Very early on the third morning after his return from that futile trip to Wonderland, Ecclefield was at his desk at strike headquarters, poring over the police and fire reports of that incident up near Kennesaw. He was a speed-reader, and his retention was very nearly one hundred percent. Nevertheless, he’d already gone over the packet several times when the telephone interrupted his concentration.
His caller displayed a manner that invited respect. The voice was cool without being hostile, aloof without seeming arrogant. It was a voice to respect—one, at least, to listen to.
“Ecclefield here.”
“Is your telephone clean, Ecclefield?”
“I hope so. Who is this?”
“It’s best that you don’t ask. It will come to you as we talk.”
“Great. What do we talk about?”
“Organized crime is your business, right?”
“Right. What’s yours?”
“The same. From a slightly different viewpoint, you could say. Does the name Charles Sciaparelli have any special meaning for you?”
“You said it, chum. Organized crime is my business.”
“Here’s an item for your block chart. Ship is the invisible man behind the Bluebird operation. It was his hard point. Munitions, booze, junk, that sort of stuff. Are you with me?”
“I’m with you. Can I rely on that information?”
“You can. You won’t find the corporate link, but it’s there. The proceeds are funneled in through his trust operations and recycled into the software. Look for a financial wunkerkind by the name of Walters. He’s the pivot man. You’ll find the dirty transactions buried in his books, if you can find a way to shake them loose.”
“Hold it, I’m trying to jot this—that name is Walter—with an S?”
“Right. Office in the Five Points area.”
“Check. Let’s return to Bluebird for a minute. What else can you tell me about that operation?”
“It was a glorious fire.”
Ecclefield chuckled. “Uh-huh. Okay. You’re the guy, huh?”
“I’m the guy. Do you feel tainted?”
“Not at all. Honored, maybe. Why me?”
“I have to pick them up and put them down very carefully, guy. It’s a problem peculiar to my business—a fatal problem, if I guess wrong. I’ve been told that you wouldn’t necessarily be fatal to me.”
“Uh-huh. I see. No, I don’t see. What is it you’re asking?”
“A friendly truce, between your side of the street and mine for a mutual exchange of valuable intelligence.”
“That sounds uh … that sounds …”
“It sounds doubtful, where I’m sitting.”
“No, I was just … weighing the possible costs.”
“No costs, except to your conscience, maybe, if you don’t know where it’s at. I need a commitment, Ecclefield. Yes or no.”
“Yes. Can we get together?”
“Be at Grant Park one hour from now. You’ll need a car with a radio, police VHF. Give me a channel, and I’ll find it.”
They established a communications contact channel, and the guy hung up.
Ecclefield slowly put his phone down then went to the door and called his assistant. He cancelled all standing strike-force assignments and placed the entire crew on headquarters standby. Then he placed calls to two separate offices in the Federal Courthouse, in quick succession; the first to the clerk for a Federal district judge, the second to the local Federal attorney. Both produced highly satisfying results.
Next, he called Washington and bullied his way through to the top man in his chain of command.
“I have a peculiar situation here, Mr. Brognola,” he told his chief. “Without going into specifics, I was wondering if I could ask for your counsel.”
“You have no friends in Washington, David,” his chief advised him.
“Yes, sir. That points up the peculiar situation I find here in Atlanta. It seems that I have found a friend.”
“Good for you,” Brognola said. “Don’t take it lightly.”
“Thank you, sir. I am happy to have your understanding.”
“That’s all you have, David.”
“Yes, sir.”
Young David hung up the phone, swiveled his chair about, and gazed upon the lovely morning arising over Atlanta. He crossed his feet on the windowsill, lit a cigarette, and said good morning to a whole new ball game.
Twenty minutes removed from downtown Atlanta, in a rather unusual setting, another police conference of sorts was just then getting under way. Participants were from various municipal and county jurisdictions. Their number was precisely one dozen. Some were in uniform, more wore ordinary street clothes. Rank seemed to have little to say about protocol; each seemed to have an equal voice as well as an equal stake in the proceedings. The meeting site was an open field where organized sports for youngsters were conducted according to their season.
The twelve congregated around their vehicles, smoked and passed a bottle in comradely fashion, and discussed in worried tones the problem of the day.
“That’s crazy. What can we do about the guy? If all the cops in New York, all the cops in Chicago, all the cops in Los Angeles, all the cops in—”
“Your record’s stuck, Billy Bob.”
“You get my meaning.”
“Meanings won’t help much. We need to stop this guy before he wrecks everything.”
“Maybe he’s already stopped. He made the hit … when?—eight, nine hours ago? Maybe he’s long gone by now.”
“Randy might have something, there. I’ve got a file drawer full of the guy. He don’t spend much time screwing around in one place. Hits and gits. That’s why he’s so damned hard to catch. When you realize he’s there, he’s already gone.”
“They don’t figure to get off that easy. They say if he knew about Bluebird, then he knows about the others. They’re worried.”
“They should be. Bluebird was the hard point. I bet they lost a lot of money up there last night.”
“Millions, you know it. I bet it wasn’t even insured.”
