Save the Children te-94

by Don Pendleton

  "Wallace is dead, Owens is dead." There was no regret in her voice as she mentioned the porn director's name, "and Dutton knows that he will be, too, if he doesn't keep his mouth shut and keep on going along with us, just like the others we've put in our pocket in Washington."

  Parelli lit his mother's cigarette, then one of his own, blowing smoke toward the tiled ceiling.

  "We can handle Bolan because we've got the leverage."

  "The Garner bitch," Denise agreed. "Yes, I think that could make Bolan see things our way and leave us alone. We'll see, won't we? So far, so good."

  The office door swung open and a heavy-jowled man in a baseball cap poked his head inside.

  "The truck's ready to go, Mr. Parelli."

  "Right," David Parelli snapped. "About goddamn time, too."

  "Anything else I can do for you, sir?"

  "No, just see that everything gets under way as soon as possible."

  The foreman nodded, touched the bill of his cap and left.

  Denise wondered if they should have him killed, too.

  The man wasn't one of their soldiers; most of the time he was just a legitimate employee of a legitimate business. He did know, though, that the owners of this business sometimes used it for other purposes... purposes that were not so legitimate.

  Like tonight.

  It was something to think about.

  She stood up. She wore an expensive dark blue dress that clung softly to her sleek figure, topped by a fur jacket. Jewelry glittered on her fingers.

  She pulled on a pair of white gloves.

  "Let's go say farewell to the children, David. I want to talk to Miss Garner again, too."

  "She's not going to tell you anything about Bolan," her son said.

  Denise Parelli smiled.

  "Perhaps she will."

  He held the door open for his mother and they left the office, crossing the asphalt area between the office and the warehouse, walking quickly because of the cold, raw wind cutting across the complex.

  One of the Parelli soldiers was waiting at the door of the warehouse, Uzi in hand. He opened the door and stepped back with a deferential nod.

  Denise swept through first, David right behind her. As the soldier closed the door behind them, Denise paused to let her son take the lead. Here among the men, she had to allow her son at least the pretense of leadership, she reminded herself.

  David stalked over to the hardguy in charge of the detail guarding the kids.

  "Everything all right in here?" Parelli snapped.

  "Yes, sir, no trouble," the head cock replied. He gestured casually with the barrel of the shotgun he held cradled in his arm. "This bunch won't give us no trouble."

  About twenty-five small children were huddled in a group along one wall, appearing incapable of giving anyone any trouble. They looked cold, miserable, scared and wholly submissive.

  All of them were under ten, most of them about eight or nine years old. They were dressed warmly enough for the chilly warehouse; a sickly child would bring less in the markets they were intended for.

  None of them had been abused other than a little slapping around.

  A haunted look in their eyes, a look of hopelessness and despair, indicated that they had already given up.

  Good, Denise thought. Her customers did not want kids who were strong-willed, who would give trouble when told by adults to do things. Her customers, and their customers, wanted kids who would obey, no matter what the orders were.

  "Gus says the truck is ready." David nodded to the hardguy with the shotgun. "I'll tell him to have it back up to the loading dock."

  "Whatever you say, Mr. P."

  There were a half dozen or so soldiers in the warehouse.

  Denise could feel them watching her.

  No one questioned her right to be there, but she knew they had to sometimes wonder why David always brought his mother along with him.

  There was probably perverse gossip of all sorts among the men about her relationship with her son, she knew.

  Let them talk.

  After all, when you came right down to it, the gun carriers, the soldiers, were nothing more than cannon fodder...

  Bolan fodder was more like it, she told herself... and their opinions and idle speculation were worth less than nothing.

  "Where's the woman?" Parelli snarled at the man with the shotgun. "I want to talk to her."

  The guy jerked his head toward a small door in the wall opposite where he had lined up the children.

  "We've got her tied up in the can."

  "Get her out here."

  "Right away, Mr. Parelli."

