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  So far, so good. But Bolan couldn’t leap into his mission as he was.

  For starters, he was naked—or, at least, he felt that way, without a single weapon close at hand. Airline security made packing weapons on commercial flights unfeasible, and Bolan couldn’t very well comply with standing rules for shipping lethal hardware in the baggage hold. Most of the gear that he relied on was legally off-limits to civilians in the States and the United Kingdom, so he’d traveled light, unarmed except for hands, feet and vast experience in taking life, up close and personal.

  But he needed guns, perhaps explosives—and some information, too.

  Thankfully, Bolan knew exactly where to find them in the heart of Glasgow, day or night.

  IAN WATT WAS a respected businessman. Although he was a product of Gorbals—Glasgow’s toughest slum, located on the south bank of the River Clyde—he’d risen far above his humble roots, like others he could name.

  Gorbals owed its name to the Lowland Scots word for lepers, locally housed at Saint Ninian’s Hospital in the fourteenth century and granted begging rights on nearby streets. Alumni of the district included some of Glasgow’s most notorious characters, good and bad.

  He had grown up on the streets, in essence, with the likes of Tam McGraw and Frank McPhee, both gone to their rewards now with a host of others who had battled through the ice cream wars and other skirmishes for turf across the years. Watt chose a slightly different path, fencing hot items through a pawn shop that had prospered and expanded into two, then four, then seven citywide. Most of his merchandise was perfectly legitimate.

  Most, but not all.

  Old friends and new acquaintances still had selected items that required a broker, and they needed other items to defend themselves from competition or the police. Firearms regulation in the British Isles had gone from bad to worse after the Dunblane massacre of 1996, in which sixteen children were killed in kindergarten class by a shooter who then killed himself. But life went on, and hardmen needed shooters all the same.

  In Glasgow, many of them bought their wares from Ian Watt.

  He had to watch out for the undercover filth, of course, but honestly, how hard was that? A few bob handed over, here and there, bought Watt a warning when the dogs were prowling in his neighborhood, and risks were minimized by dealing mainly with a trusted clientele.

  Mainly.

  Needless to say, there were exceptions to the rule, but all of them came recommended from another customer who’d dealt with Watt in other situations, with no comebacks. Like the fellow from America he was expecting for a nooner on this very day, referred to Watt by someone who knew someone else, and so it went.

  And who was Watt, a thriving businessman, to turn away a foreign visitor in need?

  Watt didn’t care what use was ultimately made of any items he procured and sold on to the street. None of the weapons could be traced to him, either by registration numbers or the fancy stuff you saw on TV crime dramas. Watt never touched a piece or cartridge with his bare hands, damn sure never left his DNA on any item from his arsenal, and wouldn’t take a fall for anything unless the coppers somehow found his basement arsenal.

  Which wasn’t very bloody likely, he thought.

  At half-past eleven on the stroke, Watt put the Closed sign on his door and sent his pretty helper, Flora, off to lunch. She always took her time about it, likely making out with her boyfriend from the pizzeria down the street, but what of it? He’d hired her as eye candy, primarily, and got his money’s worth when punters were distracted by her cleavage while he talked them down on loans, or jacked them up on retail prices. Best of all, she never questioned being sent out on some pointless errand or released ahead of closing time, as long as she was paid up for the day.

  A perfect front, he thought, in all respects.

  He smiled, amused as always by his own wry wit.

  Watt didn’t know exactly what his new customer had in mind, as far as shooters were concerned, but his inventory was extensive. Something for everyone, down in the basement—and twenty years to think about it at HMP Barlinnie, if he was caught with that kind of hardware on hand.

  Unless, of course, he struck a deal to shift the burden somewhere else.

  A dicey proposition, that was, if you thought about his customers. All men of honor, in their own eyes, meaning that they punished traitors harshly but might sell out their mothers if there was any profit in it.

