Cold Snap. Don Pendleton

bag and saw that its top flap had been secured by a swatch of duct tape.

      “If your cell phone ever gets wet, put it in a container of rice to dry it out,” Hawkins murmured aloud. Considering Japan was a nation that had experienced its fair share of traumatic tidal waves, it would also prove a smart place of storage for small electronics that could hold data... He tore open the bag and sifted through. After a few moments he felt something inside. It was a PDA. Just to make certain, he rummaged through the rice some more and came away with four thumb drives.

      Hawkins pocketed the items, then frisked the corpse of the murderous Korean who’d nearly shot him. There were no pieces of identification on the man, not even clothing tags. There were, however, two spare magazines for the Norinco copy of the SIG-Sauer P-228. He pocketed them, picked up the pistol and depressed the decocker, lowering the hammer and returning initial trigger pull to a drop-safe, flinch-resistant twelve pounds of weight. He pocketed the pistol and noticed the flicker of red-and-blue flashes through the open door.

      The time to leave was now and he opened the back door into the alley. Hawkins’s sudden arrival startled two cats in flagrante delicto and the animals leaped away from each other, yowling in protest. It almost would have been funny, but the feline racket and their flight sent garbage can lids toppling with a gonging clatter. The police out front would no doubt have heard the noise.

      Hawkins produced the NP-228 and fired two shots into the kitchen floor through the doorway. That racket would most assuredly have drawn attention, but it would also freeze the Japanese policemen where they stood. Once again, the Texan’s familiarity with police procedure, most specifically Japanese procedure, meant that he would not have to worry about inciting an international incident. The cops out front would be loath to open fire immediately, for fear of harming a possible hostage or out of concern that bullets would cut through one building and harm someone in a nearby structure.

      With that lead going for him, Hawkins made the pistol safe and took off down an alley between two houses. Vaulting short fences was little effort for him, and he wove through the neighborhood as fast as he dared without attracting further attention to himself. It took him twenty minutes before he allowed himself on the main street, circling back to where he and Manning had parked their rental vehicle. The wisdom that kept them from parking too near to where they were going had served them well. The car was undisturbed, even though it was likely a half dozen police cars had driven past it.

      Hawkins slid behind the wheel, fired up the engine and took to the streets back to the safe house that had been set up for him and Manning. Along the way, he took care to ensure that he wasn’t trailed, either by the law or by whichever Korean murderers had been waiting in reserve. The three men might have been bowled over by the pair of Phoenix Force veterans, but that didn’t mean they were incompetent. There could easily be backup agents elsewhere, but so far, Hawkins seemed to have lucked out.

      Even so, he engaged in evasion techniques twice during the drive to the Phoenix safe house. Getting sloppy and complacent was a certain path to being shot dead. It was attention to details that had allowed the two members of the team to capture prisoners and to find a friend of the murdered CIA agent.

      “That’s the assumption,” Hawkins mused. He would have to plug the devices into their sat case—a briefcase-size computer unit with USB and fire-wire ports and several sizes of flash-card data reader slots—to be sure. Through it, Able Team or Phoenix Force could instantly transmit data to Stony Man Farm for investigation. Built-in filters would catch any viruses or logic bombs hidden in potentially sabotaged data, just in case the Koreans had wanted Hawkins and Manning to find the drives and PDA.

      “What’s your status?” Hawkins asked through his hands-free communicator.

      Manning’s response was swift. “Prisoners secure. Girl quiet. No law-enforcement interception. No tails.”

      “Good news,” Hawkins replied. “Found the agent’s stash of data and her secure device. No tails here.”

      “Remain sharp,” Manning told him.

      It would take a while for Hawkins to arrive at the safe house, but that allowed him time to continue searching for possible enemies. While he would have liked to forward Veronica Moone’s intel to the Farm, haste would not just make waste, it also would leave him more vulnerable to being wasted.

      When he finally pulled up to the safe house—actually an abandoned store along the waterfront—he made sure the car was well hidden. The minivan was also there, empty and locked down.

      Hawkins looked over the appropriated pistol. He still hadn’t taken off the latex gloves he’d been given when he and Manning had discovered the crime scene. He didn’t remove them, hopeful that he’d find fingerprints of the dead man on the gun itself. His instincts told him the three men might have been North Korean agents, especially since they’d reverted to what he assumed was Korean when they’d cursed in surprise at Hawkins’s attack. There was still a possibility that the three men might have been South Korean, as well.

      If there was one truism in Southeast Asia, old grudges clung to the peoples as if they were strangling vines. Though World War II was years before, Koreans still held an enmity toward Japan and the violations of human rights inflicted upon the whole of the peninsula during their imperial expansion. People had been reduced to slave labor; thousands had been tortured or had died of overwork. In Korea, as well as China, the Japanese military had sated whatever desires their troops had had with gigantic rape camps. The men didn’t need to be North Korean to hold a grudge against Japan.

      Hawkins stuffed his hand into his jacket pocket, where he kept the appropriated combat pistol. He doubted that three people could get the drop on someone as strong and smart as Manning, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

      “It’s me,” Hawkins called out as he entered, unlocking the door ahead of him. As soon as he was through, he closed the door firmly and reset the locks. He saw Manning standing, arms folded. “No trouble with the prisoners?”

      Manning shook his head. “One did try to escape. I put him to sleep.”

      “Good,” Hawkins replied. He pulled the NP-228 from his pocket and laid it on a nearby table. “I’m going to strip this, open up some liquid cement and see if I can find any good fingerprints.”

      “Smart idea. I’ve got the prints from the others in the ether back to Stony Man,” Manning replied.

      “Can’t hurt to be completest,” Hawkins added.

      Manning looked back. “The girl’s name is Min-seo Geum.”

      Hawkins already had the SIG stripped down to parts. He poured a small cap of Super Glue and placed it under a trash-bag-improvised tent. The process was an old forensic trick at gleaning fingerprints from most surfaces. The oils that caused the surface transfer that formed a latent print would attract the fumes from the glue, producing a visible pattern that could be photographed. Hawkins hoped the flat sides of the pistol’s magazine or the outside of the slide would provide enough for identification, but just to be certain, he stripped the bullets from the magazine.

      People might think of putting on gloves for firearm handling, but few professionals were paranoid enough to wear gloves while feeding ammunition into their appropriate magazines on a clandestine operation.

      Hawkins turned away from his fingerprint-gathering project and produced the PDA and thumb drives that he’d discovered. “Is she all right?” Hawkins asked.

      Manning nodded. “She’s been having a good cry over her friend. She was a teacher at the same school. They were once very close.”

      Hawkins raised an eyebrow. “Roommates?”

      Manning nodded. “And quite a bit more.”

      Hawkins sighed. “And I threw her on top of a woman she loved...killed like that...”

      “The other option was to let her get shot in the back,” Manning offered. He took the thumb drives and looked over the PDA. “I have a wire for this device on the sat case.”

      “All