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  “Is David there?” he asked the houseman as he stepped inside.

  The guy nodded and said, “Where else.”

  “There” was the morning room—a bay-windowed breakfast nook at the east side of the house. David Eritrea, personal secretary and “business manager” to the aged and infirm lord of the manse, was an habitual early riser. Some of the housemen claimed that the guy never slept—that they heard his footsteps moving around upstairs all night long, that his habitual orange juice and toast with the rising sun was not an awakening discipline but merely the long-awaited end to a lonely night.

  Old man Marinello, it was said, was subject to terrifying nightmares. House talk had it that the faithful Eritrea crept about in the night only so as to be on hand to awaken the boss and soothe him in such moments. It had been that way since that terrible night in Jersey when Mack the Bastard blew the old man in half with a grenade.

  The security chief found Eritrea in his customary spot, seated at the window, with the customary breakfast before him. A classy guy—he always looked the same, sounded the same, acted the same. A bit prissy, maybe—but no one had ever said so to his face.

  “Good morning, Billy,” Eritrea greeted him. “What evil is bursting from that worried head on such a fine morning?”

  The guy was uncanny. He could pick up mental vibes, Billy was certain of that. Nobody ever before had been able to read the security chief’s poker face.

  “Somebody abandoned a truck on the front drive,” Gino reported quietly. “No one saw it or heard it come up. One minute it wasn’t there. Next minute it was.”

  Eritrea stared at him for a moment before replying, “So call the police and have it hauled away.”

  “It’s not, uh—I don’t think we want that.”

  “We don’t want that?”

  “No, sir. I sent a boy to check it out. It’s a refrigerator van. Carrying a load of meat.”

  Eritrea raised the orange juice to his lips and murmured, “So?”

  “Human meat.”

  The cool bastard drained the glass of juice and lit a cigarette before replying, “Okay. Better bring it inside, eh.”

  Gino nodded and started to leave when Eritrea called him back.

  “Billy. Have the powder men check it out first. Stay away until they give it a clean bill.”

  “Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”

  “Then send for Barney Matilda and his crew. I want him to handle it. Tell him I’ll expect a full report within the hour.”

  “He lives about twenty minutes away, Mr. Eritrea. That doesn’t give—”

  “Within the hour, Billy.”

  The security chief acknowledged the instructions and hurried away.

  Within the hour, sure. It wasn’t as easy as downing a glass of orange juice, David. It wasn’t even full daylight yet. Within the hour, eh. Call out the bomb squad, call out the garbage detail and ID specialists, get a complete make on the vehicle and its grisly contents, and bring it all back in a nice neat package within the hour.

  Okay. That was what David wanted. As usual, that was what David was going to get.

  The full task actually required some fifty-five minutes. Barney Matilda was a semi-retired senior citizen who’d been down many bloody roads with old man Marinello—and he was still the best cleanup man in the business.

  Billy Gino accompanied the old guy to the upstairs sitting room where Marinello customarily held court, and they sat there in awkward silence staring at each other for several minutes before Eritrea came in.

  “How’s Augie?” Barney immediately inquired.

  “Best sleep he’s had all night,” Eritrea reported with a soft voice and a commanding look. “He always sleeps best at first light. Let’s see that he enjoys it. What do we have here, Barney?”

  “Some kind of war, I’d guess,” the old guy replied. “But I can’t figure why they’d send the garbage to us. Nineteen boys, David. All died about the same time, I’d say, give or take an hour. All of them were gunshot. More than one weapon did the killing, of course. Thirty-twos and thirty-eights, looks like—dum-dum slugs. The thirty-eights did a lot of tearing and shredding, more than they had a right to. High-powered charges, maybe—a Luger type or something like that—magnums, maybe.”

  “Did you get some identity?”

  “I couldn’t make them all. You’ll have to wait for fingerprint ID for the full story there. A day or so, I’ll rush it through. But I made a few Boston boys. And I made a few Albany boys. Arm and leg men, David. Contract specialists.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them we made, yeah. I’ll have something more definite later today. I mean connections, you know”

  “What about the truck?”

