“The Caquetas have reinforcements headed into New York,” Bolan said, “but there’ll be no one left to run the show when they get here. That right?”
“As far as I can tell,” Burnett said. “Caqueta, Almarone and Ruiz were the top dogs of the cartel, in that order. Without them, you’ve got the drug-running equivalent of middle management, but nobody the troops would rally around. I mean, for all intents and purposes, the muscle might as well pack up and go home.”
“These troops wouldn’t include someone who could take charge? Someone from Colombia who’d be quick to take the reins?”
“To be honest, no,” Burnett said, “Luis Caqueta kept pretty tight control. Everyone back in Colombia is a handpicked functionary, people he figured would be loyal to him. He didn’t want anybody to get the idea they could go without him. That’s why he didn’t have more than Almarone and Ruiz in positions of power here.”
“So the Caquetas are out of the picture?”
“I’d say so,” Burnett said, sounding cheerful. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch.”
“At least I got what there was to get,” Bolan said.
“You did?” Burnett said, surprised.
“Yes,” Bolan confirmed. “Almarone admitted that the Caquetas killed West. He also gave me some dirt on West and outlined the relationship with one Donald Stevens, who is apparently the NLI employee who’s gone rogue.”
“Then how did NLI know about your meet in Bryant Park?” Burnett asked.
“There’s no way to be sure,” Bolan said. “They may have gotten it from West’s computer before Price was sent back to destroy the evidence. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why send Price days later to destroy the computer and toss the place when they could have done that at the time they got the information? They must have had some other source. Sending Basil Price to West’s apartment was an attempt to cover tracks after the fact.”
“So that’s a dead end.”
Bolan looked at Burnett. “More importantly, how did Blackjack’s operatives find us here?”
“What do you mean? They knew to take Caqueta in New York at our meeting.”
“Yeah, they did,” Bolan said, nodding, “but there are any number of holes they could have punched in Caqueta’s security. They could have had Caqueta’s place wired for sound. They could have an informant in the department itself. They could have been following Caqueta from the time he left for the meet.”
“I doubt Caqueta’s got any friends on the force.” Burnett chuckled. “Still, you’re right. So why not here?”
“We tailed Almarone here. We weren’t followed in turn. I’d have noticed. So how did they know to show up here?”
“Maybe the safe house was a known quantity.” Burnett shrugged. “Maybe they knew ahead of time he might run here, so they just showed up. Maybe they bugged his car. Like you said, there are any number of holes.”
“I don’t like it,” Bolan said. “Something about it just doesn’t feel right.”
“We’re back to square one, anyway,” Burnett said. “What do you say we start from the other end?”
“Meaning, Taveras?”
“Meaning, Taveras.” Burnett nodded. “If Caqueta is down for the count, El Cráneo is sitting on a stockpile of DU ammunition in the middle of a sudden power vacuum. They’ve got ambition and now the only force that was keeping them in check is gone. Say you’re a power-mad drug lord whose biggest rivals have just lost their leadership. They’re in chaos. You might, I don’t know, mop up a few of their operatives, maybe hit their businesses or homes to prove a point—show the rest of the community of criminals that you’re not to be fucked with, as they say. But then what?”
“You know them,” Bolan said. “What would they focus on? What does Taveras want?”
“He’s the typical egomaniacal power-mad, would-be crime lord,” Burnett said with a grin. “He lives for the day when the city is his and his alone. He wants dominance. He wants to be the man. That’s what all the heavy hardware was for, after all—to sweep Caqueta aside and clear the way for his rise to power, as he saw it.”
“A rise to power that NLI and Blackjack have helped make happen.”
“Maybe,” Burnett said. “The way I see it, it just makes it easier for jerks like me. I don’t have to split my time between both groups anymore. And think of how tidy a New York crime scene run by just Taveras would be. There’s something to be said for dictatorship. A lot of the infighting, a lot of the collateral damage, is minimized.”
“A fine idea,” Bolan said, his voice cold. “It’s been done. They called it the Mob. I remember some collateral damage.”
Burnett had nothing to say to that. Finally, he offered, “There’s a club, a strip joint, on Thirty-third. Taveras owns it. He spends a lot of downtime there, sampling the girls and entertaining his foot soldiers. It’s as likely a place to roust as any.”
“All right,” Bolan agreed.
“I don’t know about you, but I could use a nap and a decent meal, not necessarily in that order,” Burnett said. “Why don’t you stop at your hotel. I’ll take the car, get back to my place, have dinner. You can do…whatever it is you do when you’re not shooting people. We’ll converge on Taveras’s club tonight after dark, when the action is.”
“Fair enough,” Bolan said.
8
Percival Leister stood amid the bullet-riddled debris in the center of the hotel room. He looked at the blood-splattered carpet, at the scorch marks on the walls left by the small fires that had erupted. Only the fast action of his men, the training they had received at Leister’s behest, had saved them. He had lost far too many good men nonetheless. It galled him. It shamed him. It infuriated him.
