Cold Snap

The .357 Magnum on his hip, a Blackhawk single-action revolver, showed he meant business in terms of ending a shootout with a minimum amount of stops. Lyons had his own Ruger, the double-action GP-100 with a six-inch barrel. Crunch eyed the revolver and nodded with approval, making Lyons feel nauseated. He didn’t allow it to show in his features, though. He’d spent time working as an undercover agent for the FBI after his stint with the LAPD, and his control was ironclad. But when it came time to break this little clubhouse open, Lyons had plenty of fuel for his berserker rage.

“Good to see at least one of you queer-coasters like American iron,” Crunch said, acknowledging the weapon on Lyons’s hip, then looking askance toward Schwarz and his shoulder-holstered Beretta, unmistakable for its magazine base pad and the lanyard ring behind it.

Carrying or riding anything that wasn’t American-made was forbidden among bikers, which was why they’d pulled up in a rented Jeep Cherokee rather than rented “rice burners” aka Japanese-built motorcycles. As big and brawny as Honda could make a motor bike, it still was not an American-made Harley-Davidson. There wasn’t one of these men who would spare more than a second glance at a foreign-made weapon or vehicle.

Schwarz had a Beretta M-9 A-1, which thankfully had Made in the U.S.A. scrawled on its slide, even though Lyons was fully aware that some might turn up their nose at him for carrying a gun with an Italian name.

“What part of ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ don’t you understand?” Schwarz asked nonchalantly. He twisted the cap off a beer and took a drag on it. “’Sides, good enough for Uncle Sam, good enough for me.”

Crunch shook his head. “Stupid European guns. Not even in a proper caliber.”

“So give us something,” Lyons returned. “We’ve got the cash.”

“What are you looking for?” Crunch asked.

“I’m not looking to screw around with follow-up shots,” Lyons answered. “I’m here for ‘fast-and-dirty and then get the hell home.’”

Crunch nodded. “You want 12-gauge air-conditioning, then.”

Lyons smirked. “You get me, brother. You really get me.”

“What about the guy with the pellet gun?” Crunch asked.

“He digs .22s,” Lyons said with an eye roll.

Crunch leered over at Schwarz. “Poodle shooters and pasta pistols. You need a new partner.”

“Despite his wimpy tastes, I’ll keep him,” Lyons returned. “He might have to shoot someone five or six times, but he always has my back.”

“That’s a good reason to keep him around,” Crunch said. “Listen, even our semi-only ARs are pulled for important stuff. I only have shotguns.”

Lyons narrowed his eyes. “Things that bad, eh?”

“You have no idea, and you never will,” Crunch returned. “Don’t dig in our business.”

Lyons shook his head. “I don’t shit where I eat.”

“That’s a rare admirable quality,” Crunch said. “Rucks, go get these two a couple of 870s from the locker. How much ammo you gonna need?”

Schwarz spoke up. “Twenty apiece. If we need more than that, we’re dead, anyway.”

“Says the faggot who needs fifteen in a clip,” Rucks chuckled.

Schwarz was not the biggest or strongest member of Able Team, but he moved with such fluid grace and swiftness that no one in the clubhouse even saw him go from lounging on his tilted chair, heels crossed on the table in front of him to standing over Rucks, pushing the biker’s head to the floor with one hand. Lyons knew the move that kept the smart-mouth pinned. He could see Gadgets’s two first knuckles up under Rucks’s Adam’s apple, the other two fingers extended and pressed against the nerve junction under his jawbone.

The Heathens wise-ass now had trouble breathing, his airway pressed down upon. The real paralyzing pressure, however, came from the ring finger and pinkie jammed against the cluster of nerves and juncture of blood vessels at that part of his body. Rucks’s eyes were wide, his mouth moving, gaping like a fish out of water.

“You better be talking about a cigarette,” Schwarz growled as he loomed over the biker.

Rucks croaked, the knuckles paralyzing his larynx, even as Lyons knew the blood flow to his brain was being interrupted. A few more moments and he’d be unconscious. It wasn’t as if Schwarz cared if someone thought he was gay, but in the role of a bad-ass, government-hating biker thug, the merest mention of his lack of manhood should have made him fly off the handle.

