The bolt cutters had rubber grips, so there was no need for insulated gloves as Bolan spread the jaws to clasp the thick trunk line. One flex of his arms and shoulders, one brief shower of sparks, and twenty feet beyond the junction box, the building’s air conditioner shut down.
So far, so good.
Wasting no time, he crossed to stand over the air-conditioning unit, opened it and slit the silver wrapping on a large duct set into the roof. When that was open, Bolan took his smoke grenades in turn, removed their pins and dropped each of the four smoke bombs into the vent he had created with his blade. The unit wasn’t running to propel the smoke through lower ducts and vents, but each grenade contained enough HC to spread fumes through the topmost floor, at least.
And that was all that Bolan needed.
He approached the rooftop access door—no padlock on the outside there—and tried it. Locked, of course. With numbers running in his head, he stepped back from the door and raised his stubby SMG, firing a muffled 3-round burst into the steel door’s dead-bolt lock. Another moment and he was inside, descending steep stairs dimly illuminated by pale ceiling-mounted emergency lights.
Halfway there, Bolan removed a lightweight balaclava from his pocket, pulled it on and made a quick adjustment to permit clear, unobstructed vision. He had borrowed the idea from Tommy Wolff’s assassins, caught on video, and saw no reason why it shouldn’t work for him, if he was seen by anyone he wasn’t forced to kill.
Just plant the bug, he thought, but knew it might not be that simple. Nothing ever was, once battle had been joined.
Voices below made Bolan hesitate, but they were all retreating from the service stairs. No one would think of heading for the roof when they lost power. Down and out would be the drill, assisted by floor plans posted in offices and corridors, reminding people where to go in the event of an emergency.
He reached the bottom, peered around the corner and immediately saw the fire alarm wall unit to his left, within arm’s reach. Unseen, he grasped the unit’s pull-down handle, yanked it sharply, and was instantly rewarded with a clamor echoing throughout the building.
Sixty seconds, give or take, cleared out the fourth-floor hallway, even as the smoke from his grenades began to filter down through ceiling vents. Downrange, the last two visible employees reached a stairwell leading to the street below, pushed through its heavy door and disappeared.
Noboru Machii had a corner office at the far end of the hall, to Bolan’s right. Turning in that direction, Bolan double-timed to reach his destination, submachine gun gripped in one hand, while the other delved in a pocket and extracted the infinity device.
The clock was running now. Bolan could hear it in his head, louder than the insistent fire alarm.
The kyodai’s office, reeking of smoke, was vacant when Bolan got there, and a white haze was seeping from the ceiling vents. He left the door to the reception area wide open, as he’d found it, and moved on to penetrate Machii’s private sanctuary.
Empty.
Bolan went directly to the spacious desk, set down the bug he’d taken from his pocket and retrieved a small screwdriver. Within ten long seconds he’d removed the base plate from the telephone, surveyed the wiring and began the installation.
When he’d cut the trunk line on the building’s roof, it had no impact on phone service to the floors below. Landlines were powered by another system altogether, usable in blackouts, and he hadn’t touched their power conduit when he was turning off the lights at Sunrise Enterprises. He scanned the phone’s guts, finally wedging the infinity transmitter in beside the set’s digital answering machine. A simple clip job finished it, with no need to strip any wires and risk short-circuits sometime in the future. A few keystrokes on Bolan’s cell phone, and the bug went live, the arming signal cut before the desk set had a chance to ring.
He was finished, except for putting back the base plate. He had three screws set, was working on the fourth, when he heard voices coming down the corridor in his direction, speaking Japanese.
Unhappy voices, which was natural enough, and now he had to scoot.
Bolan tightened the fourth screw down as far as it would go and pocketed his screwdriver. He replaced the phone as he had found it, nothing out of place as he surveyed the desktop, making sure no traces of himself remained.
Now, out.
