And that disturbed him the most. To ambush Vuk and Ivo like that, someone had to know they were coming. But Milos himself hadn’t known where they were going until moments before he had sent them. This left only two possibilities: either his office was bugged or he had an informer in his organization.

The realization had chilled Milos’s rage. If it was an informer, who? He looked at the back of his driver’s head. Pera, perhaps? No, anyone but him. Pera had been with him since the gunrunning days. Pera would never.

A bug then? He sighed. Either was possible. After all, Milos had his own sources within rival organizations, even within the NYPD. None of them seemed worth a damn at the moment. His rivals were laughing at him and playing copies of the TV tape nonstop in their bars, but no one, either publicly or privately, was taking credit.

The police were worthless, searching for this so-called lone assailant. They had no good description other than medium height, average build, and brown hair, although some witnesses were disputing the hair color. They couldn’t agree on his facial features either except that he’d been scorched by the flames from the burning car—Milos’s car.

The police said he’d hijacked a taxi. That taxi was found abandoned in Queens where he’d apparently hijacked a Mercedes. NYPD later learned that while an all-points had been out on the Mercedes, the man they sought was lying unconscious in a North Shore hospital. The local police had considered him nothing more than a drunk driver. By the time they realized that they held a suspect in a far more serious crime, the man had vanished.

Milos wanted to scream: Not one man! He was a decoy, a set up to make it look like one man could take out two of mine! It’s all a plot, a conspiracy to ruin me!

But he would be shouting at the deaf. The only ones listening were on the other end of the bugs in his offices, maybe even here in his personal car.

The thought made him hunger for fresh air.

“Pull over,” he told Pera.

He got out at the corner of East Eighty-fifth. He saw Pera looking nervously about. He was spooked. Vuk and Ivo this morning… who would be next?

“Wait here,” he said, and began to walk east.

He had decided to take the matter into his own hands. If he could not trust his men, his phones, his offices, his cars, that left him with one resource: himself. He would track down his tormentors and personally dispose of them. It was the only means left to him to salvage his honor.

But he possessed only one hard fact about his enemy: the first call from the so-called East Hampton Environmental Protection Committee had come from a phone on the corner of East Eighty-seventh Street and Third Avenue. That was it. The rest—the man in the car in the security video, for instance—was all speculation.