rumored to be in the pockets of organized crime. Tiffany was clean-shaved, and had a puckered scar across his throat where a Jamaican drug lord had tried to behead him and failed. That was what gave the arms dealer his characteristic growl for a voice.
“What the fuck…a fake!” Tiffany snarled, dropping the spent drum of the Atchisson and reaching for another from a pile on the desk.
“Don’t do it, Mike,” Bolan said softly.
Tiffany froze with his hand less than an inch from the ammunition drum. Slowly, he looked up to squint into the darkness.
A long moment passed, then he curled his lips into a snarl and tossed away the Atchisson. It landed with a clatter on the carpeting, right next to the smoking ruin of a computer. The cover was off, and an electric stun gun was resting inside the complex wiring, molten plastic dribbling from the hard drive onto the floor.
“Okay, you got me, feeb,” Tiffany growled, raising both hands. “But you took too long, and my computer has bizarrely crashed.” He grinned as if he had just won the battle. “Now, read me my rights and call me a fucking lawyer.”
“Okay, you’re a fucking lawyer.”
Tiffany scowled. “What was that?”
“I’m not with the FBI,” Bolan stated, cracking alive another glow stick while advancing. “And I’m not here for your records, or to arrest anybody.”
“That so?” Tiffany muttered. “Well, you sure aren’t here to zap me, or else you would have tossed in a live grenade.”
Biding his time, Bolan said nothing, letting the arms dealer work out the details for himself. Interrogation was an art, not a science.
“You don’t really think I’m going to rat out my contacts for a shorter jail sentence?” Tiffany barked in a cold laugh.
“Mad Mike, the Brooklyn Terror? That possibility never even entered my mind,” Bolan stated honestly, pressing the hot barrel of the Colt against the man’s cheek.
The skin sizzled at the contact, but aside from a slight furrowing of his brow, Tiffany gave no indication that he felt anything. Finally, Bolan removed the weapon.
“Okay, now that you’ve had fun, what the fuck do you want?” the dealer demanded, rubbing the spot with his fingertips. “Money? I can get you that. More than you can spend in a dozen lifetimes!”
“Wrong again, Michael,” Bolan whispered, making the other man strain to hear the words. This was an old interrogation technique that almost always worked.
“Weapons?” Tiffany snorted in disdain. “You didn’t have to ace half my staff to cut a deal for some guns! What do ya want? Stinger missiles, C-4 satchel charges? I can even get you a PEP laser, if you give me a week.”
Bolan had started to speak when he saw Tiffany’s eyes widen in delight. Instantly, the soldier’s combat instincts flared and he spun out of the way with both guns blazing.
A big man stood in the doorway, aiming an M-16 assault rifle. He stumbled backward from the triphammer impact of the .50-caliber round from the Desert Eagle ricocheting off his chest, the shirt tearing to reveal body armor. Then the triburst of 9 mm rounds from the Beretta walked across the man, tearing away more cloth, then punching through flesh and bone.
As the riddled man fell, the M-16 cut loose a wild hellstorm of 5.56 mm cartridges, then the M-23 grenade launcher shoved beneath the barrel boomed, the 40 mm shell shooting harmlessly down the hallway.
Before the concussion stopped, Bolan spun and fired the Desert Eagle again.
Caught with his hand in a drawer, Tiffany shrieked in pain as the top of the desk exploded into splinters. He jerked back his arm, his wrist bristling with slivers. “Son of a bitch!” he snarled.
Kicking aside a chair, Bolan went around the desk and yanked open the drawer. Inside was a sleek, black Glock machine pistol and several ammunition clips.
“Now, I thought we had an understanding, Michael,” Bolan said, dropping the magazine of the Desert Eagle to slam in a fresh one.
Watching the magazine fall to floor, Tiffany went pale. “Okay, okay! Sure, no problem, we got a deal!” he replied, backing away until he was flat against the wall. “Ask away. Whatever you want. I’ll tell you everything!”
Bolan stood perfectly still and said nothing. Then he slowly raised the Desert Eagle and took aim.
“Sweet Jesus, what the fuck do you want to know?” Tiffany yelled, a touch of fear in his voice at last. “I’ll talk already! Just tell me what you want to know!”
Unfortunately, Bolan had no idea exactly what he wanted to know. So there was only one way to play this, cold and hard. “Tell me about what happened a few days ago,” he demanded, leveling the Beretta.
After inhaling deeply, Tiffany let his breath out slowly. “Oh…that. I should have known. Well, I’ll be fucking delighted to roll over on those assholes. They paid half a mil in advance, but when I delivered the goods, they released mustard gas and took everything…and killed fifty of my best men. Fifty! Even the fucking rats in the rafters were dead before the air was clear enough for me to get back inside the warehouse!”
“The warehouse on the wharf outside?”
“Yeah, bunch of locals also bought the farm. Some bums, a few gangbangers and two of my cooks.”
Civilians had died; that upped the ante. “Sorry for your loss,” Bolan said in a graveyard voice. “Keep to the important details.”
“Yeah, sure.” Slowly reaching for a wall switch, Tiffany turned on the lights. He blinked as they came on. Bolan didn’t.
“There were twenty or so of them, but one guy was in charge,” Tiffany said, sitting down in a plush leather chair. Wisely, he kept his hands in plain sight. “A foreign guy, nice dresser, platinum Rolex and such.”
“Name?”
“Mr. Loki.”
Now, that was a new one. “More,” Bolan said.
“Loki spoke really good English, but with a weird accent, like nothing I’ve ever heard before,” Tiffany said with a shrug. “Know what I mean? Not Israeli, German, French or anything normal like that. Something else.”
Which left most of the world’s population. “What did he purchase?” the soldier demanded impatiently.
“Junk.”
Bolan scowled. “Drugs?”
“No, I mean real junk,” Tiffany repeated. “Tons and tons of it. The oldest, cheapest crap I had in storage. I was figuring on dumping it all on some third world warlord who didn’t know napalm from orange juice, who didn’t know a revolver from a cruise missile, but this guy had cash in hand, bags and bags of euros. He wanted all of it, but didn’t have quite enough cash. So we cut a deal and—”
“And he used gas and took all of it.”
“Every fucking thing in
