Killing Trade

3

Burnett piloted the unmarked Crown Victoria through canyons of glass and steel, flooring it whenever a clear straightaway offered itself in the congested mess that was Manhattan traffic. Several times he came so close to surrounding vehicles that Bolan thought one of the mirrors would be sheared off, but the car remained intact. At each stoplight, pedestrians flowed around the car like a river raging against worn rocks. All around them, the city throbbed with noise and activity, as millions of people went about their business.

Somewhere among those millions were people Bolan sought.

The Executioner’s secure satellite camera-phone began to vibrate in his pocket. “Cooper,” he answered, so whoever was listening at Stony Man Farm would know he was not alone and could not speak completely freely.

“Striker.” Barbara Price’s familiar voice spoke in Bolan’s ear. “How are you holding up? We got an earful from Hal yesterday. He was fit to be tied.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Bolan said. “When you get a chance, explain to him that there was no other way.”

“I will, if he ever gets off the phone with the local, state and federal authorities in New York,” Stony Man’s honey-blond, model-beautiful mission controller said over the scrambled line. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

“I won’t,” Bolan acknowledged. “What have you got?”

“Some of the information you requested—technical specs and some dossiers per this morning’s request.”

“Go ahead,” Bolan told her.

“All right,” she said. “First, the DU rounds. Samples recovered from crime scenes in New York correspond to 9 mm, .45 and 5.56 mm small arms.”

“You spoke with Cowboy?”

“Yes,” Price said, knowing Bolan meant John “Cowboy” Kissinger, Stony Man’s armorer. “Per your request last night, he’s got a care package on its way to you. He also left me some specifications. He says the rounds are, as near as we can tell, depleted uranium cores sandwiched in tungsten shells and tipped in an accelerant that makes them explosive. They’re incredible penetrators but also mildly radioactive and plenty poisonous. Get hit, and if the bullet doesn’t kill you, the toxic shock might. Cowboy tells me the rounds are pyrophoric.”

“Meaning they’ll start fires where they hit?” Bolan asked.

“Very probably, because of the DU, the accelerant or both.”

“What will it take to stop them?” Bolan asked.

“Nothing short of heavy vehicle armor will make a difference,” Price informed him. “And we’re not talking light protection like on an up-armored Humvee or even most armored personnel carriers. In heavier calibers, this would be an antitank round at the very least. It would take a tank to stop the small stuff. Stay out of the way of them, Striker.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bolan said. “What have you pulled up concerning personnel?”

“I’ve got a possible address for Jonathan West, linked to a credit card that was recently used to purchase a variety of computer equipment. It’s on the Upper West Side.”

“Shoot,” Bolan said.

Price gave him the address and the soldier passed it on to Burnett, who adjusted course accordingly. “We’re rolling now. What else have you pulled up?”

“I’ve got photos and bios for Luis Caqueta, head of the Caqueta Cartel. Also for his half brother, Carlos ‘Eye’ Almarone, and one of his lieutenants, known only as ‘Razor’ Ruiz. Their opposite number includes Pierre Taveras, leader of El Cráneo in New York, and two operatives whom we believe are in his inner circle—Julian ‘July’ de la Rocha and Jesus Molina.”

“It’s coming through now,” Bolan confirmed, glancing at the color screen of his satellite phone and noting the data-transmission icons.

“Anything else?” Price asked.

“Just tell Bear and his team to keep working on that NLI data,” Bolan said. “I need to know what and who I’m up against there. I’ll have follow-ups as needed.”

“Will do.”

“I’ll be in touch once we find West, if he’s there,” Bolan said.

“Be careful, Striker.”

“Always,” Bolan said. He closed the connection.

“Your mother?” Burnett said, eyes on the road.

“Something like that,” Bolan replied.

“Yeah.” Burnett almost chuckled. “Assuming that was your boss, or your people or whomever, we can cross-reference what you have with the task force’s files.” When Bolan said nothing, Burnett finally pressed, “Cooper, what is your story? How are you so connected in Washington? Just what are you after?”

“I want the same thing you want,” Bolan told him. “I want those DU rounds off the streets. I want to stop the escalating war between El Cráneo and the Caquetas. And I want to find the men responsible for setting it all in motion.”

Burnett regarded him for a moment before dodging a taxi and cutting off a panel truck to take position in a slightly less congested lane. He tromped the accelerator as soon as he had the shot. The Crown Victoria roared forward.

“Who are you, Cooper?” Burnett asked.

“Just a man,” Bolan told him. “Just one man. Like you.”