  “Very interesting truck. Belongs to a packing house in Springfield, Massachusetts. Has their decals two feet high on both sides. Guy up there says it went to Pittsfield yesterday afternoon on an overnight turnaround. I left it at that. It’s legit. There’s no key in the ignition. It’s been hotwired.”

  “Pittsfield, eh,” Eritrea commented thoughtfully. “That’s only an hour or so from Albany, isn’t it? You figure someone skipped into Massachusetts and snatched a truck just to set this up?”

  The old man shook his head. “Doesn’t figure that way, David. I think they wanted us to know for damn sure where the truck came from. I think someone sent us a message. I just can’t figure why. Can you?”

  Eritrea grinned suddenly. That was bad. From personal and intimate experience, Billy Gino knew that was bad.

  “Get the garbage out of here,” the guy said coldly.

  “I’ll send it to the rendering plant.”

  “Whatever, just do it and do it right. Soon as you have a full rundown, I want it. That means names and affiliations, the whole bag. You know what to do with the truck.”

  “Yeah. We’ll cycle it through.”

  “Billy!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This one gets the silent treatment.”

  “Oh yes, sir.”

  “Make sure everybody understands. We’ll never hear of this again, will we.”

  “I already forgot what we were talking about, Mr. Eritrea.”

  “That means you, too, Barney.”

  The old guy waved his hand in dismissal of the ridiculous. “Oh, sure.”

  “Double security around here, Billy, until I say different. Nobody comes and nobody goes without my knowledge.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Send the house boss up here on your way out. And tell Nick I’ll be going to the city in thirty minutes. I’ll want full security for that trip. Get the cars ready.”

  The guy stood up. That meant goodbye. Billy Gino leapt to his feet and took old Barney by the arm just in case the guy hadn’t got that message.

  “Give Augie my best,” the old fellow requested as he was being led away.

  “I’ll tell him you were here,” Eritrea said solemnly.

  Matilda looked at Gino and back again to Eritrea. “Tell him I’d like to see him. It’s been a long time. Tell him I—”

  “He was asking about you just yesterday,” Eritrea said softly. He smiled. “Told me a very funny story about you and Charley Lucky on the Atlantic Pier.”

  The old man beamed and allowed himself to be gently hauled from the room. As they were descending the stairs to the main level, though, those shrewd old eyes threw a parting glance toward that upstairs room as he asked Billy Gino, “When’s the last time you saw Augie?”

  “I see him every day,” the security boss lied, then wondered why he’d done that.

  “I haven’t seen him since just before the Montreal meet,” Barney complained.

  Billy Gino was still wondering. When was the last time he’d seen the boss? “David runs this joint, now,” he told the old man.

  Crafty eyes flashed at him. “David may be running more than you think, Billy boy.”

  Gino chuckled at that, but only to cover his own wandering thoughts. “David ha
s been Augie’s good right man for a long time,” he reminded the oldster. “I guess since the accident he’s had to be his legs, too. Don’t you worry none about Augie Marinello, Barney. Not while David is around. They’re just like father and son.”

  The old man gave him an odd look and went on to the door alone.

  Billy Gino wandered back to the kitchen. Cookie was bustling around back there, preparing breakfast for the thirty-odd-man staff and complaining about the mess of dirty cups and pastry crumbs left by the night crew.

  “How has Augie been eating lately?” the security chief idly inquired while pouring himself some coffee.

  “Good as ever,” Cookie snapped.

  “How good is that?” Gino persisted.

  “Little here, little there. He’s been a sick man, Mr. Gino.”

  “How sick?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I’m trying to find out what you mean. How sick is he?”

  The cook’s eyes darted about the kitchen for a moment as though he were about to divulge a big secret, then he said, “You’d better ask Mr. Eritrea about that.”

