“Give me the code,” the Executioner said.

“Give me my final release. It is the only thing I ask.”

“What is the code?”

“Give me your word. What is on that flash drive is time sensitive. Open it in time and you’ll have an intelligence coup that could save lives, perhaps as many lives as I’ve destroyed in my hubris. Take too long and the window closes.”

“How do you know I’ll keep my word once you give me the code?” Bolan countered.

“Faith is all I have left. Give me your word and I’ll give you the code.”

Bolan looked at the former analyst. The man looked back at him. Tears made his eyes look weak and shiny in the unforgiving brightness of the lamp. His head shook with his suppressed emotion.

“Please,” the man whispered.

The Executioner looked at the traitor. He nodded once.

Collision Course
The Executioner™
Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Nathan Meyer for his contribution to this work.

I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

—Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900

The good must have claws—for the battle of good against evil is always fought tooth and nail.

—Mack Bolan

THE MACK BOLAN LEGEND

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

1

Mack Bolan had parked in the shadows under the New Jersey freeway overpass. The low-slung black Honda Prelude had heavily tinted windows and boasted a nitrous-augmented engine. Inside the vehicle the Executioner waited, a cell phone and a silenced Beretta 93-R machine pistol on the seat beside him.

The parking lot was hidden from the major urban arterial by an abandoned factory, its windows broken and graffiti covering its walls in a dozen hues of paint. A sour wind, smelling strongly of the ocean, pushed garbage around the vacant lot.

A scrawny one-eyed dog emerged from the mouth of a secondary alley and trotted across the broken asphalt. It nosed around a refuse pile, then lifted its leg against an overturned garbage can.

Bolan shifted inside the car and the dog’s head came up, the animal wary and feral. It growled low in its throat, then lazily trotted back toward the safety of the alley it had emerged from.

Ten minutes later a silver TrailBlazer with government plates rolled out of the same alley through the chain-link fence and came to a stop beside the Prelude, nose pointed in the opposite direction.

The driver’s window on each car powered down smoothly, and Bolan nodded to the man his old friend Hal Brognola had sent to meet him. The guy was big, with a shaved head and a bristling goatee. Despite the leathers he was wearing, something about the cool appraisal the man gave Bolan screamed “Cop.”

“I’m Danson,” he said in a gravelly voice. “A friend of mine told me to come see you. Said helping you would clean the slate between us. Since I owe the son of a bitch from way back, I came and brought what he asked.”

“What do you have?” Bolan prompted.

Danson lifted a manila envelope from the seat beside him. As he handed it through the open window, Bolan could see the word Hate had been tattooed across the scarred knuckles of the man’s big fist.

The envelope wasn’t very heavy, and Bolan quickly opened the flap to check its contents.

“Robert Scone. Goes by the street name Sideways. Biker thug. Did a stretch in Attica a couple years ago for aggravated assault on his old lady, a dancer named Shayla. Did a pretty good number on her and got three years,” Danson stated.

Bolan grunted and gently shook the contents of the envelope out into his lap. There was a stack of photocopied sheets held together by a paper clip, a police rap sheet from the City of Newark and a blowup of an official mug shot. There was also a pint plastic bowl with a sealed lid. When Bolan held it up he saw the pink of ground hamburger and two horse pills filled with white powder. He looked at Danson.

“Read on,” Danson said. “You’ll figure it out. Anyway, Sideways was connected to the Outlaws motorcycle gang as a prospect member when he went into Attica. Inside he made his bones against the Black Gangsta Disciples. Typical swastika-wearing bullshit.”

Bolan placed the plastic container beside his Beretta and held up the mug shot picture. He let his gaze roam across the photograph, memorizing every detail. His eyes flicked to the information typed beneath the snapshot. Sideways was a big man, six-five and 260 pounds at the time of incarceration. His priors included a DUI, simple assault, several counts of possession of a controlled substance and domestic violence.

“After he made his bones,” Danson continued, “he got serious about his career as a criminal. When he got out, he freelanced as muscle for a couple of the Jersey syndicates, arson for hire, collections, extortion, that sort of thing.”

Bolan nodded and slid the picture to the bottom of the pile of paperwork he held. He scanned down the page until he found the annotation for Scone’s current address. He memorized it.

“The organized-crime squad put some of their confidential informants in his path and started hearing that Sideways was making a rep for himself as a real gunslinger, hijacking freight trucks and teamsters coming out of the Newark airport.”

“They nab him?” Bolan asked.

“Yes and no. A cigarette truck on its way into the city gets nabbed. The Newark police finger our man Sideways and do a takedown on the address I just gave you there.”

“He was holding?”

“No. No cigarettes, nothing to connect him to the heist. Still, it looks like they got him on a parole violation because the team found some crystal meth and a handgun in the house.”

At the mention of handgun Bolan looked up. He knew where Danson was going now and realized why Brognola had organized the meet with the undercover cop.

“So he’s cooling his heels in lockup?”

“No. His girlfriend, Shayla, took the rap. Copped to it, said both were hers.”

“Shayla? The girl he beat up?”

“Same one. A regular Romeo and Juliet, this pair. Only Shayla has a prior herself. A pandering charge that went to probation she got while the love of her life, Sideways, was upstate in prison.”

“So she’s in jail now?”

“Exactly, Sideways is drinking beer and screwing her little sister as we speak at the address that’s in his file.”

“And the handgun Newark copped on the raid?” Bolan asked. The question was rhetorical.

“An HS 2000 Croatian pistol,” Danson confirmed.

Bolan nodded curtly. His finger found the button on the armrest of his car door and he began to power up the window.

“Looks like I need to pay our friend Sideways a little visit,” he said.

“You tell Hal we’re square now.”

Bolan nodded before the window went up and then pushed the accelerator down on his car. Within a minute he had connected to the arterial and was gunning it across the overpass above his rendezvous site.

Jersey Shore

BOLAN LEFT THE CAR behind and merged with the night.

Sideways had made it easy for him. Or rather Shayla had. The house was surprisingly isolated. She’d taken her money from dancing and put it into a rundown, one-story Cape Cod overlooking the shore. It had been a fixer-upper with potential when she’d made the down payment on the house, but nothing had been improved and Sideways obviously wasn’t the handyman type. Now the little white house merely looked shabby, with a weed-choked lawn and three Harley panheads parked under the lean-to that served as a garage.

Bolan moved up from the trees along the road, his movement masked by the droning of the cicadas and the sound of night surf battering the gray sand forty feet behind the old house.

