Devil's Bargain. Don Pendleton

it was impossible to breathe life into oneself, arise from ashes and dust, but the metaphor worked for him; he was alive and doing fine. Thanks to Big Brother, the old Michael Mitchell was long dead and gone, but Acheron was moving on into the night to settle that score, silence an unclean tongue.

      And on national television, no less.

      Acheron, he thought—he liked that, seeing himself as the living ghost of the charred bones of that skeleton body double from a forgotten covert war zone in Syria. Oh, he was back, all right, feeling good, strong, ready to grab center stage on the Josh Randall show, pull a dagger from the back of the operation of the ages.

      With one final look over his shoulder, he found the Clairmont Studio lot clear of mortals, then keyed the guest door open. The kid at the gate had been easy, one shot through the forehead with the throwaway sound suppressed Walther M-6, but he had counted on the bogus Washington Post press pass to get him close enough to the booth, eliminate one problem, confiscate keys. That left two armed rental badges inside, he knew, certain his professional talent would drop a couple of overweight play babies who seemed more inclined to walk female employees to their cars after hours than patrol the premises between doughnuts and coffee. Nailing down the routine of the security detail—so much sloppiness and laziness, he stopped counting the errors of their ways thirty minutes into his first watch—his escape route was mapped out, dry run when he wasn’t surveying the studio from his high-rise apartment directly across Connecticut Avenue. This, he figured, would prove so easy it was damn near criminal.

      Snicking the door closed behind, he found the hall empty, focused on the lights and the chatter of fools at the end of the corridor. Snugging the dark sunglasses tight with a forefinger, his former Company boss wouldn’t recognize him, he knew, not until he spoke the bastard’s handle. Black wig, mustache and goatee pasted on, it was a shame, he considered, that other traitors may be watching the left-wing-circle jerk tonight and never know who made the special guest appearance. Well, what was fifteen minutes of fame anyway, when there were years of glory and pleasure at the end of the golden road, beyond his return from the dead?

      Marching, he unzipped the loose-fitting windbreaker, pockets weighted down with two exit goodies, twin .50-Magnum Desert Eagles, the show-stoppers. It was a bonus, he recalled, cozying up to the makeup girl at the neighborhood pub, plying her with drinks. She couldn’t have drawn the setup any better. The stage then, would be off to the right, two cameramen, ten o’clock, rentals on standby, in case an unruly guest needed the hook. It happened, he knew, or so he heard, the punk star so extreme sometimes in left-wing diatribe, even the rational of viewpoint had taken a lunge at his mustache. By God, what he wouldn’t give himself, he thought, to rip that mustache off his face, ram it down his gullet…

      The coming statement would suffice.

      A few paces from the studio, and he heard the loudmouth in question—LIQ—snorting at something the kid said. “With all due respect,” LIQ rebuked, “Josh, I was there. Your sources aren’t quite on the money. I’m telling you there’s a secret paramilitary infrastructure, of assassins and saboteurs working for the United States government.”

      No shit, Acheron thought. And why did the talking dickheads always soften the verbal blow “with all due respect?” Politicians were the worst of flimflam artists, he thought, all their “quite frankly” and “to be quite honest with you” spelling out they lied the rest of the time. Let that be him up there, he’d tell the punk, “With all due kiss my ass, here’s the real fucking deal.”

      Stow the righteous anger, he told himself. This was business.

      The canister, tossed and bouncing up in the heart of the staff, led the entrance, gas spewing a cloud of noxious fumes. Their reaction was typical, expected: cries of panic flayed the air, clipboards and cue cards fell, a mad scramble of bodies ricocheted off one another. He compounded the terror, the Desert Eagle out and pealing. Two heartbeats’ worth of thunder blasting through the studio, he tagged the cameramen first, 250-grain boattails exploding through ribs, hurling them back, deadweight bowling down one of the rentals.

      The act sticking to the script, he knew he was still live and in color, coast to coast. He was a star right then, and shine he would.

      Another tap of the trigger, and he glimpsed a bright red cloud erupt out the back of the standing rental, bodies thrashing and hacking their way out of the tear gas. Tracking on, he dropped Rental Number Three as he staggered to his feet, a headshot, leaving no doubt. With only seconds to wrap it up, exit stage left, Acheron swung his aim stageward. The kid bleated out what sounded a plea, the star shrill next in demand his life be spared, silk-suited arms flapping. Acheron blew him out of his seat.

      Rolling toward the raised platform, Acheron found the LIQ glued to his chair, hands raised. What the hell? Obviously the guy had gone soft, a civilian life of fame and small fortune dulling the edge of former killer instincts and battlefield reflex. Where he remembered the LIQ once lean and hard, Acheron saw a double decker chin, coiffed hair, pink manicured fingers, a goddamn walrus in Armani, he thought.

      The former CIA assassin drew a bead between wide eyes, flipped the calling card on the table.

      Fat quivered under the man’s jowl as he looked up from the ace of spades with a death’s-head. “You?”

      “With all due kiss my ass—you’re a dirty rat bastard, Captain Jack.”

      “Wait!”

      “Waited more than ten years already,” Acheron said, and squeezed the trigger.

      FRAMED IN SOFT LIGHT, they stared back, a living malevolence, it felt, mocking sleepless nights, telling him they would come for a day of reckoning.

      “The rebel angels have risen from the pit.”

      How could it be possible? he wondered. Another shot of whiskey, and the courage he chased kept running away, an evanescent ray of light in the shadows of his living room.

      Over ten years had passed since he and several colleagues hatched the dread warning phrase they hoped none of them would ever need to pass on. Already one of them was dead, the national audience bearing witness to murder, and live on television, for God’s sake.

      It was happening.

      Still, Timothy Balton wanted to believe it was some grotesque prank by former colleagues, perhaps envious of his early retirement, that he carved himself a slice of peace and quiet, or maybe angry he turned away from them after a life of service and dedication to national security. Unfortunately there was this blight—off the record—on his career, haunting them all for more than a decade.

      Their deaths had been confirmed—sort of. After those two covert debacles, which never came to the attention of any Senate committee on intelligence or counterterrorism, even the President of the United States kept in the dark, the rumor mill churned, casting spectres of grave doubt and fear over the headshed in the loop. The best forensics teams the NSA and the CIA could marshal stated, off the record, they couldn’t be one-hundred-percent certain the burned remains were those of Alpha Deep Six. Then there were the slush funds for black ops in secret numbered accounts, twenty million and change whisked into cyberspace following their supposed demise. Well, the horrible truth behind the vanishing act leaked out when the headshed’s cover-up was launched in dark earnest. A few crumbs of intel, however, tossed their way, here and there, by followers deemed nonessential personnel and cheated by Alpha Deep Six of their own payday only magnified the enormity of the agenda. As former head of the DOD’s Classified Military Aircraft-Classified Military Flights—CMA-CMF—he discovered, during a yearlong follow-up investigation, low- and high-tech jets, cargo planes and helicopters were vanishing from CIA, DIA and NSA bases and installations from Nevada to Afghanistan. The bodies of personnel responsible for guarding such aircraft began stacking up so fast, no witnesses, no clues, not a shred of evidence as to the identities of the assassins left behind, it struck him as if…

      What? That all of them had been executed by murderous phantoms?

      Trembling, he poured another dose from the half-empty bottle. Down the hatch, hands steady moments later, enough so he felt confident he could aim and fire the Taurus PT-58 with