it was always with him. Humans found more ways to torment one another than a sane mind could imagine, but the minds he dealt with on a daily basis only qualified as sane within a narrow legal definition. If a predator knew right from wrong and went ahead regardless, having the capacity to curb his cruelty, he was considered “sane.”
Bolan didn’t care.
The best way he had found to treat a brain seething with malice and contempt for all humanity was with a quick pointblank lobotomy.
Patients were waiting for him in the dark heart of Prague.
And the doctor was in.
FOUR HOURS HAD ELAPSED since Bolan’s touchdown at Prague Ruzyn
His first priority, therefore—like that of many other visitors to Prague—was shopping.
Bolan came prepared with a short list of names for suppliers gleaned from Stony Man Farm. He never knew exactly who compiled the lists, nor did he care, as long as there was inventory standing by when Bolan needed it. The list, three names in all, came with specific passwords that should open doors for Bolan as required.
His first stop was a bust, the shop in question vacant, with a placard in the window that directed him to Zorka Geislerová Ltd., presumably some kind of rental agent. Moving on, he found the second vendor just about to lock up for the night, but Bolan’s coded phrase—ryba je
He went for one-stop shopping, stocking up on everything he thought that he might need to do the job in Prague. The ALFA pistol was an easy choice, dependable and widely circulated in the Czech Republic, guaranteeing that its ammunition would be readily available. Next up, he chose a Vz. 58V assault rifle chambered in 7.62×39 mm, a folding-stock version of the country’s standard-issue infantry weapon. It resembled the venerable AK-47, but internally it operated on a short-stroke gas piston the Czechs had designed for themselves, providing a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute and a maximum effective range exceeding four hundred yards, depending on the sights available.
In practice, though, the Vz. 58V was a close-range weapon. Thinking that he might have to reach out and touch someone at longer ranges, Bolan chose a Dragunov SVD-S sniper’s rifle with a folding stock and standard PSO-1 telescopic sight. The piece was chambered in 7.62×54 R—the R standing for Russian—and in Bolan’s expert hands it could bag targets out to fourteen hundred yards.
For heavy hitting when it counted, Bolan also bought a dozen URG-86 “universal” grenades, another Czech model combining both timed- and impact-fuse functions. Both were activated two seconds after release of the grenade’s safety lever. From that point onward, any impact would produce a detonation—or the lethal egg would go off on its own in 4.6 seconds. Each URG contained forty-two grams of high explosive, with a pre-fragmented casing to ensure distribution of death on the fly.
The rest came down to odds and ends. Spare magazines and extra ammunition, a suppressor for the ALFA’s threaded muzzle and a black steel reproduction of the famous Mark I trench knife widely issued in the First World War. Bolan paid for the mobile arsenal and duffel bags to hold the varied items using cash donated by a pimp in Baltimore who had no further use for money, velvet suits or the vintage purple Caddy Coupe de Ville he’d driven until very recently.
Under the circumstances, Bolan thought his contribution was appropriate.
And he would put it to good use.
BOXING HAD BEEN ASSOCIATED with the underworld for generations in America, and Bolan guessed it must have been the same in Europe. Violent men engaged in blood sport, managed—if not owned outright—by men whose penchant for mayhem made anything done in the ring seem G-rated and tame. Farther east, it was the same for wrestlers in Bulgaria, as Bolan understood it—and, in fact, the term wrestler had come to denote mobster. Then again, so had businessman, proving that no field of human endeavor was safe.
At one time or another, Bolan had been called upon to cleanse them all.
Approaching Oskar’s gym, he saw a light burning upstairs, third floor, behind a pane of frosted glass. No view inside from where he stood. He found the metal staircase bolted to the back wall, accessed from an alley lined with trash cans, strewn with rubbish that had never made it to a bin.
Bolan had a choice. He could go in through the back door, which he found locked, or climb the fire escape and pick a window, maybe hope for entry from the roof as an alternative. He’d never seen an urban tenement that didn’t have some kind of rooftop access from inside. The question was: What kind of access, and how well secured would it turn out to be?
The back door Bolan faced was steel and double-locked, a dead bolt and a keyhole in the doorknob. He could likely pick the latter with no problem, but the dead bolt would take longer, if his picks could open it at all. If there were other locks or bolts inside that Bolan couldn’t see, it would be wasted time and effort, leaving him exposed and perhaps attracting someone from the inside who’d object to uninvited visitors.
That left the fire escape.
He jumped to grab its lowest section, seven feet above ground level, pulled it down and grimaced at the squeal of rusty metal. Bolan waited one full minute for the racket to evoke a curious reaction, then began to climb when no one showed. It didn’t mean the noise had gone unnoticed, but at least security for Oskar’s gym did not include a swift-response team for the alley.
On the second floor—which Europeans call the first, distinguished from the ground floor—Bolan found the windows painted over on the inside. Also locked, which made him wish he’d brought a glass cutter along. Too late to worry over that, and he moved on to find the same precautions against spying on the next two floors. He listened at the topmost windows, on the floor where he had seen light from the building’s street side, but heard nothing to betray human inhabitants.
So, they were quiet at the moment. Or they’d moved the hostage, possibly disposed of him by this time. There was a slim chance, Bolan calculated, that the address he’d been given had been wrong from the beginning, though he doubted it. The only thing to do was to proceed and find a way inside. See who—if anyone—was home and what they had to tell him if he asked persuasively.
A Bolan specialty.
The roof was flat, with two old-fashioned television aerials protruding from the northeast and the southwest corners. Roughly in the middle stood a boxy structure resembling an outhouse, which he knew would grant him access to a flight of stairs descending to the tenement’s top floor. That door was locked as well, of course, but Bolan jimmied it with his knife blade and seconds later breathed the pent-up atmosphere of Oskar’s gym.
It smelled like sweat, leather and canvas, mildew and some kind of astringent.
Maybe
