Altered State

“You’re right, of course, Clay.”

“Thanks for that. Humility becomes you,” Carlisle said. “Now, if you only had a closer personal relationship with our eternal savior…”

“I’ve been working on it,” Ingram said, “but when you’ve been out in the wilderness as long as I have, it’s a problem.”

“He forgives us everything,” Carlisle said. “All you have to do is ask, but you must be sincere.”

“I ask Him every night,” Ingram said, lying through his teeth.

“Then your place in the kingdom is assured,” Carlisle replied. “Now, if you’ll just excuse me, Dale, I have to touch base with our friends and see about kicking some heathen ass.”

“I N THERE ,” F ALK SAID as Bolan drove along a street of office buildings on Jadayi Sulh.

He looked in the direction she was pointing and beheld one structure that stood out among the rest. It had been walled off from the street with concrete barricades along the curb to frustrate car bombers. The wall itself was eight feet high and topped with shiny coils of razor wire. Behind the black steel gate, an armed guard watched pedestrians and traffic pass.

“Looks like a bunker,” he remarked.

“It is,” Falk said. “Clay Carlisle may be a religious crackpot—or, at least come off like one in public—but he’s grounded well enough to know that thousands of Afghanis would be thrilled to take him out. His apartment’s inside there, along with Dale Ingram’s.”

Bolan glanced briefly at the other nearby buildings, then scratched Vanguard HQ off his mental list of targets. Infiltrating one of Carlisle’s neighbors for a shot over the walls of his command post seemed too risky to be worth the effort it would take.

But he would find another angle of attack.

Turning southward, they drove past the historic royal citadel built by Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in the late nineteenth century, which presently housed Afghanistan’s president, his chief of staff and national security adviser, and the president’s protocol office. At a glance, Bolan guessed that stronghold would be easier to penetrate than Clay Carlisle’s headquarters, two blocks farther north.

They passed the Prime Ministry, then the Republican Palace, while Bolan put his thoughts in order.

“Carlisle won’t be fielding mercs from a CP that close to the president’s office,” he said. “Where does Vanguard keep its mercs and hardware?”

“Next stop on our tour,” Falk said. “We’ve got another quarter mile or so to go. It’s by the Plaza Hotel complex, in the Pol-e-Shahi quarter.”

“Lodgings for his visitors?” Bolan asked.

“Right again,” the DEA agent replied. “He has a steady stream of drop-ins from the States, Britain, some places you might not expect.”

“Such as?”

“Last month, there were some gentlemen from Bogotá,” Falk said. “They’re wanted in America for cocaine smuggling—a couple of the so-called ‘Extraditables’ that no one ever gets around to extraditing. Booked in at the Plaza under phony names, but you can recognize them from the Wanted posters.”

“Anybody tip the local law?” Bolan asked.

“Absolutely. And the cops showed up to question them…the day after they flew back home. But, what the hell, you can’t expect them to drop everything and do their jobs.”

“Who else comes calling?” Bolan asked her.

“It’s a regular Who’s Who . We’ve spotted Corsicans, a nice Sicilian delegation, Russians, Turks, some Yakuza.”

“All in the smack trade,” Bolan said, not asking this time.

“Those were,” Falk agreed, “but Carlisle has all kinds of shiny, upright friends on the flip side. Think of a CEO from any petro company that’s doing business in the region, and he’s been here. Diplomats stop by, after they touch base at the embassy, sometimes before. We even had a stateside televangelist swing by and press the flesh, before he shot a TV special in the Holy Land.”

“You check them out?” Bolan inquired.

“As far as possible,” Falk said. “They all have public faces, but we try to dig a little deeper. Still, we don’t get much. The really big oilmen have more security around them than the President. Diplomats, forget about it. We couldn’t arrest them if we caught them with a limo-load of kindergarten prostitutes. The preacher may have trouble, when the IRS gets through with him this year, but don’t expect the dirt to rub off on Carlisle.”

“You’re frustrated,” Bolan observed.

“Who wouldn’t be? The prick’s untouchable.”

“Not anymore.”

“I wonder.”

Bolan couldn’t fault the lady Fed for being skeptical. Her own superiors had undermined her efforts against Carlisle and the Vanguard set, while the Afghan authorities played ostrich and banked their payoffs. Now, Bolan dropped in from out of the blue, and drafted Falk into an illicit war that might well get her killed.

If she’d wanted to bail, Bolan wouldn’t have argued. And he knew it still might come to that. Meanwhile…

“We’ve got the Plaza over there,” she told him, pointing to the left. “And coming up a half block farther down, that’s what I call the Vanguard Hilton.”

It was different from the company’s headquarters, not so reminiscent of the Führerbunker in 1940s Berlin, but still secure enough with heavy gates and lookouts guarding entryways to the lobby and an underground garage.

“What kind of vehicles does Carlisle stash downstairs?” Bolan asked.

“Just the normal,” Falk replied. “You want to see the hardcore motor pool, with APCs and all, we’ll need to go west, to the Bala Kohi deh Afghanan district. Out by Kabul’s big TV tower.”

“Let’s see it,” Bolan said. “And then I need to find out when Carlisle is moving freight.”

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