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  Unless he managed to survive the coming fight and bring Gianni Magolino’s head back to Salerno. In that case, Lanza believed, he just might have it all.

  * * *

  BOLAN MOVED THROUGH the trees like a ghost. He was on full alert for traps, security devices or patrolling guards. After he’d covered thirty yards, he was convinced no one had seen him scale the outer wall and was puzzled and pleased by Magolino’s failure to install some manner of high-tech defenses. Even guard dogs, a traditional approach in Italy, would have enhanced security, but Bolan didn’t try to second-guess his adversary’s failing. He would simply take advantage of it while he could.

  At forty yards, he met one of the ’Ndrangheta sentries. Young and bored by the routine task, the so-called soldier had stopped to relieve himself against the trunk of a parasol pine and missed death’s approach from behind. Bolan pumped a single, silent 9 mm round into his cerebellum, canceling all motor function in a heartbeat, and the dead man folded like an empty suit of clothes, his privates artlessly displayed.

  After depositing his first kill in a nearby clump of shrubbery, Bolan claimed the little walkie-talkie from the corpse’s belt, turned down its volume to a whisper and moved on.

  If Magolino had all his sentries walking solo beats, it could be good or bad. The up side was that Bolan probably shouldn’t expect to meet a squad of soldiers tromping through the woods around the manor house. The down side: he couldn’t predict where he might find the next lookout, or even guess how many were deployed around the grounds.

  Say Magolino had reached out to—what—a quarter of his family’s troops on short notice? Of that hundred or so, how many could have reached Tropea within ninety minutes’ time? Thirty to forty seemed a likely estimate, but Bolan couldn’t bank on it. He’d come prepared to face an army, and if it came down to that, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Or, he hoped, the last.

  A blitz was one thing, but his thoughts came back to Mariana now, as he drew closer to the big house on the hill. A floor plan would have come in handy, but he hadn’t had the time or resources to comb through local records, snoop around with architects or try some other angle of attack. That meant going in blind, once the house had been breached, and using logic to determine where a prisoner was likely to be locked away.

  Her captor might want privacy, depending on the punishment he had in mind, and the noise could be a factor. If his brain cells were connected, Magolino must have thought about the clean-up chores that followed executions and interrogations. Given his profession and the frequency with which he slaughtered enemies, the mansion might include a special chamber just for wet work.

  In the basement, Bolan thought, where you’d expect to find a dungeon.

  It was food for thought but useless to him if he never got inside the place.

  One hundred yards without another sentry in his path, and he was halfway to the house. Already, he could pick out distant voices, members of the home team on their rounds, although he couldn’t understand what they were saying. No alarms had sounded yet, and that was all that mattered right now.

  Step by cautious step, he closed in on the viper’s nest.

  * * *

  MARIANA HEARD VOICES and footsteps on concrete, outside her small basement cell. Two men, perhaps more, and she recognized one of the voices. Gianni was coming to see her, and that made her tremble with fear.

  She fought to conceal it, but lying trussed up on the bed offered no hope of striking a dignified pose. She was helpless, defenseless, restricted to speaking. And what would she say? Begging for mercy was pointless and humiliating. Cursing Gianni might enrage him, prodding him to kill her quickly, but survival instincts made her hesitant to rush the end.

  Shut up and listen, she decided. If Gianni wanted information, maybe she could buy some time by stringing out her answers.

  Time for what? Again, she came up blank.

  The door opened and Magolino entered, muttered to someone who remained outside and closed the door. He studied Mariana from a distance, face impassive, before asking, “Are you comfortable?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No,” he said. “But I don’t want you losing feeling in your arms and legs. It spoils the entertainment, later on.”

  “Untie me then,” she answered.

  “I think not.” Magolino dragged the room’s one chair over to sit beside her bed, well out of spitting range. “Your nose looks painful,” he observed. “I may have the doctor straighten it.”

  “No, thank you.”

  Magolino laughed at that. “We don’t consult the patients in our small hospice,” he said.

  Hospice, not hospital, she noted. A facility for those who are dying.

  “Perhaps he’ll geld you,” Mariana said.

  Gianni’s face darkened, but he did not lash out at her this time. “A little of the same old fire,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “I don’t know what it is you hope to get from me, Gianni.”

  “Information, possibly. If not...at least revenge.”

  “For what? The only thing I did was—”

  “Hold me up to ridicule!” he thundered, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, fists clenched. “Make me a laughingstock! Endanger everything I’ve worked for all these years!”

  “One little woman? I had no idea you were so fragile.”

  He longed to strike her—she felt the fury simmering inside him, saw the vein pulsing at his left temple. Somehow, he managed to restrain himself and eased back in his chair.

  “I loved you once,” he said. “Or thought I did. Clearly, it was a serious mistake.”

  “You used me,” she corrected him. “We used each other.”

  “So, we’re just a pair of whores, eh?” Magolino asked her through clenched teeth.

  “I may be a whore,” Mariana said. “I don’t know what you are.”

  That made him smile a predatory grin that chilled her to the bone.

