Blood Testament te-100

by Don Pendleton

  The move against Brognola's family was a calculated risk, but he had finally agreed with Gianelli that a threat to innocents would be the quickest draw for Bolan. It had worked, and now that Bolan was in town, the question of disposal still remained unanswered while the precious moments ticked away.

  The contract on DeVries had been another calculated risk, and it had backfired in their faces. Gianelli's face, to be precise, since it had been his show. The shooters had been his — all four of them, stretched out in cold drawers at the morgue beside DeVries — and there would doubtless be some questions for the capo when detectives got around to tracing those IDs. The gunners had been sanitized to some extent, but they were traceable — hell, anyone was traceable — assuming Justice chose to go the whole nine yards. And with a ranking staff investigator dead, the whole nine yards would only be for openers.

  As if the fumble with DeVries had not been bad enough, there were another eight men dead at Arlington, and they were his men this time, dammit. Trained professionals, selected for their expertise in handling the damper side of covert operations. Every one of them had been a skilled assassin with kills on foreign — and domestic — soil to prove his worth. They should have taken Hal Brognola easily, exterminated Bolan almost as an afterthought... but something had gone horribly, irrevocably wrong.

  The body count was bad enough, but the placement had been even worse. When morning papers hit the stands, their headlines would be shrieking crap like MASSACRE AT ARLINGTON and SLAUGHTER AT THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER'S TOMB. They should have staged the meeting in a junkyard, on the river, any fucking place but Arlington. He had been showing off, and it hadn't worked for shit.

  From all appearances the guests of honor had escaped unharmed. If either one had suffered injuries no evidence remained behind. A homicide detective serving double duty as another pair of Cartwright's eyes reported evidence of blood around a gravestone where no body had been found, and they were checking on the local ER logs, but Cartwright would have bet his life that they were pissing in the wind. With eight men shot to hell they could be typing blood for months and leave a tubful unaccounted for. From personal experience he knew that wounded men could travel awesome distances before they finally died.

  The worst of it was Hunter Smith. He would be traceable directly back to Grymdyke's office, and from there...

  Goddamn it!

  More loose ends that would need looking after tonight, before the mess got any worse. Grymdyke was tough enough, a veteran of the Nixon purges, but if he should smell indictments in the wind, he might decide to cut a deal and save himself from prosecution. Copping out was almost SOP in Washington, and Cartwright was continually disgusted by the way bureaucrats betrayed each other.

  That didn't matter now. He had to keep his wits about him. They were already running desperately short of time, and Gianelli stood no closer to the prize — Mack Bolan's head — than he had been six months ago. They might have missed their only chance already, Cartwright knew. The way the bastard had been tearing up the town, the way he handled eight of Grymdyke's best, the man from CIA had little hope of trapping him in Washington. They had already played their strongest hand, and he had walked away.

  Not quite.

  He hadn't walked away with any hostages, and while he was intent on rescuing Brognola's family, the bastard had an Achilles' heel. It just might be possible to stake the wife and kiddies out, trick Bolan into coming for the bait... and his death. He would be skittish after Arlington — he might be making tracks already — but he had the reputation of a gung-ho soldier unaccustomed to retreat. Brognola's family had drawn him here, and they would hold him here until he set them free... or died in the attempt.

  It would be tricky, but...

  Suppose he muffed it, fumbled one more time? Reluctant to accept the notion of defeat, he had presided over or participated in enough snafus to realize that true survivors always made contingency arrangements in advance. Before you ever fired a shot in battle, you examined ways of cutting losses, covering your ass in case of failure. If Cartwright planned to walk away from this one free and clear, without a target painted on his back and handcuffs on his wrists, he would be wise to leave his options open, cover all the bases going in.

  Brognola's wife and kids would have to die, that much was obvious from the beginning. Whether they survived the night would logically depend upon their usefulness, as balanced out by any risks that their survival might entail. Alive they were the kind of witnesses that juries loved, and they could send his pickup crew away for life. Once that had been accomplished, Cartwright lost his hold upon subordinates who would be looking for an easy ride. Alive, Brognola's family was a lethal time bomb waiting to explode, and it was only logical that they should be defused as soon as possible.

