Killing Trade

by Don Pendleton

  “He could probably ram his way out if he tried,” the detective admitted, “but it will buy us time.”

  “We don’t know that this is Pierre Taveras’s vehicle,” Bolan pointed out.

  “Trust me,” Burnett said. “I doubt that Pierre’s saintly, blue-haired mother is driving a Hummer at the age of eighty-nine. She’s probably more the sports-car type.”

  Bolan ignored the detective’s attempt at humor, but mentally conceded the point.

  They had found a chain restaurant on the outskirts of Camden, a run-down place where the service was slow and the servers were sullen. Still, the food was good, reminding Bolan of how long a morning it had been. Burnett ate like a man who’d been fasting for weeks, explaining that mortal danger always gave him an appetite. The Executioner had to admit to himself that the cocky detective’s sense of humor was growing on him, but vowed silently that he’d never tell Burnett as much.

  Burnett lingered in the restaurant while Bolan returned to the car and placed a call on his secure phone. Barbara Price sounded pleased to hear that he had come through the latest operation unscathed. Bolan briefed her on what he’d seen inside the warehouse and listened as she relayed what the on-site teams were reporting.

  The warehouse and the area immediately surrounding it were a total loss. Fortunately for everyone involved, there were no viable businesses and certainly no residences close enough to be damaged by the blast. There were some health concerns raised by the smoke cloud produced by the explosion, but Price told Bolan that EPA teams were taking air samples and had found nothing too harmful as of yet.

  “We’re running down the last of the players at large,” Bolan told Stony Man’s mission controller. “The only one left is Pierre Taveras and whomever he might have with him. Burnett tells me there’s one place, a last-ditch safe house of sorts, that he might go. It’s not far—right across the river in Philadelphia.”

  “What’s so special about this location that your detective friend thinks he’ll go there? Taveras has to be running pretty scared by now, with his organization shot out from under him,” Price said.

  “True,” Bolan said. “But this place is special. It’s where Taveras’s mother lives.”

  Price nodded before remembering that Bolan couldn’t see her. “Do you need any support? I could get Jack in the air.”

  “No,” Bolan told her, “I don’t think we’ll need him. While there have been a couple of times during this mission that I would have liked to have him, I can’t see diverting him now. Call it a point of pride, but I want to wrap this up on my terms. Burnett’s proved very useful, anyway. We’re going to drive into Philadelphia, locate Taveras if he’s there and take him down.”

  “Do you mean to bring him in?”

  “I’ll do what I have to do,” Bolan stated.

  “Detective Burnett doesn’t have any qualms about that?”

  “He’s a realist,” Bolan said. “Besides, there’s no way Taveras will come quietly. I’ve seen the type hundreds of times. A week ago he was the king of New York City, as he saw it, destined to unify the criminal element under one banner, a lord overseeing his Manhattan fiefdom. Today he’s nothing but a criminal with no resources, no options and nowhere to go but—if Burnett is right—running to his mommy. He’ll be like the worst caged and wounded animal you can imagine, racked with paranoia, ready to lash out at whoever comes to collect him. A man like that will die before he’ll go quietly. He’ll also be looking to take as many people with him as he can. Men like Pierre Taveras don’t like to die alone. They prefer lots of company.”

  “Understood,” Price said. “Good hunting, Striker.”

  BOLAN AND BURNETT left the parking garage and made their way to the main lobby, Burnett marveling at the well-furnished facilities. “I guess this sure beats being put in a home in your twilight years,” he said. “Apparently Mrs. Taveras likes to live in style. I’ve known about this address since we first started putting together a dossier on Pierre, but I didn’t put two and two together. The riverfront address pretty much screams money, I guess.”

  “It stands to reason.” Bolan nodded. They walked through the lobby, Bolan scanning from side to side, front and back, checking for targets. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. A younger man sat with an older couple, perhaps his parents, drinking coffee as they relaxed in a set of overstuffed chairs set around a low table in the lobby. There were a few other people milling about, too. This wasn’t a retirement home, Bolan reminded himself, so there would be people of all ages in the building.

