Critical Intelligence. Don Pendleton

Office gray with shock.

      Price looked at the tally and shook her head as she typed in her authorization code.

      The public was always in some outcry about thousand-dollar hammers or eight-hundred-dollar toilet seats. The truth was the number crunchers at the GAO would never have made such oversights. Those inflated purchase orders were designed to hide covert-action expenditures for clandestine units and projects just like Stony Man.

      There was a knock on the office door and she looked up. Carmen Delahunt stood in the entrance, a tired look on her face and a manila file folder in her hand.

      “Got a second?” the redhead asked.

      Price pushed herself back from her desk. “Sure,” she said. “What’ve you got?”

      “Multiples of Seven.”

      “Really?” Price arced an eyebrow.

      Delahunt entered the room and took a seat across from Price at the desk. She laid out her folder showing several computer printings and a couple of glossy jpg enlargements.

      Delahunt began leafing through them, talking fast, the way she always did when she was onto something.

      “I started cross indexing intelligence estimates and after-action reports like you’d asked,” she explained. “Looking to see if anything relating to Seven came up.”

      “You found something?”

      “I found a motherlode, Barb. I’ve got Seven cross-indexing things going back decades. Some of it can’t be related—the search is too broad, but you’ve tapped into some kind of thread here. Pieces from a thousand different puzzles that nobody realized they were even supposed to be looking at.”

      Price leaned forward, caught up in her enthusiasm. She reached across the desk and pulled a codex Delahunt had printed up. Her vision swam as she saw some of the events and people highlighted.

      Kabul urban police. Princess Diana. Baghdad Green Zone. Kiev. Israel, 1968. CERN. The Vatican. Charles Lindberg. Hangar 21. White Sands, New Mexico. Ho Chi Minh City. Aldrich Ames. There was such a collage of information it was impossible to make sense of.

      The list went on.

      “As interesting as these initial surveys are, they’re basically cold cases,” Delahunt continued. “Some much less cold than others, but for now, cold cases.” She paused. “Except for this.”

      Price looked up from the codex. “What?”

      “Canada.” Delahunt slid a paper-clipped report to Price. “Toronto.”

      “Give me the through line.”

      “Our Department of Energy runs a contract research facility there. Ostensibly to study alternative fuels. Green tech, stuff like that. From what I’ve gathered, though, much of the science is a little more experimental. A little more theoretical.”

      “And?”

      “And the DOE put in a request to the FBI last week to conduct a counterintelligence operation on the facility as internal security had started reporting recruitment approaches being made on their employees by unknown operatives looking to do pay-for-play deals. Also, electronic countermeasures had been tripped in the last forty-eight hours indicating someone was doing a hostile analysis of their hard site security.”

      “Standard Bureau stuff.” Price nodded. “Could be anyone looking to see what goodies are being cooked up. Hell, it could be industrial even, not political.”

      Delahunt nodded. “Still could be. Nothing’s been proven. However the FBI team they sent to Toronto managed to catch a glimpse of someone seen surveying the employee entrance.”

      “Custody?”

      “No.” Delahunt shook her head. “This wasn’t a joint op with the Canadians. They took his photo and requested RCMP help with digital analog forensics.”

      “They ID the guy?”

      “Sure. Man named Jen Duh sh Tyen Tsai.”

      “If Schwarz were here you’d know he’d say—”

      “Gesundheit,” Delahunt agreed. “He’s a funny man that Hermann.”

      “Yeah, but looks aren’t everything.”

      “You got that from him, didn’t you?”

      Price took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “Sometimes he’s funny. Mostly he’s just funny ’cause he’s trying to be funny and fails.” She set the mug of coffee down. “But surely Mr. What’s-his-name doesn’t go by that handle.”

      “Mostly just Jen.”

      “What do we know about him?”

      “We know he’s in Toronto. We know he’s a sort of free agent between Chinese Tong running underworld activities there. Part courier, part outside hit man, part information broker.”

      “So a criminal mercenary with connections to Chinese syndicates is running a surveillance operation on a DOE private contractor facility. And you tied him in to Seven how?”

      “Look at his sleeve.” Delahunt gestured toward a RCMP file photo. “His left arm, inside, above the elbow.”

      A “sleeve” was a slang term used by tattoo enthusiasts to indicate an arm that was entirely covered by ink designs from deltoid to wrist. Jen Tsai’s was covered in swirling images of Chinese characters, mythological demons and iconography in bold reds, blues, yellows and black.

      “Where? I don’t see…” Price trailed off as she scrutinized the photo. “Ah.”

      Just above Jen Tsai’s elbow was a horned demon skull, screaming mouth lined with fangs. Flames swirled inside the gaping jaws, and in the center of the flames were the numerals 1+6=7.

      “Yeah,” Delahunt agreed. “Little odd for a hardcore Chinese gangster to be sporting primary arithmetic in his colors, no?”

      “Oh, yes,” Price answered.

      “We have his probable twenty?”

      “We most certainly do.”

      Price picked up her coffee mug. “Good. I’ll call Hal have him pull the Bureau boys off surveillance. Then I’ll send Able Team around to knock on some doors.”

      “Knowing Ironman, it’ll be heads that get knocked more than doors.”

      Price shrugged. “Whatever…”

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      Toronto, Canada

      Regent Park, 3:00 a.m., the streets were quiet.

      From behind the wheel of the black Excursion SUV, Carl Lyons surveyed the neighborhood. The vehicle had been waiting for them at the airport.

      Lyons watched the streets with the cynical, jaundiced eye of a veteran cop.

      Regent Park’s reputation preceded it. Fifty percent of the people living in the urban area were teenagers and sixty-eight percent of all the people there were settled in well below the national poverty rate for the rest of Canada.

      With poverty, the lack of aspiration, and the loss of hope came crime and most often violent crime. Regent Park was a tough neighborhood not unlike any other bad neighborhood in any other First World country. It wasn’t Islamabad or Caracas, but it could still kill you.

      “Keep an eye out for gangbangers working as sentries for drug dealers,” Lyons muttered.

      “This isn’t my first rodeo, Hefei,” Blancanales reminded him.

      Lyons grunted and turned down Queen Street East. In the back Schwarz was using his CPDA to run a more sophisticated GPS unit than the one that had come with the big Excursion. The CPDA he had begun using was a SME PED, or Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic