Extermination

“A visit from Damascus woke them up, likely,” Rafael Encizo commented from his vantage point.

“Not this bunch,” Hawkins countered. “This wasn’t cockroach scrambling, this was lions watching a zebra. Not a nice feeling being the prey.”

“Just about satisfied, David?” Encizo asked.

“Almost,” McCarter responded.

James noticed a sudden perk of interest rise in the Phoenix Force commander. “Spot something?”

“A truck picking up trash,” McCarter said, nodding toward the vehicle. “Gary, how many guns are on it?”

They waited for Manning for a couple of moments, then the Canadian spoke up. “Five. How’d you guess?”

“I’ve done stakeouts in this area of town before,” McCarter answered. “Rubbish isn’t picked up on this day of the week, and not two haulers off a truck at the same time.”

“Amazing the amount of crap you remember,” James muttered.

“I noticed,” McCarter replied. “The Syrians sent in reinforcements.”

“We move on them?” Encizo asked.

McCarter shook his head, then spoke up. “No. We let them start this party, then we slip around the back.”

“Worked for Striker, might as well work for us,” James said.

McCarter reached for his valise and opened it, scanning the Fabrique Nationale P-90 concealed within. The tiny chatterbox was stuffed with a 50-round magazine. “We want Bezoar alive, chickadees. Treat him with kid gloves. Anyone else, fuck ’em. Especially the party from Damascus.”

The garbage truck rolled close to Bezoar’s apartment building.

McCarter and his Phoenix Force teammates were in motion before the first pop of a submachine gun was barely audible in the distance.

CHAPTER THREE

Arno Scalia walked down the hall, mouth turned in a frown that was only amplified by the downward turn of his black mustache. The fluorescent lights shone off his shaved head as he fiddled with his key in the lock. He’d just left the most secure room in the building, a structure that had cost one hundred thousand dollars to build and had been designed to resist any manner of eavesdropping. The phone call that had come in over a shielded and encrypted landline had made him uncomfortable.

Last week he and the outfit had moved crates of military electronics. Nothing could be identified, as it was still in the packaging and the labels had been scraped off, but the order was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” For the higher-ups to actually have to repeat that to Scalia, one of the most discreet of men in the entire family, it was a sign that there was no fooling around with this shipment. Nothing falls off the back of the truck, nobody looks inside a crate and for certain no one will ever speak of it again.

That kind of double-checking was indicative of two conditions. One was that the organization had received a boatload of money to keep this well under the radar. The other was that his bosses, some of the hardest gangsters in Chicago, were frightened of the consequences of a single error.

Scalia was a professional, one who wouldn’t make such a mistake, and if his subordinates had screwed up under him, he’d take it out of their hides. The shit would continue to roll downhill, until someone paid for the amount of grief he’d caused, the level of punishment rising with each and every person the frustration had passed through. No one in the transport office would screw things up. It was just too well enforced internally.

Now, he’d just received a phone call regarding a trio of Feds who were asking questions in town. Scalia had to keep an eye out for them, and if there was anything out of the ordinary, he was to quash it at a moment’s notice.

“A trio of Feds,” he murmured, repeating the term. “Actually, they were called ‘super-Feds.’”

Scalia had been in the Mafia long enough to know what that term meant. Some government agencies didn’t have to work by a set of rules that allowed groups like his to operate in relative freedom. The mention of a trio of super-Feds had also popped up all over the country, often just preceding a blitz that was second only to the horrors inflicted upon them by a lone vigilante whose name was never spoken anymore. Scalia had been present in other towns where the local organized crime had received visits from mystery men waving around Justice Department credentials just before war exploded on the streets.

The vigilante might have gone legitimate, Scalia mused, and picked up some allies. It was always a rumor, a conspiracy theory among the families, chatter about how the greatest scourge of their professional careers engaged in one bloody weeklong endgame that had crippled their infrastructure, then disappeared. Some had called it a monopoly-breaking strategy. Sometimes people using his old strategies of urban warfare came back for a visit, leaving wreckage in their wakes.

