Deep Recon

2

Lola Maxwell fumed.

It wasn’t bad enough that Johnny McAvoy was dead, but they had to send him to avenge his death?

No—that was the problem. The man they’d sent had no interest in avenging McAvoy’s death. He was just there to finish the job McAvoy had started.

In truth, that was the difference between them. Maxwell honestly couldn’t give a damn about bringing Kevin Lee to justice. If it wasn’t him selling illegal foreign firearms to the soldiers in the drug trade that ran rampant in south Florida, it would be someone else.

But Lee was the reason her lover was dead—and she intended to kill him for that.

Sleeping with McAvoy had never been part of the plan. Maxwell was a professional, and a professional never slept with a partner on an operation.

At least, that was what the rule book said. But the problem with the rule book was that it was hard to find when you were on a long-term deep-cover op.

It wasn’t so bad for Maxwell. She was playing the ex-cop hanging out in her old stomping grounds. The only difference was that she was still on the job, just nobody knew it apart from McAvoy and Faraday.

But McAvoy had been all alone out there except for her. He spent his days and nights living a lie, and the only person he could truly confide in, besides a handler he spoke to once a week or so, was Maxwell.

It was four months into the op when it had happened. One of the guys in Lee’s employ got his girlfriend knocked up, and they decided to get married. “Donald Kincaid” was trying to ingratiate himself into Lee’s world, and going to a bachelor party was definitely a way to endear yourself. So he joined them in barhopping and strip-club attending, working their way up and down Duval Street in a drunken stupor.

Afterward, he stumbled to Maxwell’s bungalow at five in the morning. He banged on her door, apparently too drunk to even operate the doorbell properly. She climbed out of bed, slipped into a silk robe and opened the door to see McAvoy, much drunker than he should have been while undercover, babbling on and on about how horrible these men were, the way they treated the other people in the bars and especially the way they treated the strippers. And when management tried to rein them in, one of them pulled his Beretta and shoved the muzzle right in his face.

The group of men had been left alone after that, but McAvoy—who’d been pretending to go along with the macho bullshit up until then—had a hard time with this incident. So he drank more.

The ironic thing was that it worked. Finley, one of Lee’s top guys, confided in McAvoy as the party was breaking up that he had been suspicious of him, but seeing him three sheets to the wind with the rest of them proved he was an okay guy.

McAvoy had been crying at this point, and Maxwell took him in her arms, the silk of her robe sliding open to reveal her ample cleavage. McAvoy started kissing her neck and working his way down to that cleavage, and Maxwell found herself completely uninterested in stopping him.

Eventually, they made it back to the bedroom, the bathrobe long since discarded, as were his clothes. Because Maxwell looked the way she did, she could have her pick of men, but because of that, she was extraordinarily picky about whom she chose to sleep with outside the confines of the job.

Of course, this was technically within those confines, but it was hard to argue with McAvoy’s hungry need that morning. Or hers, if it came to that, as McAvoy was a most sensitive lover.

Now McAvoy was dead, and she was stuck with this Cooper guy.

For Johnny’s sake, she hoped that the rumors had at least some truth to them.

“You keep pacin’ like that, you’ll wear a hole in the carpet.”

She glowered at Jean-Louis when he said that. “Bite me, Jean-Louis.”

“You ain’t my type,” Jean-Louis said with a big grin.

Maxwell couldn’t help but grin back at that. Jean-Louis liked his women petite. There were many adjectives that could describe the five-foot-ten Maxwell with her perfect hourglass figure, but “petite” was most definitely not one of them.

She and Faraday had been waiting all night for Cooper to come back with her car. She had changed into sweatpants and a white T-shirt, her breasts straining against the cotton. Maxwell knew that her ample breasts were two of her biggest assets—so to speak—and they had proved very handy in allowing her to get the upper hand over men. It was certainly worth trying with Cooper, maybe giving her the opportunity to get back in his good graces.

She was about to ask Faraday what time it was when she heard the distinctive sound of her pride and joy, the ’65 Mustang, pulling into the driveway.

“About goddamn time!” she said as she made a beeline for the front door of her bungalow and all but threw it open. The early-morning sun—it was less than an hour after dawn—blinded her briefly, but she blinked the glare away quickly with the ease of long practice.

She was about to yell at the man for taking so long with her car when her eye caught a few more things to yell at him about. There were skid marks on the passenger-side door, the side-view mirror was missing and one of the headlights was broken. That was just what she could see from the front door.

She couldn’t help but notice that Cooper didn’t look anywhere near as bad off as her car, which was too bad for him. His being badly injured in a manner commensurate with the damage to the Mustang was the only circumstance under which she was willing to even consider the remotest possibility of starting the process of forgiveness.

But no, the bastard was unscathed, apart from his slightly mussed hair.

“What the hell happened to my car?” she shrieked.