Anchoring a man to the floor by his throat with one hand wasn’t flying off the handle, but eyes widened all around the scene.

“Now you know why he only needs small stuff,” Lyons said nonchalantly. “Twenty sounds right.”

“Have your boy let my man go,” Crunch said.

Lyons nodded to Schwarz, who stood back. Rucks rubbed his throat, looking up at Schwarz.

No, Hermann Schwarz was not a big man, but he was a master of Monkey Style Kung Fu, which meant that he kept his body far more limber than anyone of his relative mass and fitness should have been. The Monkey Style was loose and agile, matching the speed and limberness of Schwarz’s mind and body. Sure, Lyons snapped dimension lumber with a single punch with his choice of Shotokan Karate, but he didn’t think of his friend as a weak link, either.

“You okay, Rucks?” Crunch asked. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Lyons. The bald biker was not going to give the undercover Able Team leader an opening due to a lapse of attention.

“Feel like I swallowed a pool ball,” the Heathen croaked.

“You’re lucky you didn’t swallow your own ball sack,” Schwarz told him.

“Someone get these two assholes their guns and ammo,” Crunch said. “I’m getting sick of looking at these left coast pricks.”

Lyons pulled a fat roll of bills from his jeans pocket.

“No. Screw it,” Crunch muttered. “The RLR will owe the Heathens.”

Lyons’s lip curled. “And we were getting along so nicely.”

True to Crunch’s word, a pair of 870s and several boxes of shotgun shells were loaded into a nylon bag.

“Now blow,” Crunch grumbled.

“That we’ll do,” Lyons returned, hefting the bag.

We’ll blow you straight to hell.

* * *

THOMAS JEFFERSON HAWKINS didn’t know which made him feel more naked: the lack of firearms concealed upon his person or the hostile glares when Tokyo citizens heard his Texan drawl, even if it was subdued. Both he and Gary Manning did their best to appear as innocuous as possible. So far, their mission was low-profile advanced intelligence gathering, seeking out signs of the conspiracy in Japan itself.

Unfortunately, Hawkins, even though he had a fairly good tourist vocabulary in Japanese, still had a tiny bit of that twang. Right now, the Land of the Rising Sun didn’t want to suffer the presence of Americans among them. Manning, on the other hand, was less conspicuous in his mannerisms and speech. He already had a voice that sounded neutral, more reminiscent of a voice-trained news announcer who buried drawls and speech shortcuts to be accepted nationwide. As a Canadian, it was no effort for him to return to a more thick-tongued, long-voweled “Great White North” pattern of speech that divorced him from the United States of America.

Even with that, Canada was scarcely a close ally of the Japanese in regard to research whaling, even though their interaction with the nation was minimal thanks to the U.S. and the Commonwealth of Independent States taking the brunt of any Japanese whaling in Arctic waters.

Hawkins might not have had a concealed pistol, but he was far from unarmed. Tucked inside a waistband sheath was a combat knife, while on a thong around his neck, blade up, was a talon-hooked Karambit knife.

The knife, sheathed and concealed at his waist, was an old U.S. Army Ranger favorite, the Fairbairn-Sykes. But rather than the weak-handled original, Hawkins went with the Emerson Knives’ version of the fabled Ranger fighting blade. Made from one whole piece of steel, the eleven-inch-long fighting tool was slim, flat, ideal for keeping hidden, yet swift into action. A 650-pound test para-cord made up the handle, providing a sure grip and, in a pinch, a length of cord that could hold Hawkins’s weight, plus that of and two other men. Double edged, with a point swelling then narrowing to a waspish waist, the F-S blade provided plenty of cutting edge for only six and a half inches of finely honed steel, and a spine tough enough to hammer through an automobile door.

The Karambit was curved like the letter J. The inner arc of the blade was serrated and sharpened all the way to the deadly, piercing tip at the end of its hook. As a tool, it reaped rice. As a knife, it adorned the personal battle kits of warriors as far spread as Thailand and the southern Philippines

Gary Manning, Hawkins’s Phoenix Force partner, had traveled the world in the course of his various business ventures and had fleetingly even been to Southeast Asia as part of an “armed observer” mission in the Golden Triangle for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Manning’s Japanese language and custom familiarity had been vastly enhanced by his close friendship with the late Keio Ohara.

