Defense Breach

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?”

“They’re good. After 9/11, Homeland Security realized the crime families might be tempted at some point to link up with a terrorist element. They have some deep plants in McCarthy’s organization.”

“How would young engineers in San Diego go about hiring the Mob? How would they get the initial contact?” Price asked.

“Too many possibilities,” Wethers answered. “A friend of a friend’s friend, an in-law connection, it could be anything. Pursuing that question is probably not worthwhile. More than that, I’d want to know how they linked up with the terrorists.”

“Internet,” Brognola said confidently. “Employees at defense firms, especially young engineers, are prime targets for subversive groups. If these engineers went looking, they’d easily find a buyer.”

“But we don’t know who that buyer is,” Wethers interjected.

Brognola finger-combed his hair while shaking his head. “No, we don’t.”

Delahunt said, “It doesn’t matter. The important fact is that someone has to get to McCarthy, find out where Piaseczna is planning to make the final drop-off and stop her from doing it.”

“I agree,” Price said. Looking across the table at Bolan. “I guess you’re going to Sin City.”

“What about the microwave weapon?” Kurtzman asked of the contraption now stored in one of the outbuildings on the compound.

“Marketing,” Tokaido answered. “It’s years behind microwave research, not state-of-the-art at all. I think they built it at their cabin to show they were real engineers. When Piaseczna contacted potential buyers, what did she have for credentials? Something like that gives a rogue engineer credibility.”

“Then it served its purpose,” Bolan stated. “And it led us to where we are.”

He stared into the distance as if he could see through the walls to where the woman named Marlene Piaseczna was hiding.

“Rogue engineer, indeed,” Kurtzman said softly. “Stop the sale, Striker. You have to make sure—” He was interrupted by the buzzing of his PDA, which he pulled from a pouch on the side of his wheelchair.

His face transformed into a frown as he held the module at arm’s length and read the display.

“There was a firefight early this morning across the Iraqi border in Iran,” he told the Stony Man Farm team. “A few United States soldiers and two Sunni were killed. One of them was carrying a piece of ADAS code.”

“I think,” Wethers said into the sudden silence, “we may have stumbled upon the buyers.”

4

Bolan pushed through the bodies pressing against him on all sides. The sound of helicopter blades cut the night air, appearing to be coming from every direction. The mere sound of choppers swooping down from a black sky like prehistoric birds of prey was often enough to bring the fainthearted to the very brink of panic. As Bolan moved forward, the airships’ ear-thumping reverberations stirred vestiges indelibly ingrained in his combat psyche, sending a rush of adrenaline to his brain. His eyes darted back and forth, constantly assessing and reassessing his environment as he made his way forward.

A silver beam shot to earth from one of the choppers, sweeping across the ground below as if searching for an escapee, pausing from time to time to randomly illuminate individuals who were pushed and pulled at the whim of the pulsating crowd. Off to Bolan’s left, a series of underwater explosions sent steaming geysers swirling two hundred feet into the sky. Seconds later, the acrid smell of burning cordite reached his nostrils as yellow flames burst from the windows of concrete buildings erected behind the dock where a fully rigged pirate ship bobbed on the moat’s gentle ripples. The leaping flames illuminated the stage in a flickering light.