other man nodded.
“Good. Now, where’s Lang?”
Shahi opened his mouth as if to answer, but checked himself. He shook his head. “Forget it.”
“Loyal to the end, huh?”
“Not even close,” Shahi said. “I just know it’s not worth it. Not worth it for you to know.”
The guy paused. Bolan stayed quiet and stared, letting the uncomfortable silence expand.
“Wherever he is, he’s dead,” Shahi said. “Understand?”
“Where’d they take him?”
Shahi shook his head vigorously. “Forget it. Where he was going, he’s already dead or he will be by the time you get there. Quit wasting your time. Quit killing people for no reason. If you ever find him, he’ll be nothing but a sack of flesh and bones. And I’m not going to tell you anything. Take me to jail and Khan will have me out in twenty-four hours.”
“You have a good line of bullshit,” the soldier said. “But here’s some straight talk. Tell me where I can find Lang or I will fire this thing point-blank at your head. In case you haven’t realized it, I didn’t put handcuffs on any of your guys and they’re not going to jail. “
“You’ll kill me anyway.”
“Not if you answer my questions.”
Shahi heaved a sigh and his shoulders sagged. He muttered the address, which Bolan memorized.
“Why did Khan go after Lang?” Bolan asked.
“I don’t know. Lang had been looking into us, but that’s all I know.”
Bolan nodded. His finger tightened on the Desert Eagle’s trigger and a peal of thunder swelled in the room, then died out. A foot-long tongue of flame lashed from the hand cannon’s barrel. The slug drilled into a wall. Shahi screamed and crossed his forearms over his face protectively. Dropping to his knees, he cupped his hands over his eyes and sobbed.
“Apparently you take me for a saint or an idiot. Either way, you’re wrong. I’m not going to listen to your endless stream of bullshit.”
By now, the soldier was unsure whether the other man could even hear or understand him, having been exposed to the handgun’s roar at such close range. Bolan was used to the weapon, but even his ears rang. For someone exposed to a shot up close and personal, the noise could be disorienting.
“Tell your friend Khan I’m coming for him,” Bolan said. “I’ll dismantle his organization piece by piece and put him in the ground.”
Shahi nodded without looking at Bolan.
The soldier backed a few steps away from Shahi and holstered the Israeli-made handgun. He walked out past the indoor pool, through a massive sitting room filled with brightly colored rugs, a plasma-screen television and leather-upholstered furniture. When he reached the front door, he pushed it open and exited the apartment.
Message delivered.
HIS HANDS SHAKING, SHAHI picked himself up from the floor. His cheeks burned hot with shame and anger churned in his gut. The American had gotten the best of him. He became aware of a warm sensation in his crotch. Looking down, he saw that the fabric of the front of his pants was dark where he’d involuntarily urinated, guessed it had happened when the bastard had fired the gun at his head.
The carnage around him was stunning. Dead bodies were sprawled at different points on the floor. Shards of glass littered the floor. Through one of the doors, he saw a corpse bobbing facedown in the pool, blood clouding the water around the body.
His breath came fast as adrenaline raced through him, causing his hands to shake and his heart to pound in his chest until he swore it would explode.
He stumbled to one of the fallen guards, knelt next to him and reached beneath the guy’s sport coat. Shahi found a mobile phone on the guy’s belt, stored in a black leather clip-on case. Picking it up, Shahi pounded in a number. With each ring the anxiety and impatience grew in him.
Finally, on the fourth ring, someone answered the phone.
“Yes?” Khan asked.
“We have trouble,” Shahi replied.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bolan crept up the stairs of the three-story apartment building, screams still echoing in his ears.
He fisted the Beretta 93-R, raised it in front of him, let it lead the way. As he neared the top of the stairs, another scream—this one more frantic and agonized—stabbed into his ears, lingering.
The solider muttered a curse. He already was losing time and likely was at risk of blowing the mission. From the third-floor landing, he heard the rumble of a throat clearing. Hugging the wall, he crept about halfway up the final flight of stairs, stopped and listened for a couple of heartbeats. A throat cleared again and the sole of a shoe scraped against the floorboards.
Bolan surged up the final steps. As he crested the stairs, he spotted a beefy man, his hair slicked straight back, coughing into a clenched fist. The guy apparently sensed the motion and wheeled in Bolan’s direction. His hand grabbed for a pistol holstered on his hip.
The Beretta sighed and a trio of subsonic 9 mm rounds lanced from its barrel. The swarm of slugs stabbed into the man’s mouth and cheek and exploded from the back of his skull in a spray of crimson. The guard’s legs suddenly turned rubbery and his body collapsed to the floor in a boneless heap. A Glock slipped from the man’s lifeless fingers and thudded to the floor.
The soldier cursed under his breath, but continued to march toward the source of the agonized screams.
In a perfect world, he would have preferred to have caught the guard unaware and put him down soundlessly with a knife to the throat.
In a perfect world, yeah. As if the soldier had ever seen such a thing.
Here in the real world, there was every possibility that the noised had alerted the band of killers hiding out in the apartment, every possibility he’d lost the element of surprise. So, okay, it was time to try the direct approach. Kneeling next to the corpse, he dug through the man’s pockets until he found a wallet, which he pocketed, figuring he could comb through its contents for possible intel later, and a ring of keys. Stepping near the door, he pressed his ear against it and listened.
By now the screaming had stopped, but he heard murmurs of conversation. It was impossible to decipher the words or to discern the emotional state of the speaker. As best he could tell, Nawaz Khan or whoever had outfitted this slaughterhouse, had positioned a couple of security cameras on the building’s exterior, but nothing inside, at least nothing he could see. It was possible the guys inside had no idea their comrade had just been gunned down.
His fingers curled softly around the knob and he tried to turn it, but found it locked. His mind flitted back to the ring of keys he’d found on the dead guard, but he dismissed the notion immediately. He had no time to test half a dozen keys in the hope that one of them might open the door. To hell with it, he decided. He needed to move now.
The
