Harmon Keel came from Boston.
So did Claudia Vitale.
And a man sometimes called Lupo, also, came from Boston.
The old city figured because she did not figure. It could be no other way. A Boston background was considered prestigious, in some circles. The nation had originated there, in many senses. The fine old patriot bloodlines descended from there, as well as some highly repsected political families.
Sure. Double damn sure. She figured because she did not figure.
The riddle, thank God, at last was solved.
And Bolan thought he knew who Lupo was.
But Lupo, he had also come to realize, would not be his final goal in Washington. That ultimate target would be someone straight, someone fine, someone prestigious and patriotic, it would be someone from respected political stock.
The Executioner would find Lupo, yes.
And then he would have to find the man behind Lupo.
He would have to find the man who was being groomed as the next President of the United States.
The problem had to work that way because it was the only solution to both sides of the paradoxical equation … a mob President was the only answer to both why and why not.
And the Executioner shivered over that truth.
He would have to hit that guy.
There simply was no question to the answer.
15: ABSORPTION
Bolan met Claudia Vitale, by pre-arrangement, at seven o’clock on the steps of the Library of Congress. He took her hand and they strolled like lovers to the Court of Neptune, the marvelously sculpted bronze fountain, where he sat her down atop the railing and they gazed into each other’s eyes and murmured soft words in the manner of lovers everywhere … but these were not words of love.
“I hear you got it set up,” he told her.
“Yes. I believe most of them will be there.”
“You too, Claudia.”
“Sure. I’ll be there.”
“You’ve got a selling job. Convince them. Fight back or get eaten, that’s the message. There is no accommodation with this enemy, no halfway house anywhere in their plans. It’s all or nothing. Let’s make it nothing. Tell that to your pigeons.”
“I’ll tell them. I know what to do.”
“I know you do. Just do it, eh. This may be the last chance.”
She wriggled under a light tremor. “It’s kind of scary, the way you say it.”
“If you think it’s scary now, wait until the cannibals take over. They’ll eat us all alive.”
“I know that. Still, I guess I never really faced the reality of it. You know … sometimes it’s easier to just drift along and hope.”
He said, “Claudia.…”
“Yes?”
“This is going to sound square and corny, but … how did a nice girl like you …?”
She laughed softly. “It’s corny only because it happens so often, I guess, to so many people. I don’t know how I got in this deep, not really. Just drifted in, I guess. First it was Jack, and—”
“Your husband.”
She soberly nodded her head. “Yes. He was a rat, I guess. I didn’t see it then. Oh … I had stars in my eyes. Political Science major, you know. Jack was … older and glamorous. It was Harmon’s—Congressman Keel’s bi-annual scramble for re-election and I was one of those nutty kids very long on ideals and very short on common sense.”
“You were working for Keel when you met Vitale?”
“No. He was. Drumming the campuses in our congressional district, looking for volunteer campaign workers.” She smiled grimly. “I got hooked … on both Keel and Jack. Anyway, we went from one warm thing to another. It was my senior year. We won for Harmon, I graduated in the Spring, and I became Mrs. Smilin’ Jack Vitale in June.”
“When did you find out?” he asked her.
“Find out what?”
“That you’d married into the Mafia.”
She screwed her face into a thoughtful, frown and told him, “Well I’m Italian too, you know. I believe I knew it all along. I just wouldn’t face it. But then … after we returned from the honeymoon and I became a full-time member of the staff—”
“What staff?”
“Harmon Keel’s staff. He keeps an office in the home district, you know. Jack ran that office for him. And I went to work for Jack. I started seeing the under-the-table deals, the payoffs and all, and of course I knew, then. And there were the constant parties, the secret meetings with known hoods, the seemingly unlimited supply of money and all the nicer things of life. On an administrator’s salary! I had to see it, then.”
“Did Harmon Keel know, Claudia?”
She shook her head. “I’m sure that he never knew. He doesn’t know to this day. That’s one of the.…”
“What were you going to say?”
She made a wry face. “I guess I didn’t want to bring it up. I … I’ve grown to love that pitiful old man. Keel, I mean. He’s like a grandfather to me. We have this thing, you see, this unspoken thing. Especially since Jack died. I believe it would kill Harmon if he should learn the truth about me.”
And Lupo used that as a lever on you?”
“Do we have to talk about this right now?”
He nodded his head firmly. “We do.”
She murmured, “Well, sure, he used it. Continually. After Jack … was removed … things suddenly began blossoming for me. I mean, career-wise. I moved very quickly from the very lowest desk of administration at the home district level to where I am now … Washington chief of staff. I didn’t know at first, though, that someone else was pulling my strings.”
“And that all started after your husband died?”
“Yes. I’ve often wondered, too, if that was why he had to die. I mean, Jack had become compromised himself. He had become ‘known’—I mean, identified by his mob connections. Too many local people knew. It was beginning to restrict his movements.”
“So you figure the mob removed him and began promoting you.”
“I’ve wondered about it.”
“When did you take your first dive?”
