Collision Course

3

Palermo, Italy

Bolan left the Palermo capo slumped dead across his desk and pocketed the flash drive that contained the information implicating Peter Taterczynski. As he exited the office, he could hear a pack of mafiosi approaching from the other direction. Bolan sprinted down the hallway, his Beretta 93-R clenched in his fist.

Behind him Bolan could hear the bodyguards closing in. A bullet screamed past his ear and smacked into the wall next to him. A heartbeat later he heard a chorus of pistol reports.

Bolan turned a corner in the hallway and bypassed the elevator banks in favor of the fire stairs. It hadn’t been Paolini who had fired, he knew. Paolini wouldn’t have missed.

The big American burst through the fire door and sprinted at breakneck speed down the stairs of the office building, stopping at each landing to vault the railing down to the next level of stairs. He had purposefully chosen the east wing of the building as his escape route, knowing it would be deserted and minimizing the chance that innocents would be caught in any cross fire.

Bolan was three floors down by the time his pursuers hit the stairwell. One of the thugs leaned over the railing and loosed a 3-round burst from his HS 2000 automatic pistol at Bolan’s retreating form.

Paolini barked an angry warning to his subordinate and reached out to pull him back from the railing. The man came away easily, his head jerking sharply from an unseen impact. The back of his skull erupted, spraying the other six gunmen with blood and brain and bits of bone.

“Fool!” Paolini snarled.

Furious, the Mob lieutenant jumped past the corpse of his soldier, the other thugs following his lead. Their speed was now marked with a certain caution that bordered on outright hesitancy.

THREE FLOORS BENEATH THEM Bolan ran on. The time would come to kill Paolini, but for now he had to escape to advance his operation. He had his eyes set on something bigger than a recently deceased Palermo capo with international influence; Bolan would pursue the Sarajevo connection and the possibility of an American traitor.

He barreled down the stairs to the fifth floor, where he abandoned the stairwell in favor of the door leading into the warren of halls that was the east wing.

The building itself had served the Palermo capo with a veneer of legitimacy, housing the offices of his credit union, construction firm, as well as his shipping and air-freight operations. When Bolan had agreed to meet the kingpin there, he knew full well he was walking into a trap.

Halfway down the hall Bolan came to a four-way intersection. He paused, weighing his options—flight or ambush?

Bolan smiled; Paolini was vain. He thought he knew all the tricks, but Paolini was just a pup for all of his violent accomplishments. It was the Executioner who was the master of hounds.

PAOLINI WASN’T the first gunner through the door.

Two of his men, Yeats and Delgaro, entered first. Yeats came in high and on the right, swinging forward with his HS 2000 Croatian pistol and laying down a hailstorm of covering fire. The weapon jumped and kicked in his hand, scattering hot shell casings onto the floor.

Delgaro was the low man, his own pistol poised to provide supporting fire. A thunderous silence echoed along the hallway as their prey neglected to return fire.

“He’s gone rabbit!” Delgaro said.

He pointed down the corridor toward the intersection of hallways.

Yeats’s face split into a smile, his teeth blunt and very white against the darker complexion of his skin. He put a finger to his lips to silence his partner and pointed. Paolini came through the doorway and peered over Yeats’s shoulder. He looked down the hall to where the subordinate was indicating.

“You better be right,” he whispered, his lips close to the man’s ear. “Now slide on up to that corner and take a look, little sister.”

Yeats bristled at Paolini’s mocking tone. The capo’s lieutenant was always testing the crew, establishing his dominance in little ways, pushing them to see if they would snap or if he could provoke emotion. It didn’t matter to him that each man had made his bones with the organization a dozen times over before being promoted to the capo’s bodyguard. Paolini was never satisfied, and with his minutes-old promotion to the top slot, Yeats knew it wasn’t likely to get any better.

Yeats sighed and began to move forward, clearing the corner with Delgaro, using rudimentary but practical tactics. Unlike Paolini, none of the other hitters had formal military training, only street experience. Still, the men had picked up a lot as targets of Italian anti-Mafia government raiders.

Yeats’s head exploded like an overripe melon.

