Bolan made the decision quickly. It was her right. He told her, “Okay. But remember, it’s all images. The name of the man is written deeply inside.”
She looked at Bolan then, deeply and earnestly, and she gave him one of those sober little smiles which he had grown to appreciate.
She touched his shoulder and said, “Yes. It is, isn’t it.”
And then she went on to confront the image of a bastard.
Smilin’ Jack Lupo was laughing and telling Faces Tarazini, “You’re great, you are really the greatest, the first guy to ever make a monkey out of—”
The declaration of brotherly love and affection got lost somewhere in the speech processes as Lupo’s mind took off on another direction.
Claudia was there in the circle of light, appearing from nowhere and unescorted, and she was just standing there looking at him with a dumb expression on her face.
He slid his chair back and returned the unblinking gaze. “Well, well,” he said sarcastically, “it’s little Miss Finkmaster, the golden slut of Washington, come to pay us a call at last.”
Harmon Keel came up off the couch, his face surprised and confused. He said, “Jack, you didn’t tell me.…”
“Relax, Congressman, it’s the Day of Days, haven’t you got that through your head yet?”
The man on the stool had swiveled about to join the party. He was leering at the girl, invading her with his eyes. “This’s the one, huh?” he said expectantly.
Claudia’s eyes shifted to the man in black and she told him, “I’m his wife. I’m Mrs. Lupo.”
Lupo blinked his eyes rapidly, exchanged a quick glance with Keel, and reached for a cigarette.
The Congressman said, “I told you. I knew she’d peg you sooner or later.”
“Mrs. Lupo, the golden slut of Washington,” Claudia declared tightly. “Whatever happened to that privileged tradition of the Italian housewife, Jack? The super-care, the super-love, the sanctified bonds of tender affection and protection? You lousy bastard you!”
Lupo came up out of his chair fast and pointed an angrily shaking finger at her. “You bitch!” he yelled. “You rotten hotpants bitch, you started that shit, I didn’t! You and your goddam bedroom Adonis, Tony Hawkins! I should’ve killed you instead of.…” He decided not to say that, after all, and his eyes fled to his cigarette.
Claudia quietly told him, “You’re right, Jack. You should have killed me. Now you won’t be killing anybody, not ever again.” The pained eyes swept across to the old man. “Nor will you, Harmon.”
Lupo sat down, threw back his head, and laughed heartily. Raymond LaCurza joined in.
Keel slumped back to the couch, muttering, “I don’t see any sense to any of this. Not now, for God’s sake.”
And then a chilling sound penetrated into the light zone from the darkness, a voice edged with ice and pitched in death. “Enjoy the laugh, Lupo. It’s the last one.”
The laughter ended in a strangled gasp and Lupo’s hands came down flat on the tabletop, as though he were trying to imprison something there as he peered into the blackness beyond the lights.
LaCurza whirled around, digging at gunleather.
A muted, chugging report sighed across the lighted zone and something terrible happened to LaCurza’s face, pieces of it splattering across the couch and onto Congressman Keel’s lap.
The man on the stool was tilted sideways, trying to snatch the machine-pistol off the floor.
Another man in black stepped quickly forward and chopped at Tarazini’s neck with a big silver pistol. The imposter went all the way to the floor and lay there unmoving.
Smilin’ Lupo Vitale was cringing into his chair and yelling, “I’m not armed, wait, hold it!”
But the world had waited long enough.
An IOU had come due.
The collector had arrived.
Bolan’s Beretta chugged once more, and the ivory of Jack the Wolf’s smile disintegrated and went inward to seek the man, as the Day of Days came to an abrupt close for its mastermind.
Claudia had not moved, nor had she watched the second death of her husband. Her eyes were on Harmon Keel.
She told Bolan, in a voice cold and hard, “Leave this one for me. I have the best solution for traitors like this.”
Bolan understood, and he agreed.
He told the old man, “You heard the lady. Get!”
