Altered State

“They were here ahead of you,” she said. “So, yeah. Unless they got a tip somehow, they followed one or both of us.”

She didn’t try to dump it all on her companion, which showed class, but Bolan had no time to parse the etiquette of laying blame. It didn’t matter, at the moment, how twelve hostile men had found him.

All that mattered was evading or eliminating them.

“My ride’s a quarter mile behind me,” Bolan said. “Who’s got the closest wheels?”

“That’s me,” the DEA agent replied. “Four blocks, due north.”

“Past the VW,” he noted.

“Right.”

“Okay. We’ll let them earn their money. Are you packing?”

“Absolutely.”

Bolan shot a sidelong glance toward Edris Barialy. “You?” he asked.

“Me?”

“Are you armed?”

After a fleeting hesitation Barialy nodded, and caught the glare from his control agent. He blushed beneath his rich olive complexion.

“Right, then,” Bolan said. “Try to ignore them as we pass their car. If they get out, let me make the first move.”

“There are cops and soldiers all around the—” Falk began.

“None of them can help us now,” he interrupted her. “Our first priority is getting out of here, alive and in one piece.”

“Okay,” she said.

Her native sidekick bobbed his head in mute agreement.

Bolan led the way north, toward the waiting Volkswagen. He didn’t eyeball any of the men inside it, kept his scan of them peripheral and unobtrusive as he closed the gap, seeming to chat with Falk and Barialy about nothing in particular.

One of the men in the VW was talking on a cell phone, now, asking for orders or receiving them. Whatever happened in the next few seconds would depend upon those orders and the ultimate intent of the watchers.

If they’d been sent to take their prey alive, Bolan would have an edge. If they were simply triggermen, he’d have to put his trust in speed and hope that Falk, at least, could back his play effectively.

He put himself at curbside, with Falk on his left and Barialy beyond her, farthest removed from the street. Whatever broke within the next few seconds, Bolan was the front line of defense, trusting an agent he had never met before that day to watch his back.

Ten yards, and there was stirring in the Volkswagen, to Bolan’s right. As he drew level with the car, both doors came open on his side and two men heaved themselves out of the vehicle. Behind and beyond them, flowing traffic briefly blocked the driver and his starboard backseat passenger from exiting the VW.

A flash of metal told Bolan that one of his assailants had a weapon held against his right leg, not quite out of sight. The man was speaking to him now, Midwestern accent ruling out a Briton.

“Hey, you!”

Bolan drew the Jericho 941 as he turned, squeezing the pistol’s double-action trigger as he found his mark between the stranger’s eyes. The shot slammed home at point-blank range and snapped the dead man’s head back, shattered skull rebounding from the car’s door frame behind him as he fell.

The second target was Afghani, trying for a crouch and bringing up his automatic weapon as the Jericho swung toward him, already too late to save himself. Bolan’s next shot wasn’t precision-perfect, but it did the job, drilling his target’s cheek below the left eye, angling downward through the sinuses to clip his brain stem, heading off the mental signal to his trigger finger.

Bolan crouched and lunged, firing twice more into the Volkswagen. He caught the backseat gunner rising through a half-turn, punched a slug through his rib cage but knew it wasn’t lethal, even as the man dropped out of sight.

The driver fumbled with his weapon, tried to swivel in his seat, but found the steering wheel a deadly obstacle. The fourth round out of Bolan’s pistol struck him just below the right nostril, slamming the driver to his left and likely knocking him unconscious, even if it didn’t kill him.

Bolan spent a precious second scooping up the AKSU rifles that his first two enemies had dropped as they were dying, then straightened to find Falk and her Afghan agent gaping at him. Somewhere at his back, tires screeched on pavement, the Toyotas peeling out.

“We’re done here,” Bolan snapped. “Move out!”

CHAPTER TWO

They moved.

Bolan had no idea where he was going, but he ran as if his life depended on it, which it did. Deirdre Falk kept pace with him, Glock drawn and held in her right hand, while Edris Barialy lagged a step or two behind.

“Another block,” Falk told him. “Left on the side street.”

Bolan’s four shots had unleashed pandemonium around the Volkswagen, where he’d left two men dead without a doubt, two others badly wounded at the very least. So far, no shots had answered his, but growling engines and the cry of tortured rubber told him that pursuit was under way.

They reached the side street Falk had indicated, turned left into it, their weapons scattering pedestrians. Cars lined the curb on both sides of the street, narrowing two slim lanes to one and change, but Bolan didn’t have a clue which vehicle was Falk’s.

She solved the riddle for him when she palmed a key and pressed a button that unlocked the doors on a new Ford Focus that might have been silver or gray. In passing, Bolan noted that the agent’s car did not display a crimson maple leaf.

Falk threw herself into the driver’s seat, while Bolan claimed the backseat for himself and left Barialy to ride shotgun. If they got a running start, Bolan knew that the primary danger would come from behind, and his two liberated assault weapons gave him an edge for repelling attackers.

Unless they were trapped at the curb where they sat.

“We should go now,” he said as Falk revved the Ford’s L14 Zetec-E engine.

“We’re going!” she told him, reversing to butt her way clear of an old car parked too close behind them. “It’s damned tight in here.”

“And about to get tighter,” Bolan said as one of the Toyota chase cars swung into their street.

Bolan leveled one of his hot SMGs at the charger, but Falk spoiled his aim with a lurch that put the Ford in motion, barreling along the narrow street in a general northerly direction. Bolan kept the chase car in his view and saw its mate approaching seconds later, just as Falk cranked through another squealing turn.

The backseat of the Focus wasn’t coffin-tight, but it was cramped: four feet two inches wide, to Bolan’s six-foot-plus stature, with three feet, eight inches of head room. It was awkward for defense, but Bolan blessed the windows that gave him a clear 180-degree view of his unfolding battleground.

“Is this car registered to you?” he asked.

“Some kind of lease deal through a paper company,” Falk answered.

“So, you won’t mind if I make some alterations, then?”

She didn’t ask what Bolan had in mind, just shot a hard glance at him from the rearview mirror and replied, “Do what you gotta do.”

The lead Toyota was almost on top of them, its backup car running some thirty yards behind. Bolan wanted to get them off Falk’s tail—or, at the very least, to slow them down enough for Falk to try some fancy footwork, maybe lose them in the maze of Sharh-e-Khone without a higher body count.