"All right."
"With any luck, I should have time to make a tag or two before you take that call."
Brognola cleared his throat, his weathered face a study in anxiety. "You've got another stop to make," he told the soldier haltingly. "Somebody wants to see you."
Bolan stiffened. "Come again?"
"The Man is anxious for a face-to-face. He's waiting for my call."
The soldier shook his head. "No good. We've played that scene before."
It was as if Brognola's frown were etched in stone. "He's given me two days. The sit-down was his price."
"You made the deal. You call it off."
"I can't do that. Considering the so-called evidence, this meeting is the only thing that's kept me on the street. You need me on the outside if we're going to make this work."
And Bolan couldn't get around his logic. The abductors would not deal with intermediaries if Brognola was arrested. Bolan needed time in which to rattle cages, turn the heat up under Nicky Gianelli and his outfit, but the time could only be obtained through Hal's negotiations with the enemy. If he should disappear, break contact suddenly, his family was as good as dead.
The news of an impending sit-down with the President had taken Leo Turrin by surprise, as well. Before the Executioner could grudgingly consent, the former mafioso blurted out a cautionary warning.
"I don't like it," he declared. "It's got the makings of a setup."
Bolan smiled. "I don't think so," he said at last. "Okay, confirm the meet and give me the coordinates. I want it somewhere public, where I won't get claustrophobia."
"No problem." Hal was on his feet, already moving toward the kitchen and the telephone. He hesitated in the doorway, cleared his throat again. "Uh, Striker..."
Bolan heard it coming, moved to squelch the words of gratitude. "It's premature," he said. "Let's see what happens."
With a thoughtful nod, Brognola disappeared. A moment later they heard his muffled voice in conversation on the telephone.
"I didn't know about this meeting," Turrin told him.
"Forget it. If the Man was working on a scam, he'd have the troops outside right now. I'm just concerned about the wasted time."
And time was one commodity that they were short of at the moment, Bolan realized. Within the hour, Hal would be receiving his instructions for delivery of the information, stalling if he could, and listening to threats against his family. The Executioner had never seriously entertained the thought that Hal would fold, deliver names of undercover officers and witnesses in hiding, but he was afraid of the alternatives. The guy might crack, agree to the delivery with an eye toward laying hands on someone he could squeeze for information. In his emotional state, Brognola might react with violence that would doom himself and seal his family's fate — unless he had the nerve to sit and wait, ride out the threats and anything that followed, placing all his faith in Bolan and the Executioner's ability to turn the heat on his enemies.
There was an outside chance that Gianelli's family had no hand in the abduction, but it didn't matter in the long run. Nothing on this scale could happen in a capo's jurisdiction if he had not granted his approval. Gianelli was the key, regardless of his personal involvement in the plot. If he was innocent, so much the better; it would make him that much more inclined to cut his losses and reveal the guilty parties once he felt the heat of Bolan's wrath.
Whoever was behind the scam, they had been making use of Gianelli's Washington connections, and from all appearances the tentacles at Justice had been long enough to touch Brognola where he lived. It would be part of Bolan's mission to identify those tentacles, to search them out and sever them before their probing grip became a stranglehold.
If he was not too late.
The recent revelations of corruption in the FBI and NSA had shaken confidence in national security, but random spies imparting information to the Soviets were few and far between. The greater risk by far was the domestic threat of infiltration and subversion by the native cannibals who had so much to gain by undermining honest government: the lobbyists who lavished cash and gifts on pliant legislators; corporation presidents who kicked through with illegal contributions in the nick of time; the manicured mobsters standing ready with their payoffs and assorted favors in return for service rendered — venal politicians, outlaw businessmen, and gangsters fattening on both.
But it was not the soldier's mission to reform a nation, overhaul a system that had sheltered corruption from the start. His war was limited in scope, his moves restricted to the possible, and for the moment it would be enough if he could save three lives. Achieving that goal in itself might be the death of Bolan, but he meant to give it all he had.
He owed Brognola that. For all the times when Hal had risked his pension, his life, to offer aid and comfort in a lonely soldier's war against the odds. For offering an opportunity to make his war official, and for maintaining contact when the roof fell in. Beyond all that, the warrior felt a gut responsibility to strike against the cannibals wherever and whenever possible. It was his life, his reason for existence and the driving force behind his endless war.
He did not share Leo Turrin's fears about a meeting with the President. The Man would not have given Hal two days without some sense of what was happening behind the scenes. Brognola would have been in jail by now, his home and office under guard, if he had not convinced the Oval Office — at least to some small degree — that he was being framed. The President's support would soon evaporate if Hal could not produce substantial evidence.
In the meantime it was simply that the meeting struck Mack Bolan as a waste of time. He owed the President a certain debt of gratitude for setting him up in the Phoenix program, giving him the freedom to conduct his war worldwide. But any debt had long been paid in blood. He forced his mind away from April and the others, wondering precisely what the White House wanted from him. In the end, he finally decided that it would be best to wait and see.
No matter what was said or offered, Bolan's obligation of the moment was to Hal Brognola and his family. If he could not retrieve those gentle souls, his mission would be ultimately counted as a failure, and the measure of his vengeance would be nothing in comparison with Hal's traumatic loss.
If he could not secure the safety of Brognola's wife and children, scourge the animals who had abducted them, his presence in D.C. was nothing but a hollow mockery.
And he was wasting precious time.
But before he moved against the enemy, he had a date to keep.
Mack Bolan braced himself to meet The Man.
8
Susan Landry pushed her chair back from the computer keyboard, stretching as she double-checked the paragraph that she had just completed on the monitor. She caught a typo and deleted it, reentered the proper spelling of the word and thanked her lucky stars again that she had purchased the machine. With its many functions, the word processor had taken half the effort out of getting stories ready for the wire. The other half, of course, was still the digging — good old-fashioned legwork, phonework, or whatever — and she doubted whether any new technology would ever help reporters cover that end of their beat.
In fact, she loved the work involved in digging out a story. Though she would complain about it with the best — comparing blisters, insults, the occasional menacing letter — she thrived on the research, the intrigue involved in rooting out corruption, searching for the dirty laundry. It was something she excelled at, and the knowledge of her own ability provided confidence required for tackling the tough — and sometimes dangerous — assignments.