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  “Let’s understand it, up front!” Rickert snapped. “I don’t take petty shit! So next time you come, leave the games at the door!”

  Bolan chuckled. He said, “You’re okay, Rickert.”

  “Get your ass off my okay desk, then.”

  Bolan chuckled again and moved away to casually prowl the room. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot,” he suggested, softening the voice. “If we’re going to work together on this, then we should—”

  Rickert snapped him off. “Who says we’re working together?”

  “Five bills a day say it.”

  The guy was mad as hell. “They didn’t say anything about—”

  “They don’t have the say. Someone else has a lot more to lose.”

  “Someone else?”

  “With a lot more to lose,” Bolan repeated.

  Rickert understood it, that time. His face flushed angrily and he lunged toward the telephone. “What’s that name again?”

  “What’s in a name?” Bolan responded casually. “Just tell them that Crusher has arrived. They’ll report directly to me until this little matter is cleared up. To me! That’s important. All other lines are closed, as of now.”

  The guy glared at him for a long moment, then woodenly asked, “How do they reach you?”

  “They reach me here,” said Bolan-D’Anglia-Crusher.

  Rickert was frowning, his hand poised above the telephone. “That’s not such a swell idea,” he said. “We shouldn’t be mobbing up. Not at a time like this.”

  Bolan was damn glad to hear that. He went to the desk and scribbled a telephone number on Rickert’s pad. “You’re right,” he said. “Give them this. It’s a hard phone. They shouldn’t worry about it.”

  The ex-cop was still frowning worriedly. “You want them to contact you?”

  “Only if the need is great,” Bolan replied. He was instructing the guy, now. He had very deftly taken charge. “That doesn’t apply to you, though. You keep me informed. I want to hear every footstep.”

  He was moving toward the door.

  “Hold it!” Rickert cried.

  Bolan went on to the door before again showing the guy his face. “What?”

  “What are we supposed to—what’s the—?”

  “What’ve you done, so far?”

  Rickert was giving him the fish eye. He rose to his feet and said, “I got the whole force mobilized. I’ve staked out all the hot spots. And I tipped the cops.”

  “To what?”

  “To what’s going down. I figure they can keep some heat on the guy.” He grinned slyly. “It’s their duty, right? To protect the citizens from maniacs?”

  “Just so it doesn’t boomerang,” Bolan said, showing the guy a sour grin.

  “What’s to boomerang? We’re covered completely. There’s no way to—I even had to put out some dummy targets for the guy to give him something to hit. I’m on top of it. And you can report that to your man. What I want to know is where you fit.”

  “I told you where I fit,” Bolan replied coldly. “Now you tell them.”

  Rickert’s gaze wavered. He said, “Sure. What I meant was—”

  Bolan growled, “Like I said, you’re okay. Just keep on top of it. You’ll know when I need you. Keep me informed.”

  He went on out, left a pleasant word with the guy in the turret, and put that place behind.

  It had been a very soft game. Not too soft, hopefully, but strong enough to seize the enemy’s greatest strength and turn it into his own.

  And to hell with the “dummy targets.”

  Very soon, now, the Executioner should be hearing from them.

  CHAPTER 7

  UNWIRED

  It had been an entirely successful penetration. He had located and invaded what appeared to be the nerve center of the Los Angeles operation, conned the security boss, and left wires all over the joint. Totally successful, yes. So why did he feel so uneasy about the whole thing? It had been a textbook operation. The equipment used was the latest, most sophisticated stuff available for electronic surveillance. A small recorder-transceiver and power pack were neatly tucked away in a wall crevice at the third floor level. Micro-pickups with fantastic sensitivity were emplaced at the reception desk, in the window in Rickert’s office and under his desktop. The confidence act had gone without apparent hitch; Rickert had bought him as a security envoy from the man up high. To all appearances, Bolan had breached the security apparatus of the men he’d come to defeat.

  So why the uneasiness?