Machii’s office had a private washroom, and the washroom had its own connecting door to yet another room beyond, labeled as Storage on the floor plan he had memorized. That room, in turn, had its own exit to the corridor from which he’d entered the office. If his luck held, he could slip around behind whomever was approaching in a heated rush, and slip back to the roof while they were fuming in the office.
And if not, at least he might come out behind them. Give them a surprise.
Meeting opposition was a risk on any soft probe, always kept in mind, no matter how much preparation went into avoiding contact. With his work done, the transmitter live and waiting to broadcast whatever words were spoken in Machii’s office from now on, it wasn’t absolutely critical for Bolan to escape unseen.
But it was vital for him to escape alive.
The washroom door was shut when Bolan reached it, and he closed it tight behind him once he was inside. No dawdling in the john to eavesdrop on the Yakuza returning to the office. He was out the other door in seconds flat, and found that Storage meant a bedroom where Machii could sleep or party privately, with someone who had caught his fancy. There was no one in the boudoir, smoky now and ripe with HC’s tangy odor, and he crossed directly to the other door. Bolan paused there, ear pressed against the panel, listening.
And heard nothing.
Behind him, in the Machii’s private office, two men conversed, their words incomprehensible to Bolan. Taking full advantage of their evident preoccupation, he stepped out into the corridor—and found two young men gaping at him in surprise.
“Hakujin!” one declared.
“Supai!” the other snapped, as both reached for their holstered pistols.
Bolan didn’t need to speak the language to know that they had pegged him as an intruder. He had them beaten, going in. The MP-5 K sneezed two muted 3-round bursts from less than twenty feet, stitching the young men’s chests with 9 mm Parabellum hollow-point rounds, mangling their hearts and lungs, stopping those hearts before the guards knew they were dead. They fell together, but he didn’t stick around to see it, sprinting for the service staircase that would take him to the roof.
It was a judgment call. To reach the street without retracing his original approach meant running back the full length of the corridor and rushing down eight flights of stairs—two zigzag flights per floor—among Sunrise employees exiting in answer to the fire alarm. If he got past them all, that route would put him on Atlantic Avenue, busy with traffic and pedestrians. If someone brought him under fire out there, it could become a massacre.
Better to do the unexpected thing, descend via the fire escape and exit through the alley. Cornered there, if he ran out of luck, at least Bolan could fight without much fear of injuring civilians.
He was on the roof and sprinting for the fire escape when someone shouted from behind him. Next, a pistol cracked, and Bolan heard the whisper of the bullet as it flew past his cheek.
One shooter was behind him when he turned, and Bolan saw another peeking from the rooftop access doorway, clearly not as bold as the front-runner. Bolan sent the shooter spinning with a 3-round Parabellum burst, his white shirt spouting scarlet, then sent three more rounds to make the doorway peeper duck back out of sight.
Eighteen rounds remained in the MP-5 K’s magazine, and Bolan didn’t plan on using any more of them topside than he could help.
He still had no idea what might be waiting for him in the alley below.
He glanced over the parapet, saw no shooters prepared to pick him off as he descended, and swung out onto the fire escape. Taking the metal ladder rung by rung was slow. Instead, he gripped the side r
ails with his hands and braced the insteps of his shoes against them, sliding down until he struck the asphalt fifty feet below and landed in a crouch.
Above him, gunshots echoed. One round struck a commercial garbage bin to his right and spanged into the heaped-up garbage it contained. Another slapped into the pavement, closer, a reminder that he had no time to waste.
Raising the MP-5 K’s muzzle, Bolan chipped the concrete parapet above him with a parting burst and saw a face fly back, out of frame. He couldn’t rate that as a hit and didn’t care. His rented wheels, a Honda Civic, waited for him on Atlantic Avenue, no more than half a block away.
He ran.
The rooftop shooters would need time to reach the alley. As for soldiers on the inside, he’d already dealt with two and given any more something to think about. Assuming they had walkie-talkies for communicating, someone from the lobby could be on his case by now and waiting for him when he reached the sidewalk, but it was a chance he’d have to take.
