Don Pendleton - Lethal Vengeance

Still, this deal...

Ross didn’t know the woman who’d reached out to him, had never met her in the flesh, although he’d fantasized a bit about that flesh after their two brief conversations on the phone. Her introduction came by way of Ross’s immediate superior—at Langley, not the Juárez consulate—with an impression of the urgency involved. That opener came wrapped as a request and not an order, something Ross was free to skip, but something told him that refusal might return him to that cubicle—maybe a basement cubicle at that, with no way out.

So Ross had gone for it, and wasn’t sorry yet. Ms. X had claimed her name was Sharon Patowsky—clearly false—serving as some kind of “liaison” with the Department of Justice in Washington. He knew the drill for cover stories, legends, plausible deniability and had listened to the sultry voice, agreeing to fulfill her needs.

The guns and other gear had been no problem. Once he had delivered them to hard-eyed “Captain Brinkman”—yet another alias—Ross figured that his role in whatever might happen next was done. But why did he regret that now?

He had a final call to make and placed that from his office, where he checked for taps and bugs routinely twice a day. It stood to reason that the contact number was a front, would certainly be disconnected after Ross left confirmation of his errand, likely via voice mail.

But he had it wrong on that score. There was no recording, no robotic voice instructing him to press 2 for English and leave his message at the beep. Instead that sultry voice came on the line after a single ring.

“How goes it, Mr. Ross?” she asked.

“Delivery complete, ma’am.”

“Thank you for your help on this. We won’t forget it.”

Ross didn’t ask who “we” might be. In fact, he never got the chance. The line went dead, no parting chitchat, no goodbye. He let five minutes pass then tried the contact number from his cell phone, maybe living dangerously.

And he heard, “We’re sorry. The number you’ve reached is out of service at this time.”

Likely forever.

So much for the sexy voice and Ross’s tiny part in something that might prove to be explosive, maybe hot enough to blow the roof off Ciudad Juárez. But there was still a chance he could keep track of it.

And why the hell not, if he took precautions?

Ross had been a gambler all his life, beginning when he’d joined the Corps. And truth be told, he missed the action, maybe more than it was healthy to admit.

Sometimes Bolan begrudged the needs of his own body. Hunger, sleep, whatever—all of them got in the way when he was on a roll. But sometimes, getting started, there was nothing else to do but pause and think, no matter how the passing time burned like a steady drip of acid in his brain.

So he was eating now—tamales and a side of rice, served in a foam take-out container from a drive-through restaurant—and studying the maps Tim Ross had given him, comparing them to notes he’d taken when he’d met with Barbara, listing addresses for potential targets in his search for Hal Brognola.

The restaurant stood in the city’s Colegio district, which lived up to its name by hosting a dozen institutes of higher learning. Its central location also gave Bolan a wealth of choices for thrusts in various directions, depending on the target he selected to begin his task of running Brognola to ground, or locating his kidnappers. Conversely, if he had been carried farther off than Ciudad Juárez, Bolan would have to deal with that problem when it arose.

Meanwhile, he had to start somewhere.

During their fly-by meeting in El Paso, Barbara had supplied him with the names, addresses and unlisted phone numbers of the top cartel men in Ciudad Juárez. If Stony Man could pluck that information from the air, sitting three thousand miles away from the Chihuahua killing grounds, it stood to reason that Mexico’s federal and state police must also know exactly where to find the district’s leading narcotraffickers.

Kuno Carillo and Rodolfo Garza both had extradition warrants waiting for them in the States, their list of charges spanning every felony from smuggling tons of drugs to terrorism, an untold number of murders, plus a raft of lesser counts including weapons violations, money laundering, kidnapping—take your pick. The stumbling block to their arrests: in recent years, tension between the Mexican president’s office and the White House had impeded any US operations inside Mexico, including capture of the war-torn nation’s leading criminals.

On top of that, police corruption often shielded prime offenders—and, as Bolan knew too well, that was a two-way street. Mordida , the time-honored bribery that many underpaid officials throughout Mexico considered as their rightful due, was frequently as rife in Washington, New York, Miami, LA—take your pick—as anywhere south of the Rio Grande.

Bolan had long since given up on fixing that pervasive problem, if it could be fixed at all. He had a more specific task and this time his attention had been narrowed to a laser point.

One man to find, alive or dead, among 1.5 million native residents and thousands of tourists swarming over what promoters liked to call the “Borderplex.” So many hiding places, innocent civilians to avoid and cops to dodge when Bolan started rattling cages, hoping to shake something loose.

And he was starting now.

Chapter Three

Somewhere in Ciudad Juárez

As Hal Brognola came awake, he was aware of four things instantly.

The first was pain. Aside from minor bruising he’d received while grappling with his kidnappers at the Gateway Rio Grande Hotel, his neck still hurt from the injection he’d received during that scuffle and his head ached now, as well. He’d been sedated for a second time, with chloroform, which left a sickly sweet taste in his mouth and tingling around his lips and nostrils from the sopping rag that had knocked him out.

Okay. At least pain meant he wasn’t dead.

Second, Brognola realized that he’d been moved. He was no longer zip-tied to the wooden chair he’d occupied before, but rather laid out on a table of some kind, secured in place with leather straps across his chest and waist, around his wrists and ankles. From the chill, he knew it was a metal table, which put him in mind of autopsies, and that was bad.

Not dead, he reassured himself once more. At least, not yet .

Third thing: his burlap hood had been removed. Now he was blindfolded, but not with simple cloth. It felt more like one of those sleeping eyeshades he’d seen people wear on airliners and sometimes in the movies, where some actress partied through the night then slept the day away. The part over his eyes felt almost silky, lightly padded, fastened with elastic stretched over his head.

And finally, wherever he was now, the atmosphere had changed. Instead of being in a normal room—that concept almost made him laugh, but the big Fed restrained the impulse—this one felt clammy, as unfinished basements often did.

Oh, and it stank of death.

Brognola fought an automatic sense of panic, wrestling with it until his pulse and respiration simmered down. He didn’t want to think about his wife, Helen, waiting for him to call, time stretching out until she might be on the verge of panicking herself. She’d have no reason to suspect that he was out painting El Paso red, fooling around, much less that he’d forgotten her or their nightly call whenever he was forced to be away from home.

No, she would realize that something had gone wrong, preventing him from keeping their phone date. But what would be her next step? Lacking an El Paso telephone directory, she couldn’t call around to hospitals asking if he’d been in some kind of accident. She could reach out to the El Paso county sheriff’s office and/or the municipal police, but that felt like a stretch.