"Make it simple," Bolan said. "You have some information, and I want it. You give, you live. Simple."
The look in Benny Copa's eyes was telling the Executioner that, yeah, the guy understood simple very well indeed. Copa nodded rapidly as he spoke.
"Fire away... hey, I mean... ask, okay?"
"You sent some crews out this morning, Benny. They didn't come home."
Copa's face registered shock at Bolan's inside knowledge. He covered it a second later, but not before Bolan had duly noted the reaction.
"Uh, I've got lots of crews, man," he said, stalling. "I run a big operation here."
"I'm only interested in two."
"Uh-huh, well... maybe we can make a deal here," he said, smiling craftily.
Bolan pressed the hot muzzle of the Beretta Belle against Benny's forehead, hearing the flesh sizzle on contact. He let Copa wince and wiggle for a moment before withdrawing the gun, leaving an angry red circle above the guy's left eye.
"You heard the deal, Benny. The minute I think you're shucking, I terminate the conversation."
And Bolan's tone left no doubt that the conversation would not be the only thing terminated, sure.
"Okay, okay," he said hastily. "Jesus, you can't blame a guy for trying."
"Sure I can," Bolan said.
Copa glowered back at his uninvited guest.
"Christ, you don't give a man much slack, do you?"
"The crews, Benny. Last chance."
"All right, dammit! We're talking about five boys, right? Two at the airport, and three more at a certain lady's house?"
Bolan nodded silently, letting the cornered weasel continue.
"Okay, right," Copa said, nodding affirmation of his own words. "They were part of a package deal. Outside contract, you know? Nothing to do with organization business."
And he smiled, as if that piece of information should settle everything.
But it didn't.
"What was their mission?" Bolan asked.
The little mobster managed a sarcastic snort.
"What do you think?"
The cold expression of the Executioner's face stifled the feeble snicker.
"They were disposal teams, man, you know?" Benny hastened to explain. "They were sent to dispose."
"Hit teams," Bolan said.
Copa nodded jerkily.
"Who was their mark at the airport?"
Copa shrugged elaborately, making a show of ignorance.
"Some dude, who knows? I told you it was an outside contract, right? The customer fingers his mark, and I count the dollar signs."
"I'll want the customer's name."
Benny Copa stiffened in his swivel chair, knuckles white as he gripped the armrests. There was new fear behind his eyes that had nothing to do with Bolan and the deadly silenced Beretta inches away from his nose.
The guy was silent for a long moment, but in the end the fear of clear and present danger won out, loosening his tongue.
"Really, man, I could buy real trouble by answering questions like that."
And it seemed the guy would never quit trying.
"You have trouble, Benny," Bolan reminded him curtly. "You're trying to buy time."
There was another, shorter pause. Then Copa opened up.
"Well, hey, I only know the dude's voice, can you dig it? We made the arrangements by phone."
Bolan's answering voice was almost sad.
"You commit five soldiers without knowing the customer's name? Goodbye, Benny."
The Beretta slid out to full extension, and Bolan was tightening into the final squeeze when Copa gave a strangled little yelp and threw out both hands, palms open, as if to ward off hurtling death.
"Wait! Shit! All right, man, I'm sorry."
The Beretta never wavered from its target.
"The name," Bolan said, his voice icy.
Benny Copa was sweating profusely. He wiped his forehead with a shirtsleeve, but it didn't seem to help.
"The name's Smalley," he almost whispered, "as in Roger. Satisfied?"
"What is he to you?" Bolan asked.
Copa looked incredulous at first, and then a canny little smile crept its way across his pale, damp face.
"You really don't know, do you?" Benny said, shaking his head. "I'll be goddamned and go to hell."
Bolan waited silently, ticking off the numbers in his head and staring at one round eye along the slide of his Beretta autoloader. Copa felt the vibrations of imminent death, and started talking again.
"Roger Smalley, man... he's only the deputy P.C. for all of St. Paul, that's all."
"So what was this Smalley character after? Why did he send you to the airport? No one knew I was coming in."
Now it was Copa's turn to be genuinely in the dark. "We weren't after you, man. All I know about you is what's going down now... And that's enough, thanks."
Bolan jammed the Brigadier's muzzle against the man's sweating nose. "Keep talking facts, little man. Who were you after? And why?"
"The customer said something about a bad detective," replied Copa, fast. "He said this dick had kidnapped a girl from the hospital. I guessed we had some sort of vigilante on our hands, a guy getting away with all kinds of shit and embarrassing the Commissioner. But it was just a contract, don't you see? No big deal."
Looking into Benny Copa's frightened eyes, he had no doubt the little guy was leveling with him.
He lowered the Beretta a notch, maybe half a notch.
"Okay, Benny," he said at last. "Live."
Bolan backed away from the littered desk and toward the door opposite. He could see relief tempered with caution flood into Benny Copa's face and form. The little mobster was desperately wanting — hell, needing — to believe that he was off the hook, but he couldn't quite accept it so suddenly. As the final realization hit him, he started to regain a touch of his natural bravado.
"Jesus, fella," he said, "you really had me going there."
