Death List

by Don Pendleton

  “Ditch the ride somewhere public,” Pierce said. “A parking garage, something like that.” He dug around in his pocket and produced a cell phone. “This is a burner with my number programmed in. Text me the details where you leave the vehicle. You can keep the phone or, if I know you, you can throw it away so the Corinos can’t track you. I won’t hold it against you. We buy ’em in bulk.”

  “You think they’d track my movements if I let them?”

  “You think I’m dumb enough to think you wouldn’t think they would?”

  The Executioner blinked. Pierce actually laughed. “That Crown Vic there has a full tank.”

  Bolan examined the car. It was a slate-gray Ford that looked old, but younger than Pierce’s vintage Lincoln. “It will do fine.”

  “Keys are under the visor.”

  “Hey, I have to know something. You said something about starting your own shop. Something you wanted to do, get out of all this.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “I’m curious,” Bolan said.

  “Guitars, if you gotta know. I want to open a shop to make guitars. I took a luthier class once.”

  “A what?”

  “Luthier. A guy who builds and strings guitars. It’s what I want to do in my retirement. Don’t hassle me, Harmon. We’ve all got dreams.”

  “I promise.”

  “You better.”

  Bolan offered his hand. Pierce shook it. His grip was firm.

  “Thanks for your help,” Bolan said. “Think about what I said before.”

  “I already am, Harmon,” Pierce told him. “I already am.”

  8

  In Transit to Federal Black Site,

  Location Unknown

  Vincent Harmon sat with his hands cuffed together behind his back. His part of the vehicle was caged off from the rest of the truck. It was a wise precaution.

  On the whole, his captors had been pretty smart up to now. They’d handled him with great care, mindful of just how dangerous he was. He’d had to bide his time, waiting for the moment they transferred him, to have any chance at breaking out. It had quickly become apparent that they’d had no intention to shuffle him from federal facility to federal facility, as he’d originally hoped. The bureaucratic dance that usually accompanied a prisoner wanted in as many different municipalities—and by as many different law-enforcement organizations—as Vincent Harmon surely was had been curiously absent.

  The message was a bad one. For Harmon. He’d run afoul of some supersecret black-ops government organization, one of those no-nonsense outfits trotted out when the usual alphabet-soup gangs couldn’t get the job done. He wasn’t stupid; he knew how the government and its tiers of secret and not-so-secret levels operated. There was a time when nobody would admit that the NSA existed. “No Such Agency,” they used to call it. These days it was common knowledge...and if the folks in power were willing to admit to the existence of No Such Agency, well, that only meant there were another twenty black-ops outfits running around in the shadows cleaning up behind. Had to keep the secrets secret, after all.

  Harmon knew he was bitter. He had come to terms with his disillusionment long ago. Now all he cared about was the only thing a man could care about, the only thing he truly owned. That was himself. He was the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. Nobody was going to tell him different. Nobody was going to lock him up in a cage, visible or invisible. There was no doubt, though, that the hole they intended to put him in would be deep and dark indeed. They were “disappearing him,” and there was no coming back from that. That meant he had exactly one chance to extricate himself from this truck, get equipped, find his way back to the Corinos, and find out how much damage had been done.

  The Corinos wouldn’t be happy about it, not one bit. He had done his homework, though. Their supersecret plan wasn’t as supersecret as they thought it was. There were plenty of sources of intel out there in the world, plenty of chatter going on over the internet. Very little of it was something a government agency could act on, but Harmon was no government. He didn’t need proof. He could take suspicion and then work with what his gut told him.

  His gut told him that the scheduling for the Corinos’ big plan, the one he was supposed to be executing, must already be under way. He wondered if they had found someone to replace him. It might be possible for him to pick up most of the hit list, once he had secured it from the Corinos. But it was going to take a lot of talking to get back in with them after he broke custody. They might even assume it was all a trick, that he was an undercover operative working for the government.

