"Just like a man," April said, ushering in the three survivors at gunpoint. "Letting me do all the cleaning up."
"DAMAGES?"
"Five dead. One dying of internal bleeding. Two wounded, but ambulatory. One wounded and unconscious. Two unwounded."
"Dante?" Bolan asked.
April shook her head. "Not here."
"Okay," Bolan said, satisfied. "Now we can get to work."
One of the prisoners spoke. "What are you going to do?" Bolan recognized her as the woman who had given all the orders earlier. She was in her late thirties, her face thin and harsh. A scratch on her cheek bled slightly.
"I'm asking the questions," Bolan said.
She sneered. "What are you, some kind of renegade cop or something?"
Bolan stood in the middle of the living room amid a haze of drifting smoke and dust, as if he were enveloped in a yellow fog. A charred hand, torn from somebody's body during one of the explosions, lay in the middle of the floor like a lost starfish. Bolan stepped aside to avoid it as he approached the prisoners, all seated in a line against the wall.
Royce Banjo glared at him. "You know who I am, man?" He looked the same as his photographs, the long dark hair braided with brightly colored feathers. He was pressing his hand against the shrapnel wound in his upper thigh.
"We've got nothing to say," the woman said, folding her arms in front of her chest. She shot Royce a tough look. "None of us."
Bolan caught the exchange. She was afraid of what Royce might say. Why? If he was one of them, what were they afraid of?
"Say, Royce," Bolan said, "you weren't really going to play at the festival today, were you?"
"Take us in or kill us," the woman said. "We've got nothing to say."
Bolan looked at her. "For someone with nothing to say, you talk too much."
"It's okay, Lynn," Royce jumped in. "I can handle this cracker."
"Yeah, sure you can, Mr. Banjo," April said, sweeping her weapon gently across the seated line of prisoners. "We just saw how well."
"Now, now," Bolan said. "We mustn't be too hard on Mr. Banjo. He doesn't realize that we saved his life tonight."
"You what?" Royce barked. "How, by fragging my leg?"
"By keeping you from performing at that festival in about twelve hours."
"You're not making any sense."
"No?" Bolan pointed his Beretta at Lynn's worried face. "She knows what I'm talking about. Don't you, cuddles?"
"Screw you!"
"What's he mean, Lynn?" Royce asked her.
"Nothing, Royce. He's trying to divide us, hoping we'll tell him where to find J.D." She stared up at Bolan, her lips twisting into an ugly grin. "But you'll never find him in time. Never!"
Bolan shook his head. "Lynn, you're not telling the whole truth to your buddy, Royce. You forgot to mention how he was supposed to be killed with the others at the festival."
"You're crazy, man!" Royce forced out a laugh.
"Maybe, but then I'm not the one being set up by my Weather Underground buddies."
"Don't listen, Royce," Lynn said. "He's lying."
Bolan stepped closer to Royce Banjo, leaned forward and stared him icily in the eye. "You do know about their plans for the OPON Festival, don't you, Royce?"
"What plans?"
"Plans for a lot of deaths. And since you'd be there at the time, you would be one of the victims."
Angrily Royce tried to get to his feet. The rush of pain to his wounded leg forced him back down, his face creased with pain. "You're a liar, man. They wouldn't try anything like that."
"What do you think the Weather Underground is? A social club?"
"They wouldn't do anything to harm me," Royce said. "I've given a lot of money to them. They're my friends."
Bolan slowly shook his head with contempt. "I don't know which of you is more pathetic, Royce, you or Dante. At least he doesn't kid himself about who he is. He knows he'll do anything, use anybody to get what he wants. But you and your type think you can play at Robin Hood without ever getting caught in the cross fire. Well, your time has come, pal. Dante used you to get across the country and as a pass into the festival. After whatever he's planning is over and the Feds come in to investigate, they'll find there's one roadie that can't be accounted for and they'll come looking for you. But with you dead, he'll be even harder to trace."
Royce looked at Bolan, realization washing over his features.
"He's lying, Royce!" Lynn hissed.