Scalia stepped into his office and saw that his multiline phone had a blinking message. He felt the blood begin to drain from his face as he could only think that it was someone in his own service telling him about a mystery visit. He hit the message playback, fumbling with the drawer of his desk to get to the pistol inside.

“Boss, it’s Dev at the desk. Some blond bastard by the name of Steele came by, telling me he was called in by you,” the message said. “I have the rest of security keeping an eye on him, but I didn’t want too much of a clusterfuck.”

Scalia sneered and hit the button for the main desk. “Dev?”

“He bluffed his way past me, pretending that he knew you,” came the answer from Lebron Devlin. “I got a look at his gear, and I’m scanning his cell for signals. All he has is two pistols, a big fuckin’ hog and a Glock or somethin’.”

Scalia sneered. “Get everybody to surround him and ready to move in. This guy is trouble!”

The door clicked and Scalia looked away from the phone for a brief moment. The doorway was filled with a broad, grim-looking bastard in a loose leather jacket, cold eyes glaring from under a brooding brow.

“No need to go all-out for me,” the guy said. “I’m just here to talk, not to fight. If I were here to cause shit, Dev wouldn’t be talking right now.”

Scalia swallowed. “So…let’s talk.”

The blond hulk in the doorway smiled, took a step in, and the door clicked in the ominous silence.

CARL LYONS COULD SEE the look of realization on Arno Scalia’s face when he opened the door. The Able Team leader knew that he wouldn’t have a lot of time before attracting the attention, and potentially the wrath, of the organization’s security. He was glad that he was able to continue his bluff, riding the wave of audacity and confusion among the mobsters all the way to the boss’s office.

“So let’s talk,” Scalia had told him, and Lyons closed the door behind him. There was a pleasing quality to the mobster’s uncomfortable silence that only added to his graveyard grin. Scalia wasn’t a small man, and the .45 auto he’d drawn from his desk drawer could easily have caused him some trouble, even with his body armor.

However, Lyons knew the value of intimidation and also realized the strength of adapting personality to the conversation. When he had been in the lobby, he was simply one of the guys, blowing smoke up people’s asses and getting accepted. Now, when he needed some questions answered, he had slipped into crazy-caveman mode. The grin he wore was pure cockiness, but the glint of determination in his eyes signaled a willingness to spill blood by the bucket.

Scalia picked up on that insanity, which, coupled with Lyons’s thick, muscular form, was a warning beacon.

“You…know that I have to maintain some secrecy for my organization…” Scalia said. “Professional…”

“Yeah, right, whatever,” Lyons cut him off. “If you know why I’m here and suspect who I learned my trade from, then you know that I’m not here to listen to you jack off at the mouth. I want answers or I’ll take blood.”

Scalia’s lips tightened into a bloodless line, his eyes flicking to the phone on his desk.

“Sure, hit your panic button, Arno. That’s not going to save your life,” Lyons said.

Scalia returned his gaze to Lyons’s face. “I’m sure I know why—”

“Then I don’t have to ask you any fucking questions, Arno,” Lyons snarled. “Don’t stall.”

Scalia nodded. “You’re wondering about some military stuff that went through here.”

Lyons nodded. His eyes burrowed into Scalia, who shifted uneasily in his seat and swallowing hard. Lyons knew that while there were ways to get information out of people—and he’d been forced to utilize torture at times for the sake of last-minute expedience—the best interrogators got their answers just by force of will. These types of interrogations were Lyons’s favorite. There was no blood, there was no moral quandary, and the answers weren’t the first lies screamed that made the pain stop. The Able Team commander was not a murderer or a sadist; he was a warrior and a seeker of justice.

“Well,” Scalia began, “we took the shipment and waited for them to bring their own trucks. We didn’t look inside, especially since the bosses made sure we didn’t fuck it up. They’re scared.”

“But you know who I come from, don’t you?” Lyons asked.

Scalia looked down, breaking eye contact. His bald dome was beaded with nervous sweat that rolled down his forehead in rivulets. “I don’t want to say his name.”

“You do know my friend Mack,” Lyons said.