  Most of Glasgow’s current so-called gangsters couldn’t hold a candle to the old breed. They were tough enough, all right, but you could never tell when one of them might crack under interrogation. Once they got to thinking about prison and the things they’d have to do or do without inside, a lot of them would spill and put their best mates on remand.

  Watt was a different sort, and anyone who mattered knew it, going in. It was a point of honor, and he knew what could become of those who snitched, even when they were certain that they’d gotten away with it. Watt, himself, hoped to die at ninety-something in a trollop’s arms, rather than screaming on a rack somewhere.

  When he had seen the back of Flora, Watt threw down a double shot of Royal Brackla whisky and felt the heat spread through his vitals, relaxing him from the inside out. First-timers always put his nerves on edge a little, but the whisky mellowed him like nothing else.

  All ready to do this, he thought, and watched the big hand creep around toward twelve.

  THE SHOP ON Dalhousie Street, in Garnethill, was closed when Bolan parked a half-block south of it, but he had been forewarned of that. A knock on the glass door produced a slim man in his fifties, salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a craggy face that had absorbed its share of blows, and then some. His suit was Savile Row, though Bolan didn’t know enough about the London fashion scene to peg a tailor.

  The proprietor beamed a smile at Bolan through plate glass, then unlocked and opened the door. “Mr. Cooper, you would be?” he inquired.

  Bolan nodded and said, “Mr. Watt?”

  “In the flesh, sir. Come in, won’t you please?”

  Bolan scanned the merchandise while Watt secured the door behind him, checking out the street. He stocked a bit of everything, it seemed, from jewelry and musical instruments to antique silverware and china. Clearly, there was money to be made from someone else’s disappointment.

  “Just in from America, you’d be,” Watt said as he returned, no longer asking questions. “And looking for some tools of quality.”

  “Assuming that the price is right,” Bolan replied.

  “I take it that you understand our situation here. We haven’t got a constitutional amendment giving us the right to carry guns, and all. The scrutiny is fierce.”

  “And yet.”

  “And yet. Of course. Just so you realize that heat increases costs for merchants and their customers.”

  “The money’s not a problem,” Bolan said.

  “In that case,” Watt replied, “please follow me. The merchandise you’re looking for is kept downstairs.”

  He trailed Watt through a minioffice to a storage space in back, then down a flight of stairs concealed behind a steel door labeled Private—No Admittance. Watt turned on a bank of overhead fluorescent lights as they started their descent, bleaching the basement arsenal’s beige paint and striking glints from well-oiled pieces of his secret stock.

  The climate-controlled room measured right around three hundred square feet, running twenty feet long east to west, and fifteen wide, north to south. Within that space, Watt had collected an impressive cache of automatic weapons, shotguns, pistols and accessories for every killing need.

  There was a .460 Weatherby Magnum for would-be elephant poachers, and a .50-caliber Barrett M-82 semiautomatic antimaterial rifle for hunters who wanted to bag an armored personnel carrier.

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sp; Speaking of big guns, Watt also stocked a 40 mm Milkor MGL 6-shot 40 mm grenade launcher, a Czech SAG-30 semiauto launcher for smaller 30 mm grenades, and a South African Vektor Y3 AGL that required a tripod or vehicle mount for its full-auto spray of 280 grenades per minute.

  “Much call for that in Glasgow?” Bolan asked his guide.

  “If someone asks,” Watt said, “I aim to please.”

  The remainder of his inventory was more convention, including various assault rifles, submachine guns and sidearms manufactured in Europe. Price tags were nowhere to be seen.

  Bolan’s first choice was a 5.56 mm Steyr AUG, the modern classic manufactured in Austria and carried by soldiers of twenty-odd nations, and by agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Its compact bullpup design, factory-standard Swarovski Optik 1.5x telescopic sight, and see-through plastic magazines all made for a convenient, reliable combat rifle.

