Don Pendleton - Ramrod Intercept

That Jim Lake wasn’t only his own man, but a god among mere mortals to be worshiped.

He was scanning the bank of security cameras hung from the ceiling over his desk when he spotted the two men in the lobby. The bigger one was haggling with the security guard, flashing a wallet packet, looking as if he were poised to fly over the desk and start slapping the man. A Fed, on the muscle, only if that guy was a Fed he was Gandhi.

“Gentlemen, I believe we’re about to have company.”

“I don’t like the looks of those two,” Grandahl said, craning his neck some to stare up at the camera bank. He was fingering his goatee, running a nervous hand over his shiny dome. “I can’t raise Morton or Roswell. We should have heard from them by now. We know the Justice Department was set to bag—”

Lake sounded a long deep chuckle, a hollow knell that seemed to swell up the suite with the sound. “Relax. We’ll deal with them. It’s time we wrapped this up anyway. We have one more pigeon out there on the run to take care of. We have a backup security force in town, which you just put out the call to, on standby.” He leaned up, smoothed out the arms of his silk jacket, punched a button on his phone. “Giddell, I’ve got company on the way. They look rather unpleasant.”

“Yes, sir, I saw them, too.”

“Stand by but make yourself available next door. There’s going to be some noise, then we’re bailing.”

“Understood, sir.”

Lake wheeled back a few inches, reached under his desk and slid the Uzi submachine gun from out of its special mounting. He checked the load, cocked the bolt, then took a peek at the Beretta 92-F in shoulder rigging. If it wasn’t enough, there was an arms cache in a hidden wall panel, twelve paces to his right.

“When we’re finished here,” Lake told his hitters, “we go pay this little snip Godwin a visit. I’m hearing he got his filthy paws on the Ramrod Intercept microchips and data manual. Without those, gentlemen, my deal may fall through. If I can’t retrieve them, our whole timetable will be altered.”

“Meaning?” Grandahl asked.

“Meaning we’ll have to go the lab in Idaho and pick up another batch. I had planned to do that anyway. One last shipment has already been arranged through a CMF.”

“A classified military flight,” Grandahl said, nodding. “Sweet.”

“Standard procedure. Look alive, they just hit the elevator.”

Of course, he took the obligatory alerting phone call from the security guard.

“They had badges, Mr. Lake, looked official, meaning they looked real enough to me. Special Agents from the Justice Department, they’re telling me. Carl Lemmon and Rosario Bocales. I—”

“Not a problem, there was nothing you could do. I’ll handle it. Thank you.”

Jim Lake leaned back and sounded off another death knell chuckle. Life, he thought, was just about to get real interesting.

And what was real gain, true triumph on the way to glory without risk?

WHEN LYONS AND BLANCANALES stepped off the elevator to the DYSAT floor, they found yet more cameras monitoring their every step.

Lyons led the march toward the mammoth teak doors with the gold-plated Jim Lake, President hung as large as a Vegas neon sign. He could feel Pol’s nerves mounting as they closed on the doors, the mirrored walls reflecting their grim looks, the cameras catching them on the roll. Lyons felt his own personal time bomb ticking away in his gut.

It was time to start spreading the misery around, kick a few of the top dogs in the teeth.

“How come I feel like raising a middle finger salute to one of those?” Lyons growled.

“How do you want to play this?”

“Straight and to the point. Just follow my lead.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

They reached the DYSAT gates to the inner sanctum. Lyons was about to bang on the door when a chuckle that sounded as if it came from the bowels of hell filtered out the small intercom beside the doors.

“It’s open, ‘Agents’ Lemmon and Bocales. Please, enter. Please, fear not.”

Lyons considered going through the door with his Colt Python out so they could get quickly beyond any friendly preamble. He opted to leave the big piece where it was for the moment, until he got a firm read on what was what. He led Blancanales through the door and found himself moving into a sprawling suite fit for a king. Big leather couches. Wet bar, giant-screen TV. Two inches of white carpet, wall to wall. Long black marble conference table. Soft white light fell from the ceiling, framing a handsome face he recognized from the Farm’s intel pac on Jim Lake. As he moved deeper into the suite, he was somewhat curious why a former Air Force colonel would wear his jet-black hair down to his shoulders, like some wanna-be hippie or biker. Go figure how the mind of a traitor, or an insane demon worked, he thought.

He took a measure of the two other men standing off to the side of the desk. One was a Van Gogh–type gunslinger, goatee, but no hair on his head, the face gaunt and weathered, the eyes sunken black pieces of coal. The other guy was a buzz-cut issue like the men he’d gunned down in the alley. The eyes of both men warned Lyons they had itchy trigger fingers.

Lyons took up turf in front of the desk, hauled out his Justice credentials. And Lake gave him that deep chuckle, in his face.

“Please, don’t insult me.”

“How’s that?” Lyons growled.

“Okay, we’ll play it your way for the moment. What can I do for you, Agent Lemmon and Agent Bocales?”

JIM LAKE KNEW a bulldog when he saw one. In fact, wildmen were the only kind he wanted to hire on as security. Guys, yes, who could go through a door loud or quiet, in search of blood and wearing somebody’s guts for a necklace, either way they charged in. No fear, just do it. To even consider losing made a man a loser before the proverbial feces even hit the fan.

The one called Lemmon wasn’t the kind to tap dance or dream of losing. “Here it is, Colonel,” the big guy said, with a contemptuous note dropped on “Colonel.” “Three of your buzz-cut Dirty Harrys were eighty-sixed. They tend to want to shoot people on sight to make their day. They tend to seem to not care if they’re civilian or like us, with the Justice Department, which already dumps you in a world of feces. This is what we know, and this is what we’re going to do. We know you’re running a scam to unload high-tech weapons and technology overseas somewhere. We know you were using your executives and think tankers to draw out the wolves, my guess is so they could be scapegoats when you left Dodge. You’ve gone for broke, and you lost. Now we have two of your employees who want to turn songbird under our care and protection.”

Lake knew what had to be done. He steepled his fingers, rubbed his eyes and blew out a long breath.

“What? Am I boring you assholes?”

“Uh, Agent Lemmon, let me speak frankly, so we can get past all this macho posturing and palavering.”

LYONS SENSED the whole mood change around him. It was as if a dark veil had dropped over Mr. Chuckles, some rage clamped down on before then, churning over now, building heat, the pot of his black soul simmering. Van Gogh and Buzz-cut Issue had to have been clued in to the sudden shift in Lake’s demeanor, and Lyons read the squaring of the shoulders for what it meant.

It was set to blow, loud and hot. It was going to get messy, and the mere fact Lake was prepared to go for it told Lyons the guy had backup somewhere, ready to bolt town to pick up the pace on whatever his dark agenda.

“Well, Agent Lemmon, I guess there’s not much left to say, except I can’t recall the last time I saw a G-man walking around in rubber-soled combat boots. I didn’t know government issues, the official kind, trooped around with compact submachine guns in special swivel rigging beneath oversize windbreakers. To answer your suspicions, yes, I have a deal, a major deal in the works that could change the entire destiny of the world. Yes, my employees were nothing more than human chess pieces to be moved around at my wish, to take the fall, as you put it, while I fly off into the sunset. You know what my problem is—”