He swiveled his head northwesterly and his mind followed his eyes to the only building in the entire area which was blazing with lights from the third-story roof to the ground.
IMAGE, the civil rights outfit for ethnic minorities.
The Mafia was an ethnic minority.
And they’d been having a bit of trouble lately with their public image.
The Man from Death smiled into his inner silence and knew for damn sure that he was on a hot one tonight.
He checked his weapons, called his inner systems to full readiness, then continued his movement against Costa Brava.
Harold Brognola was a greatly troubled man, but he knew his job and he knew what had to be done now.
Whether Mack Bolan was or was not responsible for the attack on his property and for shooting up the home of the President, somebody was running around with a wild gun and an itch to use it—and that somebody, Bolan or otherwise, had to be stopped.
He tucked Claudia Vitale safely away in an upstairs bedroom with a federal marshal at the door, then he went to his telephone, consulted a small red directory, and put in a call to Jim Williams, the treasury man who had hours earlier been named to take over the Bolan hunt.
Williams was an old and trusted friend, a tough gut-cop with a no-nonsense approach to his job, and Brognola knew that the turds would be in the fan now, for sure.
He waited patiently for several ring-downs across a variety of Washington offices, then the man in the hot seat was on the horn and telling him, “Glad you called, Hal, but if it’s not Presidential Urgent then please hang up. I’m over my ears into hysterical officials and—”
Brognola cut him off with an unhappy snort and the angry comment, “You know damn well why I called!”
A punchy sigh, then, “Okay. If you’re waiting for me to say I told you so, save time for both of us, I’m not saying it. You okay?”
“Yeah, just a nick. Jim, you need me.”
“Is that an offer?”
“It is.”
“Okay, get over here. I was about ready to draft you, anyway. You think you know Bolan pretty well? How he thinks, how he moves?”
Brognola sighed. “I think so, or I thought so.”
“Okay, I’m saving you a corner of the hot seat. Move it on over here.”
Brognola hung up and limped to the hall closet for his crutches. He reached for them, glared at them, then left them where they stood and slammed the door. He steeled himself, straightened to full height, and walked briskly along the hall without limping.
Damn right, he was thinking as he moved painfully through the doorway and to the outside. The turds were in the fan now, for sure.
Brognola’s car had hardly cleared the drive when the federal marshal who had been stationed in the rear yard was sapped from behind and dragged unconscious into a clump of bushes by two men with gleaming teeth and swarthy skin.
The two quickly joined a third man who waited in the shadows beside the house, and one of them asked him in a husky whisper, “What if she’s not still in there?”
“Has to be,” the third man replied. “The fink left by himself, didn’t he?”
The trio were moving quietly toward the rear entrance.
“There’s a couple of guys still in there with her. Take them out any way you have to, but for God’s sake, no more shooting. The goddam neighborhood is crawling with blue.”
“What if she puts up a fight?”
“Belt her, but not too hard. Raymond says she comes in one piece, you better make sure of that.”
“She’ll come,” the other man assured his crew leader.
Lupo, it would appear, had not yet completely abandoned his timetable for the Washington takeover.
17: ENCOUNTERS
The house was almost totally darkened, with but two faint lights showing—one up front and another just inside the back entrance.
Bolan could make out the figure of a man slumped into a chair near that rear light. He was gazing mournfully into the tiny rectangular picture tube of a portable Sony television receiver and taking dainty, rationed sips from a coke bottle.
The Executioner came up softly behind the man and lifted him completely out of the chair, a forearm locked into the throat and the other hand clamping off nose and mouth.
The sentry died neatly and quietly while Bolan’s own image stared at him from the lighted surface of the Sony and a background voice related the story of a sealed city and an angry search for the man whose likeness was being depicted there.
The front door guard looked up as Bolan advanced along the hallway. He rose half out of his chair, gawking at the apparition in black approaching him and called out a choking challenge. The silent Beretta phutted dully and the guy sat back down with a third eye not-so-neatly drilled at forehead-center.
Bolan left him sitting there and made a quiet recon of the ground-level area. He found a small office containing a battered desk and a metal file cabinet with a combination-style lock on the top drawer, so he delayed himself for a moment to open the tin can with the blade of his stiletto.
The lock-drawer held a single manila folder which in turn held several typewritten sheets of paper. Bolan scanned them quickly, then folded them and consigned them to his pocket-file.
The upper floor of the old house was totally bare—containing not a stick of furniture.
A front operation, he decided—and this finding served to whet his appetite for the basement level.
Down there he found carton upon stacked carton of nothing but packed earth, a small cement mixer with a gasoline engine and a trash bin overflowing with empty cement bags.
A trail of dirt and white powder led him to the doorway he was hoping to find. Beyond that was utter blackness.
The dark hole, yeah.
It was a pretty ambitious undertaking, at that.
The shaft was high enough so that Bolan did not have to bend his head to enter. His pocket flash revealed very professional shoring of the ceiling, and light fixtures at regular spaced intervals. They were still pulling wires, though, and this explained the lack of lighting. It was wide enough in there for three men to walk abreast—but Bolan had to wonder what the hell they intended to transport through that underground highway.
