Читать книгу: «Oblivion Pact»

CHAPTER ONE

Columbus, Ohio

Firing from the hip, Mack Bolan, aka The Executioner, took out both of the liveried guards, the discharge from the silenced 9 mm Beretta no louder than a hard cough.

As the dead men crumpled to the ground, Bolan moved in fast, smashing both of their handheld radios. Then he put a squirt of fast-acting glue onto the slides of their automatic pistols. If anybody found the corpses, they’d spend precious minutes trying to get the jimmied weapons to work again, and that was all the soldier needed now, just a few more minutes to get the job done.

The search for Eric “Mad Dog” Kegan had been long and hard. The gunrunner shed identities the way most other people did socks, and he always left behind a trail of bodies, most of them innocent bystanders who saw his face. But that reign of bloodshed would end here and now. If only Bolan moved fast enough.

Dressed for full urban combat, The Executioner was wearing a loose trench coat, and soft fedora. Underneath he wore a military blacksuit, Threat-Level-Four body armor, an old canvas web harness rigged with a wide assortment of weapons and tools of war and dark combat sneakers. They didn’t offer the full protection of combat boots, but made less noise.

Easing through the dark Bolan paused just before reentering the sunlight. Across the street was a small building nestled amid leafy trees and shrubs. He could see brick walls and a house set far back from the road. White stucco, the structure was two stories tall, probably a shoe store or something similar in the past, big picture windows on either side of a nice wooden door. The shutters on the second story were closed, with a small red-and-white For Rent sign in the left window that was partially obscured by streaked dust. Old, dirty, valueless, abandoned and forgotten, the store was just part of the neighborhood—there, but never truly noticed.

Crossing the busy street, Bolan attempted to look through the window, but couldn’t see anything. The pebbled glass was tinted a deep blue. Nice. Only a foot away, Kegan would have total privacy to conduct his business.

Easing into the greenery, Bolan checked for traps and hidden alarms, but found the area clear. The interior of the building would contain an advanced security system, but to maintain his cover, Kegan had to relay upon plain, ordinary locks outside so as not to draw any suspicion on the place.

Studying the building, Bolan wondered if the second floor was an apartment. This was an older neighborhood and lots of stores used to have living space above them in order to save money.

Going to the door, Bolan tried the handle but it was locked. Reaching under his windbreaker, he unearthed a keywire gun and shot the lock full of stiff wire, then turned the gun. The lock disengaged with a subtle click.

Wiggling the device free, Bolan tucked it away and drew his Beretta 93R machine pistol before sliding inside the dark building. Using a small can of pressurized talcum powder, Bolan filled the air with a swirling dust cloud to check for laser beams. But the powder revealed nothing, and he continued onward, staying alert for hidden video cameras and trip wires. This was home for Kegan and it was guaranteed to be a major hard site. He simply hadn’t found any security devices yet, which made Bolan slightly nervous. You never heard the bullet that got you. He had to stay alert, watch for everything and live another day. That was all any soldier could hope for in war.

And that’s all this was, a covert war for the streets of America, Bolan noted. On one side were Kegan and his kind, cannibals in thousand-dollar suits, and on the other side was civilization. Long ago, Bolan had decided that he wasn’t Animal Man’s judge, or jury, but his executioner. The soldier wasn’t here to enforce the law, but to dispense justice, hard and absolute. Street justice. Red law.

Kicking some torn manila folders out of his way, Bolan crossed the littered floor and stood amid the piles of destruction. There was no other way to describe the office area but totally trashed.

Pictures were smashed on the walls, the empty frames hanging from bent nails. The file-cabinet drawers had been removed and cast aside, sofa cushions ripped apart, the stuffing scattered about randomly, and assorted papers were everywhere. Somebody had been very serious about searching this room. An amateur, but dead serious.

However, just because a room had been searched, Bolan noted privately, didn’t mean that anything had been found.

The next room was an office, just as bedraggled as the waiting room but now empty shell casings from a dozen different weapons lay scattered about, telling Bolan how things had gone down. Four people had entered through the sitting room, each armed with automatic pistols, and one with a shotgun. Three others had opened fire from the staircase using M16 assault rifles, and something that left bullet holes but didn’t eject brass. The fire pattern was too tight for a bolt action...a caseless rifle? Impressive. The weapons sounded like a zipper in operation, and threw out lead faster than anything but a motorized Gatling gun. A caseless assault rifle was a serious threat. Bolan would have to keep a sharp watch out for— He froze.

