Collision Course. Don Pendleton

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