Dellavechia and Montenegro died in the next second. Delgaro screamed in fear and flung himself down to his belly on the blood-slick linoleum floor. Behind him Paolini grabbed up Yeats’s falling corpse and swung it around to use as a shield.

A hitter named Vincenetti had time to turn, dropping low in a combat crouch and swinging around on one knee, his HS 2000 pistol outfitted with a laser sight that burned down the hall, tracking for a target.

Vincenetti saw the black-clad form of the crazy bastard who’d dropped the Palermo capo in his own building. The Italian gunman lined up the sights of his handgun and his finger flexed around the plastic-alloy curve of his Croatian pistol. He had the bastard.

Vincenetti was too slow, and Paolini had another corpse at his feet. An untidy third eye blossomed in Vincenetti’s forehead.

Delgaro was sweating, pressed flat against the floor and panting in fear. Their adversary had gunned down four experienced killers in the blink of an eye.

For the first time since the hunt had begun, Delgaro thought about just running. He no longer cared if the kill was personal. Screw avenging the capo, screw pride and screw honor. He just wanted to live, goddammit.

“Get up!” Paolini snarled at the prostrate man.

Delgaro looked up, and Paolini pushed the bullet-riddled corpse of Yeats away from him. It fell to the linoleum floor with a wet slap like a bag of loose meat. Delgaro realized that as terrified as he was of the apparition that had brought hell to Palermo, he was still frightened of his lieutenant.

He scrambled to his feet, following Paolini down the hall to the elevators, trusting the ex-Foreign legionnaire’s instincts. Delgaro had never seen anything like the ambush before in his life, not ever and not even close. Even the Chechens didn’t kill like that and they were fucking crazy, he knew.

DELGARO TURNED toward Paolini where he had paused at the elevators.

“Those are service elevators. They’ll take him all the way down into the underground parking lot or even the storage basement. He may have gone there,” Paolini explained. He looked around, his HS 2000 pistol up and ready. “Or he could still be on this floor. We should split up.”

“Maybe it would be better if—” Delgado began.

Paolini looked at the other man, cutting him off. “You take the elevator—I’ll check out this level.”

Delgaro swallowed, trying to get hold of himself. He had survived some hairy plays, including pulling weapons for drugs deals with the crazy Chechens. He could be cool. It just wasn’t every day he saw five top gunners go down. It wasn’t every day he faced an old-fashioned cowboy.

“Right,” he forced himself to say and nodded.

Delgaro ejected his old magazine and slapped a fresh one home. He turned toward the elevator, well aware the mystery killer in black could be in there, waiting.

He resisted the urge to tell Paolini to cover him; it was obvious the man would, he hoped. Delgaro was a pro at urban close-quarters battle. His knowledge had been earned right out on the Palermo streets surrounding this very building.

Delgaro slid up next to the elevator doors and pressed his back tightly against the wall. He looked across the lobby and saw Paolini positioned directly opposite the elevator doors, down on one knee with his HS 2000 held steady in both hands.

Keeping his own pistol up, Delgaro used the thumb of his left hand to punch the control button on the wall, opening the elevator doors. They slid open with a hydraulic hiss and he dived onto his shoulder, rolling across his back to land flat on his stomach in front of the opening. His HS 2000 was tensed in his hand, ready to explode in violent action.

Behind him Paolini tensed so suddenly he almost seemed to flinch, coming very close to accidentally triggering his weapon.

The elevator car was empty.

Paolini relaxed as Delgaro straightened.

“All right,” the brand-new capo growled. “Check out the basement below us. I’ll call my guy on the force and get some cops who are part of our thing to respond. I’ll look out up here—we’ve got to keep him in the building. Now go.”

“You get that backup.” Delgaro nodded.

The mafioso stepped into the elevator. His last image before the doors closed was of Paolini’s angular face, tightly smiling and impossible to read. Paolini’s a cobra, Delgaro realized. Just a poisonous reptile.

Delgaro didn’t see the hatch on the elevator ceiling slide open, nor did he hear the slight popping of joints as the Executioner straightened his arm out, his deadly Beretta in a steady hand.

Delgaro moved to one side and pressed himself flat against the side of the elevator, his pistol up and ready in hands slick with sweat. He wasn’t about to be caught like a rabbit out of its hole when those doors slid open.