  He’d left the Warwagon stashed two streets over in a residential neighborhood. With all the cautious footwork required to assure his own security, it had taken about ten minutes to return to the cruiser and to initiate contact with his Bell connection. And he still was entertaining that uneasy mental atmosphere as her familiar voice sang through the mobile phone: “Special operator.”

  “It’s set,” he reported tersely. “How ’bout you?”

  “We’re already cooking,” she replied, restrained excitement filling that good voice. “He’s talking to someone right now and we’re running the fix. I’ll put it in your collector so keep a watch. How’d the interior decorating go?”

  An inexplicable chill traversed the Bolan spine. He shook it away, reminding himself that he was getting too damned emotionally involved with the lady, dismissing the chill as a formless fear. “It went fine. I guess we’re cooking everywhere. You sure it’s okay there?”

  “Sure I’m sure,” she said pertly. But then some altered quality of Bolan’s voice in the inquiry must have penetrated. Some of the perkiness dropped away as she added, “Why shouldn’t it be okay?”

  “I had a shiver,” he explained. “Combat jitters, probably. Sometimes I can smell the big one coming long before the rest of me knows about it. Uh, listen, these guys are not clowns. They probably have damned good counterintelligence. I want you to play it close to the breast. I’ll call you home as soon as possible. And when I say the word, I want you to come running.”

  She gave him a very subdued, “Okay”—remembering, perhaps, the tribulations of yesterday.

  Bolan terminated the contact and quickly went to work at the surveillance console. He poked in a computer program, then remoted the whole show to the command console. Then he went forward and immediately set the cruiser adrift.

  The “drift” was a planned cruising pattern of the streets surrounding the Investors building and the mission was audio surveillance. The little transceiver, which he had mounted on the outer wall at the third level, was good for about a mile under optimum conditions, but probably would range no more than two or three city blocks in this area of high buildings. With all its limitations, it was a very nice little package. The power pack would allow several hours of continuous operation. The recorder was sound-actuated, though, so continuous operation would be an unlikely circumstance. Actually, days of recorded surveillance could usually be packed into the little machine. Even that capability had never been tested in the sort of operations Bolan conducted. He could command the tiny unit from the surveillance console in the Warwagon to change the mode from Record to Continuous Broadcast or he could trigger “collections” of the stored recordings for high speed playback and tone transmission to the onboard recorders.

  As one of the limitations, the remote unit could not record and broadcast at the same time. This normally posed no special problems to Bolan’s surveillance efforts, but this time it did. He would prefer a continuous “live” program from the offices of SecuriCom but he also needed to know what had transpired in there during the fifteen minutes since the recorder began operating.

  He opted for a quick collection, a “drain” of stored moments in the recent lift of one Charlie Rickert. The remote unit responded instantly to the summons. A two-second tone sounded in the monitor. The console went into automatic processing while Bolan’s mind fidgeted over the implications of the two-second transmission. There could not be a hell of a lot on there. High speed re
covery, sure, but still the ratio figured at about sixty to one—a one-second tone for each full minute of recorded data.

  The console was flashing Proceed at him. He gave it the countersign and was immediately greeted by his own voice echoing dully through the audio monitor.

  “Some people worry.”

  Rickert, then, distantly responding in muffled and indistinct tones, “As well they should.”

  Bolan poked in a fast advance, moving well forward of the moment when the second bug began picking up.

  It was Rickert’s voice, close and clear now: “Sure. What I meant was—”

  Bolan again, himself how distant and a bit garbled: “Like I said, you’re okay. Just keep on top of it. You’ll know when I need you. Keep me informed.”

  A dead zone followed—then muffled undertones of quiet male voices—a door sound—footsteps—suddenly this, from Rickert: “Did you get a good look?”

  Another voice, unfamiliar: “Not very good, no. But I know I never saw that guy before.”

  Rickert: “What about the name?”

