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  “Yes I—I see that,” she weepily admitted. “And I—I think, now that it’s opened up, I—I think Grandpa or his friends must have been contacted even before they took me to the pool. They were holding me in the pro shop. And there were a number of telephone conversations. Very urgent conversations. Oh, three or four.”

  “And they didn’t try to sweat you for information.”

  “No. How’d you know?”

  He gave her a knowing look. “Just by looking at you, twit”

  “I’m not a twit.”

  Bolan grinned. “What is a twit?”

  “I’m not sure. Sort of a shrew, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m not one.”

  “I made it up,” he admitted, grinning. “Took a verb and made it a noun. Like truce.”

  She colored and told him, “We could try that on again, you know.”

  “No reason why not,” he said. “We’re all square now, aren’t we?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Well—let’s tuck it all in, girl.”

  “The second time Morello snatched me … I had just come from an office in the Terminal Tower. Your reasoning is perfect. The office is leased by Mr. Hirschbaum.”

  “Uh-huh. Still trying to beard the lion, huh? After all my warnings.”

  “Yes, well, as you said … I’m terribly naive, I guess. I had to make one last try. I couldn’t even get past the reception desk. They kept me waiting for about ten minutes, then turned me out. Morello’s goons were waiting for me outside.”

  Bolan released a long, weary sigh.

  “So they knew Morello had me that time, for sure. They sicced him on me. And there was a final contact. You remember? I called your mobile number and we had to wait while you called back? Morello called them during that period. I knew it was them by the way Morello kowtowed. He told them that he had your h-head in his pocket. And he was laughing as he told them how he’d put it there. There was a lot of joviality. They wanted him to come to this meeting and he was trying to get out of it, trying to assure them that everything was okay now. He mentioned Judge Daly several times. You must have that call on your collectors.”

  “Those collectors are no more,” he told her. “And I collected nothing after that first call from you.”

  “Oh. Well. Anyway, Morello convinced them that everything was okay now. They talked some about Judge Daly and his probable replacement in the scheme. And he did not want to attend that meeting. Told them he’d been up all night and all day. He was tired and besides his ship was wounded. He was sending it somewhere for repairs—some drydock which he referred to as a ‘snug harbor.’ And he wanted to go along and take that chance to unwind and rest up. And he looked at me and laughed as he was telling them that. There was a lot of snickering and I knew that I was the subject of that. But Grandpa could not possibly have known what that lunatic had in mind for me. He could not.”

  Bolan replied, “Probably not, no. Grandpa himself maybe didn’t know about any of that. Left think it that way, eh?”

  “Yes, God yes, there’s no other way to think it.”

  Very casually he asked her, “Where was that meeting?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t catch that. It was for ten o’clock.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Guess I should take that in, then.”

  Those eyes withdrew again. She gasped, “You said—you promised …”

  “Relax,” he said. “I’m just playing your game now. You said the Terminal Tower?”

  “Well, I don’t know where they’re meeting! You promised me, Mack. Damn you, you promised!”

  He sighed and said, “Your game, Susan. Your way.”

  “You’ll just ‘club’ him?”

  “I’m not the judge, Susan. I’ll let him be his own.”

  She sighed and relaxed, taking that explanation favorably.

  “I’d best get going. It’s already past ten. Go back to sleep. Wake you when I get back.” He smiled sadly. “We’ll truce a bit when all the hurts are better.”

  She said, very quietly, “No truce is possible, Mack, with blood between us. Understand that.”

  He understood that.

  “See you later,” he said, and went out of there.

  Bolan took a cab to the yacht club at Edgewater Park and reclaimed his battle cruiser. It was more than that, of course. It was also base camp, mission control, home. All tamper seals were intact, indicating no breach of cover security.

  He changed into a quiet business suit and rummaged through a file of ID wallets until he found one he liked. The Beretta Belle was snugged beneath the suit jacket at the left arm.

  The time was nearly ten-thirty when he fired the power plant and sent the big cruiser back onto the streets of Cleveland.

  Police patrols were in great evidence. The radio scanners were showing plenty of activity on the official airwaves, also. The downtown streets were relatively calm and quiet, though. He nosed the cruiser into a commercial park-yourself lot and went the rest of the way on foot.

  It was a nice night, very clear, stars twinkling from their faraway habitats. And Bolan felt about that far, at the moment, from …

  Right, Susan. Bloodied truces were a bit difficult to manage.

  He signed in at the security station in the lobby, showing the uniformed guard federal credentials and telling him, “No announcements. I get up there and discover I was expected, I’ll come down all over your ass with enough charges to bury you forever.”

  The guy went white and assured the federal agent that no announcements would be forthcoming.

  He took the elevator to the thirty-fifth floor and found the suite of offices he sought behind gilt-edged lettering:

  CLEVELAND PIPELINE ASSOCIATES

  How appropriate.

  The reception room was brightly lighted. A guy in wrinkled plaids sprawled there with a Playboy at his lap.

  Bolan asked him, “Are they here?”

  The guy asked, “Who are you?”

