Holzer asked one of his people, "Who is that guy?"
"Hell, I don't know," the cop replied. "We got cops here from everywhere, places I never knew existed until this morning."
"I know him from somewhere."
"Ask him."
"I will."
But the guy had moved on. Holzer followed with his gaze and saw him walk into the federal area, shake hands with a strike force fed, then move into the stake-outs section.
Holzer ambled over and asked the fed, "Who is that guy?"
"Which guy?"
"You just shook his hand. He went into the tac room."
"Oh. That's Stryker. Spell it with a y."
"One of your people, eh."
"I think so."
"You think so."
"That's what I said," the fed replied, a bit testily.
"Well, what is that, a code name or something?" the lieutenant from Grosse Pointe persisted. "I mean, strike force? Stryker?"
"I don't know what you're getting at," the fed said, definitely testy now. "Go play games with someone else. I'm busy."
The guy was reading the morning paper. Holzer said, "Yeah, you look busy," and passed on to the tac room.
The tall guy was talking to a vice squad lieutenant, pointing out something on one of the big city grid maps that choked the walls of the place. The vice man was shaking his head and stabbing a finger into another area of the chart. They were having a pretty good argument when the tall guy gazed over the other man's head and directly into Holzer's eyes. Something sparked there, and he raised a hand and crooked a finger. It could not have been meant for anyone else; Holzer pursed his lips and stepped forward.
The tall guy said, "Let's see, it's John Holzer, isn't it? Grosse Pointe?"
Holzer nodded. "And you're — "
"Do you know Lieutenant Kelso here? DPD Vice."
The two lieutenants locked eyes and nodded. "We've met," Kelso said with evident irritation.
"Policeman's Ball, maybe," Holzer said sarcastically.
"You got vice up there, Holzer," Kelso growled. "You got half the goddamn mob up there."
"Three-fourths," Holzer replied amiably. He wished he could place the tall dude in his mind.
But the tall dude was placing something else in John Holzer's mind. "Kelso says the Eight Mile triangle between East Detroit and Harper Woods has been cleaned out, neutralized."
"You mean that area up there opposite the high school complex," Holzer said, glancing at the wall chart.
"Exactly," Kelso growled. "They got three high schools side by side there — they got Notre Dame, Regina, and Lutheran East."
"But they're in Harper Woods," the tall man said.
"So what? They were screaming like hell because of — and that's why I'm saying it's clean as a hound's tooth, the whole Detroit triangle from Kelley to Hayes and up to Eight Mile. We sweep that area once a week, and I'm telling you, it's clean."
"That's close to your area, Holzer," the tall dude said quietly. "Do you agree with that?"
"Not exactly," Holzer said.
"Aw, bull," the Vice lieutenant exploded. "You name one joint that we missed, just one!"
Holzer stretched to tap the chart. "How about Linda's Salon? She was operating full blast last time I passed there. Couple days ago."
Kelso was glaring at the grid map. "What's that again now?"
"Linda just happens to be Palooka Joe Venedetti's sister-in-law. You know what Palooka Joe deals in, Kelso?"
"Where is that? Show me where that is!"
The lieutenant from Grosse Pointe busied himself at the chart for a moment. He was aware that the tall guy had squeezed past his shoulder, but he did not miss the guy until he looked up from the brief task — and the guy was gone again.
Kelso had snatched up a plastic overlay sheet and was posting the stake-out board with the new intelligence. "Okay," he growled to Holzer. "It goes on, at least 'til I can check it out. You better — what's the matter, Holzer? You look like you just saw a ghost or something."
"Who is that guy, Kelso?"
"Who — the big guy? Thought you knew. Hell, he introduced you."
"Yeah, but who introduced him?" Holzer wondered in a choked voice. He went out of there without another word to the man from Vice and hurried into the strike room.
The fed with the newspaper glanced up, then went back to his reading. "Stryker come back through here?" Holzer demanded.
"You've got a complex, mister," the fed said, and that's all he said.
Holzer had something as he hurried on across the large room and through the babble of organized confusion, but it wasn't a complex. It was a shaking gut and the certain sinking conviction that he had finally "placed" the tall man in his mental mug file.
But, hell, surely it couldn't be. No guy would try that. No guy in his right mind would stroll right into the enemy's war room, peer over the shoulders of the general staff, and engage them in debates on strategy and tactics.
No guy — well, okay, maybe one guy would. Maybe he would, at that. Some guys just worked harder, and that's why they worked better.
All the same, John Holzer was going to feel like the chump of the century if it turned out to be — if he'd actually been standing there talking to — hell, puppy-dogging the guy all over the damn place … oh, God!
He found the make sheets and went through them one by one — front view, profile left, profile right... hell, it could be. Artist's conceptions weren't all that great, not all the time — a composite sketch depended a lot on the reliability of the witness's observational powers. But, yeah, it could be the guy!
He dropped the sheets and ran to the corridor, dying a little with each pace of the trip.
The guy called him by name — knew him! How'd he get that? The same way, maybe, that Holzer got "Stryker"? By just simply asking somebody?
