LITMIR.BIZ

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return, but she simply laughed it off and concocted excuses about how hard she’d been working, how stressful her job was and so forth. Her father offered to intervene but she expressly forbade him, warning that she was an adult now and that he’d taught her to stand upon her own two feet. That was usually enough to end the conversation.

      This time, though, she knew it would become dangerous to do this alone. After sitting on the edge of her bed, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip, Naryshkin made a decision and rose to dress. It was time to face this situation with all the courage and veracity she’d been taught, and to reach out for help to the only two people left in the world she trusted. There had never been anything her father and mother couldn’t overcome in the past. Yes. Her father had once been an influential man in the government. He had many connections. And he would help her, especially when she professed her undying love for Leo. After all, her father was a hopeless romantic who could refuse his family nothing.

      Yes. She would go to them immediately, wake them from their beds if she had to.

      But Naryshkin was so focused on her mission, she failed to notice the two men who observed her leave her two-story flat, get into her car and begin the long, arduous drive to her father’s house.

      CHAPTER THREE

      “I have to hand it to you, Carron,” Mack Bolan said. “I might never have thought of this.”

      Carron chuckled and replied, “Yeah. I figure if you want to catch the mouse but don’t know where he’s hiding, then your next best option’s to sit on the cat.”

      In this case, they were sitting on an entire den of cats. One of the things Carron had learned during the past few years working the Russian sector were the hangouts of every SMJ cell in St. Petersburg. This wouldn’t have necessarily been difficult information to come by given Stony Man’s significant reach into the intelligence community, but it certainly would have taken time. It was this fact that made Bolan glad he decided to enlist Carron’s help.

      The snow stopped falling while they were in the café and the pair managed to get a taxi ride to the train station where Bolan had stored his weaponry. Another stop at a CIA safehouse allowed Carron time to check with his superiors and gave Bolan the opportunity to bring Stony Man up to date on the mission status. A second cab ride had brought them to a club, one that served alcohol and catered to the underage crowd.

      It disgusted Bolan that such establishments were permitted to exist, although he knew the problem wasn’t isolated to St. Petersburg.

      “We can’t save them all,” Carron had responded when Bolan voiced his concern.

      “We can if we do it a few kids at a time,” had been Bolan’s reply.

      The two men watched the entrance for about twenty minutes before Bolan checked his watch. “Almost 2330.”

      “Sounds like it’s about time to crash the party.”

      “My thought exactly,” Bolan said. “You’re fluent in Russian. How about I back your play this time around?”

      “No problem.”

      The two men stepped from the shelter of the awning and hurried carefully across the slippery street. Vehicles had been arriving infrequently to deposit their occupants outside the front door of the club. At the moment, the sidewalk was empty and they didn’t see anyone hanging around nearby. The weather and the weeknight hour seemed to have kept the majority of people indoors, leaving only the more young and daring crowd to venture into the nightlife. Carron had told Bolan that in the summer this part of town was typically packed with pedestrians and all the shops were open.

      The pair reached the door and Bolan opened it to admit Carron first. They crossed a very dark and narrow vestibule, and beyond that was another entryway, this one a dark, heavy curtain, through which the briefest flash of lights and the steady thump of electronic dance music encompassed them. Carron pushed the curtain aside and was immediately detained by a huge, bald man. Bolan didn’t understand the full exchange but he caught the gist of the conversation.

      “Hold it,” the bouncer said. “This is a private party.”

      “I was invited,” Carron replied.

      “I don’t think you were,” the door guy said, and he jabbed a finger into Carron’s shoulder.

      In the blink of an eye the man’s finger disappeared from sight, enfolded by Carron’s left hand. The bouncer’s knees bent some in a show of submission as Carron bent the finger backward to the breaking point. A second man, a bit smaller than the door guy, stepped forward to intervene, but Bolan intercepted him with the barrel of his Beretta 93-R in the guy’s ribs. He held the weapon in such a way nobody inside the club could see it.

      Bolan favored the man with a cold smile. “We’re not here for trouble, so don’t start any.”

      “What do you want?” the man asked in English.

      “We’re looking for two guys, names of Rostov and Cherenko,” Bolan replied. “We have it on good advice they may hang out here.”

      The man’s face paled. “They are not here.”

      Carron then said something to the bouncer in Russian. The man winced with the increased pressure applied to his finger and then jerked his thumb toward the back of the club. Through the smoky haze and the flashing lights Carron and Bolan could make out an older man surrounded by at least half a dozen beautiful women. Carron fired off a couple more questions, then released his hold on the bouncer. The bouncer’s eyes were filled with hatred but he made no attempt to detain them from entering the club.

      Carron leaned close to Bolan’s ear to be heard over the incessant beat of the music. “He says we should talk to the blond woman over there. Her name’s Sonya Vdovin. She’s like part of the SMJ’s entourage, or something.”

      “I didn’t know militant youth gangs had groupies,” the Executioner remarked.

      Carron shrugged. “I guess.”

      Bolan took point now with Carron watching his back. They advanced on the raised booth adjacent to the dance floor, approaching it from two directions. The man seated at the center of the booth wore a silk jacket in L.A. Lakers purple, and sunglasses. As many glittering, gaudy rings adorned his fingers as the number of women strewed sensuously across the massive booth surrounding his table. Bolan searched his mental files for a name to put to that smug face but came up empty. Apparently this one liked to keep a low profile. Bolan could only assume he was part of SMJ’s top echelon, and young as he might be, that still made him one of the enemy.

      Among the man’s little harem were mostly dark browns and auburns, with one blond seated two spots to the man’s left. Sonya Vdovin.

      A brief conversation took place in Russian between Carron and the pimp look-alike before total chaos erupted in the club. Bolan spotted the flash of strobes on metal in his peripheral vision and turned in time to see a pair of young men on approach, machine pistols held too close to their bodies to be effective in that space. Bolan reacted automatically, whipping the Beretta 93-R from shoulder leather. He drew a split-second bead on the first gunner and squeezed the trigger. The Beretta’s report couldn’t even be heard above the music but that made the shot no less effective. The 9 mm Parabellum round pounded into the man’s breastbone and pitched him into a table occupied by a man and woman a couple of booths down. The second gunman skidded to a halt and brought his SMG to bear, but Bolan already had him tagged. The Executioner fired a double-tap this time that drilled the first slug into his opponent’s chest and the second through his upper lip. The proximity of the shot flipped the guy off his feet and dumped him over the railing lining the walkway. His body smacked the dance floor and the people below began to scream and shrink away from the corpse.

      Bolan stepped back and nearly lost his footing on some steps as the man in the Lakers jacket suddenly upended the table and produced a machine pistol. The soldier managed to keep his feet but in that brief moment he could only shout a warning at Carron. The Company man had drawn his pistol in the moment during

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