With Hal.
Whatever waited for him down that darkened corridor now demanded action. Hal was scrambling to his feet before the thought took conscious form, already firing as he rose, half-blinded by the fury that consumed him in the presence of his enemies.
The first two rounds were wide, the Glasers gouging plaster, detonating harmlessly on either side of his intended target. Now the blond was pivoting, the Israeli-made SMG tracking onto target, yellow flame erupting from the muzzle as he fought back skillfully. He was firing high, and the vest Hal wore would not have saved him if it weren't for Bolan, bursting from the kitchen, blazing with Big Thunder as he came.
The hardman hesitated, torn between two targets, and the delay was all Hal needed. Firing for effect, he unloaded with the Bulldog and the snubby .38 until the hammers fell on empty chambers, clicking like metallic pincers. In all the blond had taken seven of the Glasers, two of them directly in the face. The bastard was already dead before he toppled backward to the carpet, leaking like a human sieve.
But Hal could not stop squeezing off, the dry-fire clatter of his weapons coming to him from a distance, through the mist that fogged his mind. He kept on squeezing until the Executioner stood before him, reaching out to twist the empty guns from his hands, which had already started trembling.
"It's over."
Bolan's voice seemed distant, hollow in Brognola's ears. How could the soldier be so far away and still reach out to touch him? Hal's mind was grappling with the problem when a hint of movement on the edge of vision brought him right around to face the hallway, with its lighted doorway standing open at the end.
And he was dreaming, had to be. His mind had snapped. How else could he be seeing Helen and the children when he knew that they were dead before he crashed the door? How could they be alive and calling to him now?
Bolan slapped him on the shoulder, but Brognola was already running, sweeping Helen up in one arm, reaching for his children with the other, and he couldn't see them clearly now, goddammit. There was something in his eyes.
But he could hold them, touch them, hear their voices. And he knew, incredibly, that he was not too late.
It was enough. For now.
"We need to move."
Mack Bolan didn't want to break Brognola's mood, but there had been too damned much shooting even for a sparsely settled neighborhood. Unless the other residents were deaf or comatose, police would be arriving soon. The family reunion would have to be postponed.
Four faces, wreathed in smiles that contradicted teary eyes, were beaming at him now. Brognola nodded, herding Helen and the children past the riddled corpses toward the door. Outside, they found a sprinkling of porch lights burning in the neighborhood, illuminating former darkness, adding urgency to Bolan's own demand for haste.
"I'll follow you," he told Brognola. "When you've got them safe, we need to talk."
Brognola's smile had disappeared.
"It isn't finished."
"No."
Not while the brains behind Brognola's grief were still at large. Not while a crony of Lee Farnsworth still held power in the CIA. Not while Nicky Gianelli walked the streets of Washington as free and clear as any decent citizen.
They owed a blood debt to Brognola, to the Executioner. Before the final curtain fell on Bolan's hellfire tour of Wonderland, the cannibals would have to pay. In full.
"I'll follow you," he said again, already moving toward his car half a block away. There was whispering behind him as Hal conducted his family toward his own sedan.
The drive would give him time to think, collect the final scattered pieces of the puzzle. Motive still eluded Bolan, but he had enough to surmise that Gianelli was the guiding force behind the move against Brognola's family. Elimination of a ranking enemy at Justice had been tantalizing, obviously, but it took a back seat to the ambush laid for Bolan. Gianelli had been banking on the Executioner's assistance to a friend in need, and he had very nearly pulled it off. As for the CIA involvement, underworld connections with Clandestine Ops ran deep at Langley. Bolan had no reason to believe they had been terminated during the investigations of the seventies, any more than they had been eliminated by the dictates of a president in the early sixties. Indeed, there were suspicions some still nurtured within official circles that the gangland-CIA connection had been linked somehow to the removal by assassination of that President. Some even whispered that his brother, running for the presidency in 1968, had been taken out by agents of the same unholy coalition.
Bolan had no hard and fast opinion on the deaths of presidents and candidates. He knew enough about clandestine Washington to realize that Gianelli might have had a dozen different handles on the Company from Asian heroin through all the machinations aimed at Castro in the days before detente. If Cartwright was a carbon copy of his mentor, Farnsworth, he was rotten to the core.
If not, then he was dirty all the same. The Executioner had never shrunk from the concept of guilt by association. Public figures who aligned themselves with public enemies were worse than savages in Bolan's mind. They consciously abandoned sacred oaths of office, violated public trusts in the pursuit of private gain, and Bolan didn't buy their hollow protestations of indignant innocence. When you lay down with jackals, you got up with fleas... or worse.
It wasn't finished while the architects of Hal Brognola's private hell were still alive. So long as any vestige of the Farnsworth clique survived at the CIA, the Executioner himself had debts to collect. For April Rose, Andrzej Konzaki, Aaron Kurtzman all the others who had suffered through the treachery of men presumably committed to protection of their country and its people.
It would not be finished until that debt was paid.
And then?
He shrugged the question off and knew that then would take care of itself. His debt was here and now. Before another dawn broke over Washington, the soldier meant to close that overdue account and wipe the ledger clean.
With blood.
24
"I'm telling you they blew it, Nicky. Are you reading me? A frigging homicide detective took the call!"
"Relax."
The mobster's voice was oily, self-assured, but his apparent confidence did nothing for Cameron Cartwright. It was over. They were caught up inside the worst scenario he could have possibly imagined. Somehow, local officers had found the safe house. Not just officers, but homicide detectives. That meant death, and any way you sliced it there was trouble on the way.
Brognola's family was alive. Cartwright's crew would never willingly have compromised the safe house with an on-site execution. And if forced to kill a hostage on the premises, they would have cleaned it up without involving the authorities. Police meant phone calls from the neighbors worse, from one of the surviving captives and a call to the police meant someone had surprised his team.
The implications of that were too frightening to consider, even for a survivor like Cartwright. It meant surviving witnesses, embarrassment and nagging questions from detectives and investigative journalists.
Even with the precautions he had taken with the safe house, there were ways to trace his men. In death, they posed a threat that none of them had ever constituted while alive. Their faces, fingerprints, surviving records that had somehow missed the shredder when they joined Clandestine Ops... There were a million ways to blow a cover, dammit, and if Grymdyke had already been exposed...
"I'm leaving," he informed his host, abruptly turning from the window to confront the man whose personal vendetta had rebounded to destroy them all. "I'm getting out."
"We're getting out," Gianelli corrected. "I could use some sun, and God knows you've been looking pale these past few weeks. You like the Virgin Islands, Cam?"