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  "I didn't want to call you over an open channel," Turrin said, "but I need your help and I don't have a lot of time."

  "Where are you?"

  Turrin gave him the address. "I don't know what we're facing here, Striker, but it involves some pretty heavy hitters. From what I've turned up, at least a dozen people have been executed in the past ten or twelve days. I've asked enough right questions in the wrong places that somebody's probably made me by now." He sighed heavily. "I feel guilty every time I call Angelina. I haven't seen her in five days because I've been trying to move on this thing quickly and quietly. She thought all the undercover-in-the-field stuff was over. Hell, so did I."

  "Give me fifteen or twenty minutes," Bolan said, cutting into Turrin's monologue smoothly. He could almost feel the exhaustion in the man through the connection. Turrin had always maintained a sense of humor in situations where life seemed to hang on every heartbeat. It wasn't danger that was wearing on the little Fed now, the warrior knew, but something definitely was.

  "Be careful coming in, big guy," Turrin warned. "Like I said, the team we're hunting probably has my number and I haven't got a damn thing on them. But they're definitely unfriendlies."

  Bolan said goodbye and replaced the receiver as the first police officer approached the door. The Executioner accepted the papers from the man and returned the grin he was given.

  "Sorry to detain you, Mr. Belasko," the officer said, "but it made me kind of edgy to see you sitting back in here so quietly."

  "I've been moving around a lot these past few days," Bolan explained as he tossed the papers on top of the clipboard. "I found out I was more tired than I thought and figured I'd clear my head for a few minutes before I tried to make it back to my hotel."

  The cop nodded affably and walked back to the cruiser, joining his partner. He climbed in and started the engine, pulling forward to give Bolan a final wave before easing back into traffic.

  Bolan waited until the vehicle faded from view, then got out of the car. He took a penlight from a shirt pocket and squatted behind the rear bumper. Alternately using his eyes and his fingertips, he searched the back of the Trans Am, grunting in satisfaction when he found the magnetic tracer locked to the undercarriage of the car. He turned it over in his hands, trying to figure out if it was domestic or foreign.

  The cops, if the guys really were police officers, had definitely been looking for him tonight. But were they operating on their own, or were they part of a team assembled to find out who Michael Belasko was? CIA, FBI or KGB? he wondered. Or part of the group setting up the assassination strike?

  Bolan closed his eyes and drew in a breath, letting it out slowly. He pictured the cruiser in his mind, watching it roll out of the parking area again, this time at his command. Mentally he froze the cruiser at a time when the glow of the surrounding streetlights had lit up the plates. He concentrated on the numbers, then locked them into his memory. Kurtzman could unravel whatever trail accompanied the «cops» and the car. Right now Leo needed him.

  He dropped the bug onto the pavement, thinking whoever was trying to monitor his activities might conclude the device had vibrated loose on its own. It would at least give him a few minutes to lose himself before someone noticed the vehicle wasn't moving.

  He fastened his seat belt and jammed the Desert Eagle beside the passenger seat so that he could get to it quickly, then kicked the engine over and slid the car into gear.

  * * *

  Bolan had no difficulty finding the address Turrin had given him. He guided the sports car through the quiet streets, seeing reflections of the Trans Am's lights mirrored in blackened department store and office windows. He flicked down the window and looked up at the building Turrin had singled out.

  It was an older structure that had been refurbished during the urban renewal effort of the fifties and sixties. Standing ten stories high, it was dwarfed by most of the other buildings around it. D.C. hadn't started going upward with the increasing community until much later.

  Bolan parked the car at the curb and walked to the corner coffee shop where Leo had said he would be. His heels rang hollowly on the pavement, and he hunkered his shoulders against the light rain that had started falling moments earlier.

