Collision Course Page 2

  Suddenly the door to the office swung open in a swift arc and a living shadow rushed into the room. There was a whirl of dark fabric as a black overcoat came open and the masked specter's arms snaked out. The gloved hands were filled with deadly technology.

  One hand swept downward and leveled a sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R on the huddled form of the cowering blonde. The left hand swung out from the intruder's coat and tracked straight onto the fat jowls and flabby chest of Frankie Bonanno.

  Behind his mask Mack Bolan smiled.

  There was a small mechanical click as Bolan's finger depressed the trigger on the stun gun and twin electrode darts fired out and hammered into Frankie Bonanno. There was a crackle as 2,000,000 volts sizzled into the big mobster. Immediately the sickly sweet stench of charred flesh filled the cramped little room.

  Bonanno's shriek of pain morphed into a choking gurgle as he began to spasm and jerk in his seat, pants still down around his thick, hairy ankles. Blue bolts of electricity arced from the fillings in his teeth in an uncanny effect that produced a mouthful of fire.

  Bolan hit the juice again and pushed another charge into the mobster.

  The fat man looked up and saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth. Then there was a pause, two heartbeats long, as Bonanno slumped helpless in his chair.

  Bolan turned his balaclava-covered face toward the cowering woman. "Get out," he ordered.

  The woman looked up at the Executioner in stunned disbelief. Mob hitters were not known for compassion, and she clearly suspected some trick.

  "I said get out!" Bolan snapped.

  This time she did not hesitate. The woman scrambled to her feet and scurried to the door.

  From the chair Frankie Bonanno lifted his head, still confused by the events unfolding around him.

  "Who are —?" he began.

  "Shut up," Bolan snapped. He pressed the cold muzzle of his Beretta against the oiled expanse of Bonanno's forehead. "If you so much as twitch I'll splatter your brains across the wall."

  Frankie Bonanno froze. The mobster was deeply afraid. When the masked gunman had burst through the door, his first thought had been the Feds. But one man did not make up a SWAT team, federal or otherwise. A lone man meant a freelancer, and if that was true then Frankie wondered why he was still alive.

  Bonanno watched as the figure in black pulled a pistol from behind his back. The handgun was identical to the weapon already sitting on the desk, a factory-new Croatian HS 2000 pistol. The man dropped it with a clatter that shattered the overflowing ashtray and spilled cigarette butts across the desk and onto the floor.

  The man dropped something smaller onto the desk between the two HS 2000 pistols. It was the size of a quarter and when Bonanno saw it lying there, an involuntary groan escaped him. His eyes showed sullen fear as they moved from the microprocessor chip on the desk back up to the intruder looming above him.

  "Three months." Bolan said, voice harsh. "Three months ago a six-man team took down the supply dock of Las-Tech in Jersey. They got away with a shipment of chips just like that one. Chips that can run the supercomputers needed to control the centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, say in Iran. Microprocessors sophisticated enough to turn scud missiles into guided munitions."

  "I... I..." Bonanno's mouth worked uselessly as he tried to force his brain to come up with some lie that might save his life.

  "Then suddenly a capo in Palermo has those same microchips on the open market and they go to an arms dealer in Bosnia, then multiple loads of Croatian pistols start flowing back through Palermo out of Sarajevo and into Jersey. And look, you happen to have one."

  "Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Croatia," Bonanno muttered.

  Bolan stepped forward and cracked the butt of his Beretta across the mobster's face. His nose exploded and sprayed blood. His hand flew out and struck the open bottle of Jack Daniel's whiskey sitting on the desk and knocked it over. Amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle and began to spread across the desk.

  "You think I need geography lessons from you?" Bolan asked, his voice flat. "Next time you get funny I put a bullet in your kneecap."

  "I don't know anything..."

  Frankie Bonanno's denial was cut short by the cough of the silenced Beretta in Bolan's hand. The slug slammed into the armrest of the mobster's chair, shattering wood with a sharp crack and driving splinters into the man's beefy arm.

  Bonanno howled in agony.

  Bolan stepped in close and leveled his pistol against Bonanno's broken, mashed nose.

  "The name. Who facilitated the transfer through the Palermo capo and into Sarajevo?" Bolan's voice was soft.

