Enemy Agents

Sometimes a spot of trouble couldn’t be avoided after all.

“You’re finished now,” the long-haired biker said, then spat a stream of brown tobacco juice directly onto Halsey’s plate.

“Looks done to me,” another biker observed.

Halsey considered stabbing the tobacco-chewer, but he knew the penalty for using deadly force unless his life was clearly threatened. Stifling the killer urge, he said, “That’s inconvenient. Now I’ll have to get another steak and start from scratch.”

“He’s fuckin’ with you, man,” one of the bikers told his chief.

“You think so?” the leader asked.

“Hell, yeah,” another said.

“That’s one stupid-ass mistake,” the leader said. Addressing Halsey, he inquired, “Is that right, boy? You fuckin’ with me?”

“I can’t imagine anything less appetizing,” Halsey said.

“You got a smart mouth, for a citizen.”

While Halsey understood the slang term for a working stiff of square, he found the comeback irresistible.

“So, what are you?” he asked. “Some kind of wetback?”

With a snarl, the long-haired biker lunged for him, surprised Halsey by clutching his right wrist with one hand, twisting, forcing him to drop the knife, while the biker’s right hand grabbed Halsey’s shirt and hoisted him out of his chair, as if he weighed nothing at all.

“Smart mouth,” the biker said. “Dumbass.”

And then Halsey was airborne, tumbling across the table through clattering plates, silverware and bottles of beer, on his way toward impact with the floor.

BOLAN PUSHED HIS PLATE and coffee cup aside. So far, so good.

He’d watched the seven grungy outlaws swagger toward the table where his targets sat and then interrupt their meal. He’d worried for a moment that the bikers might stand back and wait for one of their intended marks to throw the first punch, when the seated diners didn’t seem inclined to do so, but it worked out in the end. The spokesman for the group lipped off just enough to get himself picked up and tossed across the table.

Bolan stayed where he was watching, waiting.

He couldn’t jump in yet. If it turned out that the targets could handle themselves and were giving the bikers a beating, his uninvited help would be superfluous. Suspicious, even. It could blow his only shot at breaking in.

He had to hope his targets lost the fight—or, rather, started losing in a clear, decisive manner. Bolan couldn’t sit and wait to see them punched unconscious or delay until the cops showed up.

The bartender already had a cell phone open in his hand, but Bolan knew response time was an issue. Apple Valley was an incorporated township sprawling over seventy-odd square miles, with law enforcement covered by a police department composed of fifty-five San Bernardino County sheriff’s officers. Of those, four were administrators, five were detectives and eight were patrol supervisors—which left twelve officers per eight-hour shift, less those with days off or vacation time scheduled.

Bolan had learned all that from the internet, within ten minutes of discovering that he’d be meeting his intended marks in Apple Valley. Now, his first trick would be staying out of jail.

Brognola had arranged the setup—if these were, in fact, his bikers—but he hadn’t shared their secret with the locals. Bolan had no reason to believe that any of the Apple Valley cops were tied to Halsey’s crowd in any way, but small towns thrived on gossip. It was a rule of life.

And anywhere you went, the walls had ears.

So, he’d be going for a ride in cuffs if Apple Valley’s finest caught him brawling with a bunch of thugs in Scoots. He could plead self-defense, of course, then post bail and take a hike. But Bolan didn’t want his face in any mug-shot files, his fingerprints in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System—IAFIS—or any other data bank.

He was a dead man, after all.

And planned to stay that way, as long as he was breathing.

The bikers weren’t pulling their punches with Clay Halsey’s men, but the casual diners weren’t punching bags, either. They gave back as good as they got—well, almost—and two of the Diableros were bloodied already, though still on their feet and swinging. One of Halsey’s guys, by contrast, had been punched or booted in the ribs and lay off to one side, hunched in a fetal curl.

Bolan checked his watch—one minute gone and counting. The barkeep was still on his phone, likely giving details to the AVPD dispatcher. Any second, a prowl car would receive instructions, fire up lights and siren, and race through the desert night toward Scoots.

With how many others to follow?

They wouldn’t send one cop to handle a dozen-odd brawlers. More likely, the night shift would roll out en masse, unless some of the shift’s personnel were already scattered on other duties. With approximately seventy-three thousand residents counted in its last census, Apple Valley would have the normal complement of burglaries, car thefts, domestic beefs and nuisance calls distracting officers on any given shift.

Say eight or nine incoming, then, within the next five minutes. As for times on-site, there would be stragglers. Some patrolling at a distance from the roadhouse, others eating fast food with their radios turned on, maybe a bathroom break or two.

A little breathing room.

But if his marks didn’t start losing soon…

Bolan was ready, waiting, when Halsey charged into the middle of the fight and caught a haymaker dead center in his face. It might not be a nose breaker, but there was force enough behind the punch to send Halsey flying again. He hit the floor hard, no table to break his fall this time, and Bolan worried that the man he needed to impress might be unconscious.

No. Halsey was shaking it off, rolling over and wiping a dark smear of blood from his nostrils with his sleeve. Face flushed with impact and anger, he lurched to his feet, wobbled into a fair fighting crouch and began to advance with fists clenched.

Going back in for more.

It was enough.

Bolan slipped from his booth, feeling the rush of battle in his blood. He reached the battleground in four long, loping strides, grabbed Halsey’s adversary by one arm and spun him, scowling as he drove a fist into the biker’s face.

2

Washington, D.C.

Four days earlier, Bolan had strolled through crowds of tourists on the National Mall, making his casual way toward the pale upraised finger of the Washington Monument. His destination lay adjacent to that obelisk, on 1.9 acres of land allotted by Congress in the 1980s, on Fifteenth Street, renamed Raoul Wallenberg Place.

Bolan knew the name from history. Raoul Wallenberg had been a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest during the German occupation of 1944–45. He had issued protective passports to Hungarian Jews, saving tens of thousands from slaughter—and then, ironically, was jailed when Soviet troops “liberated” the country from Nazi rule. Dying under questionable circumstances at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1947, Wallenberg had been honored worldwide once his story was told.

It was only fitting that his name now marked the street outside of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Bolan entered the museum, collected his free pass from a clerk in the Hall of Witness and proceeded to the first-floor elevator. Self-guided tours were timed, leaving Bolan five minutes to wait in the lobby, and start on the fourth floor, with visitors working their way back down to street level through various halls and exhibits.

Bolan surveyed the first of four permanent exhibitions. This one depicted the Nazi assault on German Jews from 1933 until the 1939 invasion of Poland, including documents, photographs and other relics of the years that included the Reichstag fire and Kristallnacht riots. Lower floors, he knew, presented the rest of a grim history in chronological order: the “Final Solution” on Three, and the nightmare’s “Last Chapter” on Two. Altogether, the museum contained nearly thirteen thousand artifacts, eighty thousand photos, one thousand hours of archival film footage, nine thousand oral histories, and some forty-nine million documents charting the course of brutal genocide.

Tragically, it hadn’t been the last.

Man’s inhumanity to other humans was the world’s oldest story, played out in grim new headlines every day.

Which kept the Executioner busy year-round.

On this bright spring morning, he was killing time indoors, studying bleak reminders of how cruel humankind could be, while waiting for his oldest living friend. Their conversation, subject still unknown to Bolan, would inevitably launch him on another journey to the dark side, where he would find predators aplenty still alive and well, working around the clock to victimize the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.