The congressman got, moving amazingly fast for a man so old and rotten inside, making terrified strides toward the elevator at the other end of the chamber.
Bolan told Claudia, “I’m going to leave his boy for you, also.”
“Which boy?”
“I don’t know, but you will. A presidential contender, probably. You’ll know him.”
She nodded. “Someone innocuous. Someone who will offer the people ease, instead of challenge. Yes. I’ll take care of that one, too.”
Bolan was hoisting Faces Tarazini to his shoulder. He told Claudia, “I think I’m going to need this dude. Pretty good make-up job, huh. Look at those heels. Three inches high.”
She said, “Mr. Brognola will be delighted to see him.” She picked up the machine-pistol. “This, too. Now, how do we get out of this tomb?”
“Just follow the bouncing ball.” He grinned, adding, “That’s me.”
He left a trail of incendiaries behind him, and the fires were already roaring when he pulled Claudia into the black hole and secured the door.
Tarazini was coming around. Bolan set him on his feet and shoved him along the tunnel in the lead, then he snapped on his pocket flash and told the girl, “Just follow the man in black.”
“I guess I’d follow you anywhere,” she replied softly.
Wrong, Bolan told himself. Wrong image.
“Don’t follow anyone, Claudia,” he advised her. “Live large, and follow your own image.”
She smiled and asked, “Like you?”
He peered ahead, onto the terrible wipe-out trail which had become a dark tunnel beneath the earth, and he chuckled and told her, “Yeah. Like me.”
EPILOGUE
Claudia made the call to the number which Brognola had left with her, and she and Bolan stood at a window in the Costa Brava house and watched the leaping flames devour the last of IMAGE.
When Brognola arrived on the neutral ground of that “foreign mission,” he was “acting as a private citizen” when he took delivery of the imposter who shot up the White House and murdered “six good men” in Brognola’s own front yard. He told Mack Bolan, “I’m almost ashamed to tell you how upset I was about all that.”
“You feeling better now?” the Executioner asked the man from Justice.
“These aren’t tears of sadness, man,” the tough cop replied.
Bolan added to his friend’s sense of wellbeing when he turned over the papers and microfilm from his leg-file, and he cinched the thing with the keys to the micro-film vault.
“When” she stops burning, I’d dig down through the rubble to the basement level,” Bolan suggested. “That vault was built to ride through anything. I believe you’ll find enough goodies there to turn this whole town around.”
“Plus a certain senior congressman,” Claudia put in. “I’ll be wanting to file a formal affidavit with your office, Mr. Brognola.”
There simply was not time available to say all the things which needed to be said—and there was no way to express them, anyway.
Brognola haraumphed and looked the other way while the man in black and the woman embraced, then he told his friendly fugitive, “You’ll find a limousine out back with diplomatic flags flying. I believe you’ll recognize your chauffeur, too. He’s got some clothes for you. Don’t argue with him. He knows where to take you. There is one way, and only one way, to break the seal we have around this city. We even have Riappi and his gang sealed up inside their farm, so there’s nothing left for you around here, anyway. A boat is waiting for you, on the Potomac. I’ll have another car spotted for you down near Alexand
ria. Ripper has all the information.”
Bolan said, “Thanks.”
“You’re thanking me? Listen … I just wish there was some way to publicly acknowledge our debt of gratitude to you, man. When I brief the President on all this, I’m sure he’ll want to make some acknowledgement. Maybe, uh, an IOU, to be honored at a later—”
Bolan said, “Hell no, don’t give me that. I just got rid of one.”
The men grinned and shook hands. Bolan grabbed Claudia and left her with one hell of a kiss, and then he was out the back door and sliding into the limousine behind Ripper Dan Aliotto.
“They tell me you’re a hell of a wheelman,” he told the grinning driver.
“Just tell me where you want to go, Mr. Bolan.”
Just tell him where he wanted to go. Bolan sighed wearily and told the little guy, “Just take me out of hell, Ripper.”
Aliotto assured him that he would do just that.
