Citadel of Fear by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Stony Man Farm

Aaron Kurtzman was deeply disappointed. He had looked forward to bringing down the Demi Papas empire and bringing the Perfect Weapon to his knees. Now Demi Papas was rolling with the good guys and Kurtzman found himself having to work with him. He was forced to speak with Papas over a link and endure his whoo-hooing and his motivational boardroom speak during conference calls. The consolation prize was that being privy to every aspect of the life of a renegade financial scumbag was frankly fascinating.

Beneath Papas’s media empire he was involved in a vast swathe of gray-area business ventures. He didn’t sell drugs or pimp little girls, but he was involved in a lot of things that were strictly non-kosher. He’d hurt a lot of people and made deals with very bad government officials in far-off countries, making off with a lot of wealth and rights to resources the people in those countries desperately needed.

He was a highly intelligent man and he hid most of it well, very well. To clean up his image he had given up taking controlling interest in American companies and then savaging them. However, strangely enough, as he couldn’t stop telling anyone who would listen, he considered himself a patriot, the son of immigrants and there was nothing he didn’t owe this country or that he wouldn’t do for it. The statement might seem delusional to an outside observer, but Papas had hurled himself wholeheartedly into the investigation, and he appeared to be holding back nothing. Demi Papas had called his accountants and lawyers both aboveboard and below and they had been horrified as he had started opening up the Papas kingdom, and possibly exposing and implicating them, as well.

None of Papas’s minions seemed able to object in the presence of Carl Lyons. Blancanales spent time smoothing ruffled feathers and making reassuring noises. The Stony Man cybernetics team pored over vast amounts of data trying to make it correlate with anything that had occurred from Prague to Poland. It was a monumental task. Papas also had a number of blind trusts and don’t-ask-don’t-tell business relationships that were proving very difficult to investigate. They had been at it for nearly forty-eight hours straight.

Hunt Wethers pushed himself away from his workstation. “I don’t know.”

Akira Tokaido was tired, frustrated and had inhaled so many energy drinks he might has well just hook up an IV unit and start squeezing a tennis ball. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

Kurtzman had known Wethers and his ways for a very long time, and he felt a sudden glimmer of hope. Wethers was giving the multiple files on his screen a very professorial frown. “What is it you don’t know, Hunt?”

“I’m not big on all this financial stuff. I’m a professor of cybernetics, an egghead. Though I do love doing intelligence analysis.”

“And you’re very good at it,” Kurtzman prompted. “What’s bothering you?”

“This guy Papas. I’ve only seen five minutes of his TV show by accident, and other than

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