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
