A shadow fell over her. She opened her eyes, looked up and saw a thick-bodied man stalking toward her.
“Sit up,” he said.
She did. She looked him over and saw he had a ruddy complexion and dull green eyes that emitted a thousand-yard stare, as though he was human in form only. A portion of a tattoo—a scorpion’s tail—peeked out from beneath his shirt collar. He nodded at one of the men beside her. The man knelt.
A small sting in her left arm caught her attention. She jerked her arm away, but it was too late. The man next to her was back on his feet, a syringe in his grip. Within seconds, she began to feel light-headed. Black spots swirled in her vision and noises began to sound far away. Darkness fell over her.
S EVERAL MILES AWAY , Albert Bly stood at the edge of the clearing and stared at the smoking remains of a body. A satisfied smirk played over his lips. The smell of burned flesh filled his nostrils. He welcomed it, inhaling deeply.
The camouflage fatigues Bly wore hung loosely from his thin body. His black hair was combed straight back from his forehead, exposing a sharp widow’s peak. His skin was red, as though blood might burst from his pores at any moment.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the man next to him shake his head vigorously, heard him make a disgusted noise. “My God,” Milt Krotnic said, “that smells terrible, like cooked garbage or something.”
Bly turned his head and looked at the other man. His lips peeled back into a smile. “It’s the smell of money, Krotnic,” he said, scolding the other man. “You remember that.”
The other man shrugged. “Sure.”
Two men brushed past Bly. Surgical masks covered the lower halves of their faces. Their hands were sheathed in rubber gloves that stretched well up their forearms, but stopped short of their elbows. They angled toward the corpse, knelt beside it and stretched it out on a black plastic body bag on the ground. One of the men reached gingerly for one of the dead man’s ankles. With a pair of scissors, he began cutting at the fabric of the man’s trouser leg and peeled back the fabric. Bly caught a flash of the charred flesh and felt a surge of excitement.
“Hold it,” Bly shouted.
As he advanced on the two men, he withdrew a digital camera from his pants pocket. When he reached the body, they rose and moved away to give him ample room to perform his grisly ritual. He aimed the camera at the remains and snapped several pictures, making sure to zoom in on the puckered black flesh that still clung to the bones. When he finished, he lowered the camera a foot or so from his face and, using his thumbnail, manipulated the dial that advanced the pictures. Satisfied with the results, he turned and headed back to Krotnic, who was talking into a two-way radio, while the two medics resumed their work. Bly pocketed the camera.
“Sure,” Krotnic said into his radio. “He’ll be glad to hear that. You know where to put her? Good, then do it.”
The former colonel in the Serb military clipped the radio to his belt and nodded at his boss.
“They found her,” he said. “They have her back in Bogotá.”
“Good,” Bly said.
“She put up a hell of a fight from what I understand,” Krotnic said. “We’ve got a couple of casualties.”
“The laptop?”
Krotnic shook his head. “No, she was empty-handed. Couldn’t get her to say shit, either.”
“A temporary condition,” Bly replied.
“Of course.”
1
Mack Bolan was seated at the conference table in Stony Man Farm’s War Room. The soldier was freshly showered and clad in blue jeans, a flannel shirt and black sneakers. Even within the secure confines of the Farm, America’s ultra-secret counterterrorism center, he wore his sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R in a leather shoulder rig. His eyes felt gritty and sore from lack of sleep.
Hal Brognola sat across the table from him, a laptop positioned before him. The director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group snatched the unlit cigar from his mouth. His forehead creased with concern, he rolled the cigar between his index finger and thumb, studied it while Bolan waited for him to speak. The Executioner set his coffee on the table.
“You look old,” Bolan said finally.
Brognola snapped his head up as though he’d suddenly sat on a thumbtack. He glared at Bolan. After a couple of seconds, his dark expression melted and a grin tugged at the corners of his lips. “It’s the company I keep,” he said.
“Speaking of which, it’s five a.m. It’s Sunday. You’re wearing Saturday’s suit and tie. Hell, it may be Friday’s clothes for all I know. You need a shave. And probably a shower, though I’m not going to get close enough to find out.”
“In other words, why’d I drag your ass of bed at this hour?”
“Something like that.”
“Fair enough,” Brognola said.
A folder rested on the table at the big Fed’s right elbow. He pinned it beneath one of his big hands and thrust it at Bolan. The soldier opened it and began to examine its contents. A picture of a woman was held to the left side of the folder by a paper clip. Blond hair framed an oval-shaped face. Her complexion was dusky, her eyes dark, lips full. “She is?”
“Maria Serrano,” Brognola replied. “CIA agent. She holds double majors in forensic accounting and international business. And, from what I understand, she’s one hell of an undercover operative.”
Bolan nodded and leafed through the papers in the folder, skimming them. It contained a few government memos—from the CIA, National Security Agency and the State Department—as well as documents he recognized as presidential daily briefings and classified executive orders signed by the President detailing the kidnapping and murder of several CIA operatives.
Brognola continued, “Six months ago, the NSA picked up some noise from an American company’s operation in Bogotá, Colombia. The various bits of chatter indicated someone in Garrison Industries executive suites was breaking arms embargoes with Iran and China, along with some nonstate groups. Specifically, the company was shipping high-resolution camera components we use in our satellite program. They kept listening but took no immediate action. And, the more they heard, the more concerned they became. Two months ago, they discovered that the company was acting as an intermediary between a Chinese group that produces cylinders and other parts used in centrifuges and a group in Iran.”
“For the country’s nuclear program,” Bolan said. He closed the folder and set it on the tabletop. He’d have plenty of time to look at it later.
“Right,” Brognola said. “As far as the satellite components go, the Iranians say they want satellites to track weather and such. Needless to say, we don’t believe them. And we don’t like the notion of them having aerial-surveillance capabilities. The consensus is that the longer we can keep them blind from space, the better off we are.”
“Sure,” Bolan said.
While he took a sip