“Course it wasn’t insured. How do you write policy on illegal goods?”
“I figure those guys write anything they want to write. Hell, I bet they own some of those insurance companies.”
“Maybe you’re right. They own everything else.”
“Let’s stick to the problem, boys. Is anyone here bleeding for those people? Who gives a shit what they lose—except as it’s going to hit us? It’s our territory the guy is messing with.”
“The chief is right. We’ve got to commit to something here.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without my territory. I just bought that new lemon—that fuckin’ thing, what a dog. Without my territory, I couldn’t even keep up with the garage bills. Forget the damn finance company.”
“See, that’s our whole problem. That’s the nutshell. We’ve come to depend on all this. What’s going to happen if it all falls apart—for even a little while? Henry’s banker got it last night, at Kennesaw. Where is Henry’s envelope coming from this week? From the grave?”
“I’ll scratch something up; don’t worry about me.”
“That ain’t right, Henry. You know that ain’t right. I make a motion we set up a fund to cover this. We’re all together—right? What hits one hits all. We’ll share the bad with the good. Right?”
“We’ll talk about that later, Billy Bob. Let’s concentrate on one problem at a time. Our problem, right now, is Mack Bolan. We’ve got to chop the guy.”
“I don’t like you putting it that way, chief.”
“Naw, the chief is right. Might as well say it right out.”
“That’s right; Henry’s right. Nobody is talking about a murder here. We’re talking about doing our duty as lawmen.”
“Right, but just doing it a little harder.”
“We already have everything covered. The damn bulletins say it right out: ‘Shoot on sight. Shoot to kill.’ Lik
e he said, just try a little harder.”
“That’s what it comes down to.”
“Right.”
“This guy, uh, he—they say he don’t shoot at badges.”
“I hope you don’t believe that shit, Billy Bob! I hope you don’t hit those streets at night with a flashlight on your badge, hoping it won’t get shot at!”
“Knock it off! I don’t need that shit! You know what I was saying.”
“We all know what Billy Bob was saying. He’s saying he’ll feel bad cutting down on the guy. Hell, that’s okay, that’s human—we’re all humans here. But we all know, too, that we’ve got to stop the guy. Right, Billy Bob?”
“That’s what I was saying.”
“Okay. We’re not making decisions. There is no decision. This is a tactical meeting. We’ve got to mark the spots and make sure they stay covered. That’s our advantage, isn’t it? We know the spots. Okay. Night and day, we work it the same as a regular watch rotation. Standard procedures, see. But we work it.”
“It has to be cool. We don’t want to give away the territories. Busted is busted, whether Bolan does it or we do it.”
“The chief is right. We have to do it cool.”
“Okay. Let’s get to work on the assignments.”
“Here you go. Use this clipboard. I already got the squads marked up.”
“Yeah. Okay. Let’s see, now. If we …”
And so it went, into the morning of the first day.
If these men had their way, there would be no second day for Mack Bolan along the Dixie Corridor.
9: Fraternity
The official police reaction to the Bolan presence in Georgia took form as a unified tactical reaction force, combining elements of the various metropolitan police agencies as well as representatives from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
It was largely a “paper force,” with actual staffing limited to a coordinating function—the Reaction Control Center (RCC), headquartered within the Atlanta Police Department.
In theory, it was an impressive force with awesome resources and seemingly limitless applications. There were those critics, however, who doubted that the theory would ever become reality since success depended entirely on mutal cooperation and support from the agencies involved. And it was a diverse lot. There had not been notable success of similar ventures in the past.
For good or for bad, the Reaction Control Center was activated, and area-wide contingency plans were implemented at nine o’clock on that first morning of overt war in Georgia.
At twenty minutes past nine, the first of a series of lightning strikes by a “lone gunman” in and around the financial district of Atlanta provided the first test and initial failure of the police planning. By nine-thirty, the ranks of “the inner circle of crime bosses” in Atlanta had been decimated, with the slayings of five known syndicate “businessmen” as well as their personal bodyguards.
A frustrated watch commander at the RCC lamely explained to his superiors: “We simply weren’t set up yet for that kind of reaction. We didn’t get the first gunfire report until zero-nine-twenty-six hours. By then they were popping in from all over the district. We had Five Points sealed solid within minutes after that first report came down. And that goddamn guy was already out of it and gone.”
The police planners went back to their drawing boards, muttering over the impossibility of instant reaction to an infinite spectrum of possible events.
Alluding to those same incidents, a shamed “security boss” reported in a telephone call to the mansion on Paces Ferry Road: “I don’t know how he did it; he just did it. We had everything covered, just like we worked it out last night, and there was a Band-Aid tagman with every one of them. He took the tagmen, too. I never saw such a guy before. Where the hell is that hotshot bunch from New York, anyways? I can’t cover all the shit this guy might decide to throw!”
A follow-up call, several minutes later, reported: “He hit your Five Points office, too, sir! Cleaned out the vault and torched a whole lot of stuff. They’re still going through the ashes, trying to—when? We don’t know when. They found it like that when they opened up, at nine.”