“The other guy’s ride is in much worse shape,” was all Bolan would say in reply. He moved past her and went inside.

This just made Maxwell angrier. She followed him in and said, “I can’t believe this. What gives you the right to—”

But Bolan had grabbed a piece of paper off the notepad that Maxwell kept on a corkboard near the front door. She generally used it for shopping lists and notes for herself or Faraday. “What’s the name and address of the place where you get bodywork done?”

Maxwell blinked. “What?”

The Executioner repeated the question, at which point a confused Lola gave an answer. “Ellis Body-works—it’s on Avenue G on Fat Deer Key. Every local cop, every county deputy, and every state trooper in the Keys has their car serviced there. Why, you offering to pay to fix it?”

As he wrote that information down, Bolan said, “Yes.”

Again, Maxwell found herself brought up short by an answer she wasn’t expecting from this man. “Really?”

“I need to make a phone call.” He folded the piece of paper and pulled a sat phone out of his jacket pocket. “After that, you can take the Mustang to Ellis and leave it there. Pick it up when they’re done, and don’t worry about the cost.”

Maxwell was impressed. She’d been in this game a long time, and she never knew of any op that had the budget to do car repairs on the level necessary for this. In fact, just in case, she asked, “You do realize that this is a very old car that they don’t make new parts for it, right? Just replacing that side-view mirror will be fifty bucks, before labor, and that’s the cheapest repair on there.”

“It’s fine,” he said, moving back toward the bedroom. “Excuse me.”

He went into her bedroom and closed the door. Confusion receded in Maxwell, the outrage coming back full force. She yanked the door open to see the man entering information into the sat phone.

“This is my bedroom!” This time, Maxwell straightened her back, making sure Cooper got an eyefull of her chest.

He didn’t once look below her neck. “I’m aware of this room’s function. This call is private. Please close the door.”

Maxwell let out a noise that sounded like a pipe bursting. But she did leave the room and closed the door, which was all Bolan cared about.

HE’D BEEN UP ALL NIGHT, making sure the truck crash was contained and dealt with. Brognola had sent a cleanup crew, and also used his contacts in the FBI to get someone from the Monroe County Field Office to take charge of the investigation, making sure that the Executioner’s role was kept out of any official reports by the local cops, the Feds, or the National Transportation Safety Bureau, not to mention the company that owned the truck, who’d probably do an investigation of its own.

Complicating matters was the fact that the person in the Aveo didn’t have any ID on him, and the credit card and driver’s license he’d used with the rental car company belonged to a ninety-three-year-old retired plumber from Hialeah who’d died a week earlier.

Now Bolan needed a good-night’s sleep before following up on the only lead he had—the “Delgado” person that Kenny V mentioned during the last phone call of his life—but first he had to contact Brognola.

Once he had been connected to the head of Stony Man, Bolan provided Brognola with the information about Ellis Auto Body.

“We’ll take care of it, Striker,” Brognola assured him.

“I should’ve just rented a car,” Bolan said. “I know you said to work with this woman, but I question her professionalism.”

“She knows the players, Striker. And her reputation is sterling.”

“That’s what I heard, too, but all the evidence I’ve seen doesn’t even come close to supporting that reputation, Hal.”

“Be that as it may, she’s a valuable asset. Without her, you’ll have a much harder time of it. And now that Lee knows BATF is on to him, he may circle the wagons and we’ll have lost our chance to put him away. Time is of the essence here.”

“Fine.” Bolan had raised his objection, and Brognola had noted it. There was no point in arguing it further. “Any word on our assassin?”

“Yes, and it’s not good,” Brognola said. “We’ve ID’d him as a merc named Ward Dayton. We were only able to get a positive on him because he’s in the CIA database.”

“As a person of interest or a contractor?”

“The latter, unfortunately. They’ve used him for wet work on any number of occasions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile and a few times in North Africa. In fact, my guy at the Company wasn’t exactly pleased that you’d killed him.”

“I’m only disappointed that he got himself killed before I could find out why he was doing Kenny Valentino—though I have a pretty good guess.” Bolan paused before continuing. “Why is the CIA’s Central and South American go-to guy putting bullets in two-bit errand boys for gunrunners?”

“That’s a good question, Striker. You need to find the answer, but my guess is that this is the first step in that wagon-circling I was just talking about.”

“Valentino had a rep for shooting his mouth off, and unlike Ms. Maxwell’s rep, it was one I have little trouble believing he earned, and that’s based only on the ninety seconds I saw of him before he bought it. If Lee wants to close ranks, Valentino would almost definitely have been near the top of the list of potential loose ends to tie off.”

“What’s your next move?” Brognola asked.

“Kenny mentioned a lieutenant of Lee’s named Delgado. I’m going to pay him a visit. I’ll keep you posted.”

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