  “Perhaps not, Mariana. But you’re going to find out.” He checked his bulky, foolishly expensive watch. “Within the hour, I’ll return. Your education shall begin.”

  She held the tears back until Magolino had departed and the door was locked behind him, then the wretched sobbing started. Mariana wept for her brother, her parents, herself. She wept for the life she’d wasted and what might have been.

  Above all else, she wept for lack of hope.

  Chapter 13

  Tropea

  The second guard was better, deviating from the tiresome circuit of his beat to lie in ambush, watching for intruders. If he hadn’t sneezed, he might have glimpsed Mack Bolan soon enough to save himself.

  The muffled sneeze gave Bolan all the warning he required to stop in midstride, then retreat, retrace his steps and come up on the lookout’s blind side. He closed the gap until he stood behind the gunman, who was crouched in turn behind a clump of hemlock, with a semiautomatic shotgun on the ground beside him.

  Bolan could have rushed him and used the switchblade, but why grapple with the shooter, risking injury, when he could settle it from ten feet out? The Spectre M4 coughed again, spraying the hemlock with a gout of blood and gray matter. The dead ’ndranghetisto lurched into the poison shrubs and hung there, suspended, as his life drained through the shattered ruin of his face.

  Bolan relieved the lookout of his weapon—a Benelli Ultra Light with a sawed-off barrel—checked its load and slipped its sling over his left shoulder. The 28-gauge weapon lived up to its name, weighing in at five pounds to qualify as the world’s lightest semiauto shotgun, but it packed a punch, and he reckoned it couldn’t hurt to have a scattergun for backup once the stealth phase of his probe had passed.

  Another hundred yards or so would bring him to the tree line, where the open ground began. Bolan no
longer heard Magolino’s soldiers conversing ahead of him. They might’ve gone back inside or moved to the far side of the mansion. Maybe they were on patrol or setting up a cookout. Bolan neither knew nor cared as long as he could find a clear path to his goal.

  He crouched behind a screen of juniper and Swiss pine, studying the mansion with its roof of barrel tiles, white stucco walls and long wings extending to the east and west. The swimming pool was to his left, an empty tennis court off to his right. Farther beyond the pool, but out of sight from his position, stood a seven-car garage. He knew there was no helipad, but he supposed the vast south lawn would serve as well without unduly ruffling anyone who might be lounging on the covered flagstone patio.

  It was a lot of ground to cover, about fifty yards between the tree line and that patio, where tinted glass doors stared across the lawn like huge dark eyes. Whether they opened onto an empty or occupied parlor, dining room or rec room, Bolan had no way of knowing. For all he knew, a dozen shooters might be watching his approach, but the alternative was circling around in search of other access to the home’s interior, and that might take him to the portico in front.

  Better to take his chances from the rear and meet whatever challenge came his way with firepower in hand. As soon as Bolan stepped out of the trees and into sunlight, he would be fair game for any mobster on the property, but he’d played that game before and walked away the winner.

  This time?

  Let’s find out, he thought and started toward the house.

  Via Eugenio di Riso, Catanzaro

  “CAPTAIN! YOU SURPRISED ME,” the informer said.

  “I meant to, Arrigo,” Captain Basile replied.

  Arrigo Pecorella peered out of his small apartment’s doorway, moist eyes scanning up and down the street. “Are you alone, sir?”

  “No GOA today,” Basile said, referring to the GDF’s Gruppo Operativo Antidroga, the Counter-narcotics Group, which would worry a meth-head like Pecorella the most. “At least,” he added, “not yet.”

  “What can I do for you? You know I normally deal with Lieutenant Albanesi.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Basile said.

  He had missed Albanesi at headquarters, had missed him at home and now was reduced to grilling the man’s top confidential informant. Basile had no reason to believe Albanesi would inform such vermin of his travel plans, but Pecorella might be able to impart some other useful information.

  “May I come in?” Basile asked.

  “Well...”

  Basile drew his baton, flicked it open and cracked Pecorella across the bridge of his hooked nose, slamming him backward and onto the floor. Stepping across the bleating junkie, Basile shut the door, then swung his baton again across one of Pecorella’s raised elbows.

  “For the love of God, Captain! What have I done?”

  “You’ve done nothing, Arrigo, except to exist as a damned parasite. I am not here to talk about you.”

  “What then?”

  Basile had decided the one place Albanesi might attempt to hide from him was with the ’Ndrangheta. That meant running off to find Gianni Magolino or his underboss, Aldo Adamo. As it happened, presently neither one of them could be found in Catanzaro.

  “You know Gianni Magolino?” he asked Pecorella.

  “I know of him. We don’t move in the same circles, Captain.”

  “Different levels of the sewer. I understand. But you must have some knowledge of his whereabouts.”

  “I don’t—”

  The black baton lashed out again and made Pecorella squeal. Part of Basile’s mind rebelled at the brutality; another part exulted in it. “What was that?”

  “He might have left the city,” Pecorella whimpered. “All the trouble recently.”

  “I know that much already,” Basile said. “What I want to know is where he goes.”

  “A man that rich—wherever he desires.” The man saw Basile raising the baton again and quickly added, “but he likes Tropea best! He has another home there. Very nice, I hear, although he has yet to invite me.”

