about embarrassment now that their time had suddenly run out.
He left the shower running—put it on Hezbollah’s tab—and met up with Grimaldi in the corridor, to clear the last two apartments. Bolan would never know what had alerted one guy in the next apartment, to their right, but he was waiting with an AK-47, ripping off a hasty burst just as his door began to open under Bolan’s touch.
The Russian rifle’s 7.62 mm rounds were more than capable of piercing flimsy drywall, driving Bolan and Grimaldi to the floor. Instead of making it a siege, Bolan unclipped one of the frag grenades he’d fastened to his belt, removed its pin and pitched the bomb through the doorway, counting five seconds on its fuse. It blew on four, a foible common to that particular model, and he waited for the shrapnel storm to pass before he checked the apartment again and found his adversary facedown in a pool of gore.
No time to waste now, as they ran back to the stairs and stormed the third floor, ready for resistance from the Hezbollah terrorists remaining, meeting it almost at once. It was a tricky proposition, fighting for your life and watching out for three specific faces, knowing it was critical to capture one of them alive.
A challenge, right—but nothing unfamiliar to the Executioner.
Arlington, Virginia, Two Days Earlier
The punks were either soused or high on something, Hal Brognola guessed, noting their ruddy faces, sloppy walks and random slurring of their too-loud comments as they made obnoxious asses of themselves. They’d gotten an early start on getting wasted, since it wasn’t half past ten yet, and the four of them were well en route to being comfortably numb.
Skinheads. He knew the low-life type from long experience. They’d failed in school and couldn’t hold a job, assuming that they’d ever tried to find one, left their home or had been thrown out when Nazi tats and rants had riled their parents to the point of no return. Or maybe they’d been raised by homegrown fascists and had followed in their elders’ goose steps.
Either way, Brognola saw them as a waste of space, and not at all what he’d expected to encounter at the Ballston Common Mall, on Wilson Boulevard. All members of the public were welcome, of course, to the four-level, 580,000-square-foot mini-city with its hundreds of shops, salons, cafés and other offerings, but most of those who patronized the mall upheld a certain standard of decorum.
Not these guys.
They had a dress code, sure, all four of them in jet-black bomber jackets decorated with the symbols of their rage, from swastikas and SS lightning bolts to Celtic crosses, Rebel flags and the distinctive blood drop crosses favored by the Ku Klux Klan. Beneath the jackets, they wore suspenders over black tees decorated with more neo-Nazi “art,” tight jeans with metal-studded belts—a guy just couldn’t always trust suspenders in a street fight—and red laces in their black boots.
It was a uniform of sorts that marked them as outsiders—or, in the alternative, insiders of a small, supposedly “elite” subculture most Americans were happy to ignore until it pushed into their faces and demanded equal time.
Like now.
Brognola had been hoping they would pass him, standing alone and minding his own business at the second-level railing, near the food court. As a rule, he didn’t make a likely target for the random predators who scavenged urban landscapes. He was stocky, had an aging cop’s face and an attitude toward strangers that made most think twice about disturbing him.
Not this time.
Maybe these four punks believed the line about safety in numbers. Or maybe they were just too wasted to care.
“Hey, Grandpa,” one of them called out as they approached him. “Got a light?”
The big Fed figured silence wouldn’t be the way to go this time. He turned to face them, saw them fanning out into a semicircle as he said, “No smoking in the mall.”
“Ain’t what I asked you, is it?”
Their elected spokesman was a burly specimen whose forehead bore the inked slogan “RAHOWA”: Racial Holy War.
Brognola locked eyes with him as he answered, “No.”
“So, do you got a light, or not?”
The Justice man scanned the other grinning, slack-jawed faces, then said, “No.”
“Is that all you can say, man? ‘No?’”
The second speaker would have been a redhead if he’d let it grow a little. As it was, the stubble only made his scalp look sunburned, serving as a background for the swastika tattoo on top of his shaved pate.
“I could say, ‘Move along,’” Brognola offered.
That made two of them break out in laughter, while their leader and the almost-redhead eyed him with suspicion bleeding into fury. They were used to having people cringe before them, but it wasn’t working out that way, this time.
“There’s sumpin’ wrong wid you,” the leader said, and tapped his temple with an index finger. “Sumpin’ wrong up here.”
“Johns Hopkins, was it?” Brognola asked him. “Or maybe Georgetown? I’m surprised you found a med school that would let you in, with all that sloppy ink.”
He was pushing the limit now, but punks like these had always ranked among his top pet peeves. Bullies were made for beating down, not coddling.
“Man, you gotta have a death wish,” RAHOWA-face said. A thought surfaced inside his tiny mind. “Are you a Jew?”
“Are you a cretin?” Brognola replied. The four of them were close, but he still reckoned he could reach the Glock 23 on his hip before one of them punched him or landed a kick to his groin with a spit-polished boot. Bad news if it came down to that, but the big Fed had too much on his mind to suffer morons gladly.
“Man, you’re askin’ for it,” Red Fuzz said. “I oughta—”
But he never finished, as a deep voice just behind him asked, “Is there a problem here?”
* * *
“I HAD IT COVERED,” Brognola said. “They weren’t going anywhere.”
“I saw that,” Bolan granted. “But I thought about the paperwork, the wasted time.”
Brognola mulled that over, frowning, then agreed. “Who needs it?”
“Right.”
They’d gone to Charley’s Grilled Subs, once the four skinheads had gotten a glimpse of Bolan’s graveyard eyes and figured out that two-on-four wasn’t such inviting odds. He had a deli sub in front of him, with fries, while Hal was working on a Philly chicken hero.
“So, the mission,” Bolan prompted.
“Right,” Brognola said again. “I guess you’ve heard about the consulate in Jordan?”
“It’s
