Interception

“Current status, also missing. Last-known location, Split, Croatia,” Kurtzman stated.

“Ah,” Bolan said. “I’m sensing a perfect storm.”

“Sort of. Well,” Price allowed, “if you factor in the location, then you’re exactly right. This a perfect storm. Bear, let’s talk Prisni Prijatelji.”

The cyberwizard again worked his keyboard. First a map of the world appeared in greens and blues on the screen, overlaid with lines of latitude and longitude. Then the perspective of the screen shifted smoothly. Bolan watched as it zeroed in on the Mediterranean, then slid past the boot of Italy to tighten focus on the Adriatic Sea. It shifted to the Croatian coastline, played south and settled on the city of Split.

Once in place, the screen’s software put a white box around the city and began cycling its resolution, pulling it into focus. A street map from satellite imagery stamped with the discreet logo of the National Reconnaissance Office appeared. From an overview of the entire city Kurtzman quickly clicked down the area of observation into tighter and tighter resolution until an area of five square urban blocks filled the screen.

“I was less than three blocks away when I hit the triad in that warehouse,” Bolan commented.

Frowning as the others murmured their agreement, Bolan leaned forward. The western edge of the built-up area consisted of wharfs and industrial piers as well as several large, squared-off jetties. Beyond that, to the north, south and west the area bordered the other streets of the city of Split. Inside the designated area there was a mixture of buildings from commercial to hospitality to warehouses.

Bolan turned and cocked an eyebrow in question to the leadership cadre of Stony Man Farm. “Prisni Prijatelji?” he asked.

“Prisni Prijatelji,” Price confirmed.

Settling back in his chair Bolan took another drink of his coffee. “Explain.”

“Split has taken over from Berlin as ground zero where east means west. Hell, what East means now is something a lot different from what it meant in the bad old days of the Soviet Empire,” Brognola began. “But, for purposes of the War on Terror to our intelligence services, Split is a very important place. As important as Islamabad and more important than Damascus, Beirut or Amman. European and Middle Eastern businessmen mix there in prolific numbers, forming a smoke screen of legitimacy for the thriving black markets beneath the surface.”

“Oil money meets former Soviet stockpiles of weapons?” Bolan offered.

“Sure,” Price broke in. “Plenty of that going on. But Asian and South American drug pipelines into Europe intersect there. Terrorist cells and fugitives purchase papers and forged documents. Mercenaries cavort. International banking uses Croatian cutout companies to laundry money. As you discovered, there are thriving white slavery rings running girls from Asia into Eastern Europe and girls the other way back out again. It’s a flipping strip mall of international criminal activity from the pettiest to the largest.”

“Which is why Bout was there,” Bolan observed. “He was serving as an intermediary for his banker boss?”

“That’s what we think,” Brognola agreed. “But as bad as Split is, in general that area along the waterfront—” he indicated the neighborhood with a blunt fingertip “—is the epicenter. Ground zero, part criminal-free fire zone and part intelligence DMZ.”

“What do you mean?” Bolan asked.

“That neighborhood is one massive front. Fronts for criminals, fronts for intelligence operatives keeping an eye on the international syndicates…and each other. Success begets success. Once the big players realized how much information there was to be gleaned from this little neighborhood in Split, the services of half a dozen countries began to lean on their governments to look the other way. Let the snakes play in a nest all together so that we could get them in other places.”

Price spoke up. “Once word of the hand-off approach leaked out of the tier one agencies to their second tier allies, on both sides, it really began to heat up as every two-bit station chief from any third world country saw opportunities to get their own cut with the geopolitical immunity. Bribes and payoffs began pouring out of the sector. Enough to ensure the local and Croatian federal police keep their noses clear.”

“UN peacekeepers?” Bolan asked.

“Some,” Price admitted. Then she shrugged. “They’re positioned closer to the main industrial docks and the rail lines. They’re mostly just symbolic now in Split anyway. Besides all it would take is a word from the intelligence community to the OIC of whatever detachment has Prisni Prijatelji as their district to get them to stand down.”

“I’ve seen cities where the local police have been paid enough to steer clear of certain neighborhoods,” Bolan said. “Usually it’s a mess of a free-fire zone between pushers and street gangs.”