Lancing through the swirling cloud of talcum powder was a scintillating red beam, thinner than a human hair, almost invisible. Dropping low, Bolan eased under the laser and carefully rose on the other side, his heart pounding. Touch the beam of light, and all hell would have broken loose, probably in the manner of a dozen Claymore mines plastered inside the wall. Close, but no cigar.

Going to the window, Bolan saw the real-estate sign. At the bottom was the monthly rent, a phone number and the name of the management company. Out of curiosity, Bolan tried the number, and wasn’t surprised to get only a busy signal, then voice mail, but the box was full. That was all anybody would ever get, a busy signal. Kegan lived in a building advertised as for rent. Clever. That would have stopped most investigations, but Bolan had sources everywhere, most of them whispers and hints. Add a few together, and suddenly a pattern became visible. A soft probe, followed by a hard probe, and when the target was confirmed, a full blitz with guns blazing. But he wasn’t there yet, this was just the soft probe.

Making sure the door was locked, Bolan did a quick sweep of the place and found nothing more interesting than a couple of thousand in cash and a kilo of marijuana. He took the cash.

“Thanks, Mad Dog,” Bolan whispered, tucking the wad of bills into an empty pouch on his gunbelt reserved for just that purpose.

Bolan really didn’t have an accurate count of how many millions he had stolen from the Mafia, terrorist organizations and organized crime in general, but their bloody profits had purchased a lot of hard justice rammed back down their throats. If that wasn’t karma, then Bolan had no idea what the proper definition was.

The last room on the ground floor was an office, all brass and leather, and smelling of death. A man lay behind the sofa in a position it was impossible to achieve while alive, and a woman was draped over the desk. Her tattoos identified her as an assassin for the Colombian drug cartel.

Pitting rival gangs against each other was an old trick in his book, and one that worked extremely well most of the time. Not always, but often enough. Bolan knew that it had been a gamble to tell Kegan’s enemies where the gunrunner could be located. But he hadn’t read them as foolish enough to drive up to the building and unload a couple of rocket launchers through the front windows. Kegan’s former customers, cheated of their goods, and often betrayed to the police for the reward, wanted hands-on revenge, up close and very personal. If they had succeeded, so much the better. But at the very least, they had diverted Kegan and his people, giving Bolan a precious few minutes to try to find Kegan’s next identity and permanently end his reign of terror.

Alongside the corpse was a cheap pressboard computer desk, the PC smashed to pieces, the hard drive gone. Damn. That could have been useful. Not that Kegan would keep anything major on the drive, but there could have been hints and subtle clues. Sometimes Bolan felt as though he was fighting ghosts in the dark.

All the way across the office was a huge dark wooden desk sporting a stained brass plaque with the name Edward Carter. A common enough moniker to sound real, and close enough to his real name so that Erik Kegan wouldn’t make a fatal slip. In spite of being a bloodthirsty monster, Kegan wasn’t a fool.

On the wall behind the colossal desk was the usual assortment of impressive diplomas, testimonial letters from satisfied clients, mostly major corporations, and quite a few newspaper clippings showing Edward Carter with the mayor, and other noteworthy folks, with everybody smiling at the cameras. All fake of course, but the pictures did show Kegan himself.

Built like a bull gorilla, Eric Kegan still had the winning smile of a politician selling used cars, slicker than a snake in oil. The only tell was his eyes. The face could smile, the mouth laugh, but the eyes stayed the same, cold and dead, like the eyes of a shark.

It was strange that a man forever in hiding would allow himself to be photographed, especially by a newspaper. Anonymity was paramount for his line of business—selling death wholesale. Maybe Kegan just liked having his picture taken. Bolan shrugged. People were often contradictory.

Lifting the slashed leather chair from the floor, Bolan checked the sides for hidden controls but found nothing. Sitting in the chair, he twisted back and forth a few times, listening for a squeak, but hearing only the rustle of his clothing.

The desk itself was huge, a monstrous slab of cherrywood, topped with green leather and edged with shiny brass studs. It was clearly an antique from a bygone age and had to weigh a ton.

