Don Pendleton - China White

Two blocks from where he’d killed six men, Bolan ditched the balaclava and turned right on Hudson Street, slowing to match the flow of traffic moving northward. The map in his head told him that Hudson would become Ninth Street when he had cleared the next two dozen blocks, past Greenwich Village, and then continue toward Times Square and the Theater District. Somewhere along that two-mile drive he’d find a place to ditch the Camry and proceed on foot until he caught a cab and went from there.

Next stop: a different auto rental agency, where he’d present a driver’s license and Platinum Visa in the name of Matthew Cooper, home address a mail drop in Richmond, Virginia, that forwarded bills and whatever to Stony Man Farm. There’d be no problem picking up another ride, and he’d be on his way.

Easy.

After that, however, things would once again get complicated in a hurry.

Bolan’s plan had been diverted by the battle on Canal Street, but it wasn’t scuttled. In fact, he thought Plan B might serve him better than the scheme he’d started out with. Now that he’d acquired a load of smack worth some three million dollars, he could try a new game, not restricted to the Wah Ching base in Chinatown.

Divide and conquer, right. He’d played that hand before, with good results, and Bolan couldn’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t work this time. At least, not yet.

New wheels, then phone calls. He would reach out to the Wah Ching Triad first, since he’d relieved them of their merchandise, then he would float an offer to Wasef Kamran. Neither would ever lay hands on the suitcase full of poison, but they wouldn’t know that going in.

Hope springs eternal, even among savages.

They would believe that every person drawing breath came with a price tag, ready to abandon principle if someone offered them a payday large enough to salve their qualms of conscience. Moral ambiguity was absolutely necessary for survival of a criminal cartel. It was the mobster’s stock in trade. Neither would be familiar with a man like Bolan, who regarded the performance of his duty as an end unto itself.

A rude awakening was coming to his enemies, but if he played his cards right, none of them would live to profit from the lesson.

And when they were gone, the Executioner would deal with those who’d sent them to New York.

CHAPTER FOUR

Chinatown, Manhattan

Paul Mei-Lun poured himself a second glass of rice baiju and slugged the liquor down, waiting to feel its heat spread from his throat into his belly. He hoped that it would calm him soon and damp the waves of anger that were threatening to prompt some foolish action he would certainly regret.

Details of the attack were vague, confused, but Mei-Lun knew the basics. He had lost three men and ten kilos of heroin, while suffering another grievous insult at the hands of foul barbarians. With Tommy Mu, that made four deaths within a week, eleven kilos lost. He did not want to think about what Ma Lam Chan would say—what he might do—on learning of the latest losses.

It was Mei-Lun’s job to put things right. He owed it to the Wah Ching brotherhood and to himself, since the responsibility had to ultimately fall on him. His problem now was where to start.

Of course, Wasef Kamran and his gorillas were responsible for Tommy Mu, but someone else had interceded in the second incident. Police had found the Afghans dead, along with Mei-Lun’s men, and witnesses described a seventh man wearing a mask and firing at both sides in the fight. He had been seen escaping with a suitcase—Mei-Lun’s suitcase—in a car already found abandoned on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, close to Central Park. Mei-Lun knew the car was rented, but he had not yet obtained the name of the killer who’d hired it.

When he did...

His thoughts stopped there. The gunman clearly was a trained professional. There was no reason to suppose that he would use his real name on a rental contract or that Mei-Lun would be able to locate him once he had the alias in hand. His task was to determine why a stranger, a professional, would leap into the middle of a firefight, tackle six armed men and kill them all.

The easy answer: for the heroin. But that was too easy.

To pull it off, the killer had to have known about the shipment, where it would be coming from and when it would arrive. He had to have followed Mei-Lun’s people from the ferry terminal. Without the Afghans intervening, Mei-Lun reckoned that the gunman would have trailed them to the Lucky Dragon where he sat right now, the empty liquor glass in front of him. But Kamran’s men had intervened, and even when the shooting started it was not enough to put the other gunman off. He’d gone ahead to fight six men and kill them all, then make off with the heroin.

Acting on whose behalf?

Mei-Lun’s thoughts turned immediately to the New York Mafia. His headquarters on Mott Street stood a short three blocks from Little Italy, where rivals spawned in Sicily despised him, seething enviously over his prosperity. There had been clashes in the past between his soldiers and the goombahs of La Cosa Nostra, but no overt violence had flared among them for a year or more. It would be out of character for them, he thought, to send a single soldier on a mission of such gravity.

But if they had...

Beside the baiju bottle, Mei-Lun’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated. He scooped it up and read the message: Number Blocked. Frowning, Mei-Lun pressed a button to accept the call and asked, “Who’s this?”

Instead of answering, a voice he didn’t recognize said, “Rumor has it that you lost a piece of luggage earlier today.”

The frown turned to a scowl, but Mei-Lun kept his voice in neutral. “Luggage?”

“I suppose you’re more concerned about the contents than the bag,” his caller said.

Cell phones were dangerous, their airborne messages fair game under the law for anyone who intercepted them. “Sorry,” Mei-Lun replied. “Wrong number.”

“Okay, then,” Mack Bolan said. “I’ll speak to Mr. Chan directly, shall I?” He rattled off the Dragon Head’s unpublished number in Hong Kong without missing a beat, as if from memory.

A trick? Undoubtedly. But if the stranger knew that much and Mei-Lun brushed him off, he might indeed call Ma Lam Chan. And that could be the end of Paul Mei-Lun.

“Perhaps I was mistaken,” Mei-Lun said. “If so, I would be willing to discuss it.”

“Small talk doesn’t interest me,” the caller told him. “I’ve got merchandise to sell.”

“I see.” There’d been no mention of the heroin, nothing that would incriminate Mei-Lun so far. “What figure did you have in mind?”

“Wholesale, I understand it runs around six hundred thousand. Call it half a mil and we’re in business.”

Mei-Lun wished that he could reach out through the cell phone, grasp the caller’s throat and strangle him, but he restrained himself, controlled his voice. “That is within the realm of possibility,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll call you back with details for the drop.”

And he was gone.

Flushing, Queens, New York

KHODA HAFIZ, an Afghan social club and quasi-covert headquarters of Wasef Kamran’s organization, stood near the corner of Franklin Avenue and Colden Street, in a neighborhood occupied mostly by South Asian immigrants. Some old-time residents called the neighborhood Little Afghanistan, while others dubbed it Little India. Kamran, these past four years, had simply called it home.

The club’s name translated in English to “May God protect you,” but He had not smiled on Wasef Kamran lately, and it angered the mobster.

The loss of three good men plus failure to secure the Wah Ching shipment he had sent them to collect had Kamran simmering with rage, augmented by frustration since he had no one to punish for that failure. With no outlet for his fury—and despite the strictures of his faith—Kamran had pacified himself to some extent with a small glass of homemade liquor that included alcohol, hash oil, sugar, nutmeg, a bit of cinnamon and cloves.