If the bosses had been going for high morale, apparently it hadn’t worked. On the other side of the wide room, rainbow-colored sticky notes were arranged across the windows to spell something out. The letters were backwards, and huge, and it had taken Tony a second to figure out that they spelled FUCK THIS HOLE.
On this side of the room, however, the windows were clear, and, crouched behind this weird plastic desk, Tony had a good look at the warehouse across the street, the buildings to either side, and the intersections at each end of the block.
He lifted his head from the rifle scope and dug into his bag for his binoculars. He handed those to his capo. “He was right. I clock two snipers, one on the roof immediately to the northeast, and another at the southwest intersection. And that van in the delivery lane at our building. See?”
Nick expected the Bondaruks to break the truce arranged so this meet could happen. They’d shown themselves to be dishonorable shitheads from the start, hurting women and children, and the don didn’t believe they’d play this meet straight—and he’d been right. He meant to beat them at their own game.
“I see,” Angie answered. “No movement at the van.”
“There was. Four guys in full gear, carrying top-grade AKs.”
“Fucking hell. That’s six, plus the guards they’ll show.”
Tony nodded and peered through his scope again. Both snipers were camped with a view of the door Donnie, Angie, and their guards would go through—the front entrance. The second was far enough to backstop a miss by the first, and possibly catch them in the car, if necessary. That would be a blind shot, but a good sniper could make a strong guess where to aim to hit his target through a roof, if he’d seen him get into the car.
Neither man was set fully up, though. They weren’t planning to aim soon. “They mean to take everybody out after the meet. On the way out. Snipe Donnie, and you, take out the team, while Bondaruk sits back and waits for his ride.”
Angie handed him back the binocs. “Those four from the van could be anywhere in the building.”
“I don’t think so. They’ll cover the stairwells. You said that building has three exits—the front, one in back, down to the underground garage, and the service and delivery. The elevators are disabled, and the garage is gated.”
“Yeah.”
“They don’t need coverage at the front, because that’s how the principals are going in. That puts four men at two exits—two at the back, two at the service and delivery. They’ll station one on the second floor, where the meet is, and one the street level, at each point.”
“What about the garage?”
“With the garage blocked off, they won’t go all the way down there unless they’re chasing somebody, or being chased. No need otherwise.”
“You studied up.”
“I did.”
Angie grunted thoughtfully. “Can you do this, Tone? Gimme a clear-eyed view of yourself. You gotta be straight and true here. To get it done, the timing has to be exactly right. Nobody can get word it went wrong, or get suspicious, until it’s done. You gotta time it so they hit their check-ins first, and you can’t make a goddamn sound.”
Stealth, speed and accuracy. He had to kill four Bondaruk men—they were probably really Zelenko men, but they were in the same bed—in such a way that the Ukrainians wouldn’t have any idea it had gone down until their plan failed. It was all on him. The others—Mel, Ricky, and Keith—would be with Angie and Donnie, ready to deal with the men in the meet.
If everything went right, Bogdan Bondaruk would be in Rhode Island, hanging from a hook in a Quiet Cove Harbor warehouse, by dark, and whatever remained of him after Nick got what he wanted would be in the Atlantic Ocean before dawn.
If Tony did his job. “I got this, Ange. I got it.”
Angie stared hard at him, then nodded and clapped his shoulder. “Good man. Let’s do this.” They both got up and, keeping low, headed to the stairwell. Tony had seen what he needed to see.
~oOo~
Stealth, speed, and accuracy.
His prediction about what the Bondaruks and Zelenkos meant to do—ambush the Paganos on their way out of the meet—had to be accurate. His prediction about where that team of guards decked out in paramilitary gear would be located had to be accurate. His prediction about when the snipers would shoot had to be accurate. And he had to get into the building and take all six down, alone, one at a time, without drawing any attention. Time it to their check-ins. Kill six men ranged across a whole building and beyond, and do it so none of the Ukrainians in that meeting on the second floor knew there was trouble.
