New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (10 page)

A small sun was born over the Caribbean.

Searing light and heat washed over
Kenneth, blinding him. He could smell his own flesh being roasted. He had time
for a brief scream before the blast wave from the nuclear explosion swatted him
from the sky and sent him crashing into the sea.

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

Vincent Bufalino – ever since becoming a
made man, he had insisted on being called Vincent, and people called him Vinnie
or Vin at their peril – stared sourly at the security camera footage on his
computer screen and puffed furiously on his Cuban cigar.

“Fuckin’ Face-Off,” Dominic D’Onofrio,
Vincent’s second-hand man, muttered under his breath as he and Vincent watched
Face-Off kill the Lightning King on the screen one more time. Vincent had blown
close to a million bucks bringing the Lightning King into the States and setting
him up as an enforcer, and the colored freak had lasted all of three months
before the faceless fucker wasted him. Fucking Neos. Vincent hated Neos,
despite the fact that he technically was one of them. Just a Type One, though,
barely better than a normal human. Sure, he’d taken his gifts and put them to
good use, but he still hated the freaks, not least because he’d gotten the
short end of the stick when they were handing out super powers.

“Yeah, that fucker really screwed us.”
How badly, Vincent wasn’t sure, but he feared it would be as bad as it could
get. He’d gambled and lost, and he didn’t know if he could cover his stake.

“We gotta find ‘em,” Vincent growled.
“Him and the girl. Shit, I don’t care if I never lay eyes on his ugly mug, but
we gotta find the girl, Dom.”

“We’ll find her, Vincent,” Dom said, but
Vincent could tell Dom was just going along. There was no way they would find
her in time. Vincent had thought he could get a better deal if he played the
angles, and now he’d lost big time. Fucking Neos were supposed to be luckier
than regular folk on top of all their abilities, but his luck had been all bad
this time.

Doing business with the Russians was
always a bad idea. They were bugfuck crazy, for one, and you never knew if they
were doing something for the money or if they were working for that crazy
metal-headed freak running the show back in the Motherland. But they had a lot
of money and special toys, so it was hard to turn them down. Especially because
if you turned them down the crazy fucks might take offense and decide that your
head would work great as a bowling ball.

So when they had offered a good payday
for a simple snatch and grab – okay, not so simple, at a freaking hospital, but
easy enough – Vincent had seen no reason to decline. The Russians had been
respectful and had come to him instead of trying to do business on his turf
without his say so. Russians weren’t short of muscle but they didn’t do well
outside Brooklyn, and Vincent had contacts everywhere. He had half a dozen
rackets running out of New York-Presbyterian, so grabbing some skirt out of
there sounded easy enough. Everybody wins, nobody gets hurt.

When the details of the job started
coming out, however, Vincent had gotten suspicious. And greedy, let’s not mince
words. The job was more complicated than it had sounded at first, and Vincent
had smelled a bigger payoff. For one, the girl had to be kept heavily sedated
and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. That could only mean she was a Neo. As
soon as he figured that out, Vincent had done two things right away: he’d sent
out one his own Neos and his top enforcer, Danny Giamatti, along on the job,
and he’d started figuring out the angles.

He was supposed to drop off the girl
somewhere in Brighton Beach as soon as they got her, but Vincent had decided to
delay the delivery for a bit, and see if he could renegotiate the contract,
sweeten the deal a little. He would hold on to the girl and claim there had
been some complications, so now the job wasn’t worth his while unless the
Russians upped the ante. The Russians would be pissed, but they would pay up.
They might be crazy, but Vincent ran most of Manhattan and the surrounding
areas. They weren’t crazy enough to start something just because they’d been
shortchanged a little bit. Vincent wasn’t even going to ask for much more, just
a couple of concessions here and there, get his foot in the door on some of the
Russian rackets, like those new ray guns they were getting from the Ukraine.
They were going for fifteen grand a piece, and word was they would deep-fry a
guy no matter how much body armor he was wearing. Vincent was already
collecting taxes on any transaction the Russkies did on his turf, but he wanted
a real piece of the action. So instead of delivering the girl, he’d told
Giamatti to sit on her and made a few phone calls to get things rolling on the
negotiations.

