Havoc - v4 by Jack du Brul

didn’t add up. The admiral paused for a second, looking down at Mercer, who was sliding a credit card from his wallet. “What’s your sense of the group who took out Dayce and his men?”
    “Don’t ask me how or why but I think they knew about the mine and had gone there to make sure Dayce didn’t discover it.”
    “If the mine’s played out like you said, what’s the point?”
    Mercer had no answer. But he would find it.
     

New York City
     
    The Upper East Side co-op had a commanding view of Central Park and the apartment towers beyond. It had four bedrooms, a study, and a small suite for a live-in servant. The dining table could seat a dozen. The owner stood on the balcony, the first brush of a spring breeze blowing through his dark hair. He wore black linen slacks, a black silk shirt, and black shoes. He scanned the park like a hawk eyeing an open meadow, as if he too were searching for prey. In one hand he held a slim cell phone. In the other he cradled a snifter of seventy-year-old cognac.
    The man was in his mid-forties, unmarried but handsome enough to rarely want for female companionship. He hadn’t earned the money to buy the co-op; that had been earned generations earlier. His older brother ran the family’s empire, a far-reaching conglomerate with interests on four continents. A lesser man might have been jealous of the power his brother wielded, not only over the company but over the family as well. Yet because of the career path he’d chosen and what he’d done with the contacts he’d made, he was close to reaching a pinnacle of power his brother couldn’t even conceive.
    The roots of the operation came from within his own family history, from a story he’d learned from his grandmother, so in a sense he’d been planning it since childhood, although he’d never told a soul. This was to be something he alone would accomplish. His brother needed an army of lawyers and accountants to keep the business running, while he was about to change history with a select few.
    The cell phone rang. He answered it quickly. “Hello?”
    “It’s me, darling, I was wondering if you’d reconsidered my proposal.”
    It took him a moment to recognize the voice—Michaela Taftsbury’s, an international attorney from London currently working in New York—and to recall her proposal—a weekend at a bed and breakfast in Vermont.
    “Michaela, I told you I can’t leave the city.”
    “It’s a weekend, not a fortnight, lover. I haven’t seen you in so long.”
    Best to end it now, he decided. While she was a passable conversationalist and highly charged in the bedroom, she was becoming bothersome. “And you won’t see me for even longer,” he warned, “if you keep pestering me.”
    “Pestering? Pestering! Screw you. I thought we were having a little fun. If I’ve become a pest then to hell with you.” She hung up.
    But the phone rang almost immediately.
Damn it
. He shouldn’t have dumped her before he got the call he was waiting for. Now he’d waste precious time assuaging her feelings so he could get her off the phone. He’d only break up with her later. He checked the phone’s caller ID feature. It was an international call with a country code he didn’t recognize. This was it!
    “Poli?” he asked when he opened the connection.
    “No names!” the one-eyed Bulgarian assassin hissed.
    The man in New York ignored the rebuke. He was about to hear the news he’d waited for all his life. “Was it there?”
    “At one point maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.”
    “What are you talking about? Was it there?”
    “If it was there someone beat us to it a long time ago.”
    “It’s gone?”
    “I didn’t stick around long enough to explore the entire region, but it is safe to say that I believe it is all gone.”
    “You didn’t ‘stick around’? I am paying you a great deal of money to more than merely ‘stick around.’”
    “You’ve
promised
me a great deal of money,” the killer