Collision Course

“But they don’t have to,” Caine said. He was starting to feel the bourbon now.

This caught the woman by surprise, and she gave him a look like he was trying to be sly.

“No, it’s true.” Caine laughed. “They are free to cast the electoral votes for whomever they wish. They don’t, by law, have to cast them for whoever wins the popular vote.”

“That true?” she asked.

Caine smiled up at her. “Pour me another good one, if you please.” He slid a twenty across the bar, and the bartender smoothly went through her motions. “Supposedly it’s because of demagogues,” he continued.

He slid the hard liquor down his throat with a smooth, practiced motion. He reflected that there was a handgun in his car. He didn’t believe in guns, not anymore, but it was there, in the trunk. There was no way Charisa would ever have let it into the house, but Charisa wasn’t there anymore. He’d lost his wife and gained a gun.

How great was that?

Of course he didn’t have the house anymore, either. The settlement had been very clear; they split the house right down the middle. Didn’t much matter that the slimeball lawyer she’d left him for had a sprawling ranch-style twice the size of their old fixer-upper.

“Why?” the bartender repeated.

“What?” Caine blinked up at her.

“Why demagogues?” She sounded exasperated. “You were talking about the electoral college, remember?”

Caine gave her a dour smile and shrugged. The bartender snorted and dismissed him, moving down the bar. Someone came into the bar from the outside, and Caine realized it had started to rain.

He left a good tip by way of apology and headed out the door. Outside the rain turned everything gray. He couldn’t stop thinking about Charisa, about everything he’d lost.

He would never get her back, he knew. Would never get back his Army buddies who’d fallen in Mogadishu, either. Or his brother, Justin, who’d joined the Marines and never came back from Iraq.

But if Stephen Caine couldn’t get justice, he’d get revenge.

Someone would pay.

5

Vincent Paolini had held everything he’d ever wanted in his hands before he lost it all. He’d worked his way out of his childhood of rural poverty and to the university at Naples on a soccer scholarship. His soccer playing had been good enough to make old men cry and present him with an unending parade of female admirers.

But if blood could tell, then it told in Vincent Paolini’s case.

He was the son of a fifth-generation made man, and he’d learned in the cradle that anyone who pissed off a Paolini had to pay. He’d beaten an American sailor to death in the waterfront bar of Ravenna with a pool cue. Just like that his future as a European professional soccer player had disappeared.

He’d fled, and his friends had covered for him enough to obstruct the investigation. He joined the Spanish foreign legion, the lesser known refuge of rogues and desperate men than the French version, but just as brutal and just as elite.

He’d done three years in the Spanish legion while memories in Italy faded. He’d hunted the Taliban in Afghanistan, served as peacekeeper in Bosnia and in Liberia. He’d been trained as a light infantry commando and had been in dozens of firefights.

During that time his father, now an old man retired to his vineyards and dog breeding, appealed to the Palermo capo. In return for certain services, the capo had promised to use his influence to bury the investigation of the American sailor’s death.

Paolini had killed three people, two men, one a World War II veteran, and a woman to clear his debt. By that time he’d found he had a flair for the Family business and he’d risen to the position of the capo’s right-hand man.

Now, thanks to the mystery hitter, Vincent Paolini was the Palermo capo. Right now the Palermo capo felt something he thought he’d put behind him in the mountains of Afghanistan: fear.

He was afraid he’d gotten cocky, telling himself that despite the smooth ambush the mystery killer had pulled off, Paolini was still the better killer.

Had he been wrong?

He’d just seen five hardened killers gunned down in less than ten minutes. He hadn’t seen carnage on that scale since he’d witnessed the ethnic cleansing in Africa as a legionnaire. The guy was good, Paolini admitted. But, dammit, he was better—he had to believe that.

He had to.