What did the guy have, for God's sake, a photoelectric mind? Could he walk into a strike room like that, casually look it over, and walk away with the entire counterplan blazed across his brains?
If Holzer couldn't find the guy — if he couldn't nail him and make him produce proper identification — what then? What could he do? Run to the skipper and tell him to change the game? Just because a kid lieutenant from Grosse Pointe thought he'd entertained Mack Bolan unawares in watch headquarters?
Holzer ran to the main lobby and on through to the outside, spent thirty seconds or so in a visual search there, then reversed course and ran through to the vehicle area.
There was not a sign of the guy, not anywhere.
So ... what now, Holzer?
Nothing, that was what. Who'd believe it, anyway?
But he knew the guy now, knew what he looked like, knew how he walked and moved and held his head, knew the sound of his voice and the flash of those remarkable eyes. Yeah. No introduction would be necessary the next time.
Stryker, eh?
The knot in John Holzer's belly melted, and he found himself laughing inside.
The Metro Unified Strike Force had become the struckee. Supernatural, no. Supermilitary — yeah, hell, yeah!
And crazy, sure, like a fox.
14
Conditioned
Since that first desperate battle at Pittsfield, BoIan had been conditioning his survival instincts for the inevitable armed confrontation that must someday occur between himself and the law.
It was a negative conditioning.
Cops were just people, sure — no better and no worse than most. The greater number of the ones he's run into were pretty good — decent guys struggling to do their job well, husbands and fathers doing their best with family responsibilities, professional soldiers with a hell of a thankless task and uncertain destinies.
A cop played the game of survival every time he hung a gun and donned the badge. It was a necessary game for a species of planetary life that had learned to think and act for itself but not to discipline itself.
Most people even disliked the sound of the word
: discipline.
So, sure, cops were necessary if men were to live together in a responsible and disciplined society.
Mack Bolan was not at war with those men in blue — even if nobody knew that but himself. It was their job to enforce the law. Bolan was breaking it. Bolan was out of step, not them. He had never disliked a man for doing his duty as he understood it.
Bolan would not kill a cop. The war wasn't worth that. The war involved more than simply wiping out rattlesnakes. There existed a deeper plane — a primum mobile, or prime mover — that said that right had to triumph over wrong.
There was no way to cut it and say that it was right to shoot a cop. No personalities involved, no good or bad guy consciousness at stake, that badge of law was a symbol of freedom in a society of equals. This was Bolan's understanding. The badge proclaimed that the law of the jungle did not rule here, that men of reason had come together to fashion and hold a responsible society, that the jungle would not be allowed to encroach upon that clearing.
The man wearing the badge patrolled that jungle, of course, and sometimes he fell victim to it. Crooked cops were simply another testament to the imperfection of man. The man could not debase the badge, however; the badge itself was a perfect idea, and it merited respect from those who sought its protection — from those who wished to live outside the jungle.
Bolan, waging war from that deeper dimension, the primum mobile, would not shoot at such a symbol of right. And so the conditioning, the negative approach to the strongest instinct within a warrior's breast — that problem of survival.
In the jungle, a threatened entity did not pause to intellectualize his predicament. He reacted instinctively — with either fight or flight. With flight impossible, the cornered beast would struggle to the death, utilizing every fang and claw at his disposal.
And this was what worried Bolan, the man. He did not desire that the warrior survive an armed confrontation with the badge. He would exhaust every possibility of flight within reach, but when the corners closed about him, he wanted to be certain that all fangs and claws of the survival instinct knew when to draw back, lie down, and die.
Without, perhaps, calling it that, Bolan consciously cultivated an overlying death instinct — an innate self-destruct switch to open the grave and fill it with Mack Bolan's personal war.
He was going to die, anyway, eventually. He would not die with friendly blood on his hands.
He would not kill a soldier of the same side.
The only option, if the war was to continue, was to evade them. Evade and hide are not synonymous terms. There were times when, in order to properly evade the cops, it was necessary that he walk among them.
The penetration of the strike headquarters at Detroit Central was such an exercise.
He needed to know what the soldiers in blue were up to. He had to know where and how to move across that jungle of survival that they all trod, without confrontation. And he especially wished to know if they were watching a particular section of jungle that the Executioner strongly desired to invade.
And they were.
Even though Bobby Cassiopea had enjoyed an extremely low profile in Mafia circles, he was now on their list. It had been only very recently that even the federal specialists had begun to suspect this "international financier" as a front for the ganglords.
A reluctant fed must have wrung his conscience hard over that one. Cassiopea represented a lot of potential dynamite. To put his name on a local list and risk the loss of a very quiet federal investigation showed, to Bolan's mind, the desire those same feds had for Bolan himself. It was not exactly a comforting thought.
The "quiet watch" on Cassiopea was perfectly understandable. Bolan could sympathize with Brognola and others in the national headshed who were uneasy about playing dice with the fate of a dozen or more multinational conglomerates — especially at such a time in this country's troubled flirtations with economic disaster.
The "energy problem" was no more than the tip of an iceberg encountered by Bolan very briefly in Texas. Beneath that floating projection lay an entire subcontinent of international enganglements and potential earth-shakers that, sure, could make even an economic giant like the United States tremble and perhaps even topple.