The alley was a trap now; staying where he was meant death.
A brief pause at the alley’s mouth, tucking the MP-5 K out of sight beneath his jacket, hand still on its pistol grip through a slit pocket on his right, and Bolan cleared the sidewalk, glancing right and left as if it was a normal day, nothing to be concerned about. When no one called him out or gunned him down, he stepped off from the curb, jaywalking as if he did it every day, angling through traffic that, with any luck, would slow his pursuers.
Twenty feet from the Honda, Bolan palmed the keyless entry fob and released the driver’s door lock, instantly rewarded by a flash of taillights and a perky blipping sound. A moment later, he was at the wheel and gunning it, letting the taxi on his tail brake sharply, driver leaning on his horn and offering a one-finger salute, as Bolan pulled away from Sunrise Enterprises.
He could listen to the office bug right now, in theory, but he had more pressing matters on his mind—survival being foremost on the list—and Bolan figured that Noboru Machii wouldn’t spend the next few minutes in his office, strategizing with his men. There would be firefighters to deal with, and police, the problem of eliminating corpses in a hurry.
Something else he’d thought about, while planning his incursion: when Machii did begin to talk, the odds were good that he’d be speaking Japanese. While Bolan’s talents were diverse, he’d never had the opportunity to learn more than a smattering of Japanese. And that would have been a problem, if the superteam at Stony Man Farm hadn’t devised a program for his smartphone, offering real-time translated readouts from a list of major languages. The readout wasn’t perfect—something on the order of closed captioning on normal television—but he’d get the gist of what Machii said and go from there.
First, though, he had to get away. Find somewhere it was safe to sit and eavesdrop once his adversaries chilled a bit and had a chance to think.
Bolan checked his rearview, frowning as he saw a car behind him, weaving in and out of traffic, closing fast. Three shapes were inside the vehicle, maybe four, and while they might be office workers in a rush to get to happy hour, Bolan wasn’t taking anything for granted.
What he needed was a place to take the shooters, if they were shooters, and dispose of them without civilians getting in the way. The Ventnor City wetlands were behind him, too much trouble to reverse directions, and O’Donnell Memorial Park, five blocks ahead, would probably have too much foot traffic for him to risk a firefight.
What was left?
He thought of Chelsea Harbor, on Atlantic City’s other waterfront, three-quarters of a mile inland from the Atlantic and the boardwalk. There would be civilians, naturally—workmen, people going in and out of restaurants, whatever—but it sounded better than the obvious alternatives.
He reached South Dover Avenue, turned left against the lights and traffic, hoping there were no cops at the intersection to observe him. If the chase car wasn’t chasing him, he’d lose it there.
The matter was decided when the vehicle turned in Bolan’s rearview, clipped a motorcyclist and came charging after him.
CHAPTER THREE
Sunrise Enterprises
Noboru Machii watched his soldiers zipping bodies into heavy plastic bags and cursed them for their awkwardness.
Red-faced with exertion and humiliation, they worked faster, well aware that the police and firefighters would soon be pouring through the doors downstairs, searching the premises for any trace of fire. In fact, Machii understood, the smoke had been a ruse, but he could not tell that to the authorities. It raised too many questions that he did not wish to answer—most particularly with two corpses in the place and one up on the roof.
What would he do with those?
There was a garbage chute on each floor of the building he had rented as his local headquarters. Rubbish went down the chute, into a basement garbage bin, where he had another pair of soldiers waiting to receive their lifeless comrades. From the bins, they would be consigned to basement lockers while the search went on—no reason anyone should think the lockers harbored flammable materials—then from lockers into car trunks and away, when it was clear for transport.
While he waited for the law, Machii mulled the news he’d heard from one of his survivors on the roof. Someone—their prowler, who had killed three of his men—had cut the building’s trunk line, killing power, and had cut his way into the building’s main air-conditioning vent, inserting some kind of device to generate smoke. From there, he’d blasted through the rooftop access door, set off the fire alarm and gone about his bloody work.
