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The guy grinned.
“You can’t stop this,” he said. “It’s gone too far.”
The gun whispered once. A bullet slammed into Gruber’s forehead and thrust him into blackness.
* * *
THE ALARM ON Reinhard Vogelsgang’s wristwatch beeped three times, interrupting his train of thought as he pored over the most recent profit-and-loss statements.
Clicking off the alarm, he removed his wire-framed reading glasses, set them on his desk blotter and rose from his chair.
Crossing the office, he moved to a rectangular panel built into the wall and surrounded on all four sides by wood molding. He pressed a small stud and the panel slid away, only the slight hum of a motor audible from behind the wall. Behind the panel was a recessed area that contained a large video monitor. He snagged a remote from inside the compartment, switched on the monitor and thumbed the button that turned on the screen.
The phone call had come twelve hours ago. The news he received had left a knot in his stomach and had forced him to make a decision. Considering the stakes, it’d been an easy one. Even so, the ramifications could bring all sorts of hell crashing down on his head if he didn’t handle it correctly.
The screen was separated into four boxes. In the far right corner sat an elderly man in a dark blue suit. In a box beneath him, the image of a woman was visible. The meeting’s third participant was late, as usual, joining the call two minutes after the start time.
“I guess we can begin now,” Vogelsgang said as the latest participant, Werner Nacht, a construction-industry magnate, seated himself.
“So sorry,” Nacht said.
“It’s nothing,” Vogelsgang replied.
“I was caught in a meeting.”
“Of course. No doubt it was more important.”
Nacht laced his fingers and leaned toward the camera.
“Tremendously important,” he said. “Shall I share?”
Vogelsgang shook his head.
“I think we’ve lost enough time,” he said.
“No, really. This has more than a little relationship to our work here.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about Monaco. I think everyone wants to know about that. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Vogelsgang forced a smile. “Of course. Please update everyone.”
“A private detective was killed tonight, shot down in the streets by a couple of thugs. They accosted him in his hotel and chased him into the street. Awful business.”
“Awful,” Vogelsgang agreed.
“Would you like to tell the rest of the story, or shall I?”
Vogelsgang swallowed hard. His forced smile fading, he shrugged and leaned into the camera. “We had a problem,” he said. “Someone sent a private detective after me. The man was better than we anticipated. He figured a few things out. I had him eliminated.”
The woman leaned forward.
“You what?” she asked. “You had him killed? Without discussing it with us?”
The executive’s smile faded. “Let me assure you, it needed to be taken care of. I had no time to consult you. Frankly, I saw no reason. The decision was painfully obvious.”
Anger flashed in the woman’s eyes, but she stayed silent.
“What did he know?” asked the elderly man, a media mogul who owned two newspapers, three television stations and a book publishing operation.
Shrugging, Vogelsgang backed away from the large monitor and lowered himself into a leather chair. He knew what was coming and he wanted the best view possible. He responded to the old man’s question with silence.
After several seconds the old man’s face reddened. “Damn it,” he said, his voice growing louder, “what did he know? Did he know everything?”
Another shrug from Vogelsgang, who busied himself staring at his drink.
“He knew a few things,” Vogelsgang said finally. “He knew a surprising number of things for someone who’d come out of nowhere, a foreigner, in fact. He had credentials and experience, of course, but could barely speak the language.”
Vogelsgang turned his eyes up from his drink.
“He could barely speak German or French. Yet he pieced together so much information. He even started to tie me to the United Front. It was amazing, as though someone was feeding him information.” He paused and let his words sink in. “An insider, I mean.”
The woman, Katharina Rothschild, leaned away from the camera and licked her lips. “Do you know who hired him?” she asked, her voice husky.
“I have some ideas,” Vogelsgang said. “A hypothesis, really. Nothing more.”
He dipped an index finger into his drink and stirred it.
“It’s a bit early for a drink, I suppose. Still, I’m feeling good, feeling as though things are moving forward. A drink seems in order. I digress, though, Katharina. You’d asked me a question and I owe you an answer. No, I don’t know who hired our dead friend. My thought— My theory, if you will, is someone close to me hired him. Maybe someone who’s getting cold feet, someone who’s lost her sense of vision.”
He saw fear flicker in Rothschild’s eyes. “‘Her’?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Her. You said ‘her.’ Surely you don’t think I hired the man, do you?”
He made a dismissive gesture.
