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  "Hey, man, it isn't my war. I just do what they tell me. I'd suggest you think about that. Talk to Vince before you go off half-cocked."

  Hoffman realized he was in a bind. "Yeah, I guess I'll do that."

  "I didn't like it much at first, either. But, you know, it's what you get used to. I've been here awhile. I'm used to it. You will be, too, before you know it."

  "I don't think so, Chuddy."

  "Don't get involved, man. Go along with the program. It's better for everybody. Safer, too."

  "You threatening me?"

  Johnson shrugged. Hoffman leaned into the jeep to shut off the headlights. He heard Johnson move and turned just as the taller man barreled into him. Hoffman fell back, slamming his hip into the side of the jeep. Johnson grabbed for his throat, digging his wiry fingers into Hoffman's windpipe. The older man tried to wriggle free, then jerked his legs high into the air. He was able to lock one knee around his opponent's neck. He started pulling and Johnson let go of his throat.

  Hoffman jerked harder, and Johnson sank his teeth into the flesh just above the knee. The merc reached for the survival knife hanging from his garrison belt, and Hoffman jerked a third time. The snap sounded louder than it was in the darkness, louder still compared to the sudden silence.

  Hoffman disentangled, then climbed to his feet. His throat was full of fire, and he rubbed at the raw skin on his neck where Johnson's nails had dug in.

  It was the end of the line, and he knew it, knew that he had felt it coming. Well, now it was here, and he had a decision to make. It wasn't going to be easy, and he didn't even have a clue where to start. But he knew he'd better find one, and quick.

  Chapter Three

  The traffic of early evening had long gone. An occasional eighteen wheeler roared past, taking advantage of the unwritten law permitting highballing truckers to bury the needle if they kept to the straight and narrow.

  Bolan listened to the whine of heavy tires way off in the distance, the powerful diesel humming steadily, the pitch of both rising slowly until the truck barreled past like a freight train, then slowly faded away. In some ways it was like his own passage through the world. He was a bolt out of the blue, gone before anyone knew he'd been there.

  Restless, Bolan sat up, grabbed a light jacket and slipped it on to hide the Beretta 93-R bolstered under his arm. He opened the door to the room and stepped onto the chipped concrete sidewalk that ran the length of the motel. Leaning against the frail column supporting the roof, he watched the night. It was dark and motionless, except for the blinking red arrow under the dim blue Vacancy sign.

  He noticed a car two stalls up from his own, a man at the wheel puffing on a small cigar. He stepped out from under the roof into a soft mist drifting through the air. The man in the car opened his door and climbed out, the dome light briefly lighting his face. Bolan kept his body turned slightly, watching the man close his car door and toss the cigar butt over his shoulder, almost as if it were a ritual.

  Bolan had reached the tree line at the edge of the parking lot when the man started toward him. He waved and shouted something the warrior couldn't hear. A bright flame told him why. The man had another cigar jammed into his teeth and was trying to talk around it while he fired it up.

  The man continued to walk toward him, barely watching where he was walking. Bolan leaned against a tree, concealing his left side and pulling the Beretta. The man was fifteen feet away now, still not quite satisfied with his light. But he stopped and looked at the cigar.

  "Who are you?" the warrior asked.

  "That's my line, buddy. But you asked first, and I'm polite, so I'll tell you. Name's Byron Wade, Lieutenant Byron Wade." There was no emphasis on the rank, Bolan noticed. Wade had merely added it as an afterthought. "Miami Police Department. You got a minute?"

  "You have any identification?"

  "Sure." He tossed a small leather card case. Bolan snatched it out of the air and checked it. "Okay. What do you want?"

  "A friend in the DEA told me where to find you, Mr. Belasko. I've got a few questions." Michael Belasko was the cover name Mack Bolan was using for this mission.

  "Shoot."

  "Want to tell me what happened out on the water?"

  "No."

  "Are you responsible for the stiff in the boat?"

  "No."

  "Should I believe that?"

  "I guess I wouldn't, if I were you. But you do what you have to."

