Alexey Brusilov ran his blood-sucking operation from a place called Brighten Loans. Whether the spelling was intentional, a pun or just a clumsy error was anybody’s guess. The sign hung on a pawnshop, squeezed between a candy store and lawyer’s office, both closed for the night, though Brighten Loans was going strong. Its windows, screened by metal grates, displayed fur coats and china, saxophones and jewelry—in fact, a bit of everything.
Bolan breezed in as if he owned the joint. He had a name in mind, from Hal Brognola’s dossier on Brusilov, and dropped it to a slouching clerk behind the register, saying, “I need to see Nikita.”
“Who’s Nikita?” the sloucher asked in a heavy Slavic accent.
“Never mind,” Bolan said with a smile, already turning to retreat. “Tell him you wouldn’t let me pay the twenty large I owe him. Maybe you can make it up.”
“Hang on a second.”
Straightening a little, but not much, the Russian disappeared behind a curtain and returned a moment later, following a fat man with a hairstyle that resembled Larry’s, from The Three Stooges.
“How come I don’t ’member loanin’ you no twenty large?” Nikita asked.
“You’re slipping?” Bolan offered.
“Nobody slips twenty thousand worth.”
“You’re right,” the Executioner replied, showing the pair of them his Glock. “I haven’t borrowed any money from you—yet.”
The sloucher reached for something underneath his dangling shirttail, growling like a pit bull as he made the move. Bolan put one round through his forehead at a range of fifteen feet, dropping him, which had a surprise effect on fat Nikita’s bladder.
“Jesus Christ! You...you...you...”
“Tell me when you think of something,” Bolan said, cutting him off. “Meanwhile, let’s see the safe.”
“You’re crazy, man. This place has got protection.”
Bolan stepped behind the counter and around the corpse. “I see that.”
“No, I mean the outfit. They’ll be on you like killer bees.”
“You want to call for backup, be my guest,” Bolan replied. “After we see the safe.”
The safe room was a big, old unit, maybe antique, with Krauss Construction painted on the door in ornate, fading gold script. “You see it now,” Nikita said.
“I’d better see you open it,” Bolan advised, “or you can join your employee.”
Wheezing, fat Nikita stooped and spun the safe’s dial back and forth a few times, cranked its handle down, then waddled backward, opening the heavy door. Inside were bundled stacks of currency, denominations ranging from fives up to C-notes, with a hundred in each bundle. Bolan pegged the total somewhere north of half a million.
“Bag it,” he ordered. “Take the big bills first.”
Nikita rummaged underneath his cluttered desk and found a gym bag, filling it with hundreds, fifties, twenties, running out of space before he reached the tens. “This is the only bag I got,” he said.
“It’s plenty. You have loan forms here?”
“Loan what?”
“Some kind of legal papers, for the tax man?”
“Shit. Are you kiddin’ me?”
“I didn’t think so. How about scratch paper?”
“I got some of that. You want to write your will?”
“A loan note.”
“What the—”
“Do it!”
“Yeah, okay.” Nikita lumbered to his desk, lowered himself into a groaning chair on wheels, dug up a notepad and a pen amid the pawn forms spread across the desktop. “What am I suppose to say?”
“Write, ‘I, Nikita, on this date’—you fill it in—‘loaned’...what’s your guess, around two hundred fifty grand? Just round it off...‘to Stepan Melnyk.’”
Nikita swore. “You ain’t no Stepan Melnyk.”
“Write it now and worry later.”
Staring down the Glock’s muzzle, Nikita nodded grudgingly. He finished quickly, muttering, “The boss will kill me. I have to set this straight. Starting now!” The Russian moved quickly for a big man, groping desperately for an object under a pizza box.
“Good luck with that,” Bolan replied, and shot him in the face.
* * *
“O’LEARY, MAJOR CASE SQUAD.”
“Hey, Irish. You recognize my voice?” Georgy Vize inquired.
He pictured the policeman glancing quickly around the squad room, trying to make sure no one could overhear their conversation. “Yeah,” he said at last. “You’re not supposed to call me here.”
“I got a major case for you. It’s going on right now.”
“I kinda got my hands full with this other thing. Your buddies from Kiev?”
“Same case,” Vize said. “But now, instead of getting hit, they’re hitting us.”
“Do tell.”
“Two spots out here already, and I doubt they’re finished yet.”
“What makes you think it’s Melnyk?”
“Because he thinks we’re hitting him.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No. It’s someone else.”
“And I should swallow that because...?”
“How ’bout because we pay you more than you get from the city? If that isn’t enough, I’ve got some juicy pictures here of you and two sweet little—”
“Stop it! Christ, just tell me what you want.”
“More pressure on the damn Ukrainians. Keep ’em busy. Make ’em squeal, while we find out who started this and why.”
“You plan to handle it yourself?” the cop inquired.
Vize heard the eagerness and answered, “Maybe.”
“Only, if we’ve got new players on the scene, it’s something I should know about. See whether I can nip it in the bud.”
“And get yourself a nice promotion, eh?”
“Serve and protect,” the detective said, almost chuckling.
