lights at Sunrise Enterprises. He scanned the phone’s guts, finally wedging the infinity transmitter in beside the set’s digital answering machine. A simple clip job finished it, with no need to strip any wires and risk short-circuits sometime in the future. A few keystrokes on Bolan’s cell phone, and the bug went live, the arming signal cut before the desk set had a chance to ring.
He was finished, except for putting back the base plate. He had three screws set, was working on the fourth, when he heard voices coming down the corridor in his direction, speaking Japanese.
Unhappy voices, which was natural enough, and now he had to scoot.
Bolan tightened the fourth screw down as far as it would go and pocketed his screwdriver. He replaced the phone as he had found it, nothing out of place as he surveyed the desktop, making sure no traces of himself remained.
Now, out.
Machii’s office had a private washroom, and the washroom had its own connecting door to yet another room beyond, labeled as Storage on the floor plan he had memorized. That room, in turn, had its own exit to the corridor from which he’d entered the office. If his luck held, he could slip around behind whomever was approaching in a heated rush, and slip back to the roof while they were fuming in the office.
And if not, at least he might come out behind them. Give them a surprise.
Meeting opposition was a risk on any soft probe, always kept in mind, no matter how much preparation went into avoiding contact. With his work done, the transmitter live and waiting to broadcast whatever words were spoken in Machii’s office from now on, it wasn’t absolutely critical for Bolan to escape unseen.
But it was vital for him to escape alive.
The washroom door was shut when Bolan reached it, and he closed it tight behind him once he was inside. No dawdling in the john to eavesdrop on the Yakuza returning to the office. He was out the other door in seconds flat, and found that Storage meant a bedroom where Machii could sleep or party privately, with someone who had caught his fancy. There was no one in the boudoir, smoky now and ripe with HC’s tangy odor, and he crossed directly to the other door. Bolan paused there, ear pressed against the panel, listening.
And heard nothing.
Behind him, in the Machii’s private office, two men conversed, their words incomprehensible to Bolan. Taking full advantage of their evident preoccupation, he stepped out into the corridor—and found two young men gaping at him in surprise.
“Hakujin!” one declared.
“Supai!” the other snapped, as both reached for their holstered pistols.
Bolan didn’t need to speak the language to know that they had pegged him as an intruder. He had them beaten, going in. The MP-5 K sneezed two muted 3-round bursts from less than twenty feet, stitching the young men’s chests with 9 mm Parabellum hollow-point rounds, mangling their hearts and lungs, stopping those hearts before the guards knew they were dead. They fell together, but he didn’t stick around to see it, sprinting for the service staircase that would take him to the roof.
It was a judgment call. To reach the street without retracing his original approach meant running back the full length of the corridor and rushing down eight flights of stairs—two zigzag flights per floor—among Sunrise employees exiting in answer to the fire alarm. If he got past them all, that route would put him on Atlantic Avenue, busy with traffic and pedestrians. If someone brought him under fire out there, it could become a massacre.
Better to do the unexpected thing, descend via the fire escape and exit through the alley. Cornered there, if he ran out of luck, at least Bolan could fight without much fear of injuring civilians.
He was on the roof and sprinting for the fire escape when someone shouted from behind him. Next, a pistol cracked, and Bolan heard the whisper of the bullet as it flew past his cheek.
One shooter was behind him when he turned, and Bolan saw another peeking from the rooftop access doorway, clearly not as bold as the front-runner. Bolan sent the shooter spinning with a 3-round Parabellum burst, his white shirt spouting scarlet, then sent three more rounds to make the doorway peeper duck back out of sight.
Eighteen rounds remained in the MP-5 K’s magazine, and Bolan didn’t plan on using any more of them topside than he could help.
He still had no idea what might be waiting for him in the alley below.
He glanced over the parapet, saw no shooters prepared to pick him off as he descended, and swung out onto the fire escape. Taking the metal ladder rung by rung was slow. Instead, he gripped the side rails with his hands and braced the insteps of his shoes against them, sliding down until he struck the asphalt fifty feet below and landed in a crouch.
Above him, gunshots echoed. One round struck a commercial garbage bin to his right and spanged into the heaped-up garbage it contained. Another slapped into the pavement, closer, a reminder that he had no time to waste.
Raising the MP-5 K’s muzzle, Bolan chipped the concrete parapet above him with a parting burst and saw a face fly back, out of frame. He couldn’t rate that as a hit and didn’t care. His rented wheels, a Honda Civic, waited for him on Atlantic Avenue, no more than half a block away.
He ran.
The rooftop shooters would need time to reach the alley. As for soldiers on the inside, he’d already dealt with two and given any more something to think about. Assuming they had walkie-talkies for communicating, someone from the lobby could be on his case by now and waiting for him when he reached the sidewalk, but it was a chance he’d have to take.
The alley was a trap now; staying where he was meant death.
A brief pause at the alley’s mouth, tucking the MP-5 K out of sight beneath his jacket, hand still on its pistol grip through a slit pocket on his right, and Bolan cleared the sidewalk, glancing right and left as if it was a normal day, nothing to be concerned about. When no one called him out or gunned him down, he stepped off from the curb, jaywalking as if he did it every day, angling through traffic that, with any luck, would slow his pursuers.
Twenty feet from the Honda, Bolan palmed the keyless entry fob and released the driver’s door lock, instantly rewarded by a flash of taillights and a perky blipping sound. A moment later, he was at the wheel and gunning it, letting the taxi on his tail brake sharply, driver leaning on his horn and offering a one-finger salute, as Bolan pulled away from Sunrise Enterprises.
He could listen to the office bug right now, in theory, but he had more pressing matters on his mind—survival being foremost on the list—and Bolan figured that Noboru Machii wouldn’t spend the next few minutes in his office, strategizing with his men. There would be firefighters to deal with, and police, the problem of eliminating corpses in a hurry.
Something else he’d thought about, while planning his incursion: when Machii did begin to talk, the odds were good that he’d be speaking Japanese. While Bolan’s talents were diverse, he’d never had the opportunity to learn more than a smattering of Japanese. And that would have been a problem, if the superteam at Stony Man Farm hadn’t devised a program for his smartphone, offering real-time translated readouts from a list of major languages. The readout wasn’t perfect—something on the order of closed captioning on normal television—but he’d get the gist of what Machii said and go from there.
First, though, he had to get away. Find somewhere it was safe to sit and eavesdrop once his adversaries chilled a bit
