difference a day made. Twenty-four hours after what the media was calling “the worst massacre in the capital’s history,” Mack Bolan saw few traces of the carnage that had taken place. There were a few chips in the marble columns, which the reparation crew had yet to patch, but otherwise the monument appeared pristine: no blood, no scorch marks from a C-4 blast, no lingering stench of explosives or offal to send tourists scurrying off to the next attraction. An untrained eye would never guess that nineteen people had been killed here, terrorists included, or that fifteen more were suffering at hospitals around the city, four of them unlikely to survive.
The monument had changed, however. There was no denying that.
Throughout the day and night preceding his arrival, Bolan saw that visitors had thronged the place, likely eclipsing any turnout for a single day since it was dedicated, back in 1922. Many had come, he knew, to capture photographs before the site was purged of bloody residue, although the Secret Service and the United States Capitol Police would have restrained the ghouls and kept them at a distance. Later, with the cleanup done, a pilgrimage had started, lasting through the night, not finished yet.
The signs were obvious. Along the rising steps, flanking a path left clear for any visitors who felt a need to go inside, mourners had left floral bouquets and wreaths in wild profusion, many bearing cards. Besides the flowers, other tokens had been left, as well: a dozen teddy bears in different hues and sizes, for the children who had fallen; Bibles, some of them left open to highlighted passages; sealed letters that would be removed, likely unread, expressing sorrow, rage and empty promises of retribution; several pairs of baby shoes; and standing tall amid the jumble, wholly out of place, a plastic pink flamingo.
Who could truly claim to understand the human heart?
It was approaching twelve o’clock, a normal workday, but there was still a crowd in front of the memorial. They stood in silence, for the most part, several of them gently swaying as if caught up in some private rapture, most just staring at the scene where people they would never know had died under the gun.
It struck Bolan that this was now a double monument of sorts. In the short run, before the public’s brief attention span expired, it represented both a martyred President who sacrificed himself to save a fractured nation, and a group of strangers who, by accident, had stained a page of history with their life’s blood. Their memory would fade, of course, as new atrocities demanded airing in prime time. The previous day’s slaughter would be relegated to a thirty-second sound bite aired on anniversaries, for the next three years or so, until it lost all relevance to anyone except the wounded and immediate survivors of the dead.
“Bitchin’,” a voice said, almost at his elbow. “Man, I wish we’d seen it.”
Bolan half turned, taking in a pair of pimply teenage boys who should have been in school. They would have ditched to taste a bit of modern history, unmindful of its import. Raised on mindless action films and video games, they had no concept of mayhem beyond what they saw as entertainment value.
Bolan could have dropped them both without breaking a sweat. Two punches, lightning fast, and they would learn the stark reality of pain—albeit just a taste—but what would be the point? He couldn’t save the wasted dregs of a lost generation, even if he’d been inclined to try.
And he had other work to do.
His visit to the killing ground was not coincidence. He hadn’t been in town on other business—hadn’t decided on a detour to sate his morbid curiosity. In fact, he’d crossed the continent to be there, flying through the night from San Francisco, but it wasn’t any kind of gesture to the dead.
He was expected there, at noon, and had arrived ahead of time, as was his habit. That gave Bolan time to scan the crowd and traffic flowing on Lincoln Memorial Circle, checking for traps, looking for enemies. It was the way he lived, although in this case it was wasted effort. Only one man living knew he would be in the nation’s capital this day, and that man was a trusted friend.
As for his enemies of old, the few who still survived, none even knew he was alive. Bolan had “died” some years ago, quite publicly—on live TV, in fact—and every trace of him had been expunged from law-enforcement files across the country, a concerted purge that left no file intact. If one of his remaining foes from yesteryear should pass him on the street this day, or sit beside him in a dingy bar somewhere, they wouldn’t recognize his face or wonder, even for a heartbeat, if he still might be alive.
For all intents and purposes, he had ceased to exist.
Which didn’t mean he was a ghost, by any means. He could reach out and touch his foes anytime he wanted to. Then they became the ghosts.
“It’s something, eh?” a new voice, at his other elbow, said.
“Something,” Bolan granted, with a sidelong glance at his friend Hal Brognola, who was a high-ranking honcho in the Justice Department.
“Let’s take a walk,” the big Fed said.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Bolan replied.
They walked, clearing the crowd of pilgrims, moving east toward the Reflecting Pool that stretched for more than one-third of a mile through the heart of the National Mall, between the Lincoln Memorial and the towering Washington Monument. Brognola waited until they had some breathing room before he spoke again.
“You’ve followed all of this, I guess.”
“I caught some of the live footage in Frisco,” Bolan said, “and got the rest while I was in the air. They talked about Ukrainians on CNN.”
“And they were right, for once.”
“Some kind of manifesto left behind?”
“That leaked out of the Capital Police,” Brognola groused. “When I find out who let it slip, there will be consequences.”
Bolan let that go by, waiting for Brognola to fill him in. Another moment passed before his second-oldest living friend asked, “How much do you know about the war that they’ve got going in Ukraine?”
“Started in April 2014,” Bolan answered, “spinning off their February revolution against what’s-his-name, Yanukovych?”
“That’s him.”
“Russia weighed in to crush protests against the old regime, and that caused wider rifts within the government. By March, pro-Russian mobs were clashing with antigovernment marchers all over the country, organizing paramilitary outfits on both sides. Russian regulars crossed the border in August, then they tried a cease-fire in September. Didn’t get far with it. In November, separatists won a big election in the eastern sector, a place that sounds like ‘Dumbass.’”
“Donbass,” Brognola corrected, smiling.
“Right. Which brought pro-Russian forces out in strength, supposedly directed by more regulars the Russian president was slipping in illegally.”
“Forget ‘supposedly,’” Brognola said. “He’s in it up to his eyebrows.”
“So, today you’ve got militias, warlords, regulars, all at each other’s throats, with normal folks caught in the middle. Russian troops are massed along the border, and Ukraine’s responding in kind. Is that about the size of it?”
The big Fed nodded, then asked another question. “What about Crimea?”
“A peninsula south of Ukraine and east of Russia,” Bolan said, feeling a bit as if he was back in his ninth grade geography class. “Disputed territory going back through history, for its strategic value. Seaports and natural gas fields. A majority of the population are ethnic Russians, but Ukrainians controlled the government until they got distracted by their February revolution. In March, something like 96 percent of voters backed a referendum to split with Ukraine and become part of Russia. The UN and the European Union ruled the referendum fraudulent. Russian regulars ‘temporarily’ occupied Crimea in April and haven’t gone home yet. Pro-Ukrainian resistance groups are putting up a fight.”
“Correct,”