But Mack Bolan knew better.
There were no trails out of hell.
They were moving smoothly out of the drive and onto Massachusetts Avenue. Bolan began getting into the clothing which had been provided for him. He said, “Which way to the front, Ripper?”
Their eyes clashed in the mirror. Ripper Dan told the Executioner, “Hell, the front is everywhere. You know that.”
Yeah. Bolan knew. And the hellfire trail extended in every direction from wherever he happened to be. One grim fact was always a certainty: always, for the Executioner, a new battlefront loomed across every horizon.
He thought of Washington, and of the men who tried despite staggering pressures to meet the terrible responsibilities forever present there.
Mack Bolan had not discharged any IOU’s, and he knew that. Some debts never got paid. “Take me there, Ripper,” he told the ex-Mafioso.
“There where?”
“To the next front.”
“That’s where we’re headed. I thought you knew.”
Bolan chuckled, and released Ripper Dan’s eyes, and closed his own, and sank back into the comfort of the plush upholstery.
Sure he knew.
He always knew.
That, it seemed, was forever where Mack Bolan was headed.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Executioner series
1: PENETRATION
They were Dobermans, a matched set, and the two of them hit the hurricane fence together, each with all four feet scrambling for a hold on the steel mesh, great slavering heads lunging over the top of the barrier, lips curled back in the attack, dripping fangs slashing toward a taste of the man on the outside.
Bolan was damned glad that fence was there.
With a shivering gut, he realized that those sentry dogs fit the rest of the place, and he found himself wondering if there wasn’t a better way to begin the probe into San Diego.
The house occupied a sparsely populated stretch of highrise coastline just north of Torrey Pines State Park. It was not a spectacular place—not exactly in the millionaire class—but it seemed to offer the sort of comfort and seclusion which might be sought by a retired combat officer turned industrialist … with something or someone to fear.
An English tudor style, it probably combined all the charm of an earlier age with the most lavish conveniences of the late twentieth century—and it was not a bad way for an old soldier to fade away.
As for the super-security—this seemed to fit the new image of General Harlan Winters—the image which had lately become so disquieting to the world’s foremost Mafia-fighter.
A row of stubby, wind-stunted trees marked the circular periphery of the cliffside property. Set just inside this natural barrier was a double row of hurricane-fencing spaced about ten feet apart, neither row being of forbidding height but high enough to discourage the casual trespasser.
As a further note, bright red signs were placed along the outer fence with the warnings:
DANGER
GUARD DOG RUN
In this regard, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales had earlier made his scouting report to Bolan: “He keeps a couple of ornery Dobermans penned up in a little demilitarized zone surrounding the house. You don’t go through there without permission, unless you want to get eaten alive.”
So Bolan had come prepared for the Dobermans.
“Crossman air pistol, hypo darts,” he had decided. And he’d instructed Blancanales, “Check the dosage carefully. We just want to put them down for a half-hour or so, not forever.”
So now here he was at Howlin’ Harlan’s Del Mar beach house and it was time for the first probe into the trouble at San Diego. The weather was one of those fantastic Chamber of Commerce specials—a night almost as bright as day with the moon and stars seeming to hover at fingertip distance, the entire area wearing the heavens like a close-fitting bonnet—the breeze coming in off the Pacific like a lover’s moist kiss.
Yeah, a night for romance, Bolan thought wryly—not warfare.
But warfare it had to be.
The saliva-dripping snarls from the Dobermans were not exactly moist kisses, and their rebounds against the heavy fencing were becoming frantic under the kill-instinct.
The tall man in combat black cooly checked the load in the Crossman, then he thrust the muzzle through the steel mesh of the fence and sent a syringe through. It caught the nearest dog in the tender zone just inside the shoulder. He sat down quickly, as though someone had thrown a deactivate-switch inside his head, whimpering and licking at the offended zone.
The other one went down just as quickly and peacefully.