Today, he would double his kill count.
He had a plan and had mapped it out in his head. His day job as a scheduler for Pagano Brothers Shipping—where it was his responsibility to put cargo, route, and driver together to meet particular delivery dates, to understand the patterns of traffic and weather and how they would affect the shipment, and to sometimes arrange illicit shipments to travel with the straight goods—had built up a muscle in his mind for seeing complex patterns and keeping track of all the pieces, where they were and where they should go.
There was a game he and his sisters had played as kids: Concentration. They’d had it as a board game and a video game both. He hadn’t been all that good at it back then; Kiki was the memory queen and had liked all those sorts of games, the kind you won by remembering where things were. But now, Tony would absolutely kill at Concentration.
So when he crouch-ran to the service entrance, holding his gear bag like a baby so it wouldn’t swing and bump into anything, Tony had the full picture of his plan rolling in his head like a movie. He was making a guess about when each man would check in, but it was an educated one. He’d watched the snipers on the rooftop for a while, even while they’d only been setting up and chilling out, waiting for their signal, and he’d seen the pattern of their check-ins. Every seven minutes.
That meant he had seven minutes to get all four men in the building down, then get into position and take out the snipers before Donnie, Angie, and the others came through the front door.
He had to be perfectly accurate on little more than guesses—some educated, some entirely intuitive.
A check of his watch showed him he had twenty-two seconds to wait before he went through the door at his side. Still in his crouch, he leaned against the wall a bit and flexed his fingers around the hunting knife in his hand. The others wore suits, befitting professional men, but Tony was dressed like an assassin—black pants, a black, long-sleeved t-shirt, black gloves, black crepe-soled shoes. His Beretta was holstered at his hip, and a little Sig was on his ankle, but shit would be very wrong if he needed either of those. The sniper rifle in his gear bag should be the only thing that got fired today.
As he watched the seconds tick by, his mind put up a memory of Saturday night with Billy. Her body writhing with his, rolling and thrusting, those beautiful, sinuous arms holding—
Shit! NO. He shook his head and focused where he needed to focus. Whatever he was feeling about Billy Jones, he couldn’t do a damn thing about it if he were dead. And he would be dead if he let Nick down.
Three seconds.
Two.
One.
Tony opened the door and set his bag down as he entered. The first guy was right there, cradling an AK-308. He stood six feet away, facing away from the door. He was ready for trouble from inside the building, not outside it. The opening of the door drew his attention, but this was exactly as Tony had envisioned it, so he lunged forward, raising his knife as he did, and got behind the guy before he could turn. The knife slid across his throat. Tony held him for a second while blood ran over his vested chest, until he went limp; then Tony caught the AK before it could fall. He eased body and gun to the floor, grabbed his bag, and ran up the steps on his crepe-souled shoes, headed for body-to-be #2.
Already in the building, he was able to be truly stealthy, and he came up on the second guy without any sign. He caught him
in a choke and stabbed him in the neck, angled upward to get under his jaw and into his brain, and pulled it out on a slant to make sure the artery was full open. He caught the guy’s gun, laid him down, grabbed his bag, and moved on.
Now, he was on the second floor, and this was the most vulnerable moment. There were other guards outside the meeting room, and no way to be sure to avoid being in their sightline as he ran to the back stairwell. That was what Mel, Ricky, and Keith were supposed to do—make sure their Ukie counterparts were looking elsewhere.
They were. He made brief eye contact with Mel and got the fuck out of sight. Once he was clear, he checked his watch. Almost two minutes gone already. Fuck!
He hit the corner where two corridors met and stopped there, setting his bag softly on the carpeted floor. From his pocket, he pulled a small mirror he’d picked up in the chick section of the Quiet Cove Pharmacy, where they kept the cheap makeup and perfume and hair crap. It was glittery pink plastic, but it got the job done. He used it to see around the corner. When guy #3 was turned away, Tony ran and grabbed him.