But what was that?
Two dead men in the corridor outside his office, with his bedroom door wide open, let the crime boss piece together what had happened. Halfway to the street, descending on the service stairs, he had smelled something fishy, as the gaijin liked to say, and he’d begun the climb back to the top floor, taking soldiers with him. Standing in his empty, smoky office, he’d felt slightly foolish for a moment—until all hell had broken loose.
Now he was certain someone had been in his office, standing at his desk perhaps, or riffling through his files. A glance had shown no sign of any locks picked on the filing cabinets, but Machii wouldn’t know until he had more time and privacy.
And, naturally, he would have to tell his oyabun about the raid.
But not just yet.
Before he broke bad news to Tokyo, Machii hoped to mitigate the damage. When his soldiers caught the man responsible, Machii would have answers. If they took the man alive, he would inevitably spill his motives and the names of his employers. If they had to kill him…well, in spite of the old saying, sometimes dead men did tell tales.
Both corpses were inside their bags now, and his men were hoisting them, scuttling like peasants toward the garbage chute. Above, the soldier cut down on the rooftop had already slithered to the basement in his own rubber cocoon and should be safe inside a locker now. As for the bloodstains on the runner outside his office…
“Kenji!”
“Yes, sir!” his soldier answered.
“We require an explanation for these stains that will deceive the police. Do you understand?”
Young Kenji nodded, but his blank expression made it clear he understood nothing.
“You came to check on me,” Machii said, coaching him. “As you approached the office, you collided with another member of the staff. Sadly, your nose was broken by the impact and you bled on to the carpet.”
“Sir?”
Before the puzzled frown had time to clear, Machii slammed a fist into the soldier’s nose, felt cartilage give way and caught him as he staggered, doubling Kenji over at the waist and holding him in place while bright blood drained from his nose, soaking into the older stains.
“Good man. That should be adequate. You serve the family with honor. Now, remember what we talked about.”
“Yes, sir!”
It would be an hour, likely more, before Machii finished with the investigators, then more time to get an electr
ician on the job, restoring power to the office block. By then, he hoped to have the prowler in his hands and know exactly what in hell was happening.
* * *
South Dover Avenue
THE FIRST CROSS street in Bolan’s way was Ventnor Avenue, with traffic lights and people crossing at the corner. Checking out the chase car in his rearview one more time—it was a black sedan, of course, the model indeterminate—he slowed enough to judge the two-way traffic pattern up ahead, and let a couple of pedestrians get closer to the curbs on either side, then floored his gas pedal and blasted through the intersection. He was mindful of stores to the right, then houses, as he braced himself for sudden impact if he had miscalculated.
More horns blared at him, tires squealed, but nothing slammed into the Civic as he cleared Ventnor and shot across to North Dover. No deviation in the street’s beeline toward water, but a slightly altered name for the convenience of police or postal workers. Bolan flicked another glance behind him, through the rearview, and was disappointed when the chase car made it through the intersection as he had, all in one piece.
What were the odds that someone passing by on Ventnor, having been surprised or frightened, would take time to phone the cops? Bolan pegged it at fifty-fifty, if he and the Yakuza pursuing him had pissed off somebody enough to make it worth the time and effort.
The response time, if they did call?
Bolan had done his homework, memorized the basic layout of Atlantic City and the landmarks that were meaningful to him. Police department headquarters was on Atlantic Avenue, at Marshall Street, three-quarters of a mile to the northeast. There would be cruisers closer to the waterfront, of course, but any calls would still be routed through the cop shop, and back to the street via dispatchers.
Say five minutes until the word came through on some patrolman’s radio or one of those computer terminals that could be found in most prowl cars today. From there, the hypothetical responding officers would need another five minutes, at least, to reach the scene of the disturbance, now two hundred feet behind Bolan as he approached the next stoplights, at Sussex Avenue.
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