The elevator bell rang as the car settled. There was the familiar slight hiss of air as the doors unsealed and slid open. The discreet cough of the Beretta was lost in those sounds.

The mobster’s head smacked up against the elevator wall. A ragged hole appeared in his temple, and the other side of his head cracked open and sprayed his brains out. The mafioso gunner slid down to crumple on the floor, a trail of crimson smeared on the wall behind him. The pistol fell out of his slack fingers and bounced off the floor.

Mack Bolan had just done what the Chechens had never been able to do.

4

If pressed, Stephen Caine couldn’t pinpoint when things had begun to fall apart. Not just the gradual erosion of his personal life, but the future of the entire country grew bleaker by the day as his anger and bitterness consumed him.

It was a lot like Chinese water torture, Caine decided. Just this slow drip, drip, drip that built up over time until each drop felt like a ball-peen hammer and sounded like thunder. Every day something else happened, another loss, a fresh insult, and his frustration had become intolerable.

Things started happening and he couldn’t really remember doing them, not fully anyway. He didn’t black out, but he operated on autopilot for so much of the day that decisions he made on the edge of sleep would be fully formed and operational plans by the time the morning came around. On his own, he felt helpless to act. A majority of the people who actually made the effort to vote had chosen wrong, had bought into the bullshit and the spin machine and now everything was spiraling out of control.

Caine set the empty shot glass of bourbon on the bar and eased down a few swallows of his Bud Light to cool the burning in the pit of his stomach. He knew he was a cliché. Strangely, that realization really didn’t make him feel any better.

The bar was working class, which he definitely wasn’t, but slumming made him feel better. His father would have been right at home here, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and downing bourbon like water while watching the flickering images of sports on the TV above the bar. Caine had learned everything he believed about politics by listening to what his father said and then doing the opposite.

A talking head on the TV was explaining why collateral damage wasn’t the same as those killed by deliberate acts of terrorism. The bartender moved over and took Caine’s empty shot glass. She was forty and skinny and tired. She had a plain face and a smoker’s squint. Caine had forgotten her name.

“You want another shot?” she asked.

“Let me ask you something,” Caine said.

She looked down the bar at the handful of other customers to see if they were happy. Once she decided they were fine she turned back toward Caine. Her eyes were green.

“What’s that?”

“You know what the electoral college is for?”

“You think you’re funny? You think I’m stupid ’cause I tend bar so you can ask me these questions then laugh at me?”

Caine blinked in surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting that wasn’t it.

“No,” he answered her. “I don’t think that. I was using the question as a lead-in, more of a rhetorical thing, so I could pontificate. You know, like drunks are supposed to do.”

The bartender looked at Caine, evaluating him. She picked up the empty shot glass and placed it in the steel-lined sink behind the bar.

“Fine,” she said. “The electoral college are the ones who actually cast the votes for the President, right? They look at the popular vote for their state, then cast the votes of their electoral college for the person who won the popular vote.”

“But they don’t have to,” Caine said. He was starting to feel the bourbon now.

This caught the woman by surprise, and she gave him a look like he was trying to be sly.

“No, it’s true.” Caine laughed. “They are free to cast the electoral votes for whomever they wish. They don’t, by law, have to cast them for whoever wins the popular vote.”

“That true?” she asked.

Caine smiled up at her. “Pour me another good one, if you please.” He slid a twenty across the bar, and the bartender smoothly went through her motions. “Supposedly it’s because of demagogues,” he continued.

He slid the hard liquor down his throat with a smooth, practiced motion. He reflected that there was a handgun in his car. He didn’t believe in guns, not anymore, but it was there, in the trunk. There was no way Charisa would ever have let it into the house, but Charisa wasn’t there anymore. He’d lost his wife and gained a gun.

How great was that?

Of course he didn’t have the house anymore, either. The settlement had been very clear; they split the house right down the middle. Didn’t much matter that the slimeball lawyer she’d left him for had a sprawling ranch-style twice the size of their old fixer-upper.

“Why?” the bartender repeated.

“What?” Caine blinked up at her.

“Why demagogues?” She sounded exasperated. “You were talking about the electoral college, remember?”