He’d heard him coming up half a second before Tony got there, which was just enough time to start to react. He got his mouth open to yell, and Tony acted on pure instinct. He fed the guy his knife, stabbing him through his open mouth, into the meat of his throat, and down to his vocal chords. It didn’t kill him, and he fought on, but it silenced him. When Tony pulled his knife back for the killing blow, the guy bit down, taking the blade through his tongue, but managing to keep hold of it. Blood sprayed everywhere, coating Tony’s face. They were making enough noise to draw attention soon, so Tony grabbed by guy by the balls and squeezed as hard as he could.
All the guy’s attention went to that new pain, even worse than his mangled, gushing mouth, and Tony got his knife back. He opened the guy’s throat and got him on the floor.
Ran for his bag, grabbed it, got into the stairwell. Now, he had to creep down, staying out of the sightline of the guy below. He checked his watch. Goddammit. That guy had taken nearly two minutes, and now Tony barely had more than three minutes left to kill the fourth guy, get to the roof, and take out the snipers.
Guy #4 had set his gun down to adjust his Kevlar vest. Fully engaged in that effort, he didn’t react at all to Tony, who came up on him, shoved his bloody knife into the back of his neck, up into his brain. He gave it a twist and pulled it out. That guy, he let fall where he would. He no longer had need for perfect stealth.
Now, he ran as fast as he could up the stairs, past the second floor, the third, to the roof access. The door had been locked, but Angie had fixed that when he’d scouted the building. Tony ran through the door. He heaved the bag high, unzipped it as he ran, and began pulling parts of the sniper rifle out. Running out of time, he didn’t bother to crouch, or seek cover, or even check if he was alone. If he was seen, he was fucked. If he took the time to be careful not to be seen, he was fucked. Fucked was fucked, either way.
He skidded to his knees at the site he’d chosen from across the way—yep, those cheery Post-Its definitely spelled FUCK THIS HOLE—and put the rifle together faster than he ever had in his life. He spun the silencer into the muzzle and stretched out behind the gun.
Sniper One, to the northwest. Through the scope of this long-range rifle, Tony saw him clearly—in fact, he seemed uncomfortably close, like Tony could reach out and pat him on the head. He was aimed at the ground, at the entrance below, where Donnie and Angie would come out, but he wasn’t ready to shoot. He was relaxed, and his hand was nowhere near the trigger.
Tony found his target, aimed, and fired. The sniper’s head dropped and stayed down, his body going slack. That was it. A perfect hit.
He swung around and set up again for Sniper Two. He didn’t have time to check his watch, but he knew he couldn’t have more than a few seconds to get this right. After that, none of these assholes would check in, and if anybody was holding their leash, they would know there was trouble before Donnie and Angie wanted them to know there was trouble.
Tony found his target, aimed, and fired. The sniper had shifted at the exact same time, reaching for something—his comm unit, maybe—and Tony’s shot hit him on the shoulder. He took another shot immediately, not waiting to perfect his aim. That one caught the sniper in the side of the head, and took most of the back of his head off.
Six men down. His mission complete. Tony checked his watch. Seven minutes and four seconds.
Had it been enough?
He’d know soon, one way or the other. If the men were checking in with anyone besides each other, shit was about to get very interesting downstairs.
As he began to break his rifle down, the enormity of what he’d done finally crashed over his head. His hands shook and his stomach roiled.
Had he succeeded? Had he fucked up? On this day, in very slightly more than seven minutes, he’d tripled his previous single-day kill count and doubled his total count. He should be proud of that. Even if that last sniper had managed to sound an alert, Tony had killed six men in seven minutes and taken no harm to himself.
He wanted to be proud. But part of him was horrified. And he didn’t know if he’d succeeded in the purpose of all this death.
He zipped up his gear bag and headed to the stairwell. He needed to be at the first floor, in case the others needed backup.
