Interception. Don Pendleton

on the thugs. Can’t sell to the eurotrash touristas if bullets are flying everywhere and bodies are in the street. The territories are pretty well defined now. You get street violence occasionally and there are so many free-lancers hunting you can’t guarantee anything when the sun goes down and night comes. But it’s not like Compton in the late 1980s or something.”

      “Lovely.”

      “Make no mistake, Mack,” Price said. “Nobody but nobody in that section of the city is legitimate, or who they say they are. Your friends, the Mountain and Snake Society, have really solidified their control and the influence of both Chinese and North Korean intelligence with them. Everyone who’s not running a scam is a confidential informant. If they’re not a CI, then they’re an operative. Failing that, they’re a petty criminal.”

      “Well, there are tourists,” Kurtzman broke in. “The libertine controls on the local nightclubs make it popular for twenty-something kids from the more prosperous regions of the EU to hang out there. It’s replaced Amsterdam as the ‘it’ city for the disaffected and chic bored.”

      “Sheep for the wolves,” Bolan muttered.

      “Exactly,” Price said.

      “What’s Pandey doing there?” Bolan asked. “I get that you can score anything in this place, but doesn’t cloning tech seem just a little upscale even for this modern-day version of Casablanca?”

      Kurtzman spoke up again. “The international law on bioweapons is very clear. Certain technologies used to regulate such weapons in mass quantities are as tightly controlled and monitored as their nuclear counterparts. Not so the cloning tech. You take a strain of weaponized Anthrax, or Influenza and you replicate them, or modify their DNA helixes to be sturdier then replicate them, and you can work in peace from international monitoring agencies until the bureaucrats writing the laws can play catch-up.”

      “Seems almost too simple.” Bolan grunted.

      “We’re always playing catch-up,” Price said.

      “Unless we can be proactive,” Brognola observed.

      “That’s where I come in.”

      “As always, Striker,” the big Fed acknowledged. “As always.”

      “Right now we know both men entered Prisni Prijatelji,” Price continued. “Then they disappeared. We want to know why and we want to know where. Two of Bout’s bodyguards, ex-GRU naval infantry Spetsnaz, turned up yesterday floating facedown in the ocean outside the neighborhood. Two days before that a call girl named Marlina Dubrovnik disappeared in Prisni Prijatelji’s only hotel.”

      “A hotel where Pandey had a room where she was going to meet him?” Bolan supplied.

      Brognola held up a loosely clasped hand and blew on it, spreading his fingers wide as he did so and showing it to be empty. “Just like that. She goes to his room. He lets her in. Then they’re gone.”

      “We have people on them?”

      “We did. Team of military spooks out of the Pentagon. The unit Rumsfeld created.”

      Bolan nodded. “The Strategic Support Branch.”

      “Right, a SSB team with some electronic and signal intelligence special reconnaissance units, Special Forces commo guys, a DIA electronic intelligence analyst. Solid operators. Code parole is ‘Center Spike.’ They had a military attaché operations in Zagreb. When the Agency caught Pandey’s movement out of New Delhi, they asked for assistance.”

      “The Company asked for help?” Bolan asked.

      Brognola shrugged. “Their best operatives are running Pakistan and Iraq these days. They had a lone tail on Pandey, and Prisni Prijatelji is no place for a single operator.”

      Bolan lifted a single eyebrow. Brognola laughed. “Unless it’s you, Striker.”

      Bolan turned serious. “The SSB unit know I’m going in?”

      “They know something is going on and that they’re to provide imagery and surveillance assistance to an American intelligence operator,” Price said. “But I’ve had them replaced in position.”

      “Replaced?”

      “With Jack and Charlie Mott,” Price answered. “We’re going to keep this in the family.”

      “Akira and I set up a line of communications to ensure Farm security,” Kurtzman broke in. “They constructed boosted relay stations for our Computer Room right here on the Farm. What Jack and Charlie have is real easy ‘point and click’ stuff, less sophisticated than the controls on the planes they fly. But, by them being live we’ll have the electronic equivalent of a field office right in your back pocket.”

      Bolan turned toward Price. “So I still do my commo through the Farm?”

      Price nodded. “You’ll have an enhanced cell phone-PDA for urgent visual updates. And direct audio with them. Otherwise the Jack and Charlie team will do its thing completely separate from you and feed us updates every eight hours. They’ll go trolling to see what they pick up until you point them in a direction.”

      “So I’m supposed to enter a section of the city of Split that is a law unto itself. A place where everyone is pretending to be something they aren’t. Then I start following up leads to find two people who’ve disappeared, but whose disappearances may or may not be linked.”

      Brognola nodded. “Yeah. That about sums it up. But don’t forget, if anyone suspects you of being an American agent, there are half a hundred intelligence and criminal cells who’ll try to kill you.”

      Kurtzman leaned in. “And there’s so much going on that the potential that you could stumble onto something nefarious is high. Almost guaranteed. It just won’t be guaranteed that it’ll be the exact nefarious activity we want.”

      Bolan leaned back. “When do I leave?”