“They had some of that,” Brognola stated. “But the organized syndicates leaned on the thugs. Can’t sell to the eurotrash touristas if bullets are flying everywhere and bodies are in the street. The territories are pretty well defined now. You get street violence occasionally and there are so many free-lancers hunting you can’t guarantee anything when the sun goes down and night comes. But it’s not like Compton in the late 1980s or something.”

“Lovely.”

“Make no mistake, Mack,” Price said. “Nobody but nobody in that section of the city is legitimate, or who they say they are. Your friends, the Mountain and Snake Society, have really solidified their control and the influence of both Chinese and North Korean intelligence with them. Everyone who’s not running a scam is a confidential informant. If they’re not a CI, then they’re an operative. Failing that, they’re a petty criminal.”

“Well, there are tourists,” Kurtzman broke in. “The libertine controls on the local nightclubs make it popular for twenty-something kids from the more prosperous regions of the EU to hang out there. It’s replaced Amsterdam as the ‘it’ city for the disaffected and chic bored.”

“Sheep for the wolves,” Bolan muttered.

“Exactly,” Price said.

“What’s Pandey doing there?” Bolan asked. “I get that you can score anything in this place, but doesn’t cloning tech seem just a little upscale even for this modern-day version of Casablanca?”

Kurtzman spoke up again. “The international law on bioweapons is very clear. Certain technologies used to regulate such weapons in mass quantities are as tightly controlled and monitored as their nuclear counterparts. Not so the cloning tech. You take a strain of weaponized Anthrax, or Influenza and you replicate them, or modify their DNA helixes to be sturdier then replicate them, and you can work in peace from international monitoring agencies until the bureaucrats writing the laws can play catch-up.”

“Seems almost too simple.” Bolan grunted.

“We’re always playing catch-up,” Price said.

“Unless we can be proactive,” Brognola observed.

“That’s where I come in.”

“As always, Striker,” the big Fed acknowledged. “As always.”

“Right now we know both men entered Prisni Prijatelji,” Price continued. “Then they disappeared. We want to know why and we want to know where. Two of Bout’s bodyguards, ex-GRU naval infantry Spetsnaz, turned up yesterday floating facedown in the ocean outside the neighborhood. Two days before that a call girl named Marlina Dubrovnik disappeared in Prisni Prijatelji’s only hotel.”

“A hotel where Pandey had a room where she was going to meet him?” Bolan supplied.

Brognola held up a loosely clasped hand and blew on it, spreading his fingers wide as he did so and showing it to be empty. “Just like that. She goes to his room. He lets her in. Then they’re gone.”

“We have people on them?”

“We did. Team of military spooks out of the Pentagon. The unit Rumsfeld created.”

Bolan nodded. “The Strategic Support Branch.”

“Right, a SSB team with some electronic and signal intelligence special reconnaissance units, Special Forces commo guys, a DIA electronic intelligence analyst. Solid operators. Code parole is ‘Center Spike.’ They had a military attaché operations in Zagreb. When the Agency caught Pandey’s movement out of New Delhi, they asked for assistance.”

“The Company asked for help?” Bolan asked.

Brognola shrugged. “Their best operatives are running Pakistan and Iraq these days. They had a lone tail on Pandey, and Prisni Prijatelji is no place for a single operator.”

Bolan lifted a single eyebrow. Brognola laughed. “Unless it’s you, Striker.”

Bolan turned serious. “The SSB unit know I’m going in?”

“They know something is going on and that they’re to provide imagery and surveillance assistance to an American intelligence operator,” Price said. “But I’ve had them replaced in position.”

“Replaced?”

“With Jack and Charlie Mott,” Price answered. “We’re going to keep this in the family.”

“Akira and I set up a line of communications to ensure Farm security,” Kurtzman broke in. “They constructed boosted relay stations for our Computer Room right here on the Farm. What Jack and Charlie have is real easy ‘point and click’ stuff, less sophisticated than the controls on the planes they fly. But, by them being live we’ll have the electronic equivalent of a field office right in your back pocket.”

Bolan turned toward Price. “So I still do my commo through the Farm?”