  “What? Crusher? No, I think that’s a—”

  “Sure it is. That’s a—he signed his name D’Anglia.”

  “There’s a family back east that—”

  “Right, right! I know who you mean! They’re—”

  “He’s an import, Charlie. A classic if ever I saw one. A guy like that has only one purpose in life. I wonder what this means.”

  “It means—it couldn’t have come at a worse time. But I know for damned sure, hey, he didn’t come all the way from the east just this morning!”

  “You’re right exactly. I’d give a nickel to know who’s sponsoring him. Hey, I think the guy knows it all.”

  “Sure he knows it all. What the hell you think he came for? He’s the insurance man. Someone way up is paying his freight. I wonder how long he’s been …?”

  “Forever, probably. I told you my people don’t take much on faith. I bet they’ve got us under a microscope. I told you—”

  Rickert, greatly perturbed: “Jesus Christ!”

  “What is it?”

  The sound track became very noisy at that point. When Rickert’s voice came again, it was obviously via a more distant pickup—faint, barely readable. “There may be more. I’ll shake it down. You get in there and—is he still on the damn phone? Tell him to—no!—wait!—activate the—yeah!—yeah!”

  A door slammed in the distance.

  End of recording. And the two-second drain was explained. Sly Charlie had discovered Mack Bolan’s ears.

  But what about April’s?

  The combat spine had known, sure. And Bolan would forever ponder such inexplicable capabilities of the human mechanism. But it was no time, now, for mind puzzles.

  He grabbed the phone and summoned his lady. “Get out of there!” he commanded, the instant the line opened. “Now! Run one block west, one block south. I’ll pick you up. Go now!”

  The lady was very confused by all that. Because it was the wrong lady. “What is this!” cried the strange voice. “What’s going on?”

  Bolan snarled back, “This is agent Striker! Where’s my special operator?”

  “Some men just came and took her away!” the lady wailed.

  The Bolan heart was already frozen in place. “Calm down,” he said, talking for his own benefit, perhaps, as much as for the lady’s. “Just take it easy and tell me about it.”

  “They came in waving guns. I’m the supervisor. They showed me badges. They said—I told them she was—I thought they were part of—I showed them, and they took her away.”

  “When was this?” Bolan asked numbly.

  “Just now. Just this instant.”

  Sure. The spine had known. The rest of the man should have known, as well. Bolan was not the only guy in town with access to sophisticated equipment.

  For every action, a reaction—sure. The art of electronic countermeasures had grown proportionately with the development of electronic snooping. The guys at SecuriCom evidently were experts at the game.

  So …

  It was a forlorn hope … but the only one at hand.

  At their last contact, only a few minutes earlier, April had told him, “He’s talking to someone now and we’re running the fix. I’ll put it in your collector.”

  The collector was a recorder drop in the communications computer, fed by a mobile phone loop, used primarily as a means of receiving messages while Bolan was out of the vehicle.

  And yes, she’d made a deposit there.

  “Striker. A call at 10:17 went to a Jay Leonard at 3040 Silverlake Boulevard in Hollywood. They’re still talking. I’ll deposit the conversation when it is complete, but I want to get you this information up front. We started getting a peculiar ultrasonic pulse on that line a couple of minutes ago. The sine wave reveals a possible ECM characteristic. Also it appears only on the hot side of our patch. I’m afraid it’s a tap detector. I’ll abort as soon as—uh oh—cheese it—looks like a flying squad descending here. Could be cops. Don’t worry, I’ll stonewall. Good luck, Striker.”

  Good luck, indeed.

  Well … maybe they were cops. It was worth hoping for, anyway. But he could not rest with mere hope. Still … it seemed highly unlikely that Rickert could have reacted that quickly—in a matter of minutes—to locate the tap and put a squad of men down at the source.

  He could not rest with unlikelies, either.