“Just a theory,” he said. “Okay, a little more than a theory, actually. We grabbed his cell phone and his laptop and scoured the hell out of those things. So it’s a theory based on evidence.”
The old man leaned toward his camera. “Katharina? Katharina, did you do as he says? Why would you do this?”
“I did no such thing!”
“Please, everyone, please calm down,” Vogelsgang said. “Let’s pull it together. Katharina, I admit it was a bit of a shock at first. However, now I want to thank you.”
Nacht, the construction executive, laughed derisively.
“Thank her?” he asked. “For betraying us? Have you lost your mind?”
Vogelsgang shook his head slowly. “Lost my mind? Quite the contrary. I feel as though I’ve gained it. For the first time in years, since I first began all the hard work on this, I’m really seeing how this works. See, I don’t... No, I can’t trust you people. I’ve suspected that for some time. And now you’ve proved me right. This thing I want to accomplish, this thing Europe and the world needs so badly, I must accomplish it by myself.”
“You’re throwing us out?” It was Nacht again. “Damn you, I’ve sunk millions into this! You can’t just toss us aside like this.”
“I appreciate your passion, Werner. It’s a business decision. Surely you of all people can appreciate that. Rest assured I’m not going to toss you aside or dissolve the partnership.”
“Well, what the devil are you talking about then?”
“It’s a liquidation.”
Nacht continued to protest as did the others. Vogelsgang pressed the mute button on his remote control and blissful silence fell over the room. He felt the anticipation building, a ticklish sensation in his stomach that spread to his groin.
The woman suddenly whipped her head to the side and appeared to gasp. She slapped a hand over her chest, as if to keep her heart from jumping out. Vogelsgang turned the volume back up just in time to hear a scream burst from her lips. From off screen, gunshots sounded and one slapped into her forehead, knocking her from her chair. His team would make sure it looked like a robbery, just as they’d made the detective’s murder look like a mugging.
Vogelsgang sat transfixed as the others died on-screen, one right after the next. A man togged in black, his face covered by a ski mask, jabbed a needle into the old man’s neck. His heart problems were common knowledge among friends, politicians and the financial press. Though he was ninety-three, he’d placed himself on a transplant list for a new heart.
He needn’t have bothered.
The syringe’s contents would result in a heart attack and be virtually undetectable in an autopsy.
In the other screen, Werner’s head was tilted to the right. Dead eyes stared at the camera, but his body was still. A black-suited figure stood behind the executive, still pulling on the rope looped around his neck. Vogelsgang’s mercenaries would make Werner’s death look like a suicide. A couple of his high-profile deals had gone south in the past few months, which would make suicide plausible.
Vogelsgang clicked a button on the remote control and the monitor went black.
The brush with the detective had been too close. He’d devoted too much time and money bringing this plan together to have it fall apart because of betrayal. There was too much at stake.
Looking up at the monitor, he focused on the image of the old man. Vogelsgang had known the man for decades. But looking at him now, he just felt cold. Vogelsgang knew he’d kill 100—hell, 1,000 more—just like this man to realize his vision.
Let the bloodletting begin.
CHAPTER ONE
Monaco
Present day
Jacques Dumond lived on an estate on the outskirts of Monte Carlo. A stone security wall surrounded the property, obscuring the grounds from passersby.
Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, was at the wheel of a black Jaguar sedan. He guided the vehicle past the front gate. Peering through the windshield, he studied a pair of men standing outside a wrought-iron gate that led into the estate.
Though he could see no weapons, Bolan assumed the grim-faced men were guards because they seemed more focused on their surroundings than interacting with each other. And the smaller of the two, a slim guy decked out in a black suit, was holding what appeared to be a two-way radio in his right hand. The other guy—dressed in jeans, a white shirt and an ill-fitting blue sport coat, his bald head glinting under the streetlights—fixed his gaze on Bolan’s car as it glided past. The Jaguar was outfitted with black-tinted windows that prevented the big man from seeing anything other than his reflection as Bolan wheeled by.
Leo Turrin was in the front passenger’s seat. He nodded at the man watching their car.
“The big guy is yours,” Turrin said. “I’ll take the little one.”
“Thanks.”
Bolan drove three more blocks, making sure he was well out of the guards’ sight before he turned right. He drove another two blocks before making another right and maneuvering around the rear of the estate.
Pulling the car up to a curb, the soldier’s mind reeled through key facts about his target.
