Читать книгу Rebel Force - Don Pendleton - Страница 13

The town house was in an upscale, international resident section of the city, adjacent to the old financial district. Bolan had the taxi driver drop him a couple of blocks away, and he approached from the rear making use of the clean, wide alleys running between the houses.

It was a quiet neighborhood, and Bolan didn’t notice anyone up and moving about at such a late hour. It was place of good security due to the high concentration of foreign businessmen from the petroleum and mining industries. People here, Bolan knew, lived a hell of a lot better than they did in the rest of the Grozny metropolis.

At the back gate Bolan punched the code Barbara Price had given him into the keypad hidden behind a false plaque and disabled the alarm system. He entered the little walkway and shut the gate tightly behind him. At the back door of the safehouse, Bolan tipped up a bird feeder hanging from a low tree branch and got the key to the dead-bolt lock.

Once inside the two-story house he locked the door behind him and reengaged the alarm system. He went into the Western-style kitchen and pulled open the fridge door. The fridge was well stocked, and he pulled out a bright red Coca-Cola can. He leaned against the counter, guzzled the soda and tossed the empty can into the nearby garbage bin.

Bolan pulled the envelopes free of his jacket pocket and threw them on the kitchen table. He removed the handgun from the small of his back and set it next to the envelopes. He took off his jacket and sat down.

Bolan sighed and leaned forward, putting his head in his hands and closing his eyes for a moment. His knuckles were still slightly sore from where they’d struck the man in the porn shop.

After a moment he pulled the first of the five manila envelopes over to him. He reached behind him and drew the knife he had taken from the man he’d killed. He opened the folding handles with practiced flicks of his wrist, then used the knife blade to open the first envelope.

Inside Bolan found computer printouts. He shifted them around, studying the details. It was a schematic diagram. He frowned, knowing he didn’t have the technical expertise to know what the blueprints showed. Perhaps they were the electronics to the guidance systems DNI had been so worried Sable had procured. Perhaps they were something else.

Bolan pushed the schematic printout aside and opened up the next envelope. It contained more of the same. The third one showed a list of numbers running down a spreadsheet. He knew he was looking at an accounting ledger. The numbers showed transactions, dates, amounts and specific account numbers.

“You were getting some good stuff,” Bolan murmured to the absent Sanders.

He threw the papers on top of the pile of information, set the knife on the table and rubbed his eyes. He breathed deeply.

He picked up the next to the last envelope and opened it quickly. Several photos spilled out across the desk. He sat up, suddenly alert, completely surprised by what he was seeing.

In the photos two women were locked together, naked, on a bed. Bolan held them up. It showed a pretty, younger Asian woman kissing a blond woman. The Asian was attractive, but the blonde had an icy beauty, as hard as diamonds, that Bolan had only seen in expensive call girls.

He looked at the rest of the pictures. The women, already naked, progressed quickly beyond the kissing stage. In one shot the brunette had her face buried between the blonde’s smooth thighs. The blonde was looking down on the younger woman, her face haughty as she pulled at the woman’s hair.

“What’s this all about, Sanders?” Bolan wondered.

Bolan pulled two photos out of the pile and set them in front of him. He slid the rest back into their envelope. The two photos he kept out each showed close shots of the women’s faces. Bolan studied them intently, memorizing every detail. When he was satisfied he’d recognize them in person, he put them away and opened the final envelope from the drop.

Inside the envelope was folded piece of stationery. Bolan unfolded it and looked at what was written there. It was a simple series of numbers.

Bolan frowned. If the drop was a fast turnover situation, then it was possible the code was a simple system meant for Sanders to decipher quickly and then destroy, rather than sophisticated encryption.

The soldier got up and stretched. He went back out into the living area where he had seen a desk with a computer on it. It might help with research, but the house had been set up as a hideaway, not a field operations center, and communications were not infallibly secure. There were the cyberequivalents of blind drops, but Bolan had no intention of using them from this location unless absolutely necessary.

Bolan needed a good, down and dirty, field code Sanders might have instructed a stringer in. From the numbers, it seemed to be a replacement code of some sort. Bolan got to work with pen and paper. He was in Operational Theater Six. He added that to the last digit of the day of the date of the drop, then transposed the numbers with letters of the alphabet.

He tried the day Sanders had made his call, got a jumble of alphabet letters, then tried switching the letters out with the next letter in the alphabet. Nothing. He tried it with the letter prior and came up empty. He snarled in frustration and thrust the sheets of paper away.

Bolan got up and went to the refrigerator. He reached in and pulled out a green bottle of Heineken. He idly wondered what poor schmuck had gone all the way through college CIA recruitment only to find himself putting his security clearance to use stocking the fridge in some rarely used safehouse.

Bolan sat the beer down unopened. His mind was cluttered with images, snapshot memories of a hundred different events and a thousand different days from his past. He walked over to the doorway and reached up to grab the lip of the frame at the top. He dug his fingers in tightly and began to pull himself up in slow, deliberate movements. The exercise was an old rock climbing movement designed to strengthen the hands and forearms as much as the biceps and back.

After an easy fifteen chin-ups to get his blood moving, Bolan lowered himself and walked back to the table. He clenched and unclenched his fists, loosening the muscles of his grip. He shrugged back to stretch his shoulders and looked down at the table.

Bolan shook random thoughts away and sat, pulling his notes toward him. He looked at the numbers. They sat there, stubbornly refusing to give up their secrets. Then a slow smile slid across his face.

The soldier stood and crossed to the computer where he immediately logged on. He set his notes beside him at the desk and signed on to the Internet. He pulled up a Russian-English dictionary Website. He typed a word from his notes into the computer. The word came back unknown. Bolan threw that sheet down and picked up the sheet where he had transposed the letter corresponding with the number abstraction with the letter directly following it.

He hurriedly typed the series of letters into the computer. He got a match. He wrote the match down, then typed in each word until he translated the note in its entirety. When he was done he leaned back, feeling satisfied despite himself.

He read the note.

Tan is a dupe. Break all contact.