LITMIR.BIZ

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Zhol blinked as the hood was pulled off his head. He had never seen Jack Grimaldi before. Grimaldi popped the lock on the passenger door of the still-moving Mercedes 350SL. He grinned maniacally as he leaned across Zhol’s bound wrists and opened the door for him. “I said out.”

      The gangster gaped around in himself in disorientation. “But—”

      “See ya!” Grimaldi shoved Zhol out the door without coming to a complete stop. The gangster hit the paving stones, and the Stony Man pilot threw the key to his handcuffs after him. The pilot closed the door and pulled back into traffic. “Houston, the pigeon has landed.”

      “I have target in sight.” Hawkins sat ten yards away on a motorcycle eating a sausage he’d bought from a vendor. He was dressed as a business messenger with a bag across his shoulder and a box bungee-corded to the luggage rack. “He’s heading straight for the pay phone.”

      Zhol limped toward a pay phone, shoved in some change and began to speak immediately.

      Gary Manning was deployed across the square on a second motorcycle. The rest of Phoenix was in a ZIL panel van loaded with surveillance gear courtesy of the CIA Moscow station chief. Encizo sat in the back of the van listening intently into a pair of earphones. He was connected with a translator in the U.S. Embassy’s secure communications room. “Translator, do you read?”

      The night before Aidor Zhol had slept extremely soundly. During that time they had put a tracer in the stacked leather heal of his Italian dress shoe and a second one in his watch. A microphone had been emplaced in the tooled silver gather that held his shoulder-length black hair in a ponytail. The cape of his leather duster had been broadly painted with infrared luminescent paint.

      CIA Linguist Judith Tarko responded. “Target has not mentioned any names. He has identified himself, his location and demanded pickup. Your audio picked up the key tones of the phone. I have a man here running the tone tape to establish the number.” Tarko paused as another voice spoke in Russian. “They have told him to sit tight where he is and they will bring him in.”

      The line suddenly clicked dead. Zhol hung up the phone and glanced around himself suspiciously.

      Tarko sighed. “That’s it, sorry we couldn’t be more help. Give us thirty seconds to establish his destination number.”

      “Excellent work, Translator.” McCarter watched Zhol through his binoculars. “Let us know when you have the number.”

      Tarko came back almost instantly. “I hate to say this, but it’s a cell phone, belonging to one Zoya Krinkova, fifty-two-year-old housewife, and that isn’t Zoya on the other end with Zhol.”

      It was a cutout phone. Either stolen or else some street level thug had given Mrs. Krinkova a small sum of money to start the account under her own name and keep it up while the phone itself had been distributed to parties unknown. The phone would be used once, in an emergency, and thrown away. Tracking the end user through her would be a monumental if not impossible task without the aid of half the Moscow police, and the Russian mafiya owned well over half of them.

      “Thanks, Translator. We’ll keep you posted.” McCarter addressed his team. “It’s a waiting game now. We wear Zhol like underwear and see where he goes. If he gets capped, we go in hard for the gunmen.”

      Phoenix Force came back in the affirmative.

      Zhol sat on a bench and checked his watch. Hawkins leisurely strode by him and bought another sausage. McCarter drank three bottles of Coca-Cola while Encizo and James went through a thermos of coffee.

      After forty-five minutes, a bottle-green panel van pulled up to the curb near Zhol.

      “Phoenix, we are go!”

      Hawkins and Manning both threw a leg over their bikes.

      Zhol rose and looked around himself. The sliding door of the van opened, and a black-gloved hand reached out to Zhol to help him inside. Zhol took the hand and put a foot into the van.

      “Shit!” Hawkins warned. “We have trouble!”

      The twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun extended out the door at Aidar Zhol’s face. The Tajikistani mobster’s satanic eyebrows rose in horror and his eyes went wide. He jerked at the hand holding his, but he wasn’t going anywhere.

      “All units converge!” McCarter commanded.

      Manning’s bike burned rubber across the square as he tore toward the green van. The tires on the surveillance van screamed as James peeled out. Hawkins’s SIG-Sauer P-226 pistol ripped free of its holster. Flame blasted from both barrels of the shotgun. Tourists and sightseers screamed at the twin detonations. Zhol’s face disappeared in a red haze. His assassin let go of his hand and Zhol collapsed to the curb like a puppet with its strings cut.

      The sliding door of the van slammed shut, and the vehicle roared away from the curb.

      Hawkins’s pistol trip-hammered in his hands. The rear tires of the old van exploded as he pumped a double tap into each one, and its back end dropped as it sank onto its wheels. The bumper showered sparks as it dragged along the pavement. Hawkins raised his aim and fired the remaining twelve rounds in his magazine into the back of the vehicle. Brakes screeched and horns blared as the stricken vehicle fishtailed crazily into traffic.

      Hawk slammed a fresh mag into his SIG and gunned the engine of his Ural. “What about Zhol!”

      “Forget him!” McCarter ordered. “Let Moscow police take him! We have a contact! Take the van!”

      Hawkins shot into traffic. Manning had already crossed the square and was weaving between cars in pursuit. The van wasn’t hard to spot. It had ripped away the shreds of its tires and was showering sparks off the back bumper and out of both wheel wells.

      Traffic parted around it like it had the plague.

      The driver of the van leaned out of his window. The small blue-steel shape of a Makarov pistol began popping off rounds at Manning in rapid fire. Manning’s .40-caliber weapon filled his hand and boomed back. The driver jerked back inside as his side mirror exploded inches from his abdomen.

      Sirens began wailing in the distance.

      McCarter’s voice came across the radio. “We have to wrap this up fast. It’s broad daylight and we don’t have a hunting license.”

      “Affirmative, Phoenix One.” Manning pointed as Hawkins pulled up into the wingman position. “Front tires! I’ll take the passenger side!”

      “Affirmative!” Hawkins split off into the left lane as Manning went right. The former Ranger pulled in a few yards back from the driver’s door and extended his pistol. The Swiss pistol barked three times and the van slumped into a left-leaning tilt. The driver nearly lost control as he overcorrected the wheel.

      Manning raised his .40 to take the van’s last leg from underneath it.

      The driver violently spun his wheel to the right. Manning went full-throttle and leaped his bike up onto the sidewalk to avoid being crushed. Civilians screamed and dived out of the way as the big Canadian roared down the pavement. Manning jammed on his brakes to avoid running over an immense woman walking her dog. The woman stood screaming in place and the little dog jumped and barked between her legs. Between the cars parked on the curb and the storefronts girding the narrow sidewalk there was nowhere to go but through the woman and her dog.

      Manning yanked his bike to the right, popped a wheelie and went through the display window of a flower shop instead.

      His front tire erupted through the window; his rear tire hit the brick beneath it. The rear end of the bike bucked Manning off like a mechanical mule as it flipped nosedown through the display case. He flew through space in a cloud of sunflowers, daisies, marigolds and broken vases.

      He came to a violent halt as he flew headfirst through double glass doors of the cold case. Manning smashed the shelving holding the displays and bounced off the solid wall behind them, then collapsed with the upper half of his body in the refrigerated case

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