Manning, on the experience of both Ohara and fellow Phoenix Force member Rafael Encizo, had chosen a traditional Japanese blade. Two in fact. The first was a full-length, six-inch Cold Steel Tanto knife. With a chisel point and a rigid, thick spine the Tanto had served Encizo in countless knife battles with unfailing reliability, strength and dexterity. A smaller version was on a nylon strap around Manning’s muscular, bull-like neck. Built with a two-inch blade, it looked as if the knife had been punched in the nose and had swollen to three times its normal thickness, but its edges were every sharp. As a backup fighter, it was sturdy yet unobtrusive, giving the burly Canadian more than enough deadly punch if necessary.

The two men, relatively secure with at least their fighting knives, still knew the best weapons in their arsenals were their alertness and the knowledge gained through dozens of ambushes and years of accumulated experience in the dark, dangerous back alleys of the globe. Right now, both men cautiously made their way through a literal alley in Tokyo, far from the neon-splashed streets that made the city synonymous with ultramodern and high technology. Here, just a few yards from automobiles run on lithium batteries and storefronts packed with the latest in electronics, streetlights came in the form of rare rice-paper lanterns lit from within by candles and security relied upon the alert nose and ears of a guard dog.

As assuredly as the two warriors of Phoenix Force were currently operating without benefit of firepower, history showed that the presence of assault rifles and shotguns would not be tamped by Japanese law. Tokyo was a city where air-soft replicas of the latest in front-line rifles was commonplace to the point where professional teams formed to engage in mass simulated gun battles. Hawkins and Manning simply knew they didn’t want to risk an engagement with an already edgy and on-alert Tokyo law-enforcement community. They could not risk the attention that guns would bring, not when they were here in a wholly unofficial status to meet with a NOC—a non-official cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Whoever was working the angles of ruining the Japanese international image and national economy had made certain to work within operational security parameters that precluded any form of electronic communication. The NOC, however, had raised a report about RUMINT—intelligence gathered by rumor, in the parlance of normal, non-spy folks. It was a slim lead, one that had only been spotted through the tireless perusal of Huntington Wethers. A former cybernetics professor at UCLA, Wethers was now one of the computer wizards back at the Farm. He was nothing if not meticulous in looking for every possible thread of information, especially those that frayed and fell by the wayside of official investigation.

In Phoenix Force’s line of work, they knew that sometimes rumors were true. The five members of this world-spanning team had become urban legends in their own right, often identified as either members of a CIA black operations group or a special SWAT team under the aegis of INTERPOL, both of which were far from the truth. It was the blurry line between official backing that allowed the Farm’s commandos to board U.S. military aircraft bound for war or to be assigned to federal law-enforcement task forces and “unsanctioned” operations that kept their hands from being tied as they did not fear the diplomatic fallout from bringing down corrupt “allies” or rogues from within the United States government. Stony Man Farm had been developed specifically to avoid the entanglements of agency jurisdictional pride or the public face of international allegiances with those to whom human rights violations or the support of criminal or terrorist enterprises was not a point of concern.

Phoenix Force and Able Team were highly agile, quickly deployable teams that answered to the law of their own consciences. While special interest groups turned congressional debate over resolving issues into an endless circle of inane logic and politically advantageous rhetoric, the Farm’s cybernetic apparatus could burn through the internet, seeking out the true trails of evidence leading to the guilty. Able Team or Phoenix Force, or often both, would then be dispatched to properly solve the problem.

Those solutions usually ended with cold-hearted, greedy or fanatical murderers torn asunder by precision gunfire, all while minimizing the risk to noncombatants and bystanders as befitting a Stony Man commando. It was far more than a matter of pride that none of the Stony Man operatives had ever intentionally harmed an innocent person in the course of a mission. Be it combat or grim laser-precise direct action, the only ones who died were those who had innocent blood on their hands.

“Something feels wrong,” Manning murmured under his breath. Fortunately the hands-free communicator built into his nearly invisible earpiece allowed him to be heard loudly and clearly by Hawkins.

The Texan himself was also aware of a feeling of dread, of a potential for doom that hung in the air. He’d picked up a familiar scent wafting through the night air as he and the Canadian had made their way toward the small house owned by the NOC. “You catch a whiff of that?”