  "You have any idea about the hornet's nest you kicked open here?"

  "I'm working on it."

  Wade turned his back and struggled with the cigar again. This time he got it lit. Wreathed in blue smoke, he turned back to Bolan. "I've got a proposition for you, Mr. Belasko."

  When Bolan didn't respond, Wade puffed twice, then waved the smoke away with the back of his hand. "It goes like this — I'll tell you what I know if you tell me what you know. I could use a hand from a hotshot Justice agent on this thing."

  "I don't know if I can do that." Bolan didn't bother to inform Wade that he wasn't a Justice agent. The information could put a whole new complexion on the situation.

  "I could haul you in."

  "Maybe you should."

  "Wouldn't be fair to you."

  "That bother you?"

  "Yeah, it does. There's not enough fairness to go around. And since I know something I'll bet you don't, I have a slight advantage at the moment."

  "All right, let's have it. If it makes any difference to me, I'll tell you what I know."

  "Fair enough. The stiff? He was a spook. Part-time, contract man, true, but a spook is a spook, am I right?"

  "Tell me more."

  "C…I…A. Clear? Understand what I'm telling you?"

  "Yeah, I do."

  "You boys from Justice didn't know that, did you?"

  "No."

  "Your turn."

  "What do you want to know?"

  "All of it, if you can. If you can't, I want to know why you can't."

  "Okay. I was following a tip on a drug run. The dead man was a mule. He hooked up with a freighter off the coast about thirty miles or so. Coming back, I was on his tail and he spotted me."

  "I thought you said you didn't waste him."

  "You want to hear it all or not?"

  "All right, I'm sorry. Forgive my inquisitive nature. I'm a cop, after all."

  "He turned on me and started shooting. I fired back to keep him off me. His boat caught fire. I tried to warn him, but he didn't understand until it was too late. The boat blew."

  "And out of the goodness of your heart you fished him out so the sharks wouldn't get him."

  "Not really. He was all I had. I wanted him alive. But I figured I might learn something if I knew who he was."

  "So what's the rest of it?"

  "You want more?"

  "A little, yeah. Like what happened to the DEA's launch that you left sitting on the bottom of the lagoon out there. He do that or did you?"

  "Neither. I don't know who did it."

  "Did you know he was full of bullet holes from a big mother of a gun, probably an M-50 or M-60? We're still waiting for the M.E. to report."

  "Yeah, I knew that."

  "But you didn't do it."

  "I already told you that."

  "You fish anything else out of the drink?"

  Bolan didn't answer.

  "I'll take that as a yes. It wouldn't be dope now, would it?"

  The warrior remained silent.

  "You mind telling me what you did with it?"

  "Would you believe me if I did?"

  "Try me."

  "I flushed it."

  "All right, I'll tell you what I'm going to do, pal. But I'm only going to do this because I have a hunch about you, a gut instinct, if you will, the kind I often end up regretting, but can't afford to ignore. There's been no official ID on the corpse yet, but I know who, and what, he is. I haven't told anybody because I don't want a fucking headache two miles wide, which is exactly what
I'm going to get as soon as somebody else figures out who he is. And they will do that very shortly. You can bet your ass. As far as I'm concerned, spook or no, one dead mule is fine, although not as good as two dead mules. And so on. So I'm going to sit on this for a while, provided you tell me who you are. And I mean exactly. Right now!"

  "Got a pencil?"

  "What for?"

  "I'll give you a telephone number. Let them tell you."

  Wade scrounged a stubby pencil out of his raincoat pocket. He licked the point, then said, go ahead. He jotted the number down with short strokes. When he was finished, he said, "I see by the area code that we're into some heavy shit here. Looks like that headache will be a three miler.

  "Let me tell you just one more thing, then," Wade went on. "Miami is full of spooks. We got semispooks, semipro spooks, retired spooks, reactivated spooks, has-beens and wannabe's. They keep some strange company, and I wouldn't mind if they all killed one another one Sunday while I was in church. But it ain't gonna happen. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't know who this guy was working for, not really. So watch your ass, because anybody, and I do mean anybody, could be a friend of his. It might even be a friend of yours. Comprende?"