Before falling from grace, Dumond had been a high-level French soldier who specialized in counterterrorism operations. After a decade he’d moved to the dark side. His business card read “security expert,” but in truth he worked as a mercenary and enforcer for some of the world’s most vicious regimes. He’d led death squads in Sudan and Sierra Leone, trained antigovernment killers in Colombia and provided muscle for Mexican drug cartels. A scrape in that country had cost him his left eye. Apparently, once he moved into his mid-forties, he’d decided it was easier to sell guns than wield them. He began selling arms to some of the same criminal regimes he’d once worked for. The experts back in Washington disagreed on his exact body count, but knew it was significant, at least two-thirds of it being women and children murdered in the world’s conflict zones.
So, yeah, Bolan was hunting a jackal this night. The bastard’s blood-drenched résumé was more than enough to make him a legitimate target, but Dumond also had made the mistake of grabbing Jennifer Rodriguez, an American federal agent, which kicked him up a few more notches on the soldier’s hit parade.
Bolan and Turrin had arrived there ready to take on the Frenchman and his crew of gunners. Beneath a light black windbreaker, Bolan carried a pair of Beretta 93-R pistols in a double shoulder harness. The pistols were able to fire either single rounds or in 3-round bursts of 9 mm Parabellum ammo. With a foregrip in front of the trigger guard, the pistol could to fire 1,100 rounds per minute.
The soldier also had procured another of his old standbys. The 44 Magnum Desert Eagle Mark VII rode on his left hip in a cross-draw position. Outfitted with the six-inch barrel, the hand cannon’s magazine carried eight rounds.
Bolan’s other tools of war were sealed in the trunk. There he had stashed a Heckler & Koch MP-5 fitted with a sound suppressor, and a small duffel bag loaded with additional magazines for the submachine gun as well as an assortment of fragmentation, flash-bang and smoke grenades.
Turrin, on the other hand, had opted for a Benelli M-4 Super 90 shotgun. Manufactured by Benelli Armi SPA, an Italian company, the shotgun could be loaded with one 12-gauge round in the chamber and seven more in the tube. Like Bolan, Turrin was carrying a Beretta 93-R. He wanted the weapon because of its sound suppressor and its ability to fire multiple rounds with a single trigger pull. But he also was armed with a .38-caliber Colt Cobra that was holstered in the small of his back. The short-barreled pistol’s aluminum-alloy frame made it light to carry and it was easily concealed.
Bolan eased the Jaguar to the curb, turned off the lights and killed the engine. He popped open the door and stepped into the warm night. Turrin had stepped out of the passenger’s side and both men made their way to the trunk.
Bolan raised the lid, reached in, hefted the duffel bag and slid its strap over his shoulder. The bag’s weight caused its strap to pull taut until he could feel it dig into the muscles of his left shoulder. Next he pulled out the MP-5 and checked its load. Turrin had pulled out the Benelli and was looping the strap over his right shoulder.
Reaching back into the compartment, Bolan pulled a rope with a grappling hook.
“You realize it’d be easier to go through the front gate,” Turrin said.
“Sure,” Bolan replied. “No one would notice two guys shooting two other guys and then busting through a wrought-iron fence.”
“I’m just making a point.”
“Rope climbing a little too strenuous for you, Leo?”
“No comment.”
Grinning, Bolan turned and looked back at the wall surrounding the estate. Inside the wall, Dumond usually had anywhere between four and six gunners patrolling the grounds, especially when he was entertaining high-end clients, most of whom also were prone to violence. And, according to his dossier, the arms dealer also sampled some of his own wares, carrying a pair of Detonics .45-caliber pistols beneath his well-tailored jackets and at least one combat blade.
Bolan keyed his throat mike.
“Striker to Base,” he said.
“Go, Striker,” a female voice replied. It was Barbara Price, the mission controller for Stony Man Farm. Bolan and Turrin were connected with the Farm’s ultrasecret facility thanks to satellite links.
“We’re EVA,” he said, “and ready to hit the town.”
“You’re clear,” Price told him.
“Did they crash the party?”
“They” was the Farm’s cyber team, which had been working to hack into the computers that controlled Dumond’s lighting, security system and other critical infrastructure ever since Bolan and Turrin had left the United States.
“Party crashed. Once we saw you stop outside the target, we set the outside surveillance cameras on a loop. If anyone’s monitoring the cameras, all they’ll see is the same empty street they saw three minutes ago.”