  He briefly weighed the options of permitting them to live for, say, six hours, giving Bolan one more opportunity to risk himself on their behalf. All things considered, though, the man from the CIA did not believe that live bait would be necessary to his plan. As long as Bolan thought they were alive, he would feel honor bound to make the futile, ultimately fatal, gesture. Logic cast its overwhelming vote for death, and Cartwright seconded the motion with a scowl.

  The order should have gone through Grymdyke, but his second-in-command was now a problem in his own right. If the Bureau hadn't tumbled to him yet, his hours were numbered all the same, and while he lived he was a threat to everyone around him. Typhoid Grymdyke, bet your ass. Except that his disease was many times more lethal than a virus of the flesh. Exposure. Public condemnation. Loss of power in official circles. Death was infinitely preferable to embarrassment in the clandestine service — most especially if the death was someone else's.

  Someone, say, like Grymdyke's.

  Cameron Cartwright harbored nothing in the way of animosity against his second-in-command. Eliminating Grymdyke was a way of making up for damage that the man himself had caused through negligence. If he should disappear without a trace, the Justice probe would languish at his doorstep, starved for information that would never be forthcoming from above.

  The odd man out was Nicky Gianelli, and the very thought of him made Cartwright clench his fists in anger. Twenty-seven years of honorable service — more or less — was hanging in the balance for him now, because of Gianelli's wild vendetta. While the capo possessed the crucial files containing Cartwright's name, the evidence against him, he would never be entirely free.

  While Gianelli lived...

  Of course there were a thousand ways to take him out, but it must be accomplished with discretion. Nothing that would smack of CIA involvement, certainly. Perhaps a word to other, rival mafiosi, urging them to carve a slice of Washington from Nicky's pie. It would be simple, once the reigning capo was removed.

  That left the files, and Cartwright knew that he could never trust a rival mafioso to deliver them intact. A bargain might be made, but once another capo took the throne, once he deciphered the importance of the files, then Cartwright would be right back at square one. He might waste weeks or months and millions of illicit dollars, winding up with someone who was worse than Gianelli.

  A replacement would never be the problem. Any time a ruling capo went to jail or bit the bullet, there were half a dozen heirs apparent standing by to take his place. The key was simply dumping Gianelli, and recovering the files that would be always close at hand. It was the kind of job the CIA was made for, and there were professionals on staff to handle every phase of the procedure, from assassinating Gianelli to location and removal of the documents. No sweat, provided Cartwright picked the team himself, avoiding stumble bums like those who left their carcasses at Arlington.

  Eliminating Gianelli had its risks, of course. If Cartwright should blow it, if the greasy bastard tumbled to his plan and then survived, there would be hell to pay. It was unlikely that a contract would be let upon a ranking officer of the CIA, but nothing was impossible. More probably, selective information would be circulated to the medi
a — the goddamned Post, the frigging networks — and before you knew it there would be another round of hearings, blue-nosed senators forgetting where their campaign contributions came from, looking for a little mileage at the Agency's expense.

  It had been bad enough when Hoover's files had surfaced some years back; at least the old man had been dead and gone before they started dumping on him. But Hoover's antics at their worst would look like Halloween amusements next to Dallas and Los Angeles. Before the snoops had finished with him, Cartwright would be lucky if they let him bite the bullet — and he knew that no such mercy would occur to the inquisitors.

  He could almost hear Lee Farnsworth's voice, a dusty whisper in his memory. The moral of the story is: don't miss! When he was ready for the move on Gianelli he would have to make it stick the first time out. There would not be a second chance, and Cartwright could not tolerate the obvious alternatives to victory.

