Colony Of Evil. Don Pendleton
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centerpiece and active headquarters. From the outside, unless you climbed atop the roof and counted dish antennae, the place looked normal, precisely what a stranger would expect to see on a Virginia farm.
Not that a stranger, trespassing, would ever make it to the house alive.
Inside, it was a very different story, comfort vying with utility of every square inch of the house. It featured living quarters, kitchen, dining room—the usual, in short—but also had communications and computer rooms, though major functions were in the Annex, an arsenal second to none outside of any full-size military base, and other features that the standard home, rural or urban, couldn’t claim.
The basement War Room was a case in point. Accessible by stairs or elevator, it contained a conference table seating twenty, maps and charts for every part of Mother Earth, and audio-visual gear that would do Disney Studios proud.
How many times had Bolan sat inside that room to hear details of a mission that would send him halfway around the world, perhaps to meet his death?
Too many, right.
But it would never be enough, until the predators got wise and left the weaker members of the human herd alone.
Aaron Kurtzman met them on the threshold of the War Room, crunched Bolan’s hand in his fist, then spun his wheel-chair to lead them inside. As Stony Man’s tech master, Kurtzman commonly attended mission briefings and controlled whatever AV elements Brognola’s presentation might require.
Brognola took his usual seat at the head of the table, his back to a large wallscreen. Price sat to the big Fed’s right, Bolan on his left, while Kurtzman chose a spot midway along the table’s left-hand side. A keyboard waited for him on the tabletop, plugged into some concealed receptacle.
“Okay,” Brognola said, “before we start, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to keep up with the news these past few days.”
“Not much,” Bolan said. “Scraps from radio, while I was driving. Headlines showing from the newspaper dispensers.”
“Fair enough. We’re in the middle of a flap that has the White House nervous, not to mention certain friends abroad. Starting three days ago, on Thursday, we’ve experienced a series of attacks on Jews, here in the States and down in Mexico. It has the White House in an uproar, for assorted reasons, and we’ve got our marching orders.”
Bolan knew the protocol for Stony Man briefings. Brognola went by a script of sorts, and liked to keep his ducks all in a row.
“Who were the victims?” Bolan asked.
The big Fed tipped a nod to Kurtzman and the overheads dimmed just enough to simulate twilight. Behind Brognola’s back, a photo of a smiling couple dressed for formal partying filled up the screen.
“That’s Aderet Venjamin on the left,” Brognola said, without glancing around. “His wife’s Naomi. For the past five years, Venjamin has been assigned to the Israeli consulate in New York City.”
“Someone hit him?” Bolan asked. It was the logical assumption.
“Nope. The wife.”
Bolan’s surprise was indicated by a raised eyebrow.
“On Thursday morning,” Brognola pressed on, “she went out shopping on Park Avenue. One bodyguard, one driver, both ex-military. As she left a jeweler’s, two men on the sidewalk shot the guard, threw nitric acid in her face and fled on foot. No clear description of the perps, no vehicle observed.”
“Survivors?” Bolan asked.
“The lady’s still alive,” Hal said, “if you can call it living. Left eye gone, partially blinded in the right. Skin grafts may help a little, but she’ll never look like that again.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the screen behind him.
“Anyone claim credit for it?” Bolan asked.
“We’re not sure.”
“Meaning?”
“Two days prior to the attack, the consulate received a note, postmarked Bogotá. It took nine days to be delivered. No one in the postal service can explain exactly why.”
Another nod to Kurtzman, and the happy-couple photo was replaced by a plain sheet of paper. Roughly centered on it was a typed message: “See now, how ugly are the Jews who suck our blood.”
“That’s it?” Bolan asked. “I’d imagine the Israeli consulate gets bags of poison-pen notes every day.”
“You’d win that bet,” Brognola said. “I checked it out. Apparently they average fifteen pounds of hate mail daily, double that around well-known religious holidays.”
“So what sets this apart? The timing or the ‘ugly’ reference?”
“The postmark, actually,” Brognola replied. “But that’s hindsight. Stay with me for a minute, here.”
A nod, another change of photos. Now the carcass of a tour bus filled the screen. Fire damage showed around the frames of shattered windows. Bolan picked out bullet holes along the one side he could see. The bus’s logo, what was left of it, read Tourismo Grand de Sonora.
“This went down about an hour after the Park Avenue attack,” Brognola said. “A busload of Israeli tourists traveling around Sonora, as I’m sure you gathered from the sign. They were en route to Hermosillo, from some kind of mission, when a group of masked men stopped the bus and started shooting. Passersby, they left alone.”
“They wanted witnesses,” Bolan observed.
“Apparently.”
“Survivors on the bus?”
“Not one.”
“You’re linking this to acid on Park Avenue, because…?”
“Of this,” Brognola said, and Kurtzman keyed the next slide. Once again, it showed a common piece of stationery with a one-line message: “Jews suck the lifeblood of nations.”
“So?”
“I couldn’t see it, either,” Brognola replied, “but the Mossad and FBI agree that both notes were prepared on the same manual typewriter. It’s a vintage German model, specifically an Erika Naumann Model 6, last manufactured between 1938 and early 1945.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish. It just gets worse.”
This time the picture changed without a signal from Brognola. On the screen, a body sprawled in blood and sunshine, with pastel storefronts and palm trees in the background. Bolan couldn’t see the dead man’s face.
Small favors.
“Ira Margulies,” Brognola said. “One of the top fifteen or twenty richest people in Miami Beach. He was a force to reckon with in banking, real estate, what have you—until Friday morning, when a shooter took him down.”
“Where was the note?” asked Bolan.
“Tucked under his left elbow, away from the blood flow,” Brognola said.
And as he spoke, another note filled up the hanging screen. It read, “The Jews are not the people who are blamed for nothing.”
Bolan frowned and asked, “Why does that sound familiar?”
Price fielded that one, telling him, “It’s similar, but not identical, to a note left at one of Jack the Ripper’s London crime scenes back in 1888. The original note misspelled ‘Jews,’ and a couple of other words are slightly different. For plagiarism, it’s a sloppy job.”
“You said, from 1888?”
She nodded, adding, “But it’s quoted in every book and article written about the Ripper since then. How many hundreds are there, all over the world? We think it stuck in someone’s mind. They’re playing games.”
“Same