  Bolan showed him the credentials with the left hand and chopped him with the right as the guy bent toward the inspection. He fell back into the chair with a grunt. An ID wallet revealed the role. He was a Pinkerton.

  Sure. Very clean, very proper.

  Bolan found The Four in a large central office made up like a board room. Gleaming mahogany panels at the walls, highly polished circular table with cush chairs of crushed velour, the ever necessary portable bar with all the juices, four very startled “gentlemen” gaping disapprovingly at the intrusion.

  Though he’d never placed eyes there before, Bolan could identify each of these “gentlemen” in his own place.

  There was the silver-haired and sleekly sophisticated politician who’d built a lifetime on the take and erected a Hollywood shell around that rotten core. Paceman.

  And the boyish executive with eyes that could snap from puckish to malicious with the twitch of a lid, a real live Neanderthal with twentieth century manners and a cannibal’s appetite. O’Shea.

  Slot Two held the shyster lawyer cum instant millionnaire, a shifty-eyed scoundrel who’d sell you a car with no engine but guarantee full satisfaction on all nonmechanical parts in the small print. Scofflan.

  Finally, Numero Uno—hearty chairman of a dozen nonexistent corporations with fat accounts in too many foreign banks to count, not a Jew but a kike, the kind who gives a fine race that terrible reputation, a guy whose only God is money and whose only morality lies in the fastest way to make it. Hirschbaum, sure.

  The chairman of the board harrumphed and gnashed the stump of a cigar as he demanded an explanation for the uninvited visit. The others sat tensely with frosted drinks numbing the hands and tumbling thoughts, no doubt, enervating the brains.

  Bolan dropped a marksman’s medal to the shiny table.

  “Susan sends it with love,” he said coldly.

  Paceman twitched, and those eyes revealed the horribly nasty truth.

  O�
��Shea and Scofflan simply looked stunned.

  The chairman tried to turn it around. “Thank God she’s all right,” he boomed heartily. “You must be the young man who’s responsible for all the ruckus around town today. Can’t really say I approve but …” He laughed heartily and shook his head while regarding the “young man” with a warmly tolerant face. “You do get results, don’t you?”

  Bolan replied, “Usually.” He brought the Belle up and sent nine millimeters worth of results sighing into that warmly tolerant but quickly collapsing face.

  O’Shea flung his arms backward in pure reflex, eyes twitching rapidly from malicious to puckish to pure boyish terrified. Round two added a third eye, pure mortal dead.

  Scofflan made a run for it while the politician hung in there grimly for the final vote tally. Neither found comfort from rounds three and four.

  A blue folder fat with legalistic papers sat face up between the chairman’s dead hands. It was labeled CLEVELAND PIPELINE. Bolan retrieved the death medal and dropped it atop the bloodied folder.

  And, yes, how very appropriate.

  He ran into a highly distraught young lady on the sidewalk just outside the Terminal Tower, and he said, “Shame on you, Susan. You didn’t trust me.”

  Hope flickered there as she tried to respond to that. “I—I remembered … you told me a safe house is safe but once. I was afraid you weren’t coming back. I—I knew…”

  He said, “It’s okay now.”

  “Was he there? Did you talk to him?”

  Bolan nodded. “He found himself guilty, Susan.”

  “Don’t double-talk me, damn you!”

  “You’re right. Believe me, I am sorry. I gave him a bullet.”

  “Damn you! You promised!”

  “I said your game, your way. You conned me, kid. I conned you back. None of it is on your hands. I’ll wear it. Without shame. He earned it. Believe it.”

  “It wasn’t for him, dammit! It was for them! My mother and my grandmother! How could you make me do that to them?”

  “You didn’t do it to them,” Bolan said wearily. “In truth, neither did I. He did it to them. Long time ago. All those years, masquerading as a man. All the while, nothing but a shell with maggots inside.”

  She cried, “Oh, God!”

  He said, sadly, “It’s goodbye, I guess.”

  Those blues flashed, then quickly receded. “Yes. I guess it is.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Mack! I am going to write this story!”

  “Good for you. Watch the quotes.”

  She smiled feebly. “Nice old giant. Nice old weary, miserable giant. Watch those ten-league boots, huh?”

  He smiled back, trying to pack an eternity into one final look—then he went on and did not look back.

  No man was an island, no—nor an entire continent. At the moment, this one felt not even like a piece of one.

  It was the ultimate con job, perhaps. Upon himself, by himself.

  All he knew was that he was headed for the loneliest “home” in the universe.

  But at least, by God, it would not be the coldest. The Cleveland pipes would flow next winter.

  He hoped.

  Epilogue

  Dateline Cleveland. Slug it: “Baby, It’s Gonna Get Cold Outside”

  This began as a story I could never write. Well, tonight I’m writing it. Tomorrow I hope the whole world will be reading it. It’s a story not so much of greed and unbridled lust and rotten people as it is a story of human gallantry, unbelievable personal sacrifice, the sublimation of an entire magnificent human personality into the grim necessities of maintaining our precious civilization by whatever tools are handy, by whatever means can point toward a positive good.