  He darted a quick glance at the office building again, trying to fathom why Turrin would be there. Brognola had mentioned the little Fed's absence in passing but hadn't seemed concerned about it. Evidently Turrin hadn't been checking in regularly. Or maybe not at all. The realization that something might have happened to Leo during the time it had taken him to drive across the city made Bolan's guts twist. He forced himself to keep his steps calm and measured despite the feeling of helplessness that gripped him.

  A shadow separated itself from the gloom in front of the small coffee shop and walked toward Bolan.

  The Executioner moved in closer to the wall beside him. He felt his heartbeat surge and felt the fatigue drop away from him, suppressed by his internal survival mechanism.

  The shadow wore an unfamiliar slouch hat and olive trench coat, but the gait belonged to Leo Turrin. The man from Justice lifted his hands and showed Bolan the coffee cups he was carrying.

  Bolan fell into step behind Turrin as the man led the way to the darkened doorway of a printing shop that conducted business only during daylight hours.

  "If I'm going to keep you up tonight," Turrin said, "the least I can do is buy you a cup of coffee."

  Bolan broke the perforation and smelled the liquid, feeling his taste buds kick into overdrive. How long had it been since he'd eaten? He couldn't honestly remember. There had been too much to absorb today with Brognola and the security teams.

  "What's on tap, Leo?" Bolan asked. He noticed the heavy bags under the man's eyes in the dim light of the streetlights, as well as the slouch of his friend's shoulders. Turrin had been pursuing his objective for some time, he realized, and wondered why something so important couldn't be taken to Brognola.

  "Have you been stateside for the past few days, Sarge?"

  Bolan shook his head.

  Turrin took a big gulp of coffee, scowling at the sudden furnace heat of it. "I can't even taste the damn stuff anymore, I've been drinking it so long." He sighed heavily. "You knew I was involved in the Witness Protection Program?"

  "I'd heard."

  "As Leonard Justice, I've supervised a few cases where we transplanted whole families to new locations and new identities. So I keep my hand in the program, enrolling new people and occasionally checking up on old acquaintances. Two weeks ago a guy turned up dead — someone I helped drop out of sight after he put the finger on a gambling operation under Vito Scorscini in Pittsfield a year or so before…" he hesitated over his choice of words, then shrugged and went on"…before you got back from Nam. Him, his wife and three sons. All of them were executed with a shotgun."

  Bolan heard the break in Turrin's voice but didn't say anything, knowing it was a pain the man would have to work out on his own.

  "The guy had been relocated here in D.C.," Turrin went on after a moment. "He was bright, Mack. A real family man. I envied him that. He always talked about his boys and how they were doing in sports, about how he and his wife always made time to go to their games, no matter how confused their schedules got. I only got to talk to him three, maybe four times, to let him know what was going on. I felt responsible for the guy. I was the one who convinced him to help put Scorscini away."

  "He must have been put away pretty deep to have been under this long, Leo."

  Turrin nodded. "Not deep enough, though." He sipped more coffee and stared blankly ahead. "A day or two later, hell, I can't really remember how all of this came together anymore, I found out another family in the program was murdered here in the D.C. area. A lady who had testified in a rape case against one of the Five Families' top dogs in New York. One of the don's favorite nephews or something. The guy went to prison and got killed in a fight. By that time the Feds had her and her daughter spirited away. After I found
this out, I started looking, Mack. Really looking. You know how it is when you know you know something but can't really put your finger on what is it you know?"

  Bolan nodded tightly, sensing the frustration and torment Turrin was trying to hold back.

  "I spent two days poring over murder files here in Washington, branching out into the suburbs. I took files home at night and locked myself away from Angelina and the kids. God, I owe that woman a week out on the town after this is over with. I haven't been able to tell her where I was day after day because I was afraid someone would be monitoring my phone. I've found bugs in my house before, goddamn it, put there by the CIA, the FBI, God knows who else. Not very often, maybe, but enough to let me know guys on our side don't really trust the fact that my association with the Mafia was strictly undercover work."

