Eternal Triangle

by Don Pendleton

  "What was the action in Connecticut?"

  "Apparently some falling-out between enforcers. Local boys are working on it now. They've confirmed that Bolan was involved."

  "That doesn't mean he'll run for home. There's nothing for him here."

  "We can't afford to take the chance."

  They ate awhile in silence, each man busy with his private thoughts. It was Weatherbee who finally broke the spell of char-broiled beef and lobster dipped in melted butter.

  "What exactly do you want from me?" he asked.

  "Advice. The benefit of all your knowledge. Pointers, if you see us veering off the beam."

  "That's lame. You've got my files, my notes. You've got some others who were on the case — hell, you were on that yourself."

  John Pappas put his mangled burger down and stared across the table, looking glum.

  "I haven't got your feeling for the guy," he said. "I know that. Everybody knows it."

  Weatherbee was tempted to inquire if Pappas had been taking heat, but he dismissed the thought. The current chief of homicide had made his bed, and if it wasn't comfortable now… well, that was too damned bad.

  "I'm retired," Weatherbee said, and he made no attempt to filter out the bitterness that stained his voice.

  "I know you're smarting over that," John Pappas said. "There's nothing I can do about it. But you're still a cop, in here…" he jabbed a thumb against his chest, above the heart "…and you know what we're up against better than anybody else alive."

  "I don't know that you're up against a goddamned thing," he snapped. "You get a call that Bolan's back in town, or that he might be coming back, and now the brass is breathing down your neck."

  "We can't afford a replay of what happened with Don Sergio."

  "No problem," Weatherbee replied. "Unless there's been a drastic change since I 'decided' to retire, the mob is pretty well washed up in Pittsfield. All the action's handled out of Boston now, with strong connections to New York. If Bolan wants the capos, he'll be smart enough to take his business there."

  "And if he doesn't? If he wants to kick some ass right here, around his own hometown, for old times' sake?"

  The smile felt good on Weatherbee. "Then you've got problems," he replied.

  "Damned right. Which brings us back to you."

  "I'm out. Kaput. Finis. You may have noticed that I haven't been around the office lately."

  "Al, you know as well as I do the reasoning behind their move."

  "I do," the former chief of homicide agreed. "The force was looking old around the edges. Someone safe upstairs was reaching for the Grecian Formula and covering his ass."

  "You've got a perfect right to be pissed off."

  "Don't stroke me, John. It doesn't work, and I've been stroked by experts."

  "Fine. So will you help me out or not?"

  "Who dreamed this up?"

  "You're looking at him, buddy. From the minute I took that call, I knew you were the only man to save my bacon if the Executioner is back in town."

  "You took the call?"

  "What? Oh… well, yeah, the caller asked for me."

  "Byname?"

  John Pappas hesitated, frowning. "Yeah, he did. What is it, Al?"

  "Oh, nothing. I just wondered how he knew you, John."

  "Well… shit, I didn't think about it at the time. I figured something in the paper, maybe on the tube."

  "I haven't seen you in the papers lately, John. Not since that business with D'Antoni — what? Six months ago? Now I'm not much up on television, but…"

  "All right, don't rub it in. I know I'm not exactly Andy Rooney."

  "Someone's got a decent memory, or else…"

  "Go on."

  "Or else they know you well enough to ask for you by name."

  "I know a lot of people, Al."

  "I guess."

  "You're getting spooky on me now."

  "Don't mean to. Sorry."

  "Well?"

  "Well, what?"

  "Goddamn it, will you help me out?"

  "You haven't told me what I'd have to do."

  "Officially you won't do anything." Pappas hesitated, sensing that he might be on the verge of blowing it and hastened to explain. "Of course you'd take a look at any crime scenes, if they smell like Bolan. You could eyeball any suspects, if we get a lucky break."

  "You'll never bag him, John."

  "Don't be so pessimistic, Al. It happens."

  "Texas was a fluke. A setup. You could wait a million years and never have another chance to put the cuffs on Bolan."

