“How many heads in there?”
“Two. Sammy Spear and a guy they call Flash Gordon. I don’t know exactly what they do, but they’re somewhere in the chain to Lupo. Part of the look for these new-wavers—they’re equal opportunity employers. It’s not just an Italian mob, anymore.”
“These guys gunners?” Bolan asked.
“Betcher ass. Mean ones, too. We had a meet here once. Carlo had to work out a contact setup for reports to Lupo.”
“Reports on what?”
“Hits. We did a lot of sub-contracting for Lupo. I got the idea that these guys Spear and Gordon were the coordinators. Lupo never shows hisself personally. I never once saw the guy. More red tape than Capitol Hill. Sometimes it backfires, too. Like that deal last night, the Vitale hit. Somebody got their signals crossed. Lupo didn’t want that hit. By the time the word came down there was no way to stop it.”
“Okay,” Bolan said. “Let’s go talk to the coordinators.”
The time was shortly past noon. Ripper Dan Aliotto went directly to the door and pushed the bell button.
Bolan, conspicuously flashy in the skyblue business suit and dark glasses, remained on the walkway in open view of the windows and made a show of casually looking over the neighborhood.
The door at 17-B cracked open on the second summons. A chain-lock was in place, and Bolan drew a fleeting impression of a voluptuous blonde woman on the other side of that door.
A pleasant female voice sang out, “What do you want?”
Aliotto announced, “Tell Sammy it’s Ripper Dan. Urgent business.”
“I’ll see if he’s here,” the blonde replied.
While they waited, Bolan lit a cigarette and idly drifted up the walk. A deep voice from the doorway warned, “That’s close enough, guy.”
Bolan halted and crossed his arms across his chest.
Aliotto said, “That you, Sammy?”
“Yeah. Where’s your boss?”
“Over in Virginia.”
“Yeah, so I hear. Who’s your friend?”
“That’s Frankie Lambretta. We gotta come in, Sammy.”
The door clicked shut momentarily then rebounded fully open. The voice from the inside was farther removed now as it called out, “Okay, come on in. One at a time.”
Aliotto smirked at Bolan and stepped into the apartment. The cool man in blue followed close behind, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke ahead of him.
Sammy Spear stood in the center of the room with a snubnose revolver trained on the doorway. He was a man of about thirty, medium height and build, wearing rumpled dress slacks and a shirt open at the neck, gunleather suspended from the shoulder.
Another man was also present. He was similarly dressed and armed but his weapon was sheathed. Obviously a bit younger than Spear, Flash Gordon wore muddy-blond hair in a fuzzy “Afro” style. He held a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other; he was leaning casually against the back wall.
The buxom blonde had retreated to a couch. She wore nothing but bra and panties—with very little fabric to either. Strikingly pretty in a brassy way, Bolan read her as sex on the hoof—any time, any place, any way.
He also had a flashing rear view of another girl, equally undraped, as she disappeared through a bedroom doorway.
Bolan casually turned his back on the entire scene to close the front door and restore the chain lock. When he turned around again, Spear was sheathing the revolver and walking toward a small portable bar in the corner.
The gunman paused in mid-stride to snap an irritated command to the fall-out blonde: “Go get something on!”
The girl flounced out of the room and Spear went on to the bar and poured a hefty slug of bourbon into a glass.
“This is getting on my nerves,” he announced to no one in particular. “If you boys want a drink, help yourselves. Bartender is off duty.”
Aliotto read the eye signal from Bolan and replied, “Thanks, we ain’t got time.”
The man at the back of the room drawled, “That’s all we have got.” He was obviously a southerner, with a twangy high-pitched voice. “Y’all sure that sergeant sonnabitch isn’t on your tail?”
“Shut up, Flash,” the other man muttered.
Gordon grinned at Aliotto and said, “Sammy don’t like to be reminded. A Ghost Who Walks is in town, and my buddy Sammy is haunted.” He laughed, raised his glass in a silent toast, and took a deep pull at the drink.
Spear ignored the gibe from his partner. “What d’you boys want?” he asked the visitors.
