The Killing Rule

The computer wizard regarded Bolan dryly. “I gather you left a road map to your exact location.”

“Pretty much,” Bolan admitted. “You get anything on the bartender at the Claddagh?”

“Ronald Caron, former Irish wrestling champion, former military policeman in the Irish Defence Forces, suspected of gun trafficking, suspected of harboring fugitives, suspected of assault, twice arrested on conspiracy charges but released for lack of evidence and a ‘person of interest’ in nearly every alleged IRA action in London for the past two decades.”

Bolan nodded. The bartender might be a hundred pounds over his fighting weight, but underneath the jolly exterior he had given off the vibe of a very dangerous man.

Kurtzman pulled up MacGowan’s file again. “It’s of note that Liam MacGowan and Caron both served at the same time in the Irish Defence Forces. Though MacGowan was light infantry rather than an MP.”

That didn’t come as a surprise, either. The Irish Defence Forces were small by nature, generally equipped with obsolescent equipment due to budget constraints, and chronically short of manpower. English recruiting officers for the U.K.’s armed forces were only a ferry ride across the Irish Sea and offered better pay, better benefits, better terms of service and were always happy to enlist Irishmen. The only reason to join the Irish Army was that you were Irish and wanted to.

The Irish government denied it, but there had always been cells of the IRA within the Irish Defence Forces, who used the Irish military as an IRA recruiting and training ground, as well as using the military structure for networking. He had no doubt that Caron had probably recruited MacGowan. When it came to petty intrigues, strong-arming and IRA errand-running on the streets of London, Caron was MacGowan’s and O’Maonlai’s control officer.

Still, killing CIA agents seemed somewhat above their pay grade. There was something bigger happening, and bigger fish were involved. Bolan was sure of it.

His phone rang. “Just a sec, Bear.” Bolan picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

A basso profundo, distorted voice that had obviously been put through a voice scrambler spoke over the line. “You’re dead here.”

Bolan pushed a button on his electronic warfare suite. The trace started, but he doubted his caller would stay on the line. Bolan had his suspicions about the caller. “That you, fatso?”

“Get out of England or you’ll wind up like the other two.”

The line clicked dead.

“Well, that was pretty cut and dried,” Kurtzman commented. “So you think they have the hotel surrounded?”

“I’m sure they’ve got an eye on it.” Bolan checked his watch. It was 2:15 a.m. He doubted they would have an assassination attempt or a snatch set up this quickly. The call was more designed to egg him on rather than to warn him off.

Bolan decided to be egged. “Well, I’m going out for a ride.” He scooped up the shillelagh and took a few choice items out of a suitcase.

“You’re not going back to the pub.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll check back in a little later.” Bolan clicked off the satellite link, tested the security measures in the room, then took the elevator down to the garage. His Renault rental vehicle was nondescript, but had enough power to suit his needs. Bolan key-carded the gate and tore out into the night. There was little traffic in the late hour other than cabs, so he quickly arrived at Pub Claddagh. The light over the sign was off and the windows shuttered closed. The ancient, thick oak door would probably withstand minutes of abuse from a police handheld door ram.

Bolan exited his vehicle and pulled a short length of flexible charge out of his coat pocket. He peeled off the adhesive backing, inserted a detonator pin and pressed the charge against the door lock. He stepped back and pushed a preset cell phone number. Yellow fire cracked like a halo around the lock, and Bolan put his foot against the door and shoved.

The lights were on. The fire in the fireplace still crackled. Caron blinked in surprise from behind the bar. MacGowan and O’Maonlai looked up from their beers in horror. Two men sat with the thugs. Bolan didn’t know them, but he recognized their long, dark coats and the hoods they’d pushed back onto their shoulders.

The Executioner closed the distance in three strides. Both of O’Maonlai’s lower legs were in casts, and a pair of crutches leaned against the table. The left side of MacGowan’s face was swollen as if a rugby ball had grown under the skin. The bruising had turned an ugly black and his left eye was swollen shut. He was drinking his pint of stout through a straw. He winced and sputtered beer as Bolan advanced. He couldn’t work his jaw to speak.

O’Maonlai shouted and pointed hysterically. “It’s him! He’s the man who—”

Bolan rammed his heel into the man’s chest and toppled him and his chair backward. MacGowan started to rise and Bolan lunged, thrusting his forefinger like a fencer into his opponent’s distorted left cheek. Liam let out a high, thin scream and fell backward over his chair.

Bolan grasped his new shillelagh. The two men Bolan didn’t know had recovered from their initial surprise. The closer man slapped a hand down on the table to push himself up and his other reached under his jacket. Bolan swung the club like a hammer and brought it down on the man’s hand. The man jerked and cringed with shock. The Executioner then swung the shillelagh in a tennis forehand and swatted the hand clawing beneath the coat. The man slid out of his chair, screaming and tucking his crushed hands against his sides.

The other man was up, his coat thrown back, and his silenced PB pistol had just cleared leather, but the combination of the long sound suppressor and a shoulder holster made for a slow draw. Bolan lunged again, ramming the brutal head of the shillelagh into his opponent’s solar plexus. The blood drained from the man’s face as his sternum cracked beneath the lead-loaded club. Bolan brought the weapon down across the gunman’s wrist. The ulna cracked and the pistol fell to the floor.

The assassin joined it a second later.

Ronald Caron leisurely came around the bar with his own shillelagh. He tapped the huge knob into a hand the size of a bunch of bananas and smiled at the weapon Bolan held. “Oh, boyo, you should have brought a gun.”