Her eyes blanched. “You mean beneath the bedcovers? Let’s not talk about that, please. Not you, Mack, please. I’ll tell anybody else you say, but.…”
He growled, “Okay. But I’m struggling for the pieces to the puzzle, Claudia.”
“That part of me is no puzzle,” she said in a very low voice. Then, obviously steeling herself, she went on. “I just sort of slid into it. My first dive, as you call it, was entirely innocent on my part. I mean, I didn’t know I was being used. For God’s sake, I’d been a widow for two years. I’m not … old, Mack.” She took a shuddering breath and continued. “Well they had my place wired … for sounds and sights. And they got plenty of both. I was sort of in love with the guy, and I still believe that he was serious about me.” She shrugged her shoulders in a delicate little gesture. “They killed that, oh boy did they kill it. A short while later, Lupo arrived on the scene and then my strings really got a jerking. Pretty soon I simply didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care about anything. I did what they told me, without a quiver. Until.…”
Bolan said, “Okay, I have the picture.”
“It sure is a dirty one,” she murmured.
“But getting cleaner all the time. Keep it going. You’re doing great.”
They parted moments later, Claudia to keep a rendezvous with her conscience—Bolan to keep a date with death.
Yes. He had the picture now.
The time was eight o’clock and the place was Harold Brognola’s modest townhouse in Georgetown. The full list of invited guests had arrived and had clustered into small groups of quietly self-conscious compatibles.
Brognola came in with Claudia Vitale, who was making a brave effort to keep her chin high and her eyes sparkling. Without preamble the meeting was called to order and the serious business of salvaging a number of once-promising political careers got underway.
Claudia had her say, holding the floor for most of twenty minutes, and it was a brutal recitation of encroaching national doom.
Then Brognola added his official comments, recommendations, and assurances that “this whole thing can be smoothed out and made right.”
The sticky details of individualized “scandals” were not discussed, but Brognola passed around a “logbook” and asked for signatures “to cement the common bond and to signify a willingness and a desire to stand up and fight back.”
Eleven of those present signed the logbook. The other three expressed an unwillingness to commit themselves “at this time,” though promising to keep the matter under consideration.
At about 8:40, the meeting broke up.
Claudia Vitale remained in her chair, sipping a glass of sherry, while Brognola saw his guests to the door.
It was a black night, moonless and starless, and no one was aware of that other presence in the darkness outside until the fireworks began. The solemn group was clustered about the small porch and short stairway, saying goodnight, when a tall figure in total black stepped from the shadows of the yard into the glow of the porch light.
He tossed a metallic object onto the porch; it clattered against the side of the house and fell into the crowd.
Brognola cried out, “Mack, for God’s sake, what are you doing?”
And then an automatic weapon which the man in black was holding began its chilling chatter, and the group on the porch went into dissolution.
Two of the guests staggered down the stairs and made a run for the darkness. They were promptly chopped down.
Harold Brognola, his face streaming blood from a flying chip of brick, dodged back into the house and returned the fire with his revolver.
The attack ended as abruptly as it had begun, and when the shooting was over, fourteen men lay sprawled across the porch, the stairs, and the lawn. The man in black had vanished.
Two junior United States Senators and a Congressman died there at Harold Brognola’s front door.
A top congressional aide and an official of HEW died minutes later, enroute to the hospital.
A prominent political committeeman, an FBI administrator, three law clerks assigned to the U.S. Supreme Court, and three other officials in high levels of the executive branch sustained non-mortal wounds.
And as the final ambulance departed the scene, Harold Brognola, his face streaked with dried blood from his own minor wound, turned to a shaken Claudia Vitale and dropped a marksman’s medal into her hand. “I can’t believe it,” he croaked. “I simply cannot believe this.”
At that grimly dismal moment, the man from Justice would have given both his legs to know that the man who left the marksman’s medal was not Mack Bolan, but an ex-actor known as Faces Tarazini.
Mack Bolan was being “absorbed.”
And while the police were still churning up the neighborhood in the vicinity of Brognola’s home, the whole city and ultimately the entire nation was electrified by the news that “at approximately nine o’clock this evening, a man believed to be Mack Bolan, firing from an as-yet-undisclosed location, sent a fusillade of high-powered rifle bullets through several windows of the White House. There were no injuries, repeat, no injuries to the President, his family, or to any members of the White House Staff.”
Yes, the man from blood was being thoroughly absorbed.
16: MOVEMENTS
While the city buzzed with the latest shocking developments and the outraged official clamor approached fever pitch, the real Mack Bolan piloted his warmobile out Massachusetts Avenue and onto Waterside Drive in a penetration of Rock Creek Park. He left the vehicle in good concealment just west of Embassy Row and doubled back on foot, a black-clad moving shadow of a foreboding night.
The Executioner was combat-ready. He wore the tough, skintight blacks with matching ripple-tread shoes. The Beretta Belle nestled in her shoulder holster beneath his left arm. The impressive silver hogleg, the .44 AutoMag, lay snug in flaptop military leather, suspended from a web belt at the waist. Four small fragmentation grenades also dangled from that belt, and in his leg sheaths were stiletto, incendiary flares and extra clips for Beretta and AutoMag.