  Well. No time to worry about that now. That was borrowing trouble, something Harmon didn’t believe in. Fortunately he had long ago prepared for this eventuality. He had one shot. Just one shot to prevent him from spending the rest of his life in some deep, dark hole, where nobody would ever speak his name again. He wasn’t going to go out like that. He was nobody’s number. He’d never liked being seen as a cog in the machine, and he didn’t intend to end his life that way.

  He’d die first.

  But why die when you can kill instead? he thought. He reached out and began kicking the cage that separated him from the rest of the truck.

  The vehicle was a windowless prisoner transport. There was no window between the prisoner area and the cab of the truck. The prisoner box was completely sealed and armored, the idea being to prevent someone outside from busting in once the locks were dogged down.

  Two guards were on the other side of the cage. They were big men, dressed in full paramilitary garb: MOLLE-compatible load-bearing vests, ballistic armor, hard-knuckle gloves, knee pads and the rest of a full tactical load-out. The sight of all that gear, just for him, just to keep him locked up, made him laugh. Missing from the gear, though, were any weapons. The M-9 pistols were not in the empty drop-leg holsters both men wore. They had magazine pouches for M-4 rifles that contained loaded magazines, but the rifles themselves were not present. If there were any knives clipped to their load-bearing gear before they’d boarded the truck, those had been removed, too. Harmon suspected all of it would be in a locker or some other secured storage either in the cab of the truck, or even external to the passenger compartment, such as on the frame behind the cab.

  “Stop that kicking,” Manny Ramirez, one of the guards, ordered. They were the first words either man had spoken. They were both big, burly, clean-shaved fellows sporting flat-top haircuts.

  “I can’t,” Harmon said. “Spasms are a side effect of the cyanide.”

  “What did he say?” the second guard, Jack Ernst, asked.

  “Jack, I think he said poison. He’s talking about poison!”

  “Stop him!” Both guards lurched off their bench, heading for the cage. Ramirez had the keys to the metal mesh door clipped to his gear. He stopped when he realized it might be a trick. The two guards exchanged worried glances.

  “I had it installed a long time ago,” Harmon said. “I chose it because it was the stupidest, most spy-movie thing I could think of. And because I knew it would work.”

  “Installed what?” Ernst demanded.

  “The fake tooth in my mouth,” Harmon replied as though in pain, continuing to kick the metal cage as hard as he could.

  “Get him, get him, get him!” Ramirez shouted.

  “What about cyanide fumes?” Ernst demanded.

  “Hold your breath! Just grab him! Stop him!”

  Harmon shoved himself off his bench and onto the floor of the truck, against the metal mesh of the cage holding him in.

  He was really surprised they’d fallen for it.

  They fumbled around and opened the cage. He waited until he felt hands on his shoulders. They started to lift him.

  For a moment he was close enough to feel the guard’s breath on his face. He turned and looked up at t
he guard. It was the first one, the one with the keys. And he smiled. A second later he tore into Ramirez’s throat with his teeth.

  The hot, salty, coppery taste wasn’t something Harmon had experienced before. He bit down hard, ripping open the man’s throat, spitting out whatever blood and matter he could tear away. The sound that escaped the doomed man was something Harmon would never be able to forget. He had heard a lot of men die over the years. He wasn’t sure if the fact that he could still be surprised was a good thing or a weakness. He would have to think about that. He would ponder it the next time he took a life. And the time after that.

  The second guard was trying to hit him, using an expandable baton of some kind. He kept hitting his partner instead, who was between them. Harmon chided himself for not noting the existence of the baton. How had he not seen it? It was possible the guard had held it back. It may have been hidden from even the man’s government employers. So stupid. These imbeciles always underestimated the prisoners they guarded. They figured they could do dumb things like flout regulations, hold back dangerous implements. A weapon was never brought into a secured-prisoner environment. There was always the danger of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.