Low lights were on in the house behind drawn shades, and the hard riffs of Metallica bled out through the closed windows and doors. The volume was surprisingly subdued given the biker stereotype.

Bolan, dressed in a blacksuit, crouched in the tall weeds at the edge of the yard. A massive pit bull was curled up on the front steps. It made soft snuffling noises as it slept. From where Bolan knelt the animal looked upward of eighty pounds of solid muscle. The soldier carefully unbuttoned the flap of the cargo pocket on his right pants leg and pulled out the plastic container Danson had given him and opened it.

Bolan took the two horse pills that had come with the meat and pried them apart, one after the other, and gently sprinkled their contents into the hamburger. Once he had spilled the tranquilizer powder into the meat he rolled it into a ball and held it loosely in his right hand.

He checked the wind coming in off the ocean, felt it push into his face. Satisfied, Bolan rose out of the weeds like a liquid shadow and lobbed the meatball in an arc over the thirty yards toward the front door of the one-story house.

The hamburger hit the walkway in front of the stairs with a muted little splat, and Bolan instantly folded himself back down into the weeds. The pit bull got to its feet in the blink of an eye, and Bolan could hear its deep-throated growl clearly. It sounded like the idling engines of one of the Harleys parked in the lean-to behind it.

The guard dog descended the wooden stair on stiffened legs, back hair bristling and teeth bared. Bolan remained motionless, draped in the night.

The dog suddenly stopped growling. Bolan saw the beast’s snout suddenly shift as it caught the scent of the meat. Again the dog moved almost too fast to see, lunging forward and snapping up the ball of raw hamburger in a single chomp.

The dog worked the food around in its mouth, then swallowed it. With a last, suspicious glare into the night, it turned its nose and returned to the porch. It curled up again and went to sleep.

Bolan counted off the minutes on his wristwatch. He watched the dog’s breathing first slow, then lengthen and deepen until he was sure the animal was securely drugged. Confident, Bolan rose and ghosted across the lawn toward the back of the house. The silenced Beretta was out from its shoulder holster and ready in his hands as he came up alongside the building.

He crept forward and reached a window, its blind not fully drawn. He stopped at the edge and slowly bent at the knees and lowered his body until he could peek under the shade and into the house through the dirty window.

Empty beer bottles were lined up on the end table four deep. Just beyond them he saw flickering images on a TV screen. A bed was positioned in front of the TV and Bolan recognized the woman on it from the file Danson had given him as Sheila, Shayla’s younger sister and Sideways’s current girlfriend. She was so skinny Bolan thought the pit bull might have outweighed her.

She opened her mouth and released the rubber tubing held between her teeth. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she pulled the empty hypodermic from her arm.

Grim-faced, Bolan turned away and continued toward the rear of the house. He cut through the lean-to, past the panheads and came around the corner where the smell of the sea was even stronger. He eased up to the screened-in back porch and took stock of the situation. Two men sat at a kitchen table drinking beer and shaking their heads in time to the music coming out of a boom box CD player on the counter next to a sink piled high with dirty dishes.

Bolan scrutinized the men through the open screen door. He recognized Sideways immediately. The man’s gorilla arms hung from a cut-up flannel shirt and swirled with prison tats. A spiderweb had been tattooed on his elbow. The other guy was wearing an oil-stained sleeveless red T-shirt with an Aerosmith decal on the front. His long hair was held back in a ponytail. He was small only when compared to the massive Sideways.

A piece of glass, a double-edged razor blade and a generous mound of white powder were sitting on the table between the men. There was also a pistol. Bolan narrowed his eyes and took in the details of the handgun. It was a Croatian HS 2000.

The shorter man said something and Sideways snorted with laughter. He turned his head and called something out over his shoulder, obviously meant for the woman Bolan had seen dosing herself in the bedroom. When he got no answer, the frustrated biker stood abruptly, obviously pissed off, and stalked out through the kitchen doorway toward the front of the house. The second biker laughed to himself, then polished off his beer. He set down the empty and crossed the kitchen toward the refrigerator. As he bent to reach in and snatch up a full bottle of beer, he heard the screen door slam behind him. He straightened, a puzzled expression on his face as he turned.

Bolan stood before him.

“Who the fu—?” the man began.

Bolan slammed the butt of the stolen HS 2000 downward, and the end of the magazine cracked the biker across the nose. The big man crumpled at the knees and went down. A gash opened up across the bridge of his nose and spilled blood across his face.

Stunned, the biker rolled his eyes up and looked at the nightmare figure looming over him. Bolan slapped the muzzle of the pistol across the man’s jaw, snapping his head to the side. With his face turned up like an offering, Bolan quickly snapped the Croatian handgun back then drove it forward, slamming the butt into the man’s temple and putting his lights out.

Without uttering a word, the unconscious biker bounced off the fridge door and fell face-first onto the dirty kitchen floor. Bolan produced a pair of hinge-style handcuffs from his back pocket and quickly secured the man’s hands behind his broad back. He could hear heavy footfalls approaching the kitchen from the front of the house, so he quickly moved beside the doorjamb.

Sideways stopped cold, incredulous shock stamped on his face, when he almost tripped over the unconscious and handcuffed body of his buddy lying on the floor.

Bolan stepped out and drove the muzzle of the HS 2000 Croatian pistol into the big man’s solar plexus. Sideways grunted and folded like a cheap card table. As he went down, Bolan’s knee came up and clipped him hard on the point of his chin.

Stunned by the second blow, Sideways flopped over on his back, hitting the dirty linoleum hard as he went down. In an instant Bolan was on him, shoving the gun into his face and pinning him to the floor with his other hand wrapped around the man’s neck. Sideways’s eyelids fluttered as he fought to regain his composure after the brutal ambush.

The Executioner’s voice was like a cold wind through a high mountain pass as he spoke.

“I’m going to ask you some questions about where you got this pistol,” Bolan said. “And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”

2

The squalid little Boston bar sat quiet and dark, caught between rundown residential neighborhoods on one side and the sprawling industrial wasteland surrounding a factory park on the other side.

The business was the kind of place that accepted food stamps and cashed welfare checks. On the first and fifteenth of every month it was a pretty lively place. It was early in the morning now, and the last of the homeless had been chased from the alleyway behind the one-story building. The tired old neon beer signs in the grimy front windows were turned off.

The only lights inside the tavern emanated from the crack beneath the door to the combination office and storage room in the back, just across from the entrance to the walk-in cooler. Muffled voices and sounds seeped out through the cheap wood along with the bar of pale yellow light.

