assumed the rear defense stance. Dramatic, almost cinematic in nature, with most of his weight resting on his outstretched forward leg while his torso was held back, arms up, nunchaku held along the outside of his right arm.
“W-what?” Confusion. The beginnings of fear.
“I’m not going to lie,” Klegg snorted. “I like this weapon ’cause it’s so fancy. Does a lot for my self-esteem.”
He exploded into motion, whipping the segmented clubs around through an intricate pattern of moves: reverse shoulder swing into a figure-eight swing, down into an underarm grip.
He was grinning so wildly now his smile threatened to split his face. He forcefully exhaled and performed a cross-back swing too fast for the eye to follow, and Svetlana, at last understanding what was about to happen, opened her mouth to scream.
The end of the nunchaku whipped around and slapped the woman across the jaw. Her head snapped to the side and her scream was cut short by the impact. Blood painted the dirty snow in stripes of scarlet. She stumbled back, long heels sliding on the icy ground, only the alley wall keeping her up.
Klegg, eyes burning, moved in, the nunchaku cycloning through its figure-eight pattern. He struck her again, then caught the stick under his arm on the rebound. Her head snapped back and this time teeth flew like tumbling dice.
She sagged to her knees and her ruined face poured blood out in a hot, sticky puddle beneath her.
Klegg lashed out again and again. His skill was not simply that of a choreographed dancer; he could swing the arcane weapon with deadly force. The teakwood handle made sickening crunching sounds like cracking ice as it slapped into Svetlana’s skull and jaws over and over.
Blood splatter painted the walls, painted the ground, soaked the woman until her face was a mask of it. She couldn’t find the strength to scream, couldn’t drag in enough air to cry out before she was struck again.
She could only whimper.
Klegg’s smile was a horrible rictus on his gleaming face. His breath came in short, hard pants like a man having sex. The concussive shock of each blow traveled back up his arm with each strike.
Finally one of the octagonal edges of the striking club caught the ravaged woman a glancing blow along her temple and she was knocked unconscious. She sagged face-first to the ground, still as a slaughtered carcass. Klegg struck the back of her head two hard snaps and more blood matted her once silky hair.
Gasping for breath, he moved around behind her and took each side of the nunchaku in an underhand grip. He bent and looped the nylon cord under her chin then twisted. He twisted until he felt her larynx crumple like an empty soda can under his heel and he rose, dropping the weapon to lie beside Svetlana’s rapidly cooling corpse.
He took off his gloves and ran a hand through his hair. He straightened and smoothed his overcoat. He reached down and adjusted his still prominent erection in his slacks.
Without hurry he lit a cigarette and blew smoke out in twin streams from his nostrils. Slowly his heart slowed and his breathing calmed. His erection began to fade.
He smoked half the cigarette down, then dropped it to the ground. It landed in a sludgy pool of snow and blood, instantly extinguished.
He turned and walked calmly from the alley to hail a taxicab. He had no fear of the police. Kiev was a wide-open, dirty city and he was under the protection of Milosevic, the biggest villain of them all.
Things were working out just right, he decided.
Stony Man Farm
BARBARA PRICE sat at her desk in the Annex.
She had three computer screens open in front of her, each with a spreadsheet showing expenditures for separate areas of the Stony Man operation. She had itemized ledgers for the armory, for Transportation and for Buck Greene’s security projects. Requisition forms for jet fuel alone were enough to make clerks from the Governmental Accountability Office gray with shock.
Price looked at the tally and shook her head as she typed in her authorization code.
The public was always in some outcry about thousand-dollar hammers or eight-hundred-dollar toilet seats. The truth was the number crunchers at the GAO would never have made such oversights. Those inflated purchase orders were designed to hide covert-action expenditures for clandestine units and projects just like Stony Man.
There was a knock on the office door and she looked up. Carmen Delahunt stood in the entrance, a tired look on her face and a manila file folder in her hand.
“Got a second?” the redhead asked.
Price pushed herself back from her desk. “Sure,” she said. “What’ve you got?”
“Multiples of Seven.”
“Really?” Price arced an eyebrow.
Delahunt entered the room and took a seat across from Price at the desk. She laid out her folder showing several computer printings and a couple of glossy jpg enlargements.
Delahunt began leafing through them, talking fast, the way she always did when she was onto something.
“I started cross indexing intelligence estimates and after-action reports like you’d asked,” she explained. “Looking to see if anything relating to Seven came up.”
“You found something?”
“I found a motherlode, Barb. I’ve got Seven cross-indexing things going back decades. Some of it can’t be related—the search is too broad, but you’ve tapped into some kind of thread here. Pieces from a thousand different puzzles that nobody realized they were even supposed to be looking at.”
Price leaned forward, caught up in her enthusiasm. She reached across the desk and pulled a codex Delahunt had printed up. Her vision swam as she saw some of the events and people highlighted.
Kabul urban police. Princess Diana. Baghdad Green Zone. Kiev. Israel, 1968. CERN. The Vatican. Charles Lindberg. Hangar 21. White Sands, New Mexico. Ho Chi Minh City. Aldrich Ames. There was such a collage of information it was impossible to make sense of.
The list went on.
“As interesting as these initial surveys are, they’re basically cold cases,” Delahunt continued. “Some much less cold than others, but for now, cold cases.” She paused. “Except for this.”
Price looked up from the codex. “What?”
“Canada.” Delahunt slid a paper-clipped report to Price. “Toronto.”
“Give me the through line.”
“Our Department of Energy runs a contract research facility there. Ostensibly to study alternative fuels. Green tech, stuff like that. From what I’ve gathered, though, much of the science is a little more experimental. A little more theoretical.”
“And?”
“And the DOE put in a request to the FBI last week to conduct a counterintelligence operation on the facility as internal security had started reporting recruitment approaches being