  Not that Harmon considered his hands the wrong ones. Oh, no. His were the right ones. He got the necessary leverage and, with his arms wrapped around the bleeding, dying man’s ruptured neck, he twisted with all the strength he had. The dying man’s neck snapped and he convulsed. Harmon’s entire body felt sticky with blood. He rolled the corpse off him.

  “Check in,” came a voice from the wall. “Cab to Capsule, check in.”

  The second guard’s baton came down. Harmon met it, clapping his hands over the club and rolling with the momentum. Slamming his forehead into the man’s face, he was rewarded with the sound of crushed cartilage and a scream of pain. Then he pushed, waited for resistance, and yanked the weapon from the startled guard’s grasp. It came free and he instantly whipped it around and into the side of the guard’s head.

  That stunned the poor bastard. Harmon laughed and began hitting harder, as hard as he could, as much as the strength in his arm would allow. He felt the expandable baton bend under the onslaught and kept hitting. That was the thing with these telescoping jobs, truth be told. They never held up to a good, old-fashioned beating, the kind that left a guy dead on the deck with his head caved in. Whenever possible, Harmon preferred the heft of an old-style wooden baton. Give him hard wood any day.

  Harmon laughed again at his own joke.

  “Hard wood, get it?” he said out loud, still smashing the guard’s skull with the bloody, misshapen baton. “Hard wood!”

  “Capsule, this is Cab,” came the voice from the wall of the truck. “Capsule, are you guys all right?”

  It took a little while, but finally it occurred to Harmon that his enemies were down. He stood and took stock of his clothes. He wore only an orange prison-issue jumpsuit, now coated with blood. That wouldn’t do. He began to strip the less soiled of the two guards to don his BDUs and tactical gear. Then it occurred to him that he could go whole hog, really pour on the supersecret spy stuff. Chuckling, he began shoving the big, undressed guard into his orange jumpsuit. The clothes weren’t a good fit, but it only had to pass for a minute. He arranged the body in the cage and was stepping out just as the truck began to slow.

  “Check in, Capsule! Check in, dammit!”

  Harmon found the intercom system on the wall. He pressed it with one bloody thumb and said, while rubbing the palm of his other hand over the microphone to distort his voice, “Prisoner is down! Prisoner is down! Send immediate armed support!”

  “Capsule? Capsule!” came the reply.

  Harmon stationed himself next to the rear doors of the prisoner compartment. The doors opened out. All he had to do was wait.

  When the men outside opened the doors, they came in behind their M-4 rifles. Harmon had only to reach out, snatch the barrel of the first weapon, and wrench it out of the hands of the very surprised man holding it. He flipped the weapon, breaking the man’s trigger finger, jamming the trigger back as the rifle spun. The weapon discharged a short burst then another, as Harmon drove the barrel toward the owner’s groin.

  “Hope you wore your trauma plate down below!” Harmon shouted. He had the weapon now, and as the first guard folded in the open doorway, he punched several more rounds through the two remaining guards. The M-4 went dry, so he dropped the mag and slammed in a fresh one from the pouch on the load-bearing vest he now wore.

  Thoughtful of the guards to provide his reloads.

  He didn’t have much time. Already, he could hear the truck being thrown into gear. He ran along the side, bounded up the running board on the passenger side and threw open the door.

  “Are you guys—?” the driver started to say, letting his foot off the accelerator. He had been about to follow procedure and haul out of there when things went south in the prisoner compartment. Seeing the familiar tactical gear, he’d naturally assumed one of the guards had come back.

  “They aren’t,” Harmon said.

  “Aren’t what?”

  “Aren’t okay.” Harmon then sprayed the man out of the driver’s seat with the M-4. The bullets pocked the armored glass of the windows and windshield as the driver was spread around the interior of the cab. Harmon didn’t even bother to search him. He just needed to silence anyone who might put out the alarm.