Inside the room, against the far wall, crates of liquor devoid of tax stamps and cases of hijacked beer were stacked toward where Frankie Bonanno kept his desk, which was piled high with invoices, shipping recipes and defunct tax forms. A cheap accountant’s calculator sat on the desktop next to an overflowing ashtray where a cigar smoldered.

Next to the ashtray was a lady’s compact mirror with coke residue smeared across the glass and a sticky razor blade. Beside the mirror was a HS 2000 Compact Croatian handgun.

Just like Robert Scone, Frankie Bonanno was a big man. His forearms and shoulders were huge and hard from his time working the docks and cracking skulls. He was equally comfortable behind the controls of a forklift or swinging a sawed-off Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The knuckles on his hands had been broken so many times they were huge and misshapen.

His thin, greasy hair was swept back and plastered into place with the liberal use of gel in a vain attempt to cover an emerging bald spot the size of a tea saucer. His ruddy, acne-scarred complexion matched his alcoholic’s broken-veined nose. His pig eyes were scrunched tightly in pleasure as the skinny blond woman’s head bobbed up and down in his lap.

Suddenly the door to the office swung open in a swift arc and a living shadow rushed into the room. There was a whirl of dark fabric as a black overcoat came open and the masked specter’s arms snaked out. The gloved hands were filled with deadly technology.

One hand swept downward and leveled a sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R on the huddled form of the cowering blonde. The left hand swung out from the intruder’s coat and tracked straight onto the fat jowls and flabby chest of Frankie Bonanno.

Behind his mask Mack Bolan smiled.

There was a small mechanical click as Bolan’s finger depressed the trigger on the stun gun and twin electrode darts fired out and hammered into Frankie Bonanno. There was a crackle as 2,000,000 volts sizzled into the big mobster. Immediately the sickly sweet stench of charred flesh filled the cramped little room.

Bonanno’s shriek of pain morphed into a choking gurgle as he began to spasm and jerk in his seat, pants still down around his thick, hairy ankles. Blue bolts of electricity arced from the fillings in his teeth in an uncanny effect that produced a mouthful of fire.

Bolan hit the juice again and pushed another charge into the mobster.

The fat man looked up and saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth. Then there was a pause, two heartbeats long, as Bonanno slumped helpless in his chair.

Bolan turned his balaclava-covered face toward the cowering woman. “Get out,” he ordered.

The woman looked up at the Executioner in stunned disbelief. Mob hitters were not known for compassion, and she clearly suspected some trick.

“I said get out!” Bolan snapped.

This time she did not hesitate. The woman scrambled to her feet and scurried to the door.

From the chair Frankie Bonanno lifted his head, still confused by the events unfolding around him.

“Who are—?” he began.

“Shut up,” Bolan snapped. He pressed the cold muzzle of his Beretta against the oiled expanse of Bonanno’s forehead. “If you so much as twitch I’ll splatter your brains across the wall.”

Frankie Bonanno froze. The mobster was deeply afraid. When the masked gunman had burst through the door, his first thought had been the Feds. But one man did not make up a SWAT team, federal or otherwise. A lone man meant a freelancer, and if that was true then Frankie wondered why he was still alive.

Bonanno watched as the figure in black pulled a pistol from behind his back. The handgun was identical to the weapon already sitting on the desk, a factory-new Croatian HS 2000 pistol. The man dropped it with a clatter that shattered the overflowing ashtray and spilled cigarette butts across the desk and onto the floor.

The man dropped something smaller onto the desk between the two HS 2000 pistols. It was the size of a quarter and when Bonanno saw it lying there, an involuntary groan escaped him. His eyes showed sullen fear as they moved from the microprocessor chip on the desk back up to the intruder looming above him.

“Three months.” Bolan said, voice harsh. “Three months ago a six-man team took down the supply dock of Las-Tech in Jersey. They got away with a shipment of chips just like that one. Chips that can run the supercomputers needed to control the centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, say in Iran. Microprocessors sophisticated enough to turn scud missiles into guided munitions.”

“I—I—” Bonanno’s mouth worked uselessly as he tried to force his brain to come up with some lie that might save his life.

“Then suddenly a capo in Palermo has those same microchips on the open market and they go to an arms dealer in Bosnia, then multiple loads of Croatian pistols start flowing back through Palermo out of Sarajevo and into Jersey. And look, you happen to have one.”

“Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Croatia,” Bonanno muttered.

Bolan stepped forward and cracked the butt of his Beretta across the mobster’s face. His nose exploded and sprayed blood. His hand flew out and struck the open bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey sitting on the desk and knocked it over. Amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle and began to spread across the desk.

“You think I need geography lessons from you?” Bolan asked, his voice flat. “Next time you get funny I put a bullet in your kneecap.”

“I don’t know anything—”

Frankie Bonanno’s denial was cut short by the cough of the silenced Beretta in Bolan’s hand. The slug slammed into the armrest of the mobster’s chair, shattering wood with a sharp crack and driving splinters into the man’s beefy arm.

Bonanno howled in agony.

Bolan stepped in close and leveled his pistol against Bonanno’s broken, mashed nose.

“The name. Who facilitated the transfer through the Palermo capo and into Sarajevo?” Bolan’s voice was soft.

Bonanno rolled his eyes toward the shiny, factory-new HS 2000 sitting on the desk just a few feet away, he knew it would do him no good. He inhaled breath through his pain and began to talk.

“Some guy,” Bonanno said. “Got a Polack name or something. Taterczynski. Peter Taterczynski.”

“How is he connected? Where does he work from?” Bolan fired his questions hard and fast, keeping the other man off balance.

“He’s international, that’s all I know. He used the Palermo capo because he wants a screen between himself and primarie’s when it comes to operating in the States. The capo told my crew what to take, on spec.”

“The microprocessors.”

Bonanno nodded. “The microprocessors. Like I can move tech on my own? I deal in auto parts and cigarettes.”

“So straight trade. Armed heist for tech you can’t move in exchange for pistols you can.”

“Yeah, basically.”

“All set up by this player out of Sarajevo, Taterczynski?”

“Yeah, the Polack. But everything went through the Palermo capo’s guy. A lieutenant, really scary dude name Paolini.”

Bolan looked over at the desk where Bonanno’s cell phone sat in the middle of the guns and the mess.

“You talk to this ‘really scary’ dude named Paolini on that phone?”

Bonanno nodded, his eyes hooded. They shifted past Bolan and suddenly he jerked upward toward the desk just as the hinges on the door behind them squeaked as it was thrown open.