It had been a nice plan, except things
had gotten fucked up from the get go.

First, Giamatti had gone off the
reservation and killed four civilians at the hospital, the stupid mook. It
should have been an easy in-and-out job. Vincent had greased the wheels with
the hospital people so they knew to get out of the way and be on a break when
Giamatti and his boys showed up. Somehow someone had zigged when they were
supposed to zag, and Giamatti had started shooting people like this was a
fucking Asian War. Okay, that had been bad, but not the end of the world. In
fact, it even gave Vincent a perfect excuse to demand a better deal. But then
Giamatti had decided to take the night off instead of staying with the skirt he
was supposed to be watching – which normally wouldn’t have been a big deal,
granted – and fucking Face-Off had been waiting for him at his place. Why
Face-Off had decided to go after Giamatti tonight of all nights, Vincent didn’t
know.

He had some suspicions, though.

Face-Off mostly went after small-time
assholes, especially guys who killed or hurt civilians – gang bangers, serial
killers, sick fucks that had little or nothing to do with Vincent's rackets.
Vincent's people usually didn't bother civilians; they mainly went after others
in their business – competitors or traitors, assholes nobody was going to make
a fuss about. That kept his dealings off the radar of vigilante types like
Face-Off or Condor. Once in a while things went wrong; usually that meant one
of Vincent’s guys had decided to break the rules, and then vigilantes would
step in and mess things up. If things got too serious, Vincent had his own Neo
muscle ready at hand, although most of the time his freaks were there to
impress the
paisans
and deal with the competition.

Thing was, Face-Off
knew
stuff,
stuff he had no business knowing. Not too long ago, the faceless fuck had found
out one of Vincent’s guys had been running a snuff film racket using girls
nobody would miss. That was something
Vincent
hadn’t had a clue about
until Face-Off shut down the whole operation and put three of his people behind
bars and four others in the morgue. While cleaning up the mess afterward,
Vincent had gone over the operation, and the security had been tight. The seven
guys involved had been careful, and left no witnesses or clues behind. And yet
Face-Off had just strolled in like he knew every little detail. He probably had
some Neo juju that let him know things, clairvoyance or something. And that had
to be how he’d found Giamatti, and then the girl. Vincent fucking hated Neos.
You never knew what kind of shit they could pull on you.

Things had gone from bad to downright
horrible. Face-Off had whacked everybody at the warehouse, including the
expensive Type Two Neo Vincent had sent along, and made off with the girl.
Vincent had known something was wrong when Giamatti didn’t check in, but by the
time he sent some guys to the warehouse, it was too late. The only good thing
about the situation was that Face-Off wasn’t the type to go to the cops, not
that it mattered much at this point.

Vincent had already set up a sit-down
with the Russians to renegotiate the deal, and now he didn’t have the girl to
deliver. He’d figured on working things out in a few hours, tops. The Russians
had sounded like they wanted the girl very soon; the whole job had been set up
in less than a day. There was no way Vincent was going to be able to find her
before the Russians figured he either didn’t have her or was trying to screw
them. When they did, the shit would hit the fan.

Like all Neos, Vincent hadn’t gotten any
older after reaching full adulthood. He’d been born in 1935, and he looked like
he was in his thirties; if he dressed up like the asshole kids did nowadays, he
might even pass for someone in his twenties. His top lieutenant Dominic was the
grandson of the original Dom, who had retired to Florida and died of a stroke
during a shuffleboard game. Vincent was not going to die during a shuffleboard
game, but that didn’t mean he was going to live forever, either. His years of
experience had gotten him where he was, at the head of the D’Agostino family,
wiping out all the original D’Agostinos along the way. He ran New York and all
of Jersey that mattered. But this kind of screw-up was how heads of families
got cut off.

He could delay the Russians for a bit,
but soon enough they’d know. If the girl was important enough, this could mean
war. At the very least, there would be retaliation. They might even decide to
go after him personally. That would be crazy, but the Russians had cornered the
market on crazy for a long time.

