Before Bolan could put his question into words, a bullet struck the wall beside Takeri’s head and ricocheted into the street. A woman screamed, perhaps wounded, beyond his line of sight. Takeri turned at once, pushed through the door behind them, Bolan following into a tattoo parlor.
There were two chairs in the shop, both occupied by customers. The tattoo artists looked like twins, emaciated stick figures with matted hair and Fu Manchu mustaches going gray. Between the cloying incense, the whine of tattoo needles and demonic artwork mounted on the walls around him, Bolan felt as if he’d stepped into the third circle of Hell.
One of the artists said something he couldn’t understand. Takeri answered curtly and proceeded through the tiny shop toward a back room. They rattled through a screen of dangling beads, hooked left to where the back door stood propped open with a wooden crate and shouldered through into an alley barely wide enough to let them pass in single file.
Bolan had no idea who would construct an alley so narrow, or why, but it appeared to be a dumping trough for litter thrown from windows overhead. Thankfully, most of the discarded refuse had been dry—paper and cardboard, empty cans and bottles, scraps of wood and plaster board—instead of offal and the like. They clambered over knee-high dunes of rubbish, slogging north along the claustrophobic passageway, Takeri hissing steadily for Bolan to keep up.
“I’m right behind you,” Bolan said, then ducked as bullets started flying through the alley, gouging furrows in the brick to either side.
He crouched and swiveled, bruised a hip in those close quarters, lining up his Glock on a dark figure at the far end of the alley. Bolan saw the shooter’s muzzle-flash and fought the urge to flinch from it, squeezing his pistol’s trigger twice in rapid fire.
The echo of his shots was thunderous inside the alley, punctuated by the sound of cartridges rebounding from brick walls. He saw his human target stumble, turn, collapsing on his face. When the shooter did not immediately rise again, Bolan dismissed him, moving on.
Takeri reached the next street, plunged across it without looking left or right, while horse-drawn carts and rickshaws bustled past him. Bolan dodged a battered taxi cab and followed, gaining on Takeri as his contact reached the sidewalk opposite, then ducked into another darkened doorway.
Stairs this time, with people lounging on them, possibly asleep. Takeri hurdled each new obstacle, cursing when one reached out to snag his cuff, kicking to free himself. Another hand found Bolan, tried to grasp his ankle, but it lacked the strength to hold him. Moments later, they were pushing through another door and out onto the building’s roof.
“Where to?” Bolan asked, as he paused to catch his breath.
“With luck, they may not find us here,” Takeri answered.
Any hope of that was dashed a moment later, with the sound of angry voices and a gunshot from the stairwell. Bolan spun to face the doorway, leveling his pistol, but Takeri stepped in front of him.
“Better to run while we still can,” Takeri said.
“Run where?”
“Across the rooftops, there.”
Takeri pointed, already in motion as he sprinted toward a nearby parapet and launched himself through space to land on the rooftop of a building to the south. Bolan went after him, immediately thankful for the narrow alleyways that seemed to be Calcutta’s fashion. He was tiring, and a broader leap, followed by three or four more of the same, might well have winded him.
They crossed four rooftops, running hard, before Takeri found another open door and led the way down darkened stairs—unoccupied, this time—to reach the street. Bolan had not looked back to see if they were being followed, but he took it as a given. They would have to stand and fight soon, even if Takeri’s preference was an all-night run.
Bolan was on the verge of saying so when they emerged onto the crowded sidewalk and his contact hailed a passing cab. The driver stopped at once, and they piled into his back seat, almost as if the ride had been prearranged.
Bolan glanced through the cab’s rear window and saw no one in pursuit. Relaxing for the first time in what felt like hours, he sat back and stowed his pistol in its armpit holster.
“So,” he asked Takeri, “what was that about?”
“I can’t be sure,” the younger man replied. “Do you have lodgings in Calcutta?”
Bolan nodded. “Why?”
“Because we need a place to talk, and I no longer trust the streets.”
3
Fort McHenry, Baltimore
It had been Bolan’s turn to choose the meeting place, and he’d made his selection on a whim. It had to be within an hour’s drive of Washington, but within those parameters anything went.
He’d chosen Fort McHenry for its history— “Star Spangled Banner,” and all that—as well as its proximity to certain high-crime streets that might prove useful if the call from Hal Brognola concerned another job.
And what else would it be?
Granted, Brognola was a friend of long standing who phoned his regards on holidays, birthdays and such. He couldn’t send cards, because Mack Bolan had no fixed address. But a weekday phone call requesting a face-to-face ASAP could only mean work.
And work meant death, no matter how they tried to dress it up in frills.
The fort had been restored with loving care. Tourists could stroll along the parapets where early defenders had cringed from the rocket’s red glare, clutching muskets and sabers, most praying they wouldn’t be called on to use them.
That had been during the country’s second war with Britain, going on two hundred years ago, and Bolan’s homeland still hadn’t achieved a lasting peace. Its history was scarred by conflict stretching from the shot heard ’round the world to Kabul and Baghdad. The freedoms cherished there were sacrosanct to Bolan, but their price was high.
He wondered, sometimes, what the politicians thought they had achieved, besides securing their own reelection, but it never troubled him for long. The republic had survived good presidents and bad, congressmen who helped the poor and robbed them blind, judges who did their level best and others who were on the take from every scumbag they could find. America endured, sometimes despite its leaders, rather than because of them.
In Bolan’s world it was a different story. He’d quit taking orders when he shed his Army uniform and launched a new war of his own, against the syndicated criminals responsible for nearly wiping out his family. That war had taught him things he’d never learned in Special Forces training, and Bolan had taken those lessons to heart.
These days, he was unique among all other warriors he had ever known or studied. The nearest facsimile came from ancient Japan, when masterless samurai called ronin traveled at will through a feudal landscape, choosing their battles and renting their swords to the highest bidder.
Bolan wasn’t a mercenary, though. He’d cast his lot with Hal Brognola at the Department of Justice, and Brognola’s covert-action teams at Stony Man Farm, in the wild Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. But he didn’t belong to them. Bolan