He was ready for war.
The Costa Brava “diplomatic mission” was housed in a smallish mansion snuggling with the more impressive embassies lining Massachusetts Avenue, their backsides reaching out toward the park. He came in through the rear, scaled a rock wall and penetrated several hundred feet of turf to the garages without incident.
There he experienced an incident.
Some dude was lying on a garage roof and breathing rapidly through congested nasal passages.
Somebody, Bolan decided, should send a Care package of Sinex to the Costa Bravan delegation.
He doubled back to the wall, scaled it, and began again, this time directing his advance along the top of the wall itself, moving on hands and knees and with the utmost care along the side of the property to that point where garage roof met rock wall.
He stepped aboard and moved cat-fashion to the peak, easing down on the guy with the Beretta extended onto the opposite downslope.
“Freeze,” he suggested in a voice just above a whisper.
The guy stopped breathing momentarily, then turned his head slowly toward the sound of doom. Twenty seconds ticked across Bolan’s mental clock, then the guy whispered, “Well—fuck me. Is that Mack Bolan?”
“I am. Who you?”
The guy raised to all fours and began a slow crawl up the incline. Bolan allowed it, but cautioned him, “Carefully.”
Yes, there was something familiar about that face-but it had been only hastily glimpsed under tense conditions, and Bolan was sliding it across his mental mugfile when the guy told him, “You don’t know me. But we met already, God did we. I was wheeling that hit on the Vitale cunt last night.”
Bolan said, “Do tell.”
“Yeah. Name’s Vasquez. They call me Bandalero.”
“What are you doing holding down this roof, Bandalero?”
“Say, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me,” Bolan suggested.
“Them lousy bastards sent a crew after me.”
“What lousy bastards?” Bolan delayed the response with a hand over the guy’s mouth. “Talk quiet if you intend to live on.”
“Sure. I was talking about Lupo and company. I just had a feeling, I knew by the way they gave me those dicky instructions for the meet. They were setting me up.”
It wasn’t making much sense, but Bolan asked him, “Why?”
“Hell, I don’t carry a card. I’m no blood brother to those guys. I just take orders and four bills a week. Guess they figured they didn’t need me anymore, not with Frank Matti dead and gone.”
“So you still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”
“I won’t put up with that crap, that’s why. I figured to find Lupo and have it out with him, face to face. Besides, they owe me a week’s pay.”
“Keep talking, soldier.”
“Well I got around a lot with Matti. A wheelman sees a lot that ordinary soldiers don’t see. I brought the guy here a lot of times.”
“You brought him here?”
“Yeah. I figure there’s a connection somewhere.”
“What makes you figure that?”
“I mean, a real connection. A tunnel or something, to somewhere. Twice I remember Matti bitching about a dark hole and why the hell didn’t they furnish bicycles or something. Also he didn’t like the way they treated him. He was growling around about having to use the servant’s entrance, like he wasn’t good enough to be seen going in the regular way.”
“Going in where?”
“Hell I don’t know. But it wasn’t this joint.”
“So did you find the tunnel?” Bolan asked.
“Me?” The Bandalero seemed confused. “You mean, did I go inside there looking for one? Hell no, not me. I just figured to lay up here and wait for something to show.�
��
“You’re the guy with the shotgun,” Bolan told him.
“Yeah, I.…” A streak of raw fear traveled the full length of Vasquez’s face in a slow advance from the eyes to the mouth. He said, “Whatta you got, a photographic brain or something?”
Bolan told him, “Or something. Where’s your boomer?”
“Down there.”
“Down where?”
“Edge of the roof. Layin’ in the gutter.”
“Okay. Leave it there and split. Come up this way, down my side, onto the wall, and haul ass for the park. Don’t dawdle and don’t look back. Above all, don’t come back.”
“Say, are you hitting this joint?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’d like to hit it with you. I’m pretty good with that scatter-gun.”
Bolan pondered the offer, but only briefly. He had pushed his luck too far already this day, dealing in both Claudia and Ripper Dan. He told the little guy, “Thanks, but I work alone.”
Vasquez seemed almost relieved by the turndown. He said, “Yeah, sure. Why argue with success, huh? Well listen. I been staked-out here since just after dark. I haven’t seen a goddam soul move for two hours.”
“That’s unusual?”
“Sure is. Anytime I was here before there was always a lot of people churning around. So take a tip from a brother. Watch your step in there. When they get this quiet, it usually means nothing good for nobody.”
Bolan said, “Okay, thanks. Now move it.”
The Bandalero flashed a white smile, whispered, “You’re okay,” then moved it.
Bolan held his position to give the little guy plenty of time to get clear, and take advantage of the delay to reorganize his own thinking.
A tunnel, eh?
He dragged out onto the surface of his mind the sketch he had made of the neighborhood earlier that day, and he scrutinized it with his inner eye until every detail was indelibly etched there.
There were three major embassies in this immediate area plus a number of institutions and private residences. The damn tunnel, if there was a tunnel, could be connecting with any of them or all of them. What would be a logical…?
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