Vincent had a great big house – ‘the
manor’ his wife called it – out by the Catskills, but he spent maybe three days
a week there. His home away from home – not counting the three apartments he
kept for his mistresses – was hidden under an old restaurant in Little Italy.
That was the heart of his turf, the place he had grown up in. He’d
single-handedly kept the Chinks from moving into the neighborhood, and kept the
place Italian, the way it was meant to be. He’d owned
La Trattoria
for
close to five decades, turned the small eatery into one of the best restaurants
on Canal Street. The restaurant proper only occupied a small portion of the
entire city block that served as Vincent’s headquarters. He had offices, a
hidden fortified bunker that only a few made guys knew about, and a nice little
apartment that would go for a few million if he ever wanted to sell it. The
hidden bunker was where he held important meetings, where had had signed many a
death warrant, and where, on three occasions, had done the deed himself.

He should be safe there. The best defense
was secrecy. People knew he owned the restaurant and that he ate there all the
time. Only a handful of people – two of them were in the room with him – knew
about the secret bunker belowground. To enter it, he had to go into a basement
on Spring Street with a hidden door leading into a tunnel. He’d had to grease a
lot of palms with assorted city workers to get it done, and afterwards he’d
quietly disposed of everyone involved in the project. On top of that, Vincent
always had a pretty impressive Neo bodyguard around. He and Dom were as safe as
could be. Of course, he couldn’t stay in the bunker forever. Going to the
mattresses only worked for a while. But if he could string the Russians along,
maybe he could fix things.

“Dom, let’s get things going. Start with
Jerk-Off. Send the guys out to find any known associates, friends, anybody he
fucking hangs out with. See if anybody knows where he could be.” That was
probably just pissing in the wind, but he had to start somewhere. “Next, find
me a Neo tracker. There’s one guy in Atlantic City and another in Newark, they
can find people with their minds.”

“Yeah, I know those guys,” Dom said.
“They’re expensive.”

“Get them both. We need to find that
little bitch quick, before the Russians figure out we fucked up.”

Dom nodded and started talking on his
comm. Vincent left him to it and walked to the bar. The bunker office had all
the amenities and his bodyguard could mix a killer Bloody Mary in addition to
his other skills. “The usual, Tor.”

“Yes, Mr. Bufalino,” Toreador replied,
his Spanish accent still noticeable despite having lived almost twenty years in
the US. He was a real Spaniard from Spain, not some jumped-up Mexican or Cuban
like the people doing the dishes at
La Trattoria
. Pretty classy guy,
knew how to show respect. He also was a trained Neo assassin and a veteran of
the Second Asian War. Vincent should have sent him on the job instead of
Giamatti and that lightning-throwing punk, but he never felt safe when Toreador
wasn’t around. He was a guy Vincent could trust.

Toreador had been on the run from the
Freedom Legion, something about war crimes during the Asian War. Stupid shit,
really; hadn’t they gone over there to kill gooks? What did they think would
happen? Vincent had recruited him and given him a whole new identity and a
place in the organization. Toreador was alive and free because of Vincent, and
he never forgot it.

Vincent got his Bloody Mary and drank it while
he thought on the best way to go about the situation. He’d let the Russians stew
for a bit, let them call him first, and try to stall. If that didn’t work,
maybe it would be best to hit them first, before they knew what was going on.
If the girl was so valuable to them, he should find out why. Maybe it was
something he could use. He smiled. Yeah, he was in deep shit, but if he played
his cards right he might come out of it smelling like a rose. He was Vincent
Bufalino, and he owned Manhattan.

The smile vanished from his face when the
bunker’s reinforced door started to burn. “What the fuck?”

The door was built like a vault door,
reinforced metal with multiple locking rods. The inside was covered with wood
paneling. The paneling was smoking and smoldering. Something hot enough to cut
through reinforced steel was drawing a blazing line through the entrance’s
locking mechanism. The stench of burning wood and melting metal filled the
room. Someone was using a blowtorch on the door, or a Neo was doing a blowtorch
impression on the door. Either way, it meant they had found Vincent’s hideout.
Only Dominic and Toreador were with him. Chances were he was fucked, with no
way out.