Bolan caught a flash of motion as he shifted and twisted hard and felt the jerking tug of a knife blade catch in the tough polymer fibers of his Kevlar vest.

The soldier grunted in surprise as he reacted. It was the woman, back for some mad reason of her own and trying to save her tormentor in the vain hope of future favors. The knife in her hand was a big bladed kitchen utensil with a serrated edge, and she clearly aimed to kill Bolan with it.

The Executioner grabbed the overextended woman by the tangled hair at the back of her head and flung her hard to the ground. Frankie Bonanno was in motion, rising out of his seat and grasping for the butt of his loaded HS 2000 with a sweat-soaked hand. Bolan stepped forward and lashed out with one big, strong leg.

The heel of his low-cut boot ground against the mobster’s wrist with an audible crunch on impact. The woman struggled to her feet, shrieking in rage, and threw herself at the black-clad intruder. Bolan drove his elbow backward into her soft belly and tossed her against the office wall. She slid down to the floor, her eyes rolling backward into her head. Bolan snapped his head back around as Bonanno reached for the HS 2000 pistol on his desk.

Bolan pivoted at the waist and fired three single shots into the fat man, pinning him to the seat, the Croatian pistol held uselessly in the man’s uninjured hand. Frankie convulsed as his lungs deflated and the Croatian handgun discharged into his desk. Bonanno’s eyes fluttered, and then a trickle of bright blood bubbled over his quivering lip and dribbled onto his chin.

Purposefully Bolan crossed to the desk and began to jerk open drawers. Casually he swept the mess on the desktop onto the floor. When the police came, they could make the link between the stolen tech and the smuggled pistols. Bolan would be several thousand miles ahead of any local investigation by the time they finished putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

He pocketed the dead man’s cell phone, a virtual treasure trove of information, Bolan knew. Inside the desk he found a locked metal box. He swept up the container and smashed it against the edge of the desk, busting the cheap lock. Inside he found several grams of cocaine and two grand in worn twenties and fifties.

He stuffed the money into a pocket to add to his war chest. He turned and made for the office door, stepping over the sprawled form of the unconscious woman. He doubted if anyone outside would have heard the pistol shot, or that they would call the police if they had. Despite that it was sloppy fieldwork to tempt luck and Mack Bolan had not survived this long by being sloppy.

Bolan jerked the balaclava from his head as he stepped out the back door of the bar and into the alley. He moved forward, folding his black overcoat around him like a protective cloak of shadows. He navigated the filthy alley at a brisk pace and turned out onto a narrow street two blocks from the tavern.

He used his pocket remote to disengage the alarm on the black Prelude and it chirped once in response. He opened the door and slid into the vehicle.

Behind him the ocean mist swirled and crept along the littered ground as the Executioner sped away into the night.

3

Palermo, Italy

Bolan left the Palermo capo slumped dead across his desk and pocketed the flash drive that contained the information implicating Peter Taterczynski. As he exited the office, he could hear a pack of mafiosi approaching from the other direction. Bolan sprinted down the hallway, his Beretta 93-R clenched in his fist.

Behind him Bolan could hear the bodyguards closing in. A bullet screamed past his ear and smacked into the wall next to him. A heartbeat later he heard a chorus of pistol reports.

Bolan turned a corner in the hallway and bypassed the elevator banks in favor of the fire stairs. It hadn’t been Paolini who had fired, he knew. Paolini wouldn’t have missed.

The big American burst through the fire door and sprinted at breakneck speed down the stairs of the office building, stopping at each landing to vault the railing down to the next level of stairs. He had purposefully chosen the east wing of the building as his escape route, knowing it would be deserted and minimizing the chance that innocents would be caught in any cross fire.

Bolan was three floors down by the time his pursuers hit the stairwell. One of the thugs leaned over the railing and loosed a 3-round burst from his HS 2000 automatic pistol at Bolan’s retreating form.

Paolini barked an angry warning to his subordinate and reached out to pull him back from the railing. The man came away easily, his head jerking sharply from an unseen impact. The back of his skull erupted, spraying the other six gunmen with blood and brain and bits of bone.

“Fool!” Paolini snarled.

Furious, the Mob lieutenant jumped past the corpse of his soldier, the other thugs following his lead. Their speed was now marked with a certain caution that bordered on outright hesitancy.

THREE FLOORS BENEATH THEM Bolan ran on. The time would come to kill Paolini, but for now he had to escape to advance his operation. He had his eyes set on something bigger than a recently deceased Palermo capo with international influence; Bolan would pursue the Sarajevo connection and the possibility of an American traitor.

He barreled down the stairs to the fifth floor, where he abandoned the stairwell in favor of the door leading into the warren of halls that was the east wing.

The building itself had served the Palermo capo with a veneer of legitimacy, housing the offices of his credit union, construction firm, as well as his shipping and air-freight operations. When Bolan had agreed to meet the kingpin there, he knew full well he was walking into a trap.

Halfway down the hall Bolan came to a four-way intersection. He paused, weighing his options—flight or ambush?

Bolan smiled; Paolini was vain. He thought he knew all the tricks, but Paolini was just a pup for all of his violent accomplishments. It was the Executioner who was the master of hounds.

PAOLINI WASN’T the first gunner through the door.

Two of his men, Yeats and Delgaro, entered first. Yeats came in high and on the right, swinging forward with his HS 2000 Croatian pistol and laying down a hailstorm of covering fire. The weapon jumped and kicked in his hand, scattering hot shell casings onto the floor.

Delgaro was the low man, his own pistol poised to provide supporting fire. A thunderous silence echoed along the hallway as their prey neglected to return fire.

“He’s gone rabbit!” Delgaro said.

He pointed down the corridor toward the intersection of hallways.

Yeats’s face split into a smile, his teeth blunt and very white against the darker complexion of his skin. He put a finger to his lips to silence his partner and pointed. Paolini came through the doorway and peered over Yeats’s shoulder. He looked down the hall to where the subordinate was indicating.

“You better be right,” he whispered, his lips close to the man’s ear. “Now slide on up to that corner and take a look, little sister.”

Yeats bristled at Paolini’s mocking tone. The capo’s lieutenant was always testing the crew, establishing his dominance in little ways, pushing them to see if they would snap or if he could provoke emotion. It didn’t matter to him that each man had made his bones with the organization a dozen times over before being promoted to the capo’s bodyguard. Paolini was never satisfied, and with his minutes-old promotion to the top slot, Yeats knew it wasn’t likely to get any better.