  “I’m asking you, Cookie.”

  “Look. Ask the doctor. He’s here every day. Ask him.”

  “Are you feeding him or aren’t you?”

  “He’s been on a special diet for more than a month.”

  The guy walked away and busied himself at the refrigerator.

  Billy Gino doggedly followed him.

  “How special?”

  “Very special. Aw, come on, Mr. Gino. Don’t put me on the spot. Don’t put me in the middle of this. Mr. Eritrea would skin me alive if …”

  Billy Gino snapped, “Forget it,” and went out of there. He had to roust Nick and the bodyguard crew for a secure caravan run to Manhattan. It wasn’t all that unusual, hell no, but with everything else that had come with first light …

  And he thought he knew, now, why David Eritrea walked the floor all night every night in that upper sanctuary where no one else was permitted. Augie Marinello was dying. They were probably keeping the old boy alive with tubes and bottles, hope and prayer.

  That was too bad, sure—but why the big dark secret?

  Why not take the old man to the hospital and give him a medical chance? Or was it that hopeless? And were they all scared to death that the empire would die with him? A lot of people, sure, had been waiting a long time for Augie Marinello to die. Ambitious people, sharkish people.

  And what did that shipment of cold meat, delivered at the doorstep at first light, have to do with all this? A message of some sort, no doubt about that. Old Barney had been wondering about it. David had apparently figured it out.

  Billy Gino shivered and went on to his duties.

  A new day had dawned. And Billy knew somehow that things would never again be the same for the Marinello Family.

  They had not been the same, indeed, since that terrible night in Jersey when Mack the Smasher had made half a man out of the boss of bosses. Now the other half was dying. And the empire, apparently, was coming apart at the seams.

  Was the fine hand of Mack Bolan at work again?

  He hoped not. Billy Gino sure as hell hoped for anything but that. He made a run for the front door, suddenly vividly aware that he needed to talk to old Barney Matilda. Barney was the master craftsman—the ultimate cleanup man—and old Barney would know.

  Barney had cleaned up behind Mack Bolan a couple times before. Even, yeah, after that terrible night in Jersey.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Outside In

  The rain had ended during the night and the skies were mostly clear. The warwagon was parked along the shore of Pontoosuc Lake, at the city’s northwest edge. The view through the one-way window took Bolan briefly back through the years, to happier times and to those occasional camping trips with his dad—the sun peeking over those same Berkshire Hills, the smell of bacon cooking in the crisp, morning air.

  The memories were there, yeah, but fleeting and elusive, hard to capture and embrace with anything more than a tendril of the mind. Most of Mack Bolan’s memories, now, were of the other life. They were visions of war and survival, blood and death and terror—lessons learned the hard way—and he recognized that this was the way it must be, for a survival candidate.

  So he shrugged away the wispy echoes of a kinder past and turned his energies to work toward survival in an uncertain future. A dreadful future, maybe, sure—but he reminded himself that it was the only one available.

  He showered, shaved, and donned appropriate clothing for the day ahead, then had a quick breakfast and put the day into motion. The Ford sedan which had carried him about the city during the night was now under tow by the warwagon. The big Toronado power plant was not even aware of the extra load as it smoothly pushed the battle cruiser through the hills. Thanks to a remote console arrangement forward in the con, the computerized plotting board of the amidships console was feeding him terrain information and topographical maps of the entire western edge of Massachusetts and eastern New York state. The slowly moving display gave him plenty of time to absorb the details and still give proper attention to navigation as he invaded that enemy territory.

  A “sector view” occupied and overlay an upper corner of the viewscreen, relating his own position and movement through another computerized system of navigational vectoring. The electronics were positively awesome, and Bolan had not yet ceased to marvel at their effectiveness. The systems had come to him with the compliments of an aerospace wizard in New Orleans, who, after the installation, had proudly advised the new owner: “You’ve got everything the space program can apply to your problem, Mr. Striker.”