Thinking quickly, Vize replied, “We’ll think about it, when we find out who’s behind it. If it’s just a couple guys, they’ll likely get a boat ride.”
“Yeah, but if it’s something bigger—”
“Chill, my friend. I won’t forget you.”
“Right. Okay.”
“Get busy now,” Vize said, and cut the link.
He never ceased to marvel at the avarice of human beings, driven to distraction by their pride, lust, greed, obsession with advancement. Everyone, himself included, had that innate weakness, but Georgy Vize had learned to cover his, screen it from prying eyes and go about his business like a dedicated soldier.
Which he was, in fact. Dedicated simultaneously to his godfather, his Family and to himself. Why should he separate the three, unless his own needs took priority?
But someday soon, he thought, when just the perfect opportunity arose...
4
St. Mark’s Place, East Village, Manhattan
Detective Sean O’Leary had his orders. Not from the New York City Police Department, where he’d worked for nearly twelve years and drew a salary of eighty-four grand, plus benefits. This day, his marching orders came from Alexey Brusilov, the scumbag who contributed another sixty thousand to O’Leary’s off-the-books retirement fund each year.
O’Leary hadn’t started out dirty. As a patrolman in the Bronx, he had become accustomed to the little bonuses that came his way, most of it trickling down from precinct bagmen who paid captains and lieutenants first, then took care of the street cops in their turn. He knew the great department’s history, a cycle of corruption and exposure, followed by “reform” and more corruption, dating back to its beginning in the 1840s. Every ten or fifteen years a “new broom” came along at City Hall, vowing to clean things up. When the dust settled, a few cops had bee
n sacrificed for the cosmetic value, and everything went back to normal.
Now, creeping up on two hundred years since the rot set in, O’Leary found himself in a predicament with no way out. He was a cop, had done some good work in his time, but he was owned body and soul by criminals. That wasn’t how he’d planned it, but he knew he wouldn’t last ten minutes if he blew the whistle, and besides, how would he get along without the extra cash?
So he was out, rousting Ukrainians with warrants he had sworn to under oath, citing anonymous “informants of proven reliability,” busting joints he’d known about forever, just like every beat cop in the precinct did. They looked the other way, most times, because Stepan Melnyk and his Mob fed the kitty too, from street corners to judge’s chambers. Sadly, for the Ukrainians, they hadn’t greased O’Leary lately. He was still a Russian tool, and with the warrants in his hand, the raiders he’d dragooned to help him couldn’t very well protest.
Their current target was a numbers bank—what the Ukrainians called chysel, which he found oddly appropriate—seizing cash under the guise of civil forfeiture. It didn’t matter if the charges stuck or not. Melnyk would never see the loot again unless he went to court and proved the cash was clean, a neat reversal of the famous innocent-until-proven-guilty rule modern Americans believed was still intact.
Morons.
The officers he had on loan from ESU, all soldiered up in black like something from a futuristic sci-fi flick, were dragging five of Melnyk’s people to a paddy wagon. One of them, the honcho, had a big mouth on him, shouting that he’d paid protection for the month and what the frack was going on? He shut up after someone tripped him “accidentally” and slammed his face into the paddy wagon’s open door. O’Leary heard a crunch and guessed there was a rhinoplasty session in the lowlife’s near future.
Two stops down so far—the first had been an escort service boiler room, with burned-out hookers on the phones—and he had half a dozen more to go before sunrise. After the first raid, they had picked up stragglers from the Times and Post, along with cameras from two TV networks, which suited Sean O’Leary fine. It never hurt for NYPD detectives to get their faces on television or in the papers, most particularly when they had a secret boss to satisfy. Georgy Vize would watch the news, and he would know O’Leary had obeyed his orders, earned whatever bonus might be coming to him.
All in a night’s work.
But Jesus, it was getting old.
Shore Parkway, Brighton Beach
MACK BOLAN HAD his eye on Georgy Vize. He hadn’t quite decided what to do with the Russian, take him out or play with him a little first, but he’d been watching Vize’s home on Neptune Avenue when the man led six shooters to a Lincoln Town Car waiting on the street and they took off, bound for the Parkway and beyond, joining the same Prospect Expressway that had carried Bolan into Brighton Beach. Vize and his goons were headed back the other way, bound for Manhattan, but they skipped the Carey Tunnel with its toll and caught a freebie on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Bolan was with them all the way, intrigued now, smelling something in the air besides New York’s pervasive stench of smog.
Why would the second in command of Brusilov’s Family be heading into hostile territory in the middle of a night when guns were going off? Maybe he had a special kink to feed, a little something on the side, but Bolan doubted it. Whatever Vize craved in that way was available in Brighton Beach. His Family made sure of that, whether the guilty pleasure ran toward sex, toward chemicals, whatever.
So, a mystery.
He trailed the Lincoln easily across the bridge, into Manhattan, where the driver picked up St. James Place, northbound through Chinatown and Little Italy. Bolan was taken by surprise when Vize’s driver turned right onto St. Mark’s Place. It hit him then. Unless Georgy had surrendered to a yen for staring at the East River by moonlight, he was heading into East Village. Hostile territory, and particularly now, when blood was spilling on both sides.
