LITMIR.BIZ

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experience. Throwing in his knowledge of Arabic, German and French—as well as his ability to fly anything with wings or propellers—was the icing on a hardcase cake.

      The members of Phoenix Force were picked because they could fight, but none of them was just pure brawn. Each of them knew at least three languages fluently, as well as possessing a gamut of knowledge ranging from deep sea diving, archaeology, structural engineering, medicine and chemistry.

      Hundreds of lives were at risk, and Phoenix Force had the Syrian assassins to thank for it. Damascus was hardly a friend of the United States and the rest of the Western world, but when the Syrian government reacted to one of their own going rogue, the globe had to sit up and take notice.

      “Anything, Cal?” McCarter asked.

      James shook his head. “Still nothing. How much longer are we going to watch that hole in the wall?”

      McCarter took a deep breath. James knew that before he’d been given leadership of the team, his impetuous and impulsive nature had him chomping at the bit to get into action. Anything that hinted of hesitation crawled under McCarter’s skin like a burr. Since his promotion, however, even the appearance sitting idly was misleading. The Briton’s mind was buzzing, a gleaming light shining behind his eyes indicating thoughts racing along as he plotted angles and strategies.

      Being the boss didn’t make things easier, but it alleviated any boredom he used to have.

      “Until we’re ready,” McCarter said.

      James shook his head again. “A few years ago, I’d ask who the hell you are and what you’d done with the real David.”

      McCarter looked at James and winked. “The real David’s having fun working out the probabilities of my plans a dozen times over, looking for every single outcome. Before, I had to twiddle my thumbs, waiting to do my thing. Now I’m rolling plans in my head to make sure all you little chickadees return home to roost, not just because you’re all my mates, but because Mama Hen Barb would turn me into a fryer if I fucked up.”

      “I’m so glad that our friendship is more important than your fear of reprisals, David,” James said.

      McCarter chuckled, then brought his radio to his lips. “Gary, luv. Still warm up there?”

      “A Paris evening in November?” Gary Manning asked. “In Canada, this is T-shirt weather.”

      “Any change of security?” McCarter returned.

      “Same patrol patterns. Bezoar has some tightly wound people watching him, and they’re not fucking around,” Manning answered. “They haven’t noticed you two yet, but then, it takes me a minute to locate you.”

      “Good news,” McCarter said. “T.J., how’re you doing?”

      “Aside from the hairy eyeballs I caught from security, I’m peachy,” Hawkins told him. “They noticed me just walking on the sidewalk, so Bezoar has plenty of sharp eyes and ears on the scene.”

      “A visit from Damascus woke them up, likely,” Rafael Encizo commented from his vantage point.

      “Not this bunch,” Hawkins countered. “This wasn’t cockroach scrambling, this was lions watching a zebra. Not a nice feeling being the prey.”

      “Just about satisfied, David?” Encizo asked.

      “Almost,” McCarter responded.

      James noticed a sudden perk of interest rise in the Phoenix Force commander. “Spot something?”

      “A truck picking up trash,” McCarter said, nodding toward the vehicle. “Gary, how many guns are on it?”

      They waited for Manning for a couple of moments, then the Canadian spoke up. “Five. How’d you guess?”

      “I’ve done stakeouts in this area of town before,” McCarter answered. “Rubbish isn’t picked up on this day of the week, and not two haulers off a truck at the same time.”

      “Amazing the amount of crap you remember,” James muttered.

      “I noticed,” McCarter replied. “The Syrians sent in reinforcements.”

      “We move on them?” Encizo asked.

      McCarter shook his head, then spoke up. “No. We let them start this party, then we slip around the back.”

      “Worked for Striker, might as well work for us,” James said.

      McCarter reached for his valise and opened it, scanning the Fabrique Nationale P-90 concealed within. The tiny chatterbox was stuffed with a 50-round magazine. “We want Bezoar alive, chickadees. Treat him with kid gloves. Anyone else, fuck ’em. Especially the party from Damascus.”

      The garbage truck rolled close to Bezoar’s apartment building.

      McCarter and his Phoenix Force teammates were in motion before the first pop of a submachine gun was barely audible in the distance.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Arno Scalia walked down the hall, mouth turned in a frown that was only amplified by the downward turn of his black mustache. The fluorescent lights shone off his shaved head as he fiddled with his key in the lock. He’d just left the most secure room in the building, a structure that had cost one hundred thousand dollars to build and had been designed to resist any manner of eavesdropping. The phone call that had come in over a shielded and encrypted landline had made him uncomfortable.

      Last week he and the outfit had moved crates of military electronics. Nothing could be identified, as it was still in the packaging and the labels had been scraped off, but the order was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” For the higher-ups to actually have to repeat that to Scalia, one of the most discreet of men in the entire family, it was a sign that there was no fooling around with this shipment. Nothing falls off the back of the truck, nobody looks inside a crate and for certain no one will ever speak of it again.

      That kind of double-checking was indicative of two conditions. One was that the organization had received a boatload of money to keep this well under the radar. The other was that his bosses, some of the hardest gangsters in Chicago, were frightened of the consequences of a single error.

      Scalia was a professional, one who wouldn’t make such a mistake, and if his subordinates had screwed up under him, he’d take it out of their hides. The shit would continue to roll downhill, until someone paid for the amount of grief he’d caused, the level of punishment rising with each and every person the frustration had passed through. No one in the transport office would screw things up. It was just too well enforced internally.

      Now, he’d just received a phone call regarding a trio of Feds who were asking questions in town. Scalia had to keep an eye out for them, and if there was anything out of the ordinary, he was to quash it at a moment’s notice.

      “A trio of Feds,” he murmured, repeating the term. “Actually, they were called ‘super-Feds.’”

      Scalia had been in the Mafia long enough to know what that term meant. Some government agencies didn’t have to work by a set of rules that allowed groups like his to operate in relative freedom. The mention of a trio of super-Feds had also popped up all over the country, often just preceding a blitz that was second only to the horrors inflicted upon them by a lone vigilante whose name was never spoken anymore. Scalia had been present in other towns where the local organized crime had received visits from mystery men waving around Justice Department credentials just before war exploded on the streets.

      The vigilante might have gone legitimate, Scalia mused, and picked up some allies. It was always a rumor, a conspiracy theory among the families, chatter about how the greatest scourge of their professional careers engaged in one bloody weeklong endgame that had crippled their infrastructure, then disappeared. Some had called it a monopoly-breaking strategy. Sometimes people using his old strategies of urban warfare came back for a visit, leaving wreckage in their wakes.

      Scalia stepped into

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