"That's him. Assuming that he hasn't moved."
Assuming that the front man he had wasted back at Arlington had not been working on his own.
Assuming any one of half a dozen different scenarios that might make chasing Milo Grymdyke a colossal waste of time.
But they had time now, he remembered. There was no more need for haste. They had already crossed the deadline, fumbled in the end zone, trashed the play beyond repair. It didn't matter if he had to follow Grymdyke to Afghanistan and back. Brognola had the kind of time that men alone possess, free time in such abundance that it gradually crushes them beneath its weight.
He could not make himself believe that there was any hope. It would accomplish nothing, holding on to phantoms while the living still required assistance. Leo's blood was soaking through the seat, and Hal could not ignore the sacrifice his friend had made in the attempt to win his wife and children back.
He concentrated on the next light, and the next one after that, intent on dropping Bolan at his car before proceeding on with Leo to emergency. There would be police and questions to be answered, once the doctors got a look at Leo's leg, but that was fine. Hal had the time for questions now and there might even be some answers waiting for him.
God knew there was nothing else ahead of him but empty nights and hollow days, beset with memories of faces he would never see and voices he would never hear again except in dreams.
In nightmares.
He could hear them now, and they were whispering embittered accusations, carping on his failure. They had every right and he did nothing to evade them, taking all of it inside and nurturing his shame.
He had a single reason left to live, and that lay in the hope that Bolan might allow some stragglers to survive. There was a chance that one or two of Hal's tormentors might escape the cleansing fire, and he would have a reason to continue living while they lived, committed to extermination of the animals who had already torn his world apart.
When they were finished he would have to find another motive for survival, or surrender to the darkness that surrounded him already. For now, it was enough to concentrate on traffic, on the winking lights and on his pain.
He had sufficient time for any tasks that still remained unfinished, and there would be pain enough, he knew, to see him through his days.
20
Cameron Cartwright set the telephone receiver in its cradle, swallowing an urge to rip it free and fling it through the nearest open window. Years of playing cloak-and-dagger had prepared him to control his own emotions, and no hint of strain showed through the passive poker face. For all the outward evidence he might have just received a bulletin about the next week's weather. An astute observer might have marked the concentration lines that formed between the salt-and-pepper eyebrows, indicating that the man from the CIA was lost in thought. But none would have surmised the sharp anxiety, the brooding anger that was building inside of him.
When Cartwright lost control say, once a decade he was careful to surround himself with solitude before the fact. It was incongruous, this preparation for a tantrum with meticulous attention to detail, but perfectionism was his trademark, and he could not let it go this late in life. Routine was part and parcel of his life, although clandestine warriors theoretically abhorred the semblance of a pattern in their daily lives. It had been years since Cartwright worked the field, and if he seemed to have gone soft with age, with his advancement up the ladder of the Agency's command, there was a frame of steel still hidden underneath the middle-aged upholstery.
He was adept at dealing with disaster, fielding crises that might break a lesser man, but there were limits even so. His shoulders might be broad, but he was growing tired of carrying the world upon them, bearing burdens that should rightfully have fallen onto others.
Nicky Gianelli was a constant thorn in Cartwright's side, the more so since he had conceived his master stratagem for dropping Bolan and Brognola with a single stroke. No matter that the two of them were strictly Nicky's problem, he had asked for help demanded help and there had been no graceful way for Cameron to disengage. As long as Gianelli had those files he would be in the driver's seat, and Cartwright's only hope was to survive the bumpy ride with life and limb intact.
He blamed Lee Farnsworth for the problem. It had been Farnsworth who recruited Gianelli's predecessors for the war against Fidel, who had continued the assassination efforts in defiance of repeated White House orders after the Bay of Pigs disaster. When spokesmen for the Mafia's Commissione had bitched about the federal drive against their brothers of the blood, it had been Farnsworth who conceived the series of scenarios that culminated on an autumn afternoon in Dallas. And before the smoke had cleared, it had been Farnsworth with some help from Cartwright, granted who had agitated for a special panel to investigate the murder of the President; a panel that would close the door on ugly rumors permanently, and prevent the furious attorney general from initiating an investigation of his own.
It would be thirty years before you knew it, but the Mob had never tired of dropping little reminders into Farnsworth's ear. When an aircraft was required to haul the fruit of countless poppies stateside, the CIA had volunteered to fly the covert "rescue missions," braving hostile fire and customs agents to supply a growing army of addicted zombies in the streets of Everytown. When Momo Giancana thought his mistress had been looking for a little action on the side, the Agency provided wire men to investigate the "boyfriend," finally absolving him and thereby, doubtless, lengthening the poor schmuck's life. When the IRS expressed a passing interest in foreign bank accounts, the cry of "national security" was sounded to repel investigators.
It had worked to everyone's advantage through the years. The Company, for its part, had been granted access to the eyes and ears of underworld associates from Brooklyn to Marseilles, Los Angeles to Bangkok and Taiwan. The eyes saw many things, those ears heard many whispers that might otherwise have been ignored. The godless enemy was only human, after all, and when he paid for pleasure in some foreign port of call, he spent his rubles with a good friend of the Agency.
When there were problems, when attrition claimed the principals Roselli, Giancana, Lansky there were always others standing by to take their place. As for directors of Clandestine Ops, a few had voiced their outrage at the Agency's peculiar bargain with the devil, but they changed their tune the moment something interesting surfaced in the cesspool. None had finally possessed the nerve the guts to terminate Lee Farnsworth's monster. None so far.
Cartwright thought he might decide to do that little job himself.
But it would be no little job, and Cartwright recognized the problems he would face if he attempted to disrupt the status quo. For openers, he was already ass-deep in the most horrendous foul-up since the Watergate fiasco. Worse, since this particular disaster had been foisted on him by outsiders, in defiance of his own expressed concerns. It had been Gianelli's baby from day one, and now that it was starting to unravel, Cartwright knew that he would be expected to be brilliant and save the day.
Except, he knew, it might already be too late.
The move against Brognola's family was a calculated risk, but he had finally agreed with Gianelli that a threat to innocents would be the quickest draw for Bolan. It had worked, and now that Bolan was in town, the question of disposal still remained unanswered while the precious moments ticked away.
The contract on DeVries had been another calculated risk, and it had backfired in their faces. Gianelli's face, to be precise, since it had been his show. The shooters had been his all four of them, stretched out in cold drawers at the morgue beside DeVries and there would doubtless be some questions for the capo when detectives got around to tracing those IDs. The gunners had been sanitized to some extent, but they were traceable hell, anyone was traceable assuming Justice chose to go the whole nine yards. And with a ranking staff investigator dead, the whole nine yards would only be for openers.