Devil's Bargain. Don Pendleton

he was, albeit indirectly, responsible for loosing on the world.

      He stared at the picture on his desk. Choking back tears, he wondered if he would soon join his wife and only son.

      He flinched, wind howling outside, pistol up as he pivoted toward the curtained windows, something banging off the wall. Shadows, it looked, danced in the night world. Could be, he thought, just moonlight shining through scudding clouds. Wind, he knew, often gusted over the plain, stirred south from the Badlands.

      He hesitated, then laid down the weapon. One more shot, he told himself, he desperately needed sleep, if only for an hour. He was thinking he should check the alarm system one more time, recon the ranch and perimeter when—

      “So I understand you want divine knowledge.”

      Balton froze. He felt them, no need to turn, he discovered, three shadows flickering over the wall. His hand shook as he reached for the pistol. He felt a strange urge to laugh, amazed and terrified at how easily they breached his security net, but knew they had the technology able to burn out the guts of a warning system, laser beams melting alarms and motion sensors to molten goo, no matter how complex. It was over, he knew; it was simply a question of how it would end, how soon, how much pain he would endure.

      “Cramnon,” he breathed.

      “Richard Cramnon’s dead, remember? I am Abbadon.”

      “What?”

      “I have been raised up from the dead as Abbadon. That would be ancient Hebrew for ‘destruction.’ I am the bottomless pit, consuming the damned in eternal fire. I am the abyss that vomits forth the dark angel to spread plague and death across the earth.”

      “You’re insane.”

      “No. I have never been more right.”

      Balton felt his heart skip a beat, a rumble of cold laughter striking his back.

      “Don’t look so puked out, Timothy. We just came by to say we love you.” His laughter echoed by the others, Cramnon went on, “By the way, I was real sorry to hear about your wife. Breast cancer, huh. Pity about your boy, too. Heroin, was it?” He laughed.

      “You rotten son of a—”

      “Drugs, modern-day scourge, I always said, the invisible foreign invasion. Hey, they say it’s a real heartbreaker, a father having to bury his own child. What do you think it was that pushed the little punk over the edge? Kid couldn’t live up to your high standards?”

      Balton squeezed his eyes shut, heard Cramnon laugh beyond the roaring in his ears.

      “Too much pressure from the old man, not enough love and affection? Big shot that you were at DOD, too caught up in work, family always on the backburner. Bet you hated and blamed yourself when you stared into his coffin, huh? Wonder still how such a tragedy could happen? Wish to God you could have it back to do over. Thing about that, Timothy, human beings always wish they could do it over, make it right, the old ‘if I knew then what I know now.’ Being a little more than human these days, well, I had a long chat with God while I was away. He told me, among other things, human beings would commit the same damn mistakes even if they could turn back time. Oh, yeah, I was thinking about you, asked God why even bother to create your son if the punk was going to cause you such grief. God, He tells me humans are always crying, ‘why?’ when they should ask ‘how?’As in how to fix, how to find a solution. That’s why I’m here…the disk?”

      Shaking, Balton began to turn, aiming his rage toward their laughter. He hoped his body concealed the Taurus, long enough where he could at least tag one, two if he got lucky. He was in slow motion, dizzied by shock, as he faced the three of them. The one he believed was Cramnon appeared to float across the room, a tall shadow in a long black coat, rolling counterclockwise from the other two shadows peeling the other way. Pistol coming around, trigger taking up slack, he balked, shocked at how different they looked than he remembered. Where they were once clean-cut and fair-skinned, he found hair as black as a raven, flowing to their shoulders. With prominent cheekbones and hawk noses, complexions so dark or burnished by sun, black eyes that were once blue, they appeared…

      Semitic?

      A shot cracked from the dark. He heard a sharp grunt, pistol flying from his hand, then froze at the sight of blood jetting from the stump where his thumb was amputated. Balton slumped, clutched his hand, gagged.

      “Your boy, Gulliver, I made it last two days before he gave you up.”

      Balton heard his bitter chuckle, then felt tears welling as he looked at the picture. So this was how it would end, he thought, the world fading, the blood pumping out. So many mistakes, so much neglect dead-ending in too much pain and sorrow. It galled him, but Cramnon’s cruel words rang true, ground deep. They—whoever they were, he thought—said a man’s character was his destiny. Strange, he decided, he wasn’t sure what was his own true character. Way beyond guilt and regret now—again, “they” claimed not even God could change the past, and, yes, that even the Devil knew the darkest corners of human hearts, the worst pain, the most atrocious of every man’s thoughts and desires—he suddenly prayed to a divine being he hadn’t thought about since his wife died. He heard the evil thing demand the disk. Brushing it to the edge of the desk, he heard, “And the password?”

      Why not? “Agrippa.”

      He shut out the laughter, silently implored for a quick, merciful end he knew he didn’t deserve. He prayed for forgiveness, his own sins too many, he thought, to even recall. He glimpsed one of the shadows falling beside him, slip the disk into the computer. A metallic click. Behind, smoke blew over his head, Cramnon laughing about the irony of the password. Something about how Agrippa was an ancient sorcerer’s book, pages made of human skin, how it listed the names of every demon in Hell, how they could be summoned to earth to help the caller fulfill whatever desire and wish.

      “We’re in business,” Balton heard the shadow say.

      Then Cramnon asked, “You prefer it in the back?”

      He straightened, offered up a last silent prayer this monstrous evil was soon, somehow, removed from the face of the earth, sent where it belonged, before it was too late.

      Turning, he told Cramnon, “No.”

      CHAPTER ONE

      If the nation’s enemies pulled it off, Mack Bolan feared the United States of America would cease to exist as he knew it. Any number of apocalyptic nightmares charged through his mind, stoked a sense of dire urgency while inflaming a righteous anger he hadn’t felt in some time. Martial law, he knew, would prove the least of the nation’s woes. The shortlist of horrors spewed from the brewing caldron of this hell—looting, riots, interstates and highways parking lots as panicked civilians fled for the hills, murder in the streets by those left behind in the chaos and terror—was incomprehensible to rational human minds.

      Unfortunately, he had walked this road many times in his War Everlasting. And he knew all about the cannibals unleashing death and destruction on free and not so free societies, consuming or oppressing the innocent, driven by whatever dark machinations churned in hearts pumping with the blood of the wicked.

      Only this crisis defied any past experience Bolan had ever known.

      Wedged in the doorway beside the M-60 gunner, the Black Hawk gunship sailing over the wooded countryside of Williamsburg, Bolan took in the command-and-control center. A quick head count, as the warbird descended, and he figured ten to fifteen special ops ringing the farmhouse perimeter. Four Black Hawks were grounded in the distance, fuel bladders, he found, already dropped off for quick topping out of tanks, one critical detail out of the way.

      Slashed by midmorning sunshine, there were too many black sedans to bother counting—government-issue vehicles having delivered the best and brightest from the FBI, NSA, DIA and whoever else muscled their way into the game—he then noted the small armada of oversize vans in matching color. High-tech communications-surveillance-tracking centers on wheels, bristling with