  A moment later, one of the soldiers led Lana Garner from the small, smelly rest room.

  Holding her right arm so tightly that she winced in pain, the hood led her over to where Denise Parelli and her son stood waiting.

  Lana had been treated more roughly than the children, Denise could see at a glance. Her blouse was torn in several places, her right cheek bruised. A small trickle of dried blood encrusted the corner of her mouth.

  She stared defiantly at the Parellis.

  "I don't care what you do to me, I won't tell you a thing!" she blazed at them.

  Denise smiled.

  "My dear, what could you possibly know that would be of interest to us? There's only one reason you're still alive and it really has nothing to do with you."

  Lana shook her head, more angry than afraid as she stared at the Parellis while the hood maintained his iron grip on her arm.

  "You're crazy if you think holding me will stop Mack Bolan. He's going to find you and he's going to kill you!"

  David slapped her brutally with an open hand across the mouth, spinning her around. The blow drove her to one knee. She would have fallen to the cement floor if the hardman had not yanked her back to her feet.

  "You shut up about Bolan, bitch. That bastard's a dead man if he gets near this place. And there isn't much chance of that, is there? He doesn't have a clue where we are, now does he?"

  She opened her mouth to shoot back a hot retort, then paused abruptly, grinning at him savagely.

  "Oh, no you don't. You're not going to trick me like that! You just want to find out how much Bolan does know about you. You want to know if he's located this place. Well, you can just wait and find out, you slimebag!"

  Denise stepped close to Lana until their faces were only inches apart. Denise lifted her gloved hand and softly stroked the fingertips along Lana's bruised cheek.

  "You shouldn't call David names like that, dear," she said softly. "I am his mother, after all."

  "I'm sorry." Lana closed her eyes. "I was wrong."

  "That's more like it," Denise murmured sweetly.

  Lana spit on the floor between Denise Parelli's feet. "I should have said that he's a son of a bitch!"

  Denise sighed.

  "My dear, my dear. I'm afraid you leave us no choice but to teach you some manners."

  "The hard way," David chimed in.

  His smile said he was savoring the experience. He nodded to a hood standing next to Lana.

  The nearby soldier stepped up and slammed the butt of his shotgun into the small of Lana's back.

  She cried out and fell to both knees, scraping them on the rough concrete when the man holding her released his grip.

  Against the wall, the children saw this and began whimpering, a strange, eerie sound in the spacious warehouse, as if they knew that the brutalized young woman was the closest thing they had to a friend in this horrible nightmare.

  David lifted his hand to the soldier who had struck Lana.

  "No more." He looked down at the woman sprawled before him and licked his lips in anticipation. "Not yet, anyway. Business first."

  He stepped over to Lana, reached down, cupped her chin in his hand. He jerked her head up so that she had to look at him.

  "Don't touch me, slimebag," she snarled vehemently.

  "When this is over," he told her with a reptilian smi
le, "we won't need you for anything. Except for maybe one thing... until you die. That oughta be lots of fun. For me, and for the boys."

  Before she could respond, there was the rumble of a truck's engine outside and the loading dock door began to screech upward.

  The big trailer rig had been backed up to the warehouse loading dock, its rear doors wide open.

  The foreman walked in from the loading dock.

  "We're ready to load, Mr. Parelli."

  David lost interest in the woman sprawled before him. He looked at his mother and saw the barely perceptible nod. "Load 'em up and move 'em out." He looked back at Lana with a leer. "Then we fix you."

  18

  The fashionable neighborhood bordering Evanston was quiet. There were lights on in some of the big houses behind manicured lawns, but few cars moved along the broad, tree-lined boulevards.

  Bolan parked Lana Garner's car a block away from Senator Mark Dutton's house, where he lived with his wife and teenage daughter.

  Bolan had chosen one of the darkened houses when he parked the car. He loosened the bulb in the dome light and there was no flash of illumination when he slipped out of the vehicle, quietly closing the door and angling for the thick shadows underneath trees.