Caine gave her a dour smile and shrugged. The bartender snorted and dismissed him, moving down the bar. Someone came into the bar from the outside, and Caine realized it had started to rain.

He left a good tip by way of apology and headed out the door. Outside the rain turned everything gray. He couldn’t stop thinking about Charisa, about everything he’d lost.

He would never get her back, he knew. Would never get back his Army buddies who’d fallen in Mogadishu, either. Or his brother, Justin, who’d joined the Marines and never came back from Iraq.

But if Stephen Caine couldn’t get justice, he’d get revenge.

Someone would pay.

5

Vincent Paolini had held everything he’d ever wanted in his hands before he lost it all. He’d worked his way out of his childhood of rural poverty and to the university at Naples on a soccer scholarship. His soccer playing had been good enough to make old men cry and present him with an unending parade of female admirers.

But if blood could tell, then it told in Vincent Paolini’s case.

He was the son of a fifth-generation made man, and he’d learned in the cradle that anyone who pissed off a Paolini had to pay. He’d beaten an American sailor to death in the waterfront bar of Ravenna with a pool cue. Just like that his future as a European professional soccer player had disappeared.

He’d fled, and his friends had covered for him enough to obstruct the investigation. He joined the Spanish foreign legion, the lesser known refuge of rogues and desperate men than the French version, but just as brutal and just as elite.

He’d done three years in the Spanish legion while memories in Italy faded. He’d hunted the Taliban in Afghanistan, served as peacekeeper in Bosnia and in Liberia. He’d been trained as a light infantry commando and had been in dozens of firefights.

During that time his father, now an old man retired to his vineyards and dog breeding, appealed to the Palermo capo. In return for certain services, the capo had promised to use his influence to bury the investigation of the American sailor’s death.

Paolini had killed three people, two men, one a World War II veteran, and a woman to clear his debt. By that time he’d found he had a flair for the Family business and he’d risen to the position of the capo’s right-hand man.

Now, thanks to the mystery hitter, Vincent Paolini was the Palermo capo. Right now the Palermo capo felt something he thought he’d put behind him in the mountains of Afghanistan: fear.

He was afraid he’d gotten cocky, telling himself that despite the smooth ambush the mystery killer had pulled off, Paolini was still the better killer.

Had he been wrong?

He’d just seen five hardened killers gunned down in less than ten minutes. He hadn’t seen carnage on that scale since he’d witnessed the ethnic cleansing in Africa as a legionnaire. The guy was good, Paolini admitted. But, dammit, he was better—he had to believe that.

He had to.

BOLAN’S MUSCLES STRAINED and jumped beneath his skin as he climbed handover-hand up the elevator shaft, clinging to the thick cables like a spider to its web. He’d sent the elevator up a few floors, pressing multiple buttons so that the passenger car would stop at every floor in between. Once the elevator was in motion, Bolan had pried open the shaft doors and begun his journey upward. He hoped the ruse would give him enough time to hunt down and catch an angle on Paolini.

He knew that common sense told him to take his information and run. The Palermo capo’s operation had been thrown into disarray, and Bolan had what he needed to move up the food chain toward his ultimate prize. The payoff was bigger if Stony Man exploited the information he’d obtained than if he killed a single Italian Mob lieutenant.

But he was going to do it anyway.

PAOLINI STOOD IN THE SHADOWS and watched the elevator going up, plotting its progress by the lighted numerals above the doors. The lift had stopped on his floor, and the doors slid open to reveal nothing more than Delgaro’s bloody corpse. The doors slid shut again and the elevator rose. When it finally halted, Paolini had recalled it and, stepping inside, had quickly pushed the button to send the elevator all the way back down before stepping out.

All the way down to the basement.

He snickered. If the mystery gunman was doing what Paolini suspected, then he’d be squashed flatter than a bug under his heel. That is a sign of old age, Paolini thought, predictability. In their business, the business of professional killers, that was a fatal flaw. In the future Paolini intended to make sure he didn’t make the same mistakes.

BOLAN LOOKED UP as he heard the elevator kick into life, and he knew he had mistimed his trick. It was a potentially fatal mistake, but he’d known the risk when he played his gambit and he was prepared to live or die by his instincts.