Leister had seen real combat. He had walked the war-torn fields of Rhodesia. He had commanded men in battles so ruthless that the word atrocity put a positive spin on the acts he’d seen committed—and had committed himself. He was a veteran in every sense of the word, experienced in war, experienced in death, experienced in the taking of lives and the meting out of destruction.
That he should come to this, in an industrialized nation, appalled him. True, he was amid the Yanks in the United States, not home in his native England, but still. The colonists weren’t the savages of Africa, for pity’s sake. The operation should never have been so difficult. Hell, he should have been able to mop up long ago, silencing Stevens and leaving the Big Apple far behind.
Instead, he was surrounded by destruction and reminders of good men lost, a victim of his own attempt to be clever.
One of his men, Thompson, brought him the full report, assessing their losses and listing the various bribe money that had been spread around to cover up the events. One of Leister’s field men was arranging for new quarters in another location.
Leister’s attempt had failed. Now, to the list of men they’d lost in the skirmishes so far, he had to add several more bodies to a count that already included Reynolds and Price.
He would not miss Reynolds. The man was a capable field commander and had a military record that was impressive enough in its own right, but Leister had seen the type before. Reynolds was a hothead, a man who didn’t learn from his mistakes. Caught off guard, Reynolds would put himself in the same situation over and over, hoping to intercept the ambush before it came. He’d had something to prove and walked around with a chip on his shoulder. Reynolds, unlike Price, had never realized that waging wars, fighting others’ battles for them, was a business proposition. It had no honor and nobody kept score, save to tally the pay distributed at the end of each campaign.
Reynolds’s behavior in Bryant Park simply bore out Leister’s worst fears. The man had no sense of proportion, no sense of containment. Leister himself was not above staging operations on that scale, of course, but to then take the battle down a congested city street? Absurd. Better to let the quarry escape, regroup your own forces and find a new way to approach the problem, rather than to dig your own hole deeper, risking cap
ture and exposure. Chasing after the big man who’d shot up their forces at Bryant Park would have fit with Reynolds’s sense of personal honor, however. He’d lost men, and that meant that the man who’d killed them had to pay. Calculating his next step, using cunning rather than brute force, never entered into Reynolds’s mind.
Most of Blackjack’s employees were ex-military or would-be military men. While some were cynical—they stayed in line as long as the pay was good—many were still clinging to movie notions of what being a soldier of fortune was supposed to be like. Leister knew few men ever made their fortunes carrying rifles for others. There simply wasn’t that much money in it. Even Leister, who had risen through the ranks and weathered the storms to find himself in charge of Blackjack’s combat operations, didn’t have much money squirreled away. He had saved enough to provide for his own retirement, if he lived that long, and as the years went by he was starting to think he might actually make it after all. But he would never be a rich man.
He wondered sometimes at these fools who thought an honest day’s work in an office, a field, or a factory was somehow less worthy than carrying a rifle and shooting men with whom they had no direct quarrel. Leister had lived in field camps, in foxholes, in leaking tents and in freezing temperatures. He had seen men die for lack of medical supplies to treat them. He had watched men grow gaunt, their eyes hollowing out, for lack of enough food to feed them. He had seen battles turn to fixed bayonets and knives because neither side had enough ammunition for an extended firefight.
He had seen many, many friends die.
He would miss Basil Price. The man had been a faithful friend, a good soldier, fighting many campaigns by his side. Basil had been the man on whom Leister could always depend, someone whose judgment Leister never needed to second-guess. No doubt someone like Reynolds would have sworn holy vengeance and gone looking for whomever had taken Basil’s life. Leister, on the other hand, knew that it was just business. Basil had played the game and, unfortunately, he’d let someone get the drop on him. It was a very clean equation, one in which emotions need not figure. The transaction had been fair. Basil’s bill had come due.
Still, as many times as he had seen death, losing a friend always saddened him deeply. At one time he had thought he’d spend his golden years surrounded by fellow wartime comrades, trading stories and telling lies. Now he wondered if anyone with whom he’d worked and warred would be alive, when that time came. He’d allowed himself to think Basil would make it, that he’d have at least one old friend by his side when the time finally came to hang up his guns and live a life of quiet leisure. He had looked forward to the idea of spending his days playing chess with Basil, or simply sitting and drinking coffee on the veranda of a small home in a tropical climate, purchased with the money he’d so painstakingly scraped together over the years.
Curse his luck. Curse his bloody, rotten luck. And curse Basil, too—poor, loyal Basil—for letting himself be killed by enemies who were even now vexing Leister. Such a pity. Such a waste.
Leister pushed thoughts of retirement from his mind. He was old and getting tired, but he still had a job to do. He had directed his lieutenants to prepare for a counterstrike, to hit back hard. Unlike Reynolds’s notions of why such an attack should be mounted, Leister’s own opinions on the matter were far more pragmatic. He simply had to see to it that Blackjack remained a force to be reckoned with, one that was not taken lightly—nor attacked casually. A properly planned, properly coordinated military operation would take care of that with, Leister hoped, a minimum of casualties among his dwindling resources in New York.
The further complication to this sordid affair was the big, dark-haired man.