  "I'll be satisfied to see him out of town without a trail of bodies left behind."

  "Good luck. If Bolan's coming home, he's got a reason."

  Pappas made a sour face. "It damned sure can't be family."

  "There was a brother…"

  "Jimmy? Jerry?"

  "John."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "Whatever happened to him?"

  Pappas shrugged and spread his hands. "He was adopted, someone in the government. They moved away. It's ancient history."

  "I guess."

  But Weatherbee was thinking of a young man, dark and agile, hurdling the wooden railing in a Texas courtroom, closing on the gunner who was poised to kill Mack Bolan. Poised to kill his brother?

  "Can we check him out?"

  "Check who?"

  "The brother."

  Pappas mulled it over, shrugged again. "I'll try, but it's a long shot. Those adoption records, minors…all that damned red tape. It's murder."

  "That's your business, John."

  "Hey, don't remind me."

  Silence stretched between them for a moment, growing strained, and Pappas was the first to speak.

  "I need you, Al. The city needs you. Bolan on the rampage is a cop's worst nightmare — any cop. If you can help us take him off the streets, you owe it to the city. Hell, you owe it to yourself."

  When Weatherbee responded, he could feel the ticking of a tightly wound internal clock beginning in his skull, as if there had never been an interruption. As if he was back in uniform, back in harness, taking to the streets again. The former chief of homicide immediately swallowed the familiar feelings, consciously suppressed his excitement at the mere suggestion of a manhunt. Lurking under the surge of his adrenaline was another, less pleasant feeling. Something else…

  "I'll make myself available," he said at last. "In case you have a squeal that looks like Bolan's work." He raised a hand before Pappas could thank him. "There are two conditions. First, you keep the newshounds off my back. If anybody prints my name, or even whispers it in public, I'll be gone before you have a chance to start up the apology machine."

  "Agreed. What else?"

  "If there's some kind of miracle, if Bolan suddenly goes senile and lets your men corner him, I want to be there."

  Pappas hesitated, thinking fast. He could almost hear the objections from the brass. Weatherbee was a mere civilian now — an old civilian, by their own account — and he could take them to the cleaners if he got injured. The chief of homicide was silent for another moment, finally decided he could pull it off.

  "You're on."

  "All right. So how about dessert?"

  They wanted him — Weatherbee knew that much. Somewhere up the ladder of command, they had convinced themselves they needed him. It wasn't true — at least he didn't think it was — but Weatherbee was tickled at the thought of the brass in uproar, chewing on their polished nails and searching for a lure to bring him back, part-time, in spite of all that had been said and done when he departed. When he was evicted.

  The idea to consult Weatherbee had not come from John, of course, although it would have pleased him. The present chief of homicide had never turned his back on Weatherbee; if anything, he thought, it was the other way around. Throughout the whole fiasco, Pappas was supportive, caring — or at least as much as he could be and still survive in the department. Weatherbee himself had turned against his forme
r friends and lumped them all with the men who drove him from his desk. He had been killing the messenger because he didn't like the news, and it was time to get a firm grip on reality before he lost it all.

  The search for Bolan might be therapeutic, in its way. He would not be returning to active duty, would not have an office or a desk to call his own, but he would still be doing something… if the soldier came to town.

  The timing bothered Weatherbee. He was even more concerned about the call to Pappas from a tipster who had called the chief of homicide by name. Of course there were mobsters on the street who knew John Pappas by reputation, snitches who had worked with Pappas on his cases through the years. A host of possibilities… and none of them rang true. A caller should have left his whispered message with the operator, cut and run in the erroneous belief that calls received by the police could be immediately traced. Unless…

  Unless the caller knew John Pappas, knew he would take the Bolan lure and run with it for all he was worth. Unless he dialed the station house and asked for John by name, as the first step in some devious plan.

  He didn't like the possibilities suggested by that line of speculation, so he turned to other thoughts. Of Texas, and the slender, dark young man there who had rescued Bolan, snatched him from the brink of execution by a mercenary firing squad. Of Bolan's face, so different after plastic surgery, yet immediately recognizable to anyone who had ever looked into those graveyard eyes.

