Devil's Bargain. Don Pendleton

      “I’m getting there, bear with me. By the way, is the smoke bothering you?”

      “I’ll manage.”

      Another shot down the hatch. He glanced at the bottle, showed Price a weak smile. “Oh, please, forgive me my bad manners. Would you care for something to drink?”

      “No. Go on.”

      He smoked, coughed, drank, then laid the ace of spades with death’s-head on the coffee table. “That was their calling card back then, a mock tribute to their victims, or a warning to future casualties,” Geller said. “This was taken by NSA operatives last night from the crime scene at Clairmont Studios. They were there before the D.C. police arrived. Advance knowledge, but, I’m assuming, not until the play was in motion, the signature card left behind expressly for them, a middle finger to the agency and everyone else in the intelligence community, but I really couldn’t say.”

      Couldn’t or wouldn’t? Price wondered. Whichever it was, though, if he was being truthful about the death’s-head ace of spades, then the agency knew about their meeting.

      “Alpha is back, and they’re letting their former employers know their heads are on the chopping block. Do you watch the Josh Randall show?”

      “I heard about the murders,” Price answered. “I know a former CIA paramilitary operative with more ego than good sense had his head blown off last night.”

      “Live and in color, before a national audience. Now, if you watch the replay carefully there’s no mistaking, despite the hokey disguise, the killer was this one,” he said, stabbing a picture, third man in line.

      Price looked at the grizzled face, bald dome, eyes hidden by shades, but she was struck by the ridges of bone hung over the sunglasses like some birth defect or grotesque plastic surgery. She looked at the other members of Alpha Deep Six, Geller remarking how the group apparently had no race problems, equal-opportunity brigands, two of them black. Price read their cold, pitiless eyes. She knew the type, men blinded to all but their own animal instincts and passions.

      Sociopaths.

      “Michael Mitchell was the shooter. He vanished without a trace, dumped two grenades on his way out of the studio to seal his exit. Like the others, he can kill, and is a veritable ghost in the night. Three tours of duty in Vietnam, like Richard Cramnon and Ryan Ramses, they were Special Forces. The stories about their roots are too many, too atrocious to bother repeating. They say you have to be a borderline psychopath to want to have done three tours in Vietnam to begin with. The others—Delta, Marine recon—saw action in Panama, Gulf I. The word is they maybe even had a hand in smuggling out a few top Iraqi officials and some WMD into Syria during Gulf II. All of them, no wife, no kids, no ties. With no past, no roots, no one who cares for them or they care about, they could have futures that would never exist be created to further the interests of certain parties who were reading the future of the world, and decades ago. They were the perfect deniable expendables. They were chosen to become the perfect assassination machines.”

      “I suppose it wouldn’t do me any good to ask how you know all of this?”

      Geller snorted, as if she’d asked a stupid question. “You know as well as I do how it works. In our business, information is bought or bartered. If not, you beg, borrow or steal. In Alpha’s case they had more extreme methods. Last night was payback on the Josh Randall show, a grandstand moment for Alpha to announce they’ve risen from the grave. The word I get from my sources is the late Captain Jack got cold feet at the last minute way back when over the real agenda behind the staged deaths of ADS. Either way, you could say he signed his own death warrant, promoting himself all over the cable talk shows, shooting off his mouth about things he had no business revealing for civilian consumption. I’m thinking if Acheron didn’t get him, the CIA or the NSA eventually would have yanked his ticket.”

      “Acheron?”

      She watched as Geller looked away, focused attention on the bottle, his hand trembling as he filled the glass. There was enough of a flicker in his eyes that told her Geller wished he could kick himself. He’d slipped. Accident, though, or act?

      “It’s believed they have chosen handles—from Greek mythology, ancient Hebrew, various playwrights and mystics—all in reference to Hell, the gates of Hell, eternal damnation, beasts from the pit who unleash death and destruction on the earth. It’s gathered that’s their warped idea of dark humor.” He waved a hand. “I know, you want me to get to the point.”

      She shrugged, no hurry, not willing to concede she was on any clock. Geller bobbed his head, sucked down another shot, Price watching as some intense, near fanatic fire lit his eyes.

      “Bottom line, these men not only helped create the global arms race, they were the global arms race. They were the original shadow merchants of death, the negotiators for the United States military-industrial complex, the real movers and shakers who sold far more than just fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Allow me to run some numbers by you. Out of the 169 countries on Earth, fifty are presently at war.”

      “And you’re telling me Alpha Deep Six is responsible for all these conflicts?”

      “The United States is the number-one arms exporter to Third World countries, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to where the rest of the hardware goes. Someone has to do the legwork, make the deals happen with countries with leaders most rational, civilized people find detestable but who are willing to spend the cash. Are you aware 130 billion in weapons and military assistance has been shipped to 125 countries in the past decade alone by the United States, and the numbers are going up every year? America’s yearly arms export sales eclipse the GNP of Russia. It’s easy enough to verify, if you care to.”

      “The enemy is us?”

      Geller ignored the remark, working on his smoke with renewed fury. “I always believed you were something of the altruistic sort, a lady of principle. I admired that in you when we worked together, but I always admire the virtue in others I know I can never possess.”

      “Careful, Max. Whatever you’ve heard about flattery does not apply here.”

      “Sure, sorry.” He took a moment with his smoke. “You want to know how much of an upside-down world we live in? Just look at what the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund say about loans they are practically forced by the United States to make to African dictators, what the international community has called ‘the crocodile rulers.’ Broken down to basics the price of one helicopter equals twelve thousand school-teachers in Africa, a one-million-dollar modern tank the equivalent of a thousand classrooms for thirty thousand children. In terms of comparing the gross discrepancy between arms to food, the numbers are beyond astronomical. In a perfect world I suppose there wouldn’t be this immoral madness, but it’s a madness that is man-made. I’m telling you this nation is involved in the deliberate worldwide proliferation of arms. You see, what the voting public does not know is that the military-industrial complex of this country—or rather a shadow group that have knighted themselves the inheritors of the Earth—is seeking to create wars, unleash whole campaigns of genocide, perhaps even drive the human race into World War III. Three reasons. One, the military contractors need to keep the plants running, or, simply put, there would be a lot of people out of work, likewise some heavy brass at the Pentagon. Two, since Vietnam, there are certain circles within the intelligence and military communities who saw the creation of future conflicts around the globe as a means to justify their existence, gain personal glory in history, albeit a shadow note.”

      “And they would get rich in the process.”

      “Obscenely rich. Three, by 2020 it’s believed by our top scientists there will be fifteen to eighteen billion mouths on this planet to feed. Simply stated, these powers want the strong—themselves—to survive, whatever masses crawl out of the rubble and the ashes of a holocaust to serve them. They believe if something isn’t done to contain the swelling numbers on this planet, there’ll be mass starvation, natural resources depleted, nations swept up in anarchy with the collapse of the global economy. Plague, famine, pestilence, death, they’re seeking