  Bolan understood only too well. "There's a phone in my room."

  "Let's go make that call."

  * * *

  When Wade was gone, Bolan lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He had no choice but to hold out on the cop; he needed the kind of information Wade wasn't likely to have. He knew that if Wade did have access to it, others might know somebody was looking. It was safer, for him and for Wade, to hold a little back.

  Lost in thought, he stared at the fly-speckled ceiling. A question haunted him — why? Bolan knew only too well it was the one question a scientist never permitted himself, and the one question which, more than any other, concerned men in his line of work. Understanding human behavior, the reasons for it, motive, was the most difficult aspect of his job.

  Yet without it he was paralyzed. On the other hand, staring the question in the face was enough to short-circuit every nerve. It could numb the brain, freeze the hand halfway between thin air and a holster, even get you killed.

  Looking too closely at the things men did to one another was bad enough. Trying to understand why they did them, what it was that made men willing and able to do them was all but impossible. But of all the crimes that he had encountered, the warrior had never been able to understand why a man could turn his back on the things he professed to believe in just to line his pockets. Clearly money was part of the answer, but only a part, perhaps the smallest and least significant.

  Selling drugs to innocent kids was about as evil as a man could get, but how much more evil was a man whose obligation was to prevent that evil and, instead, abetted it? Lining his pockets in the process, true enough, but why did money turn some heads and not others? The drug lords had money to spare, rolling hundred-dollar bills into tubes, snorting coke through them as casually as a kid sucked soda through a straw, so casually that it was an insult to anyone who ever needed a buck.

  And no matter how hard Bolan tried, no matter how many dealers went down, no matter how many couriers were torn to bits by their own cupidity, the problem just kept getting worse. It spread like a cancer, and at times Bolan felt he was out there on the front line all alone. Knowing he wasn't didn't make him feel any better. Knowing that there were men who served two masters made it feel a whole lot worse.

  Bolan closed his eyes reluctantly, as if he were betraying some commitment he felt but didn't understand. He knew he was taking things too personally. He knew, too, that he couldn't change if he wanted to. But sometimes he felt so tired that he wondered if he could go on, even for another day. And then, when he thought about comrades who had refused to give up, he didn't see how he could stop. He owed it to them not to, as much as to himself, as much as to any sense of duty.

  It was easy for a man to deceive himself, to let self-importance, ego, take over. But Bolan was no ordinary man. He had an ego as much as anyone else, but unlike most men, he kept it under tight rein. It served him. He was its master. He did what he had to, not what self-aggrandizement would tempt him to do. No showboating, no grandstanding, just the plodding, incessant weariness of anonymity.

  And he could step back and look at what he had done and nod, not with pride but with a matter-of-fact acceptance that it was important work, and that he had done it well. It was the quiet satisfaction of a master, almost zenllke in its egoless purity. There were nights, though, and this was one of them, when he couldn't help but wonder whether it made any difference. If he died during the night, would the world be a worse place when the sun rose? Mack Bolan didn't know.

  But he had to keep fighting.

  Chapter Four

  Byron Wade sipped the cold coffee on his desk. He made a face, took another sip, then reached for the phone. Its blinking light was distracting him even more than the insistent buzz of the intercom.

  "Yeah, Wade," he snapped." All right, yeah. I'll be right there."

  He'd been expecting the call all morning. Longer, in fact. Once he eyeballed the stiff, he knew there would be a lot of very low-profile — but intense — interest. He thought back to his meeting with Belasko and the phone call to some high-muck-a-muck Fed in Washington. But the big man was bona fide, so he'd keep his part of the bargain solid. As long as he could.

  The hall was empty when Wade stepped through the open door. The phone rang, this time a bell, indicating an outside line, but he ignored it. Three offices down Captain Randolph Parsons waited in the doorway.