Yeah, a guy could ride a bicycle along that trail.
He could also penetrate what would probably otherwise be a very nasty defensive set-up.
Maybe.
At this moment, penetration was the name of Bolan’s game. To hell with the maybes.
He snapped off the flashlight and went on cold, with only the back of a hand brushing the dirt wall to guide him. He counted his paces as he progressed, did his best to divine the angular changes in direction—and when he reached the door at the far end he knew that he had traveled far enough to have arrived at the Institute for Minority Action Group Encounters.
If these guys liked encounters, then.…
The door was locked. His pocket flash revealed a small button emplaced at eye level in the steel framework surrounding the door. He pointedly ignored that convenience and quietly went to work on the locking mechanism with the handy stiletto.
A moment later the catch snapped back and the door swung freely on silent hinges.
A brightly lighted cubicle-sized room greeted him. He stood there in the open doorway until the pupils of his eyes adjusted to the sudden bombardment of light, then he moved on through to the next door.
He quietly tried the knob, found it free, and went through fast. This was a large room, elongated, with a lot of equipment at the far end.
A youngish man in sports shirt and slacks with a machine-pistol slung muzzle-down from a shoulder harness was leaning with his back against the wall, his head swiveled into the unexpected encounter and the startled eyes mere inches removed from Bolan’s.
While the message was still trying to bang its way through suddenly flooded synapses, an iron forearm with two hundred pounds of push behind it pinned the sentry’s throat to the
wall and a fast-moving knee paralyzed the solar plexus, stilling all struggles. Those eyes bulged and rolled upwards, and the guy died there quietly pinned to that wall.
Another door, marked “Film Archives,” stood to the other side of the dead man. Bolan opened it and pushed the guy inside, then laid him across a library-style table and pulled the door closed.
It was another cubicle. Except for the table and a few chairs it contained nothing but a small machine with a view-screen across the top.
Set into the back wall, though, was a vault-like door with a complicated locking mechanism featuring an interlocked spin wheel and dogging levers.
Bolan found the keys on the dead man’s belt, and he carefully inspected the mechanism for evidence of an alarm system. Finding none, he followed his instincts and went on in.
It was a micro-film storage area.
Drawer after drawer of hermetically-sealed and carefully protected celluloid dynamite—a drawer for each letter in the alphabet—all neatly cross-indexed for fast retrieval. Each drawer must have held thousands of miniaturized documents.
Bolan studied the index for a moment then undertook a search mission for certain files. When he found them he put them deep in his inside pants pocket.
Then he moved the dead sentry into the vault, locked the door, and added the vault key to his other treasures.
As he was striding back across the cubicle to the outer exit, that door swung slowly open and a guy leaned in, one hand on the door and the other grasping the jamb. His eyes recognized the problem much faster than the rest of him could react, for he was trying to get himself together. But there wasn’t time enough left in his life to get anything together. He died there, with both arms outspread and the off-balance body tumbling on into the room.
Someone just outside exclaimed, “Holy…!”
Bolan stepped across the fallen man and through the doorway just in time to see another guy wheel around and take off like a track star, sprinting at emergency steam toward the far end of the larger chamber.
A nine-millimeter challenger overtook the runner at about the third stride, plowing into his neck just above the shoulders and ending the race in a facedown slide into eternity.
Both guns were in the Executioner’s hands now, the big silver cannon up and ready in the right, the chillingly silent Beretta in the other as he stood poised there, sniffing the atmosphere of the place like a deadly jungle cat on the hunt.
There were no sounds of alarm, no unusual movements, nothing whatever to indicate that his presence there was known among the living.
Something was going on at the far end, down in the equipment area, evidenced by moving shadows on the wall, an occasional rising murmur of voices, laughter and the general sounds of people relaxing and enjoying themselves.
At the other end of the chamber was nothingness, a blank wall about ten yards from Bolan’s position and the bottom limit of an open elevator shaft.
He went to the fallen sprinter, sheathed the AutoMag, grabbed a foot and dragged the guy into the cubicle with the others.
As he was coming out of there for the second time, Bolan heard the whirring of the elevator mechanism. He proceeded unhesitatingly to that next possible scene of encounter and stood in the shadow provided by the shaft’s framework to watch the open cage descend.
It was a slow-mover, the type used primarily to transport things instead of people—but this time it was moving people.
Two people.
The first objects to come into view were two sets of human legs—a male set, if one could still bet on pants and hard shoes—and an alluringly female set which Bolan recognized at first glimpse.
It was Claudia Vitale and a guy.
He saw her in profile as the cage settled to bottom, and there was defeat there in that slumped stance, resignation, the end of hopes and dreams.
Not so for the guy. He looked smugly happy, contented, almost triumphant.
The guy stepped out of the cage and executed one of those exaggerated flourishes which men sometimes put on for the ladies, a sort of comic Walter Raleigh act of deference—and as he straightened up his back was less than an armlength away from where the black cat waited.