What was he up to?
There was only one way to find out.
Bolan tracked the Lincoln to the northern edge of Tompkins Square, where Vize’s ride came up against a wall of flashing lights and uniforms. Police were in the middle of a raid, and Bolan recognized the address as a target on Brognola’s list, a bookie operation he’d passed over on his first sweep through the area, before he headed out to Brighton Beach. A SWAT team had three men in custody as Vize’s limo pulled in to the curb downrange and sat there, with its engine idling, Vize and his companions taking in the show. Bolan, a half block farther west, used field glasses to bring the scene up close and personal.
Five minutes in, he saw a plainclothes officer stroll over to the Lincoln, bending and saying something to the passengers in back. One of them answered and the cop nodded, glanced at his watch, said something else, then moved away. The Lincoln moved on, and Bolan following instinctively, sensing that he was onto something now, although he didn’t have a clue exactly what it might turn out to be.
Vize had his driver pull into an all-night diner, climbed out of the car alone and went inside. He took a table by the window, ordered coffee and some kind of pastry from a weary-looking waitress and sat waiting, munching slowly, sipping java, killing time.
Ten minutes passed before the cop from Tompkins Square arrived, solo, and parked four slots away from Vize’s Town Car. Glancing at the goons the mobster had left outside, he entered, went directly to the Vize’s table and sat down.
Bolan wished that he were a lip-reader, but it was not a talent he’d acquired over the long years of his war. Instead, he raised a Nikon D5200 camera and started snapping photos of the cop and Georgy Vize, catching the cop full-face when he peered out through the window into darkness, maybe checking to be sure he wasn’t spotted in the middle of his late-night rendezvous.
Too late.
Before he pulled away and left them to it, Bolan also photographed the license plate on the unknown detective’s unmarked Ford Fusion Hybrid, the latest thing in eco-friendly policing. He could use it, with the facials, to identify his man and maybe get a fix on what was happening.
But he would need a little help from friends.
Szold Place, East Village
STEPAN MELNYK WAS in a rage. It wasn’t bad enough he had the Russians trying to put him in a box, now cops were coming out of nowhere—cops he’d paid good money to, for God’s sake—taking down his operations left and right, without a warning or a by-your-leave. He didn’t have the first freaking idea what they were doing, and it made him furious.
Pacing the living room of his penthouse apartment, Melnyk felt his soldiers watching him, feeling his nervous energy and hoping that when he exploded they would not be in the line of fire. Better to be out hunting enemies, taking their chances on the street, than to be caged up with the boss when he went off into one of his screaming fits.
“Where’s Dimo?” he demanded, asking no one in particular. When no one answered, Melnyk rounded on them, shouting, “I said, where the hell is Dimo?”
One of the men, a relatively brave soldier, lifted a hand as if he were a kid in school, asking to use the toilet, and said, “Boss, you sent him out.”
“I know I freaking sent him out! You think I’m stupid? Why hasn’t he come back yet?”
“I don’t know, Boss.”
“Why not?”
“Um, because you didn’t tell us where you sent him.”
“Somebody call him.” They were all reaching for cell phones when he changed his mind. “No, wait. I’ll call him. Find out what in hell is going on around here.”
Dimo Levytsky’s cell phone rang twice before he answered, asking, “What’s up, Boss?”
“What’s up? What’s up? Are you freaking kidding me?”
“Hey, Boss, I just—”
“Where are you?” Melnyk asked, cutting him off.
&nbs
p; “South of the park. You know that place.”
He did, indeed. It was another of his brothels, with a small casino in the basement, both lucrative operations. “Okay. So?”
“So, the cops beat me here. They’re grabbing everything and everybody.”
Cops. Another burning wave of red washed over Melnyk, briefly blinding him. He clutched his cell phone so hard, he was surprised it didn’t crumble into pieces.
“Bastards!” Melnyk hissed into the phone. “What do we pay them for?”
“Most of these guys, I’ve never seen before,” Levytsky replied. “They aren’t from the Ninth Precinct, Boss. I bet my life on that.”
You just did, Melnyk thought, and asked, “So where are they from, then?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say downtown.”
Headquarters. Melnyk had his eyes in there, of course, but so did every other outfit in the city that could raise the necessary scratch. And he supposed that would include Alexey Brusilov.
“That Russian bastard!” he snarled. “It must have been him all along.”
“What, Boss?”
“Get back here, Dimo! Move your ass! We got some heavy work to do.”
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
AARON KURTZMAN’S WHEELCHAIR hummed beneath him as he navigated the Computer Room, rolling toward the workstation where Akira Tokaido worked his magic, heavy rock pounding his brain through headphones that he wore throughout his long workday. Tokaido claimed the racket helped him work. This day it let Kurtzman cruise up behind him, unheard.
Kurtzman, head of the Farm’s cyberteam, tapped Tokaido on the shoulder and asked, “How’s it going?” after his young colleague lowered the headphones, music rising from beneath his chin.
Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Page 5