For a nonnegotiable price fixed by Lorik Cako.
Business was good. Cako controlled himself around the merchandise, maintained strict supervision over his employees and was merciless with anyone who soiled the goods. The last example he had made—nineteen-year-old Vasil Ghica, barely off the boat himself—would stick forever in the memories of each man Cako had compelled to view the young transgressor’s execution.
Ghica had spent six hours dying. For the first two, he had wept for mercy. In the last four, he had begged for death. Cako had made his other soldiers mop up afterward, to drive the lesson home.
Cako’s customers weren’t required to call out bids like peasant farmers at a cattle yard. Each seat was fitted with a button in its left armrest, opposite a molded plastic cup-holder attached on the right. A simple finger tap logged silent bids in Cako’s control room next door, where Qemal Hoxha monitored the bidding and reported each new bid to his boss through a tiny earpiece.
As each new specimen appeared on stage, Cako announced a rock-bottom reserve price, ranging from fifty thousand dollars to three times as much, depending on the item’s beauty and her purity, where applicable. He then declared each bid as it was logged anonymously from the audience. These women weren’t earmarked for seedy brothels staffed by groggy drug addicts. Thus far, not one had ever failed to sell above the base rate Cako had established.
Now and then, a nervous customer might bid mistakenly. Cako allowed retraction of the offer, but only if the clumsy customer announced his error to the group. Embarrassment prevented most from rectifying such mistakes, and in any case they were rich enough that five grand more or less meant nothing to them anyway.
It was pure profit for the syndicate that Cako served, since they had literally plucked these women off the streets of cities all around the world. Their transportation costs were minimal, covered by drugs or other outlawed merchandise that traveled with them. A few, ironically, had even paid their own way to the States in hopes of finding a career in Hollywood or on the Broadway stage.
Such fools.
Bids stood at ninety thousand for the redhead in the spotlight, when his earpiece crackled. Cako smiled, preparing to announce another raise, but then heard Hoxha say, “Come quickly, sir! We have trouble!”
Frowning, Cako told his assembled patrons, “Please excuse me, gentlemen. A minor difficulty requires my brief attention. I’ll rejoin you momentarily. The bidding, meanwhile, stands at ninety thousand dollars.”
All of them tracked Cako with their narrowed eyes as he retreated through a side door, joining Hoxha in the small control room with its monitors, computers and microphones.
“What is it?” he snapped at Hoxha.
“Vasil says that the outer guards aren’t answering on their radios, and—”
Even underground, Cako heard the explosive rattle of an automatic weapon firing somewhere overhead. Inside the house. His house.
The buyers had to have heard it, too.
A rack in the control room held a Benelli M-4 Super 90 semiautomatic shotgun and two AKM assault rifles. Cako grabbed the shotgun and told Hoxha, “Get in there with the customers and calm them. If we need to move them out, I’ll let you know.”
“And the women?” Hoxha asked.
“If there’s need and time, we’ll move them, too. Always take care of money first.”
“Okay, Lorik.”
Clutching his weapon, Cako left the small control room through its second door and stormed the nearby flight of stairs.
IT HAD TO HAPPEN sometime. Bolan had been hoping he could clear a portion of the house without attracting any notice. But when he reached the kitchen, there were two armed men negotiating something with a cook dressed all in white. Both shooters gaped at Bolan as he entered, reaching for their weapons simultaneously.
One fell without managing to draw his pistol, faceless from a 3-round burst of Parabellum rounds that punched his nose and forehead deep into his mangled brain. The other guy was faster, managing to pull his piece before another burst ripped through his chest. He triggered one shot as he fell, a wasted ricochet off tile that served as an alert to anybody else inside the house.
Bolan was moving as the second body dropped, waving the frightened cook away and holstering his pistol, going with the M-4 carbine as the other housemen started shouting back and forth, rushing to find out what had happened. Bolan couldn’t translate most of what they called out in Albanian, but he could track the gist of it.
They were coming prepared for a fight, coming to kill him.
Or they’d die trying.
Bolan cleared the kitchen’s exit and found two men armed with submachine guns double-timing toward him, grim-faced and determined. Dropping to a crouch, he stitched the pair from left to right and back again, watching them slam-dance into each other as they fell. The dying gunner on his left began to fire as he went down, the point-blank muzzle-flashes from his SMG setting his partner’s shirt on fire.
The Executioner was up and moving in a heartbeat, ducking to his right as someone at the far end of the corridor squeezed off a pistol shot. It missed him by a yard or more, but Bolan couldn’t see the shooter yet, since he—or she?—had drawn back out of sight around a corner.
Bolan had two goals—to liberate the women caged in Lorik Cako’s house and to eliminate the man himself, together with as many of his gunners as were willing to engage the Executioner. He guessed that would be all of them, which suited Bolan to a tee.
Long odds, but not the worst he’d ever faced.
Not even close.
Six down and counting, with how many more to go? Perhaps a dozen; maybe twice that, with an auction under way. If he could tag the buyers, too, so much the better, but he wasn’t feeling greedy.
Bolan edged along the hallway, watching doors to either side and waiting for the shooter at the far end to reveal himself once more. It happened seconds later, as the guy popped out to fire another round, then jerked back under cover while a burst from Bolan’s carbine filled the air with plaster dust.
No score.
Bolan paused long enough to palm a frag grenade, release its safety pin and pitch the bomb underhanded toward the shooter’s hiding place. It struck the wall down there and bounced around the corner, out of sight, starting a scramble with a frightened cry.
Four seconds later it blew, shrapnel scoring the walls, smoke and more dust erupting downrange. There were cries of pain, or perhaps pleas for help, all gibberish to Bolan’s ears as he advanced to deal with the survivors, whittling down the odds while there was time, before Cako’s troops got their act together and came at him in force. The more he could eliminate before that moment came, the better off Bolan would be.
Not home and dry, by any means, but still more likely to survive and help the women who were waiting for him somewhere in the house. Praying for help, perhaps, and waiting for an Executioner.
CHAPTER TWO
Virginia, two days earlier
Skyline Drive ran through Shenandoah National Park, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Its course covered 105 miles from Front Royal, the northern terminus, to Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro, where it connected with Interstate 64 and U.S. Highway 50, branching off eastward to Charlottesville or westward to Staunton. Those who hadn’t seen enough trees yet could keep on rolling down the Blue Ridge Parkway for another 469 miles, to wind up in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Mack Bolan wasn’t going that far—or even to Rockfish Gap—in his rented Toyota Prius Model NHW20. He’d be leaving Skyline Drive between Luray and Skyland Lodge, taking care of ugly business on a lovely summer’s morning.
The