of purple from the drapes, rugs and cushions. It had a feminine touch.
“Carl, stop looking so pissed off and let Mr. Cooper through. He was always a good customer,” Yates said in an almost prissy tone. From the way Carl deferred to him, with a barely concealed petulance, Bolan wondered how the hell the faux Englishman had ever managed to conceive a daughter.
“He doesn’t look much like a Carl,” Bolan remarked as they descended the stairs hidden by inset shelves. The walls were decorated with hangings depicting historical battles, and as they reached the basement he could see that the heavy oak desk and cases of weapons were more in keeping with the man as he knew him than the decor upstairs. A plasma-screen TV and a laptop were the only signs of the twenty-first century on display. A glass-fronted bookcase contained a large number of old books in lurid dust jackets.
“He isn’t. That’s just my little conceit. I call him Carl Petersen, just as I call myself Dornford Yates. The IRS call both of us something else completely. Or at least they would if they could find us.”
“Touching, I’m sure. But that’s none of my concern.”
“Don’t mind me, I just like to keep the personal touch,” Yates murmured, leading Bolan through an aperture into the three connected rooms that housed the illegal ordnance that had paid for Yates’s luxury.
Two things came to Bolan’s mind as he followed. The first was that the supposed “personal touch” was an intriguing ruse. Yates was in a position to extract secrets from his customers that would no doubt be useful as leverage, or playing one buyer against the other. The second was more practical: Florida was one of the most waterlogged states in America. Although many richer homes had panic rooms and bunkers, shoring up a basement complex this large must have been expensive and disruptive. To do this unremarked spoke of Yates’s ability to snake out tentacles of influence. Another time, and Bolan would maybe have to take him out of the game. But not now. There was other work to be done.
Bolan filled two duffel bags with grenades and plastic explosives, a Steyr and ammunition, a micro-Uzi with spare clips and an HK with the same. He had to balance the need for firepower with the need for speed and moving light. As he left the house with the bags, Carl shadowed him, to make sure he did so without delay. Bolan cast an eye toward the girls in the pool and wondered if they had any idea how their friend’s father paid for all this—and whether they would even care if they did know.
Carl watched the soldier get into the sedan and pull out. Bolan could see him in his rearview mirror as he turned off the quiet suburban street, and he felt a prickle at the back of his neck. Instinct was an inexact science, but it had kept him alive long enough for him not to ignore it.
* * *
AS THE SEDAN moved out of sight, Carl went into the backyard, closing the gate behind him. He called out to the girls to make sure they kept it shut, before moving back through the house and down to the basement. Yates was seated at his desk, staring into space.
“I don’t like him,” Carl said without preamble.
“We don’t have to like them, we just have to like their money,” Yates replied. “Frankly, I don’t like any of them. But you’re right about Cooper. Terrible name, obviously made up by some desk monkey with no imagination. No man who was completely in the fold would ever need to use a dealer like myself to supply his needs. However, someone who was working in such deep cover that they didn’t officially exist...”
“If he’s here to cause trouble, then chances are it’s going to be with your customers,” Carl said.
“Indeed,” Yates said drily as he reached for the phone. “I don’t mind setting them against each other if it makes me a profit, but someone like Cooper is not going to give me that kind of pleasure. If he’s a government man of any stripe, then I think I may have a shrewd suspicion of where he’s headed.” As he spoke, he punched in a number.
“Ah, Ricke,” he purred into the mouthpiece, “I think I have something that might be of interest to you.... No, no, Duane hasn’t been causing any problems.... I don’t know exactly what you’re up to, but I think you should be aware of a few facts that have come to my attention....”
* * *
BOLAN TOOK A COUPLE hours to get away from the Miami metropolitan area and out into the county that was his destination. Once he crossed the border, he left the highways and took the smaller roads that led him to Griffintown. By the time he drove down the main drag it was dusk, and some of the larger stores were shut. The smaller mom-and-pop operations were still open, as were the diners and coffee shops. There was no mall on the outskirts of this town, so the streets were still busy. It looked idyllic.
At one end of the community was the small industrial park that housed the Midnight Examiner’s printing plant and editorial offices. Six stories tall, the building dwarfed everything else in town. In the evening light, it wasn’t too fanciful to see how the town was dominated by the tabloid and its owners. How much they knew about the secretive cult on their stoop was something Bolan wanted to probe, if possible, without alerting an eager staff to a potential story.
Right now, he needed a hotel, a shower and a chance to study the rest of the intel Kurtzman had sent him, before getting some rest and checking out the area around Eveland.
He found a quiet hotel with a white-painted wooden facade, a terrace and a swing in the front yard. Inside, the owners had gone for the colonial look. A man who appeared to be the same age as the dead security guard, Myres, signed Bolan in. The ex-soldier and sheriff’s officer should have been doing a job like this, not peddling his waning skills and waiting to be taken down. There was a lesson here, if Bolan cared to pay attention.
He was shown to his room, then thanked the proprietor, ordered a meal and took a shower. Over steak, Bolan studied the maps and topographic reliefs he’d downloaded. He had a fair idea of what to expect.
But there was nothing like the real thing.
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