"Shut up, Lynn," Royce said calmly.
She turned to Bolan. "You're wrong, mister. Sure, J.D. planned something, something that would make us a political power again."
"What?" Bolan demanded. "What did he plan?"
"He didn't tell us any details and I wouldn't tell you even if he did. But he swore that only a few would die."
"Only a few would die...." Bolan's dark eyes brooded coldly upon her. "Where's Dante?"
Her voice trembled as she spoke. "I—I don't know."
"She's telling the truth," Royce said warily. His voice was hollow and defeated. He didn't care anymore. "Dante doesn't confide anything. All I know for sure is that his girl friend picked him up a few hours ago in her Dodge van."
"You stupid son of a bitch!" Lynn snarled. "When I tell Dant—"
Royce snapped his fist into her jaw. The effort caused a great surge of pain in his bleeding thigh, but not as much pain as it caused Lynn. Her jaw shifted out of alignment and her lower lip split, leaking blood down her chin. She cradled her jaw in her hands, making a choking noise as the blood bubbled through her fingers.
The grubby man sitting next to her started to scramble toward Royce, but Bolan waved the barrel of the Beretta at him and shook his head. The man sank back to the floor.
"As I was saying," Royce continued. "The girl's name is Melissa. She has a condo at the marina." He gave the address and laughed bitterly. "I helped pay for that place, too."
"You think they might be there?" April asked anxiously.
He shrugged. "Don't know. But he spends most of his time there. He might have left for the festival already. They both have passes as part of my crew setting up the equipment."
"Is there any way he could smuggle explosives in with your equipment?"
"No. The security people check everything that comes in with special dogs."
"So how does he plan to do it? How will Dante attack half a million people?"
"He'll do it," Lynn managed to mutter, a trace of a smile showing teeth smeared with blood. "And there's nothing you can do to stop him."
"I'll stop him," Bolan promised.
In the back of his mind flickered a desperate thought. What if she's right?
16
"Anything in the bathroom?"
"Nope," April called. "She washes with Ivory, conditions with Breck, brushes with Crest and protects with a diaphragm. But nothing incriminating."
"Figures." Bolan yanked out another drawer from the small dresser and dumped the contents on the unmade water bed. Panties, bras, panty hose. He pawed through them, then angrily swept them onto the floor with the rest of the clothes he had searched.
April returned to the bedroom, her voice soothing. "Maybe we should just go straight to the festival, Mack. It's going to take some time to get there."
"Fine, but what do we do once we're there? Even if we manage to locate and catch Dante, there's still Zossimov to worry about. And we don't have a clue as to where he might be."
"His file says he always has a hand in the final operation."
"That's my point. It's a cinch we'll never get Dante to tell us anything, even if we take him alive. So where will that put us? And the half a million people at the festival?"
She walked closer to him, laid a warm hand on his arm. "What exactly is going down at that festival, Mack? Those hardcases we took in Laurel Canyon seem to think there's just some grand scare tactic involved. But you're convinced it's much more."
"I know it's more. There's a saying,
'The easiest mark to con is another con man, meaning that people who con others for a living think that no one would dare try to con them. That's why they're so easy to take. Same principle here. I don't know how deep Dante is in this whole thing, but I do know that Zossimov wouldn't bother getting involved unless there were a lot of lives at stake. Maybe Dante and his Weather Underground planned it one way, but that's not how it's going down. Not with Zossimov pulling the strings. He'd let them think they have him by the balls, then he'd pull a switch and slam-dunk them into the ground."
"So Dante is just a fall guy for Zossimov?"
"He doesn't know it but, yeah, that's how it is. And unless we find out how they plan to attack that crowd, there's going to be a long waiting list at a lot of local funeral homes. It's already too late to stop the festival. It would just beg a riot. So our only chance is to head off the hit as it's about to go down."
Bolan ushered April into the living room. A plate-glass window dominated one whole wall with a magnificent view of Marina Del Ray and its parade of sailboats and cocky bright spinnakers. "Expensive view," April noted.
