way of greeting.
“Caught a tailwind,” Bolan said, and shook hands all around.
“You need to freshen up, or shall we get to work?”
“Work’s good,” the Executioner replied.
THE FARM’S WAR Room was a basement chamber, accessible by stairs or elevator. Bolan’s party used the elevator for Kurtzman’s sake, those who were ambulatory taking familiar seats around a conference table built for an even dozen. So far, within the project’s history, there’d been no need to bring in extra chairs.
Brognola sat at the head of the table, with Bolan on his right, Price on his left. Kurtzman took the other end and manned a keyboard that controlled the War Room’s lighting and its audio-visual gear. He dimmed the lights a little, leaving them bright enough to read by without eye strain, and lowered a screen from the ceiling behind Brognola’s chair. Beside him, a laptop hummed to life.
“What do you know about Albania?” Brognola asked without preamble.
“It’s on the Adriatic, in southeastern Europe,” Bolan answered. “Facing toward the heel of Italy. Russia took over after World War II, but then there was some kind of break that pushed Albania toward China in the early sixties. The communist regime collapsed along with Russia and the rest of them, in 1991 or ’92, followed by chaos and violence. It’s one of the poorest, most backward countries in Europe. Beyond that,” he added, “not much.”
“That’s better than average,” Brognola said. “But you forgot the Albanian Mafia.”
“Okay.” Bolan breathed and bided his time.
“Like every other place on Earth,” Hal said, “Albania’s had its share of criminal clans and secret societies throughout history. I know you faced one of its organizations not long ago. They operate under a loose set of laws called kanuni, as you know, similar to the Mafia’s rule of omertà, triad initiation oaths, and so on.”
The big Fed paused, then proceeded when Bolan said nothing.
“Albanian mobsters made their living from vice and black-market trading under the old Red regime. They got their first real boost during the war in Kosovo, which interrupted the flow of Turkish heroin to western Europe through Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. Rerouting tons of smack through Albania changed the drug landscape. So much heroin passed through Veliki Trnovac that the DEA started calling it the Medellín of the Balkans. Today, the Albanian Mob has active branches in Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and they’re giving the Cosa Nostra a run for its money in Italy. Scotland Yard’s tracking Albanian operators in the U.K. And—huge surprise—they’ve made it to the States.”
“Sounds like a problem for the FBI,” Bolan said.
“And it would be, if we lived in normal times. By which I mean pre-9/11 times, without two wars in progress overseas and half the G-men in the country eavesdropping on mosques. It’s no great secret that the Bureau shifted its priorities after the towers fell. Hell, it was in the papers and on CNN—twenty-four hundred agents removed from ‘traditional’ investigations to work the terrorist beat, while Mafia and white-collar prosecutions dropped by 40 percent or more. They’re trying to redress that imbalance today, over at the Hoover Building, but they left the barn door open too damned long.”
“So, let’s hear it,” Bolan said.
“Last week,” Brognola said, “a Coast Guard cutter on patrol along the Jersey Coast tried to stop and search an unidentified trawler. The trawler’s captain made a run for it, then set the boat on fire and bailed. He got away somehow, or maybe drowned, with whatever crew he had aboard. The boat—a shrimper stolen from New Orleans six weeks earlier—burned to the water line with nineteen people still aboard.”
Bolan frowned. “You said—”
“That the captain and crew got away. These were passengers.”
As Brognola spoke, photos of a blackened, listing boat began to scroll across the screen behind him. Soon the focus shifted to recovery of charred and shriveled corpses, while the trawler did its best to sink and disappear.
“Illegals,” Bolan said.
The big Fed nodded. “From the autopsy reports, it was eight men, seven women and four children. Cooked alive belowdecks, for the most part.”
“Jesus.”
“Maybe He was watching,” Brognola told Bolan, “but He didn’t lend a hand.”
“They were Albanians?” Bolan inquired.
“Affirmative. Against all odds, the Coast Guard saved some papers from the wheelhouse. Traced a bill for fuel back to a dock on Bergen Neck, New Jersey. Sift through the standard bs paperwork, and you’ll discover that the dock belongs to this guy.”
Bolan watched new photos march across the screen above Brognola’s shoulder. Each image depicted a man of middle age and average height, with an olive complexion and black hair going salt-and-pepper at the temples. His meaty face reminded Bolan of a clenched fist with a thick mustache glued on.
“Arben Kurti,” Brognola said. “He runs the Mob on this side of the water, moving drugs, guns, people—anything that he can milk for cash.”
“So, human trafficking,” Bolan said.
“Split two ways. He offers immigrants a new start in the States, complete with bogus green cards, if they pay enough up front. Sometimes they get here and discover that they still owe more. You’ve heard the stories.”
“Sure.”
“The other side of it is purely what we used to call white slavery, before the world went all politically correct. Today its labeled compulsory prostitution. If the Mob can’t dupe women into using their underground travel agency, thugs snatch them off the streets of European cities, maybe some in Asia and Latin America, too. Age only matters if it helps to boost the asking price.”
Across the table, Barbara Price mouthed a curse that Bolan hadn’t heard her use before. Her ashen face was angled toward the screen as Kurtzman kept the pictures coming.
Girls and women being led from seedy rooms by uniformed police. Stretchers employed to carry out the ones who couldn’t walk, either because they had been drugged or used so cruelly that their bodies had rebelled, shut down in mute protest. A couple had the pallid look of death about them.
Bolan wondered whether it had come as a relief.
“Kurti answers to this man, back home,” Brognola said. Another string of slides revealed a somewhat older man, larger in girth if not in height, dressed stylish by southern European standards without working the Armani trend. He was fat-faced, with bad teeth and tombstone eyes.
Bolan wished he could study that face through a sniper scope.
“Rahim Berisha,” Brognola announced, by way of introduction. “Think of him as Albania’s Teflon Don. He’s got the best and worst friends that money can buy, on both sides of the law. Some say he knows the president of Albania, but we can’t prove it. There’s no doubt that he has connections to the Albanian army, moving weapons out the back door for a profit. Double that in spades for the Albanian State Police and RENEA—their Unit for the Neutralization of Armed