After a quick glance around at the bodies on the floor, he added, "You also left me a helluva mess to clean up."
"Your problem, Benny," Bolan told him curtly. "You could have gone with them."
Copa snorted, grinning from ear to ear.
"Right, hell, buttons are everywhere... dime a dozen."
The little hood seemed struck by a sudden inspiration.
"Hey, wait," he called. "Maybe we can make another deal."
Bolan paused in the doorway.
"You've got nothing else I want, guy," he told the little cannibal.
"Well, Jesus, hear me out, huh? I'll double what you're getting now. Name your price. I could use a man of your... abilities."
Bolan said nothing. He was amazed at the guy's gall in trying to buy him and his gun.
"Listen, really," the mobster prodded, "I know natural talent when I see it. These boys were no shitheads, you know? Not like the old days, hell, but okay. You didn't take them out with no friggin' beginner's luck."
Bolan remained silent, letting the guy spill his guts.
"Fact is," Copa continued, "damned few guys I ever heard of could take two men... three men... in a face-to-face. Some of the old aces maybe, but hell..."
Behind those weasel eyes, wheels were turning, gears clicking into place as an embryonic idea or suspicion took shape. Benny's face underwent subtle changes, and Mack Bolan's gut rumbled in response, feeling something coming.
"You know, if it wasn't so goddamned far out... hey, uh, listen... that wouldn't be a Beretta you're holding, would it?"
Bolan saw the end coming, inexorably, the last unknown variables falling into place behind Benny Copa' s suddenly haunted eyes.
And he nodded.
"You called it, Benny."
Copa's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, then he licked his lips and tried again.
"You're dead, guy," was all he could manage.
"So are you," Bolan told him.
And the Beretta chugged once, putting a 9mm parabellum round thro
ugh Benny Copa's left eye socket and slamming him over out of sight behind the desk. There was no need to check his condition, and Bolan didn't bother.
He put Copa's place behind him swiftly, his mind occupied with his own thoughts. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, the office phone began jangling overhead, loudly and insistently. There was no one up there to answer the call.
Back in his rental car and rolling, Bolan heard the grim words again in his mind. First spoken by Pol Blancanales in predawn darkness, and now, again, by the late and unlamented Benny Coppacetti.
You're supposed to be dead, guy. Dead and buried.
And yeah, theoretically, hypothetically, Mack Bolan was buried. Parts of him had been shed forever in Southeast Asia, in Pittsfield, in the final New York firestorm of his second mile against the Mafia.
It might come to pass that another part — or all of him — would be buried right there in St. Paul that very day, but he couldn't — hell, wouldn't — live in fear of the unknown and the inescapable. It was not his way, and never would be.
Mack Bolan was alive and living large.
All the way to a meeting with the assistant P.C. of St. Paul, yeah, and beyond that, if necessary, into the gates of hell itself.
12
From the journal of John Phoenix:
We live in a cyclical universe. It seems that everything repeats itself, and comes full circle given time. I know that to be true of life and death, love and hate. I am finding out that it is also true of war. Nothing stays the same in life or war, but in the end, nothing changes.
At one time, during one existence, the Mafia was my enemy and primary target. I believed that the disruption and destruction of their cannibalistic operations was the highest goal I could aspire to. With time, the "unwinnable" conflict resolved itself into something else, and I began to see a dim light at the end of the tunnel. And there was a victory of sorts, however temporary, but not before my war against the Mafia had gone full circle and returned to the city, to the ground where it had begun.
This is a new war, against new enemies, but I cannot escape a sense of deja vu. The circles keep on turning, and in time all the faces of the predators and victims take on a similarity that is inescapable. I begin to feel that I am fighting the old war all over again, this time dressed up in a new disguise. The names of the enemies have changed, their addresses have shifted, but down deep, where the soul rot takes root and consumes healthy tissue, they remain the same.
Terrorism is the target this time out. But was it ever any different? At its most basic, stripped of all the political and religious window-dressing, terrorism is nothing more than a frontal assault upon the safety and security of the individual, or of society. It violates with a vengeance the most basic human rights of all: the rights to life and personal security. In the final analysis, it matters little if the victims of terrorism are held hostage in a foreign embassy, or cornered individually in the darkness of an underground garage. The end result, the violation of the person, is exactly the same.
It is that violation, that rape of the body and spirit, which we fight against. The enemy is always the same. Only the battlefield changes.
Terrorism is a time-honored concept, employed in one way or another since primal man learned to hide in the dark and leap out at unwary neighbors with his club. It would be fundamentally inaccurate to think that only certain groups, or particular segments of our population, perpetrate the crime. Terror has no color, language or religion; it is a universal constant, the writhing of a soul in fear and torment. At the bottom line, terrorism can only exist at an individual level, one-on-one.
The Mafia was expert at this kind of personal, one-on-one terrorism before its founding fathers stepped onto the dock at Ellis Island. Generations before the Palestinians or South Moluccans turned to violence in their different causes, homegrown terrorists were bleeding immigrant ghettos in America and sending out their tentacles into the everyday world of business and commerce. That terrorism was no less real, no less lethal, for being stripped of pseudo-idealistic songs and slogans. The victims were real, and the cost to America, in dollars and bloodshed, is undeniable by any thinking being.