  "So what did you find?" Bolan asked, watching Turrin slump against the brick wall. The trench coat had slid open and exposed the Smith & Wesson .38 Bodyguard he had holstered butt-forward on his left hip. Leo hadn't been one much for guns, and Bolan wondered what it was that made his friend feel so vulnerable. Or so protective.

  "Twelve people, Mack," the little Fed stated in a cold and neutral voice Bolan wouldn't have recognized if he hadn't heard it coming from the man's lips. "In the past two weeks twelve people living in D.C. under the Witness Protection Program have been killed. Nobody knows about it or even seems to have correlated the deaths. Except me."

  "Because you were looking for it."

  Turrin nodded. "These people were placed in the city by different groups associated with the program, so it may take some time for the information to filter back to the main office. Even longer before the connection is made. In the meantime, more people are going to die."

  "You think someone inside the program is dirty?" The thought turned Bolan's stomach cold and hard inside. It had taken a lot of bravery for the witnesses to testify in court, and those individuals had known the price they were going to have to pay for that bravery. They had been ripped from familiar settings and placed in sometimes strange and new environments, where they could trust no one and had to carefully keep in mind the manufactured pasts the government agencies had given them. And all this while they were the innocent ones.

  "Damn it, Mack, I don't know what to think. These people are getting their information from somewhere."

  "What people?"

  "I guess I'm getting a little ahead of myself." Turrin drained the rest of his coffee. "After I put all this together, I hit the bricks myself. Most of the police agencies in town are tied up with planning the meet between Gorbachev and the new Prez. And I didn't have a lot to go on. Sure, four different families in the program have been wiped out, but the statistics in this town for murder are high enough that maybe that fact wouldn't throw a red flag out to anyone. Maybe I was taking it too personal. At any rate, I still have connections in a few of the right places. Quiet connections, though."

  Bolan switched to a different quadrant of the star-filled sky as helicopter rotors tore through the night. He located the source of the churning engines as it blew in from the east with the dry wind.

  "A guy who would know told me Scorscini was contacted by a group offering to put the witness and his family down for a price. The amount was right, my guy said, and Scorscini put it up."

  "Did you get a name?" Bolan asked.

  Turrin shook his head. "I don't know if Scorscini got one. My guy said the leader of the group gave Scorscini some pictures of another family they had done. It convinced Scorscini."

  "And he was interested after all these years?"

  "Yeah, you know how it is with the Families, Mack. An eye for an eye as long as both parties live."

  "What brings you here?"

  Turrin pointed at the office building across the street. "This is where the next hit is supposed to take place."

  "How sure are you?" Bolan shifted, scanning the almost deserted street. Overhead the helicopter was making another pass.

  "Sure enough to call you once I pried the number out of Brognola."

  "What did you tell Hal?"

  "That I had a hunch about some things and wanted a backup. He agreed that you were the one to call. I don't want anyone else on it yet, Mack. There'd be too much clutter around us to be able to get a fix on this thing."

  Bolan nodded. He had already been feeling the pressure of too many teams working on one project with the surveillance concerning the arrival of the Soviets. It felt good to be moving again on his own, with no restrictions and no laws except the ones he lived and fought by. "Who's in the building?"

  Turrin joined him at the front of the doorway. "Kirby Howell. He's a lawyer working for a small firm on the eighth floor. Wednesday nights are his night to stay late and do the files." Turrin checked his watch. "It's almost ten now. He should be finishing soon."

  Bolan studied the lights on the eighth floor, watching to see how much of the room was visible to the outside observer. There were no curtains that he could see, but none of the nearby buildings were high enough to allow a sniper beyond the building's perimeter. The assassination would have to take place inside. "Does Howell know?"

  "Yeah, I contacted him a couple of hours ago before I started trying to find you. He agreed to stay at work until I could get him an escort home. I've already assigned four agents to protect his son."

  "It takes a pretty gutsy guy to sit there knowing someone is stalking him."