“I got orders to contact Lupo,” Ripper Dan truthfully replied.
The “coordinator” shrugged and told him, “You know how.”
“Not anymore. It’s all gone ka-flooey. The whole town has buttoned up.”
The southerner was staring fixedly at Bolan.
The Ghost Who Walks casually removed his dark glasses, dropped them into a pocket, and stared back.
The other gunner was telling Aliotto, “That’s tough shit. I hear your whole bunch has holed up in the country.”
“That’s the problem,” Aliotto admitted.
“Well that’s your tough shit. We’re on Condition Red security and it’s going to stay that way.”
Aliotto complained, “Well, geez, how the hell’re we gonna …?”
The southerner chuckled, his gaze still interestedly on Bolan. “This dude here looks familiar. Who is it, Frankie what?”
The man in the blue suit spoke for the first time since entering that apartment. The icy voice advised, “Frankie nothing. The name is Bolan.”
Flash Gordon started a nervous laugh, then snapped it off and very slowly moved the cigarette to his lips and left it there.
The man at the bar dropped his glass to the floor and carefully moved both hands onto his belly. He growled, “Don’t screw around. That’s not funny.”
In a flattened voice, the southerner declared, “He’s not screwing around. It’s him, all right.”
Moving nothing but the muscles required for speech, Spear said, “Ripper, you son of a bitch.”
Bolan was simply standing there at stage-center, legs spread, arms hanging casually at his side, coat open, the Beretta visible in her snapaway rig.
“Get clear, Ripper,” he quietly commanded.
Aliotto casually dropped into a chair near the door, a strained smile masking his emotions.
Sammy Spear’s voice was showing its tension as he said, “Easy, easy. Let’s understand just what we got here.”
“You’ve got trouble,” the cold tones of the Executioner informed him.
“We all got trouble,” Spear replied. “But nobody’s blasting yet. So … what do you want?”
“I want Lupo.”
The southerner let out a shaky chuckle. “You can’t have him,” he said, but not very convincingly.
“So I’ll have you boys instead.”
“Which one?” Flash Gordon blustered. “One is all you’re going to get, if that much.”
“Try me then.”
“Hold it, dammit,” the other gunner demanded. “This’s all a lot of bullshit, anyway. We don’t know nothing to tell you.”
Bolan said, “Too bad. That was your only out.”
A strained silence took over the room, magnifying the situation. Small sounds which ordinarily would go unnoticed became almost clamorous—the ticking of a watch, a fly buzzing against a window pane, the movement of air through constricted breathing passages.
Bolan gave the moment full head, allowing adrenalin-charged muscles to tense and fatigue, encouraging nervous systems to overtax and deteriorate—and then he told them, “Time’s up. Start talking or slap leather.”
Sammy Spear made the first break, and he made the mistake of trying it cowboy style, spread-legged and flat footed.
Bolan had him measured, aligned, and timed—and the Beretta Belle was leather-free and spitting her soft song of doom before the challenger’s hand had closed around his weapon.
; The Parabellum hi-shocker crunched in squarely between Sammy’s bugging eyes and punched him over backwards onto the bar, his dying gurgle lost in the crash of bottles and the splintering of the cheap wood.
The second silent round was already tracking Flash Gordon as he catapulted sideways toward the bedroom door. It smashed into his gun arm and spun him around just in time to catch another sizzler in the throat—and gun and man continued the death plunge, crashing into the door and on through to the bedroom floor.
Ripper Dan Aliotto was poised motionless half in and half out of his chair, his face an emotionless blank.
Bolan muttered, “Damn! Strike out.”
In a hushed voice, Aliotto told him, “Depends on your point of view, I guess.”
The blonde woman, still clad only in the abbreviated panties and bra, lurched through the open doorway from the bedroom. She had evidently been in the receiving line for Flash Gordon’s geysering blood, and she was wearing it in rivulets about her upper body. The pretty face was twisted into a grotesque mask of horror and shock.
Bolan holstered the Beretta and warned her, “It’s no better out here.”
