Don Pendleton: Extraordinary Rendition

“Someone from the Company?” Bolan asked.

“Better. From the FSB.”

“Outstanding. All I need now is a Cheshire cat.”

“Maybe you’ll find one as you go along.”

Brognola pulled a CD in its jewel case from an outer pocket of his coat and handed it to Bolan. The soldier palmed the gift, catching a small boy nearby watching from the shelter of his mother’s skirt. Wide-eyed and curious.

Bolan gave him a smile, raising a cautionary finger to his lips, and made the jewel case disappear.

“Who’s that?” Brognola asked.

“My backup,” Bolan said. “He kneecaps anyone who tries to follow me.”

“He’s built for it.”

“So, I’ll look over this and book a flight to…where, again?”

“Moscow. Our boy lives near Saint Petersburg, but he’s forever back and forth, tending to business.”

“With any luck,” Bolan said, “I can interrupt his cash flow.”

“Interrupt him altogether,” Brognola replied. “But gently, if you please.”

“My middle name.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We ought to talk about what happens to the target if it all goes sideways,” Bolan said. “How badly do you want him breathing, if I can’t deliver him intact?”

Brognola frowned. “The notion of your failing,” he replied, “has never crossed my mind.”

THAT WAS A LIE, of course. Brognola’s job at Justice—and at Stony Man—was to consider all the options anytime he put an asset in the field. Failure was always possible, no matter how much he abhorred the thought of it.

Mistakes were made. Luck turned. Men died.

Sometimes the wrong men died. And women, too.

Brognola didn’t like to think about that aspect of his job, but he was paid to think about it, to plan around it. Have another hole card tucked away when best-laid plans went south, sideways, or up the chimney in a puff of smoke.

False modesty aside, Brognola was the best in Washington at what he did, which, on the public record, was a paper-shuffling job at the Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

He weighed the price of failure in advance. His field agents were also friends, a lapse in strict professionalism occasioned by the circumstances of their meeting. Bolan and the rest had crossed Brognola’s path initially while he was with the FBI, assigned to bust the Mafia. He’d played within the rules in those days—to a point, at least, before he’d seen the Executioner in action, scoring wins with the direct, scorched-earth approach.

The rest was history. He’d known who to recruit when Stony Man was organized, and they’d been carrying the fight to human predators around the globe since then.

But not without a cost.

Sunlight enveloped Brognola as he emerged from the International Spy Museum. It stung his eyes and cued his sweat glands to resume their labor. Slipping on a pair of sunglasses, the big Fed focused hard on blocking out the names and faces of lost friends who jockeyed for position in his mind.

Go back to sleep, he warned them. I’ve got work to do.

And leaks to plug. Maybe.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a rivalry between competing federal agencies had drawn blood. In most such cases, wrists were slapped, someone was reassigned or quietly encouraged to retire. Charges were rarely filed. Brognola couldn’t think of anyone who’d actually gone to trial during his decades on the job.

Agents were jailed for bribery on rare occasions, or for selling secrets to a foreign power, but screwing with their rivals in the “sister” services was more or less a given.

Until someone bought the farm.

Brognola made himself a promise. If he found out someone in the Company—or any other branch of government—had sent eight G-men to their deaths in Russia, he would see the guilty parties punished. Off-the-books, if necessary.

Even if he had to do the job himself.

“Homeland security” was nothing but a joke—and a bad one, at that—if the people who’d sworn to uphold it spent all their time looking for ways to hamstring one another. They were worse than useless, in that case.

They were the enemy.

Brognola had spent his professional life negotiating red-tape jungles and negotiating labyrinths of office politics. He played the game as well as anyone in Washington.

But he was sick of it.

In peacetime, it was one thing. Call it busywork or personal amusement. Each department had a reputation and budget to protect—goals that could often be achieved more easily by undercutting so-called friends than going to the mat against real enemies.

But peace, such as it was, had ended when those hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Like it or not, the country was at war, with no end in sight.

And in a war, you either pulled together…or you lost.

In wartime, those who helped the enemy were traitors.

And in Brognola’s world, traitors could expect no mercy.

As for Sokolov, the global death merchant, Brognola recognized the man for what he was. A player and a pawn. He armed the killers, but he also served them. And above him, shadowing his every move, were men and women who could take him off the board at any time. He lived because they found him useful for advancement of their various agendas.

Brognola, likewise, had masters watching him and breathing down his neck. Self-interest motivated them, like anybody else, and he could only hope that their needs in this instance coincided with some greater good.

Alive or dead, removing Sokolov from circulation was a good thing. Putting him on public trial, revealing those—or some of those—he’d served might also benefit humanity. It wouldn’t stop the global trade in arms or any of the slaughter that resulted from it, but it might slow down the pace of killing.

For a day or two.

Small favors, Brognola thought as he neared the entrance to his subway stop.

If anyone could do the job, Mack Bolan was the man.

BOLAN SAT in a drab motel room on I-495, better known as the Capital Beltway. His focus was the laptop humming softly on the smallish writing desk in front of him. Brognola’s CD-ROM was giving up its secrets, prepping him for Moscow and beyond.

First up were photos of Gennady Sokolov, with a detailed biography. Bolan surveyed the high points. Born in 1962, in what was now Turkmenistan. No record of his parents had survived, nor any hint of siblings. Sokolov had joined the Russian army at eighteen, had made the cut for Spetznaz—Russia’s special forces—eight months later, and had been a captain by the time he mustered out to join the KGB in 1984. Six years later, he had graduated from Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages, fluent in English, French, Spanish, German and Arabic, besides his native tongue. After the Soviet collapse, he was in business for himself.

And what a business it had been.

Over the past two decades, Sokolov had founded half a dozen cargo airlines, shipping military hardware out of La Paz; Miami; the United Arab Emirates; Liberia and Ostend, Belgium. From 1992 until the present, Sokolov had armed at least one side in every war of any consequence, and several dozen that had barely rated mention by the talking heads at CNN. He’d left his bloody tracks in Africa and Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, Latin America and Bosnia. In nations theoretically at peace, Sokolov’s weapons and explosives found their way to neo-fascists, would-be revolutionaries, ecoterrorists and mafiosi.

Sokolov had been arrested once, in Thailand, but had bribed his jailers to go deaf and blind while he escaped and caught a charter flight out of the country. That had been two years ago, and in the meantime Sokolov had spent most of his time in Mother Russia. Recent sightings reported from Damascus and Islamabad remained unconfirmed. No charges had—or would be—filed against him in the death of eight FBI agents who’d died far from home, in a failed bid to end his career.