Collision Course

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.”