“Yeah,” Burnett scoffed, “just an ordinary guy who runs around in a black commando suit under his jacket, hoping nobody will notice his odd fashion sense.”

Bolan said nothing. The formfitting blacksuit he wore beneath his windbreaker was subtle enough that most people wouldn’t notice it, but Burnett wasn’t stupid. They both knew Bolan, whatever relationship he had to the Justice Department, was no ordinary government functionary. Bolan hoped the cop’s respect for authority would keep the lid on his curiosity. It didn’t hurt at all to have a local professional, somebody familiar with the battleground that was New York, to help Bolan with his search. If Burnett became a liability, however, Bolan would have to go it alone.

The two rode in silence for the remainder of the trip. Burnett parked in front of a fire hydrant when they reached their destination. They exited the vehicle and paused to look up at the five-story brownstone.

“What floor?” Burnett asked.

“Fifth,” Bolan told him, patting himself down and checking the Beretta in its holster. “We’ll have to search, once we get up there. Do you carry anything heavy in the trunk of this?” He gestured back to the unmarked car with his thumb.

“I’ve got an 870,” Burnett told him.

Bolan nodded to the car. Burnett took the hint, unlocked the trunk and freed the Remington shotgun from its rack. He checked its loads and then scooped a handful of double-aught buckshot shells from a cardboard box in the trunk, dropping the shells into the left-hand pocket of his suit jacket.

“You expecting trouble?” Burnett asked.

“I always expect trouble,” Bolan told him.

A woman in a frayed housecoat watched them from the steps of the brownstone, where she sat knitting something and drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. Bolan nodded as he passed her on the steps.

“Ma’am,” Burnett said, carrying the shotgun close to his body and tipping an imaginary hat with his free hand.

Inside, the lighting was dim compared to the sunny autumn day outside. Bolan squinted and paused in the small entryway, letting his eyes adjust. Outside, the brownstone looked almost charming. Inside, the wallpaper was peeling and the interior was obviously divided into a warren of studio apartments. Burnett scanned the mailboxes mounted flush with one interior wall. Only a few had names, none on the fifth floor.

“I guess it wouldn’t be that easy,” Burnett said. The shotgun in both fists, he made for the stairs. Bolan followed. The rickety stairs creaked under their weight. As they climbed, Bolan drew the Beretta, his thumb swiping up the slide safety out of long habit. The stairwells smelled of urine. As they passed the third floor, they could hear someone screaming. Bolan paused only momentarily. It sounded like a domestic squabble. Shaking his head, Burnett looked upward and Bolan nodded. The two men finally made the fifth floor without incident.

“Now what?” Burnett asked quietly.

“Try these apartments nearest the stairs,” Bolan told him. “I’ll start at the other end. Stay sharp. If I flush him to you, try not to kill him.”

“Right,” Burnett said dubiously. “Because I was planning on shooting the suspect as soon as I saw him.”

Bolan looked at Burnett hard. “Don’t get yourself killed, either.”

“I’ll do my best,” Burnett said. Bolan marched off. The two men started rapping on doors, both of them staying well clear of the doors themselves. Bolan had been on the receiving end of more than a little gunfire through locked doors before. Burnett either had experienced some of the same, or he was just good at his job. Either way, Bolan was glad not to have to hold his hand; the man was a veteran officer and knew his way around.

Bolan was on his third door, having received no answer and hearing no movement at the first two, when the hollow-core door flew open.

“What the hell is it?” The woman who answered was slim and not unattractive, despite the heavy black eye makeup she wore. Her bottom lip pierced by several silver rings. She wore shorts and a halter top, her bare midriff covered in Celtic tattoos. Bolan, his gun held low behind his right leg, nodded to her.

“Miss,” he said. “I’m looking for someone.”

She smiled up at the Executioner. “What a coincidence,” she said, one hand sliding idly up and down the door frame as she leaned in the doorway and eyed Bolan up and down. “So am I.”

Bolan produced a small photo from the inside pocket of his windbreaker. “I’m looking for this man,” he said, letting her get a good look at the photo of Jonathan West. “He might not look like this. He may have changed his hair color, or grown a beard or done something else to disguise himself.”

The woman frowned through a lip full of metal. “You a cop?”

“No,” Bolan said truthfully. “It’s very important—”

Several shots rang out two doors down, as bullets peppered the thin wood of the apartment door on which Burnett had been knocking.

Burnett jacked the pump on his Remington 870, pressing himself against the wall beside the door. “Police!” he bellowed into the corridor. “This is a lawful entry!”