  The man could change his face, his hair, his clothing, sure. But he could never change his soul.

  And that was problem number one for Weatherbee.

  The former chief of homicide was not entirely sure, these days, that Bolan should be taken off the streets. Since his forced retirement, even before that, he had been questioning the values he had carried with him through his long career behind the badge. His dedication to the law had not faltered, but he had begun to recognize the system's defects. If the courts were not revolving doors, they were at least deficient in performing their primary task — enforcing the law, dispensing justice. Clogged with frivolous lawsuits, overdedicated to the rights of criminals at the expense of injured victims, at its worst the system obstructed justice. There was cause enough for righteous anger in a man like Weatherbee… and he had lost no members of his family to the predators. Not yet.

  Whenever he explored this ground, the former chief of homicide stopped short of granting Bolan his approval. Vigilante justice had no place within the system, but he understood the soldier's feelings. In Bolan's place, would Weatherbee have acted differently?

  No answer.

  If the victim was Alice, or one of the children — all grown now, and gone — would he stand back and wait for justice from a system he knew to be impotent? What did it take for disgust with the courts and police to turn to a personal quest for revenge? Was Bolan's method better, after all?

  Again, no answer.

  From the start, Weatherbee had nursed a sneaking admiration for the soldier. You couldn't help but respect the soldier for his rigid code of honor. Bolan never dropped the hammer on a cop, no matter how corrupt. He never harmed an innocent civilian. His war had damaged untold millions' worth of property, but for the most part it was the property of savages, which the system would have confiscated, anyway, if it had been operating as it should.

  The soldier was a menace, Weatherbee supposed. The fact that he never fired on innocent civilians didn't mean his next round might not ricochet to kill a child. The conduct of his war was reckless. The guy was gambling with lives every time he hit the streets, and someday, somewhere, he was bound to lose.

  The news of Bolan's death in Central Park, so long ago, had filled Al Weatherbee with mixed relief and sadness. At a conscious level, he had been glad to see the last of Bolan's bloody, doomed crusade. But he had felt a sense of loss, as well, a wistful sadness when he realized there might be no one left to stand alone against the savages.

  One evening, five or six days after Bolan's "death," Weatherbee had been drinking beer with Pappas and another homicide detective when the sudden thought of taking over Bolan's role had come to Weatherbee. It would be simple. Drive to Boston, use the addresses that he knew by heart and work his way right through the ranking mafiosi till they cut him down or he exhausted all his targets. It was the whiskey, he supposed. Before he got farther than the parking lot, John Pappas had collared him and driven him home… But still, the thought was there.

  What might a young Al Weatherbee have done, completely sober, if his family had been annihilated by savages? What might he do today, if confronted with the opportunity to bring Mack Bolan down or let him walk?

  The shock of Bolan's public "resurrection" had recalled those mingled feelings of distress and relief. The former chief of homicide had been like a sleeper who awakes to find his nightmare all around him, unabated in daylight. Anguish, yet it was tempered by the knowledge that a champion survived, that there was someone out there who wasn't afraid to face the cannibals and drive them back into the jungle.

  Weatherbee would provide John Pappas with the benefit of all his hard-won expertise because police work was his life. But he had no wish to harm the Executioner. Alive, Mack Bolan was the single greatest crime deterrent Weatherbee had ever seen. Bolan's death, he thought, would be a loss to society.

  And it would have to be his death this time. The soldier would not let himself be caged again. The experience in Texas had been a fluke, that could never be repeated. Bolan had survived his brief captivity — in spite of two determined efforts to assassinate him — but he could not expect to duplicate the feat in Massachusetts. He would have to know that, going in. Weatherbee suspected the soldier was prepared to die resisting arrest, thereby avoiding slow death in a cage.

  Can't say I blame him, Weatherbee decided, sipping his coffee, letting Pappas carry the conversation. Can't say I blame the guy for anything.