  It took only a few moments for him to make his way through the backyard toward a high wooden fence that closed off the Dutton property from prying eyes.

  Bolan paused, listening intently for a moment, hearing nothing from the other side of the fence.

  A door slammed somewhere, but it was several houses away. A couple of dogs in the neighborhood were barking sporadically. He heard nothing else, nothing from the direction of the Dutton residence on the other side of the fence.

  He reached up, grasped the top of the slats and vaulted over, his booted feet landing with a muffled thump in the backyard.

  The rear of the Dutton house was dark. Wind rustled tall evergreens in the yard.

  Bolan started toward the senator's residence, slipping the night vision goggles he wore into place.

  The sound of the wind almost covered the rush of footsteps from behind.

  He dropped to one side, the thought flashing through his mind that this guard was more competent than most. He heard the hiss of a knife blade through air, coming at him.

  He spun and snaked his arm out, blocking the stab.

  The sentry let out a grunt, pulled back and slashed again.

  Bolan felt a line of fire race across his right forearm as he blocked this slash. His left dipped and the Gerber MK II combat knife sheathed mid-chest seemed to spring into his hand.

  He pivoted as the blademan danced back again. Bolan snapped a kick to the guard's knee.

  The man yelped in pain and staggered.

  Bolan moved in, looped his bleeding right arm around the man's neck to stifle a cry. He drove the blade of his knife into the guard's back, expertly guiding it between the ribs, into the heart.

  The sentry gave a mighty lurch in Bolan's grip, then went slack.

  Bolan lowered the body to the cold ground. He wiped his knife clean on the dead man's jacket, sheathed the weapon and quickly frisked the corpse. He found a Colt .45 in shoulder leather and id claiming that Louie Caputo had been licensed to carry a concealed weapon in his capacity of security coordinator for Tri-State, Inc.

  Bolan stood, confident that he had taken the life of nothing more than a Mafia street goon... posing as a private detective... put here by the family to bodyguard the senator.

  Bolan's pocketknife had a back door of the senator's house open in less than ten seconds.

  It took about three times as long to find the button of a burglar alarm and disarm it, then Bolan stood inside.

  The house smelled of fragrant odors from a roaring log fire.

  Bolan himself smelled of the brutal night.

  Cold.

  Sweat.

  Tension.

  He moved through the strange air of other people's lives, lives he could only guess at.

  He spotted a staircase and moved toward it, careful not to nudge anything in his way, his NVD goggles guiding him.

  At first he didn't notice the light, only saw it peripherally as he moved past, then it registered: a thin line of light beneath a tall door leading to the basement.

  His gloved hand turned the knob slowly.

  A steep staircase descended into shadow.

  He took the steps one at a time, breathing slowly.

  The basement was well furnished. At the end nearest him was a bar that could easily accommodate twenty or thirty people.

  He heard sounds from behind a half-open door between the bar and where he stood. He moved toward it, negotiating a pool table, sliding the night vision goggles up, knowing he had found the senator alone down here in his study while Mrs. Dutton and their teenage daughter slept somewhere upstairs.

  Good, thought Bolan.

  He eased up to that half-open door to look inside.

  The senator was seated in an overstuffed armchair, nursing a drink, his back to Bolan. The politician's attention was riveted to a TV screen that was playing a videotape from the VCR atop the set.

  Bolan detected a faint, wheezing sound, and it took him a second to realize what it was.

  The senator was breathing heavily, thinking he was alone, entranced by what was on the screen.

  Bolan saw it, too.

  The image of young girls, no older than eight or ten, looking frightened, terrified by someone off camera. The children were parading naked before the camera as if they were in a beauty contest...

  Bolan had to restrain himself from emptying Big Thunder into the man's head. Disgust, rage and bile rose in the soldier's throat, but he kept his hands empty.

  The senator was so transfixed by the images on celluloid that he was not aware of the Bolan presence until he touched the Off button of the unit's remote control device, making the young girls disappear to a pinprick of light, then nothing.

