Point Blank. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ on her feet once more, she tried to kick him, but he turned aside and slammed a fist into her face. She dropped again, weeping. This time, Adamo left her on the floor.

      He pressed a button on the intercom atop his desk, and three of his men entered, barely glancing at the fallen woman while they waited for instructions. “Take her to the pier,” Adamo said. “I have the Mare Strega waiting for you. Go out a mile or two and feed her to the fishes, eh?”

      “Yes, sir,” one of them said, the others standing mute on either side of him.

      Two of them picked the woman up as if she weighed nothing, supporting her between them as they left Adamo’s office, with the third man bringing up the rear. Still seething from the insult she had hurled at him, Adamo took some consolation from the fact that he would never see her face or hear her mocking voice again.

      “Sleep with the fishes,” he advised her fading memory and gladly turned his mind to other things.

      * * *

      BOLAN WAS PROCEEDING CAUTIOUSLY. The modest block of offices he was looking for, on Via Nuova, listed Aldo Adamo among its tenants. Ranked as number two in the major companies of the ’Ndrangheta, Adamo would make a decent target for the start of Bolan’s blitz. With one stroke, Bolan would send a message, letting every member of the rotten family know that nobody was safe.

      Psywar. Or, as the Pentagon was pleased to call it lately, shock and awe. It all came down to killing with a purpose.

      Some things never change.

      He looped around curving one-way streets to catch Vialle dei Normanni, circling north again to pick up Via Nuova southbound. Streets in Catanzaro were a winding maze, where the traffic alternately surged and stalled. Some drivers kept the pedal down regardless, blaring their horns at anyone who tried to drive the speed limit, while others poked along, searching for addresses they never seemed to find. Trucks were the wild card, belching diesel smoke and straddling lanes or blocking traffic to unload their cargo as the spirit moved them.

      Bolan took it all in stride. He had no deadline for his drop-in on Adamo, and he wasn’t even sure the mobster would be there when he arrived, but either way, the Executioner would leave a message for the ’Ndrangheta in a language its goons could understand.

      Although the ’Ndrangheta owned the building he was headed for, other tenants could be in the line of fire—most of them innocent—if things got out of hand. Bolan didn’t plan on leveling the place or hosing it with automatic fire, but he thought it would be nice to stop and introduce himself, after a fashion, to the men who thought they owned the city.

      The Executioner’s present life had started with a one-man war against the likes of Catanzaro’s parasites—bloodsuckers who infected everyone and everything they touched. Negotiation was impossible with ticks, lice, gangsters—choose your vermin. Bolan couldn’t purge the plague forever, as researchers claimed they’d done with smallpox, but he could provide a dose of topical relief and give the authorities—the decent, honest ones—a chance to do their jobs.

      And if the scourge returned, if Bolan survived that long, he could return and do it all again.

      Bolan rolled along the snaky path of Via Nuova, following a bus that smelled more like a garbage truck, until he spied the address he was looking for. A side street let him duck through a strip mall’s parking lot and double back to find a parking space that let him watch the building. Bolan checked out security and studied nearby pedestrians for any sign that they were cops or mobsters.

      Both posed problems for him, one being a target, whereas the other was an obstacle. At the beginning of his lonely war, Bolan had vowed he would never kill a cop, regardless of the circumstances. Plainclothes detectives were a headache because they might shoot first without announcing who they were, and Bolan didn’t want to take a chance on dropping one of them by accident.

      But the building’s entrance was clear—as far as he could see—until three no-neck types emerged, marching a woman toward the street. She sagged between them, and they held her up by her arms, which seemed to be secured behind her back. As Bolan watched, a car pulled up to meet the four, and they deposited their captive in the backseat before climbing in to sandwich her and close the doors.

      Game change.

      As the sedan rolled out, Bolan gave it a block, then started following.

      Why not? If he could sting the ’Ndrangheta with a rescue operation, it was worth a shot.

      Besides, he’d always been a sucker for a damsel in distress.

      * * *

      “WHERE ARE WE taking her?” asked Dino Terranova, in the driver’s seat.

      “The boat,” Fausto Cortale said. “She’s going for a swim.”

      “Too bad,” Ruggiero Aiello chimed in. “Seems like a waste.”

      Cortale grunted in response. He had a date lined up for later in the evening, and he did not want to dawdle with their prisoner. Load her aboard the Mare Strega, cruise a few miles out to sea and leave her with a bullet in her head, maybe a gym bag filled with scrap iron tied around her ankles. By the time she floated up again, if ever, there’d be next to nothing left for lab analysis.

      And if she was identified someday, so what? A boss’s mistress disappeared and later turned up dead. Who cared? By then, her family would be extinct and life would have returned to normal, as it was before her brother had betrayed the family.

      Knowing who had wiped out the Natale clan was one thing; proving it was something else entirely. It was good for word to get around. Making examples was the best way to prevent prospective rats from talking out of turn.

      Still, now that he was sitting close to her, their thighs pressing together....

      “It’s a waste, all right,” Gitano Malara echoed, resting one of his hands on the prisoner’s other leg. “We ought to stop somewhere and have a little party, eh?”

      “You don’t mind, do you, bella?” Terranova asked, angling for a quick look in the rearview mirror.

      “She don’t mind,” Aiello said. “Lets her live a little longer anyway.”

      “That’s right,” Malara said. “I bet she’d be real grateful.”

      “Have you seen a mirror lately?” Cortale asked him.

      “Hey!”

      But it was getting to him, sitting close to her and hearing all the bawdy talk, knowing they could take her anywhere they wanted, make her do anything, as long as she still wound up feeding fish. Aldo would never know the difference if Cortale swore them all to silence under pain of death.

      They wouldn’t even have to deviate from Aldo’s plan. The boat was waiting for them. Once they had put out to sea, there would be nothing, no one, to distract them.

      Trying to keep it casual, he let his left hand come to rest on her right thigh. She tried to squirm away from him, but there was nowhere she could go, trapped with Malara to her left. She made a whiny noise but couldn’t even push his hand away because hers were tied behind her back.

      The possibilities aroused Cortale, inflaming him.

      “Hey, СКАЧАТЬ