With a heavy sigh, Leister returned to the task of sifting through the debris in the hotel room, salvaging what he could and identifying those items that would have to be destroyed before he and his men could relocate.
There was much to do, yet, and an attack to wage.
Blackjack Group was going hunting.
9
Stony Man Farm transmitted a text file to Bolan’s secure phone outlining the career highlights and background information of Donald Stevens. It was useful context, but none of it provided the Executioner with more insight than did Almarone’s brief commentary. Stevens, forty-six, had been recruited directly from a prestigious university and had worked for Norris Labs International ever since. For reasons the company would not disclose, he was let go at the end of the previous year. There were no records of his activities since then. He had not applied to other jobs, nor did he hold a permanent address anywhere in the United States. He had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.
The personality profile Stony Man had managed to work up wasn’t terribly helpful, either. Stevens was extremely intelligent. He had no family and no living relatives. He had no connections to anyone at all—which painted the psychological portrait of a genius loner, someone whose work occupied the sum total of his waking hours. His work was highly classified, but Stony Man’s sources, as well as government contractors knew enough about NLI to know that it was generally related to arms manufacture. It was likely that Stevens was either involved in the development of the DU small-arms production, or understood it well enough to go into business selling it himself.
Everyone involved had assumed West was the culprit, but what little information there was on West pointed to Stevens, his boss. West had the technical knowledge, according to his résumé and work history. But he had never really risen to a position of power or influence. He had the mark of a follower, not a leader. Stevens was the likely source, the ringleader, as detailed by Almarone.
Somewhere, Stevens was sitting on a stockpile of DU rounds. He had either cached them after misappropriating them from NLI, or he knew enough and had resources enough to manufacture them himself. Bolan’s money was on the latter. If NLI and Blackjack were willing to engage in open war to silence any ties back to them—including killing their own to prevent their capture and interrogation—the whole affair was larger than simply stealing a trailer’s worth of rounds that would eventually be used up and off the market. If NLI saw Stevens’s operation as an ongoing threat, one large enough to warrant the type of operation they’d mounted to this point, Bolan could conclude only that Stevens had a factory somewhere.
The report from the Farm had included photos from the blacksuits’ raid on what turned out to be a small house in the suburbs. The Swedesboro, New Jersey, home was empty. There had been nothing to find. Bolan was glad he hadn’t left the city to make the trip out there.
While Bolan and Burnett had been tailing Almarone, things were already starting to heat up in Manhattan. El Cráneo had staged two small raids on what Burnett believed were Caqueta holdings. One of these was a hotel in Manhattan, which had been largely burned to the ground. The other was an auto repair and detailing shop just outside the city. The hotel had produced nearly a dozen casualties, while the auto yard had been almost as messy. At the auto yard, the Caquetas had been hit in their cars. The rival gang had shot through the vehicles with DU ammunition, wiping out what remained of their competition. Also during that shooting, bullets had passed through a Caqueta vehicle and penetrated an adjacent storefront, setting fire to that building in the process. Two civilians, customers in the store, had been killed. The fire got out of control and gutted most of the building and another adjoining address.
The mayor was screaming to the governor for the National Guard, Burnett had informed the Executioner. The possibility of martial law loomed. Bolan wasn’t opposed to the idea if it helped lock down El Cráneo but knew it might make it more difficult for him to track down Stevens. Until Stevens and his pipeline of ammunition was shut down, any solution reached—no matter how bloody—was a temporary move at best. All Stevens had to do was wait until he could find other customers. He might pull up stakes and find an entirely new market, unleashing his hellish war by proxy on the streets of another city. Bolan was determined not to let that happen.
Someone knocked softly on the door to Bolan’s hotel room.
The Executioner drew his Beretta 93-R and stood next to the door. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Just me,” Burnett’s voice came back. “I come bearing gifts.”
Bolan opened the door. The detective glanced at the gun in Bolan’s hand but didn’t comment on it. He was carrying a fat vinyl case under one arm.
“What have you got there?” Bolan asked.
“Leadership has its privileges.” Burnett winked. “You don’t think I just drive around with a directional mike and a video camera in my car all the time, do you? Surveillance is the best tool my task force has in dealing with Taveras, Caqueta and their boys. If we can get them on video, on record, we have a better chance of nailing them down. I’ve had teams watching people from the Caqueta and Taveras organizations. I’ve also got Taveras’s club, the cozy little place we’re about to visit, wired for picture and sound—and don’t ask me if it’s legal, because I’m bending the rules.”
“Bending them how hard?” Bolan asked.
“Let’s just say I’m hoping the ends will justify the means so I don’t get fired.” Burnett shrugged. “If I do this completely by the book, I’ll never get anywhere. But then, you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” The big detective grinned.
Bolan shook his head. He was more aware than anyone just how badly the system worked against those it was designed to protect. “So what is that?”
Burnett removed a portable DVD player and a couple of rewriteable DVDs from the case, inserting one of them into the folding machine and turning up the sound. “It turns out that last night, before today’s fireworks,” Burnett said, “Taveras had an extremely interesting meeting. The video’s a little dark, but the sound’s fine. The monitoring team brought this to me when I stopped in at the department.”
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