At precisely ten o’clock, young David Ecclefield was joined in his vehicle, just outside the Civil War Cyclorama in Grant Park, by a tall man wearing yellow eyeshades and a safari-style leisure suit. The precise time and point of the meeting had been established moments earlier via cryptic directions over an Atlanta police radio channel.
“Let’s move,” the visitor suggested as he slid in beside the Federal cop.
They moved instantly, cruising slowly out of the park and along Southeast Boulevard.
Bolan placed a briefcase on the backseat as he explained to his companion, “There’s some ammunition for your war. Don’t ask where or how I got it, and I won’t tell you anything to ruffle your official sensibilities. One more link to the chain, and you can topple the Sciaparelli empire—all nice and legal. You’ll need the Walters books, and I don’t know where to tell you to look for them. Later, maybe.”
Ecclefield was eyeing the guy as much as he could risk without appearing overly fascinated. The cop’s palms were clammy on the steering wheel and his voice a bit ragged as he inquired, “What’s in the briefcase?”
“Financial codes, I’d guess. The keys to the Walters books. Here’s something you need to know. The clean books sort of caught fire awhile ago. They no longer exist. So his people will have a hell of a time reconstructing them because they were all lies and manipulations. If you can bust him quick on the Walters data, lock up everything, and keep it legally frozen, they’ll go crazy trying to refute your case.”
“That’s stupendous,” admitted the strike-force boss. “I already have some people working the Walters angle. I’ve established a legal framework, anyway. What, uh, where have you been the past hour?”
“Don’t ask,” Bolan suggested.
“Okay, I won’t. But I just heard some amazing stuff on the radio. Five Points got blitzed about half an hour ago.”
“Imagine that,” Bolan said lightly.
“You’re a mighty tough man, Mr.—I’m sorry, you never identified yourself, did you?”
“Some people in your line of work call me Striker.”
“That’s very fitting. It could even fit me, couldn’t it?”
Bolan gave the guy a sober grin, a mere flash of white teeth. “I told you, Ecclefield, that we’re in the same business. Our difference is largely a point of view.”
“Our difference,” the youngster argued, “is largely one of effectiveness. I envy your freedom but not your peril. What can I do for you, Striker?”
“You can wreck the Sciaparelli empire for me, Ecclefield. I can make heads roll, yeah, if you call that effectiveness. But this is a monster that grows new heads as fast as you whack them off. I can’t reach the roots, guy. You can. Do it.”
“I’ll give it my damndest,” the Fed replied soberly. “I guess I am more of a roots-and-tangle man—not a head whacker, like you. But I suspect that you make it sound far too simple, for yourself. It’s more complex than that, isn’t it? The head-whacking. What is it that really burns your guts, Striker?”
“It’s the rot that burns my guts, David. It’s dreams dashed, lives wasted, and decent men corrupted in wholesale lots that burns my guts. It’s a system that dehumanizes and brutalizes everything it touches that burns my guts. Shall I go on?”
“I get the idea,” the Fed replied, sighing. “I figured it that way. You’re no soldier of fortune, mister.”
“Never pretended to be.”
“Sometimes the media play it that way. Sometimes they play it with you in the heavy role—the big bad psychopath with a God complex. I never could buy either version. I always had you figured as a guy with a burn he couldn’t put out, a guy with a heart too damned big to live and let live on a sinking ship.”
“Thanks for the vote,” Bolan said quietly. “You can drop me now—back where we started.”
>
“Okay. But when you called, you mentioned an exchange of intelligence. So far it’s been a one-way street. What can I give you in exchange?”
“Maybe you’ve already given it.”
“I can give you more than votes, mister. Try me.”
“When the time comes, David, I promise to try you.”
“Okay. I’ll be around.”
They drove on in silence for a moment. Then Ecclefield told the big guy, “I talked to Brognola, by the way.”
“Congratulations.”
“I’ve heard whispers about that guy.”
“Not from me.”
The young Fed sighed. “Not from you, right.” He sighed again and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Some day, Mister Striker, I hope to join the fraternity.”
“You already have, guy. Once you start living large, there’s no avenue of retreat. This is good—drop me here.”
The cop pulled over, and the tall man got out.
He leaned back inside to say, “Stay hard, friend.” Then he closed the door and walked quickly away, disappearing immediately in the greenery.
“Stay what?” the cop muttered to himself.
He got the meaning, though.
And, yeah, he’d damn sure found himself a friend—perhaps, he mused, an entire fraternity of friends.
10: Brothers
It was just past ten o’clock when the caravan reappeared at the mansion on Paces Ferry Road. Mellini had seen them cruise past once, moving slowly and eyeballing the layout. Apparently, they’d made a complete circle to approach from the same direction again.
Five cars, loaded for head, were moving like a funeral procession at car-length separation, halting now, looking, and now nosing cautiously into the circular drive.
Mellini popped a fist into a palm and paced the porch. Come on, dammit! This is it! Come on!
The lead vehicle had barely entered the grounds when doors popped open to disgorge four quickly moving men who ran on ahead while the creeping caravan inched forward.
Well, Jesus Christ at breakfast! Talk about skittery!
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