Survival Mission

“But this one didn’t.”

“Right. It’s still unclear what happened to the girl, exactly,” Brognola went on. “Another kid swears Mandy wasn’t taken from the room they shared. Seems she went out to get a Coke instead of calling room service. The vending machines are on alternate floors, so she had to go up or down one. She never came back.”

“Security cameras?” Bolan asked.

“The hotel’s equipped,” the big Fed confirmed. “Exits and elevators covered, but it’s spotty on the hallways. There’s no tape of Mandy leaving, on her own or with an escort. Two things clicked as possibles. First up, a food delivery around that time, downstairs, with crates of goodies coming in and empties going out. Second, a bellhop with his face averted from the CCTV, wheeling out a laundry cart.”

“How many people on the food delivery?” Bolan asked.

“Two came with the truck,” Brognola said. “A couple from the kitchen helped them with unloading.”

“Have they been cleared?”

Brognola shrugged and tried the toast again, then answered with his mouth full. “They’ve been questioned by the cops in Prague and by the PCR—those are the Feds, Police of the Czech Republic. No evidence of any criminal activity has been discovered, quote, unquote.”

“The faceless bellhop, then.”

“More likely,” Brognola agreed. “A shot, some chloroform, a blackjack—take your pick. One guy could shift a ten-year-old without backup, much less involving two hotel employees.”

“So, she’s gone,” Bolan said. “Four days, Hal.”

“I know, I know. There’s been no ransom call, so that’s a wash. Whoever snatched the girl had other things in mind. Whether it was a trafficker or just some random psycho off the street, it’s all bad news.”

Bolan tried to decide which might be worse and couldn’t make the call.

“I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a heartbreaker.”

“I hear you,” Brognola replied. “But here’s the rub—her daddy is a well-connected chief of corporate security at GenTex Oil. Any given year, he earns more than the President of the United States.”

“He’s making noise,” Bolan surmised.

“I wish it were that simple,” Brognola replied. “Before he took the GenTex job, he was a Navy SEAL for sixteen years. Won every decoration they could pin onto his wet suit, except the Congressional Medal of Honor, and that was a close call. On his last time out—in Pakistan, no less—he saved a wounded teammate’s life. The other guy happened to be the grandson of a Texas senator with tons of GenTex stock in his portfolio.”

“Which nailed his present job,” Bolan observed. “A hero with connections.”

“And with skills,” Brognola stressed. “He’s not just making noise. When no one from the FBI, the Company or State could satisfy him, he went over there.”

“By which you mean—”

“To Prague,” Brognola said. “I shit you not. It’s Death Wish Seven, or whatever, and the film crew isn’t using blanks.”

“Has there been contact?”

Brognola sipped his coffee, grimaced—too much sugar.

“There’s no way to verify it,” he told Bolan. “This guy— Andrew Murton—may be middle-aged and rusty, but he’s still a player. Flew on bogus papers to the Czech Republic, and he likely has at least one spare ID on tap for when he’s ready to come home. If he comes home.”

Bolan waited for Brognola to tell it his way, in his own good time.

“Could he find guns in Prague?” the man from Justice asked rhetorically. “Hell, yes. Has there been trouble since he landed? Cops report that one suspected trafficker’s gone missing, but he had a court appearance scheduled for next month. Could be a simple bail jumper. The thing is, Murton had been talking to his wife something like five, six times a day. Updating her, you know. And now he’s stopped.”

“How long?” Bolan asked.

“Half a day. It spooked her bad enough for her to call the Hoover Building. They reached out to me.”

“And here we are,” Bolan said.

“Right. What do you think?”

“About the girl? I told you, Hal—”

“I know. But what about the dad? If there’s a chance that we could pull him out…”

“It plays out one of two ways,” Bolan said. “He either found the traffickers who took his daughter, or he found somebody else. With option B, the only reason for not killing him straight up would be a ransom bid.”

“Again, there’s been no call,” Brognola said.

“Okay. He’s either dead or being held by someone with another reason not to put him down. Maybe interrogation. Maybe using him for leverage somewhere down the line.”

“Bad news, no matter how you look at it,” the man said.

“The worst,” Bolan agreed.

“All right,” Brognola said. “It’s your call. Want to go and have a look around, or not?”

THE FLIGHT FROM Dulles International to Paris-Orly Airport spanned seven hours and forty-eight minutes. Orly to Prague consumed another hour, plus the downtime Bolan spent waiting to make his Czech Airlines connection. Bolan had used the time efficiently, to study Brognola’s file on Andrew Murton, then erase it; to memorize the Google map of Prague; and finally, to catch up on the sleep he’d miss when he had reached his destination.

Finding Murton in the urban jungle that was Prague seemed like a nearly hopeless task to Bolan, but he knew that nearly wasn’t absolute. Someone had seen the missing father. Someone knew what had become of him, whether he was alive or dead. Someone would talk, if the correct inducement was applied.

The problem: Bolan was a stranger to the Czech Republic and its capital, clearly a foreigner. Unlike the vanished former SEAL, he spoke neither German nor Russian, much less Czech, Slovak, Croatian or Bulgarian. The good news: according to his Fodor’s guidebook, ten percent of all Czechs spoke at least some English. In Prague, the number supposedly rose to fifty percent for residents aged nineteen to thirty-five, and hit eighty percent for those eighteen or younger.

So all I have to do, he thought, is keep asking directions from kids on the street.

It was a joke at first, then soured on him when he thought about the people he was hunting and their chosen trade. Whether or not he could find Andrew Murton—much less the aggrieved father’s child—Bolan vowed to wreak havoc among the Czech merchants of misery.

Scorched earth, if he could pull it off.

If not, at least a healthy dose of cleansing fire.

Bolan had never been a moralist per se. He didn’t care who slept with whom, or why, as long as all concerned were consenting adults or roughly equal in age. He didn’t mind if sex was sold or bartered, either. What repulsed him was the domination of illicit prostitution by a breed of predators who victimized the helpless to enrich themselves. Slave traders, in effect, and Bolan owed them nothing but a bullet, which, in most cases, was long years overdue.

He harbored no real hope of saving Mandy Murton. Even if he found her still alive, in Prague or somewhere else, and managed to extract her from the hell that had consumed her life of privilege, what would be left of her? Would years of therapy undo the trauma she had suffered at the hands of her abductors and their paying customers?

Bolan knew how her father must have felt. His own long war against the Mafia had started with a tragedy at home, akin to Andrew Murton’s. Bolan had exacted justice on his own, using his military skills, when there’d been no one left to save. He didn’t have to speculate over the depth of Murton’s rage, the guilt that haunted him for failure to protect his own from half a world away.

He found that Brognola was right. It didn’t take a master spy to find black-market guns in Prague. In fact, it only took a name and Luscious Luther Johnson’s contribution to the cause. Bolan was pleased to spend the cash he’d taken from a killer pimp in aid of tracking and destroying other predators. If not exactly karma, it still felt like some kind of poetic justice.

As for information, that came down to asking questions. Brognola had gotten him started with the name of Murton’s suspected first victim—an indicted trafficker, one Mikoláš Zeman. The vanished man had known associates, and Bolan, having duly armed himself beforehand, went in search of them.