LITMIR.BIZ

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and metamorphosed volcanic formations.

      A motorcycle passed him, doing seventy or better, north of Thornton Gap. On any other morning—any other highway— Bolan wouldn’t have considered it a threat, but trips to Stony Man Farm, home to the nation’s most covert strike teams, were different, demanding even more alertness than he normally applied to daily life.

      There was a possibility, however slim verging on nonexistent, that he might have picked up a tail in D.C. or at the previous night’s stop in Falls Church, Virginia. Officially, Mack Bolan didn’t exist. He’d been dead and buried for years, his various dossiers stamped Closed, filed and forgotten after a historic flameout in Manhattan’s Central Park.

      But still… He’d been out there with various personas, and in his current incarnation as Matt Cooper, he’d been rather active lately. Most of Bolan’s enemies were well and truly dead, but there were bound to be some stragglers somewhere who had glimpsed his mug in passing, on some bloody killing ground or in some seedy dive. Hopefully, no one was on his tail. He hadn’t spotted anyone as yet.

      Bolan turned off Skyline Drive onto the Farm’s single-lane access road. No gates were visible at first. Approaching vehicles or pedestrians had to round a corner first, by which time they had tripped two sets of sensors and were screened from view of any other passing travelers.

      Alone, where they could be examined and condemned without an audience.

      As soon as Bolan saw the gate, he keyed a pager-size device that would alert the Stony Man Farm team to his arrival. They already knew that someone was approaching, from the hidden sensors, but his signal would prevent a mobilized reaction in defense.

      The gate still didn’t open, though. For that, he had to nose the Prius in and power down his window, leaning out to let a hidden camera focus on his face without a layer of tinted glass obstructing biometric measurements. The Farm was far removed from Hollywood in every way—not least among them being that a new arrival couldn’t pass on looks alone.

      Bolan supposed there had to be intercoms somewhere around the gate, but no one greeted him by verbal communication. Instead, the steel gate topped with razor wire rolled open on its hidden track, taking its sweet time. He waited, then drove through and saw the gate reverse direction in his rearview mirror, shutting out the world.

      It felt like coming home, if any place deserving of that label still remained on Earth, but even Stony Man wasn’t invulnerable. Some years back, a rogue CIA agent had pierced the Farm’s veil of secrecy and mounted an attack that claimed the life of April Rose, Bolan’s love. That debt was paid, but it would never be forgotten.

      As he rolled up to the farmhouse, Bolan saw three figures waiting for him on the porch. Hal Brognola, stationed in the middle, was his oldest living friend and overseer of the Stony Man operation, working mostly from his office at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington. Before the current program was created, the big Fed had been a G-man, hunting Bolan nationwide, drawn slowly into grudging admiration of the Executioner’s technique and its results, then into a covert alliance that could have cost Brognola his pension, if not his life and freedom.

      On Brognola’s left stood Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller. Bolan caught her smile as he stepped from the vehicle, returned it with feeling, then turned his attention to the man on Brognola’s right.

      Aaron Kurtzman, nicknamed “the Bear” for his beard and hulking size, had been shot in the spine on the same night April Rose died, confined to a wheelchair since then. The chair was low-tech, as Kurtzman had refused a motorized chair.

      “You’re early,” Brognola declared by way of greeting.

      “Caught a tailwind,” Bolan said, and shook hands all around.

      “You need to freshen up, or shall we get to work?”

      “Work’s good,” the Executioner replied.

      THE FARM’S WAR Room was a basement chamber, accessible by stairs or elevator. Bolan’s party used the elevator for Kurtzman’s sake, those who were ambulatory taking familiar seats around a conference table built for an even dozen. So far, within the project’s history, there’d been no need to bring in extra chairs.

      Brognola sat at the head of the table, with Bolan on his right, Price on his left. Kurtzman took the other end and manned a keyboard that controlled the War Room’s lighting and its audio-visual gear. He dimmed the lights a little, leaving them bright enough to read by without eye strain, and lowered a screen from the ceiling behind Brognola’s chair. Beside him, a laptop hummed to life.

      “What do you know about Albania?” Brognola asked without preamble.

      “It’s on the Adriatic, in southeastern Europe,” Bolan answered. “Facing toward the heel of Italy. Russia took over after World War II, but then there was some kind of break that pushed Albania toward China in the early sixties. The communist regime collapsed along with Russia and the rest of them, in 1991 or ’92, followed by chaos and violence. It’s one of the poorest, most backward countries in Europe. Beyond that,” he added, “not much.”

      “That’s better than average,” Brognola said. “But you forgot the Albanian Mafia.”

      “Okay.” Bolan breathed and bided his time.

      “Like every other place on Earth,” Hal said, “Albania’s had its share of criminal clans and secret societies throughout history. I know you faced one of its organizations not long ago. They operate under a loose set of laws called kanuni, as you know, similar to the Mafia’s rule of omertà, triad initiation oaths, and so on.”

      The big Fed paused, then proceeded when Bolan said nothing.

      “Albanian mobsters made their living from vice and black-market trading under the old Red regime. They got their first real boost during the war in Kosovo, which interrupted the flow of Turkish heroin to western Europe through Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia. Rerouting tons of smack through Albania changed the drug landscape. So much heroin passed through Veliki Trnovac that the DEA started calling it the Medellín of the Balkans. Today, the Albanian Mob has active branches in Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and they’re giving the Cosa Nostra a run for its money in Italy. Scotland Yard’s tracking Albanian operators in the U.K. And—huge surprise—they’ve made it to the States.”

      “Sounds like a problem for the FBI,” Bolan said.

      “And it would be, if we lived in normal times. By which I mean pre-9/11 times, without two wars in progress overseas and half the G-men in the country eavesdropping on mosques. It’s no great secret that the Bureau shifted its priorities after the towers fell. Hell, it was in the papers and on CNN—twenty-four hundred agents removed from ‘traditional’ investigations to work the terrorist beat, while Mafia and white-collar prosecutions dropped by 40 percent or more. They’re trying to redress that imbalance today, over at the Hoover Building, but they left the barn door open too damned long.”

      “So, let’s hear it,” Bolan said.

      “Last week,” Brognola said, “a Coast Guard cutter on patrol along the Jersey Coast tried to stop and search an unidentified trawler. The trawler’s captain made a run for it, then set the boat on fire and bailed. He got away somehow, or maybe drowned, with whatever crew he had aboard. The boat—a shrimper stolen from New Orleans six weeks earlier—burned to the water line with nineteen people still aboard.”

      Bolan frowned. “You said—”

      “That the captain and crew got away. These were passengers.”

      As Brognola spoke, photos of a blackened, listing boat began to scroll across the screen behind him. Soon the focus shifted to recovery of charred and shriveled corpses, while the trawler did its best to sink and disappear.

      “Illegals,” Bolan said.

      The big Fed nodded. “From the autopsy reports, it was eight men, seven women and four children. Cooked alive belowdecks, for the most part.”

      “Jesus.”

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