just be a liability in all of those areas.
Instead, he carried nonlethal weaponry in its place: a canister of pepper gas, a roll of duct tape, some plastic restraints and a stun gun, which the soldier intended to use only in an extreme emergency, since the device had the potential to do serious damage; it could even be lethal to a security guard with a bad heart.
Bolan also carried a pouch filled with climbing gear: rope, carbiners, belays and rappelling devices. The security at the VA hospital was light, but it was heavy enough to turn the probe into an ugly situation. Shooting his way in and out wasn’t an option. To keep this probe soft, the Executioner was going to have to put his back into it.
The soldier parked his rental car, a Chevrolet Impala, about as nondescript as nondescript could be, in a residential neighborhood just west of the VA campus. The main entrance was to the east, and that put him as far away from any late-night activity as possible. Bolan scaled the ornate stone wall that surrounded the grounds with ease. The wall was strictly decorative, a pretty barrier that kept the local residents from having to accidentally see a wounded warrior.
The next climb Bolan would have to make wouldn’t be as easy. The east end of the wing housing the administration offices had no windows and was featureless. The gaps in the granite covering were too narrow and too far apart to use for hand jamming and foot jamming. A granite trough, however, that served as a character line in the bleak twelve-story-tall stone surface and also masked a drainage pipe for rain that accumulated on the roof. That would provide the soldier with an avenue into the offices. He would have to make his way up to the top of the building, and then gain access through the roof entrance.
Bolan had left the offices via the stairway rather than taking the elevator. Before he’d left, he’d gone up the stairs to the roof exit, disabled the alarm and slipped a thin piece of cardboard into the doorjamb, preventing the bolt from locking. He only hoped that no one had removed the cardboard or fixed the alarm. Judging from the thick layer of dust covering everything on the stairway landing leading to the roof, he guessed it didn’t see a lot of use and was probably safe.
Bolan wedged himself into the gutter, which was about eighteen inches deep and two feet wide. With his back against one side, his feet against the other, he was able to extend his legs enough to get the leverage he needed to shimmy up the gutter. Then he began the long, slow, grueling process of inching his way up twelve stories of rough granite, holding himself in place with the tension of his body while he raised one foot, then the other, then slid his back up the opposite side of the trough.
But that was the easy part. The trough ended in a rain chute that was too small for the soldier to crawl through. Instead, he was going to have to rely on a series of ornamental ridges on the overhang that jutted two feet beyond the gutter. Keeping his arms straight and perfect tension in his body, Bolan levered himself outward and reached for the lip that he had spotted in his earlier recon of the building. He trusted the lip would be in the exact spot he’d noted earlier; if his calculations were off by a single inch, he would plummet to his death, 130 feet below. When his hand connected with the ridge, he spared a millisecond to be grateful for the precision of his military sniper observation training. Using his entire body as a lever, Bolan lunged up around the overhang. His arms were melting from the abuse of climbing the wall, but he knew he only had to make it a few more feet and he was finished. Without missing a beat, the soldier used his momentum to scramble up the overhang and pulled himself over onto the roof of the hospital.
He took just a moment to rest his muscles from the strain of climbing and tied the rope he planned to use to rappel down the side of the building to a bracket holding an air-conditioning unit in place, then jogged over to the door. The thin cardboard still prevented the bolt in the door from engaging and he pushed it open. The alarm inside was still disabled. Bolan crept down the stairs with as much stealth as possible, but every footfall, though near silent, seemed to ring down the stairwell like a church bell. When he got to the next landing, the door into the administrative offices were locked. The soldier removed a small but powerful handheld computer from a drop pouch strapped to his left leg, took out a magnetic key card connected to a USB port and attached the card to the computer. He pulled out his cell phone and sent a text message to Kurtzman saying, “Get ready—about to transmit,” then swiped the magnetic key card through the slot on the scanner next to the doorway.
Moments later he received a text back from Kurtzman. Try it again. Bolan swiped the key card one more time, only this time instead of blinking red, the LED light turned solid green and Bolan entered the offices. The stairway was at the west end of the office suite; the east side of the suite was a glass window looking out at the balcony that in turn overlooked the atrium. Bolan saw a figure walk past on the balcony outside the suite and stop. It was a security guard, making his rounds. Bolan crouched behind a cubicle wall while the figure swiped a key card, opening the door into the office suite. The figure shone his flashlight around the suite, and then began walking toward the soldier.
The cubicle in which Bolan crouched had a desk along one side and a table along another. It was part of a two-person cubicle suite, and another table separated one work space from the other. He crouched and slid under the table separating the work spaces, then slowed his breathing almost to a standstill. A large courier mailing box sat on the floor next to him. As silently as possible, Bolan placed the box between himself and the opening into the aisle that formed the boundaries in this cubicle kingdom.
He slowed his breath even more as the security guard approached the cubicle in which he hid. In his mind, Bolan formulated a plan for neutralizing the guard in the most humane way possible. When the guard stopped to shine a light into the cubicle where Bolan hid, pausing longer than he had at other cubicles, the soldier thought he was going to have to put that plan into action, but after a few moments of scoping out the scene of the crime, the security guard moved on. An interminably long five minutes later, the guard left the office suite.
After the man had moved on, Bolan extricated himself from under the table, went over to the filing cabinets and found the one marked Vendors. The cabinet was locked, but the lock was a simple blade affair that the soldier was able to twist open simply by inserting the tip of his knife into the key hole and turning. Once he figured out the organizational system, he was able to locate the vendor that had provided the hardware. He coordinated the dates of the delivery with the names of patients receiving the hardware in just moments. A bit more searching revealed that the piece the technicians had extracted from the body at the lab in Quantico—titanium braces used to reshape mangled tibia and fibula plateaus—had been installed in one Theodore Haynes, a veteran of the Iraq war from Plainfield, Wisconsin.
Bolan took out a black cloth from the drop pouch, placed it over his head like a shroud, then crouched beneath the cloth and took digital photos of all the documentation regarding Mr. Theodore Haynes. The camera was connected to his notebook computer and downloaded the images directly to a secure FTP site at Stony Man Farm. In all, it had taken Bolan less time to gather the information than it had taken the security guard to make his rounds at the office.
He replaced his equipment and was getting ready to exit the way he’d came when the security guard once again shone his flashlight through the glass separating the suite from the atrium balcony. Bolan dived behind the cover of a cubicle wall, but he worried that the security guard had seen him. The man swiped his key card, which dangled from a chain around his neck, entered the suite, handgun drawn, and made his way to Bolan’s position.
The Executioner scurried around the corner of the cube wall before he could be discovered, and found that he’d backed himself into a narrow corridor without any cover. The soldier crouched and when the man rounded the corner, he sprang up, grabbed him around the neck, at the same time putting his hand over the man’s mouth to stifle an outcry. He guided his target to the ground, using his own body to absorb the impact of the fall to avoid hurting the man any more than necessary. Bolan grabbed the guard’s pistol in the process, and when he had the man down, he put the barrel of the