  For backup and variety, Bolan next chose a Spectre M-4 submachine gun, manufactured at the SITES factory in Turin, Italy. Feeding 9 mm Parabellum cartridges from a four-column casket magazine, the Spectre carried fifty rounds to the average SMG’s thirty or thirty-five. Its double-action trigger mechanism allowed safe carriage while cocked, and its muzzle was threaded for a suppressor, which Bolan added to his shopping cart.

  Last up, for guns, he chose another Italian: the same selective-fire Beretta 93-R pistol that he favored in the States. It was no longer in production, but the piece Watt had acquired was brand-new in appearance, and a quick look proved it fully functional. In essence, with its muzzle brake, folding foregrip, and 20-round magazines, the 93-R gave Bolan a second SMG to play with. He picked a fast-draw shoulder rig to carry it, with pouches for spare magazines, and started shopping for grenades.

  His choice there was the standard British L109 fragmentation grenade, a variant of the original Swiss HG 85 that had replaced the older L2A2 in the early 1990s. Each grenade weighed one pound and had a timed fuse, with a Mat Black Safety Clip similar to those found on American M-67 frag grenades.

  Bolan bought an even dozen, just in case, added a KA-BAR fighting knife on impulse and decided he was done.

  With ammunition, extra magazines and gun bags to conceal his purchases, the total was a flat eight thousand pounds. Say thirteen grand, in round numbers.

  “I have a counteroffer for you,” Bolan said.

  “Not quite the way it works, friend,” Watt replied.

  “You haven’t heard it, yet.”

  “Go on, then. Make me laugh.”

  Before Watt reached his pocket pistol, Bolan had the KA-BAR’s blade against his throat.

  “A name and address for your life,” he said.

  IT DIDN’T QUITE work out that way. Watt thought about it for a minute, then gave up the information Bolan needed, but it went against the grain. He could’ve simply spent the afternoon in handcuffs, in his soundproofed arsenal, but something in the Gorbals sense of “honor” made him try his hand against the Executioner, and Bolan left the KA-BAR stuck between the man’s ribs to dam the blood flow, while he took another to replace it from the dealer’s stash.

  He left the shop with two gym bags, locked the door and dropped Watt’s keys into a curbside rubbish can. Someone would come to look for Watt, sooner or later, and eventually they would find him with his basement cache of arms.

  Or not.

  It made no difference to Bolan, as he loaded the rental car with tools for the continuation of his endless war and left the neighborhood of Garnethill behind him, heading west along New City Road to Bearsden.

  A slightly richer neighborhood, that was, and Bolan thought about the name while he was driving. He had no idea if there had ever been a bear in the vicinity, or if its den was anywhere nearby, but he was looking for a predator among the stylish homes that lined attractive streets, all redolent with history.

  The target’s name was Frankie Boyle. He’d dominated Glasgow’s rackets for the past decade or so, his interests covering the normal range of gambling, prostitution, drugs, extortion, theft and loan-sharking. Through Ian Watt and several others like him, Boyle also controlled a fair piece of illicit trafficking in arms for Glasgow and environs, which, as Bolan understood it, covered most of Central Scotland east of Edinburgh.

  It was the weapons trade that sent Bolan in search of Boyle this afternoon. Or, more specifically, some of the people who were purchasing his wares. A group of homegrown terrorists whose war, though dormant for a time, had flared to life again in recent weeks with grim results.

  Bolan would happily have turned the tap to halt on illegal weapons sales worldwide, but that would never happen, realistically. One major reason was that most of the world’s industrial nations—the United States included—constantly sold guns and bombs to other countries who were ill-equipped to make their own. Official sales were perfectly legitimate, but once a load of hardware was delivered, the security surrounding it depended on a cast of human beings who were fallible at best, malicious and corrupt at worst.

  Add in the thefts from military arsenals and legal shipments, and you had a world armed to the teeth, with an insatiable craving for more guns, more ammunition, more grenades and rocket launchers.

  Arms trafficking was the world’s second-largest source of criminal revenue, after drugs, and Bolan was a realist. He couldn’t disarm a square block in New York or Los Angeles, much less a city the size of Glasgow. Cleaning up a state or country? It wasn’t realistic.