It was that local terrorism that I set out to combat in the old war. I find now that I was only scratching at the surface, picking at a blemish while the cancer grew in size and strength just below the surface.
And things do come full circle. Wherever I go, however far I range away from the original battlefields of my own private war, the echoes of that struggle call me back. The Mafia is like a fabled serpent, headless now, and hacked into pieces, but like the Hydra, each piece seems determined to grow a new head and put down deadly roots of its own. I expected that much when I charted my last mile against the Outfit, but I had hoped that it would take some time for the lethal new weeds to flower.
The time is now.
And terrorism, once again, has become very personal.
This one is for Toni, and for Pol. But it is also for myself, and for the other victims of a silent terrorism, past and present. Their blood cries out for vengeance, for a justice long denied them. If the war against the Mafia was unwinnable, quixotic, then this one against the violators can be little more than a localized delaying action. It may take a generation, and determined action by the courts and legislatures, to make our cities safe again for women — or for children, men, you name it. There is nothing that an Executioner can do to stem that tide of random rape and murder in our nation. A fighting man needs specific, individual targets, and just this once I have some.
I suppose it is the nature of the target that disturbs me. From the beginning of my home-front war against the mob, police have been untouchable to me. They are soldiers of the same side in a war against the creeping tide of lawlessness and violence that is terrorism at its most basic. I have met some cops — and some politicians, some lawyers, some doctors — who disgraced their oaths of office and their comrades by selling out to the very forces they are sworn to combat. I've been able to expose a few, and the reaction of their fellows in the field has been revulsion, the healthy body throwing off a contaminating parasite. In the end, with an occasional assist from outside, the lawmen have been both willing and able to police themselves.
And I have never fired on a policeman, or felt the urge to, before now. There were times, in that other war, when I could have eased my own way, or made the victory something more than partial, by taking out a cop. I do not believe you can defeat your enemy by becoming your enemy.
Sometimes, a man who is capable of bearing arms is faced with a positive duty to use those arms. At times, a man is duty-bound to kill so that others, the builders and civilizers, may go on about their tasks in peace. The predators must be held at bay, and there is no peaceful way to reason with the savages and cannibals among us.
But to kill a cop...
The knowledge of a limited police complicity — however high-placed — comes as no surprise to me. I've seen too much of the corruption men are susceptible to. But for the first time, I may find it necessary to bend my own personal set of rules, to revise the guidelines of my war.
It is a new war, after all, at least in name. And it may require some new tactics, some new perspectives.
If Benny Copa and Fran Traynor are correct, then certain highly placed officials in this city have been aiding and abetting an insidious campaign of terrorism over months and years. It may well be impossible to build a solid case against them, or to find a prosecutor willing to attempt the job. In any case, the justice they deserve for wasting lives and violating souls will not be found in any courtroom. That justice must be swift, sure, irreversible. For Toni, and the others. For the universe.
And yes, it may be necessary to change some perspectives that I've carried for a lot of bloody miles. It may be time to face the fact that beyond a certain point, when he has passed some particular mile marker on the road of violence and corruption, even a lawman becomes hopeless, unsalvageable. He becomes a traitor
, in the truest, most basic meaning of that hated term, and the penalty for treason is inescapable.
Before now, it has been something unthinkable, like spitting on the flag or changing sides in the middle of my own private war. The sides never change, but people do, and perhaps it's time for me to meet that fact head-on with respect to the targets I've acquired. Even flags, when torn and soiled beyond repair, are destroyed to make way for newer, cleaner ones.
So be it. I take nothing for granted in this struggle, and I keep an open mind with regard to targets and solutions. If it becomes necessary for me to take the final step, I will take it not with eagerness or anger, but with sadness — the quiet, personal grief that accompanies the death of an ideal.
And the war goes on, unchanged, unchanging. The target is still terrorism, whatever its face, name or position in society. And the victims, the souls hanging in the balance, are the same — the builders and seekers, the gentle civilizers. They are worth saving, worth protecting at any cost, and with that decision made, the other questions answer themselves. The war goes on.
13
Assistant Police Commissioner Roger Smalley listened to the incessant ringing at the other end of the line, cursing softly to himself. After several long moments, he cradled the receiver, his mind racing to evaluate the ramifications of his problem.
Benny Copa would have to learn that he couldn't just waltz off to nowhere and leave a job unfinished. Especially this kind of job.
When Smalley had first heard from one of the metropolitan precincts that a girl, the girl, dammit, had been spirited out of hospital, he absolutely did not know what to make of it. And then the facts had started to come in. The girl belonged to some kind of detective agency. Able Company, or something like that. Another member of the agency was an out-of-towner, apparently her brother. And that stank. Smalley hadn't liked that at all. He wanted the stranger neutralized. That was Benny Copa's job.
And he blew it.
Not that Smalley now suspected Copa of running out on him entirely, oh, no. The little ferret didn't have the guts for that sort of double cross.
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