  Bonanno rolled his eyes toward the shiny, factory-new HS 2000 sitting on the desk just a few feet away, he knew it would do him no good. He inhaled breath through his pain and began to talk.

  "Some guy," Bonanno said. "Got a Polack name or something. Taterczynski. Peter Taterczynski."

  "How is he connected? Where does he work from?" Bolan fired his questions hard and fast, keeping the other man off balance.

  "He's international, that's all I know. He used the Palermo capo because he wants a screen between himself and primarie's when it comes to operating in the States. The capo told my crew what to take, on spec."

  "The microprocessors."

  Bonanno nodded. "The microprocessors. Like I can move tech on my own? I deal in auto parts and cigarettes."

  "So straight trade. Armed heist for tech you can't move in exchange for pistols you can."

  "Yeah, basically."

  "All set up by this player out of Sarajevo, Taterczynski?"

  "Yeah, the Polack. But everything went through the Palermo capo's guy. A lieutenant, really scary dude name Paolini."

  Bolan looked over at the desk where Bonanno's cell phone sat in the middle of the guns and the mess.

  "You talk to this 'really scary' dude named Paolini on that phone?"

  Bonanno nodded, his eyes hooded. They shifted past Bolan and suddenly he jerked upward toward the desk just as the hinges on the door behind them squeaked as it was thrown open.

  Bolan caught a flash of motion as he shifted and twisted hard and felt the jerking tug of a knife blade catch in the tough polymer fibers of his Kevlar vest.

  The soldier grunted in surprise as he reacted. It was the woman, back for some mad reason of her own and trying to save her tormentor in the vain hope of future favors. The knife in her hand was a big bladed kitchen utensil with a serrated edge, and she clearly aimed to kill Bolan with it.

  The Executioner grabbed the overextended woman by the tangled hair at the back of her head and flung her hard to the ground. Frankie Bonanno was in motion, rising out of his seat and grasping for the butt of his loaded HS 2000 with a sweat-soaked hand. Bolan stepped forward and lashed out with one big, strong leg.

  The heel of his low-cut boot ground against the mobster's wrist with an audible crunch on impact. The woman struggled to her feet, shrieking in rage, and threw herself at the black-clad intruder. Bolan drove his elbow backward into her soft belly and tossed her against the office wall. She slid down to the floor, her eyes rolling backward into her head. Bolan snapped his head back around as Bonanno reached for the HS 2000 pistol on his desk.

  Bolan pivoted at the waist and fired three single shots into the fat man, pinning him to the seat, the Croatian pistol held uselessly in the man's uninjured hand. Frankie convulsed as his lungs deflated and the Croatian handgun discharged into his desk. Bonanno's eyes fluttered, and then a trickle of bright blood bubbled over his quivering lip and dribbled onto his chin.

  Purposefully Bolan crossed to the desk and began to jerk open drawers. Casually he swept the mess on the desktop onto the floor. When the police came, they could make the link between the stolen tech and the smuggled pistols. Bolan would be several thousand miles ahead of any local investigation by the time they finished putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

  He pocketed the dead man's cell phone, a virtual treasure trove
of information, Bolan knew. Inside the desk he found a locked metal box. He swept up the container and smashed it against the edge of the desk, busting the cheap lock. Inside he found several grams of cocaine and two grand in worn twenties and fifties.

  He stuffed the money into a pocket to add to his war chest. He turned and made for the office door, stepping over the sprawled form of the unconscious woman. He doubted if anyone outside would have heard the pistol shot, or that they would call the police if they had. Despite that it was sloppy fieldwork to tempt luck and Mack Bolan had not survived this long by being sloppy.

  Bolan jerked the balaclava from his head as he stepped out the back door of the bar and into the alley. He moved forward, folding his black overcoat around him like a protective cloak of shadows. He navigated the filthy alley at a brisk pace and turned out onto a narrow street two blocks from the tavern.

  He used his pocket remote to disengage the alarm on the black Prelude and it chirped once in response. He opened the door and slid into the vehicle. Behind him the ocean mist swirled and crept along the littered ground as the Executioner sped away into the night.

  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 o
ther 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.