PDA, Bolan clicked a picture of the lifeless face. As an afterthought, he took the dead fingers and dipped them into ink from a broken pen and used a sheet of complimentary stationery to record the corpse’s fingerprints.
Bolan looked over the Uzi and the magazines he’d confiscated in the assassination attempt. He took some clear adhesive tape and laid it along the bodies of the magazines, then laid out the strips on more plain white paper. Close examination of the tape picked up three or four good, readable fingerprints. The warrior took a moment to compare the results with the prints taken off the corpse sitting limply in the chair. To his sharp eyes, they appeared different enough to be worth copying and transmitting back to Stony Man Farm. Thanks to the science of forensics, Bolan was able to disprove the adage, “dead men tell no tales.”
Bolan linked up with Aaron Kurtzman at Stony Man Farm in the electronic ether utilizing his wireless secured broadband connection from his laptop.
“I thought you told Hal that you were going on vacation,” Kurtzman said without preamble.
“It turned into a busman’s holiday,” Bolan confessed. “A friend of mine ended up on the receiving end of a Russian-speaking murder team.”
“Russian speaking? That will narrow down the database to compare these faces to,” Kurtzman replied. “Oh, you’ve got fingerprints, too?”
“Grabbed some enemy weapons. The prints came along with the spare ammunition,” Bolan explained. “Scotland Yard have anything yet on the bodies I left at the docks?”
“The dead are at the morgue at the East Metropolitan Police crime laboratory,” Kurtzman said. “Eight, including your friend. You said you left another behind? There aren’t any reports of suspects in custody.”
“Run the latent prints first, then,” Bolan requested. “The magazine came from his harness. It might help me track him down.”
“Running them through both IAFIS and its Interpol counterpart,” Kurtzman replied, referring to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Think of any other databases to check them against?”
“These people were well-trained, so try to hack into the Russian Defense Department,” Bolan suggested. “All records, even the closed files.”
“That would take a lot more time,” Kurtzman said. “We’re not dealing with a state-of-the-art U.S. agency’s computer system.”
“I figured as much,” Bolan answered. “I’m going to check with a few friends I have here in the Metropolitan Police. Maybe they have some suggestions for London’s Russian immigrant crime problem.”
“Hal won’t be particularly pleased with you hitting up old contacts. You’re not supposed to exist, Striker,” Kurtzman warned.
“Then don’t tell Hal. I’ve been around the globe hundreds of times. The folks I’ve met are the same people who make me seem almost omniscient,” Bolan said. “Computer hacking and satellite photography aren’t the only ways for someone to gather information.”
“What about your prisoner?” Kurtzman asked. “Is he doing any talking?”
“Only if Hell has its own version of Saint Peter as a receptionist,” Bolan replied. “He bit down on a cyanide capsule.”
“That’s old-school,” Kurtzman commented. “Haven’t seen a Russian bite down on one of those in ages.”
“He woke up as my prisoner, wrists tied. Plus, we were in a dark garage,” Bolan pointed out. “He probably thought I was going to hook his nipples or testicles up to a live battery.”
“Water boarding is the new vogue,” Kurtzman said. “Less painful and less chance of death.”
“Neither way is my style,” Bolan countered. “But how was he to know that?”
“Truth told,” Kurtzman said. “The Russian defense records are a garbled mess. I doubt the programmers have even heard of indexing software. That even presumes all of those fingerprints are stored electronically and not in metal filing cabinets.”
“What about IAFIS and Interpol?”