  So much for space-age technology, in a world intent upon eating itself. It helped, of course—but it also made Bolan’s war larger, and, thus, more complicated. To offset the wider reach, he also needed wider combat capabilities. So another wizard provided the latest in communications and intelligence-gathering technology; yet another, the ultimate in weaponry and electronic fire control. It had cost a pile of money, sure. All of it came from the warchest, though, which itself was kept stocked by involuntary contributions from the enemy’s own flow of black bucks—so it worked out rather well, with the mob supplying its greatest enemy with the cash needed to fuel the machinery of its own destruction. Bolan thought that particularly fitting—justice in all its poetic sense.

  At the moment, though, the skipper of the warwagon was thinking only of getting inside that new enemy hardsite in the Berkshire Hill country of western Mass and learning its secrets. The single most important task of the moment, in that regard, involved an intimate familiarity with the territory itself. Bolan’s memories of the area were mostly childhood perceptions. They would not serve him well, now. What he needed was a soldier’s familiarity, and that was precisely what he was acquiring via the warwagon’s fantastic technologies.

  He devoted a couple of hours to prowling the backroads and trails, taking careful note of the various terrain features and committing them to the personal combat computer within his own skull—relating them to human habitation, commercial establishments and activities, transport routes, communications and power transmission lines, waterways—the entire “lay”—from all of which he meticulously selected the site for his forward base and began preparations for a penetration of the enemy camp.

  “Penetration” did not necessarily entail the injection of a physical human body across enemy lines. All that was required, to get the outside inside and the inside outside, was to inject the human senses into the situation—and that was what the warwagon was all about.

  He’d located the perfect site. The enemy was below and within range of the optic systems—unwind, barring a sudden shift, and that would be a plus for the audio effort—sufficiently distant so as to not arouse suspicions which could defeat the surveillance. For a special added factor, the telephone lines serving the hardsite were a mere hundred yards away.

  As the first order of busines
s, Bolan activated the optics and programmed the video recorders for “movement-actuated” service. There would be no simple landscape or still-life scenes recorded. Only motion of a particular type would trigger the system and commit the action to a video recording.

  Next, he focused the barrel-mike pickups for the audio surveillance systems, positioning two of them for wide-angle pickup and zeroing—in a third “hisense” mike on an open window at the side of the target building. He set a low threshold for the sound-actuated recorders, crossed his fingers, and went on to the next important step.

  This one was a bit trickier. It was not space-age technology but Bell System basics which had to be applied here, and he tapped into a half-dozen carriers, using a simple but effective process of elimination, before striking paydirt. And there was but one way to be sure of that.

  He got a surly response from the first ring: “Club Taconic.”

  “I want to make a reservation,” Bolan told the guy.

  “No way, buddy, too bad—we’re closed for the season.”

  “Are you sure?” Bolan inquired, a bit belligerently.

  “Whattaya mean, am I sure? Sure I’m sure.”

  “Well, maybe I have the wrong place. I’m supposed to be meeting my girl there. How the hell am I going to—?”

  “That’s your problem, buddy.” The guy seemed to be enjoying the problem just the same. “Whattaya mean, you don’t even know where you’re supposed to be? Do you even know where you’re at?”

  The guy was bored and looking for a bit of diversion—and he had a sadistic humor, as well—all of which was just fine with Bolan. He faked a nervous laugh as he told the guy: “I guess I better come up there, just the same. Rosalie must have goofed. When she shows up—listen, she’s a tall—”

  “Hey hey, hold it! I told you we’re closed. Nobody comes. Got it? If the broad shows, she’ll be turned away at the gate by the security people. You got the wrong place, guy. Try over there in the public ski area—what’s it called?—Jiminy Cricket or something.”

  “Jiminy Peak?” Bolan corrected him. “Isn’t that where you are located?”

  “Naw, hell naw, Jesus Christ! I hope you make out better with Rosalie, dum dum. You want me to go over there and lead you to the right hole, guy?”