Read Online The Reluctant Warrior (Warriors Series Book 2) by Ty Patterson - Free Book Online Page A

get into or out of any business they wanted. A conglomerate of illegal activity, business principles being applied with military efficiency.
    ‘Then we started getting results. Thugs, admittedly low level, but higher up the food chain than the ones we’d arrested before. But these thugs didn’t talk. Or rather, they didn’t talk enough. Many of them were bailed or our charges thrown out on flimsy reasons. The gang had expensive lawyers on retainer, and we suspected they might have had a few judges in their pocket, but we never pursued that angle. Too much on our plate as it was.
    ‘The tech route was deployed in parallel, phone taps on suspected gangbangers, remote surveillance – data analysis, cause-and-effect stuff; hell, we also threw in wheels-and-feet surveillance – kitchen sink, bathtub, the works – and for all that, we got pretty much a big fucking fat zero in return.’
    He backtracked. ‘That’s not strictly true. We got some names, big names, more flesh on their organization structure, background on their gang leader, a shadowy East European, but just not enough meat to the bone, nothing in comparison to what we had on the Mafia, the Russian mob, and the other gangs. And to top it off, we could prosecute very few of those we arrested.’
    ‘The others got bail?’
    ‘Nope. Most of them got killed when in custody.
    ‘These fuckers have the reach and the efficiency to get into our jails and have them killed within twenty-four hours or at the most forty-eight hours of being arrested. The Mafia, Latin Kings, Bloods, none of them could execute their own guys as regularly as this gang did. They were mocking us, the NYPD and the FBI, with those kills. Demonstrating that we could do jackshit to them.’
    Isakson shook his head almost in admiration. ‘We finally started getting some traction, long enough though it took, when we started talking to Interpol.
    ‘They were hunting a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a mercenary who they believed had fled to the United States. Interpol had issued an arrest warrant for war crimes for this fucker and had proof of those crimes, which they laid out for us. Torture, summary executions, rape, burning children and women… this scumbag had done it all. Even the Kosovo Liberation Army distanced itself from him, and there were rumors that he was to be eliminated quietly. Evidently he got wind of this because he disappeared. Interpol traced his flight to the United States on false papers, and there is a record of his arriving here in New York ten years back, and then he disappeared. Bureaucracy and red tape between Interpol and the FBI resulted in this guy walking into the country under the guise of an American citizen and then disappearing.’
    He ran his hand over his head tiredly. ‘Once we got these details, we let loose our computers, and sure enough, the two stories met. The timelines matched, the snippets of info we squeezed matched, the ethnicities of some of the hoods tallied to this guy’s. This guy is New York based, but never lives in one place. He moves from safe house to safe house, borough to borough, almost every night… has been living like this ever since he came to this country. Interpol said this was second nature to him. He lived like that in the KLA too. This guy is now a US citizen under a false identity, and running the most successful criminal empire in New York.’
    Isakson paused and reflected for a moment, the room quiet but for the ticking of a clock on his desk. He shook his head in reluctant admiration. ‘His gang has close to three hundred fuckers operational in each borough of the city and in a couple of counties in New Jersey. He’s also muscled in on the illegal border traffic out West. You know, between Mexico and Arizona, Texas and California, running drugs and aliens.’
    Isakson said grimly, ‘Once we got his real identity from Interpol, we ran our databases and got his assumed identity. And then we got lucky. A