  They bypassed the elevators at the far end of the lobby and instead took the stairs. Burnett groused about the long walk to the twelfth floor, where the apartment was located, but he seemed as aware as Bolan of the dangers inherent to being enclosed in an elevator during a combat scenario.

  As the stairwell door closed behind them, neither man saw the younger man at the coffee table pull a cell phone from his pocket and make a quick call.

  Burnett was breathing hard by the time they made the twelfth floor. “You don’t even look winded,” he said, stopping to catch his breath with his hands on his knees. “How do you do it?”

  “Practice,” Bolan said. He opened the twelfth-floor stairwell door and peered out through the crack. “I don’t see anyone,” he said. “No guards, no visible cameras.”

  “Twelve-fifteen,” Burnett wheezed. “That’s the one we want.”

  “Looks like it’s at the end of this hall on the left,” Bolan told him.

  “Well,” Burnett said, straightening, “let’s get him, then.” He drew his Glock and press-checked it.

  “Yeah,” Bolan said. The Desert Eagle felt good in his hand. There was no need to check it again; he knew it was chambered and ready.

  They moved quietly down the hallway. Bolan kept his eyes open for civilians. He did not want anyone walking into the line of fire. While the setting was much more affluent, the whole scenario felt a lot like the raid on Jonathan West’s apartment. From the look on Burnett’s face, he was thinking the same thing.

  They reached the door to unit 1215 and Bolan motioned for the detective to take the left side while he took the right. From the side, well clear of the doorway, Bolan rapped on the door with his free hand, the Desert Eagle held at low ready.

  “Hello?” an elderly woman’s voice responded.

  “Mrs. Taveras?” Bolan said through the door. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am. My name is Cooper. I’m with the Justice Department. Could we come in and speak with you for a moment?”

  “Just a moment,” the woman said. There was at the sound of a dead bolt moving and a chain being unhooked from the other side of the door. When it swung open, Emilie Taveras stood there, a frail old woman with blue-tinted hair and fingers gnarled by arthritis. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” said Pierre Taveras, who stood behind his mother holding a 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol to her head. “Step inside, hijo de puta. Keep your gun pointed at the floor until you have closed the door again behind that puto, Burnett. Then drop your guns on the floor. Carefully. I love my mother. I would hate to have to spray her brains all over both of you.”

  The two men complied. Taveras motioned both of them to sit on the leather-upholstered couch in the living room. Then he whispered to his mother and she wandered off in the direction of her bedroom.

  “Your mother takes being threatened pretty well, especially when it’s her son doing the threatening,” Burnett commented.

  “She has been senile for many years,” Taveras said, taking a seat opposite Bolan and the detective. He kept his Smith & Wesson aimed between them, occasionally swinging it from one man to the next as he spoke. On the glass-topped coffee table between them was a closed laptop.

  “Do not doubt me,” Taveras warned. “I would kill her in a heartbeat. She is old and her mind is mostly gone. It would be a mercy, I think. And I would rather kill her myself than trust what would happen to her after I am gone, after the money that pays for this
place, for the home nurses that attend to her each morning, is all gone. Is that really so hard to understand?”

  “That you’d put a bullet in the back of your own mother’s head?” Burnett said. “Why, gosh, no. Any of us would do that. Right, Cooper?”

  “I knew you would come,” Taveras said, ignoring the detective. “I knew the men who had done so much damage to me, who helped lead my enemies to my doorstep so many times, would not stop until they hunted me to my final refuge. That is what you did, is it not, Detective Burnett? I should have killed you when last we met.”

  “Probably,” Burnett said.

  “And this one.” Taveras nodded to Bolan. “He should be screaming his last at the point of July’s knife right now. Yet here he is, this bastardo grande, alive and well, and July is dead. How did you escape, pendejo? Did this one—” he laughed as he nodded at Burnett “—come to your rescue? Now, that would be funny!”

  “Cut to the chase, Taveras,” Burnett said. “What do you want?”

