approach to Edwards was made, and within a month she was in.'
Bolan had not missed the feminine pronoun. An idea started to take shape in his mind and he did not like the look of it.
'This was projected as a long-term operation, to be conducted with absolute minimum risk of error. For that reason, our agent has contacted us exactly twice in those six months. In the first instance, she informed us that Edwards was just as professional as we believed. He was treating her as what she was: a highly trained and proficient operative. No grab-ass bullshit or anything like that. She had been given a few assignments, nothing very sensitive-courier duty, surveillance, intelligence analysis, and so forth. Edwards was testing her out, and she was passing with flying colors. He was convinced that she was what she professed to be: a fellow professional and a fellow traitor.'
'Hal,' Bolan interrupted. 'Who is she?'
'You know her, Striker. The name is Toby Ranger.'
Bolan leaned back in the straight-backed wooden chair and let out breath. Yeah, he knew Toby Ranger.
In that other lifetime, when the Mafia menace took him the length and breadth of the country, fate had engineered the intersection of his path with that of Toby Ranger more than once. He had fought at the woman's side. He had saved her life.
And she had saved his.
So maybe 'know' wasn't quite the right word. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the lives of Mack Bolan and Toby Ranger were bonded, in a way few men and women could ever hope to know.
'Striker, listen...' Hal began.
'You said Toby made two contacts,' Bolan broke in, his voice betraying no emotion. 'Brief me on the second.'
'It's fresh, Striker — came in while you were airborne en route to Heathrow. Last week, Edwards held some kind of big meet at a chalet he owns in the Swiss Alps, in the canton of Valais. Nominally, Edwards now holds Swiss citizenship. Anyway, this chalet is apparently one of his permanent bases. He maintains a full-time security force there, multinational, recruited from the terrorists he serves as opposed to his handpicked inner-circle force that Toby became a part of. The chalet also has a communications facility. Probably Edwards has other bases like it, but he's never domiciled in one place for long.
As near as Toby could make out, something damned big was being hatched at this meet. Those people weren't terrorists, at least not what we usually think of as terrorists. Toby was pretty sure they were intelligence agents, representing nearly every freeworld nation. Some of them were 'retired' like Edwards, but some of them were still active, we think.
Besides the agents, there were a few others offering 'specialized services.' One of them was Frederick Charon.' Brognola's voice had gone harsh with tension and suppressed rage. 'Do you have any guesses as to what this could mean, Striker?'
'An international underground intelligence network,' Bolan said evenly. 'A 'black' CIA, run by men trained by the top legit agencies in the world, serving the needs of the terrorist network. With state-of-the-art technology provided by traitors like Charon.'
'That's the way it shapes up,' Brognola agreed. 'And it has to be stopped.'
So the mission wasn't over after all; in fact, it had hardly begun. The Charon penetration, the cutting of the Charon-Drummond-KGB chain, was only a foot in the door of a major infrastructure of deceit, treason, and terror. Somewhere in the bowels of that infrastructure sat Frank Edwards, renegade agent, death merchant.
And it was up to Mack Bolan to bring that temple of terror crashing down on him, burying him forever.
'Where is Edwards, Hal?'
'Striker, you're in no shape to take him on, not now. That bullet wound...'
'Where is he?'
Brognola's sigh cut through the static. 'We don't know.' Bolan waited. The idea in his mind was getting uglier. 'Toby was only able to pass what I've told you. She was leaving the Valais chalet, but she wasn't sure for where.' Another pause. 'I'll level, Striker. She suspects her cover might be blown.' The ugly idea was clear as a photograph now.
Frank Edwards operated in a grim dark world, and the realities of that world were overwhelmingly lethal.
Toby Ranger would remain among the living only until she had revealed everything she knew to Frank Edwards. And Edwards and his men would know every vicious method for encouraging her to talk.
The odds that Toby was alive were short. The odds that she was entire were almost nil.
'We're not even sure where the Valais chalet is located, Striker,' Brognola said bleakly.
The phone handset cradled against his shoulder, Bolan was using his right hand to undo the sling. The pain was down to a dull ache, and the arm itself would serve if he could control it.
'I know how to find out,' Bolan said grimly.
'Striker?
'What?'
Brognola started to say something, seemed to change his mind.
'Live large,' he murmured, and Bolan heard the connection break.
The sound of the chair legs on the floor seemed unnaturally loud in the bare room, and the door creaked when Bolan went out.
It was time for one last conversation with Frederick Charon.
6
The dark-haired guy was trying to blink cigarette smoke out of his eyes and bring around the M-16 carbine at the same time. He had accomplished neither when the silenced 9mm slug tore through his throat.
The cigarette dropped from his lips as he went down, and blood geysered from the jagged wound to stain the grass on which he fell. Then, almost lazily on the clean twilight mountain air, smoke drifted from the same gory hole, as the guy's lungs rejected the inhalation that was his last living act.
Mack Bolan grabbed the guy, who had been dying for a smoke, by his heels and dragged him under the canopy of the lower branches of one of the stunted larches that dotted the steep slope, before melting into the shadows of the trees himself. The exertion cost him some pain from the tightly bandaged shoulder, but he needed time for surveillance before moving in. The encounter with the guard had been chance, but it did not mean the numbers were up yet. It could be some time before the guy was missed.
Right now time was not Mack Bolan's ally.
His chronometer, now set to Switzerland local time, read 2010; within a few minutes it would be full dark. He had left London less than five hours before, in a Lear-jet nominally registered to a British citizen, but flown by a crackerjack RAF pilot. At Cointrin Airport in Geneva a chopper was waiting to transport him to Sion on the Rhone River, capital of the Alpine canton of Valais. A Land Rover loaded with the equipment Colonel John Phoenix had requisitioned awaited him.
It was undoubtedly some of the most beautiful country in the world, with its crystal-clear mountain streams bisecting the rugged scarps of the towering peaks.
Driving west, Bolan passed through groves of larch trees and hornbeam; a marmot darted across the road. But the thought of the traitor Frank Edwards and the woman who was likely now his prisoner occupied Bolan and allowed him only the most superficial appreciation of the extraordinary terrain.
At Sierre he turned the Rover south, up the Anniviers Valley. He passed the power station at Vissoie, the tiny resort towns of Ayer and Zinal. Soon after that, about thirty miles after he left the Rhone Valley, the gravel road narrowed, and less than two miles further on a posted gate announced that it was a private access from that point on. Rigging for combat, Bolan went EVA.
Ten minutes of dog-trotting had brought him to his present position and to the guard who had just learned that like the pack said, smoking was hazardous to your health.