Yeats sighed and began to move forward, clearing the corner with Delgaro, using rudimentary but practical tactics. Unlike Paolini, none of the other hitters had formal military training, only street experience. Still, the men had picked up a lot as targets of Italian anti-Mafia government raiders.

Yeats’s head exploded like an overripe melon.

Dellavechia and Montenegro died in the next second. Delgaro screamed in fear and flung himself down to his belly on the blood-slick linoleum floor. Behind him Paolini grabbed up Yeats’s falling corpse and swung it around to use as a shield.

A hitter named Vincenetti had time to turn, dropping low in a combat crouch and swinging around on one knee, his HS 2000 pistol outfitted with a laser sight that burned down the hall, tracking for a target.

Vincenetti saw the black-clad form of the crazy bastard who’d dropped the Palermo capo in his own building. The Italian gunman lined up the sights of his handgun and his finger flexed around the plastic-alloy curve of his Croatian pistol. He had the bastard.

Vincenetti was too slow, and Paolini had another corpse at his feet. An untidy third eye blossomed in Vincenetti’s forehead.

Delgaro was sweating, pressed flat against the floor and panting in fear. Their adversary had gunned down four experienced killers in the blink of an eye.

For the first time since the hunt had begun, Delgaro thought about just running. He no longer cared if the kill was personal. Screw avenging the capo, screw pride and screw honor. He just wanted to live, goddammit.

“Get up!” Paolini snarled at the prostrate man.

Delgaro looked up, and Paolini pushed the bullet-riddled corpse of Yeats away from him. It fell to the linoleum floor with a wet slap like a bag of loose meat. Delgaro realized that as terrified as he was of the apparition that had brought hell to Palermo, he was still frightened of his lieutenant.

He scrambled to his feet, following Paolini down the hall to the elevators, trusting the ex-Foreign legionnaire’s instincts. Delgaro had never seen anything like the ambush before in his life, not ever and not even close. Even the Chechens didn’t kill like that and they were fucking crazy, he knew.

DELGARO TURNED toward Paolini where he had paused at the elevators.

“Those are service elevators. They’ll take him all the way down into the underground parking lot or even the storage basement. He may have gone there,” Paolini explained. He looked around, his HS 2000 pistol up and ready. “Or he could still be on this floor. We should split up.”

“Maybe it would be better if—” Delgado began.

Paolini looked at the other man, cutting him off. “You take the elevator—I’ll check out this level.”

Delgaro swallowed, trying to get hold of himself. He had survived some hairy plays, including pulling weapons for drugs deals with the crazy Chechens. He could be cool. It just wasn’t every day he saw five top gunners go down. It wasn’t every day he faced an old-fashioned cowboy.

“Right,” he forced himself to say and nodded.

Delgaro ejected his old magazine and slapped a fresh one home. He turned toward the elevator, well aware the mystery killer in black could be in there, waiting.

He resisted the urge to tell Paolini to cover him; it was obvious the man would, he hoped. Delgaro was a pro at urban close-quarters battle. His knowledge had been earned right out on the Palermo streets surrounding this very building.

Delgaro slid up next to the elevator doors and pressed his back tightly against the wall. He looked across the lobby and saw Paolini positioned directly opposite the elevator doors, down on one knee with his HS 2000 held steady in both hands.

Keeping his own pistol up, Delgaro used the thumb of his left hand to punch the control button on the wall, opening the elevator doors. They slid open with a hydraulic hiss and he dived onto his shoulder, rolling across his back to land flat on his stomach in front of the opening. His HS 2000 was tensed in his hand, ready to explode in violent action.

Behind him Paolini tensed so suddenly he almost seemed to flinch, coming very close to accidentally triggering his weapon.

The elevator car was empty.

Paolini relaxed as Delgaro straightened.

“All right,” the brand-new capo growled. “Check out the basement below us. I’ll call my guy on the force and get some cops who are part of our thing to respond. I’ll look out up here—we’ve got to keep him in the building. Now go.”

“You get that backup.” Delgaro nodded.

The mafioso stepped into the elevator. His last image before the doors closed was of Paolini’s angular face, tightly smiling and impossible to read. Paolini’s a cobra, Delgaro realized. Just a poisonous reptile.

Delgaro didn’t see the hatch on the elevator ceiling slide open, nor did he hear the slight popping of joints as the Executioner straightened his arm out, his deadly Beretta in a steady hand.

Delgaro moved to one side and pressed himself flat against the side of the elevator, his pistol up and ready in hands slick with sweat. He wasn’t about to be caught like a rabbit out of its hole when those doors slid open.

The elevator bell rang as the car settled. There was the familiar slight hiss of air as the doors unsealed and slid open. The discreet cough of the Beretta was lost in those sounds.

The mobster’s head smacked up against the elevator wall. A ragged hole appeared in his temple, and the other side of his head cracked open and sprayed his brains out. The mafioso gunner slid down to crumple on the floor, a trail of crimson smeared on the wall behind him. The pistol fell out of his slack fingers and bounced off the floor.

Mack Bolan had just done what the Chechens had never been able to do.

4

If pressed, Stephen Caine couldn’t pinpoint when things had begun to fall apart. Not just the gradual erosion of his personal life, but the future of the entire country grew bleaker by the day as his anger and bitterness consumed him.

It was a lot like Chinese water torture, Caine decided. Just this slow drip, drip, drip that built up over time until each drop felt like a ball-peen hammer and sounded like thunder. Every day something else happened, another loss, a fresh insult, and his frustration had become intolerable.

Things started happening and he couldn’t really remember doing them, not fully anyway. He didn’t black out, but he operated on autopilot for so much of the day that decisions he made on the edge of sleep would be fully formed and operational plans by the time the morning came around. On his own, he felt helpless to act. A majority of the people who actually made the effort to vote had chosen wrong, had bought into the bullshit and the spin machine and now everything was spiraling out of control.

Caine set the empty shot glass of bourbon on the bar and eased down a few swallows of his Bud Light to cool the burning in the pit of his stomach. He knew he was a cliché. Strangely, that realization really didn’t make him feel any better.

The bar was working class, which he definitely wasn’t, but slumming made him feel better. His father would have been right at home here, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and downing bourbon like water while watching the flickering images of sports on the TV above the bar. Caine had learned everything he believed about politics by listening to what his father said and then doing the opposite.

A talking head on the TV was explaining why collateral damage wasn’t the same as those killed by deliberate acts of terrorism. The bartender moved over and took Caine’s empty shot glass. She was forty and skinny and tired. She had a plain face and a smoker’s squint. Caine had forgotten her name.