  “Want? Want? Why, I want to kill you both,” Taveras said. “But first I think I will torture you until you go insane. That is what I want.”

  “De la Rocha thought he was going to do the same,” Bolan spoke up. “It ended badly for him.”

  “Then we will sit and chat,” Taveras said lightly. “We will get to know each other as enemies should. And while we chat, my men will be murdering every single person living in this building. How would that be, hmm?”

  Burnett looked to Bolan and back to Taveras. “You’re not serious.”

  “Of course I am serious,” Taveras said. “What have I to lose? You and this one—” he jerked his chin at Bolan “—have seen to it that everything has been taken from me. I have very few resources left. I have no more of Stevens’s precious bullets. I have a handful of men still loyal to me. I have no safe houses, no bases of operation. Even now, the lesser gangs of New York will be moving in on territory previously held by El Cráneo. My empire crumbles around me.”

  “Killing innocent people won’t change any of that,” Bolan told him.

  “No? Perhaps not. But it will make me feel better. And it will make you feel worse, before I kill you both. A man in my position learns to take his pleasures when and where he can.”

  “You’ll never pull it off,” Burnett said. “There are hundreds of people in this building. You don’t have the manpower to get them all, especially once it becomes obvious what you’re doing. Look around you, Taveras! Everything changed with 9/11. People won’t just stand by and be slaughtered. They’ll come at you with everything they’ve got. You’ve got, what, a dozen men left, tops? It’s not enough.”

  “You underestimate me even at the end, Burnett,” Taveras said. Still pointing the gun, he reached with his free hand for the laptop, opening it. The sleep mode deactivated and the screen displayed the program running on the computer. The schematic of a multilevel apartment building was visible. Red blips on the screen moved slightly in key locations on the schematic. Perhaps two hundred other blips, those designated blue, were clustered among the rooms on the computer-generated diagram.

  “What is that?” Burnett asked.

  “This,” Taveras said proudly, “was a little present from Stevens. He sold us much firepower, but also a bit of other technology, now and then. He was very proud of this little device.” Taveras held up a small, pressurized canister. This gas is remarkable. It has no smell. It has no taste. It is invisible. But when it is released into, let us say, the ventilation system of a building like this one, it clings to living flesh and reacts with body heat. It creates a signature that one may track. Stevens told me the technology for the sensor is little different than a cell phone or, in this case, a wireless computer.”

  “Those dots,” Burnett said. “Those are the people in this building.”

  “Yes,” Taveras said. “And the red dots are red because my people each wear these.” The drug lord held up a small electronic disc the size of a penny. “You see? I know where everyone is. I know where my men are. From here, and with this,” Taveras said, tossing the disk aside and bringing out his own cell phone, “I can coordinate their actions. I can kill everyone in this building and see to it no one escapes. I am God here.” He laughed, an edge of hysteria in his voice. “And I am a wrathful god, Burnett!”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Burnett said. “You’re only making it worse for yourself if you get caught. Cut a deal instead. I head the task force—my word carries a lot of weight. There’s another way, Taveras.”

  “Another way?” Taveras scoffed. “In a cage? I do not think so. No, I think the way is revenge. Revenge for the many things you both have taken from me. Revenge for July. Revenge for Jesus, who was stupid but loyal. Revenge for me. You have insulted me. You will not live to tell the story. You will not amuse others with the tale of how you broke Pierre Taveras.”

  Taveras stood. With one foot, he shoved the glass coffee table aside, clearing the space between him and where Burnett and Bolan sat on the couch. Looming over them, he aimed the gun from Burnett to Bolan and back again. “Which of you,” he said, “will die now, and which of you will die later? I find I need only one witness for what we are about to do here. I need very much to kill one of you first. The other can stand by and feel the pain of being helpless to stop my people.”

  “You don’t have to kill innocent civilians,” Bolan said, his voice full of menace. “Don’t do this, Taveras.”