  “In Tropea?”

  “Well, outside the town a little way. I saw it once, just driving by. It’s on a hilltop. Very elegant. You can’t miss it.”

  “I hope you’re correct,” Basile said, “for your own sake.”

  He left then, closing and holstering the baton before he reached his waiting car. He thought about requesting backup, possibly a helicopter and an entry team from the GDF’s Antiterrorism and Rapid Response unit, but he didn’t know who he could trust at headquarters to organize the raid.

  No, he decided. It was better if he went alone. At least assess the situation first before he asked for help.

  Would Pecorella squeal to his superiors? Basile doubted it, but if that happened, he was ready to explain himself and bear responsibility. By that time, if his supervisor found him, he would either have his man in custody, with a confession, or he would be dead.

  And did it matter which?

  Pulling away from Pecorella’s drab apartment, Basile took a hasty inventory of his gear. He had his pistol and baton, the tired suit on his back and, in the Fiat Bravo’s trunk, a Benelli M4 Tactical shotgun with a full magazine and two spare boxes of buckshot.

  It sounded like a lot of firepower, but it might not get Basile very far against Lieutenant Albanesi’s well-armed, lowlife friends.

  Tropea

  LIEUTENANT CARLO ALBANESI—make that ex-lieutenant, now that he was on the run—had phoned Aldo Adamo from the outskirts of Tropea to declare he needed help. The ’Ndrangheta underboss had seemed less than sympathetic, but he’d finally given into Albanesi’s begging and agreed that he could proceed to Magolino’s hilltop hideaway.

  Now, as he pulled up to the entrance, Albanesi wondered if he’d made a grave mistake.

  If he’d angered Magolino or Adamo, even if they simply found him useless now that he’d fled Catanzaro and the GDF, would they simply dispose of him rather than offer him sanctuary? Once that thought took hold, he almost turned around and drove away, but the guards were opening tall wrought-iron gates and waving him through, and Albanesi worried they might kill him if he tried to cut and run.

  Dejected and sick with worry that he might have trapped himself, he drove with hands clenched on the steering wheel along a curving driveway that delivered him to Magolino’s broad front porch. Adamo was already waiting for him, flanked by two stout ’ndranghetisti who resembled Russian weightlifters: no necks to speak of, massive shoulders, barrel torsos, legs like tree stumps straining at the seams of shiny suits.

  Albanesi wondered if bullets would stop them and decided it made no difference.

  He’d walked into the lion’s den. If they were hungry, he was dead.

  He switched his engine off and stepped out of the car, leaving his key in the ignition. What did he care if they stole his vehicle after they’d murdered him? It was of less importance than the sudden twitching Albanesi felt between his meaty shoulder blades, as if a blade or bullet were about to pierce him.

  “Your timing’s not the best, Lieutenant,” Adamo said. “But since you’re here, come on inside.”

  “I did my best,” Albanesi said as they crossed the threshold into rural splendor. “I can’t help it if—”

  “Your captain killed four of my men,” Adamo said, cutting him off. “He got away. If that’s your best, I’d hate to see your worst.”

  “I set the meeting, as instructed,” Albanesi answered, cheeks warming even as a chill ran down his spine. “What else was I supposed to do?”

  “An interesting question. Possibly observe and make sure all went as planned?”

  “He would have seen me. That Basile—”

  “Or, he might have smelled your fear. You’d find it easier to hide if you lost weight.”


  “I was not told to do the job myself. If that had been the case—”

  “I’m not the one you need to sell,” Adamo interrupted him once more. “You’ll see him later. He’s...engaged with other business this afternoon. You’ll wait.”

  “Of course. Captain Basile—”

  “Can he trace you here?” Adamo asked. “And is he fool enough to follow you if so?”

  “He may suspect I’d come to you for help. Whether that brings him to Tropea...who can say?”

  “You really don’t know much, do you?” Adamo mocked him.

  He had no good answer to that question. Albanesi let it pass as they arrived outside a hand-carved wooden door. “You’ll wait in here,” Adamo said. “The library. You read?”

  Embarrassed, angry, Albanesi simply bobbed his head in the affirmative.

  “Maybe you’ll find something to interest you. Your dinner will be brought to you if il padrino is still occupied. This room has a lavatory. Do not leave the library for any reason whatsoever. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Adamo said. “You may have nothing to be grateful for.”

  And he was gone, closing the door behind him and leaving Albanesi in a room where shelves of books rose to the ceiling on all sides, so tall that ladders were required to reach the higher ones.

  “I read,” the former lieutenant muttered to himself.

  He wondered if he’d already seen the writing on the wall.

  * * *

  BOLAN WAS FOCUSED on his dash between the tree line and the manor house. Once he’d crossed that open ground without drawing attention to himself, he couldn’t linger on the patio, exposed to any passerby or sentry traipsing through the woods.

  He had to get inside.

  He tried the sliding door, and it immediately opened to his touch. Why bother locking it when they were on a walled estate with guards around? The logic worked for him, but Bolan thought Gianni Magolino might regret his little lapses as the hour wore on.