BOLAN’S MUSCLES STRAINED and jumped beneath his skin as he climbed handover-hand up the elevator shaft, clinging to the thick cables like a spider to its web. He’d sent the elevator up a few floors, pressing multiple buttons so that the passenger car would stop at every floor in between. Once the elevator was in motion, Bolan had pried open the shaft doors and begun his journey upward. He hoped the ruse would give him enough time to hunt down and catch an angle on Paolini.

He knew that common sense told him to take his information and run. The Palermo capo’s operation had been thrown into disarray, and Bolan had what he needed to move up the food chain toward his ultimate prize. The payoff was bigger if Stony Man exploited the information he’d obtained than if he killed a single Italian Mob lieutenant.

But he was going to do it anyway.

PAOLINI STOOD IN THE SHADOWS and watched the elevator going up, plotting its progress by the lighted numerals above the doors. The lift had stopped on his floor, and the doors slid open to reveal nothing more than Delgaro’s bloody corpse. The doors slid shut again and the elevator rose. When it finally halted, Paolini had recalled it and, stepping inside, had quickly pushed the button to send the elevator all the way back down before stepping out.

All the way down to the basement.

He snickered. If the mystery gunman was doing what Paolini suspected, then he’d be squashed flatter than a bug under his heel. That is a sign of old age, Paolini thought, predictability. In their business, the business of professional killers, that was a fatal flaw. In the future Paolini intended to make sure he didn’t make the same mistakes.

BOLAN LOOKED UP as he heard the elevator kick into life, and he knew he had mistimed his trick. It was a potentially fatal mistake, but he’d known the risk when he played his gambit and he was prepared to live or die by his instincts.

He scrambled up the service ladder set into the shaft. Above him the bottom of the elevator smoothly powered down toward him. He was in a race, climbing against the clock, and now time had run out. He’d tried to play Paolini for a fool and had been off by a good thirty seconds.

That could prove to be a lifetime.

Realizing he would have to climb faster if he wanted to make it, Bolan stopped to replace his Beretta in his shoulder holster. His right hand slid the muzzle of the weapon into the sling as his left wrapped around the rung just above his head.

The metal rung was covered in some cold, slimy fluid. Perhaps it was maintenance oil or some other service fluid; in the dim light Bolan couldn’t tell. His hand slid off the slick metal, surprising him, and he overbalanced. His hands flung outward and one foot slipped off the rung below him. As he scratched for purchase his pistol fell away.

Darkness enveloped him as he fell, bouncing off the walls of the elevator shaft. His hands reached out to grasp the rungs of the service ladder. His sudden stop pushed him roughly up against the sheer metal wall again, forcing air from his lungs. His head slammed forward and his lip was split against the steel ladder.

The agony was a sharp, sudden shock and his tenuous grip weakened and then slipped. He fell backward down the shaft for a second time. His leg was jerked cruelly in its socket and he came to a brutally abrupt halt, his ankle twisted in one of the rungs.

Hot spears of pain lanced through his leg and muscles and tendons shrieked in protest at the tension.

Above him the elevator raced down.

Bolan reached up with one strong hand to pull himself back up. His face was sticky with blood from his nose, and his lips were bloody and swollen as he fought to regain control of his breath.

Bolan fought himself up into a vertical position. Standing on the ladder, favoring one leg, he stretched out a blood-smeared hand and pried his fingers into the rubber buffer curtain set between the floor-level doors.

The muscles along his back and shoulders bunched under the strain. With a final desperate exertion, the top half of the fingernail on his middle finger was ripped away, but the doors came open under his grip.

He looked up. The bottom of the elevator was in plain sight, rushing down toward his upturned face. Bolan tensed then sprang off the ladder rung, reaching out for the opening. He scrambled through the opening just as the elevator filled the space directly above him.

Adrenaline shot through his body, and Bolan found the desperate strength he needed to live. He pulled himself through the opening just as the elevator dropped past him. He had made it.

PAOLINI STRUCK the Executioner like a runaway locomotive, driving him back into the open shaft. Their momentum was greater than the elevator’s and they hit the roof of the carrier hard. They fell like squabbling cats, punching and striking at each other as they dropped.