Going around, Bolan checked the front and sure enough saw a line of holes in the wood from three different pistols, but none of the lead had achieved full penetration. Even his furniture was bulletproof. That was when he caught a whiff of something in the air other than the talcum powder and blood. Perfume from the woman? No, what assassin would do a job wearing perfume to reveal her presence in the dark? It might be a man’s cologne, brandy-cut tobacco mixed with the faint aroma of homogenized oil.

He checked the top right-hand drawer and there was a cleaning kit for a gun. Plus a spare magazine and a box of ammo for a 10 mm Colt Magnum pistol—semisteel jacketed hollow-point rounds. Serious ammo. Those tens hit like sledgehammers and punched holes through everything short of Threat-Level-Five body armor.

Wearing only Level Four at the moment, that gave Bolan pause. Then he moved on. Kegan had to be stopped. End of discussion.

Closing the drawer, the soldier looked over the office again and tried to reconstruct in his mind how it got this way. Everything had been smashed or slashed open, even the books on the shelves. The plastic fern in the corner had been removed from its wicker pot and wood chips were scattered everywhere. Looking for something small and flexible... Documents, perhaps?

There were three doors lining the interior wall. Wading through the mounds of trash, Bolan went to the first and found that it opened onto a short hallway with stairs going up and another door to the left that had to lead to the basement.

The stairs didn’t creak as he’d expected, which was a good sign of proper maintenance. At the top, Bolan reached a blank wall with picture-used-to-be-here stains and a short hallway. Just to the left was a modern kitchen, obviously a recent addition, with a small breakfast area.

The kitchen table was in pieces, the steel tube chairs disassembled. Same as downstairs, the kitchen had been thoroughly searched, corn flakes littering the floor, bag of sugar busted wide open. Bolan studied the sugar for patterns in the granulated surface but found none. Whatever was hidden hadn’t been found here.

Rummaging through a drawer Bolan found a can opener and wasted precious minutes opening a couple of soup cans from the bottom cupboard. He had once encountered drug lords who smuggled messages to each other hidden inside sealed cans of soup. Simply open the bottom, insert your item, then weld the bottom back on. It had worked for years before the DEA got wise, then they did nothing to stop the transfer of information, merely opened the cans, copied the messages then sealed them up again.

Moving upstairs, Bolan moved onward, keeping an ear out for a car arriving or a knock downstairs. A neighbor might have seen him enter and called the police. But this was Columbus where everybody minded his or her own business and quietly got killed without disturbing the people next door. An open doorway led to what remained of a living room, couch flipped over, cushions slit open, the covers removed from the electrical outlets, pictures off the wall, even the television set had been kicked in and the cover removed. After the assassins had been chased away by Kegan and his crew, somebody else had entered the building, and done a thorough job of searching the place from top to bottom. Smart move, and the perps were certainly thorough enough, he’d give them that.

The curtains were off the windows, and the blinds torn down, the weighted bottoms cracked apart. Impressive. Bolan never would have thought of hiding anything inside the bottoms of venetian blinds. He was starting to get the feeling that whatever Kegan had hidden had to have been found and was long gone. But he still had to double check. Just the chance of stopping Kegan was worth the effort.

Down the hall was a bathroom with grout dust covering the fixtures. Somebody had run a knife along the wall tiles to look for fresh work over a secret panel. They really were good! Bolan filed that trick away to use himself sometime in the future.

The bedroom looked like a hurricane had hit a rag factory. Nothing was intact. Feathers swirled about his shoes from pillows gone to heaven. The northern wall was a single expanse of closets with a bare top shelf. Bolan probed for a panel leading to a crawl space or attic, but found nothing except dust and deceased spiders.

The light-switch panels had been yanked off the walls, exposed wires dangling dangerously loose, and the carpet was torn up in several spots. A rush of adrenaline was building within Bolan. Time was short, the numbers falling, and he wondered if there was any place they hadn’t looked.

Going to his personal favorite spot to stash important things, Bolan lifted the ceramic lid off the toilet tank and looked inside. Nothing there but water, the usual mechanical works and a drained sanitizer cylinder. The pros who’d hit this place would never have missed an area so obvious as the toilet tank. But had they searched everything?