Critical Intelligence

On the phone Tsai suddenly spoke again, voice rich with suspicion. “One plus six.”

Blancanales turned and looked at Lyons, then back over his shoulder at Schwarz, hand up and face questioning. “What do I say?” he mouthed silently.

Lyons cut his eyes back to the approaching gangsters. He saw the leader produce a TEC-9 machine pistol. He turned back toward Blancanales and pulled out his silenced Beretta 92 with extended magazine.

“One plus six!” Tsai barked into the phone.

“Fuck it!” Lyons snarled. “Hang up, we’ll roll hot. I’m tired of all this goddamn sneaking around anyway.”

“We just got here!” Schwarz protested.

“Hurry up,” Blancanales answered him. He caught sight of the approaching gangsters in the rearview mirror and snapped his cell phone shut, cutting off the angry Tsai. “If you don’t move fast, Schwarz, then Ironman is going to kill all the good ones.”

Stony Man Farm

BARBARA PRICE, hair still damp from her shower, finished dressing.

She was in the bedroom of the farmhouse where she kept toiletries and clothing for the times she spent overnight at Stony Man. Most weeks she spent more time sleeping here than she did at her D.C. town house.

The shower in the room’s bathroom was running as Mack Bolan rinsed off. He’d just returned from somewhere, doing something—Price had no idea what.

He’d smelled like gunpowder and had blood under his nails. The past half hour had been stolen moments, but stolen moments were the only moments the casual couple got.

She thought idly about perhaps stripping down again and joining him in the shower. What was another fifteen minutes if she was in a stealing mood?

The push-talk application on her SME PED broke squelch and she heard Kurtzman’s gruff voice call out to her from across the Farm in the Annex.

“You on, Barb?” the leader of the cyberteam asked.

Price sighed and rose off the rumpled bed. She felt a pang at the missed opportunity but by the time she reached the phone the feeling was gone. With practiced self-discipline she slammed her shields down, brought her discipline up and become once again mission controller.

“Go ahead, Bear.”

“Barb, Carmen has pulled something out possibly relating to Seven. I think you should take a look.”

“Copy. I’m en route to your twenty now.”

“I’ll have the coffee ready.”

“Don’t threaten me, Bear.”

Price turned to look in the mirror over the dresser and pushed a stray strand of her blond hair behind an ear. Pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together. Whoever this Seven was, Price could tell she was starting to get their scent in her nose now.

It’s only a matter of time, she thought. She left the room, mind completely absorbed in the problem now.

Bolan would figure out something had come up easily enough.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“What did you find?” Price asked.

The Annex was a flurry of activity. Akira Tokaido’s desk area looked as if a bomb had gone off. Red Bull cans and Snickers candy bar wrappers lay cast around like spillover from a landfill. His fingers hammered his keyboards while the Smiths cranked out of the earbuds of his iPod.

“I found more cases of Seven,” Delahunt said. “Bear is setting up the display right now.”

Across the room Kurtzman was plugging a flash drive into a media presentation station connected to a large flat-screen monitor set on the wall. The screen saver showed the actor Mel Gibson in his costume from the Road Warrior.

“How recent?” Price asked.

“I found some interesting links to both our old MERGE and TRIO operations, but that’s old, though it does raise all sorts of questions.”

MERGE had been a criminal network consisting of elements from the Mexican mafia, Corsican crime families and Colombian cartels. TRIO had proved to be an Asian counterpart to MERGE, formed by Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian organizations.

“Seven was behind both those unifications?” Price sounded incredulous. “That kind of global influence is insane.”

“It’s not definitive,” Delahunt admitted. “But now that I know what to look for, I’m linking things together that have no business being connected. It’s like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.”

“Ready,” Kurtzman announced.

The women turned toward the display screen.

A line of bodies lay in sequence on a green tarp. The corpses were bullet riddled and all black male adults. Standing around them were five Caucasian men in desert camouflage stripped of rank and identification, all holding American weapons.

Price didn’t recognize the men but she saw one was holding a Stoner M-63 light machine gun. “SEALs?” she asked.

“Yep, DevGru,” Kurtzman replied, using the shorthand for the unit that had replaced the legendary SEAL Team 6. “In Somalia, last year. Tag-and-bag mission of al Qaeda in Africa. Major communication node and his team of bodyguards.”

“What am I looking for?”

“There,” Delahunt said. “On the one with gray hair, the leader. Bear, blow up his left clavicle.”

Kurtzman grunted and worked the control pad on his automated wheelchair. A mouse drew a box around the indicated area, then blew up the resolution. A series of stars about the size of a dime were tattooed in blue ink.