to what was happening beneath his very nose.
Still, the survival reflex was as strong within Gil Favor as in any other human being who had lived by wits and guile for the majority of his or her life.
A second, louder chime told Favor that his uninvited guests were drawing closer to the house, along the driveway from the street outside. He wasn’t expecting any deliveries, but his mind still offered innocent suggestions for the visit.
Fat chance, however.
In four years and counting in his minipalace, he’d never had a salesman on his doorstep. No neighbors visited without an invitation, and he hadn’t issued any.
That meant trouble was coming, one way or another.
Favor set down his brandy snifter, rose from his recliner and retrieved the sawed-off shotgun from its hidden cubbyhole beside the liquor cabinet. The first cartridge was rock salt, for a wake-up call; the four that followed it were triple-aught buckshot.
“You should’ve picked another house,” Gil Favor muttered as he left his study, moving briskly toward the parlor and front door.
THE OCCUPANTS OF TWO CARS were unloading near the mansion’s broad front porch as Bolan passed the driveway, counting heads. He saw no uniforms, no proper suits that would’ve indicated plainclothes officers.
“They’re not police,” he said.
“What, then?” Blanca Herrera asked. “Maybe he has a dinner party.”
“Doubtful,” Bolan said. “You saw them, right? They don’t fit with the neighborhood.”
“He is a fugitive from justice,” she reminded him. “Why would his friends be chosen from the social register?”
“Good point.”
But Bolan knew Gil Favor wasn’t one for making friends. And if he did, the self-made billionaire would handpick those who best served his camouflage of affluent respectability.
“Why are you stopping?”
“I just want to check this out,” Bolan explained. “If they’re sitting down to surf and turf, we’ll wait and tag him after they go home.”
“And if it’s something else?” Herrera asked. “What then?”
He nosed the Ford into an alley two doors down from Favor’s driveway, switching off the lights and engine. “Then I intervene,” he said.
“Against eight men?”
“I’ll do my best.”
She scrambled out to join him in the darkness, while he was extracting hardware from the larger of two duffel bags on the backseat.
“You can’t be serious!”
“I’ve left the keys,” he told her. “If it gets too raucous, or I’m not back here in fifteen minutes tops, clear out.”
Herrera gnawed her lower lip, then said, “I’m coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“How will you stop me?”
He pinned her with a glare that made her take a slow step backward. “This is my part of the deal,” he said. “You got me here. Now step aside and let me work.”
“I’m fully trained,” she challenged.
“Not for this.”
“How would you know?”
He fought an urge to squeeze her slender neck just hard enough to break her grip on consciousness for twenty minutes, give or take. But what might happen if he left her in the car that way?
“All right,” he said through gritted teeth. “You asked for it.”
Her smile was fleeting but triumphant. Bolan wondered if she would live to regret her rash choice.
Already armed with a Beretta Model 92, snug in its armpit rig, Bolan retrieved a classic Uzi submachine gun from his duffel bag of lethal gear, spent three seconds attaching a suppressor to its threaded muzzle, filled his pockets with spare magazines to feed the SMG and clipped a flash-bang grenade to his belt.
His overanxious sidekick wore some kind of smallish pistol tucked inside her waistband. From his quick glimpse of its grip and the extended magazine, Bolan surmised either an HK4 or Walther PPK. She didn’t ask for anything more powerful as he prepared to leave the car, and Bolan hoped that she would have the sense to simply stay out of harm’s way.
Assuming that was possible.
They walked back from the alley to Favor’s driveway, Bolan covering the Uzi with his windbreaker. No traffic passed them on the quiet street, but he imagined neighbors peering from their windows, wondering about the sudden flurry of activity at Señor Favor’s place.
They wouldn’t call for the police right now, but at the sound of gunfire…
Bolan scanned the sweeping driveway and the house beyond, saw no one standing near the cars that had pulled in a moment earlier. Eight men had either gone inside the house or fanned out to surround it, vanishing from Bolan’s field of view.
“What now?” Herrera asked. “Do we knock on Favor’s door?”
“Not quite,” he said. Spotting the motion sensors ranged along the driveway, Bolan added, “Follow me. Stay off the pavement.”
She followed without asking questions. Bolan took advantage of the property’s strategically located trees as he approached the mansion, moving at an urgent pace. He had discounted booby traps upon discovering that Favor had no gate to keep stray dogs or children from the occacional intrusion. Blowing them to smithereens or crushing tiny ankles in a leghold trap would certainly have caused his stock to plummet with the neighbors.
“Don’t you think—”
He shushed her with a hiss and kept moving toward the house. They’d closed the gap to twenty yards or so when muffled gunfire echoed from inside the house. A shotgun, by the sound of it, one blast immediately followed by the pop-pop-pop of pistol fire.
Bolan made for the front door, thinking it would be the quickest way to get inside the house. He didn’t care if it was locked, already thinking past the first obstruction, wondering if he had come too late and Favor was already dead.
Vengeance was one thing he could definitely handle, but it would mean mission failure and freedom for another predator three thousand miles away.
He reached the porch and found the front door levered open, then pushed shut again by someone who had come before him. Bolan shouldered through it, smelling gunsmoke as he crossed the threshold.
LUIS RODRIGUEZ CLUTCHED his Ingram MAC-10 SMG and waited for a target to present itself. Nearby, not quite within arm’s reach, his point man lay facedown on white shag carpeting.
The gringo had surprised them with a shotgun blast from nowhere