  "Howell is a gutsy guy," Turrin replied. "He's in his early thirties and grew up in Harlem. He was good at track and got a scholarship to go to college. Then he held down a couple of nighttime jobs while he earned his law degree. Three years ago, be saw Adelio Madrano personally execute one of his rivals in the street and testified at the trial. At first he refused protection from the program, believing everything had been settled in court. He came home one evening to find two men torching his apartment. Howell broke the door down and forced his way through the flames. He managed to save his three-year-old son, but his wife was dead. Six months later the program shuffled him here."

  "You're sure the hit is supposed to go down tonight?"

  "Madrano's father was promised, and you don't give a promise to someone of his rank lightly."

  "You might if you were sure no one knew who you were."

  "Yeah," Turrin agreed, "but these guys have a proven track record they're using to promote their business."

  "It sounds like they know the whole setup before they ever approach their buyers. They just lay the scenario out and name their price."

  Turrin nodded.

  Bolan glanced at his watch. Ten o'clock. "How many people are in the building?"

  "Maybe twenty, including the four security people, and most of those are scattered over all ten floors."

  "It's time for Howell to check out, isn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  As he led the way across the street, Bolan checked his weapons. The Desert Eagle and Beretta were familiar weights across his upper body. His jacket pockets contained two garrotes and a short knife. The Gerber combat blade was sheathed upside down on his right calf for an easier draw.

  He let Turrin take the lead when they reached the first security checkpoint and watched him show the guard his Justice ID. Just as Bolan stepped inside the air-conditioned atmosphere of the building, he heard the chopper rotors pass by again. Then the door closed and he had his own ID out for inspection.

  "Thanks for coming, Mack."

  "You've been there for me."

  A feeling of lightness in Bolan's stomach signaled their arrival at the eighth floor. The doors slid back. The Executioner checked Leo's movement with a hand and held the door open, sweeping the empty hallway with a glance before they stepped out.

  Canned music followed them down the tiled hallway as they made their way to Howell's office. The Executioner surveyed the closed doors of the three other offices on the floor, ready to move quickly if he had to.

  Turrin knocked and waited.

&n
bsp; Bolan could see the tension eating at the smaller man in the way Turrin kept balling his fists as he stood before the door and tried to look unconcerned. When the little Fed raised his hand to knock again, the door opened.

  The black man behind the door glanced at Bolan, but didn't step back to admit either man. He was young, Bolan saw, and looked like he belonged in the three-piece suit he wore. The only thing that looked out of place was the automatic filling his right hand and the worried look that mirrored Turrin's.

  "This the guy you were telling me about, Leo?" Howell asked.

  "Yeah. Any problems?"

  The man shook his head.

  Flashing lights drew Bolan's attention away from Howell. He stared at the window at the end of the hall, past the blackness of the heavy tint, and saw lights suspended eight stories up just as the vibration from the helicopter's rotors echoed in his ears.

  The glass shattered under a sudden burst of autofire, fragments skittering brightly across the tiled floor like diamonds.

  Bolan unleathered the .44 smoothly and drilled a 240-grain hollowpoint toward the shadowy figure holding the automatic rifle. He grabbed a fistful of Turrin's trench coat and pulled him toward the elevators, realizing the office was no place to be trapped. "Follow Leo," the Executioner growled at Howell. He held the Magnum in a Weaver's grip and finished off the 8-round dip into the side of the helicopter, watching the chopper rise out of view.

  He changed clips on the run, keeping watch over his shoulder, knowing the attackers wouldn't give up easily.

  Turrin was holding the elevator doors open when Bolan reached the cage, the .38 S&W Bodyguard in his right hand. Howell had his own weapon up and ready.

  "Take it down, Leo," Bolan directed as he punched the first floor.

  "You can't stay up here," Turrin protested.

  "Get Howell out of the way," Bolan said as the doors closed, "and call for some backup. Somebody's got to stay here and run interference."