said a man of fiftysomething was too old to play with toys?
His brief stop at the strip mall on Dade Boulevard did not involve his business. It was strictly personal. The storefront that he entered, darting from his car at curbside to the swinging door through scalding tropic heat, was one of half a dozen mail drops where he kept post boxes under different names.
Why not? It was entirely legal, and the correspondence he received, while not fit for wife or children to peruse, made his days—and nights—more pleasant. After long days at the office, he enjoyed a little something on the side, and in these days of killer viruses, the safest sex of all was solitary.
He was out again in less than sixty seconds, carrying a package and six envelopes in his left hand. He barely registered the movement on his left, until a man’s voice asked him, “Ira? Is that you?”
Margulies turned, already trying to concoct an explanation, but he did not recognize the speaker. Frowning, he was on the verge of a reply when the stranger produced a pistol, smiled and shot him in the chest.
Already dead before he hit the pavement, Ira Margulies had no thought of embarrassment about the package and the envelopes strewed all around him, soaking up his blood.
CHAPTER ONE
Bogotá, Colombia
Mack Bolan’s Avianca flight was ninety minutes late on touchdown at El Dorado International Airport. It hadn’t been the pilot’s fault, but rather issues of “security” that slowed them. Bolan supposed that meant drugs or terrorism, possibly a mix of both.
For close to thirty years, throughout Colombia, it had been difficult to separate cocaine from politics. The major drug cartels bought politicians, judges, prosecutors, cops, reporters, and killed off the ones who weren’t for sale. They backed right-wing militias that pretended to oppose crime while annihilating socialists and “liberals,” occasionally using mercenary death squads as their front men to attack the government itself.
Colombian police had coined the term narcoterrorism, but they rarely spoke it out loud. To do so invited censure, demotion and transfer, perhaps an untimely death.
Back in the States, Bolan read stories all the time claiming that cocaine trafficking was up or down, strictly suppressed or thriving at an all-time high. He took it all with several hefty grains of salt and got his information from a handful of selected sources he could trust.
The traffic was continuing, and U.S. Customs seized approximately ten percent of the incoming coke on a good day. That figure had been static since the 1980s, with a few small fluctuations. Nothing that had happened in the interim—from cartel wars and Panamanian invasions to the bloody death of Pablo Escobar—had altered the reality of narcopolitics.
Drugs paid too much, across the board, for any government to halt the traffic absolutely. Narcodollars funded terrorism and black ops conducted by sundry intelligence agencies, bankrolled political careers and made retirement comfy for respected statesmen, greased the wheels of international diplomacy and commerce.
The filth was everywhere, and Bolan wasn’t Hercules.
But he could clean one stable at a time.
Or, maybe, burn it down.
His latest mission to Colombia involved cocaine, but only in a roundabout and somewhat convoluted way. His main target was equally malignant, but much older, an abiding evil beaten more than once on bloody battlefields around the world, which still refused to die.
As Evil always did.
In spite of its delays, his flight down from Miami had been pleasant—or at least as pleasant as a flight could be when he was traveling unarmed toward mortal danger, with no clear idea of who might know that he was coming, or of how they might prepare to meet him on arrival.
First, there was the matter of his contact on the ground. The man came recommended by the CIA and DEA, which could spell trouble. Bolan knew those agencies were frequently at odds, despite the “War on Terror” and their separate oaths to operate within the law. One side was pledged to halt narcotics traffic by all legal means; the other frequently played fast and loose in murky realms where drugs were just another form of currency.
The fact that both sides found his contact useful raised a caution flag for Bolan, but it wouldn’t make him drop out of the game. He’d worked with various informers, spooks and double agents in his time, and had outlived the great majority of them.
A few he’d killed himself.
So he would give this one a chance, but keep a sharp eye on him, every step along the way. One false step, and their partnership would be dissolved.
In blood.
Their first stop in the capital would have to be a covert arms merchant, someone who could supply Bolan with the essential tools of his profession. That, he guessed, would be no problem in a nation whose homicide rate topped all the charts. That meant guns in abundance, and Bolan would soon have what he needed.
His bankroll would cover a week of high living, assuming the job took that long and he lived to complete it. The cash was a tax-free donation, furnished that morning by one of Miami’s premier bolita bankers who’d decided, strictly from his heart and the desire to keep it beating, that he wouldn’t miss $250,000 all that much.
Right now, Bolan supposed, the macho gambler’s goons were scouring Dade County and environs for the man who’d dared to rob him, but they wouldn’t find a trace. Bolan had played that game too often to leave tracks his enemies could follow—if, in fact, they had the stones to look him up in Bogotá.
And they would have to hurry, even then, because he didn’t plan on spending much time in the capital. Some shopping, some discreet interrogation, and he would be on his way. His target was not found in Bogotá, in Cali or in Medellín.
That would’ve been too easy.
Bolan couldn’t smell the jungle yet, riding in pressurized and air-conditioned semicomfort, but he’d smelled it many times before. Not only in Colombia, but on five continents where Evil went by different names, wore different faces, always seeking the same ends.
Evil sought power and control, the same things politicians spent their lives pursuing. Which was not to say all politicians were dishonest, prone to wicked compromises in pursuit of private gain. Bolan acknowledged that there might be various exceptions to the rule.
He simply hadn’t met them yet.
And something told him that he wouldn’t find one on this trip.
JORGE GUZMAN WAS SMART enough to check the monitors, but waiting in the crowded airport terminal still made him nervous. El Dorado International’s main terminal sprawled over 581,000 square feet and received more than nine million passengers per year. Toss in the families and friends who came to see them off or to meet them on arrival, thronging shops and restaurants and travel agencies, and visiting the airport was like strolling through a crowded town on market day.
Which made it difficult, if not impossible, for Guzman to detect if anyone was watching him, perhaps waiting to slip a knife between his ribs or to press a silenced, small-caliber pistol tight against his spine before they pulled the trigger.
Guzman had no special reason to believe that anyone would try to kill him here, this evening. He had been cautious in preparing for his new assignment, as he always was, informing no one of the covert jobs that came his way, but he had enemies.
It was inevitable, for a man who led a covert life. Guzman had been a thief and then a smuggler from his youngest days, but for the past eight years he’d also served the cloak-and-dagger lords of Washington, who paid so well for information if it brought results.
Guzman had started small, naming street dealers and some minor smugglers with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, first obtaining their assurance that his name would never be revealed to any native law-enforcement officer or prosecutor under any circumstances. Some of them were honest, to