Blancanales moved out of the tree cover and bent his back beside the fence. Bolan took the boost and went over quickly. As he touched down inside, the Politician showed him a droll smile and murmured, “I think there were just two.”
Bolan whispered, “Funny, that’s funny,” and knelt to examine the tranquilized animals. He withdrew the darts and ruffled the fur in the areas of entry, then passed the Crossman and the darts through to his companion. “Okay, I’ll take it from here,” he growled. “Get on station and stay hard.”
Blancanales tossed an exaggerated salute and abruptly disappeared into the trees. Bolan crossed the dog run and scaled the interior fence, then made a cautious advance across the grounds, blending with the landscape and the shadows wherever possible.
He was in blacksuit. Hands and face were also blackened. At his right hip was the formidable .44 AutoMag—beneath the left arm, the black and silent Beretta. Slit pockets on the lower legs held a variety of small tools. Several miniaturized electronic gadgets were carried in a belly-pouch.
Halfway across the grounds, Bolan paused in the shadow of a flowering shrub to establish contact with the warwagon, left several hundred yards behind under the command of Herman “Gadgets” Schwarz.
“I’m inside,” Bolan reported in a husky whisper. “How’s it sound?”
A tiny voice purred up from his shoulder in reply: “Great, coming in five-square on all channels. It’s a go.”
Bolan went.
This was to be a soft probe, an intelligence mission—not a hard hit.
Howlin’ Harlan had once been a friend.
The problem now was one of re-identification. Harlan Winters, Brigadier General, U.S. Army retired. Friend or foe?
Either way, Bolan knew, Winters could well be the most dangerous problem so far encountered in this eternal damned war of his.
He could very well become the final problem.
By all the indicators, Howlie was a high-priced front man for the syndicate. Bolan had known of those indicators even before his arrival in San Diego.
Indicators, of course, were not always accurate.
If the general was really in a mess, Bolan could not turn his back on the man.
On the other hand … if Howlie was as dirty as Bolan suspected … then he could not turn his back on that, either.
Yeah, it could become a twenty-karat mess.
Therefore, friend or foe, the seal
on General Winters had to be complete, positive and one hundred percent authentic. And it had to be done without the general’s knowledge.
So this was more than a simple soft probe. It was a target-verification mission.
Howlin’ Harlan Winters, once one of the most respected strategists in Vietnam, had to be outflanked and sealed.
And, yeah, San Diego was going to be one hell of an interesting war zone.
It had not been a spur of the moment decision to penetrate the Winters place, but a carefully planned operation, entailing several days of patient scouting and fastidious intelligence-gathering.
The job inside the house would require only a few minutes to perform. But only because so much attention had gone into advance preparations.
Bolan had scouted the terrain by boat, by car and on foot—covering specific periods of both day and night—noting comings and goings, visitors, trying to get some feel for the household routine, the people who lived there, worked there, slept there.
Blancanales, meanwhile, had nosed around the area in a home-delivery bakery truck, seeking and cultivating talkative neighbors, tradesmen, and local characters.
Gadgets Schwarz had engineered a telephone tap from the primary cable junction and had 48 hours of electronic surveillance recorded on the gear inside the warwagon.
So, sure, the thing should have gone pretty smooth. Bolan had known exactly where to go and which areas to avoid. He had a diagram of the interior layout of the house—he knew the ins and outs of the place—and he knew how to accomplish the most good in the least time.
The idea had been to rig the joint for sound, all the places that mattered, anyway—the entrance hall, the study, the dining room and a private little secondary study which adjoined the general’s bedroom.
And, yeah, it should have gone off like clockwork.
It did not.
Bolan’s first stop was at the large combination library-study at the downstairs rear.
Dying embers glowed feebly in a huge rock fireplace.
The only other light was at the far corner of the room, where a hi-intensity beam lamp was brightly illuminating a small area of a gleaming mahogany desk and offering the stark profile of a lovely young woman who stood woodenly behind the desk.
Washington I.O.U. Page 13