  “Of course I have to!” Taveras said, swinging the gun at Bolan. “What do you think Times Square was for? I must send a message. I must make it clear that I am willing to do anything. I must be feared. Why, this is the start of El Cráneo’s return to power! The city will tremble at the thought of the Skull among them, and they will know that we cannot be stopped. We will—”

  Bolan pushed off the couch with his arms and fired a vicious front kick into Taveras’s shin, which was just within range. There was a snapping sound, and Taveras fell as his leg gave way beneath him. Bolan kicked him again in the face as hard as he could, snapping the drug lord’s head back with an audible crunch. He landed on the corner of the coffee table, the back of his head driving through the edge of the table and shattering the glass top. The computer hit the carpeted floor in a shower of glass.

  Taveras’s eyes rolled up inside his head and he was still.

  Burnett’s jaw dropped.

  Bolan hurried to secure Taveras’s gun. Then he knelt, checked the drug lord’s pulse. Finally, he searched the body, finding a money clip and a few other personal accessories, but nothing else.

  “Is he dead?” Burnett asked.

  Bolan nodded.

  “Can’t say I’m real sorry to hear that,” the detective said.

  “The feeling is mutual,” Bolan said. “Grab the computer and make sure it’s okay. We’ve got work to do.”

  18

  Emilie Taveras was sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the death of her son in the next room. Burnett returned from checking on her and sat down at the kitchen table, where Taveras’s laptop was open and running. He’d found the power cord and connected it. Taveras had apparently been fairly casual about things like battery power remaining.

  Bolan stood behind him and watched as Burnett played with the monitoring program, changing views from room to room. The three-dimensional schematics of the building itself weren’t something Stevens’s sophisticated tracking gas would have been able to provide. The soldier suspected Taveras had to have provided the information somehow, planning all along to use the tools Stevens had given him to create a last line of defense in the one place he was likely to go if everything else went wrong. Taveras had been an egomaniac and an unstable, brutal man, but he had also been quite cunning. He and El Cráneo would not have risen to power, otherwise. It would have been just like Taveras to plot out such an elaborate strategy to protect himself—and to give him the means to strike back, using innocent people as leverage.

  The soldier and the detective
had no choice but to assume that any word of Taveras’s death would trigger a response from the ten men stationed throughout the apartment building. Burnett had Taveras’s cell phone in his pocket. So far no one had called, but either Taveras’s men would check in with him regularly, or the drug lord himself would be expected to call his El Cráneo operatives. It was likely that those in the building knew Burnett and Bolan had come up, for Taveras had not been at all surprised by their entrance. It all added up to falling numbers. They would need to work quickly to avert Taveras’s scheduled massacre.

  Already working in their favor was the fact that the monitoring program could no longer be used to coordinate the attack. Too many people would die, however, if the El Cráneo gunmen simply started shooting. Bolan would not risk that if it could be avoided. There had been too much death already.

  Bolan dialed Burnett’s number from his secure phone, attaching the wireless headset he carried for the device. “Testing,” he said.

  “I’ve got you,” Burnett said, holding his own phone to his ear.

  “And I can hear you loud and clear,” Bolan said. “All right, Burnett. You’re my eyes. Keep talking. I’ll be the red dot that’s moving.” He held up the disk that Taveras had discarded, placing it in a pocket of his blacksuit.

  “I see you on the screen,” Burnett confirmed.

  “Remember that if I answer you I might give away my position,” Bolan warned, “so in most cases just keep telling me what’s happening. Assume I’m listening.”

  “Gotcha,” Burnett said. “Time to clean house.”

  Bolan nodded. He drew the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R, press-checked it and slipped out of the apartment. Burnett watched him go and then turned to the laptop screen, following the moving blip.

  Bolan’s first step was to take the stairs all the way to the lobby level. Taking out the El Cráneo shooters from top to bottom would give those on the ground level more time to become aware of what was happening. They were therefore more likely to escape, if they could, and Bolan could not have them running free in the surrounding area. El Cráneo would die, the threat ended for good. Bolan could not bring back the countless people El Cráneo had killed in their bloody rampages, but he could see to it they never took another life.