~oOo~
One of the many things Tony had had no option but to guess about was whom the guards were checking in with. Nobody in the meeting room could get or give a message. Elsewhere, Pagano and Ukie guards were matched and keeping an eye on each other. Unless somebody was secreted in a different empty office, which was a possibility, the guards and snipers were checking in with each other.
That made sense. It was efficient and the right kind of redundant. But it also made sense that they had a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ plan, to contact somebody somewhere outside the encounter, somebody who could come in from the margins and change the game. That was why Tony had known those seven minutes were all the time he could afford.
As he descended the stairs to the first floor, he played his scope view of the last sniper over. That shift, the guy going for something in his pants. Had he been intending to call in an alert? Had he succeeded?
Tony didn’t think so. He thought he’d killed him before he could do what he’d meant to do. But he worried.
He reached the first floor and put his hand on the handle. Just then, gunfire exploded on the other side of the door, and something bizarre happened inside Tony. His hand flew off the handle, and he stared at the door while a memory almost a year old played in his head. Not while he was dreaming, but while he was awake.
The little boy he’d killed.
He stood there in that stairwell with his hand hovering in midair between his body and the door, his heart going triple time, much faster than when he’d been racing against a clock, killing Ukies one after another.
He couldn’t reach for the door.
On the other side, his people were fighting for their lives, and he didn’t know if it was according to their plan or not. They might need him, but all he could see was Artem Honcharenko’s small, terrified face, his ruined throat. He’d died to a chorus just like this one. He’d died innocent.
Then the guns went silent, and the boy’s image faded with the sound. Released from the memory, Tony could move again, and he grabbed the handle and opened the door. He walked forward, toward the building lobby and the stairs from the second floor. Slowly, he walked, until he came upon the carnage.
It didn’t occur to him until just that moment that, if the Ukrainians had won this part of the fight, he’d have been walking straight to his death.
But the Ukrainians had not won.
Four, five, six bodies, five of them Ukrainian. Keith lay on the ground, a pool of blood at his head. He was dead. All the other Pagano men were standing. Angie, Donnie, and Mel stood in a cluster, surveying the carnage. Bogdan Bondaruk sat against a wall. His right leg ble
d badly; he’d taken a bullet to the knee. Ricky held his own shoulder, and blood seeped heavily between his fingers, but he kept his Beretta trained on the sole surviving Bondaruk.
“Jesus Christ, Tone.” Angie came up to him, frowning. “You’re a mess. You hurt?”
Staring at Keith’s body, Tony shook his head. He didn’t know what Angie was talking about, but he knew he wasn’t hurt. “I got them all,” he said. His voice sounded odd in his head. Dull and empty.
“Good man. Well done.”
“Angie,” Donnie said, “get Bondaruk. Mel and Tony, get Keith. I called the cleaners. Let’s get the fuck out of this hellhole.”
Hooking his gear bag on his back, Tony crouched and lifted Keith’s shoulders as Mel lifted his legs. Keith’s head fell backward, his dead eyes and mouth open, the bullet wound in his cheek like a black hole, and Tony closed his eyes against the sight. He and Keith hadn’t been close—Keith was older, had a wife and a kid and didn’t hang out much—but they were Pagano men together. They were brothers. Members of a family.
Keith had a kid. A little boy, about seven years old, the same age Artem Honcharenko had been. Now he was an orphan. Jesus.
Would Keith be alive if Tony hadn’t seized up in the stairwell?
“Tone.” Mel was giving him a look. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah.” Tony gave his head a hard shake and got back in the game. “I didn’t take any damage.”
Although he hadn’t lost any blood, he thought maybe that was a lie.
~oOo~
“Tony.”
Tony stepped up to Nick’s side. “Yeah, don?”
“Do you remember what the Bondaruk roaches did to Bobbo?”
He nodded. Word of that attack had gone through the organization like the clap through a whorehouse. Last summer, Bondaruks had ambushed a security team right on the Pagano Brothers Shipping property, executed three men, and cut off pieces of their faces.
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