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  Those guys’ worst enemy was themselves.

  CHAPTER 9

  HOUSE OF CARDS

  The long conference table had been moved up to abut the oval desk, on which, less than an hour earlier, the head of the family had spilt his final blood. The death scene had been thoroughly cleansed, and Bolan could even smell the lingering traces of room deodorizer in the air.

  Carmen Reddi ran a clean ship.

  Apparently the master’s desk had been set up for Frankie’s use during the parley. Ten men sat at the table, five to each side, grouped at the end nearest the desk. Four of those were lieutenants under Damon and La Carpa. Faultless protocol had been observed in the seating arrangement: Damon and La Carpa first, facing each other: then Leo and Larry Haggle, followed by the lieutenants, paired at their boss’s side of the table; finally, the head cock and his understudy.

  If that group had come from a deck of cards, the underbosses would represent the queens positions. Their lieutenants would be jacks. Larry Haggle would have to be a joker, useful only in conjunction with another power card. Leo, of course, was another wild card. As for Mario and Carmen … they were not face cards, at all, but highly prized “hole cards” of a value that couldn’t be determined until it was time to lay the whole hand on the table.

  Carmen stood stiffly in the background, near the wall, watching two of his housemen wheel in the serving carts. Those guys were more than waiters. Bolan knew them to be quite capable hardmen, though getting a bit old for the more strenuous duties of legbreaking and helling around, relegated now to palace duty and direct service to their liege … a pair of fives, maybe.

  The head cock and the house boss held a rather curious traditional relationship, which remained more or less constant, no matter whom they served. The house boss was exactly what the term implied: boss of the house, which included everything under that roof from maintenance and housekeeping to internal security and bodywatching. In ordinary circumstances, he answered to none but the lord of the manse himself—whether that lord be a king, a queen, or whatever.

  The head cock, on the other hand, was sort of like the captain of the palace guard, the hardarm serving directly the wishes and needs of the lord in a more military sense. He, too, answered only to the chief and was directly responsible for all security, and other matters involving arms and force outside the manse and beyond. In that sense, he was ultimately responsible for all offensive and defensive operations involving the direct desires of his boss, as opposed to those carried out under various franchise and territorial operations. The head cock was not in business for himself, nor was the house boss.

  The division of responsibilities had never been written out as any formal procedure, but the roles were clearly understood and maintained by the pressures of tradition and common acceptance. There seldom existed friction or competition between the two, in whatever, famliy, even where the duties tended to interface or overlap—simply because, in reality, there was no overlap. Each man was virtually a sovereign in his own right, though faceless and technically rankless, exercising authority in the name of his boss in the area of his own expertise. There was no need to compete, because these men were as high as they would ever travel in their chosen field. They would never make a capo, nor would they even dream of such a thing—they were technicians, not business executives—and they would never become independently wealthy. But they would also never go hungry or lack shelter, and their positions commanded universal respect within the family.

  But these two here, Reddi and Cuba, were now in a very curious position. Their lord was dead. In whose name did they now act? Whom did they serve?

  For big Mario, the question had probably not yet risen to the surface of his thoughts. He was hurting, he felt humiliated, and he had not really been called upon yet to perform any duties since the passing of his king.

  But Reddi, now … the house boss was undoubtedly very acutely aware of the problem. One did not serve a house … nor even guests in that house. What was served was the master of the house … and this house no longer had one of those.

  But the problem went deeper than that even. One of these men now seated here would undoubtedly succeed as new head of the family. But which one? Not Frankie, certainly. Such things were not done—and, indeed, Frankie was a mere technician, as well. Frankie acted in the name of his boss—which was La Commissione itself.

  However … that organization of bosses, which was headquartered in New York, would have a lot to say about which of these seated here would be admitted to their council of kings. Damon and La Carpa were not the only underbosses in the Santelli family; they were merely locally based and therefore geographically closer to the seat of power. Perhaps psychologically closer also, though. Still, other underbosses were scattered through the far-flung empire and although these were generally regarded as “colonials” it was still quite possible that La Commissione would decide to sponsor one of those in preference to either Damon or La Carpa.

  La Commissione was present at this meeting. It was present in the person of Frankie the Ace.

  Some very important business was, indeed, about to happen here.

  So, yes, many troubling considerations could now be working at the front of Carmen Reddi’s head.