  The former chief of homicide could not predict his reaction if he met Mack Bolan on the street. It rattled him, as always, to realize that youthful concepts of black and white had changed, with time, to subtle shades of gray.

  God help him if he had to face the Executioner.

  God help them both.

  11

  Gino Girrardi was pissed. When his profits declined, when business fell off and he had to explain the red ink to his sponsors, the man from Manhattan got angry. When angry, Girrardi might drink, take it out on some whore or just get in his Caddy and drive. The Caddy was power unleashed, a magnificent juggernaut throbbing with life of its own, taking Gino as fast and as far as he wanted to go.

  Like to Boston.

  The thought brought him down, made him angry again. In a week he was due to report to the capos who had given him his break. The old men expected progress, profits, and Gino was not looking forward to disappointing them. They would look at each other and frown, finally staring at him as if picking the flesh from his bones with their eyes. If Girrardi was lucky, that was all they would do.

  The posting to Pittsfield had been a test, Gino knew. They were giving him rope and the time he needed to tie up the town — or to string himself up. It could go either way. The capos would sit in their boardrooms in Boston, snug and secure with their profits, or else they would send someone else to succeed where Girrardi had failed. As for Gino, a failure in Pittsfield would mark him for life as a loser — if the capos allowed him to live. He would never advance through the ranks, never ride in a stretch limousine of his own, never sit by the pool in his mansion with babes in bikinis to bring him scotch on the rocks. He would never be anything more than a soldier if Pittsfield blew up in his face, and he knew it.

  So Gino Girrardi was pissed. And with reason.

  For one thing, the frigging economy hadn't played along with his plans. As the interest rates fell, the consumer price index declined, fewer factory workers came begging for loans from his shylocks. His money was dead on the streets, and most of his regular customers were paying their loans back on ti
me.

  Still, if more prosperous times were bad for loan sharks, they were good for some of Gino's other lucrative sidelines. For workers with money in their hands, and their children and neighbors, he offered a full line of chemicals, from grass to cocaine and the hard stuff. If romance was lacking in anyone's life, he could rent the illusion of love at affordable hourly rates. For the timid, who steered clear of warm, living flesh, there were video, film, magazines. Whether the customer was white or black, straight or gay or somewhere in between, Gino Girrardi offered satisfaction at rates the youngest and the poorest could afford.

  But lately, there were problems. Agents for the DEA were drying up supplies of heroin from Mexico and Asia, sending prices through the roof when there was any skag to sell at all. The goddamned bikers had their meth labs cooking speed around the clock and driving prices down — forget about the quality — and if you tried to reason with them, cut a deal, they started shooting like Wild West psychos on parade. For all that, however, Gino preferred to deal with bikers any day rather than mess with the Colombians — and that was where the business was disappearing, bet your ass. The Indians controlled cocaine in the United States, or near enough, and with their Cuban runners and their bottomless supply of flake they were cutting deeply into Family business. No sooner did the Feds attack Miami than it started snowing in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tucson, even Atlanta. While it had taken a little longer for the Colombians to discover Massachusetts, they were already strong enough there to present Girrardi with some major problems.

  Squaring off with the Colombians and bikers over junk was bad enough, but now the blacks were cutting Gino out of numbers, shylock operations, even girls. It seemed like no one feared the families anymore. They tested boundaries, stepped across at every opportunity and challenged the amici to defend their old preserves. As soon as one smart bastard got away with something, a dozen more popped up to follow his example, and a hundred after that.

  When Gino thought about it — which was constantly — his memory coughed up something he had read in school about the Roman Empire. The Romans once had owned the goddamned world, from one end to the other, but they had got soft and fat, while their borders went to hell. Savages had risen up against them in the sticks, and the Romans were too lazy, too preoccupied with orgies to stop and kick some ass. The savages got closer, eating up the territory Rome had held for centuries, until finally there was no more Rome, just a bunch of greasy barbarians pretending they were civilized, kicking back to watch the world go by.