“You want another shot?” she asked.

“Let me ask you something,” Caine said.

She looked down the bar at the handful of other customers to see if they were happy. Once she decided they were fine she turned back toward Caine. Her eyes were green.

“What’s that?”

“You know what the electoral college is for?”

“You think you’re funny? You think I’m stupid ’cause I tend bar so you can ask me these questions then laugh at me?”

Caine blinked in surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting that wasn’t it.

“No,” he answered her. “I don’t think that. I was using the question as a lead-in, more of a rhetorical thing, so I could pontificate. You know, like drunks are supposed to do.”

The bartender looked at Caine, evaluating him. She picked up the empty shot glass and placed it in the steel-lined sink behind the bar.

“Fine,” she said. “The electoral college are the ones who actually cast the votes for the President, right? They look at the popular vote for their state, then cast the votes of their electoral college for the person who won the popular vote.”

“But they don’t have to,” Caine said. He was starting to feel the bourbon now.

This caught the woman by surprise, and she gave him a look like he was trying to be sly.

“No, it’s true.” Caine laughed. “They are free to cast the electoral votes for whomever they wish. They don’t, by law, have to cast them for whoever wins the popular vote.”

“That true?” she asked.

Caine smiled up at her. “Pour me another good one, if you please.” He slid a twenty across the bar, and the bartender smoothly went through her motions. “Supposedly it’s because of demagogues,” he continued.

He slid the hard liquor down his throat with a smooth, practiced motion. He reflected that there was a handgun in his car. He didn’t believe in guns, not anymore, but it was there, in the trunk. There was no way Charisa would ever have let it into the house, but Charisa wasn’t there anymore. He’d lost his wife and gained a gun.

How great was that?

Of course he didn’t have the house anymore, either. The settlement had been very clear; they split the house right down the middle. Didn’t much matter that the slimeball lawyer she’d left him for had a sprawling ranch-style twice the size of their old fixer-upper.

“Why?” the bartender repeated.

“What?” Caine blinked up at her.

“Why demagogues?” She sounded exasperated. “You were talking about the electoral college, remember?”

Caine gave her a dour smile and shrugged. The bartender snorted and dismissed him, moving down the bar. Someone came into the bar from the outside, and Caine realized it had started to rain.

He left a good tip by way of apology and headed out the door. Outside the rain turned everything gray. He couldn’t stop thinking about Charisa, about everything he’d lost.

He would never get her back, he knew. Would never get back his Army buddies who’d fallen in Mogadishu, either. Or his brother, Justin, who’d joined the Marines and never came back from Iraq.

But if Stephen Caine couldn’t get justice, he’d get revenge.

Someone would pay.

5

Vincent Paolini had held everything he’d ever wanted in his hands before he lost it all. He’d worked his way out of his childhood of rural poverty and to the university at Naples on a soccer scholarship. His soccer playing had been good enough to make old men cry and present him with an unending parade of female admirers.

But if blood could tell, then it told in Vincent Paolini’s case.

He was the son of a fifth-generation made man, and he’d learned in the cradle that anyone who pissed off a Paolini had to pay. He’d beaten an American sailor to death in the waterfront bar of Ravenna with a pool cue. Just like that his future as a European professional soccer player had disappeared.

He’d fled, and his friends had covered for him enough to obstruct the investigation. He joined the Spanish foreign legion, the lesser known refuge of rogues and desperate men than the French version, but just as brutal and just as elite.

He’d done three years in the Spanish legion while memories in Italy faded. He’d hunted the Taliban in Afghanistan, served as peacekeeper in Bosnia and in Liberia. He’d been trained as a light infantry commando and had been in dozens of firefights.

During that time his father, now an old man retired to his vineyards and dog breeding, appealed to the Palermo capo. In return for certain services, the capo had promised to use his influence to bury the investigation of the American sailor’s death.

Paolini had killed three people, two men, one a World War II veteran, and a woman to clear his debt. By that time he’d found he had a flair for the Family business and he’d risen to the position of the capo’s right-hand man.

Now, thanks to the mystery hitter, Vincent Paolini was the Palermo capo. Right now the Palermo capo felt something he thought he’d put behind him in the mountains of Afghanistan: fear.

He was afraid he’d gotten cocky, telling himself that despite the smooth ambush the mystery killer had pulled off, Paolini was still the better killer.

Had he been wrong?

He’d just seen five hardened killers gunned down in less than ten minutes. He hadn’t seen carnage on that scale since he’d witnessed the ethnic cleansing in Africa as a legionnaire. The guy was good, Paolini admitted. But, dammit, he was better—he had to believe that.

He had to.

BOLAN’S MUSCLES STRAINED and jumped beneath his skin as he climbed handover-hand up the elevator shaft, clinging to the thick cables like a spider to its web. He’d sent the elevator up a few floors, pressing multiple buttons so that the passenger car would stop at every floor in between. Once the elevator was in motion, Bolan had pried open the shaft doors and begun his journey upward. He hoped the ruse would give him enough time to hunt down and catch an angle on Paolini.

He knew that common sense told him to take his information and run. The Palermo capo’s operation had been thrown into disarray, and Bolan had what he needed to move up the food chain toward his ultimate prize. The payoff was bigger if Stony Man exploited the information he’d obtained than if he killed a single Italian Mob lieutenant.

But he was going to do it anyway.

PAOLINI STOOD IN THE SHADOWS and watched the elevator going up, plotting its progress by the lighted numerals above the doors. The lift had stopped on his floor, and the doors slid open to reveal nothing more than Delgaro’s bloody corpse. The doors slid shut again and the elevator rose. When it finally halted, Paolini had recalled it and, stepping inside, had quickly pushed the button to send the elevator all the way back down before stepping out.

All the way down to the basement.

He snickered. If the mystery gunman was doing what Paolini suspected, then he’d be squashed flatter than a bug under his heel. That is a sign of old age, Paolini thought, predictability. In their business, the business of professional killers, that was a fatal flaw. In the future Paolini intended to make sure he didn’t make the same mistakes.

BOLAN LOOKED UP as he heard the elevator kick into life, and he knew he had mistimed his trick. It was a potentially fatal mistake, but he’d known the risk when he played his gambit and he was prepared to live or die by his instincts.

He scrambled up the service ladder set into the shaft. Above him the bottom of the elevator smoothly powered down toward him. He was in a race, climbing against the clock, and now time had run out. He’d tried to play Paolini for a fool and had been off by a good thirty seconds.

That could prove to be a lifetime.