Manning, in the dim light of a distant rice-paper lamp, frowned deeply, his features darkening in the lengthened shadows. “Dead body.”

Hawkins scanned the small cube home of their contact and noticed that one of the windows was cracked open only slightly. He moved closer to the sill and took a deep sniff. It was with a queasy certainty that he could tell the exact length of time the corpse had been moldering inside the house just by the faint odor leaking through a window left ajar. “Seven hours.”

Manning nodded agreement with Hawkins’s assessment. The brawny man went to the door and, deftly drawing the Tanto from its sheath, hammered the chiseled point into the doorjamb just off to the side of the door handle and lock combination. Against wood and brass, and focused by the sturdy knife, Manning was more than adequate to open the locked door with the sound of a sharp crack in the space of only a moment.

Hawkins had his knife out, the Karambit held with his trigger finger through the loop, the wicked talon of the blade sticking out from the bottom of his fist. The grip was rock-solid, making it nearly impossible to pry from his grasp. He also produced a powerful LED Surefire pocket-size flashlight. He was to take point and would only activate the switch when he absolutely needed to illuminate a target.

Neither Hawkins nor Manning had anticipated the need for night-vision goggles, so the less they used their flashlights, the better their natural senses would allow them to maneuver in the darkness. Less utilization of flashlights would also lower their profile.

Like it or not, if the Tokyo police showed up to a house with a corpse inside, Hawkins and Manning had both illegally broken into the dwelling. Suspicion over the death would fall on them.

Manning clicked his tongue and Hawkins glanced back at his partner. The Canadian had had the foresight to bring along latex gloves to minimize the chances of leaving behind fingerprints or DNA. Hawkins pocketed the knife and sheathed the Karambit swiftly to free up his hands for donning the gloves, then quickly rearmed and readied the light to scan the shadows if necessary.

“Won’t have much time,” Manning mused softly. “The door cracking open will have been heard by someone.”

“This doesn’t seem like an area with a lot of 9-1-1 callers,” Hawkins said, following his nose to the body.

The Texan came to a halt, seeing the outline of the body on the floor.

In life, her name had been Veronica Moone. At least, that was the name given to her nonofficial cover. She’d been there in the guise of a young college graduate traveling abroad, living in Japan, sometimes working as a translator and sometimes teaching American English to local students. The ruse had given her plenty of room to move around, allowing her to travel to different Japanese cities for schools or businesses needing English translators. Invariably she’d had an inside edge for identifying potential threats to those global corporations.

In her role, either speaking to the parents of grade-school students or conversing with young businessmen looking to make it easier for themselves internationally, she could pick up details and information with far greater precision than the most advanced satellite imagery.

Moone wasn’t the name she’d been born with, Hawkins doubted, any more than their cover names were real.

Seven hours and her body was still in rigor. Kneeling beside her, he used what little ambient light was available to look for signs of injury. Barring that, he cupped his fingers over the lens of the flashlight and the glow between his fingers and a gleam he let loose to splash over her body. Shielding the light from being visible through the windows gave him immediate illumination, both figuratively and literally.

A line of bruising on her throat, marked by a large knot of blackness over her windpipe, revealed the tool of her death as being a garrote.

Manning took a glance, then frowned. “Silk scarf with a coin knotted into the middle.”

“Or para-cord around a large chain link,” Hawkins said, though he didn’t really believe that. “Why in hell would someone kill her along the lines of a Thuggee killer?”

Manning’s shrug didn’t give Hawkins any good vibes. Unfortunately, Manning’s familiarity with the cultlike murder/assassination was only too much of an indicator of how often different killers resorted to techniques such as these. Hawkins hadn’t been on the team in one instance where the masterminds behind a new Thuggee cult had gone so far as to create an animatronic statue of the Thuggee’s deadly goddess Kali, complete with a compact microwave laser unit installed in her elaborate headdress that could kill with a single robotic glance.

“The Thuggee, the Assassins, the Ninja, they’re all effective, and the more they appear as something either cultlike or outré, the more layers of obfuscation fall between the murderer and the victim,” Manning said. “We’re likely the only two people in this city, or even Japan, who could have figured out that Veronica here was murdered because she was a CIA operative instead of just a poor unlucky victim of a death goddess fetishist.”

