must be holding the second half the buyers wanted, and she was savvy enough to make sure everything would never be in one location.”
“Striker’s right,” Brognola said. “Homeland Security couldn’t put names to the killers’ corpses you left at the cabin in Manitoba, but they’re sure they were from the Middle East.”
“Amateurs!” Kurtzman exploded from the end of the table. “Stupid engineers! Thinking they could hold back half the code and leverage it into providing protection for themselves. Didn’t they realize their customers were cold-blooded murderers?”
“Never mind their customers,” Brognola said. “What about their new partners?”
Turning to Bolan, he added, “You’ll love this. Maxwell put some of his people on the money trail. It also leads to the McCarthy Family in Las Vegas.
“It seems,” the man from Justice continued, “that our engineers hired McCarthy to be a go-between for the final piece. According to Maxwell’s Las Vegas source, the remaining segment of code is apparently planned for delivery to one of McCarthy’s men. McCarthy is passing it on to the terrorists, whoever they are.”
“Slick move,” Price said. “The engineers must have been terrified of their buyers. They thought delivering half the code would keep them safe until they got all their money. But they knew once their customers had the complete product there would be no reason not to kill them. So they hired the Mob to make the final delivery. Slick but stupid. Out of the frying pan. How reliable are Maxwell’s sources, Hal?”
“They’re good. After 9/11, Homeland Security realized the crime families might be tempted at some point to link up with a terrorist element. They have some deep plants in McCarthy’s organization.”
“How would young engineers in San Diego go about hiring the Mob? How would they get the initial contact?” Price asked.
“Too many possibilities,” Wethers answered. “A friend of a friend’s friend, an in-law connection, it could be anything. Pursuing that question is probably not worthwhile. More than that, I’d want to know how they linked up with the terrorists.”
“Internet,” Brognola said confidently. “Employees at defense firms, especially young engineers, are prime targets for subversive groups. If these engineers went looking, they’d easily find a buyer.”
“But we don’t know who that buyer is,” Wethers interjected.
Brognola finger-combed his hair while shaking his head. “No, we don’t.”
Delahunt said, “It doesn’t matter. The important fact is that someone has to get to McCarthy, find out where Piaseczna is planning to make the final drop-off and stop her from doing it.”
“I agree,” Price said. Looking across the table at Bolan. “I guess you’re going to Sin City.”
“What about the microwave weapon?” Kurtzman asked of the contraption now stored in one of the outbuildings on the compound.
“Marketing,” Tokaido answered. “It’s years behind microwave research, not state-of-the-art at all. I think they built it at their cabin to show they were real engineers. When Piaseczna contacted potential buyers, what did she have for credentials? Something like that gives a rogue engineer credibility.”
“Then it served its purpose,” Bolan stated. “And it led us to where we are.”
He stared into the distance as if he could see through the walls to where the woman named Marlene Piaseczna was hiding.
“Rogue engineer, indeed,” Kurtzman said softly. “Stop the sale, Striker. You have to make sure—” He was interrupted by the buzzing of his PDA, which he pulled from a pouch on the side of his wheelchair.
His face transformed into a frown as he held the module at arm’s length and read the display.
“There was a firefight early this morning across the Iraqi border in Iran,” he told the Stony Man Farm team. “A few United States soldiers and two Sunni were killed. One of them was carrying a piece of ADAS code.”
“I think,” Wethers said into the sudden silence, “we may have stumbled upon the buyers.”
4
Bolan pushed through the bodies pressing against him on all sides. The sound of helicopter blades cut the night air, appearing to be coming from every direction. The mere sound of choppers swooping down from a black sky like prehistoric birds of prey was often enough to bring the fainthearted to the very brink of panic. As Bolan moved forward, the airships’ ear-thumping reverberations stirred vestiges indelibly ingrained in his combat psyche, sending a rush of adrenaline to his brain. His eyes darted back and forth, constantly assessing and reassessing his environment as he made his way forward.
A silver beam shot to earth from one of the choppers, sweeping across the ground below as if searching for an escapee, pausing from time to time to randomly illuminate individuals who were pushed and pulled at the whim of the pulsating crowd. Off to Bolan’s left, a series of underwater explosions sent steaming geysers swirling two hundred feet into the sky. Seconds later, the acrid smell of burning cordite reached his nostrils as yellow flames burst from the windows of concrete buildings erected behind the dock where a fully rigged pirate ship bobbed on the moat’s gentle ripples. The leaping flames illuminated the stage in a flickering light.
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