Death Dealers. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ CHAPTER TWO

      The ceiling fan rotated slowly and Carl Lyons’s night vision had accustomed to the shadows so that he could even make out the wicker patterns inlaid into the paddles as he lay on his back. The Hawaiian night was full of the songs of insects and birds outside the open windows, but their tunes carried from the surrounding jungle, making this calm, warm night, silvery-blue moonlight cascading through gossamer drapes, seem far more warm and welcoming than it had any right to be. He was in this hotel under the name of Karl Long, also known as Stone among the Heathens Motorcycle Club of California.

      This was an undercover operation for Stony Man Farm, and Lyons wasn’t here solo. In other hotel rooms were his two partners: fellow Able Team member Hermann Schwarz and Phoenix Force’s Thomas Jefferson Hawkins. Lyons would have felt more comfortable here in Hawaii with Able Team as a whole, cohesive unit, with the third member of the squad, Rosario Blancanales, as part of this deception. However, as Lyons was supposed to be a former member of the Heathens, and an up-and-coming bit of new blood in the Arrangement, hanging out with a Hispanic man, even if he was a blue-eyed “true Spaniard,” would have been suspicious. So Able Team had brought in Hawkins as a replacement.

      All three men would be quite passable as members of a white supremacist movement. Lyons was tall, blond and Nordic. A twenty-first-century Viking warrior with a day’s worth of rough stubble on his chin and the faded tattoos running down his neck, arms and chest proclaiming his allegiance to the white race. The tattoos were fake, etched into his skin with a biological dye that would fade to nothingness after a month. Until then, the big blond ex-cop would have to endure the presence of obscene hatred and twisted, almost-blasphemous religious symbolism scoured across his skin.

      That was part of why he couldn’t sleep tonight, why he allowed himself to be absorbed into the slowly rotating fan blades as they barely churned the night air in his room.

      This was far from the first time Lyons had gone undercover, and also far from the only time he’d ever had to don the hideous mannerisms of a bigot to do his job. What kept him awake was more than disgust for the identity he’d slipped into, and more than paranoia that made him keep a Colt Python under his pillow, within easy reach of his right hand.

      It wasn’t paranoia if you were surrounded by representatives from dozens of gangs around the world, all assembled for a global auction by handwritten invitation—one that Able Team had uncovered while cleaning up loose ends from a prior crisis. It had looked handwritten but in truth had been merely printed, the cursive script the product of a font. No one would be able to perform a handwriting analysis on the mechanized scribbling on paper, and there were also no fingerprints except for those of Kevin Reising, the man who’d received the letter.

      Reising was currently still listed among the living, but in hiding. The truth of the matter was that his corpse was nothing but charred ashes, with a .45-caliber slug where the brainpan should have been. The announcement of the man’s death would not be released until after there was no longer a need for the current undercover identities of Karl Long, Herman Shore and Thomas Presley.

      By then the organizers of this event, a sale for everything from handguns to long-range missiles, would be dead and gone. The host organization of this auction went by the name of Abalisah, and this hotel was far from the beaten trail, on a small island of the archipelago. With a title that was Arabic for devils, it was a sure sign that things were not going to be safe and calm. The man who was the face of the auction was a tall man who could have been anything from European to Middle Eastern. His skin was well tanned, but he had no accent, no truly identifiable features. He was called Jinan.

      “Do what you will,” Jinan had said over a loudspeaker, his voice distorted by a modulator. At least it might have been, but it also could have been a simple computer program or just a schmuck hired to read a sheet of paper put before him. “You have been allowed to keep your sidearms, your knives, your poisons. I merely wish your money, so if you cannot outbid your enemy, perhaps you can steal from him or perhaps murder him. The only things that I forbid are attempts to steal my property or attacks upon my personal staff.”

      Anything goes, Lyons thought, sliding his fingers under his pillow and around the handle of Colt Python, feeling the diamond-checkered grips against the palm of his hand. Surrounded by enemies, dozens of whom Lyons recognized from their Interpol profiles accessed at Stony Man Farm, he and his partners were in deep.

      There was a rap at the door and Lyons sat up. He looked over and saw that it was closing in on three in the morning. He hadn’t placed any orders with room service. By the same token, he couldn’t imagine why someone out to blow him away would knock politely at his door. Out in the hall, he heard more knocks on different doors and softly spoken words even as they were opened.

      Lyons got out of bed, not bothering to put on pants or underwear. It was perfect weather for lying in bed, no covers, naked and enjoying the sea breeze wafting through the window. A pair of undershorts wouldn’t make him any less vulnerable to gunfire or a knife. Still, his cop training took hold as he stood behind the doorjamb while he turned the knob to his door. If a bullet were to cut through the door at his moment, it would slice into empty air, not his chest.

      The door swung open, silent on well-oiled hinges, and Lyons caught a hint of jasmine in the air as he looked into the hall. It was lit, but not so bright that it made his eyes hurt as they adjusted. Instead of a killer in the hall, there was a woman standing there. He couldn’t tell her age as she stood in front of him in the doorway.

      Her skin was deeply bronzed, bare shoulders in sharp contrast to the cream-hued cloth that looped around her neck and then came down to cradle her full, soft breasts. The fabric draped to one side and knotted over her hip, exposing the curve of silken flesh beneath. The light caught a glint of gold from a small ring that adorned her navel while that same light cast an undeniable silhouette, leaving no doubt that the filmy fabric was the only thing between her bare skin and the sultry evening air.

      Once more, Lyons hated the skin he was forced to wear, the tattoos of white power with hateful slurs branded, if only for a month, on his flesh. However, as he returned his gaze to her face, he saw that she wasn’t a black woman. He tried to place her, either as Hispanic, or perhaps a Pacific Islander, but her large brown eyes and full sensual mouth were most definitely not Asian or Caucasian.

      “Mr. Long, my name is Sanay,” she said. Her accent was as unidentifiable as her features, and Lyons couldn’t help but think that the branches of her family tree had roots in different parts of the forest. There was a hint of British in it, but her voice was as elusive in its origins as her appearance. “I am your gift for tonight from Master Jinan.”

      “Master Jinan,” Lyons repeated, looking her up and down. Was this some kind of test? After all, Karl Long was an Aryan thug, an outlaw motorcyclist whose racist pedigree had been cemented with a violent assault on a La Sombra prisoner that had left him brain damaged and with an amputated arm. It wasn’t murder, which would have meant that Long could never leave prison, but it was a show of strength and unity among the Arrangement. “What makes your boss think that I’d have interest in a little brown thing like you?”

      Lyons smirked, hating the words that poured from his lips but also knowing full well that Long was spending prison time for the assault and rapes of Filipino, Polynesian and Hispanic women. Even her age, a little north of thirty, and her diminutive five-foot height, matched Long’s taste in victims.

      Abalisah’s researchers were good, uncannily so, to have pulled up those kinds of facts about him. So even as Lyons made his dismissive challenge to the girl, Sanay stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She glanced down to the cocked pistol in Lyons’s hand and then to the growing arousal obstinately making itself known despite his bravado. СКАЧАТЬ