  It was perhaps this inherent confusion that produced the only failure in the protocol of the moment. Thomas Santelli was hardly cold in his bones. No one should occupy his chair in a formal family sit-down, at least until those royal remains had been decently interred—in the strictest tradition, not until a successor had been properly chosen.

  Yet Carmen had set it up as always, and there was nowhere for Bolan to drop his frame except in the capo’s chair.

  Or maybe the guy had very consciously set it up this way just to see how “Frankie” would handle it.

  Bolan was not about to be sucked into anything like that. He positioned Santelli’s chair at the left corner of the desk and sent an eye signal to the house boss.

  Reddi understood that signal, okay. He brought over another chair and placed it at the missing boss’s ghost right hand. Bolan lowered himself into the chair, gave Carmen a nod, and sat back to await the ceremonial “wine and cheese and good bread.”

  A houseman brought a towel-draped bottle and a large goblet. He poured a couple of fingers of wine into the goblet, and stood waiting expectantly while Bolan sampled the offering.

  “It’s fine,” Bolan told him, returning the goblet. He silently signaled his desire that the sample be passed on around the table. That little gesture produced an approving flash from Reddi’s eyes.

  And, yeah, the guy had set it up that way.

  But the ceremonies were off to a good start.

  Almost. One of the desk phones rang. Reddi quickly stepped forward to silence the offender, then discovered that it was the “cool phone” which was creating the disturbance. Inappropriately named, the cool phone was connected to a national relay system, which very effectively scrambled both the origin and the destination of all calls passing through it. It was reserved for top level business only.

  The house boss seemed a bit hesitant as to how to handle the matter. Bolan relieved him of that decision, scooping up the phone himself and responding with a clipped, “Yeah.”

  The cool system garbled more than station identities; it also produced a weirdly echoing distortion to the voices.

  “Pardon me, but I need to talk to him.”

  “This is him,” Bolan muttered.

  “Thank God, I’m relieved, I was afraid—pardon me, I been on the run all night and I just now get someplace cool. Hope you don’t mind me using this line. I got something really hot for you.”

  “I guess I don’t know who you are,” Bolan told those strange echoes.

  “This is the one that caused all your misery yesterday. But I didn’t call to apologize, Mister—sir. I called to give you something very hot in case you don’t already know.”

  The guy thought that he was speaking to Tommy Santelli. B
ut the one that “caused” the miseries of yesterday was now standing in for Santelli—which made this a mysterious caller, indeed.

  “You better name some names,” Bolan told that guy. “Don’t worry about it. Just give me what you’ve got to give.”

  “This is the Pip.”

  Bolan’s pulse picked up just a bit. Carlo “the Pip” Papriello was the head cock down on Santelli Island, the scene of Bolan’s Thursday hit. Bolan had assumed that the guy was dead, or in police custody.

  “Hey, that’s great! Glad you made it, Pip. So what d’you have for me?”

  “I think it was you-know-who, the bastard, that hit us.”

  “You mean, uh, the soldier boy. We, uh, made that already, Pip.”

  “Oh. Okay. I figured maybe nobody’d put it together that way yet and I—well, listen, that’s not all I wanted to tell you. This is very embarrassing and I—well, I’m ashamed to tell you, but I think I have to and I’ll let you be the judge of—you know, if I could make it up some way to you.”

  “Make it quick, Pip. We have something going, here.”

  “Oh, yes sir, I didn’t mean to—”

  “What d’you have?”

  “I think maybe I got a make on that bastard. You know who I mean. I think he was passing hisself off here as a headshed Ace called Frankie. I’m almost sure of that, sir. He made a hell of a sucker out of me, I’m ashamed to say. He sent Guido away and put me in charge. What a sap I am. All the time I’m thinking he’s acting in your name. I’m responsible for everything that happened after that, I admit it. I’m ready to take my medicine for that. But I wanted you to know about this.”

  Bolan told that guy. “You were right to call, Pip. We’ll take up the other matter later. Right now I want you to take a vacation. You get my meaning. And I want you to keep quiet. This could look bad for all of us. And right now we have a very delicate situation. So you don’t tell that story around, not yet. You get me?”

  “I get you, sir. I’m really sorry as hell about—”

  “Forget that, dammit! I’m telling you not to worry about it. Who else knows?”

