One of the airmen stationed at the base said he would take care of Bolan’s rental car. The Executioner knew that Brognola had contacts all over the military and in law enforcement, and it was no surprise that he’d gotten Selfridge to do him this favor without their knowing precisely what it was about—or who it was they were doing it for.
The Falcon 10 had only one occupant when Bolan arrived: Charlie Mott, a civilian pilot who sometimes flew for Stony Man. “Welcome aboard, Striker,” Mott said with a sloppy salute at Bolan’s approach.
“Since when does Brognola give you chauffeur duty?” Bolan asked, as he climbed the small set of steps leading to the aircraft’s interior.
As he pulled the steps up into the closed-door position behind Bolan, Mott said, “He wanted to make sure you got to the Farm in one piece. He said this one’s a biggie.”
“So he told me over the phone.”
Mott then went into the cockpit and started preparing the plane for takeoff.
The Executioner slept for most of the two-hour flight to Stony Man Farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The Falcon 10 could accommodate up to eight people in extremely comfortable seats, and Bolan had long ago learned to take his rest where he could get it.
Mott taking the Falcon 10 into its final descent was enough to awaken Bolan, and as soon as the plane touched down, he gathered his rifle case and satchel and waited for the aircraft to come to a stop.
Brognola was waiting for him on the runway of the Farm’s airfield. “Welcome back, Striker. Let’s head up to the farmhouse so you can get a shower and a change of clothes. I’ve got a full briefing ready to go as soon as you’re ready.”
“No need to wait. You obviously want to get going quickly on this.”
“Fine.” Brognola hadn’t expected Bolan to actually accept any delay in getting the briefing to his next mission, but he had made the offer in any case out of respect for the man.
He and Bolan walked the short distance to the farmhouse, rather than accepting a ride in the Jeep that was standing by. After walking up the front steps and keying in the proper access code, the two men made their way to the War Room. A solid wooden conference table, surrounded by ergonomic chairs, dominated the room. At one end was a state-of-the-art laptop with a twenty-inch monitor. A USB cable was plugged into the laptop at one end and into a huge plasma TV mounted on the far wall, showing what was on the computer’s monitor in high definition.
At the moment, that was the desktop, which had assorted icons of programs and folders with file names made of seemingly random alphanumeric characters. Bolan knew that these were codes. Brognola moved the cursor to one of those folders and double-tapped the laptop’s track pad.
The folder contained several Portable Network Graphics files, also given coded alphanumeric file names.
First, Brognola called up four of the images, which were all crime-scene photos of dead bodies, and arranged them on the screen so Bolan could see all four.
There was a man with thinning brown hair lying against a rock in a grassy area, a woman with short steel-gray hair lying dead in a city street with a bullet wound in her back, an overweight man with his head literally blown off in a parking lot and a bald man with multiple stab wounds in his chest.
“You’re looking at Albert Bethke, Michaela Grosso, Terrence Redmond and Richard Lang.”
Bolan started at the third name. “Redmond’s been retired from the NSA for, what, ten years?”
“Twelve. And that’s something he has in common with the other three. They’re all people with a history of covert ops, and they’re all retired. Bethke was one of the people who set up DHS after 9/11, and before that he was NSA and FBI. Grosso and Lang were both CIA. They were all killed over the course of the past week or so—assassinated by the Black Cross.”
“You’re sure?”
Brognola hesitated. “No. But the evidence points to it.”
“The lack of evidence, you mean.”
“Yes,” Brognola said reluctantly. “There’s virtually no evidence at any of the crime scenes. No hairs, no fibers, no fingerprints save those of the victims, no biological residue for DNA save those of the victims, no shell casings or bullets at the scene or in any of the bodies despite the presence of bullet wounds, and almost all the blood traces that aren’t compromised by liberal application of bleach are also the victims’.” Brognola called up several more files, which were also digital photos. “Any number of killings over the years have matched this total lack of evidence. The FBI has a file a mile long on these—I know, ’cause I’m the one who started it. Of course, some of those are your executions, but the ones that aren’t…”
“The rumors about the Black Cross go back to my Army days,” Bolan said. “An elite group of assassins made up of the best of the best.”
“I know. And I know that there’s nothing to support it.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, just because the theory fits the evidence—or lack of same—doesn’t mean it’s right. And we’ve got nothing solid, except for the fact that local police were completely stymied. They kicked it up to FBI, and they brought it to me.”
Bolan scratched his chin thoughtfully. “When you referred to the evidence, you said ‘virtually’ and ‘almost.’ What’s different about these crime scenes from all the other ones you think are Black Cross?”
Brognola actually smiled at that, pleased that Bolan noticed how carefully he’d chosen his words. “Not ‘these,’ just the one. Bethke was killed in the Mohonk woodlands in New York. Two distinct sets of blood evidence were bleached far away from Bethke’s body—but there were a few drops of blood that weren’t bleached, and didn’t belong to Bethke. DNA identifies it as belonging to a former sharpshooter in Baltimore City PD’s Quick Response Team named Bert Hanson. He retired after only nine years on the job and then fell off the grid.”
“You think Black Cross recruited him?” Bolan asked.
“Makes sense. If I was looking for assassins, the QRT would be on my list of possible recruiting sources. Hanson had been a model cop—several decorations, no bad notes in his jacket. And then, out of nowhere, he quits, no reason given, and he’s not been heard from since—until he bled on the ground at Mohonk.”
“So what does that get us?”
In response, Brognola double-tapped another graphics file, which called up the face of a walleyed man with a thick beard, a large nose and curly hair. “I did a little digging into Hanson’s departure from the BPD. This is somebody who met with him at BPD’s Western District headquarters shortly before he quit. They talked in an interrogation room. He signed in as a lawyer, so there’s no audio of their meeting, but the name he signed in with doesn’t match any lawyer in the Maryland State Bar Association. So I ran his face through the database and eventually got a hit.”
Double-tapping on yet another file brought up another picture of the same man, but with the beard shaved off and thick-lensed glasses over the walleyes. “The only name we have for him is Galloway, and he’s been seen with a wide variety of dodgy personalities. Terrorists, arms dealers, assassins, you name it. But nobody’s ever been able to pin anything on him, or even find out his first name.”
“You think he’s recruiting for the Black