He was putting her down and really rubbing it in as he announced, “Your level, Highness. Won’t you please honor us with the pleasure of your—”
Those were all the words he had.
A surgical-steel stiletto entered his neck between the second and third cervical vertebrae, instantly severing the spinal cord and other vital matter, and the guy quietly sighed and died and oozed to the floor in front of the cage.
Claudia did not immediately comprehend. Her dull gaze rose from the instant corpse on the floor to the tall figure in black who emerged from the shadows. She cried, “Oh!”—and fell into his arms.
Bolan rubbed her back, and calmed her, then stood her aside while he tidied up the area for those who might follow. When that was done, he pulled her into the shadows and asked her, “What are you doing here?”
She said, “Oh Mack, somebody crashed our party and shot all those people, and they’re trying to blame it on you. And then they attacked the White House and they said you did that too.”
He was remembering the disturbing words coming from the Sony at the other end of the tunnel, and he put it all together in a flash.
“But how does that get you here?” he wanted to know.
“Mr. Brognola went out to join the hunt.” She dug into her bra with trembling fingers and produced an angular scrap of paper. “He left this number for you to call, if you should try to check back. Mack, they set you up. They’re trying to make you look like some sort of maniac, attacking the President and—”
He said, “Never mind that. How’d you get here?”
“These men killed Mr. Brognola’s marshals and brought me here.”
“What men?”
“There were three.” She pointed to the lump in the shadows. “That one. The other two came down ahead of us.”
Okay. Bolan knew which men. The other two were piled into the cubicle next door.
He asked her, “What’s upstairs?”
“An armed camp,” she replied promptly. “It looks like D-Day up there.” Her fire was returning and she was pulling it all back together. “Didn’t you come in that way?”
He shook his head. “Private entrance. Okay, give me the upstairs layout, best you can.”
She said, “You’re after Lupo. Right?”
“Right.”
“He’s not upstairs. He’s down here. They were bringing me to him.”
The Executioner’s head swiveled to the scene of activity at the far end of the chamber. His lips thinned and he told Claudia Vitale, “Okay, let’s go give you to him.”
18: IMAGES
They were lounging on one of the “sets” of the studio.
A television camera on a dolly was shoved into a corner, out of use.
A microphone boom had been left in place, hovering above their heads.
Lupo sat in a chair at a small table in the center, sharing the table surface with an electric coffee pot, a cup, and an overflowing ashtray.
Raymond LaCurza shared a stiff little couch with a much older man.
Another man, clad in night-fighter combat garb similar to Bolan’s, occupied a wooden stool directly opposite Lupo. A European style machine-pistol lay on the floor beside him.
The four were watching a televised news program, laughing and commenting about information being divulged there concerning the government’s now intensive war on Mack Bolan.
Bolan himself, with Claudia, was watching from an adjoining and darkened control booth, separated from the others only by darkness and a soundproofed wall of glass.
The Executioner asked Smilin’ Jack Vitale’s widow, “Do you know the guy in the brown suit?”
Her eyes were nearly in shock and the usually lush lips were flattened and white against her teeth as she replied, “I’ve seen him around. Carrico
, I think, is the name.”
“So what’s bugging you?” he wanted to know.
“The man on the couch. The old one. That’s Harmon Keel.”
Bolan did not know what to say to that. Following a moment of silence, he told her, “Well it’s a weird world, Claudia.”
She murmured, “Yes, isn’t it.”
He told her, “A guy on television today said something about gods dying tonight. We have to take that sort of thing in stride.”
Her lips were beginning to quiver. She said, “Yes, I suppose we do.”
He knew what was running through the tortured channels of her mind. Years of deception, duplicity, cruelty, depravity, betrayal.
She had given up body and soul for the sake of that old cannibal.
Bolan would have given anything to be able to spare her the rest of it. But … she had to learn to take these things in stride.
He told her, “Look very closely at Carrico. Study the mannerisms. Watch the way he forms his words, the way he always seems to be smiling—forget the face, look at the man.”
She exclaimed, faintly, “Oh my God.”
Gently he told her, “Plastic surgery alters only the face, not the man behind it.”
The guy certainly had to be a bastard. The things he had put that girl through.…
Bolan saw the entire story in her eyes as she stared through a growing awareness at the husband she had thought dead for three grimy years, the agonized knowledge of marital treachery and carnal abuse.
Smilin’ Jack had raped this woman’s very soul, prostituted her on the high altar of personal ambition, and cast her into the hell of all feminine hells … and, yes, the story was written there in blood across Claudia’s shuddering features.
She whispered, “So Jack is Lupo.”
He said, “Yeah. Do you want him?”
Claudia shook her head, slowly, numbly.
Bolan told her, “Okay, I’m taking him.”
“Let me … confront him first.”
He said, “That would be dangerous. A lot of lead—”
“I don’t care. I want him to look at me, and I want to know it’s him looking—and I want him to know I know.”
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