  It’s a savage world, the man said, and the meek shall never inherit while the savages rule the heights. The man who said that is Mack Bolan, a tremendous giant who strolls all the heights and who could rule, you better believe it, but chooses instead to serve the meek.

  I am in love with this man. I so proclaim it to all the world and one day I hope to lie in his arms again as I did so unreservedly and so very proudly earlier today. But let this revelation not cloud the story I am about to tell—because, as you shall see, there are two sides to every human relationship—and this man also coldly and with great premeditation executed my own grandfather a few short hours ago.

  “I gave him a bullet,” said Mack the Giant as though he had conferred some sort of honor thereby.

  And maybe he did. I will tell the story and let the reader judge. It began one chilling day in the study of my grandfather’s home. His name is, or was, Franklin Adams Paceman—a proud name, is it not? No, it is not. You see, my grandfather was a rotten shell of a man with nothing but maggots inside. I know this may sound …

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Executioner series

  CHAPTER 1

  SOLUTIONS

  The big man crouched in darkness, immobile, his alert senses sending out reconnaissance probes into the surrounding blackness. Around him, the desert was vibrantly alive with secret movement—the nocturnal thrust and counterthrust of instinctive survival. Insects trilled lightly in the thorny bush beside the man, and somewhere on his flank a sidewinder lisped across the sand in its endless search for prey. The man, Mack Bolan, was also hunting, but his quarry was far deadlier than the venomous desert reptile.

  The Executioner was hunting cannibals. He had followed their spoor from the killing grounds in Cleveland to the arid expanses of Arizona, where he found them in abundance. The Mafia savages were there, daily strengthening their parasitic grip upon society in the Grand Canyon State. There had, indeed, been such a wealth of targets that Bolan spent the better part of a week in Tucson merely cataloguing them and gauging their numbers, seeking the most propitious point and moment to strike. Amid the now familiar recital of scams and swindles which everywhere marked the symptoms of the Mafia cancer, the Executioner had uncovered “something else.” Beginning with vague whispers, fragmented rumors of a “joint in the desert,” Bolan had gradually pieced together an admittedly incomplete portrait of something special brewing on the Tucson Mafia scene—“something else” worth further in-depth investigation.

  Bolan had found the “joint in the desert” late on his sixth day in Tucson. He had come without preconceptions, expecting nothing and open to any opportunity for a “handle” on this latest phase of his unending war. What he found was an enigma. A solution without a mystery, an answer lacking the question. And so he had returned in darkness, seeking that question which would, in turn, lead him on to yet other questions and their ultimate solutions.

  The Tucson Mafia’s “joint in the desert” was a military-style compound covering some thirty acres and ringed with tall chain-link and barbed-wire fences. In daylight, long, squat buildings were visible near the heart of the compound, all darkened now in the predawn hours.

  The big project of the Arizona Mafia was currently narcotics, the wholesale importation of marijuana and “brown” heroin by jeep, truck, and private plane across the 360-mile border shared by Arizona and Mexico. Of late, Federal narcotics officers had come to speak of an Arizona Corridor for drugs which threatened to equal and eventually eclipse the volume of the old French Connection routes from Europe. Dope and a readily accessible border had built the southwestern Mafia, but this apparent hardsite in the arid wastes carried little of the narcotics smell about it.

  Sure, there was the paved airstrip running north to south along the western rim of the compound, and Bolan would not be shocked to learn that more than one plane load of Mexican drugs had found their touchdown point there. But the joint itself was clearly more than an isolated heroin depot, and Bolan knew it at a glance. The mob preferred isolated and inconspicuous sites for such landings, and the Tucson mafiosi would never have considered erecting fences and buildings to advertise their purpose.

  The place was, theoretically, an outpost of the State Land Reclamation Com
mission, as proclaimed by the metal NO TRESPASSING signs on the perimeter. The official facade meant nothing to Bolan, and fifteen minutes of circuit riding in the guise of an idle rockhound had been enough to convince him that the cover was fraudulent. No canals or irrigation pipes crossed that perimeter, and the buildings, which he scanned casually through field glasses, lacked the nebulous “official” quality he had come to expect in sites devoted to scientific research at state expense.

  No, the place was a hardsite—or had been at one time. Neither Bolan’s daylight recon nor his silent nocturnal vigil had turned up more than a handful of hardmen moving too casually about their business. There was no open display of gun-leather, but those guys inside the compound were hardmen all the same. Bolan read their pedigree from a distance as easily as if they had been uniformed. City boys, unfamiliar and uncomfortable with desert living, even in the mild heat of early spring. They dressed casually in blue jeans and fatigues, but they moved like men more accustomed to flashy, expensive suits and alligator shoes.

  The Executioner meant to know their number and their purpose. He had opted for a soft probe, if at all possible, and had outfitted himself accordingly. He was in blacksuit and blackface. His “head weapon,” the big silver .44 Automag, rode military web at his right hip. The silenced 9mm Beretta Brigadier, the “Belle,” nestled in side-leather beneath his left armpit. Extra clips for both pistols circled his waist. Slit pockets in the legs of his skinsuit held a stiletto and other useful accessories. Black sneakers on his feet completed the doomsday ensemble.