Don Pendleton: Renegade Agent

There was a guard there, dressed like the others, but he was faster. His gun was already out and coming up.

Bolan was faster still. The Beretta spoke a soft word, and blood bloomed on the front of the guy's blouse as he slammed back against the wall and slumped to the floor, suddenly unseeing eyes staring witlessly at his Executioner.

"The personnel file," Bolan said in a flat steely voice. "I want it."

The bald technician did not move. Saliva flicked his trembling lips. Bolan crossed the room, let the guy look into the blackness of the Beretta's silencer.

"The names of the ones who have signed on with Edwards. Now."

This one was by the ear, yet again, but it was a short-odds gamble. Bolan was counting on Edwards's training and his affinity for hi-tech methods.

They would dictate that records be kept, and the logical place for keeping them was in Edwards's mainframe computer at the Wheelus base. And according to Toby, it was tied in by phone link to the villa.

Bolan lay the muzzle against the guy's high bald forehead. "I... I..."

"Do it," Bolan said softly.

The guy spun around in his chair. It took him a moment to get his trembling fingers under control. He tapped at a keyboard, moaned as he made an error. The video display in front of him went blank as he started over. A moment later a line printer in the corner started to chatter out copy.

Bolan went over and glanced at it as it came up.

It was all there: names, code names, aliases, service histories, affiliations, contracts.

Nearly two dozen agents, some still active, some terminated for a variety of real and contrived reasons.

Among them they represented every major country, free and communist, in the world. Bolan ripped off the printout, folded it and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. It was not his function to interfere in the workings of the intelligence services of other nations, but he would pass the list along, for sure. A lot of directors were going to be unpleasantly surprised to find out that some of their key people had traded loyalty for avarice. But they'd also be damned relieved to find out who they were. The precarious world balance would be that much more stabilized.

A lot of bad apples were going to be shaken out of the tree. Next to the line printer was a radio transceiver. Bolan put three 9mm slugs into its face.

The balding technician was staring at him, gap mouthed.

"Turn around," Bolan ordered.

The guy looked at the dead room-guard. Most of his upper torso was now greasy with blood. The guy began to sob, as if he had seen a vision of his destiny revealed.

"Turn around," Bolan said again.

The blubbering guy slowly put his back to Bolan. Bolan hit him behind the ear, just hard enough to stop the blubbering.

He paused only long enough to reassure himself that the guy's pulse and breathing were steady, before following the declining numbers out of the room.

He did not want to be late for breakfast.

The waiter wheeling the serving cart looked up at Bolan in surprise. Then he saw the Beretta, and the surprise turned to fright. In front of the cart were the double doors to the dining room. Bolan flattened himself against the wall to one side, gestured to the waiter with the pistol.

The waiter slid the doors to either side and rolled the cart inside. Bolan spun around behind him, tracked down the Beretta, and said, "You're first, Edwards." He was counting on the other man's documented coolness under fire. For the moment it worked.

"Don't anyone move," Edwards said softly.

In all there were five men around the table.

Edwards sat at the head. Bolan recognized the others from Toby's description. The two on Edwards's right hand were senior agents of the Russian KGB. Across from them was a colonel in the Cuban Direccion General de Inteligencia, and a ranking officer of the extremist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In front of each was the rind from a crescent of melon. "Hands flat on the table," the Man from Ice ordered.

"Do what he says," Edwards echoed. "None of you are in any danger in this house."

They were free to believe that if they wished. In fact, Bolan did not consider any of them as targets, unless it was their lives or his. Sure, they were enemies of everything Bolan cherished, but no war had been declared. Though Bolan might rue the fact, he knew that along with the official sanction he had accepted came limitations, restraints.

Five pairs of arms framed the melon plates.

Though he contained it, Bolan's righteous anger gnawed at him. These four were not renegades, not in the sense that Edwards was.

Possibly they were here on their own initiatives; but just as possibly they were present on direct sanction of the governments they represented. It was common and confirmed knowledge that the Soviet Union and its client states were semi-supporters of international terrorism. Edwards's scheme would undoubtedly accrue to their benefits as well, and perhaps even attract their covert support.

"What do you want?" Edwards said calmly, in the same tone he might use to offer more coffee.

Bolan gave him no response but the implacable cold stare on which he had the guy skewered.

There were two other men in the room, besides the waiter, who had retreated to a corner to cower.

Kenneth Briggs, Edwards's full-time bodycock, stood behind his boss, his hands up at shoulder level, palms out. A Slavic-featured guy in an ill-fitting suit that was too heavy for the climate stood behind the two KGB agents.

Bolan kept Briggs within the field of his peripheral vision. "Take the gun out and drop it," he told the guy. "Two fingers will do the job." The heavy .45 thudded on the thick carpet.

Briggs was the dangerous one. Toby had managed to cozy up to the head bodycock once, get him talking. Before he had gone bad he had won nearly every decoration in the manual. And his two consecutive tours in Nam had been underjungle foliage, not a tin roof.

Like Bolan, Briggs was a survivor.

"Against the far wall," Bolan told the men at the table. "Your backs to me. Keep your hands high and make sure I can see them. Not you, Edwards."

The four men were professionals ( pro enough to recognize walking death when they saw it. None of them made any abrupt moves as chairs slid away from the table.

Except for Briggs.

The big man picked the moment for its distraction, his right hand flashing behind his neck and out again, the movement smooth as an athlete.

And if Bolan had in fact been distracted, it might have worked. Bolan twisted sideways, dropped to a crouch. There was no time for anything but a body shot. It was enough. The 9mm flesh-mangler caught Briggs in the middle of his flat stomach.

Behind Bolan the razor-sharp six-inch blade of the throwing knife quivered in the rococo woodwork.

Briggs sat down hard. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Then he seemed to shudder, and his eyes closed as he toppled over to sprawl across the carpet, no movement of breath disturbing his perfect stillness.

Bolan tracked onto the Russian bodycock and snapped, "Go ahead. But do it real slow." The Russian's left hand came back out from beneath the lapel of his suit, gingerly holding a 9mm stockless Stechkin machine pistol. He let it drop.

Frank Edwards looked thoughtfully at the backs of the five men lined up against the wall across the table from Bolan. "Let me make a suggestion." The man's tone was normal, conversational. But to Bolan it grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. "I know who you are," Edwards went on. "Not your name, of course, but names don't mean that much." His open face broadened in a faint smile. "I hear things. About one man, doing a lot of damage to some of the people I, ah, associate with. In Panama, Turkey, across the frontier in Algeria." Edwards shifted very slightly in his chair.