Don Pendleton - Oblivion Pact

On the wall behind the colossal desk was the usual assortment of impressive diplomas, testimonial letters from satisfied clients, mostly major corporations, and quite a few newspaper clippings showing Edward Carter with the mayor, and other noteworthy folks, with everybody smiling at the cameras. All fake of course, but the pictures did show Kegan himself.

Built like a bull gorilla, Eric Kegan still had the winning smile of a politician selling used cars, slicker than a snake in oil. The only tell was his eyes. The face could smile, the mouth laugh, but the eyes stayed the same, cold and dead, like the eyes of a shark.

It was strange that a man forever in hiding would allow himself to be photographed, especially by a newspaper. Anonymity was paramount for his line of business—selling death wholesale. Maybe Kegan just liked having his picture taken. Bolan shrugged. People were often contradictory.

Lifting the slashed leather chair from the floor, Bolan checked the sides for hidden controls but found nothing. Sitting in the chair, he twisted back and forth a few times, listening for a squeak, but hearing only the rustle of his clothing.

The desk itself was huge, a monstrous slab of cherrywood, topped with green leather and edged with shiny brass studs. It was clearly an antique from a bygone age and had to weigh a ton.

Going around, Bolan checked the front and sure enough saw a line of holes in the wood from three different pistols, but none of the lead had achieved full penetration. Even his furniture was bulletproof. That was when he caught a whiff of something in the air other than the talcum powder and blood. Perfume from the woman? No, what assassin would do a job wearing perfume to reveal her presence in the dark? It might be a man’s cologne, brandy-cut tobacco mixed with the faint aroma of homogenized oil.

He checked the top right-hand drawer and there was a cleaning kit for a gun. Plus a spare magazine and a box of ammo for a 10 mm Colt Magnum pistol—semisteel jacketed hollow-point rounds. Serious ammo. Those tens hit like sledgehammers and punched holes through everything short of Threat-Level-Five body armor.

Wearing only Level Four at the moment, that gave Bolan pause. Then he moved on. Kegan had to be stopped. End of discussion.

Closing the drawer, the soldier looked over the office again and tried to reconstruct in his mind how it got this way. Everything had been smashed or slashed open, even the books on the shelves. The plastic fern in the corner had been removed from its wicker pot and wood chips were scattered everywhere. Looking for something small and flexible... Documents, perhaps?

There were three doors lining the interior wall. Wading through the mounds of trash, Bolan went to the first and found that it opened onto a short hallway with stairs going up and another door to the left that had to lead to the basement.

The stairs didn’t creak as he’d expected, which was a good sign of proper maintenance. At the top, Bolan reached a blank wall with picture-used-to-be-here stains and a short hallway. Just to the left was a modern kitchen, obviously a recent addition, with a small breakfast area.

The kitchen table was in pieces, the steel tube chairs disassembled. Same as downstairs, the kitchen had been thoroughly searched, corn flakes littering the floor, bag of sugar busted wide open. Bolan studied the sugar for patterns in the granulated surface but found none. Whatever was hidden hadn’t been found here.

Rummaging through a drawer Bolan found a can opener and wasted precious minutes opening a couple of soup cans from the bottom cupboard. He had once encountered drug lords who smuggled messages to each other hidden inside sealed cans of soup. Simply open the bottom, insert your item, then weld the bottom back on. It had worked for years before the DEA got wise, then they did nothing to stop the transfer of information, merely opened the cans, copied the messages then sealed them up again.

Moving upstairs, Bolan moved onward, keeping an ear out for a car arriving or a knock downstairs. A neighbor might have seen him enter and called the police. But this was Columbus where everybody minded his or her own business and quietly got killed without disturbing the people next door. An open doorway led to what remained of a living room, couch flipped over, cushions slit open, the covers removed from the electrical outlets, pictures off the wall, even the television set had been kicked in and the cover removed. After the assassins had been chased away by Kegan and his crew, somebody else had entered the building, and done a thorough job of searching the place from top to bottom. Smart move, and the perps were certainly thorough enough, he’d give them that.

The curtains were off the windows, and the blinds torn down, the weighted bottoms cracked apart. Impressive. Bolan never would have thought of hiding anything inside the bottoms of venetian blinds. He was starting to get the feeling that whatever Kegan had hidden had to have been found and was long gone. But he still had to double check. Just the chance of stopping Kegan was worth the effort.

Down the hall was a bathroom with grout dust covering the fixtures. Somebody had run a knife along the wall tiles to look for fresh work over a secret panel. They really were good! Bolan filed that trick away to use himself sometime in the future.

The bedroom looked like a hurricane had hit a rag factory. Nothing was intact. Feathers swirled about his shoes from pillows gone to heaven. The northern wall was a single expanse of closets with a bare top shelf. Bolan probed for a panel leading to a crawl space or attic, but found nothing except dust and deceased spiders.

The light-switch panels had been yanked off the walls, exposed wires dangling dangerously loose, and the carpet was torn up in several spots. A rush of adrenaline was building within Bolan. Time was short, the numbers falling, and he wondered if there was any place they hadn’t looked.

Going to his personal favorite spot to stash important things, Bolan lifted the ceramic lid off the toilet tank and looked inside. Nothing there but water, the usual mechanical works and a drained sanitizer cylinder. The pros who’d hit this place would never have missed an area so obvious as the toilet tank. But had they searched everything?

Tucking away the Beretta, Bolan pulled a knife. Grabbing hold of the copper support rod to hold it steady, he slid the blade along the slightly slimy rubber. The knife slipped once and cut him, but no blood welled from the wound. Just a surface scratch. Bolan proceeded more slowly, switching to a fillet blade and sawing through the resilient material, rather than trying to slice it apart like a ripe melon. The slick bulb wasn’t cooperative, but he finally got through, and a clear corner triangle of a plastic bag jutted into view.

Forcing the blade along the side of the bulb, Bolan widened the cut until it was big enough for him to grab and pull it apart. There lay a clear plastic bag filled with maybe a dozen film negatives. Going to the sink, he wiped the bag off on a dingy towel bearing the name Sheraton. The bastard had millions in a Swiss bank, but stole hotel towels?

Opening the sandwich bag, Bolan lifted out the negatives, only touching them by the edges, and held a strip to a flashlight. They were negatives of a passport, birth certificate, college diploma, dental and general medical records for a Shawn MacTeague of Glasgow, Scotland. The man in the photos was Kegan. Bolan knew that the man spent years building a perfect identify and with these gone, Kegan would have no place left to run. He’d be forced to make a stand and fight, which was exactly what Bolan wanted.

Slipping the bag full of negatives into a pocket, Bolan paused to text a brief message to a friend in Washington: Kegan was Shawn MacTeague, Glasgow.