Bolan smiled back. “I did.”

Caron continued to advance, apparently without a care in the world. “You should’ve used it, then. When you had the chance.”

Bolan took a step back and put the table between them. He didn’t want to shoot Caron, but Cro-Magnon club fighting was the Irishman’s game, not his. Caron stepped over MacGowan’s mewling form and continued to advance. He tsked at the weapon in Bolan’s hand. “You know, I never much cared for the leaded ones. It ruins the balance.” He dropped his club to his side and began making small, lazy figure eights. “Of course some say it adds power. But as for me?”

Caron moved with speed belying a man of his age and bulk. He swung the shillelagh up and around, not like a man with a club but a man cracking a whip. The club crashed down and smashed the pub table between them in two. Caron recovered instantly and tapped the knob into his palm again, smiling at the carnage he’d wrought. “I say it’s the man behind the shillelagh that matters.” He stepped forward, wood crunching beneath his feet and his smile going ugly. “What d’you have behind yours, boyo?”

Crossing clubs with the big man was suicide.

Bolan flung his shillelagh. He threw it down like a game of mumblety-peg being played with sledgehammers. Caron should have had polycarbonate Lexan inserts in his shoes. The giant Irishman grimaced and tottered with his first two toes broken. “Oh, you’ll—”

Bolan was already airborne. He sailed across the broken table and delivered a flying side kick into Caron’s chest. It was like kicking a beer keg. Caron grunted and budged half a step back. Bolan pistoned his right fist into exactly the same spot over Caron’s heart, and for the first time the man’s face registered genuine pain. His left hand shot out and covered Bolan’s face like a catcher’s mitt, his fingers vising down in an iron claw. It wasn’t quite the facial neuralgia he’d induced in MacGowan, but it felt like cold chisels were attempting to crash through his facial bones.

Bolan thrust his thumbs into Caron’s carotids, but the bull-like neck resisted the blow.

The giant Irishman yanked the soldier into his embrace by the face and rammed it with his hip. A second later he’d spun Bolan and stood behind him, the huge shillelagh pressed against one side of his throat, a brawny arm squeezed against the other. The huge hand had slid from Bolan’s face to the back of his head and shoved his face forward into the strangle. It was the figure-four choke out, aided and abetted by three feet of Irish firewood.

Caron whispered in Bolan’s ear like a lover. “Yer going to go to sleep now, boyo, and when you wake? It’ll be me standing over you. Not with my pride and joy, now—” Caron cinched the strangle deeper with a practiced shrug of his shoulders “—but with a knife from the kitchen. We’ll have a long talk you and I, before I send you to the Old Place, at the bottom of the Thames.”

Bolan couldn’t break the hold. His trachea compressed and sparkly things danced in his vision. He regretted not having drawn his pistol. The Beretta was in a small-of-the-back holster and wedged against Caron’s massive middle. He was swiftly running out of air and options. Caron knew what Bolan was thinking from long practice, and he buried his face into Bolan’s back to prevent any eye gouging.

The Executioner lifted his knee to his chest and stomped down with all of his might on the Irishman’s two broken digits, breaking a third in the bargain. Caron groaned, and Bolan raised his foot and stomped his heel down again. The Irishman couldn’t help himself. He instinctively lifted his mangled foot from the floor to protect it. Tottering on one leg, he lost all his leverage. Bolan grabbed the club pressed against his neck, dropped to one knee and heaved.

The three-hundred-pounder flew over Bolan’s shoulder in a textbook judo “flying-mare” throw.

O’Maonlai screamed as the giant beached like a whale across his broken legs. Bolan gasped air into his lungs. Caron was already struggling to rise. The soldier strode forward and kicked the Irishman in the side of the neck. The blow had far more power than a karate chop, and the bartender went limp. The shooter with the broken sternum lay gasping weakly and staring up into the lights. His gun hand lay like a broken bird protectively between his legs. MacGowan was reaching through the rubble for Bolan’s fallen shillelagh. His open eye widened in terror as Bolan loomed over him. The soldier gave him another finger poke in the swollen hinge of his jaw. The thug passed out without even screaming.

The remaining shooter had risen to his knees and elbows and was making an admirable attempt to wrap his broken hands around his silenced pistol. He looked up just in time to receive Bolan’s foot in his teeth. He fell onto his back and took the soldier’s second kick between the legs. He curled fetal, spitting teeth and vomiting up stout.

Bolan relieved both shooters of their pistols. He shot out the overhead lights, blew out the mirror behind the bar and with a twinge of conscience expended the remaining bullets on the vintage ports and the decades-aged single malts on the top shelf. It was a shame to shoot up a historic pub like this, but it had become a nest of serpents, and it was a calculated affront. He wanted the IRA enraged. He wanted the hotheads among them to search him out for payback.

Bolan tossed the spent pistols onto pile of humanity on the floor. He tucked his shillelagh back up his sleeve and scooped up Caron’s, as well.

Now he had two.

CHAPTER THREE

“Well, Bear—” Bolan held up wood in each hand for the satellite camera “—now I have two.”

Kurtzman grinned. “That’s very nice, Striker, but did you really have to go back and beat up everyone a second time?”

Bolan considered. “No, but I felt like it.”

Kurtzman’s faced showed what he thought of that, and Bolan knew he was right. It had been close. Two CIA field agents were dead, and so far all Bolan had to show for it were two pub brawls and a couple of bludgeons. He just had to hope he’d stirred things up enough that someone higher up the food chain would reveal himself. “Have Shane, Caron or any of the boys showed up in any hospitals?”