“Which side?” Bolan asked.
“Hard to say. The rumors go both ways,” Dixon replied. “Since then, our boy has mostly been a gun-for-hire and part-time training officer for outfits like Hamas, al Qaeda and the Islamic Jihad. No Muslim background that we know of, but he likes those petrodollars. Has three bank accounts, one each in Switzerland, the Caymans and Sri Lanka.”
“It’s a small world, after all,” Bolan remarked.
“And getting smaller all the time, apparently,” Dixon said. “In the past eleven months, Talmadge has logged close to a half a million frequent-flyer miles. We’ve tracked him back and forth to different parts of Europe, to Australia and New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, and once to Canada—B.C., specifically. He’s literally all over the map. Some of it’s visits to his banks. The rest, we’re guessing meets with his employers and some contract jobs that just coincidentally occur when he’s nearby.”
“Has anybody thought of handing him to Interpol?” Bolan asked.
“Thought about it, sure. But on what charge? His bank deposits are straightforward, nothing to suggest a laundry operation. He’s not moving contraband, as far as anyone can tell. The people we can prove he’s spoken to aren’t fugitives—at least not in the countries where they’re living at the moment. On the hits, we can’t prove anything beyond proximity.”
“And now, this Gitmo thing,” Bolan said.
“Right. He’s up to something for the AQ crowd, but what? We’ve covered his apartment in Jakarta. Bugs and taps, the whole megillah, but he doesn’t use the telephone for anything important, and his only visitors are hookers. Once a week, like clockwork, he gets laid if he’s in town. Tonight’s the night.”
“Maybe we ought to crash the party.”
“It’s a thought. Take flowers, maybe?”
“Maybe lilies. But we need another car, first thing.”
“You won’t be trading this one in, I take it,” Dixon said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay.” The younger man considered that, then said, “I’ve never hot-wired anything before. I mean, they didn’t teach car theft or anything like that in training.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Bolan said. “What we need right now is somewhere we can drop this one and not be noticed while we switch the plates to something suitable.”
“My first thought would be HPK,” Dixon replied. “Halim Perdana Kusuma. The airport.”
Bolan thought about it, judging distances. It meant driving three miles or so, across Jakarta, without being noticed by police. “What’s closer?” he inquired.
“There’s Kemayoran, formerly the local airport,” Dixon said. “They’ve turned it into some kind of outlandish shopping mall, but there are parking lots.”
Closer, the warrior knew, from memorizing street maps in advance. “Okay. Let’s try that first.”
“Suits me. You know the way?”
“I’ve got it,” Bolan said. “But just the same, correct me if you see I’m heading off toward Borneo or something.”
“Right.” It was the first time he had seen Tom Dixon smile. “About just now…in case you couldn’t tell, I’ve never killed a man before.”
Bolan could have replied, “First time for everything,” but that would be both flippant and a lie. Most people never killed another human being. Soldiers, cops and criminals were those most likely to take lives, but even then it was a relatively rare event. Millions of soldiers served their tours of duty in peacetime and never fired a shot in anger. Most cops never pulled the trigger on a suspect, making those who did so more than once immediately suspect in the eyes of their superiors. Even most criminals had never killed, restricting their activities to theft, white-collar crimes or petty drug offenses.
Without planning it, Tom Dixon had been drafted into a fraternity whose members shared a single trait: the rare experience of canceling another human being’s ticket to the great arcade of life. Some members of that clique enjoyed it; others never quite forgave themselves. The rest, who spilled blood in the line of duty forced upon them by their times, their conscience or their personality, learned how to live with it.
Bolan couldn’t predict which kind of killer Dixon might turn out to be. In fact, he didn’t care, as long as Dixon managed to perform his duties adequately for the next few hours or days.
Once Bolan left, he could break down and weep, become a raving psychopath or simply go back to his paper-pushing job. It wouldn’t matter to the Executioner.
This day, this job was all that mattered.
But they had blown their cover big time. Everything beyond that point would be a catch-up game.
And Bolan feared that they were running out of time.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jakarta’s Kemayoran district, formerly the site of a major airport, lies in the city’s eastern quadrant, two miles distant from the cooling breezes of the Java Sea. It swelters from the wicked combination of a tropic climate and an overdose of asphalt topped by concrete towers rising toward the humid sky. Pedestrians sweat through their clothes while traveling a block, and those blessed with the miracle of air-conditioning are prone to let it run full blast.
Finding the former airport was no problem. It appeared on Bolan’s maps, and Dixon knew the mall by reputation, while denying that he’d ever shopped there. Bolan cruised the spacious parking lot until he spotted a Toyota the same year and model as his bullet-punctured ride, then parked as close as possible.
It was that hazy time of dusk, between late afternoon and early evening, when floodlights set on timers hadn’t flared to life and mall employees tasked to watch security monitors were thinking more about the night ahead than what was happening on any given one of twenty smallish screens. Bolan was grateful for the hour, but he wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
“You’re watching, right?” he asked Dixon.
“Affirmative.”
Reaching into a bag behind the driver’s seat, Bolan withdrew a foot-long strip of metal and a large screwdriver, both of which he tucked beneath his floppy shirt. He left the car with Dixon, his companion staking out a point midway between the two Toyotas and pretending that he had to tie his shoe while Bolan went ahead.
Another moment placed him in the parking slot beside the target vehicle. He took a final searching look around, then slipped his shim into the narrow gap between the driver’s window and its frame. He found the catch in something like ten seconds, slipped it and was in the driver’s seat a heartbeat later, thankful that the car had no alarm installed.
The screwdriver came next, applied with brutal force to wrench the round ignition keyhole mechanism from the steering column. Once that obstacle had been removed, Bolan’s screwdriver doubled as the missing key itself; a simple twist was all that he needed to revive the sleeping engine.
Bolan left it running as he found a switch beside his seat, opened the trunk and exited. Dixon kept watch while Bolan palmed another tool, removed the rental’s license plates, then claimed his various belongings from the now abandoned car: his small toolkit, a slightly larger bag for clothes and shaving gear, a heavy duffel bag that clanked and rattled when he picked it up or set it down.
The latter earned a blink from Dixon, but he didn’t ask. Instead, he settled in the shotgun seat as if the car