escape his nasal cavities.
“What’s on your mind?” Richards asked, sucking on his soda through a straw.
“Just thinking,” Noth said.
“I’m not going to be given up, am I?” Richards asked, popping a fry into his mouth. “The media’s howling for my head.”
“We’ve already got a half-dozen patsies in place, depending on where the investigation takes the government,” Noth explained. “All you have to do is lay low until we find you a new assignment.”
Richards looked at Noth, his mood darkening as he regarded the liar sitting across from him. “I know too much, despite being an overly medicated little minion,” he said.
“The smell from the pill bottle wasn’t right,” Noth admitted. “Don’t make a scene. I have a gun leveled at your gut under the table.”
“The Rose Initiative takes out a piece of trash, before it can be revealed that he’s their garbage, right?” Richards asked.
“What’d you do? Mold sugar pills to resemble the right medication?” Noth asked.
Richards nodded. “Not that it matters now. You’ve got the drop on me.”
Richards placed a fry between his lips, letting it dangle like a cigarette.
“Spit that out,” Noth ordered.
“Oh, come on, let the condemned have his last smoke,” Richards replied.
“Spit it out,” Noth growled.
Richards spat the fry with blow-gun force, zapping Noth in his left eye. The man’s reflexive jerk caused him to pull the trigger, but it also yanked his aim off target. The bullet seared into the lower spine of an elderly man sitting at the next table. The gunshot and the cry of agony created an uproar in the food court, giving Richards a chance to lunge across the table.
Noth realized he’d left himself wide open, despite the gun in his hand. He pulled the trigger again, but Richards had cleared the top of the table, thumbs rammed into Noth’s larynx, fingers closing on the back of his neck. The third shot plowed into the tiled floor, panic lashing out like a writhing mass of hungry crocodiles through the crowd. Footsteps thundered, screams mounting, drowning out the third gunshot. Richards wrenched with all of his might, Noth’s vertebrae shattering under the force of his powerful hands.
The gun clattered from dead fingers, and Richards charged through the crowd.
He had to contact his pilot, Costell, and get to the base he’d set up for himself. The Rose Initiative would be hot on his heels, and there was no telling what would happen next. Richards let himself be swept along by the running crowds, got out of the terminal and hailed a taxi.
He didn’t know why the Rose Initiative had been feeding him behavior modification drugs for the past fifteen years, but suddenly his assessment of the organization’s sanction left him alone and chilled. Richards had broken loose from their control, and that made him dangerous. The battles he’d waged across the turn of the millennium to protect his government from deadly threats had been real enough. The Initiative had a stockpile of mega-weaponry housed in its Washington, D.C., headquarters, enough matériel to render the surface of the planet uninhabitable for centuries.
Richards stuffed himself and his gym bag into the back seat of the cab.
“Where to?” the swarthy man behind the wheel asked.
Richards rattled off the name of a hotel he frequented while in town. He wouldn’t stay in the place, since the Initiative knew he’d go there, but he’d be able to find a dozen places to hole up from there. The cabbie nodded and steered out into traffic, cursing other drivers in his foreign tongue.
No wonder the President had swiftly condemned his actions in Los Angeles, Richards realized. The Rose Initiative had been using him as a puppet. A weapon to keep the public in the dark about the countless threats that were really endangering them. Richards’s covert wars kept American citizens from realizing the threats of Islamic operatives and foreign influences on U.S. soil. Rather than smear the menace across the headlines and news programs, they were quietly dealt with so that those who would profit from association with the devils could continue their underhanded deals.
It was all so clear now.
For decades, he’d been a dealer in death, and now, he knew that there was no way to take back the battles he’d waged that had enabled faceless government officials in power. Their chains hung around the American citizenry.
There had to be a way to break that relentless choke hold.
Richards knew of several militia groups who would throw in with him, powerful and trained allies who could help strike several small blows against the dictatorship he’d supported while drugged. Costell would also be a great ally, not to mention Colonel Weist and his mercenary forces.
Still, even with all that manpower, there was no way that Richards could strike a significant blow. The Rose Initiative was a monolithic force.
It would take a blow unlike anything that had been struck before.
Richards thought about the Initiative’s deadly stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. From horrendous, but specific plagues to ultra-low frequency transmitters that could instill murderous rage into entire city populations, they were tools which could carve a new future.
All Richards had to do was break into the stockpile.
That meant distractions, and high-tech equipment.
And an assault on Washington, D.C., itself.
The death dealer nodded, realizing that it would be a suicidal ploy to free the world from its hidden masters, but it would be worthwhile.
Richards realized he had to atone for his wrongs against America.
2
JoAnn Wolfe looked up from the microscope as she examined a sample from the stack of bills. The Los Angeles Crime Lab night shift was no less busy than any other time of the day, but Wolfe had been given a pass on new cases and assigned to examine the evidence sample brought in by Matt Cooper on behalf of the Justice Department.
Wolfe’s dark, red tinted hair was tied back and her smooth brow furrowed with a tiny cleft of a wrinkle between her eyes.
“What?” the Executioner asked.
“I’ve got fingerprints from two sources. Both are in our database. Einhard and Admussen. They’re arms dealers. Heard of them?” Wolfe asked.
Bolan nodded. “No fingerprints from anyone else?”
“Not even on the wrapper for the stack. Normally you get impressions, and while I have fingertip shapes, there are no whorls,” Wolfe said. “Unless this guy regularly trims his fingerprints, he should have left something, but I’ve got nothing.”
Bolan frowned. “Regular use of solvents would smooth out the ridges.”
Wolfe let him look through the microscope. There were round, featureless pads left by skin-based oils on the bill that hadn’t