The door practically disintegrated under a withering full-auto blast, peppering the plaster of the opposite wall. Bolan tackled the woman before him, throwing her down through the doorway onto the scarred hardwood floor of her apartment. He stayed on top of her until the shooting stopped. Burnett’s shotgun sounded like a cannon in the narrow corridor outside as the lawman fired back.

Bolan checked the woman beneath him, who looked at him with a mixture of fear and excitement. The Executioner nodded to the large windows at the end of the small studio, beyond which he could see a fire escape.

“Does that go all the way across the front of the building?” Bolan asked sharply.

She thought about it for a second. “Yes,” she said, as Bolan got to his feet, his Beretta in a low two-hand grip. “It connects all the apartments on this side.”

“Stay low,” Bolan told her. “Don’t go out until the shooting stops. And call 9-1-1!” He was moving before she could say more, throwing open the window and stepping outside. Wind tugged at his hair as he crept along the rusted metal fire escape. From the apartment two doors down, more gunfire erupted. It was the unmistakable chatter of an Uzi, punctuated by more of Burnett’s shotgun blasts.

Wincing as his combat boots rang on the metal fire escape, Bolan slowed and dropped to his knees as he neared the window he wanted. Then he threw himself on his back, using his legs to shove himself forward as he stared skyward, concealing himself between the window ledge and the floor of the fire escape. Below him, New York City continued to bustle, temporarily oblivious to the slaughterhouse within the unassuming fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side.

There was another lull in the automatic gunfire. Bolan popped up, his pistol held compressed against his chest in both hands. He fired twice, punching spidery holes in the window glass, then lowered his shoulder and dived through. He came up, still targeting the shadow he’d seen through the glass—a single, relatively small man with a submachine gun in his fists. The gunman was shoving another stick magazine into the grip of the weapon.

“West!” Burnett called from the hallway. “Stop!” The small man charged the door. Bolan dived aside as a shotgun blast from the doorway peppered the rear wall of the apartment. Then Burnett was down, tackled as the Uzi fell to the floor. The two rolled into the corridor. Bolan closed on the doorway, his Beretta leading, unable to get a clear shot.

“Cooper!” Burnett called, wrestling for his shotgun.

As Bolan approached he could see blood soaking the khaki shirt the small man wore. Burnett’s blast hadn’t been a complete miss. The cop used his size advantage to muscle his way to his feet, shaking the smaller man back and forth as the pair fought each with both hands on the Remington.

Bolan aimed the Beretta two-handed, trying and failing to acquire his target. He lowered the weapon, then raised it again as first Burnett, then the small man moved into his line of fire. “Down!” he shouted.

Burnett took the cue and dropped onto his rear, falling back and slapping his arms. The small man, who had been pushing against Burnett’s resistance, flew forward with the shotgun in his hands. Bolan fired once, low, catching the gunman in the thigh. The man grunted and stumbled over Burnett down the corridor, out of Bolan’s view. The shotgun fell from his fingers.

“Stop!” Burnett called. From the floor he clawed for the gun holstered on his hip. Bolan reached the doorway as the wounded gunman rammed the door of the woman’s apartment two doors down. It opened and the woman screamed.

“Shit,” Burnett cursed, pushing to his feet with a .40-caliber Glock in his fists.

“Back! Get back!” the gunman shouted. He reappeared in the corridor, one arm around the young woman’s neck. He held a folding knife to her face, the serrated S-curved blade just barely below her right eye. His face was ashen. A pool of blood was forming where he stood.

Bolan advanced, the Beretta high in his line of sight. Burnett backed him as the two men crept forward.

“I said stop, damn your eyes,” the small man said. He spoke in a clipped, British accent. “Come any closer and, I swear, I’ll carve this bird’s eye out.”

The woman’s eyes widened at that, but to her credit she remained still. Bolan’s gaze found hers and her expression hardened with resolve.

“You’re going into shock,” the Executioner said. “You won’t be on your feet for long.”

“Get back, I said!” the wounded man shrieked. “I’m walking out of here, you lot, and little missy here is coming with me. If I start to go, I’ll cut her throat as I do. Now, drop the hardware!”

Bolan nodded, almost imperceptibly.

The woman jerked her head to the side, away from the knife. It was just enough. Bolan’s shot drilled through the man’s eye. The body collapsed, a puppet with its strings cut, the folding knife still clutched in one dead hand.

The woman screamed.

“Easy,” Burnett said, holstering his Glock. He went to her and put one arm around her shoulders as she started shaking. “Easy,” he said again. “It’s okay. We got him. We got him.”

