Oblivion Pact. Don Pendleton

were Kegan and his kind, cannibals in thousand-dollar suits, and on the other side was civilization. Long ago, Bolan had decided that he wasn’t Animal Man’s judge, or jury, but his executioner. The soldier wasn’t here to enforce the law, but to dispense justice, hard and absolute. Street justice. Red law.

      Kicking some torn manila folders out of his way, Bolan crossed the littered floor and stood amid the piles of destruction. There was no other way to describe the office area but totally trashed.

      Pictures were smashed on the walls, the empty frames hanging from bent nails. The file-cabinet drawers had been removed and cast aside, sofa cushions ripped apart, the stuffing scattered about randomly, and assorted papers were everywhere. Somebody had been very serious about searching this room. An amateur, but dead serious.

      However, just because a room had been searched, Bolan noted privately, didn’t mean that anything had been found.

      The next room was an office, just as bedraggled as the waiting room but now empty shell casings from a dozen different weapons lay scattered about, telling Bolan how things had gone down. Four people had entered through the sitting room, each armed with automatic pistols, and one with a shotgun. Three others had opened fire from the staircase using M16 assault rifles, and something that left bullet holes but didn’t eject brass. The fire pattern was too tight for a bolt action...a caseless rifle? Impressive. The weapons sounded like a zipper in operation, and threw out lead faster than anything but a motorized Gatling gun. A caseless assault rifle was a serious threat. Bolan would have to keep a sharp watch out for— He froze.

      Lancing through the swirling cloud of talcum powder was a scintillating red beam, thinner than a human hair, almost invisible. Dropping low, Bolan eased under the laser and carefully rose on the other side, his heart pounding. Touch the beam of light, and all hell would have broken loose, probably in the manner of a dozen Claymore mines plastered inside the wall. Close, but no cigar.

      Going to the window, Bolan saw the real-estate sign. At the bottom was the monthly rent, a phone number and the name of the management company. Out of curiosity, Bolan tried the number, and wasn’t surprised to get only a busy signal, then voice mail, but the box was full. That was all anybody would ever get, a busy signal. Kegan lived in a building advertised as for rent. Clever. That would have stopped most investigations, but Bolan had sources everywhere, most of them whispers and hints. Add a few together, and suddenly a pattern became visible. A soft probe, followed by a hard probe, and when the target was confirmed, a full blitz with guns blazing. But he wasn’t there yet, this was just the soft probe.

      Making sure the door was locked, Bolan did a quick sweep of the place and found nothing more interesting than a couple of thousand in cash and a kilo of marijuana. He took the cash.

      “Thanks, Mad Dog,” Bolan whispered, tucking the wad of bills into an empty pouch on his gunbelt reserved for just that purpose.

      Bolan really didn’t have an accurate count of how many millions he had stolen from the Mafia, terrorist organizations and organized crime in general, but their bloody profits had purchased a lot of hard justice rammed back down their throats. If that wasn’t karma, then Bolan had no idea what the proper definition was.

      The last room on the ground floor was an office, all brass and leather, and smelling of death. A man lay behind the sofa in a position it was impossible to achieve while alive, and a woman was draped over the desk. Her tattoos identified her as an assassin for the Colombian drug cartel.

      Pitting rival gangs against each other was an old trick in his book, and one that worked extremely well most of the time. Not always, but often enough. Bolan knew that it had been a gamble to tell Kegan’s enemies where the gunrunner could be located. But he hadn’t read them as foolish enough to drive up to the building and unload a couple of rocket launchers through the front windows. Kegan’s former customers, cheated of their goods, and often betrayed to the police for the reward, wanted hands-on revenge, up close and very personal. If they had succeeded, so much the better. But at the very least, they had diverted Kegan and his people, giving Bolan a precious few minutes to try to find Kegan’s next identity and permanently end his reign of terror.

      Alongside the corpse was a cheap pressboard computer desk, the PC smashed to pieces, the hard drive gone. Damn. That could have been useful. Not that Kegan would keep anything major on the drive, but there could have been hints and subtle clues. Sometimes Bolan felt as though he was fighting ghosts in the dark.

      All the way across the office was a huge dark wooden desk sporting a stained brass plaque with the name Edward Carter. A common enough moniker to sound real, and close enough to his real name so that Erik Kegan wouldn’t make a fatal slip. In spite of being a bloodthirsty monster, Kegan wasn’t a fool.

      On the wall behind the colossal desk was the usual assortment of impressive diplomas, testimonial letters from satisfied clients, mostly major corporations, and quite a few newspaper clippings showing Edward Carter with the mayor, and other noteworthy folks, with everybody smiling at the cameras. All fake of course, but the pictures did show Kegan himself.

      Built like a bull gorilla, Eric Kegan still had the winning smile of a politician selling used cars, slicker than a snake in oil. The only tell was his eyes. The face could smile, the mouth laugh, but the eyes stayed the same, cold and dead, like the eyes of a shark.

      It was strange that a man forever in hiding would allow himself to be photographed, especially by a newspaper. Anonymity was paramount for his line of business—selling death wholesale. Maybe Kegan just liked having his picture taken. Bolan shrugged. People were often contradictory.

      Lifting the slashed leather chair from the floor, Bolan checked the sides for hidden controls but found nothing. Sitting in the chair, he twisted back and forth a few times, listening for a squeak, but hearing only the rustle of his clothing.

      The desk itself was huge, a monstrous slab of cherrywood, topped with green leather and edged with shiny brass studs. It was clearly an antique from a bygone age and had to weigh a ton.

      Going around, Bolan checked the front and sure enough saw a line of holes in the wood from three different pistols, but none of the lead had achieved full penetration. Even his furniture was bulletproof. That was when he caught a whiff of something in the air other than the talcum powder and blood. Perfume from the woman? No, what assassin would do a job wearing perfume to reveal her presence in the dark? It might be a man’s cologne, brandy-cut tobacco mixed with the faint aroma of homogenized oil.

      He checked the top right-hand drawer and there was a cleaning kit for a gun. Plus a spare magazine and a box of ammo for a 10 mm Colt Magnum pistol—semisteel jacketed hollow-point rounds. Serious ammo. Those tens hit like sledgehammers and punched holes through everything short of Threat-Level-Five body armor.

      Wearing only Level Four at the moment, that gave Bolan pause. Then he moved on. Kegan had to be stopped. End of discussion.

      Closing the drawer, the soldier looked over the office again and tried to reconstruct in his mind how it got this way. Everything had been smashed or slashed open, even the books on the shelves. The plastic fern in the corner had been removed from its wicker pot and wood chips were scattered everywhere. Looking for something small and flexible... Documents, perhaps?

      There were three doors lining the interior wall. Wading through the mounds of trash, Bolan went to the first and found that it opened onto a short hallway with stairs going up and another door to the left that had to lead to the basement.

      The stairs didn’t creak as he’d expected, which was a good sign of proper maintenance. At the top, Bolan reached a blank wall with picture-used-to-be-here stains and a short hallway. Just to the left was a modern kitchen, obviously a recent addition, with a small breakfast area.

      The kitchen table was in pieces, the steel tube chairs disassembled. Same as downstairs, the kitchen had been thoroughly searched, corn flakes littering the floor, bag of sugar busted wide open. Bolan studied the sugar for patterns in the granulated surface but found none. Whatever was hidden hadn’t been found here.

      Rummaging through a drawer Bolan found a can opener and wasted precious minutes opening a couple of soup cans from the bottom