"Paid for from celebrity donations and by robbing banks."
"Why do they do it, people like Royce and the others? They've got everything they worked for, fame and fortune and all that. What can they possibly hope to achieve by linking up with the Weather Underground?"
"Scary, huh?" Bolan said. "But I don't think there's any complicated psychological reason. Some do it for kicks, like that soap star, what's her-name . . ."
"Carly Carlyle."
"A woman like her just needed the excitement, the kinky danger. And Dolph Connors, former center for the Steelers, he wasn't much different. Didn't want to be thought of as just a dumb jock, so he hung around with what he thought were intellectuals. They paid the price."
"What about Royce Banjo?"
"Yeah, good ole Royce. Born William Joseph Royce in the slums of Atlanta. He's a little different. I think he felt guilty about all the money he'd made, tried to give some back in some way. He's an idiot. He never thought it through."
April pressed her face against the cool glass window, watched a young couple casting off the lines from their sleek cabin cruiser. For a moment she imagined it was her and Mack on that boat, heading out into the early-morning sun. Away from this place, away from their awesome responsibilities. She turned from the window, back to business. "Where does that leave us?"
"It leaves us with no choice but to get down to San Bernadino Valley and start searching. Hal has an APB out on the blue Dodge van and its license number. I wish I could find—" He broke off in the middle of his sentence, and faced the far wall. Under the Fritz Scholder print was a tall chrome-and-glass unit that shelved a Toshiba stereo and speakers, a nineteen-inch RCA TV, and a JVC video cassette recorder. Two of the shelves were lined with video cassettes. Bolan pulled them down one at a time and read the labels. "The French Connection, M*A*S*H . . ." He stopped reading them aloud, tossing the ones he examined onto the floor.
"What are you looking for, Mack?"
"I don't know. But all these people seem to be heavily into video equipment. Maybe they use it like a notebook or a diary, to record current information."
April kneeled, began reading the labels of another shelf of tapes. "Debbie Does Dallas, Sex Machine. These are the good ones."
"Here we are, try these," Bolan said, pulling down two cassettes. "These aren't marked."
April clicked on the TV, set the VCR, popped in the first tape. The picture rolled twice, then stabilized. Dan Rather's familiar face ballooned onto the screen, his voice heavy with authority.
"Like Woodstock a generation ago, and the US Festival the past couple years, OPON is trying to do something politicians and religious leaders have failed to do for years: unite people of all ages and beliefs. Their secret weapon? Music." The screen throbbed with writhing bodies of young people dancing, then showed elderly couples with their arms around each other, children of all races playing tag in a grassy field. The camera cut to a close-up of Kris Kristofferson singing on stage. The camera pulled back in an aerial shot of the hundreds of thousands of people as Dan Rather's voice continued. "And if these crowds are any indication, they might just pull it off."
The rest of the tape was filled with more local and national newscasts concerning the upcoming OPON Festival.
Bolan slid in the second tape. More of the same. "What do you think this is for?" April asked as they watched.
"Blueprinting. This material helps them anticipate what might happen, gives them a scale of probabilities. Helps them to plan better whatever it is they're going to do."
"But what?"
Bolan shook his head. "That's the five-hundred-thousand-person question."
They watched more of the tapes. An interview with Leonard Zeno, boy genius, wealthy film director and sponsor. A feature about a day in the life of a soft drink vendor at entertainment events. More aerial shots of rock-festival crowds. Segments filmed under a rotating stage where electronic equipment was stored. Planes sky typing over crowds, announcing the names of groups in giant white letters. Statistics on how many bathrooms are needed at a massive outdoor event, how many day-care centers, emergency medical treatment tents. Everything was presented to show how sanitary and safe such an event can be.
The third tape was a whole episode of "Entertainment Tonight" devoted to following the per-formers around before, during and after their shows. Desperate groupies, appreciative fans, pushy managers. A camera caught an unidentified man wielding drum sticks, staggering drunk up some stage stairs.