Realizing he would have to climb faster if he wanted to make it, Bolan stopped to replace his Beretta in his shoulder holster. His right hand slid the muzzle of the weapon into the sling as his left wrapped around the rung just above his head.

The metal rung was covered in some cold, slimy fluid. Perhaps it was maintenance oil or some other service fluid; in the dim light Bolan couldn’t tell. His hand slid off the slick metal, surprising him, and he overbalanced. His hands flung outward and one foot slipped off the rung below him. As he scratched for purchase his pistol fell away.

Darkness enveloped him as he fell, bouncing off the walls of the elevator shaft. His hands reached out to grasp the rungs of the service ladder. His sudden stop pushed him roughly up against the sheer metal wall again, forcing air from his lungs. His head slammed forward and his lip was split against the steel ladder.

The agony was a sharp, sudden shock and his tenuous grip weakened and then slipped. He fell backward down the shaft for a second time. His leg was jerked cruelly in its socket and he came to a brutally abrupt halt, his ankle twisted in one of the rungs.

Hot spears of pain lanced through his leg and muscles and tendons shrieked in protest at the tension.

Above him the elevator raced down.

Bolan reached up with one strong hand to pull himself back up. His face was sticky with blood from his nose, and his lips were bloody and swollen as he fought to regain control of his breath.

Bolan fought himself up into a vertical position. Standing on the ladder, favoring one leg, he stretched out a blood-smeared hand and pried his fingers into the rubber buffer curtain set between the floor-level doors.

The muscles along his back and shoulders bunched under the strain. With a final desperate exertion, the top half of the fingernail on his middle finger was ripped away, but the doors came open under his grip.

He looked up. The bottom of the elevator was in plain sight, rushing down toward his upturned face. Bolan tensed then sprang off the ladder rung, reaching out for the opening. He scrambled through the opening just as the elevator filled the space directly above him.

Adrenaline shot through his body, and Bolan found the desperate strength he needed to live. He pulled himself through the opening just as the elevator dropped past him. He had made it.

PAOLINI STRUCK the Executioner like a runaway locomotive, driving him back into the open shaft. Their momentum was greater than the elevator’s and they hit the roof of the carrier hard. They fell like squabbling cats, punching and striking at each other as they dropped.

In the split second before they smashed into the elevator roof, Bolan managed to twist his enemy beneath him so that he landed on top of the capo. Paolini kicked his adversary away from him, knocking him back across the elevator roof to the other side of the lift. Bolan rebounded off the wall of the shaft and bounced forward to his knees before coiling and leaping to his feet.

Both men sprang forward and, locked together, they struggled as the elevator descended to the basement.

When Bolan had been in the Army, he’d undergone training in defense against attack dogs. The premise had been as simple as it was brutally effective. You gave the animal an arm, knowing it would be bit, then the free arm came down like a bar and wrapped around the back of the dog’s head where the skull met spine. The man then fell forward and the beast’s neck snapped like a stick of rotten wood.

Bolan’s arms broke the clinch and one forearm pressed hard against the Italian’s face. His other arm slid into place behind the man’s neck, right where the skull met the spine. He began to push.

Paolini could feel his neck begin to break. Terror lent him a superhuman strength but to no avail. His huge fists hammered into Bolan’s midriff, his knee attempted to maul Bolan’s crotch, but the Executioner ignored the blows, the damage, the pain.

The elevator settled into position on the ground with a subtle lurch, just enough to cause Bolan’s injured leg to buckle. He tripped back and fell through the open maintenance hatch, dropping straight down through to the elevator compartment below.

His purchase suddenly gone, Paolini tumbled forward, as well. His momentum carried him down through the elevator hatch to land on top of Bolan. A backward elbow caught the Italian in the face, stunning him for a second as Bolan lunged for the pistol lying on the floor next to Delgaro’s limp hand.

Bolan lifted the pistol just as the elevator doors slid open and Paolini’s heel cracked hard against his wrist, sending the handgun spinning off out of the compartment. Bolan twisted back toward the Mob enforcer and saw him clawing his own Croatian HS 2000 out of a shoulder sling. Bolan brought a hammer-hard fist up from the hip and smashed it into Paolini’s temple, staggering the man as he tried to rise to his knees.

Bolan’s other hand lanced out and tried to take the pistol from Paolini. The two men struggled for control of the weapon. Bolan drew back his left hand to strike the other man again.

Paolini squeezed the trigger, and 9 mm rounds riddled the roof and walls of the elevator as he continued jerking the trigger. The pistol bucked and kicked in their hands as Bolan tried to wrestle it free, slugs stitching a crooked line across the wall toward the control panel.

Three soft-nosed slugs smacked into the delicate electronics and chewed their way through the thin outer casing. The elevator doors finished sliding open as sparks flew in rooster tails. The lights went out the instant Paolini pulled the trigger on the final bullet in the handgun.

Once again darkness enveloped Bolan.

Paolini swung wildly in the darkness, his knuckles clipping Bolan on the chin. The American’s head snapped back and he rolled with the force of the blow, letting it carry him back away from the mafioso.

As he finished his backward somersault, he felt the cool hardness of a concrete floor. He had cleared the elevator, but the basement was as dark as a tomb.

Bolan rose and reached out a hand to either side of him in the pitch blackness. He walked quickly forward, lifting his feet high and putting them down flat to avoid tripping in the dark. Despite his precaution, he nearly tripped over some obstacle and he used the noise to dodge hard to the left, coming up against a wall.

He pressed his back against the structure, his ears straining to catch any sound. Silence was the key. When you fought with one sense gone the surest way to victory was to deprive your opponent of his other senses.

He stood motionless, fighting to control his breathing, painfully aware of how loud his ragged, gasping breath had to be. After what felt like an eternity he regained control of his body.

Holding his breath, Bolan strained to listen.

Soon the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears deafened him to the point that he was defeating his original purpose. Slowly he exhaled, struggling to keep the escaping breath silent.

Then he heard it. He heard Paolini breathe. He couldn’t be sure, but it had seemed, in that instant, that Paolini was no more than a few yards from him.

Bolan began to move. He kept his back flat against the wall, his hands reaching out far to the sides to feel for obstacles. He moved slowly, crossing one leg over the other. He swallowed tightly, concentrating on pinpointing Paolini’s exact location.

Five steps and then he halted. He could hear no sound. Tension gripped him, but only for a moment. Bolan had spent too many years on the hellgrounds to be killed by indecision.

He swallowed tightly and then stepped away from the safety of the wall. He couldn’t hear Paolini moving, and he froze. After a short while he heard the strained outlet of escaping breath and realized Paolini had been listening for him.