  He didn't count on any problem with the syndicate, provided his initial move on Gianelli was successful. Nicky's "brothers" in the outfit were a bunch of cutthroat bastards who would sell their mothers if the price was right, and if his sources were correct, they cherished no enduring love for Gianelli. There would be some confusion at the outset, capo blaming capo for the hit, the old dogs watching one another warily before they fell on Gianelli's rackets like a pack of jackals, but their petty palace politics held no significance for Cartwright. If he needed any cover for his move, it had already been provided, courtesy of Nicky's private little war.

  The Executioner would handle Gianelli for him, and if evidence was needed, the technicians in Clandestine Ops could muddle through the details. It was known that Bolan had a certain style, a preference for certain hardware, which amounted to a signature of sorts. It shouldn't be too difficult to sell the media or Nicky's fellow goombahs on the notion that the Executioner had struck again, perhaps in grim retaliation for the murder of DeVries. As for Brognola's family, the wild-assed warrior had abducted them upon exposure of his one-time friend's connection to the syndicate. It was regrettable that they could not be saved, but if their sacrifice illuminated Bolan's state of mind, his swift degeneration into madness, then perhaps their deaths were not in vain.

  It was a neat scenario, and it covered all the bases. He could even pass off the Arlington disaster as an attempt to trap the Executioner, a valiant effort that had cost the lives of eight outstanding agents in the field. The media would buy it, grudgingly at first, but with renewed enthusiasm once the Agency produced some solid "evidence." He knew the Mob would buy it, after all the grief that Bolan had bestowed upon them through the years. And with a bit of luck the boys at Justice just might buy it, too.

  Except for Hal Brognola.

  He would never buy it in a million years, no matter how they recreated history or tried to sugarcoat the bitter pill. With the elimination of his family, the man had nothing left to lose, and he would blow the whistle loud enough to wake the dead at Arlington.

  Through no fault of his own Brognola had become a liability to Cameron Cartwright, and the man from the CIA decided instantly that there would have to be another corpse. Another victim of the Executioner, perhaps: a civil servant linked to underworld corruption, and who had paid the price of his divided loyalties in blood.

  It was poetic justice, when you thought about it long enough.

  But Cartwright did not have the time for poetry tonight. His heart and mind were on the firing line, intent on salvaging a victory from disaster.

  One more chance to do it right.

  And if he blew it, Cartwright knew, he would be a long time dead.

  21

  It was a fifteen-minute drive to Alexandria, and Bolan used the time to sort out the pieces of the puzzle that he had already managed to acquire. The gunners who had taken out DeVries were Mafia, most likely part of Gianelli's private stock, while those who bought the farm at Arlington were past or present CIA. He didn't like the implications, the malignant odor that his nostrils had detected early on, but in the last analysis he had no choice. If he was going to retrieve Brognola's family intact, he would be forced to hold his nose and forge ahead.

  Brognola's hunch on Milo Grymdyke might be all he needed to complete the picture... or it might turn out to be another damned dead end. There was no way of judging in advance, and so he made the drive from Arlington, aware that if Brognola's hunch was wrong, the wasted quarter hour could mean life or death for the big Fed's family. If Grymdyke had no part in the arrangements, or if some other faceless spook was phoning in an order to scrub the hostages, then it was too damned late already.

  He might arrive too late to help the innocent, but he would still have time to hunt down the guilty and let them have a taste of hell on earth before he offered them the sweet release of death. Above all else, a taste of hell for Nicky Gianelli — something in the nature of a preview for the afterlife. If there was any lasting justice in the universe, if life was not a string of futile gestures climaxed by oblivion, then Gianelli and his kind had hell and worse in store for them. But first, it was Mack Bolan's turn to stoke the fire.

  He found the address that Brognola had recalled from memory, and circled once around the block. The house was modest in comparison with others in the neighborhood, set back behind a broad expanse of manicured lawn, almost secluded by surrounding trees and hedges. From all appearances Milo Grymdyke liked his privacy, a carryover from his years in the clandestine service. That was fine with Bolan; he preferred their little interview to be conducted quietly, without arousing the anxiety of Grymdyke's neighbors. Failing that he would rely on speed, the hour and reaction times delayed by sleep to see him safely off before some busybody raised an alarm.

