Don Pendleton - Mind Bomb

“Oh, I am gonna remember you, asshole!” Ibanez snarled. “You have any idea who you’re screwing with?”

Lyons spent a long infuriating moment searching his eyebrows for the answer. “Webb County Sheriff’s Department?”

Ibanez smiled pure hatred. “That’s right, smart guy, and you are so dead.”

Lyons lifted his chin and turned his head to the right and then the left. “You sure you don’t remember me?”

“I’ve put away more scumbags than I can count, but I’d remember you from a lineup.” Ibanez glared bloody murder at James. “And Super Fly over there.”

James grinned at Lyons. “Called me Super Fly!”

“Up yours.”

The Phoenix Force pro was smiling but he and Lyons exchanged a look of agreement. Spooky was at 3 percent and rising. Lyons spread his hands and kept his tone mocking. “This morning? Half a platoon of Zetas? RPGs? Grenades? Kidnapped Mexican nationals? Me shooting you in the chest twice? None of this ringing a bell?”

The captain’s eyes flickered down to his scorched and bruised chest. For a heartbeat Lyons saw pure confusion before Ibanez snapped back to rage. “I don’t know what’s going on here or what your beef is...” Ibanez’s voice dropped low. “But best you kill me, Sunshine.”

Lyons waved his pad. “Nah, think I’ll burn you a steak instead. You like hot sauce, Captain?”

“Screw you! Webb County always pays its debts!”

Lyons picked up his laptop and followed James out. Ibanez shouted after them. “Dead! You’re dead! That goes for you, too, Shaft!”

James grinned happily. “Called me Shaft.”

Lyons wasn’t in a laughing mood. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.”

James’s amusement faded. “This is messed up.”

They went back to the kitchen and Lyons tapped the video feed back to two-way. “What’d you make of that?”

“Well, if I didn’t know you’d been there personally, I’d—”

“You’d believe him. I know. What do you make of it?”

“Positively anomalous.”

“I keep hearing that word. I don’t like it.”

“You seem to keep running into this behavior on this one, Carl. What do you make of it?”

Lyons looked at James, who shrugged. “I’m going to give him a few minutes to calm down. Then I’m going to want to get a blood sample to run a full toxicological on him, then make an attempt at a real interview.”

“All right.” Lyons let his mind go detective again. He considered the known facts, and all he had was that almost nothing was known. He could work with that. “Bear?”

“Yes?”

“For the moment I am going to back-burner demonic possession.”

“Okay...”

“I need you to search databases, start with Homeland Security and the FBI. I need any suspected act of terrorism or a violent crime where the suspect was caught and denied all knowledge. I would be tempted to start internationally.”

“You know just about everyone says they didn’t do it, in every language.”

“Look for more than that, not just denial but denial of any knowledge, particularly if they got caught red-handed. I don’t care if it’s going to be a long night.”

Kurtzman rubbed his head at the enormity of the task ahead of him and his team. “You’re talking a long week, possibly a month.”

“I’ll give you a hint to narrow down your search. Look for anomalies and look for suspects who later went into comas, went crazy or died.”

The Repair Shop, Zurich, Switzerland

PIRMIN “THE WOLF” WOLFLI worked late into the night. There was nothing wolflike about him. He was short and pudgy. His bulging dome of a forehead, drooping jowls, pendulous ears and heavily bagged, sad-canted eyes made him more like a human caricature of an aged basset hound. Around the office people affectionately called him “Wolfie.” Behind his back less affectionate people called him “the Gnome.”

“The Wolf” was a sobriquet he had first earned long ago in what he warmly remembered as “The Swinging Seventies.” The nickname had been earned by his ruthlessness in hunting down his fellow man. He was in his seventies himself now and by his own admission not much was swinging these days. Wolfli was still a very dangerous hunter of humans; but rather than loping through the shadowy corners of Europe like a wolf as he had in his youth, he now plodded along like the hound he resembled, and used his very well-trained nose to ferret out his prey.

Wolfli let his juniors do the running.

His back office looked like a tiny eighteenth-century European salon. He hunched over his desk, peering through a flex-necked jeweler’s magnifying glass as he performed delicate surgery upon the innards of a 1978 vintage Rolex Sea Dweller diving watch.

Watch repair was a front, but Pirmin Wolfli was a genuine artist. He considered it occupational therapy. The craftsmanship, precision and rightness of a Swiss instrument gave him some hope that the human race was capable of doing at least one thing correctly. It relaxed him, and he was currently under incredible levels of stress. The little bell above his door rang and a tall, beautiful, blonde, buxom woman walked in.

Daniela Winter was his personal assistant both in the shop and in the Wolf’s other line of business. The Wolf took in her perfect carriage and her perfectly tailored charcoal pantsuit. Ninety minutes of a very strenuous style of yoga before dawn every morning and very subtle cosmetic surgeries over the past decade had left Winter at some un-guessable age ranging somewhere from a possible late thirties to an unthinkable fifty. She had once been runner-up in the Miss Switzerland pageant. Winter never mentioned it because it might give a clue as to her real age. The Wolf smiled. He was one of the few people who knew it.

“Pirmin.” Winter was one of the few people on Earth who addressed the Wolf by his first name, and only in private. She spoke in High German. “We have a problem.”

The Wolf gently lifted out a tiny brass flywheel and frowned at the corrosion. The old diving watch had salt-water damage. “I am beset by them.”

“I fear the Americans may have become involved.”

Wolfli set the tiny wheel on the felt in front of him. The operation he was currently running was the most delicate, dangerous and had the highest stakes of his career, and quite possibly anyone else’s on Earth. “Are you sure?”

“It seems very likely.” Winter made a face. “Ferraris thinks it is the FBI. Circumstantial evidence supports his idea.”

It was very likely that one day soon either Winter or Ferraris would inherit the Wolf’s position. Ferraris had the bad taste to be openly in competition for it and to make misogynistic innuendo behind Winter’s back. “Well.” The Wolf peered over his glasses. “Ferraris does bench-press more than you.”

Winter smirked.

“What do you think?” the Wolf inquired.

“It does not smell like the FBI.” Winter waved a casual hand. “To me anyway.”

The Wolf smiled again. Winter was from the central canton of Fribourg. High German was her first language but any Swiss who met her would laugh and say, “That one is Italian!” by temperament. Wolfli himself was from the southernmost canton of Ticino and he had grown up speaking Italian. Winter was the first woman the Wolf had ever recruited and trained. “And what is it that you smell, Dani?”

Winter’s nose wrinkled. “Cowboys.”

The Wolf nodded. The United States was an amazing place, and the FBI and CIA were marvelous organizations. The best of their kind in the world. However, during the seventies and the Vietnam conflict, and the eighties when their President Reagan had decided to win the Cold War, the prime of the Wolf’s fieldwork, the CIA had cemented its cowboy reputation among its fellow nations. It remained a nickname for them to this day in some circles.