He had to frown at that. “Sounds like we’re wasting time.”
“Cako will need that time to calm his customers, if they’re still with him. If they’re not, we have lost nothing.”
“Nothing but the women,” Bolan said.
“You think he will dispose of them?”
“He might.”
“Cako may be a zhopa—what you call an asshole—but he’s first a businessman. He won’t dispose of valuable merchandise without good reason. More importantly, his masters would resent it.”
“After last night, he may think he has a reason,” Bolan said.
“I doubt it. Certainly, he faces inquiries from the authorities. His house may need repairs. But who can link him to the women or even prove they exist? In his mind, I assure you—and in Arben Kurti’s mind, as well—the living women still have value. Now, if they were rescued by police and were prepared to testify…”
She didn’t have to finish it.
“Okay,” Bolan agreed. “Let’s say you’re right. I have to get it done this time. Clear out the hostages and deal with Cako, then take Kurti out before he slips away.”
“You’re an ambitious man,” Volkova said.
“I dropped the ball tonight,” Bolan replied. “Call it damage control.”
“And I will help you.”
“Won’t your people be upset?” Bolan inquired. “I don’t imagine you were sent to hunt down the Albanians this way.”
She shrugged and told him, “My superiors appreciate results. There was no realistic prospect of collaborating with your FBI toward prosecution of Kurti or Cako. I’m more likely to be charged myself, for some infringement on homeland security.”
“I take it you don’t have a diplomatic pass?”
“Only a simple tourist visa, as it happens.”
Simple tourist. Right.
“Okay. We give the other side some time to pacify their customers, then see about my car when everybody’s heading off to work. Sound fair?”
“I’ll change now,” Volkova said, “to save some time.”
He watched her take some items from a dresser drawer and disappear into the small bathroom. Ten minutes later she was back, dressed in a tight black turtleneck and matching jeans, hair tied back in a ponytail. All that she needed was some war paint to cover her peaches-and-cream complexion, but Bolan wasn’t complaining.
“You’ve come prepared,” he said.
“I do,” she told him, ducking to retrieve a duffel bag from underneath her bed. She set it on the bedspread, opened it and pulled out an AKS-74U carbine. The U stood for Ukorochenniy—“shortened,” in Russian—and the stubby piece lived up to its name. It was a standard Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle, truncated to fire from an 8.3-inch barrel, with a skeletal folding stock. Ammo-wise, it chambered 5.45 mm rounds with the same magazines holding thirty or forty-five cartridges, with an effective range of six hundred yards and a full-auto cyclic rate of 650 rounds per minute.
“You didn’t pack that flying coach,” Bolan said.
“Indeed not,” Volkova replied. “The diplomatic pouch is good for something, yes?”
“Seems so. About that sleep…”
“We are adult enough to share the bed, I think.”
“Suits me,” the Executioner agreed.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Pine Barrens
Lorik Cako seethed internally but dared not let his anger or embarrassment be visible. He viewed Kurti’s surprise arrival as a calculated insult, an expression of his leader’s sense that Cako couldn’t handle any of the problems that confronted them, but there was nothing he could do about it at the moment.
Not with Kurti’s hard-eyed men surrounding him.
Cako was forced to smile and nod and play along, ever the dutiful subordinate who wouldn’t harbor any disloyal thoughts regardless of the provocation. Total crap, but it was a way to stay alive.
For now.
He trailed Kurti around the house, flanked by the soldiers who had invaded his home. Of course, it wasn’t actually Cako’s home, either on paper or in fact. A phony corporation formed for that specific purpose held the deed, while Kurti and the syndicate they served had paid the tab. Still, Kurti only visited the rural house on rare occasions, so it felt like home to Cako—more than the defiled abode in East Keansburg—and he resented the intrusion he was suffering this day.
And still he smiled, watching his master work.
Arben Kurti could be a suave and charming man when circumstance demanded it. He had a way with ladies, for example, that beguiled them into thinking that he was a gentleman steeped in the kind of chivalry enshrined by romance novels. Once they had surrendered to him, though, it was another story altogether. Some endured him. Others fled.
A few had not survived.
This morning, with the first pale light of dawn just visible over the barrens, Kurti used his charm to placate Cako’s foreign customers. He sympathized, commiserated, nodding as they bitched and moaned to him about their disappointment and the peril they had suffered.
Never mind that none of them could show a scratch for all their trials and tribulations.
Granted, they had been disturbed and caught a whiff of gunsmoke as they left the other house. What of it? Each and every one of them were murderers, notorious for their brutality. Their whining angered Cako nearly as much as the raid on his house at the shore.
But Kurti had a way with men, as well as women. He was bringing them around, no doubt about it. Alternately frowning, nodding and joking with the clients, he’d managed to convince them that they shouldn’t write their trips off as a total waste. Why turn around and leave without the merchandise they’d hoped to purchase in the first place, when it still remained available?
Within arm’s reach, in fact.
By breakfast he had charmed them all. Cako’s personal chef prepared a feast, skipping the ham and bacon on the Muslim plates as ordered, and the waiters offered whiskey for those diners who desired to spike their morning coffee as a special treat.
“To get the juices flowing,” Kurti told them.
He had saved the day—but was it anything Cako himself couldn’t have done? How would they ever know, when he wasn’t allowed to try?
For the first time in their association, spanning seven years, Cako felt hatred for the man who pulled his strings. When Kurti told this story to Rahim Berisha—and he would, no doubt—all of the credit would be his, while Cako took the blame.
That was, if Kurti lived to tell the tale.
With enemies at large and staging vicious raids, who could predict how long he might survive? And if by some chance he was slain, together with his bodyguards, Berisha would be forced to trust Cako’s accounting of events.
Who would be left to contradict him, after all?
“Come, come! Enjoy!” He beamed at his guests, matching his own enthusiasm to Kurti’s. “We have great surprises in store!”
“WE STOP HERE,” Volkova said, “and proceed on foot.”
“Sounds fair,” Bolan replied.
The Porsche Boxster wasn’t an off-road vehicle by any means, but Volkova nosed it cautiously into a copse that offered her a hiding place of sorts. Determined searchers would be sure to find the car, but passing