She was already well unglued before her eyes settled on the ugly sight on the opposite side of the room. “God, you shot his eye out!” she wailed.
True enough, one of Sammy’s eyes had popped from its mutilated socket and bounded halfway across the room. It lay there, bloodied, iris up, streamers of shattered nerve tissue coiled about it.
Ripper Dan dropped back into his chair with a shuddering, “Jesus Christ!”
Bolan took the blonde’s arm and led her back to the bedroom. The other girl, a cool-looking redhead, was standing woodenly over the crumpled remains of Flash Gordon. She had pulled on a pair of bluejean hip-huggers but was bare from the hips up.
Bolan steered the blonde around the mess there and shoved her toward the bath. “Clean yourself up,” he suggested.
The redhead turned to regard him with a cool gaze. “Why’d you have to do this?” she asked him, in a voice which could have been inquiring about the time of day.
Bolan wondered fleetingly if she was narked-up, then quickly decided that she was not.
Maybe it was not a total strike-out, after all.
He shrugged and quietly responded to her inane query. “War is hell. I’m looking for Lupo.”
She said, “I know. I heard it all. You’re out of luck. These guys were nothing. They wouldn’t know Lupo from Margaret Mitchell.”
“Would you?”
The woman shook her head. “I’m nothing, too. I work for him, sure, like this poor jerk here did. But so what? We’re layered, see, and I mean layered. This is the lowest layer. I don’t know how many more there are between here and Lupo. Loud and clear?”
Bolan told her, “Loud and lying. I’ve never shot a woman. But I might start.”
She stared at him for a long moment, and what she saw there apparently brought her mind to a sane decision. She sighed and told him, “Oh hell, it’s not worth it.”
She stepped away from the gore beneath her and made bloody barefoot tracks to the bed where she dropped to her knees and dug something from beneath the mattress.
When she stood up she was holding a small leather folder which she thrust at Bolan.
“If what you want isn’t in there, you’ll just have to start shooting,” she said. “It’s not much but it’s all we ever had.”
Bolan opened the folder with one hand and riffled the lined pages inside, then he moved immediately into the living room and told Ripper Dan, “Bingo. Let’s go.”
Aliotto preceded him to the front door without a word or a backwards glance.
The redhead came in behind them and called to Bolan, “You’re a real hard son of a bitch, aren’t you!”
He turned to look at her as he was going through the doorway.
“I try to be,” he said, and gently closed the door on Lupo’s lower layer.
12: THE MAN
It was precisely three o’clock in the afternoon when Ripper Dan dropped his passenger on the east side of the Lincoln Memorial.
The tall man in the blue suit, mustachioed and wearing dark glasses, immediately struck off through the trees lining the Reflecting Pool.
He was awaited there, several yards into the trees, by a powerfully built man on crutches.
The meeting with Harold Brognola had been pre-arranged that morning.
The Justice Department official’s first words to the most wanted man in the country were, “Who do you think you’re fooling with that get-up?”
Bolan smiled soberly and replied, “Myself, maybe.”
“You’re sure standing this town on its head,” Brognola sourly observed. “I wish you’d move a bit softer. You’re diverting a lot of attention from the critical points.”
Bolan knew that, and the worry expressed by Brognola was not exactly alien to himself. He said, “Yeah. It’s starting to pay, though.” He produced a folded sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his coat and gave it to the other man. “Don’t bother studying that right now, I only have a minute or two. It’s an organization chart showing the pyramid of power in the local operation. Trouble is, most of the blocks are blank. All I have filled in are about the lower three levels. And I’d hate to tell you what I had to do to get that far.”
“You’re working on the others, though.”
Bolan sighed. “I am.”
“I’ve been getting calls all afternoon, from a lot of greatly embarrassed people. Are you behind that, too?”
Bolan told him, “Maybe. Which people?”