Bolan reached out and punched the Stop button. He grabbed April under the arm and half-dragged her toward the door.
"Mack, what is it?"
"I know how they're going to do it," he said hoarsely, his jaw clenched. "And it's worse than we thought."
IT WAS a matter of common sense. To a soldier, that means combat sense. Mack Bolan, who lived waist-deep in the flowing river of blood that had long been prophesied as his destined route—that sticky swirl daily threatening to pull him into its flow of faceless mangled bodies, a miasma of great gaping wounds, a river that groaned with the muted symphony of violent dying—Mack Bolan knew about combat sense. Indeed, it was the most vital sense he possessed.
Tuned and organized combat awareness told him how the hit was going to go down. The flexing of his survival instincts, plus some prodding from the strongly conditioned retentive web of his combat consciousness, combined to reveal to him the method of the strike.
The secret would be the transmitter. . . Every unrevealed event needed a method of transmission. The transmitter would be the key element.
Exactly what was to be transmitted was a different matter. The information about that came to Bolan by empirical logic. He figured out the range of possibilities and selected the one that he himself, if he had been the aggressor, would have chosen. Such a method was a mark of respect for the bloody determination of his enemy.
17
"Nothing can go wrong."
She nodded, trying to smooth the worried wrinkles from her brow. "I know."
"Trust me," Dante said, gently stroking her arm.
"I do. I really do."
"Good."
"I guess I'm just a worrier."
His fingers stopped caressing her arm and clamped tightly around it instead, pinching the soft pale skin. His face twitched with sudden rage. "Then keep your goddamn worrying to yourself. It's making me nervous."
"Sure, okay, J.D. Okay." She tried to yank her arm free but he held tight, squeezing even harder. Finally, with a harsh laugh, he released her. She stumbled across the van, massaging her bruised arm.
Dante bent over a box of equipment as if nothing had happened. "Grab that thing, would you?"
Melissa waded through the boxes of electronic devices she couldn't name and picked up a heavy metal box. "This?"
He glanced over his shoulder. "Yeah. Hang on to it a sec."
"What
is it?"
"What do you care? Just do what I tell you." Dante stopped fussing in one of the boxes, pulled up the right leg of his jeans, shifted the Colt .45 M-1911 wedged into his boot and scratched his calf. "Damn thing itches like hell. Giving me a rash."
"I can carry the gun for you in my purse," Melissa offered, anxious to get back in his good graces.
Dante stood up, his head bent slightly because of the van's low ceiling. He wore an amused but cruel smile. "Listen, baby, I don't mind making it with you occasionally, but I would never, never trust you with my gun. You savvy?"
Melissa lowered her head, swallowed. "Sure, J.D., I understand."
"You'd better. We're not playing house here, lady. We're getting ready to shout a message to the whole TV Guide middle-class world outside. Not a message, a goddamn demand!"
She listened to his angry voice echoing off the metal walls of the van like a ricocheting bullet. She watched the unnatural light shimmering in his eyes, the clenched fist jabbing the air for emphasis. And she knew why she had always done what he'd wanted, always would. He had the power, he was a mover. If only her smug chairman-of-the-university-history-department father could see her now, could know the physical abuse she'd taken at Dante's hands, could know the emotional and sexual humiliation she'd gladly endured. Know the people she'd killed, snitches she'd offed at his command. Know that she'd do it all again just to be with Dante. That would show him, show them all. And after today, they'd know her for the first time.
Dante finished his speech, his eyes glazing slightly as they stared off through the metal roof of the van as if studying some distant constellation. He took a deep breath, rolled his neck, smiled. "Let's go, baby. The show must go on."
They exited from the rear of the van, their arms full of equipment. Quickly, without looking around, they walked from the special parking lot for performers toward the rear entrance of the stage. Melissa lagged a few steps behind Dante, trying to balance the heavy metal box while she ran to catch up.
Dante looked at her over his shoulder and smiled. "If you drop that, lover, I'll put a bullet through your tiny brain."
Executioner 057 - Flesh Wounds Page 10