  But he could stop one specific trafficker, and thereby slow the flood of killing hardware for a day or two, until the top man was replaced and pipelines were reopened. Bolan could take out selected buyers and make sure that they never pulled another trigger.

  If his targets didn’t kill him first.

  Boyle’s street was nice, its houses big and old enough to rate respect. Not mansions, in the sense you might expect for Texas oil tycoons or dot-com billionaires in Silicone Valley, but cruising past them in a humble rented car, you knew the wealth was there.

  No walled estates or obvious security devices here. Bolan drove slowly, as if looking for an address—which he was, in fact—and saw no lookouts posted on the street near number 82. No curtains flickered as he passed; why would they? he thought. Boyle would take the usual precautions: sweep the place for bugs, use prepaid cell phones for his business calls and speak in code, stash any serious incriminating items well away from his home, and pay off whichever cops would take your money and agree to drop a dime before a raid went down. Or fudge an address on a warrant, so the search was bad and anything collected would be inadmissible in court.

  Friends taking care of friends.

  Greed was another problem Bolan couldn’t fix, and he had sworn a private vow to keep his gunsights well away from law-enforcement officers. He’d helped to put a few in prison, but if push came down to shove, there was a line he’d rather not cross.

  So Glasgow’s Finest, even those who weren’t so very fine, had nothing to fear from Bolan. Racketeers like Frankie Boyle, however, were another story altogether.

  If he’d known what was about to happen to him, to his little urban empire, Boyle would likely have been quaking in his boots. Or, maybe he was too far gone for that, a stoned psycho who never gave a second thought to fear.

  Suits me, Bolan thought. Crazies died like anybody else.

  He scoped the house and then drove on. Still daylight.

  And the Executioner had time to kill.

  Chapter 2

  Glasgow: 3:35 a.m.

  Frankie Boyle wasn’t drunk, but he was working on it. He’d been up and out since early afternoon, showing himself and being seen at the familiar haunts, checking accounts at different operations on a random basis, so the boys he’d left in charge would never know whose books might be examined next.

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p; This night, he had surprised Joe Murray at Night Moves, one of the five strip clubs Boyle owned through paper fronts in Glasgow. One of Murray’s girls—Boyle’s girls, in fact—had beefed that Murray helped himself to tips beyond the standard fifty-fifty split Boyle had imposed on dancers in his joints.

  That was a minor problem, which could have been resolved with just a quiet word, but Murray had been rolling certain customers, as well. Just two or three so far, but Boyle knew it would be bad for business if the word got out and customers stayed away. Worse yet, if it brought the police sniffing after Boyle.

  And adding insult to the injury, Murray hadn’t shared the loot he’d stolen with his boss.

  Major mistake in Boyle’s book.

  Boyle had strolled into Night Moves at a quarter past eleven, with a couple of his boys, and put the smile on everyone in sight. He bought a round for the house and accepted the grateful applause in return, then took Murray to the soundproof office for a private chat. Murray reckoned everything was fine until he saw the ball-peen hammer, then he started bawling like a baby, blubbering and pleading innocence while Boyle got down to work.

  Knuckles and walnuts sounded the same when they were crushed.

  Boyle had considered smashing Murray’s feet as well, but changed his mind and took the greedy bastard’s shoes instead, along with keys to his brand-new Mercedes-Benz, and tossed him out the back.

  Adding, “Oh, by the way, you’re fecking fired,” before he slammed the door.

  The dancer who had tipped him off received a healthy tip and was invited to see Boyle at home after she got off work. When she’d arrived, a little after two o’clock, he’d thanked her properly. And twice more in the time since then, leaving her limp and snoring softly on his king-size bed.

  No worries there, Boyle thought. He had no wife to scold him, and no kids to barge in without knocking first. After he’d satisfied his thirst, he might go back and thank the lady one more time. It would be fine if she woke up; if not, so be it.