Blood Vendetta

“I’ll get to that. But, in short, we believe it’s someone Nightingale stole from. From what we’ve been able to scrape together, they flew into London a couple of days ago. Bought their airline tickets under false names, with fake credit cards. Nothing in their luggage was of any use. If they hadn’t been busted for petty crimes along the way, it’s possible we never would have made them.”

“They leave anything behind?”

“Couple of cell phones. The London authorities are tracking them. We’ll see how far it takes them. Their weapons, obviously. Night-vision goggles. A rental car.”

“Most likely they didn’t fly into London with all that stuff,” Bolan said. “They must have had someone on the ground supplying them.”

“We thought of that,” Brognola said. “Solid theory. We don’t have the intel to back it up, though. But we have someone working that angle.”

“That someone is?”

“David McCarter.”

“McCarter’s in London? My apologies to the queen.”

Brognola grinned. “David was already over there, buying a Jaguar that had been buried under some tarps in a garage somewhere. We thought it might help having someone on the ground to act as—” Brognola made quotation marks with his fingers “—a liaison between MI5, Scotland Yard and the U.S.”

“God help us.”

“Yeah, we needed a diplomat, but we got McCarter. Imagine.”

“The Brits will appreciate his deft touch.”

“Look,” Brognola said, “here’s the upshot of all this. As you can imagine, the U.S. government finds itself in a unique position here. Officially, the government doesn’t condone vigilantes. We don’t condone stealing money from people, even if they’re criminals and terrorists, unless it’s part of a sanctioned intelligence operation.”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming.”

Brognola downed some coffee and nodded. “Absolutely. What this person has accomplished is pretty damn amazing. As best we know, she or he has no governments backing her.”

“Which means no government-imposed constraints.”

“As I said, what Nightingale has been able to accomplish is nothing short of amazing,” Brognola said. “This person has acquired account numbers and pieced together complex financial networks. He or she knows lots of things, and we want to know how.”

Bolan’s eyes narrowed and he leaned forward. “Look, if you want someone to plug a leak.”

“Hardly,” Brognola replied, shaking his head vigorously. “Frankly, we want to recruit this person. Nightingale could fill in gaps in our knowledge. There’s a place for those skills.”

“Off the books, of course,” Price interjected. “But we can offer full legal protection, a new identity, the works.”

“What leads do we have?” Bolan asked.

Kurtzman gestured at the stack of photos in Bolan’s hand.

“Look through those,” he said, “stop when you find a picture of a white-haired guy.”

Bolan found a close-up of a round-faced man with pink cheeks, pale green eyes and white hair trimmed down to stubble. He studied the photo for a couple of seconds, then tossed it, face up, on the tabletop. “This the guy?”

“That’d be him,” Kurtzman said. “His name is Jonathan Salisbury. He’s British by birth, but moved to the United States in the early 1970s and eventually became a citizen. Did a lot of computer work for the Pentagon, all highly classified. Guy was a genius.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead,” Kurtzman said. “Poor bastard asphyxiated himself in a garage. Neighbors found him in the car while it still was running. Hadn’t been dead long. I have a file I’ll give you with some clips about him. It was big news in the Beltway when he died.”

“I’ve never heard of him. He famous in computer circles?”

“More like infamous,” Kurtzman said. “Technically, he was in deep shit with the Feds.”

Bolan sipped his coffee. “Isn’t that like being a little pregnant?”

“I knew the guy,” Kurtzman said. “We weren’t friends, but I knew him. I knew his work. To say he was brilliant would be an understatement. His depth of knowledge when it came to computers and cybersecurity was nearly unmatched.”

“Except by you.”

“There are maybe three dozen people with this guy’s chops. Me and thirty-five others.” Kurtzman allowed himself a grin, though it faded almost immediately. “That said, the guy was branded a traitor.”

“Because?”

“He tapped into the Defense Intelligence Agency’s computers, dug up some records on a Russian guy, Mikhail Yezhov, and passed it along.”

“Passed it along to whom?”

Kurtzman shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure,” he said.

“That’s a pretty big deal.”

“Sure,” Kurtzman said. “I’m not saying otherwise. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But there were extenuating circumstances. His wife was killed. Not by Yezhov, but a couple of his shooters. At least that was the working theory of the Russian investigators. Not a far-fetched theory, either. But the Russians didn’t want to go after Yezhov, so they let the whole thing go. Salisbury’s wife was a criminal justice professor and taught at Georgetown University. She’d written a couple of papers on Yezhov’s network and then she turned up dead.”

“The Justice Department tried to get the Russians off the dime on this thing,” Brognola added, “but they wouldn’t budge. Apparently, Yezhov rates top-level protection in his country.”

“You think Salisbury got pissed off enough to steal information?” Bolan asked.

“And pass it along to Nightingale? Yeah, I do. That’s the theory. And our two dead friends have links to Yezhov, too.”

“Clearly,” Brognola said, “we think Salisbury killed himself. The forensic evidence says so. His coworkers and friends confirmed that he was despondent after his wife’s murder. That he couldn’t at least get a little closure likely only made things worse.”

“So he takes matters into his own hands,” Bolan said. “He gets caught and loses his security clearance and his reputation. And kills himself.”

“Right,” Brognola said.

“A month before the ceiling fell in on the guy, he took a trip to London,” Kurtzman said. “We’re assuming he took the intelligence he stole to England and passed it to someone else.”

“But we don’t know who for sure?” Bolan asked.

“No,” Kurtzman said, “we don’t. But we are hedging our bets that it was Nightingale. Yezhov likely sent these two thugs out to exact a little revenge, but they obviously underestimated Nightingale’s skill.”

“Will you take the assignment, Striker?” Brognola asked.

“What if I find Nightingale and he or she tells me to go to hell?”