  Discretion meant avoiding the appearance of unorthodox activity, and Bolan knew that he could not afford to park in front of Grymdyke's house. Although it was not late, comparatively, lights had been extinguished in the homes on either side of Grymdyke and across the street. A sweep of headlights, slamming doors, might be enough to rouse the neighbors and suspicions.

  On his second driveby, Bolan marked the narrow alley that meandered behind the houses fronting Grymdyke's street. The residents deposited their rubbish here, in preference to planting cans and bags along the sidewalk out in front, a further bid to maintain the beauty of the neighborhood. He killed the headlights going in, aware that he might well be driving over nails or broken glass, preferring darkness to the relative security his high beams would provide. By counting rooftops that were visible above the fences, Bolan knew when he had reached the rear of Milo Grymdyke's property. He parked the rental car, shed the overcoat that covered his blacksuit and was EVA within another moment.

  Grymdyke's wall was six feet high, constructed of cinder blocks with broken bottles set into concrete along the top. There were assorted ways around the obstacles, but Bolan didn't have to look that far. A wrought-iron gate was set into the wall, allowing Grymdyke to deposit garbage in the four bright cans that lined his fence outside, and once he had determined that the gate was free of booby traps, the soldier scrambled nimbly over, crouching as he touched down on the lawn.

  No dogs. No sign of any sensors, though he wouldn't know for sure until the hidden floodlights pinned him in their glare. The soldier hesitated for a moment, conscious of his vulnerability, relaxing slightly when there was no call to arms, no sudden blaze of artificial daylight in the yard.

  There was a light, however, burning in an upstairs window that he took to be a bedroom, or perhaps a study. Grymdyke might be sitting up and waiting for a call from Arlington, assuming that the shooters had been his. Assuming that Brognola's information was not sadly out of date and useless. Grymdyke might be reaching for the telephone right now, to order disposition of the hostages.

  An ivy trellis climbed the wall in back of Grymdyke's house, ascending to the balcony outside that lighted window. Bolan thought it over for a moment, weighing odds and angles, banking on the spook's inherent paranoia to insist upon some s
ort of burglar alarm inside the house. The Executioner might be able to gain entry through the door that seemed to open on a modern kitchen, might have seconds left to bypass any circuitry connected to the door.

  It had to be the trellis. For the sake of time, surprise, he could not try the door or downstairs windows. Standing silently in darkness, Bolan tried the trellis with his weight. When he was satisfied that it would hold, the soldier scrambled upward with a smooth agility. He reached the balcony in seconds, pausing there and listening before he eased one leg across the railing, followed slowly by the other.

  From beyond the sliding windowpane that stood open, the night breeze ruffling drapes inside, he heard voices. He recognized a woman's although the words were breathless, indistinct. A man responded urgently in monosyllables.

  He edged the curtains back with his Beretta, sighting down the slide into a woman's face, her head thrown back, red hair cascading over naked shoulders. The rest of her was naked, too, and Bolan had an unobstructed view of luscious breasts in motion, hips rotating as she rode a man stretched out beneath her. He saw the man in profile — hawk nose and receding hairline, bushy eyebrows, cheeks and forehead slick with perspiration.

  "So good," she crooned. "Oh, Milo..."

  "Do it, baby. Work it out."

  He almost hated to disturb them. Almost. But his mission took priority above their pleasures. He swept the curtains back with one arm, kept his pistol leveled aimlessly between them as he stepped into the room. The woman's eyes snapped open at the unexpected sound, the color draining from her face, and she scrambled backward, leaving Grymdyke high and dry.

  "Hey, what the hell..."

  The spook was on his elbows, rising, when the muzzle of the 93-R's silencer made contact with his temple.

  "Easy, Milo. Don't go off half-cocked."

  "I hear you. Just take it easy with that thing, okay?"

  Ignoring Grymdyke for the moment, Bolan pinned the woman with his eyes and nodded toward a closet that was standing open on the far side of the master bedroom.