is something bigger going on here, and for whatever reason your department has been told to low priority the situation or ignore it completely.”
Finch’s face set in stone. “For the record, you are not to engage in any intelligence operations against the IRA on English soil. For that matter, you are not to ‘operate’ on English soil in any capacity at all unless directly requested to by Her Majesty’s government. If you are caught doing so, it would be my duty to have you at the very least detained and deported if not brought up on criminal charges.”
Bolan nodded. “I understand.” He glanced at the recorder on the table and Finch clicked it off. “For the record, any and all intelligence I might gather if I engaged in such a questionable activity would be immediately shared with Her Majesty’s government, and done so through your offices exclusively.”
“I believe we understand each other.” Finch placed her business card on the table and pressed the intercom button. “Security, please have our guest escorted off the premises.”
BOLAN GLANCED at his watch as he drove through traffic. His modified wristwatch was blinking at him, which meant that someone had gone into his hotel room without deactivating the security suite. Bolan drove an extra block past his hotel and then circled around to approach from the back, heading into the hotel loading dock. A man in a purple hotel jacket looked at his vehicle askance. Bolan exited the vehicle and handed him a fifty-pound note, and the man went back to overseeing the off-loading of towels from a linen truck. Bolan followed the pallets of towels into the laundry.
His watch peeped at him again. Someone had opened his laptop.
Bolan approached two men in white uniforms speaking what Bolan was pretty sure was a Nigerian dialect and smoking cigarettes. “Say, can I ask you a favor? Could you go up to the fifth floor and see if anyone strange is lurking around outside room 502?”
One of the men grinned. “Sorry. We’re on break.”
Bolan peeled off another fifty-pound note. “There’s no way I can convince you?”
The second Nigerian snatched the note. “I am convinced.” He pinched out his cigarette and carefully placed it back in the pack. “I’ll be back.”
His partner scowled after him as he disappeared into the service elevator.
Bolan smiled sympathetically. “I might have a job for you in a minute.”
The man peered at Bolan narrowly. “This is nothing illegal, then?”
Bolan was almost positive the two men were illegal immigrants. They were probably in desperate need of money but even more desperate to have no attention drawn to themselves. Bolan shrugged. The man clapped a hand to his forehead as if he had a migraine. “Oh, man…”
Ten minutes later Bolan’s scout returned. He shook his head. “This real James Bond shit, you know.”
Bolan nodded. “How many?”
“Two. One big. One little. Nasty-looking white men. Lounging about. I don’t know, but beneath their jackets I think they have guns.” He peered at Bolan in identical suspicion as his partner. “That your room?”
Bolan held up his key. “Can I ask you gentlemen a favor?”
They blinked in unison. “Oh?”
“I need a diversion.”
They stared at Bolan noncommittally.
The big American turned to his scout. “What’s your name?”
“Musa Balam.”
“Musa, nice to meet you.” He turned to the other man. “And you?”
He stared at Bolan defiantly. “Sheriff Modu.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Matt. What I want you to do is this. I want you both to go back up the elevator. When it opens, Musa, you run down the hall to the stairs, and you? You chase him, yelling in Hausa.”
Modu looked at Bolan as if he were insane. “Not for fifty pounds.”
“How about a hundred?” Bolan grinned. “Each, and another hundred once it’s done.”
Balam peered curiously. “And after it is done, what?”
“You’re better off not knowing. You just run for the stairs and keep going.”
A furious exchange in Hausa ensued. Balam apparently won. “Show us the money.”
Bolan peeled several bills from his money clip. Even the reticent Sheriff Modu’s eyes lit up. Bolan handed them a hundred each and followed them into the elevator. Modu took a wet towel from a bin and coiled it into a rat’s tail. The door pinged open on the fifth floor. Balam ran out screaming and Modu raced after him, shouting in scathing Hausa and snapping the towel like a whip. Bolan waited four seconds until he knew they had passed his door and then filled his hand with his Beretta 93-R and stepped out of the elevator.
As Balam had said, two men stood near his door. Both men had short, brush-cut blond hair and wore leather jackets. By the bulges under their left arms, his scout was right. They were packing substantial heat. The smaller man held a cell phone, obviously waiting for warning from the men watching the garage and the lobby. The two Nigerians were almost to the stairs at the end of the hall. The big man shook his head in disgust at their antics. “Agh, can you believe those bloody foreigners.”
The accent told Bolan that the man was a South African. Bolan strode up to him, the big man catching the movement a second too late. Bolan cracked the slide of his Beretta machine pistol across the side of the man’s face, laying the cheek open to the bone. He whipped the 93-R backhand across the bridge of the little man’s nose and shattered it. The big man had bent over with pain and clutched his face. The butt of the Beretta crunched into the back of his skull and dropped him unconscious to the ground. Bolan rammed the muzzle of the Beretta into the side of the little man’s neck and he fell to the carpet.
Bolan knelt over the big man and took his ID. Beneath his jacket he was wearing Threat Level II soft body armor. In a shoulder rig he was carrying a BXP submachine gun with the stock folded and a sound suppressor fitted over the barrel. The weapon was basically an American MAC-10 cleaned up and improved to South African specifications. Bolan took the weapon and checked the load. It was loaded with hollow point rounds. He took the little man’s BXP, as well, and checked his watch. Someone was still messing with his laptop. That laptop had been designed by Akira Tokaido, one of Stony Man Farm’s cybernetic experts. The Farm’s resident armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, had installed a number of security devices that had nothing to do with binary code. Bolan pumped the bezel of his watch three times and was rewarded with a scream as the right-hand speaker in the laptop’s monitor frame spewed a compressed stream of pepper spray into the operator’s eyes.
Bolan kicked open the door of his hotel room.
A redheaded woman was on the floor in front of Bolan’s laptop clutching her face. The man who had been in guard position looked up from where he bent over her. His BXP was in his hand but on the wrong side of his body. Bolan put the red-dot sight of his right-hand weapon on the man’s chest and squeezed the trigger. The BXP stuttered and twenty-two rounds of 9 mm hollowpoint ammo jackhammered into the gunner’s chest as Bolan held the trigger down on full-auto. The man’s