Cassiopea was not a hood — not in the usual sense. He held a law degree from a prestigious midwestern school and was a recognized authority on international business law. In a write-up in Newsweek, once, he had been described as "the golden boy of international finance" and, in a more personal vein, "the playboy financier of the western world."
Only once had the guy been even remotely connected publicly with shady business tactics, and this involved a penny-ante securities swindle in Utah some years back. Even here, though, Cassiopea had managed to convince everyone concern that he had been duped along with the other victims.
According to Bolan's poop sheet, the guy was forty-one years of age, married to, but living apart from, a genuine Italian countess, had two youngsters who spent most of their lives in European boarding schools.
He owned a joint in Grosse Pointe Woods — not far from the mob's yacht club. He kept offices downtown, not far from civic center, and had a "retreat" up near Bald Mountain between Pontiac and Flint.
At one of those spots, or upon some jungle trail connecting them, Bolan expected to discover the key to the riddle of Georgette Chableu's fate.
Let the earth shake where it would, there came a time for every man when he had to stand down from the impersonal war and deal entirely on the people level.
Georgette was special people.
Somehow Bolan had to isolate Cassiopea from those who watched and waited, maneuver him into a section of unpatrolled "jungle," and pin an Executioner badge on the guy. Somehow. Yeah. But how?
15
Counted
Bolan proceeded directly from the strike room to the police garage. Pool vehicles were being serviced there and put on the line with the special strike net radio frequencies plugged in. It was a routine operation made difficult only by the quantity of vehicles involved.
The master of "role camouflage" needed one of those vehicles.
His senses flared into the situation and unerringly focused upon the service boss, a harried man in his middle years with too much to do and too little to do it with.
Bolan possessed a special knack for getting "in step" with people. Perhaps it was one of the secrets of his success.
He approached the service boss with a sympathetic grin and told him, "Don't rush, just get it done yesterday, eh?"
The guy grinned back, sourly, and replied, "Same old shit. When it gets this bad, I stop worrying. It can only get better."
Bolan chuckled. "Maybe not. I could be coming down here to tell you the game's changed again. Take it all out and put it back like it was."
The guy's grin faded. He muttered, "Is it?"
Bolan laughed again and playfully poked the guy's shoulder. "Nah. No time for cheap jokes, is it?" He handed over a business card that had thoughtfully been handed to him in the strike room. "Skipper wants you to check your list for this guy. Make sure he's on it."
The service boss accepted the card and frowned at it. "Why don't the feds furnish these vehicles?" he complained. "If they're going to send the man, they should send the car with him."
Bolan shrugged. "You know how it is during a flap. Hey, we don't want to send the guy over to Avis — right? Detroit tries harder because we're only number three — right?"
The guy laughed. "Well ..."
"He is on the list, huh?"
"Naw." A tired sigh. "But he will be."
"I should pick up the car right now. This is, uh, you know, one of those protocol things. Skipper doesn't want these guys going back telling tales out of school."
"Yeah," the guy growled. Now he was being sympathetic. "Same old shit." He was scanning a log book. "Okay." He spun the book around and indicated a line with his finger. "This one's ready."
Bolan accepted a ba
ll-point pen and scribbled a badge number in the space provided. "Thanks. Remind me to buy you a beer."
"Buy me a couple more mechanics instead."
Bolan laughed and looked toward the vehicles. "Head of the line, eh?"
"Right. Gassed and ready. That one just had a brake job. If it pulls a little, let the self-adjustors burn in."
Bolan thanked the guy again and went to claim his vehicle. It was fairly new, unmarked, with an inconspicuous antenna. Perfect. He slid in, cranked it, checked the radio, and checked the hell out of there.
The plan was only vaguely formed in his mind, but he knew what he had to do. How he would do it remained to be seen.
Off the numbers now and by the ear, the Executioner was again on the offensive. Let friends and enemies stand up and be counted. The jungle would claim her own.
Officers Larson and Papado were two short hours into their vigil and just beginning to settle into the tedium of a long stake-out.
They were positioned for surveillance of the main entrance to the Cadillac Tower Building, with a third detective stationed in the lobby and in direct radio communications with the vehicle.
Blown-up photos of one Bobby Cassiopea, lifted from a magazine and a couple of old newspapers, lay on the seat between the two men, sharing honors with composite sketches of the man of the moment, Mack Bolan.
Larson uncorked a thermos of coffee and poured a slug into a paper cup. "Want some?" he asked his partner.
Papado responded with a negative grunt, then added, "My ass is going dead."
"Shift to the other cheek," Larson suggested.
"I've run out of cheeks."
"Play with your balls or something. That'll get the blood to pumping again."
Papado chuckled. "What we need on these gigs is female partners. I'd feel self-conscious playing with my own."
Larson sipped his coffee, then swiftly lowered the cup. "Get a look at that guy?"
"Yeah. Right build but too old."
"Better check him anyway."
Papado sighed and spoke into a small transistor radio. "Paul. Close-sight an incoming."
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