Altered State. Don Pendleton

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.”

       CHAPTER FIVE

       Park-e-Zarnegar, Kabul

      The mausoleum of Abdur Rahman Khan stands in Zarnegar Park, near Kabul’s city center. Once, it was a palace, converted to a vast tomb by the king’s son when Abdur Rahman died in 1901. Its red dome mounted on a white octagonal structure, surmounted by small minarets, still ranked among the finest examples of nineteenth-century baroque architecture in Kabul.

      Clay Carlisle loved beautiful things. He had booked the mausoleum for a private tour soon after his arrival in Kabul, but at the moment he had no eye for antiques. His thoughts were focused on the future, both immediate and long-term.

      Zarnegar Park was the hub of Kabul, located near Embassy Row, overlooked by the stylish Kabul Serena Hotel and Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications. None of those features had drawn Carlisle to the park, however. He was not a tourist, and his visit on this fading afternoon was strictly business.

      His limousine stopped at a newspaper kiosk on the park’s western boundary. One of Carlisle’s four security guards stepped out of the car and returned seconds later with a new passenger in tow.

      The man was fortysomething, with a long face under thinning sandy hair, his slender form clothed in a tailored suit of charcoal-gray. Black wingtips made his feet seem overlarge and heavy. Opaque sunglasses concealed his eyes, which Carlisle knew from past experience were washed-out bluish-gray with a tendency to squint.

      “Strange days,” said Russell Latimer, the CIA’s deputy station chief in Kabul.

      “Getting stranger all the time,” Carlisle replied. “What can you tell me about our dilemma?”

      Latimer cocked one eyebrow behind his shades. “I’m not sure that I’d call it our dilemma just yet.”

      “Wouldn’t you?” Carlisle made sure his practiced frown fell somewhere short of hostile. “My mistake, then. As an uninvolved outsider with no future stake in anything that happens to my company, what can you tell me about my dilemma, then?”

      “Hold on a second, now.”

      “Hold on to what, Russell? Remember what our Lord and Savior said in Matthew 12:30: ‘He who is not with me is against me.’”

      “Hey, I’m with you, Clay. All right? I only meant—”

      “Don’t tell me what you meant. Tell me what whatever you’ve found out about my problem.”

      Sandwiched between two bodyguards who made him look emaciated, Latimer put on a brave face and replied, “You seem a little out of sorts today, my friend.”

      “Seeing eleven of my men gunned down has that effect, Russ. Call me crazy.”

      “I’d call it normal, in the circumstances. And I’m working on it, but—”

      “I hope you’re not about to disappoint me,” Carlisle said.

      “That’s never my intention.”

      “But you don’t know anything.”

      “We have a name, okay? Maybe we have a name.”

      “Let’s hear it.”

      “Matthew Cooper. He left Baltimore for Paris yesterday, then caught connecting flights to Rome and into Kabul. Had a rental car waiting when he arrived. We have it now, impounded from the Old City around the time of your…unpleasantness this afternoon. Trunk full of guns and ammo, see? And I don’t mean the magazine.”

      Carlisle ignored the feeble joke and asked him, “Is there more?”

      “I ran a check on Cooper, stateside. He’s got credit cards that bill him through a P.O.