LITMIR.BIZ

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Brognola agreed.

      “Okay,” Bolan said. “Let me hear the rest of it.”

      THE REMAINING DETAILS were quickly delivered. “Someone” had located al-Bari’s hidey-hole in northwest Pakistan, where he shared lodgings with Rashad and other members of al Qaeda. Some of them were only passing through—dodging pursuers, picking up their orders or delivering reports—but there appeared to be a constant staff of four or five top aides in residence, plus bodyguards.

      How many guards?

      No one could say, with any certainty.

      After the briefing, Bolan went up to his usual room. Brognola, or someone acting on his orders, had prepared a CD-ROM containing biographical material on Bolan’s two main targets and his Pakistani contact, plus a summary of known al Qaeda actions since the group was organized in 1988. Born out of battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan, al Qaeda—“The Base,” in Arabic—was a fluid band of Sunni Muslim militants, founded by one Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. A bomb blast killed Azzam and his two sons a year later, in November 1989, outside a mosque in Peshawar. Suspects named in different media reports included the Mossad, the CIA, and O.B.L. himself. Officially, the case remained unsolved.

      The rest was history. With O.B.L. in charge, warriors of al Qaeda rolled on to murder thousands, from New York and Washington to London and Madrid, Djerba and Casablanca, Istanbul and Aden, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Jakarta and Bali. The world was their battleground. Their stated goals: destruction of Israel, eradication of all foreign influence from Muslim nations, and establishment of a new Islamic caliphate.

      In practice, that meant killing anyone who disagreed with them on any point of doctrine, or who was perceived to aid the group’s enemies. Bolan had faced al Qaeda members in the past and managed to survive, but this would be his first crack at the group’s top-level leadership.

      Which brought him to the men themselves.

      According to Brognola’s file, Akram Ben Abd al-Bari had been born in Cairo, in September 1951. His father was a pharmacist and teacher, from a long line of physicians and scholars active in radical politics. Al-Bari joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age fourteen, went on to study medicine and served in the Egyptian army as a surgeon, married and had two daughters. By 1980 he was rising through the ranks of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which merged with al Qaeda in 1998. Three years later, when American smart bombs leveled Taliban headquarters at Gardez, Afghanistan, al-Bari’s wife and daughters died in the rubble.

      Al-Bari escaped and channeled his grief into rage.

      Ra’id Ibn Rashad was another Egyptian, younger than al-Bari. Conflicting CIA reports claimed he was born in April 1960 or November 1963, but neither date was relevant to Bolan. Rashad was a suspect in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, but he’d dodged indictment in that case and fled to Sudan with other members of al-Bari’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, later following his mentor into a merger with al Qaeda. FBI reports named Rashad as a guiding force behind two U.S. embassy bombings in 1988, which claimed 223 lives in Kenya and Tanzania, leaving another 4,085 wounded. Rashad had missed a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, but made the Bureau’s roster of Most Wanted Terrorists when that program was created after 9/11.

      Neither target was a combat soldier, though Rashad had done his share of training in assorted desert camps. They weren’t guerrilla fighters in the normal sense, but both had proved themselves die-hard survivors, living on the run for over a decade, while the combined military and intelligence networks of the United States and Great Britain tried to hunt them down.

      That told Bolan that they were determined and had a very strong support system. He wondered, now, if either man suspected that their hideout had been blown. Beyond the knowledge that their deaths obsessed some operatives in Washington and London, did al-Bari or Rashad know that specific plans were in the works to kill them?

      Bolan had no way of knowing for certain if Brognola’s information was correct, but the team at Stony Man Farm had never let him down before. Yet Bolan knew that every operation was a fluid, living thing.

      At least until the final shots were fired.

      Al-Bari and Rashad might know they’d been exposed, or they might simply crave a change of scene and slip away before he got to Pakistan. In which case, Bolan might be able to pick up their trail—or he might not.

      Some of the burden rested on his native contact, one Hussein Gorshani. Brognola’s dossier said that Gorshani would turn thirty-four the following month. He owned a small repair shop in Islamabad, specializing in electronics, and had roughly quadrupled the country’s average per capita income of $2,900 over the past ten years. He also drew a modest paycheck from the CIA, which was a story in itself.

      Pakistan is a self-proclaimed Islamic republic, and while about ninety-seven percent of its people subscribed to the faith, some Muslims were more equal than others. Hussein Gorshani belonged to the Shia minority, outnumbered four-or five-to-one by hostile Sunnis. Still, Gorshani’s dossier claimed that religious persecution had not sparked his decision to work for Langley. Rather, that had come about by slow degrees, as Gorshani observed his nation’s leaders drifting ever closer to covert support for O.B.L. and al Qaeda.

      Gorshani had served four years in Pakistan’s army, rising to the rank of havildar, or sergeant. As a native of the North-West Frontier Province, he had served most of his time there, on border patrols with the paramilitary Frontier Corps. He was also trilingual, rated as fluent in Pashto, Urdu and English.

      An all-around Renaissance man.

      There were, however, two things that Brognola’s dossier could not reveal about Hussein Gorshani. First, despite his military training, there was nothing to suggest he’d ever fired a shot in anger at another human being. When the crunch came—and it would—could Bolan trust Gorshani to pull the trigger on one of his own countrymen?

      The second question was more basic, but equally vital.

      Could Bolan trust Gorshani at all?

      Turncoats, double and triple agents were a dime a dozen in the murky realm of cloak-and-dagger operations. Every nation had its clique of spies, and the U.S. had more than most. Each and every spy network on Earth used bribery and blackmail to recruit from opposition groups, as well as from civilian populations.

      Who could absolutely guarantee that Bolan’s contact wasn’t secretly working for Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, its Federal Investigation Agency, or some military outfit under the umbrella of Islamabad’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence?

      Answer: no one.

      It was a risk that Bolan ran each time he set foot onto foreign soil, relying on a local contact. He had beat the odds so far, but that just meant that he was overdue to roll snake eyes.

      Bolan’s less-than-comforting thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a cautious rapping on his door.

      “OH, GOOD. You’re decent,” Barbara Price observed, as Bolan stood aside to let her in.

      “Depends on who you ask,” he said.

      “I guess it would.” She nodded toward the open laptop with Gorshani’s mug shot on the monitor’s screen. “We’re pretty sure he’s clean,” she said, as if reading his mind.

      “And he’s the only game in town,” Bolan replied.

      “That, too.”

      “He’s not the one who blew the whistle on al-Bari and Rashad, though.”

      “No,” she said, “he’s not. Langley won’t part with that name. They’ve supposedly got someone deep on the inside.”

      “So, he could do the job himself,” Bolan suggested.

      “That was Hal’s first thought, but Langley doesn’t want to lose him. After all, someone’s bound to replace al-Bari and Rashad after you take them out. As long as Mr. X is still in place, the Company can track al Qaeda’s leadership.”

      “The

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