Don Pendleton: Renegade Agent

The corridor door slid shut and a red light blinked on above it, shining for ten seconds or so before going out, indicating April was through the interlock.

Bolan repeated her process, pronounced the word "Phoenix" into the mike. A few moments later he was with her in the War Room. The Bear was at his computer terminal. On the end of the conference table next to him was an ashtray containing his pipe and a scattered pile of computer printouts, most of them dusted with the ash from Virginia's best cut.

"I think we've got something, Mack," Kurtzman said in his deep voice, not turning. He inputted something and watched as characters raced across his video display, then leaned back and grunted with satisfaction. "Gadgets and I were able to figure out the format of Charon's signature." Kurtzman turned to Bolan for the first time. "That is, the number of letters and characters and so forth of his user code and access protocol."

"Aaron," April prompted gently.

"Beg your pardon? Oh, right, sorry." Kurtzman stuffed dark tobacco into his pipe. "I tend to forget that computer detective work might not be as interesting to you as it is to me." He touched a match to the pipe, puffed out great clouds of blue smoke. "Okay, the bottom line," Kurtzman said.

"Two bottom lines. One — we're not ready to address the DonCo mainframe yet, but we do know that Frederick Charon has juggled the computer books to disguise the fact that a prototype of the new missile guidance system that his company was developing is now missing, along with the specifications manual that he himself developed."

"How big a prototype?" Bolan asked.

"Physically? It would be fairly substantial it would have to include a control board and a display of some sort. I'm guessing to a degree, but I'd say two standard twenty-two inch bays, each about as tall as a refrigerator. The manual would be no size at all. Reduced to microfiche which it probably already is it would fit in a small envelope."

"Okay," Bolan nodded. "What else?"

"Two — something that looks very much like that missing prototype was shipped to Transworld Import/export, an outfit that has a warehouse in the International Zone at Heathrow Airport in London."

"That way," April explained, "any cargo held for transshipment only does not have to pass British customs."

"Third," Kurtzman growled on, "Transworld Ist is a front run by our friends in MI5 — BRITISH Intelligence. And fourth, there is here Kurtzman shuffled through the printouts '4-a 99.3 percent chance that this "Sir Philip" whose name you saw, Mack, in Charon's datebook is Sir Philip Drummond, a high ranking MI5 official."

"Wait a minute," Bolan objected. "That doesn't make sense."

Kurtzman smiled with satisfaction. "It does if you add in point number five." He held up his hand, palm out, all digits splayed. "Sir Philip Drummond is a puppet," he announced. "And the Kremlin is pulling his strings."

Bolan's coffee cup was still half-full when he left the War Room. Within an hour, he was in a military jet, clearing the Atlantic coast, racing to meet the incoming twilight.

The man sitting alone at the corner table was in his mid-fifties, and wore the years well. He was dressed in an impeccably cut Savile Row three-piece suit, gray with muted gray pin striping, and his full head of silvery hair looked as if it had been styled that morning, every strand in place. He was slim and tall, carried himself with an offhand grace, visible now as he came into the vip lounge on the first floor of the departures section of Terminal Three at Heathrow Airport, London, England.

From his position four tables away, Mack Bolan had a clear line of sight to the elegant man. Two walls of the lounge were glass, looking out on the airport's terminal aprons. Planes with a variety of international markings taxied to or from the building every minute or so; Terminal Three handled intercontinental traffic. A third wall of the lounge was faced by a long table on which a luxurious buffet brunch had been laid out, a complimentary courtesy for the international passengers that the various airlines were most anxious to woo: business people, statesmen, anyone who did a good deal of traveling. The brunch was presided over by a Pakistani chef in livery, as was the cocktail bar tucked up to the fourth wall.

At mid-morning, there were no more than a dozen people in the room. Of the four at the bar, Mack Bolan knew the identities of three. The sandy-haired man at one end was named Voorhis; the man with whom he appeared to be in deep conversation was named McMahon. Both were American Intelligence agents.

At the other end of the bar, a young blond man, hardly twenty-five, appeared to be dawdling over a Guinness stout.

In fact he was an agent of MI5. Like his American colleagues, he was fully briefed on what was to come down.

The distinguished-looking man at the corner table glanced at his watch, then took a sterling silver cigarette case from his inside jacket pocket.

He extracted a slim brown-paper cigarette, produced a lighter that matched the case, drew in flame.

His name was Sir Philip Drummond, and although he did not know it, he was sitting right in the middle of a suck.

A West Indian waiter in immaculate whites approached Bolan's table and refilled his coffee cup. Bolan's protective coloration for this rather refined corner of the human jungle consisted of a lightweight turtleneck and conservative slacks. The coordinated jacket was specially cut to conceal the Detonics mini .45 Associates automatic pistol riding in custom-crafted shoulder leather under his left arm.

On the table next to him was a slimline Samsonite attache-case with combination lock.

Three tables away, Sir Philip stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and glanced impatiently at the lounge's entrance. He did not smile, but his frown relaxed as he rose from his seat. Frederick Charon crossed the room.

The two men shook hands with no particular warmth, then both sat down. Bolan kept them in the corner of his vision. To all appearances, two classier members of a pair of great nations, meeting to discuss something of worth or import within the elegant surroundings to which they had been bred.

In reality, two traitors, pooling resources to sell out those great nations. For all their intelligence, culture, and social status, to Mack Bolan these two men were certainly no less harmful than a pair of fat old Mafia dons who argued obscenely about how to split the profits of their vicious exploitation.

It was all a question of choices. Charon and Sir Philip could have chosen to be leaders, men who enriched the societies to which they had climbed to the top.

Instead they had chosen to be criminals.

The clue to the tie-in had come with the notation on the datebook of Charon's secretary: "Brunch with Sir Philip." It was an elementary computer exercise for Aaron Kurtzman: compare that name to all names filed in the Stony Man Farm data banks, with crosscheck to the NSC computer. It had taken exactly 51 seconds — Kurtzman was proud to announce to produce the correct name.

Bolan had studied the printout summary of Sir Philip Drummond's dossier on his transatlantic flight. Now aged fifty-six, he was the only son of a titled family that traced its lineage back to England's famed House of York. He was a member of the House of Lords, and was third-ranked officer below the Minister of Defence. His private school was Eton, after which he read for his baccalaureate at Cambridge University. In addition he held a Master of Arts degree from Oxford.

And for more than thirty years, Sir Philip had been a double agent for the Russian KGB.

This creep had first become involved with communism as a theoretical system, when he joined a socialist student faction at Cambridge. Such an association was not particularly unusual in those days, was considered no more than a harmless intellectual flirtation. Since Sir Philip had renounced it quite quickly, it was no barrier for his entrance into the British Intelligence service, first as a military officer during the Second World War, then with MI5 after mustering out.