“Striker ran into some Thuggee like this a while back, too, only operating in the Middle East,” Hawkins returned. “And let’s not forget England and the so-called Ripper killer.”

“Makes you wonder if fifty to a hundred years from now, some hush-hush group disguises their disposal of witnesses as the work of a fiend with a machete and a hockey mask,” Manning mused.

Moone, her mousy-brown hair cut short, but not boyishly so, might have been more attractive if all the blood had not drained from the right side of her face, leaving it gaunt, and settled into the left side, rendering it bloated and discolored. Her hazel eyes glinted in the shielded light, her having died with them open.

“Not a real Thuggee. They always close the eyes of their victims,” Hawkins noted.

“Obfuscation, obfuscation,” Manning repeated grimly. He turned away from the scene and moved toward the back of the house. The front door was locked, and there might have been another exit.

Hawkins knew that the death she suffered would not have been easy or gentle. The coin in the center of the garrote would have crushed her windpipe, so even if the pressure had been released, she would have had no chance of getting another breath. The strangling cord had been pulled tight, but there were no signs of fists balled up against the underside of her mandibles, meaning that while she’d suffocated, her brain had received blood. Moone wouldn’t have passed out.

A crust of dried tears pooled at the corners of her eyelids. Her end had been slow. Cruel. Meticulous.

All to cover up a conspiracy. This woman, who genuinely had taught people a language they’d wanted to learn, had been murdered. She’d gained information about what might have been a clue as to why shiploads of Japanese whalers died in a salvo of ship-busting missiles. Hawkins normally had a low opinion of those who engaged in wanton murder, but so far the logic of these brutal deaths escaped him.

Certainly, Hawkins had more than a little passing concern for the smart, almost relatable giant mammals of the ocean. Even as a good-ol’-boy hunter, he believed in conservation, not sloblike slaughter. He couldn’t fathom the slaughter of an endangered animal just to make a rug or to simply get a piece of rhinoceros horn to enhance the strength of their own horn. Be that as it may, the Japanese sailors killed on the factory ships were not killers. They’d simply been working jobs to feed their families.

However, many in the world saw the deaths of “evil Japanese hunters” as a cause to rejoice. Those who simply wanted to protect an endangered species, and the lawmen who sought to protect their freedom of speech, had also been slaughtered.

Dead was dead, so it shouldn’t matter, but Hawkins was offended. He was raised with strong values of what was right and what was wrong. Being murdered for doing your job was in the wrong column, so he sympathized with the Japanese sailors, and even more for the widows, orphans, surviving siblings and parents of those who’d died at sea.

Moone was a covert operative; she’d known that any one of her investigations could have brought her to a violent death. But seeing her lying there, murdered in this manner, Hawkins felt a pang of guilt for her. She looked innocent. She’d tried to do right by her country. She was a sister in arms. A face to which he could attach the statistics of those murdered.

Movement out in front of the house brought Hawkins’s attention back to the present and he rose from beside the dead girl. The light had instantly been smothered by his hand and he made certain the toggle switch was turned off. “Gary?”

“I’m out in the alley,” Manning answered over his hands-free com.

Hawkins padded in the direction his friend had gone. “Movement through the front door.”

“I’ll circle around,” the Canadian returned. “Stay put unless it’s a badge.”

“Yes, sir,” the Texan replied. He perched in the shadows by the back door, making certain that his presence was unseen in the frame of the partially open entrance.

Tense, he waited to see who would show up on the doorstep of a murdered girl. And just in case, he had both knives out and ready, hoping to greet the assassin.

CHAPTER FIVE

The door swung clumsily on its hinges, the shattered lock giving no resistance as it was pushed open and reached the apex of its usual swing with a slam. No flashlights sprayed their glare, no echo beyond the entrance to Moone’s kitchenette. T. J. Hawkins was familiar enough with police procedure to know that cops would not enter a darkened house without lights. Sure, the glare would make them an obvious focus, but in dim conditions as in Moone’s almost empty home, the blaze of LED bulbs would actually do more to blind an ambusher than anything else.