In the deep darkness of the basement Bolan had his enemy pinpointed. He stepped forward and reached a sprint in three quick strides. Bolan leaped into the air, thrusting out both feet before him.

His injured leg struck Paolini in the gut, driving the younger man’s arm into his own stomach and forcing the air from him. Bolan’s other leg struck the cinder-block wall Paolini had been standing against and buckled under the force of impact.

Bolan bounced away, striking the floor on his rebound. Paolini fell beside him and the Executioner rose, smashing his fist down. He nearly cried out in pain as his knuckles struck the concrete floor and his arm went instantly numb.

He heard a sharp crack and instinctively threw up his good arm to ward off the invisible blow. His forearm jerked under the force of some club, probably a snapped-off broom handle.

Intuiting Paolini’s position by the angle of the blow, Bolan whipped his legs around and he felt the Italian topple. He heard Paolini’s club clatter away as he slammed to the floor, and Bolan snatched up the weapon for himself.

Bolan didn’t hesitate. He rose to one knee and brought the stolen stick crashing down. The stick splintered along its length from the force of the blow on Paolini’s body.

Paolini responded like a fighter, lashing out quickly. The ball of his foot slapped into Bolan’s face, driving him backward with the blunt force of a sledgehammer.

Bolan felt fresh blood hot in his mouth as his bottom lip was cut by his own teeth. Again he used the energy to roll with the blow and disengage, flipping over backward and gaining his feet. He tripped and fell back, landing hard on his butt with a jar that seemed to loosen his teeth in his head. He blinked in surprise. He was sitting up higher than the floor. He reached behind and realized he was on a flight of stairs.

Bolan turned and scrambled up the steps, racing so fast that his head butted against the door. He yanked at the knob.

It was locked.

Bolan felt around the walls, found what he was looking for and the lights came on as he flicked the switch. He blinked in the sudden illumination and looked behind him. Paolini was at the bottom of the staircase, a jagged-ended broom handle in his fists. The left side of his face was a long purple bruise where Bolan had struck him with his own club.

As Paolini began to slowly climb the steps, his eyes never left Bolan’s for an instant. “You’re mine now, hardass,” he growled. “I’m gonna jam this stick in your heart.”

Paolini raced up the last few steps and jabbed the splintered end of the stick forward in an attempt to stab Bolan. The Executioner dodged to the side and kicked Paolini in the face. Weakened, the man tumbled down the stairs rolling end over end.

The mobster hit the bottom step at a wrong angle, and Bolan heard the snap of the Italian’s neck as it broke. The Mob lieutenant plopped into an unceremonious pile of tangled limbs at the bottom of the stairs.

Bolan quickly descended and confirmed the kill.

Then he turned to collect his weapons and search for an exit route.

6

The day that Stephen Caine quit his job he didn’t tell anyone he was going. He wouldn’t need the job; it would only slow him.

He walked out of his office and to the elevator. He wanted a drink. Inside the elevator he suddenly realized he couldn’t remember what his office looked like. Couldn’t remember the faces of the people there, or their names.

He wanted a drink, but he didn’t want to return to the blue collar bar. He didn’t belong there. His father would have belonged there and so, by definition he didn’t belong there. He was going to go some place upscale but mellow, maybe with a piano player.

In the Explorer, on the way to the lounge, Caine began to cry. The tears streamed down his face in salty rivers. Six casualties a day. All of them dying just like his buddy Angel Ramos had in Mogadishu: hard and bloody.

In the car Caine remembered the medicine the Army doctors had given the men of the unit upon rotating home, just until the nightmares and flashbacks had stopped, or subsided anyway. He figured there had to be several dozen pills out there that could help trip the switch to stop the images, stop the tears. He didn’t think the doctors would hesitate to give him some pills if he told them about Mogadishu.

The piano bar was quiet and open but comfortably dark, and Caine didn’t look out of place in his suit with loosened tie. He drank straight through into evening and met the hooker once the sun had gone down.

Her name was Stephanie, and he was pretty sure from the start that she was a call girl. She was beautiful and didn’t look anything like Charisa and, unlike Charisa, she didn’t seem to have a problem getting blasted with him. He got his first Xanax from her, a little pill she fished out of the bottom of her Versace handbag. He watched the way the ends of her long brown hair rubbed across the smooth curves of her spilling cleavage while she dug for the pill. She smelled really good, and after she gave him the antianxiety medicine he decided she could really be into him. He washed the pill down with a swallow of imported beer.

“Because of demagogues,” he finished.

“Demagogues?” she asked.

“Yes, demagogues. A political leader who gains power by appealing to people’s emotions, instincts and prejudices in a way that is considered manipulative and dangerous…to paraphrase.”

“So you’re saying the President is a demagogue.”

“Yes. The problem is that the electoral college failed. The system is flawed. It is flawed because we only have a two-party system. The parties that control the electoral college are partisan. So maybe they would vote to check a demagogue who was an independent, but never to check one from within their own party. Without agreement, which is impossible in partisan atmospheres, the electoral college could never keep out a demagogue if they emerged from one of the two ruling political parties. The system fails.”

“That’s democracy.” Stephanie shrugged. She seemed to be tuning him out, bored. But Caine was talking mainly to hear his own voice anyway. What he was planning was a big deal, and it scared the hell out of him. The Xanax seemed to help.

Stephanie’s eyes were like glass marbles and her words came out softly slurred.

“But if democracy had ever been intended to be a simple mob rule then the founding fathers never would have inserted the electoral college into the process to begin with,” he continued. “It is a part of the system. The system failed.” And six a day are dying because of it, Caine thought to himself.

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, Thomas Jefferson had a few ideas….” Caine trailed off and took a drink.

Her hand came to rest on his thigh and the scent of a sensuous perfume drifted over him. He felt himself respond and knew what he wanted, even though he understood what Stephanie was.

“I meant tonight,” she purred. The purr was as slurred as her words.

Caine looked over at Stephanie and smiled. He felt warm and detached, and he knew now that if he needed to do something then it would be much later and he would be detached enough to do it then, too.

Thomas Jefferson had known what to do about demagogues, but Caine would be doing it in his own way. The plan started to coalesce in his mind as he stared into Stephanie’s eyes. He was not yet sure what it involved, but he was certain it would get to the truth, to the pattern that ran beneath the surface.

“You ready to get out of here?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “I’m ready.”

The sudden resolve in his voice suggested he was talking more to himself than to Stephanie.

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