Bolan stepped around them and leaned over the corpse. There was a lot of gore, but most of the face was still visible. He took his phone from the inside pocket of his windbreaker and checked the photo viewer, examining the small image on the color screen.

Burnett, still calming the distraught woman, caught Bolan’s frown. “Is it him?” he asked.

“No,” Bolan said, steadying himself on one knee. He activated his phone’s built-in digital camera, snapping a couple of shots of the dead man. “I’ll transmit these—”

“To where?” Burnett queried.

“I’ll send these,” Bolan said evenly, “for analysis.” He nodded to the woman. “Get her back to her apartment and call in before we’re buried in units responding to the gunfire. I’m going to check West’s apartment.”

Burnett nodded and ushered the crying woman past the body and through her doorway. Bolan backtracked, unclipping the SureFire combat light from his pocket. With the Beretta and the light together in a Harries hold, he swept the cluttered and dim studio, wary for West or someone else hiding in ambush.

The studio was a wreck. Apart from the bullet holes just added to it, and the litter of empty pizza boxes, soda cans and other bags of garbage, what little furnishings it held had been torn apart. The sofa cushions had been cut open, as had the mattress sitting without a box spring in one corner. A set of bookshelves had been knocked over and many of the books torn up as whoever had tossed the place—probably the dead man in the hallway outside—searched for hiding places. A rolling computer desk bearing a state-of-the-art desktop unit was relatively unscathed, but the computer itself had been gutted.

Bolan checked near the desk and found the hard drive on the floor. It was badly damaged. No computer technician himself, Bolan was not sure if its data was retrievable or not, but he placed the drive in a pouch of his blacksuit nonetheless.

Behind the desk, on the floor in the far corner of the studio, Bolan found Jonathan West.

The image in his phone’s data file confirmed it. It was Jonathan West and he was quite dead. The smell hit the Executioner as he examined the body, finding nothing in the man’s pockets and discovering a small-caliber wound behind the dead man’s left ear. Judging from the condition of the corpse, West had been murdered at least a few days previously.

The Executioner frowned again. The gunman he and Burnett had intercepted hadn’t been here to kill West, at least not that day. That meant he’d had some other purpose in mind. Bolan’s eyes fell on the gutted computer again. He would have the hard drive couriered to a mail drop for the Farm, where Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman and his team could take a crack at it. Stony Man’s wheelchair-bound computer expert and his assistants had worked similar miracles in the past. If anyone could manage it, they could. It might be nothing, of course. But it might just be the case that the dead man in the corridor had come to destroy the computer, which meant the information on it might be valuable.

Bolan was no cop and he had no interest in playing detective. He did, however, need to find the source of the DU ammunition. Without West, there was no telling where it might be, where it was coming from, or how much more of it could be waiting to hit the streets and turn them red. If West could not tell the Executioner his secrets, perhaps West’s computer could.

“Cooper!” Burnett’s voice was agitated as he called from the doorway to West’s apartment. He held a wireless phone to his ear. “We may have a break.”

Bolan holstered his Beretta. “What have you got?”

“The department called. It’s Caqueta. The cartel wants to deal.”

4

Burnett parked the Crown Victoria illegally, checking his Glock unnecessarily as he and Bolan exited the vehicle. As they crossed the street, a horse-drawn carriage clopped past, the tourists inside staring about happily. Both men paused for a hurtling yellow cab before taking the asphalt-covered path into Central Park.

“I hate leaving the shotgun in the car,” Burnett said as they walked.

Bolan said nothing. He had his messenger bag slung over his shoulder across his body, his windbreaker covering the Beretta and his spare magazine pouches. Behind his left hip he wore a SOG Pentagon dagger in a custom Kydex Sheath inside his waistband. The guardless, double-edged, serrated dagger had a five-inch blade. There’d been no need for the weapon before now, but he’d worn it since arriving in New York and recovering the Beretta and his other personal items from the courier drop at the airport.

“That was good shooting back there,” Burnett offered.

“You didn’t do too badly yourself,” Bolan said.

“Yeah, whatever.” He looked back at the car as they left it behind. “Cooper, I’m bringing you in on this because I don’t figure I can keep you out of it if I want to.”

Bolan looked at him as joggers, power walkers and various people on bicycles passed the two men. He was uncomfortably aware of the number of innocents who might be caught in the line of fire. “If the Caquetas are part of the street war in New York, the one West or someone else has been using as a market for the DU ammo, he’s a legitimate target. He’s also a potential source of information.”