  He climbed down from the truck, reloading his stolen M-4 again. The weapons locker he had been hoping for was located behind the cab, just as he’d suspected. It didn’t even have what he’d consider a decent lock; just a simple padlock. A few strikes with the butt of the M-4 knocked it clear. He opened it and almost whooped for joy.

  Just like Christmas morning, he thought to himself. He removed a pair of M-9 pistols and several loaded magazines. There was also a combat dagger—a double-edged model with a rubber grip serrated on one side of the blade. That would do. He could get by with these things. He missed his own, custom guns, but, hell, a man made do with what he had. Some days were a bigger pain than others.

  He needed to put distance between him and the truck, and fast. There was every likelihood the vehicle was GPS-tracked. It was sitting unmoving on the side of a—he looked around, assessing his location—four-lane highway. No doubt that was unscheduled, in terms of stops for a secured prisoner vehicle headed to a black-site prison. There would probably be troops, or helicopters, or both on top of his location in minutes.

  The highway was bordered on both sides of the road with deep stands of trees. He couldn’t see any road markers, but if he had to guess, he would say he was somewhere in Upstate New York, maybe farther east or south. Connecticut? Pennsylvania? Something like that. He made his way into the trees. Cars were moving back and forth on both sides of the highway but, God bless America, none of them stopped or even looked curious. That’s what Harmon loved about Americans. Too busy racing from point A to point B to get involved.

  On the other hand, there was every chance there was now footage of him from three different angles on a video-sharing site on the internet.

  Once in the trees, hidden from view, he took off at an angle from the truck, careful not to move directly away from it but to make as much diagonal distance as possible. He thought he heard a chopper overhead at one point, but that might have been unrelated. Then again, it might be a government pursuit helicopter. The odds were a lot more likely.

  He needed to get to a pay phone—if he could find one. From the phone, he could make arrangements with the mercenary firm he kept on retainer for just such emergencies. And once he got hold of them, he could assess the damage his sudden absence from the scene had caused his budding relationship with the Corinos. It was very frustrating not knowing.

  He took up an easy jog through the woods. He was in good shape, and at a low trot he could cover grou
nd for hours. He estimated he had been moving for maybe three or four at the most when the woods started to thin. The sounds of traffic were growing louder. He heard air brakes, too.

  Harmon took stock at the tree line and spotted a truck stop and rest area. He slung the M-4, doing his best to look like he belonged there, and made his way casually down the slight decline toward where the tractor-trailers were parked in rows at the rear of the stop.

  From the signs, he now knew that he was in Pennsylvania. There were quite a few New York license plates in the car park attached to the tractor-trailer lot, which meant he was also close to the New York border. Okay, that was good. He had a vague fix on his location.

  He used the trucks to screen himself from view. A trucker started to climb down from his cab, spotted Harmon and froze.

  “Afternoon,” the assassin said. “Border patrol, sir. Just routine.”

  “Frigging fascists.” The trucker spit. “The Canadian border’s nowhere near here! You wanna detain me, you jackboot?”

  “No, sir,” Harmon replied. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Yeah, you better move on, you government drone.”

  Harmon reached the car park and, at the rear farthest from the rest stop building, began moving his way up and down the rows of cars. If anyone challenged him he would just use the same cover again.

  He found a door that was unlocked. It was a minivan, which wasn’t particularly sporty, but it would be nondescript enough once he changed plates. He put the M-4 on the floor between the seats, closed the door and checked for extra keys. There were none.

  Dammit, he thought. Hot-wiring would add minutes to the time it took to get out of there. He drew the combat knife he’d taken from his guards, found the necessary wire harness and started cutting and stripping. Before too long he’d made the connection to get the power on, then sparked the starter. The van started up without difficulty.

  Pulling out of the parking spot, he made sure to drive away from the building, not toward it. If the owner was on his or her way out, or seated inside the building near a window having lunch, he didn’t want the person to see him taking the van.