extra magazines and gun bags to conceal his purchases, the total was a flat eight thousand pounds. Say thirteen grand, in round numbers.
“I have a counteroffer for you,” Bolan said.
“Not quite the way it works, friend,” Watt replied.
“You haven’t heard it, yet.”
“Go on, then. Make me laugh.”
Before Watt reached his pocket pistol, Bolan had the KA-BAR’s blade against his throat.
“A name and address for your life,” he said.
IT DIDN’T QUITE work out that way. Watt thought about it for a minute, then gave up the information Bolan needed, but it went against the grain. He could’ve simply spent the afternoon in handcuffs, in his soundproofed arsenal, but something in the Gorbals sense of “honor” made him try his hand against the Executioner, and Bolan left the KA-BAR stuck between the man’s ribs to dam the blood flow, while he took another to replace it from the dealer’s stash.
He left the shop with two gym bags, locked the door and dropped Watt’s keys into a curbside rubbish can. Someone would come to look for Watt, sooner or later, and eventually they would find him with his basement cache of arms.
Or not.
It made no difference to Bolan, as he loaded the rental car with tools for the continuation of his endless war and left the neighborhood of Garnethill behind him, heading west along New City Road to Bearsden.
A slightly richer neighborhood, that was, and Bolan thought about the name while he was driving. He had no idea if there had ever been a bear in the vicinity, or if its den was anywhere nearby, but he was looking for a predator among the stylish homes that lined attractive streets, all redolent with history.
The target’s name was Frankie Boyle. He’d dominated Glasgow’s rackets for the past decade or so, his interests covering the normal range of gambling, prostitution, drugs, extortion, theft and loan-sharking. Through Ian Watt and several others like him, Boyle also controlled a fair piece of illicit trafficking in arms for Glasgow and environs, which, as Bolan understood it, covered most of Central Scotland east of Edinburgh.
It was the weapons trade that sent Bolan in search of Boyle this afternoon. Or, more specifically, some of the people who were purchasing his wares. A group of homegrown terrorists whose war, though dormant for a time, had flared to life again in recent weeks with grim results.
Bolan would happily have turned the tap to halt on illegal weapons sales worldwide, but that would never happen, realistically. One major reason was that most of the world’s industrial nations—the United States included—constantly sold guns and bombs to other countries who were ill-equipped to make their own. Official sales were perfectly legitimate, but once a load of hardware was delivered, the security surrounding it depended on a cast of human beings who were fallible at best, malicious and corrupt at worst.
Add in the thefts from military arsenals and legal shipments, and you had a world armed to the teeth, with an insatiable craving for more guns, more ammunition, more grenades and rocket launchers.
Arms trafficking was the world’s second-largest source of criminal revenue, after drugs, and Bolan was a realist. He couldn’t disarm a square block in New York or Los Angeles, much less a city the size of Glasgow. Cleaning up a state or country? It wasn’t realistic.
But he could stop one specific trafficker, and thereby slow the flood of killing hardware for a day or two, until the top man was replaced and pipelines were reopened. Bolan could take out selected buyers and make sure that they never pulled another trigger.
If his targets didn’t kill him first.
Boyle’s street was nice, its houses big and old enough to rate respect. Not mansions, in the sense you might expect for Texas oil tycoons or dot-com billionaires in Silicone Valley, but cruising past them in a humble rented car, you knew the wealth was there.
No walled estates or obvious security devices here. Bolan drove slowly, as if looking for an address—which he was, in fact—and saw no lookouts posted on the street near number 82. No curtains flickered as he passed; why would they? he thought. Boyle would take the usual precautions: sweep the place for bugs, use prepaid cell phones for his business calls and speak in code, stash any serious incriminating items well away from his home, and pay off whichever cops would take your money and agree to drop a dime before a raid went down. Or fudge an address on a warrant, so the search was bad and anything collected would be inadmissible in court.
Friends taking care of friends.
Greed was another problem Bolan couldn’t fix, and he had sworn a private vow to keep his gunsights well away from law-enforcement officers. He’d helped to put a few in prison, but if push came down to shove, there was a line he’d rather not cross.
So Glasgow’s Finest, even those who weren’t so very fine, had nothing to fear from Bolan. Racketeers like Frankie Boyle, however, were another story altogether.
If he’d known what was about to happen to him, to his little urban empire, Boyle would likely have been quaking in his boots. Or, maybe he was too far gone for that, a stoned psycho who never gave a second thought to fear.
Suits me, Bolan thought. Crazies died like anybody else.
He scoped the house and then drove on. Still daylight.
And the Executioner had time to kill.
Chapter 2
Glasgow: 3:35 a.m.
Frankie Boyle wasn’t drunk, but he was working on it. He’d been up and out since early afternoon, showing himself and being seen at the familiar haunts, checking accounts at different operations on a random basis, so the boys he’d left in charge would never know whose books might be examined next.
This night, he had surprised Joe Murray at Night Moves, one of the five strip clubs Boyle owned through paper fronts in Glasgow. One of Murray’s girls—Boyle’s girls, in fact—had beefed that Murray helped himself to tips beyond the standard fifty-fifty split Boyle had imposed on dancers in his joints.
That was a minor problem, which could have been resolved with just a quiet word, but Murray had been rolling certain customers, as well. Just two or three so far, but Boyle knew it would be bad for business if the word got out and customers stayed away. Worse yet, if it brought the police sniffing after Boyle.
And adding insult to the injury, Murray hadn’t shared the loot he’d stolen with his boss.
Major mistake in Boyle’s book.
Boyle had strolled into Night Moves at a quarter past eleven, with a couple of his boys, and put the smile on everyone in sight. He bought a round for the house and accepted the grateful applause in return, then took Murray to the soundproof office for a private chat. Murray reckoned everything was fine until he saw the ball-peen hammer, then he started bawling like a baby, blubbering and pleading innocence while Boyle got down to work.
Knuckles and walnuts sounded the same when they were crushed.
Boyle had considered smashing Murray’s feet as well, but changed his mind and took the greedy bastard’s shoes instead, along with keys to his brand-new Mercedes-Benz,
