Don Pendleton - Defense Breach

Abbas took the memory stick and hustled to the side of the Sunni on the left as Hasseim began walking to his SUV. Only he and his driver would take the trip back, the others would remain to arrange the scene.

“The Americans will be alerted?” Hasseim asked the driver, although his tone conveyed the question was more a statement than an inquiry.

“Within hours. We’ll give them GPS coordinates. They’ll be here tonight,” the driver replied.

Hasseim took a final look toward the water when they reached their vehicle. The sun was low, reflecting off the Gulf’s rippled surface. In his mind, he pictured the narrow channel jammed with American warships. From the highlands above the strait, militiamen equipped with hundreds of missiles would find the unprotected vessels easy targets. Allah be willing, the remainder of the code would be delivered to his servants and the infidels would be destroyed.

Running a dry tongue over his chapped lips, Hasseim climbed into his SUV. For the first time since morning, he thought of his most recent partners in Las Vegas, the city that in Hasseim’s mind, said all there was to say about Western civilization.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Hal Brognola was sitting at the conference table, engaged in quiet conversation with Carmen Delahunt and Akira Tokaido, two-thirds of what Aaron Kurtzman considered to be the best cybernetics team anywhere. They stopped talking and looked up when Mack Bolan stepped into the room.

“Striker,” Hal Brognola greeted the warrior.

Bolan pulled a chair away from the conference table and slid in next to Delahunt.

“Something I didn’t ask,” he said, looking at Brognola as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “was how they came to our attention in the first place.”

“Homeland Security phone monitoring,” Brognola replied. “Key words and patterns flagged them for follow-up investigation. Akira started looking into their actions three weeks ago.”

The hacker snapped his bubble gum a few times in rapid succession before saying, “Rookies. Lame attempts to cover their tracks. E-mail, phone and bank records are all over the place. They’re definitely selling a code they say will disable ADAS.”

From his seat a good six feet away, Bolan could hear a tinny percussive sound coming from Tokaido’s high-fidelity earbuds. As he often did, he wondered how the young man could hear and carry on normal conversations while rock music was coursing at ear-splitting volume into his auditory canals.

“If we know who they are and what they’re trying to do, why don’t we just go get them?” Bolan asked.

The others looked directly at Brognola, who said, “Let’s wait until everyone gets here. Carmen has to be brought up to date, too.”

The wait was not long. Bolan poured himself a cup of coffee from the insulated carafe placed next to the cups. The coffee was a high-quality blend, not Kurtzman’s horrid brew. He had barely taken his first sip when the door to the War Room opened.

Barbara Price entered first, followed by Huntington Wethers, then Kurtzman pushing his wheelchair forward with both hands, a cup of his infamously strong coffee in a holder mounted to the chair’s left arm.

The three found places at the conference table, Price sitting directly across from Bolan, whom she greeted with a slight smile as she eased herself onto the upholstered cushion and pulled her seat closer to the table. Kurtzman moved to the open spot at the head as nonchalantly as if a chair had never occupied the space there.

“Who’s up?” he asked while taking his brimming coffee cup from its holder and tasting a small mouthful of the steaming drink before putting it onto the conference table’s highly polished surface.

“Let’s get a summary,” Brognola answered. “Striker asked how we initially latched on to them, and Carmen has been out of the loop. Akira?”

“Robbie Maxwell’s group,” Tokaido said, referring to the team’s contact at Homeland Security, “picked up keywords and phrases. Not sure if it was random. Home Security monitors employees at companies like Nautech more than ordinary citizens. After the initial alert, Maxwell put one of his guys into Nautech’s facility in San Diego while we investigated four engineers whose names he gave us. Like I just said to Striker, they tried covering their tracks, but it was easy to trace phone calls and money deposits into numbered accounts in the Caymans. Each account received a deposit of five million dollars.

“Bank records led us to the four engineers,” Tokaido continued, ticking off each name with his fingers. “Sherry Krautzer, David Thompson, Wesley Maple and Marlene Piaseczna. Maxwell’s group was all set to arrest them when the four suddenly vanished.”

“Security leak?” Wethers asked, displaying the methodological approach that Kurtzman had known would be a perfect complement to Delahunt’s intuition skills.

“We thought so at first,” Brognola jumped in to answer the question. “But Maxwell’s guy was very discreet. These four were not tipped-off. They were just lucky.”

“Not too lucky,” Bolan said in a flat voice, remembering the names spoken by the young woman at the cabin who had identified herself as Sherry Krautzer. “Three of them are dead. Marlene Piaseczna is the only one who wasn’t in Manitoba.”

“We believe she’s the ringleader,” Brognola replied, “but Maxwell also thought there could be a fifth conspirator. Akira’s money trail gives support to that idea. Twenty-one million withdrawn from the source banks, but only twenty million redeposited into the four accounts in the Caymans.”

“I can see young engineers going on a wild spending spree,” Delahunt said. “Fast cars, electronic gadgets, designer clothes and jewelry—a kid with money for the first time could go through a quarter mil in nothing flat.”

“But they didn’t,” Brognola said. “We’ve been into their apartments. There’s some evidence they were planning to leave the country, but they didn’t go out and buy a bunch of stuff. That missing million bothers me.”

“Did the Piaseczna woman betray her comrades?” Price asked.

“I don’t think so,” Bolan answered. “If there were separate accounts in the Caymans for each name individually—” he glanced at Tokaido, who gave him a confirming nod “—she wouldn’t be able to get at her co-conspirators’ money, so greed wasn’t a motive. The killers in Manitoba tried to strong-arm the remaining code from the engineers there. They didn’t have it. Piaseczna must be holding the second half the buyers wanted, and she was savvy enough to make sure everything would never be in one location.”

“Striker’s right,” Brognola said. “Homeland Security couldn’t put names to the killers’ corpses you left at the cabin in Manitoba, but they’re sure they were from the Middle East.”

“Amateurs!” Kurtzman exploded from the end of the table. “Stupid engineers! Thinking they could hold back half the code and leverage it into providing protection for themselves. Didn’t they realize their customers were cold-blooded murderers?”

“Never mind their customers,” Brognola said. “What about their new partners?”

Turning to Bolan, he added, “You’ll love this. Maxwell put some of his people on the money trail. It also leads to the McCarthy Family in Las Vegas.

“It seems,” the man from Justice continued, “that our engineers hired McCarthy to be a go-between for the final piece. According to Maxwell’s Las Vegas source, the remaining segment of code is apparently planned for delivery to one of McCarthy’s men. McCarthy is passing it on to the terrorists, whoever they are.”

“Slick move,” Price said. “The engineers must have been terrified of their buyers. They thought delivering half the code would keep them safe until they got all their money. But they knew once their customers had the complete product there would be no reason not to kill them. So they hired the Mob to make the final delivery. Slick but stupid. Out of the frying pan. How reliable are Maxwell’s sources, Hal?”