Don Pendleton - Stolen Arrows

“Call anybody, and I’ll come back,” Bolan said, tucking the Beretta into its holster. “Only next time, we don’t talk.”

“Hey no problem.” The man smiled weakly. “Time for me to retire anyway.”

Attaching the safety belt as a prelude to rapelling down the side of the building, Mack Bolan paused at the window to glance over a shoulder.

“Dummy missiles?” he said, giving a brief hard smile.

“What the hell.” Tyree sighed, looking past the Executioner at the distant Manhattan skyline with a noticeable gap in the line of towering skyscrapers. “It’s a new world.”

Richmond, Virginia

EVENING WAS starting to fall across the lush Virginia countryside as the dark gray sedan rolled off the highway and into the suburbs of Richmond. The streets were astonishingly clean and lined with old trees, the front lawn of each house wide and immaculately maintained, with dogwood flowers sweetly scenting the air. Every car was in a garage or parked on the driveway; nobody was using the street.

“Jeez, it’s like something out of a Disney movie,” Cliff Maynard complained from behind the wheel. “I keep waiting for the music to swell and credits to roll.”

“Got to be a tough commute to D.C. every day,” Eliza Linderholm replied, checking the power-pack in her Taser. Tucking the electric stun gun away, the CIA agent pulled out a Glock 21 pistol and carefully threaded on a sound suppressor. Mr. Osbourne wanted the woman alive, undamaged if possible, but that wasn’t carved in stone.

“Maybe Dupont likes the peace of the countryside,” Cliff continued, reaching under his jacket and snapping off the strap of his shoulder holster. “It’d drive me crazy.”

“Amen to that, brother.” Linderholm smiled. “I’m a big-city girl and plan to stay that way.”

Back in Langley, the Agency was at its most busy when the place was quiet. Casual conversations and laughter meant that nothing important was happening in the world, an uncommon event. To any CIA agent, peace and quiet always meant trouble.

“This must be it,” Maynard said, checking the map on the dashboard display. He turned off his navigational computer and it folded back out of sight.

“You sure this is the right address?” Linderholm asked, sliding a medical pack into her skirt pocket. The boss had sent her along in case Helen Dupont was found in the shower or the agents had to strip search for weapons. After the debacle in London, the Agency was toeing the line on every government regulation. At least, for the present conflict.

“Got it out of her personnel file,” Maynard said, parking the sedan on the street a few houses away. Down the block, a old man watering his lawn studied the strange car in frank disapproval, then turned his back on them to concentrate on the weeding and fertilizing.

Pulling out a monocular scope, Linderholm swept the vicinity for anybody standing guard. The house was a modest two-story. Fake wooden shutters sat alongside the windows for purely artistic effect, which was ruined by the addition of a plastic gnome in the flower garden. Returning the scope to her pocket, the black woman shrugged at the sight. At least it was better than those racist Civil War lawn jockeys.

“Looks clean,” she reported.

“Good enough,” Maynard said. “Then let’s go catch a traitor.”

A low-level G4 clerk in the records department of the Agency, Helen Dupont was rather plain-looking, but known for getting overly friendly on the weekends. Fair enough. Nobody cared about sexual peccadilloes, as long as they were discreet. Consenting adults, and all that. However, a routine security check revealed that Dupont seemed to only be going to bed with people in the technical repair department. And the technicians had been among the very first people told about the plan to recover the Zodiacs so that they would be ready to safely disassemble the bombs.

However, in the opinion of Special Team Leader David Osbourne, that sounded suspiciously like sexual backpay. A crude spy would offer sex in exchange for secret information. Sometimes that worked, mostly it didn’t. On the other hand, a good spy would have sex with the target several times, hundreds of times over many years if possible, to build a good rapport and then have emotional leverage on the victim. Now the requested intel seemed more like a favor, with the implied threat of ending the affair if denied. The Agency did that themselves, and the ploy worked more often than not. To discover it was being done to them was extremely disturbing.

New rules for sexual conduct were already being drafted, but that wasn’t the pressing problem at the moment. Plain, sweet, sexually repressed until the weekend, Helen Dupont had left the office complaining of a migraine headache exactly when the Scion had stolen the truckload of Zodiac bombs.

It could just be a coincidence, those did happen. But the team was taking Dupont to the section chief for questioning. Just routine. Unless she cracked, and then the traitor would be hauled down to the Tank, the soundproofed room in the basement where enemies of the nation could be strenuously interrogated without undue interruptions.

Getting out of the car, the agents started for the house, but froze at the sight of the slightly ajar front door.

Returning to the car, Linderholm pulled out a radio and called for more agents as Maynard moved along the driveway and to the side of the door. Openly pulling his piece, the man waited, holding his breath to try to hear any noises from inside. But the house was silent. A few moments later Linderholm was at the other side of the door, weapon drawn. The agents nodded three times in unison counting down before she kicked open the door as Maynard rushed inside.

The living room was immaculate, not a speck of dust in sight or a book out of place on the shelves. Linderholm eased beside him and jerked her Glock at the hallway when they both caught a familiar smell. Oh, hell.

Rushing into the kitchen, they found nothing out of order. They moved fast down the corridor and into the bedroom. Dupont was tied spread-eagled on the bed, a soup bowl on the nightstand containing her fingernails, teeth and ears. The woman was almost naked, her clothing slashed off her to expose the bare skin, then left there to partially drape the mutilated corpse. Both of her breasts were covered with the circular burn marks of a cigar, the left leg covered with round bruises where the bones had been broken by some sort of blunt instrument, a hammer, or perhaps a baseball bat. As per regulations, Maynard checked her pulse, but there really was no need. The woman was dead, and had been for hours.

“It’s Dupont,” Linderholm said. “But this doesn’t make any sense. There is no way Zalhares could have gotten here yet to do this.”

“And why torture her?” Maynard demanded, making to holster his pistol, then moving to the closet to check. It was empty. “If she was working for them, and it now certainly seems that way, they might kill her to plug the leak. But why torture their own contact?”

Even as he said the words, the truth hit them both.

“Zalhares was a double agent,” Linderholm said, pulling out her radio again.

“Playing us and some other group against each other so that he could steal the bombs? Damn, sounds solid.”

“Hello, base? This a priority two report,” Linderholm said quickly. “Inform Internal Affairs and the chief that our contact has been neutralized, and we now have gate-crashers at the party. We’ll be back in an hour to report.”

Closing and locking every door, the CIA agents returned to their car and raced for the highway. Helen Dupont had only been a pawn and Cirello Zalhares was a double agent. Yeah, made sense. Unfortunately, it didn’t require any great leap of logic to guess who his employers were. Or rather, who they had been, since it seemed he had also cut them out of the deal. The Agency was finally going to go directly against the Brazilian S2. And there was no doubt that the breakage in innocent human life would be very high before this mess was finally settled.