Renegade Agent by Don Pendleton Page A

hand, he'd damn well have it.
    "What do you remember about Frank Edwards?" Brognola said. Edwards had been a back-burner project of the Stony Team for some time, and Bolan was familiar with the broad outlines of the man's dossier.
    "Ex-CIA," Bolan said. "Suspected of freelancing for various Arab radical factions in the Middle East. He's also been fingered as having worked in an advisory capacity for Amin in Uganda and Khaddafi in Libya, training and tradecraft, if I remember correctly."
    "You do, Striker," Brognola confirmed. "Add to that gun-running, we believe he's been acting as the middleman in the illegal shipment of American armament ultimately destined for terrorist hands. But he's beyond our official reach, and even if he weren't, we couldn't put him on trial, because we'd have to make top-secret intelligence public in order to present the evidence against him."
    "But we would like to see him take a fall."
    "He's got to take a fall, Striker," Brognola said. "New intelligence has just come in on the guy, and if I read it right, he's got his finger in a far bigger pie than we ever suspected. Not only that, but it ties in with Charon. Edwards has to be interdicted, and now..."
    Bolan ground out his cigarette butt on the concrete floor of the barren underground room. "Take it from the top, Hal."
    "Right. We're telexing you Edwards's updated dossier and a data package, but here's the bare bones of it. Edwards's personal staff, the half dozen or so he employs for security, communications, liaison with his terrorist clients, and other "housekeeping" duties, are all Americans. They're either ex-Special Forces, or ex-Agency, like him."
    Like him, for sure. Another nest of treasonous vipers, men in whose lexicon words like "loyalty" and "patriotism" had been replaced by "power-lust" and "self-interest." Yeah, Edwards needed to take a fall, and Bolan would be more than happy to give him the push.
    "More than six months ago, we infiltrated one of our people into Edwards's organization. Because Edwards is a highly trained operative himself and still maintains a vast network of clandestine contacts within the international intelligence community, we had to make it look absolutely authentic. Only three people knew the truth: the agent, myself, and the commander in chief. That'll give you an idea how badly we want Edwards. Following orders, the agent sold some factual but outdated information to a KGB counter-intel operator, was caught, and was cashiered of course. As far as the agency knows — and her files support this — she was drummed out after a long and valued career because she turned rotten. Even her closest colleagues believe it. It had to be that way, because we believe it's possible that Edwards may even have a pipeline into the agency. It worked. Within a week the approach to Edwards was made, and within a month she was in."
    Bolan had not missed the feminine pronoun. An idea started to take shape in his mind and he did not like the look of it.
    "This was projected as a long-term operation, to be conducted with absolute minimum risk of error. For that reason, our agent has contacted us exactly twice in those six months. In the first instance, she informed us that Edwards was just as professional as we believed. He was treating her as what she was: a highly trained and proficient operative. No grab-ass bullshit or anything like that. She had been given a few assignments, nothing very sensitive-courier duty, surveillance, intelligence analysis, and so forth. Edwards was testing her out, and she was passing with flying colors. He was convinced that she was what she professed to be: a fellow professional and a fellow traitor."
    "Hal," Bolan interrupted. "Who is she?"
    "You know her, Striker. The name is Toby Ranger."
    Bolan leaned back in the straight-backed wooden chair and let out breath. Yeah, he knew Toby Ranger.
    In that other lifetime, when the Mafia menace took him the length and breadth of the country, fate had