  The senator saw Bolan and half jumped out of his chair, almost knocking over the drink on a small table next to his chair. Bolan came around to stand before him, clamping a big hand over Dutton's face and pushing him roughly backward into the chair.

  Dutton's eyes bulged fearfully as Bolan brought his hand away from the other man's mouth.

  "Sound an alarm and I'll kill you right now."

  The senator looked as if he didn't need to be told twice. He stared up at Bolan, face white and shaking, his hands gripping the arms of the chair.

  "Wh-what do you want?"

  "You've got some taste in movies, Senator. Where did you get that tape?"

  Too quickly, Dutton said, "I rented it."

  "Right. Most video places have tapes like that."

  "A friend gave it to me."

  "What's his name?"

  "I don't remember."

  Bolan flared with anger. He backhanded Dutton across the mouth hard enough to draw blood, pop out two of the senator's pearly capped front teeth and rock the chair, but because Bolan loomed over him, Dutton remained seated.

  He had no choice.

  "I should've known I wouldn't get a straight answer out of a politician the first time out," Bolan seethed. "Let's try it again, Senator. The big question. Where are the children?"

  "Don't... know what you're talking... about," Dutton answered stubbornly, wiping away the blood of his split lip with his sleeve. "What kids?"

  "I know all the rest of it now," Bolan told him. "I know about Wallace. He supplied the Parellis with the children. And I know the Parellis are shipping out a cargo of those children tonight. I'd be curious to know, Senator, how it feels to have your soul so dead that you can allow yourself to deal in human lives and the young like that, you goddamn monster, but right now I don't have the time. I want to know where that shipment is leaving from. You're going to tell me."

  Dutton shook his head, his blood continuing to leak out onto his expensive shirtfront.

  "Nothing... nothing I can tell you..."

&
nbsp; Bolan shook his head.

  "You're being loyal to the wrong people, Senator. Wallace knew about it and he's dead. So is Randy Owens."

  "Wallace... dead?"

  "They supplied you with some of those children from time to time, didn't they, Senator? That was part of their hold on you."

  Dutton looked into Bolan's eyes and seemed to see mirrored there what Bolan saw. The senator sank deeper into the chair, exhaled a heavy sigh.

  "I am a monster," he nodded wearily. "You... can't know what it's like." He seemed to begin deflating before Bolan's eyes. "The girls... I never hurt them... didn't want to hurt anybody... I'm like two men... I love my wife, my daughter, dearly... I'm sick, Bolan... that's what the Parellis are really blackmailing me with... They're less than human ... and God help me, so am I..."

  "Where do they have the shipment?" Bolan asked in a soft voice.

  Dutton looked up at Bolan with tears in his eyes.

  "Trucking company... Skokie..." He rattled off a street address. "David Parelli owns the place."

  "What time are they scheduled to leave?"

  "Supposed to be... midnight."

  Bolan glanced at his watch.

  11:20.

  Forty minutes to midnight.

  "Bolan... wh-what are you going to do?" Dutton asked in a halting whisper.

  "I'm here to collect your tab, Senator."

  The soldier watched as the politician's hand began to move slowly toward a drawer in the small end table.

  Good, thought Bolan, he's going for hardware. It'll make the fight even fairer. Because the rage that coursed through the warrior made him realize that he would have felt no remorse at choking the senator to death with bare hands right where he sat. The man was too dirty to let him live.

  But no, let the scum try to save his life.

  Dutton's hand was almost out of the drawer now, and Bolan saw the unmistakable shape of a small handgun.

  Far enough.

  The sleek Beretta filled Bolan's fist and a single discreet chug echoed in the basement's silence as a 9 mm stinger pinned the politician against the armchair.

  Bolan turned to the VCR that sat on top of the TV set.

  He ejected the child porn tape from the machine, then turned around to Dutton's lifeless body and dropped the foul video on the dead man's chest.