  And, of course, in the world of electronics, time and space had little meaning. If the guy had the gear to do it, sure, he could have flushed that tap in a split-second and—yeah, yeah, he could do the rest, too. He’d told Bolan-Crusher that he had “mobilized the entire force”—which could mean, among other things, roving squads of security cops blanketing the city with quick-reaction capability. Rickert had been trained by one of the best police departments in the nation. And how many “cops” did SecuriCom employ? No matter about that. He could have lucked into it with a squad in the vicinity of the telephone exchange where April had set up shop. A couple of minutes? Sure. Blind luck or not, the result would be the same for April. So there was damn little hope with the unlikelies.

  Bolan had to play it where it lay. Whatever and whomever, the detectives had been detected. Bolan had to take the assumption that April Rose was in enemy hands.

  They would not be particularly tender hands.

  “Good luck, Striker.”

  She was contemplating a stonewall while wishing him luck. Some kind of plucky lady. And, yes, Bolan had to admit the truth: he was very strongly emotionally involved with the lady.

  If it was cops … then okay … no problem … no problem.

  If not … well, the Striker knew and the lady knew that there was no stonewalling those other people. They could bust the mind wide open and empty everything from it in mere minutes. Nor would they hesitate to do so. Some of them would even enjoy doing it, necessary or not. And there would be no return for April Rose from such an adventure.

  Luck, April?

  Mack Bolan knew that he and the lady would need much more than luck. They both would need a miracle. And sometimes, a guy simply had to make his own.

  He needed to get their attention—their full attention—and to give them something much larger than April Rose to think about. Or else he had to snatch the lady back, damned quick—and that could be the toughest task of all.

  Luck, okay. He’d take all he could get. And he’d take one of those miracles, too, thanks.

  He’d take whatever the hell he could get.

  CHAPTER 8

  A QUESTION OF TIME

  The question was entirely one of time—and Bolan was not convinced that there was enough of that left in all the world for April Rose.

  He left the cruiser idling in the alley and went in via the service entrance.

  The naked eye of a television camera ogled him as he stepped through from the receiving docks to the interior passageway.

  He was carrying a special cu
tdown version of the M-79 beneath his coat and the bulge must have been obvious but there was no challenge as he proceeded on toward the nerve center.

  Another camera watched him into the short hallway leading to SecuriCom. The one mounted above the security door had little time to read him. He unleashed the ’79 from twenty paces out, sending forty flaming millimeters of HE thundering into that door and obscuring the hall with puffing clouds of smoke.

  The heavy steel door was buckled inward by the blast, hinges sprung and askew, still standing but a bit cockeyed and open to entry.

  Some crazy people behind the smoke were firing handguns at phantoms of their own imaginations. Bolan moved inside with the smoke and immediately dispatched another round toward the back wall. The two crazies back there had already opted for cover, but not quite soon enough. The blast caught them both in mid-dive and flung them on into a row of filing cabinets with battering force. These were simple concussion rounds, no shrapnel or other dispersal materials other than the flame and smoke unleashed by the blast itself and super-energized molecules of air. Even so, they could knock a man silly from ten yards—and a contained blast could flatten the walls and drop the roof of a small building.

  The guy at the console up near the door had gotten his bell rung by the first blast. He was lolling in his chair about half conscious, blood oozing from both nostrils, not giving a carefree damn about the alarms erupting from his equipment.

  Bolan turned into the little anteroom and sent another charge into the door at Rickert’s private office. That one broke into two pieces and hurled itself on into the room. He thumbed in another round as he moved in behind the blast. At that same moment, a trick panel in the wall to his left swung open and a guy in civilian dress came charging out, pistol in hand, wild-eyed and grunting. The charge became a sliding halt in the confrontation with the gaping barrel of the ’79. The pistol kept on moving across the room as the guy’s hands flew quickly overhead.

  “What the hell!” he muttered.

  This guy was a brother of the blood, for sure. And Bolan had heard the voice minutes earlier, in the taped conversation with Charlie Rickert.