  When Wade reached him, Parsons stepped back enough to make room for his subordinate to pass, then closed the door.

  "Sit down, By." Parsons was using his syrupy voice, and Wade ground his teeth.

  Taking a chair across from Parsons's desk, Wade crossed one leg over the opposite knee, glanced at his dangling foot just long enough to notice his shoes needed shining, then rubbed a hand over his red-rimmed eyes.

  "I know it's late, but this was too important."

  "That's all right, Randy. It's not like I have a home life anymore. Go ahead. What is it?"

  "That stiff we got in last night."

  "What about him? He's not really dead, or what?"

  "Oh, he's dead. That's not the problem. It's not what he is. It's what he was."

  Wade sat there, chewing on his lower lip. He knew what was coming but had to pretend he didn't. He hoped he could pull it off. When it became apparent Parsons wanted him to ask, he took a deep breath, then did what he always did. "What was he?" he asked.

  "He has friends in Langley. You tell me."

  "Shit!" Wade stood and ran a hand through his unruly hair. Parsons watched in fascination, trying to decide whether Wade wanted to straighten the tangles or make them worse. The problem with Wade, who was a good cop and a better friend, was that you were never sure, not just about his hair, but about everything he did.

  Finally Wade expelled his breath in an explosive rush. "You know. Randy, I read a book once, about Bugsy Siegel. You know what it was called?"

  "No, what?"

  "It was called We Only Kill Each Other."

  "So what's your point?"

  "My point is, every time we turn over a rock, we find one of these assholes with a hole in him. We turn over another rock, and we find the guy who put it there. And every time, we find everybody has the same damn uncle. It's getting old. I wish to hell they would all go to Guatemala or some fucking place. Then they could shoot each other to pieces for all I care."

  "You sound bitter, By."

  "Who, me?" Wade laughed. "Bitter? No way. I love trying to investigate a homicide with ail these Feds stepping on each other's dick. I only get pissed when they step on mine."

  "We've already got a bite on this one. Guy named Arledge. He'll be here in fifteen or twenty minutes."

  "What's he want? Too late for mouth-to-mouth."

  "I gather he want
s to apprise us of the federal interest."

  "You mean he wants to orchestrate the cover arrangements, don't you?"

  Parsons spread his arms wide. "Hey, I don't like it any better than you do. But what can we do about it?"

  "We could tell him to go fuck himself. Just this once."

  "What good would that do?"

  "Make me feel better."

  "Look, I know how you feel. But you know how it is. There's a lot of shit going down out there." He gestured vaguely toward the street. "We don't know all the details."

  "Secrets. You know what I think? I think every time one of their cowboys goes off the deep end, they just pump the lake out and pretend nobody drowned. That's what I think. If they kept a tighter rein on these goons, it would be a hell of a lot better for everybody." The glass rattled, and Wade looked at the door. "That him?"

  "Beats me."

  "He know how we got the good news?"

  "No."

  "You gonna tell him?"

  "If he says pretty please, then maybe. Hell, it was only an anonymous tip, anyway, but let him sweat a little. All right?"

  "Suits me."

  Wade got up and opened the door. A tall man with the sharp features of a hungry weasel stood with his knuckles poised for another rap on the glass. The lieutenant stepped back, and the visitor walked into the office. "Shut the door," he said to Wade over his shoulder.

  Wade made a face, then sat down. The visitor glared at him, turned and grabbed the door by the knob.

  "Don't slam it," Parsons said.

  "You Parsons?" the visitor asked.

  "Says so on the door, doesn't it?"

  The visitor jerked a thumb at Wade. "Who's he?"

  "Whatever happened to hello?" the lieutenant asked. "Kids…" He shook his head as if he'd never understand.

  "I'm Vincent Arledge." The guy spoke his own name as if it should mean something to his hosts. When neither man said anything, Arledge continued, "You want to tell me what happened?"

  "We don't really know what happened," Parsons replied. "We've got a stiff. A check of his prints rang a few bells in D.C. That's all I can tell you."