“Hell, I won’t go into names. But the list includes congressmen, civil servants, members of executive and congressional staffs—one, even, from the White House staff. All with a similar story. They’d been duped, compromised, and blackmailed by a young woman on Harmon Keel’s staff. They would talk to me and only to me. I got the same suggestion from each of them—as though they’d been coached. A secret meeting, a group meeting, to discuss ways and means of exposing the operation.”
“Did you set up the meeting?”
“Sure I did. Eight o’clock tonight. You knew about it, eh?”
Bolan said, “Yeah. Keep it quiet, eh. There’s something rotten in your own house.”
“Are you,” Brognola snapped, “telling me? It’s like walking across wall-to-wall marbles. But don’t worry. I’m playing all cards very close to the chest. Incidentally, for what it’s worth, I’m going to be walking your side of the street from here on, even if I have to resign and walk it as a private citizen.”
Bolan said, “Don’t do that.” He gave his unofficial friend a tight smile and added, “Speaking of walking, how’s the leg wound?”
Brognola had picked up an unintended bullet in the thigh while attempting to nail Bolan to a casino wall in Las Vegas.
He returned the smile and told his favorite fugitive, “It’s okay. I’ll be ditching these crutches in a few days.” It was obviously an embarrassing point. He averted his gaze toward the Pool and growled, “Hey, I was temporarily insane at Vegas. It’s a condition called dementia bureaucratis.”
Bolan chuckled. He said, “Forget it. I have. What can you tell me about a lower echelon hood called Smiling Jack Vitale?”
The Justice man’s eyes flashed in recognition. “Vitale is a name I’ve been hearing all afternoon,” he snapped. “That’s the woman in the case.”
Bolan told him, “Smiling Jack’s widow. I need to know exactly how long she’s been a member of Keel’s staff, how she got there, the whole bit. Also I’d like to know if her husband ever worked for Keel, when, and in what capacity.”
“You said widow. The guy’s dead, then.”
Bolan nodded. “He was with the old Boston mob. The story goes that he got caught in the middle of the factional dispute up there. But something is off center. I need a full profile on the guy.”
“Okay, I’ll run it down.”
“Keep it quiet.”
; “Sure. How will I get it to you?”
“I’ll contact you.”
Brognola rubbed his nose and said, “Okay. This is getting pretty hairy, though. I don’t even trust my own telephones anymore.”
“You shouldn’t,” Bolan told him. “I keep getting rumbles about a fantastic intelligence network at work here.”
“Electronic eavesdropping?”
Bolan growled, “Yeah. A very sophisticated refinement of the game. And I keep bumping into ex-CIA people. This guy Lupo has pulled together one hell of an effective operation.”
“No clue yet to Lupo’s actual identity?”
Bolan shook his head. “Not yet, but I’m getting closer. Ever hear of a country, Costa Brava?”
Brognola stroked his chin for a moment before replying. “Seems like. One of the small Latin American republics.”
“It’s more like a municipality,” Bolan said. “It began as two small islands in the Caribbean—privately owned property. Through some mysterious international hijinks, it has emerged as a constituted nation.” He grinned, adding, “Population one hundred and twenty. But they have tentative recognition in the UN and a diplomatic mission here in Washington. Can you buy that?”
The Justice Department man snorted. “At this stage, I’ll buy anything. What’s the connection with Lupo?”
“I don’t know that yet. But wouldn’t it be a sweet setup for the mob? Picture it. A nation of their own, less than an hour by plane from Miami. Political sanctuary, diplomatic immunity, financial freedom for illegal bucks, the whole trick.”
Brognola swore softly. “And a retirement village for elder Mafiosi, eh. Yeah, I’m buying it more and more. The traffic south has been growing heavier all the time. But what’s the local connection?”
“Immunity, maybe,” Bolan replied. “Their mission is in the middle of Embassy Row. Small but neat—and who could ask for a better cover?”
“You think you’ll find Lupo there?”
Bolan said, “No, not there. It’s just another block in the pyramid. But a rather strategically placed one, I think. I’m going to hit the place tonight.”
Brognola put on a wry smile and commented, “You don’t recognize diplomatic immunity.”
“There’s no immunity in my jungle,” the Executioner softly declared.
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