  “Well I’m in Lauderdale. You know where. Nobody’s here but a couple of the boys. I’m afraid I told them, already.”

  “You tell them what I told you, then. Keep it under their hats for now. I’m depending on you to handle it. You and those two boys go take yourselves a little vacation. Go to the islands. Do it. Now I gotta go.”

  Bolan hung it up and pushed the telephone away.

  “Turn this thing off,” he instructed Reddi. “Turn ’em all off.”

  “Sure thing, Frankie. Uh, was that…?”

  “You heard, yeah, it was Carlo the Pip. He made it out okay. Poor guy probably crawled through the everglades all night just to tell us what we already know.”

  “About, uh…?”

  “Yeah. Now I think we better get on with this. Let’s bury Tommy and get on with the business.”

  “We’ll serve the bread and wine now, Frankie.”

  “Do that,” Bolan-Frankie muttered.

  And do it damned quick, yeah.

  The whole damned house of cards was in grave danger, now, of falling in on Mack Bolan’s head. A damned hole card had escaped the discard deck. And there was just liable to be hell to pay for that little oversight.

  Maybe, yeah, he’d played his aces-high hand one damned time too many.

  CHAPTER 10

  BACKBOARD

  The battle cruiser was parked atop a high promontory overlooking the bay. Innocuous-looking, sure—just aonther RV in the fast-growing fleet of luxury camping vehicles, which were quickly taking the hearts of freedom-loving Americans. But this particular RV was a freedom bus in the truest sense. For Mack Bolan, the Executioner, it was home—mobile base camp; weapons lab; battleship; scout vehicle; war library; sophisticated spy ship it was a one-vehicle logistics support unit for a one-man army; and it was the most impressive damned thing in Hal Brognola’s long and varied experience with sophisticated police and combat technology.

  But the wonder was not so much that the fabulous vehicle existed; the wonder was that it had been engineered and fabricated by volunteer help from some of the nation’s top experts in the aeronautics and space programs: the damned thing had taken form in a matter of weeks, in the hands of less than a dozen men, whereas any comparable government-funded project would have required months on the drawing board alone, perhaps years in the final realization.

  So that warwagon symbolized much more than one man’s determination to crush the Mafia; it symbolized also the strong undercurrent of secret public support for this man and his task. Any of the engineers and technicians who had volunteered their involvement in that secret project could have been arrested and tried for high crimes involving the unauthorized use of highly classified information and materials. Some of the electronic systems in that vehicle were so advanced as to be at the very horizon of American technology—still in the test and evaluation phase in laboratories around the country.

  In the final analysis, then, Mack Bolan’s warwagon was the symbol of civilized man’s determination to free himself from domination by savages.

  Bolan himself had said that, though in characteristically plainer words, “Show a savage a bigger club than his own, and you can stare him right back into his hole.”

  And that, of course, was the sum of Bolan’s mission—to make the world a safer and happier place for civilized men and women.

  He had told Brognola, in one of those rare philosophic moods, “The meek will never inherit a savage earth. And, of course, the meek are the most civilized of us all. So they need a champion. They need a larger savage to stand on their side of the street and spit back. Otherwise the Huns will take it all over and we can kiss our grand civilizations goodbye.”

  It bothered the guy not a whit that many of those “most civilized” beneficiaries of his blood-and-guts crusade were sickened and repelled by his approach to the problem.

  “I don’t want their love,” he once told Brognola. “Not even their respect. It makes no sense to take them into hell with me. They’ve got enough hells of their own to contend with.”

  A remarkable guy, yeah, on a remarkable mission—and he by God deserved all the support he could get. It was just a damned crying shame that it had to be covert support. Brognola would gladly step into the front lines with the guy. In fact, he had to keep reminding himself that they, too, serve who only watch and wait. Someone had to backboard the guy. And it had been only very recently that Bolan would tolerate even that degree of active support.

  Even now, such support was severely limited by constraints which had been insisted upon by Bolan himself. Apparently the guy did not want to see official government agencies sullied or tainted by illegal and unconstitutional police methods.

  “I can handle those scars better by myself.”

  He had not wanted to see the nation’s watchdogs became the savages—not even temporarily, and with the highest of motives.

  Brognola sighed and stepped aboard the impressive gunship. April was seated in the mid-ships cockpit, surrounded by a bank of video monitors. She had noted Brognola’s approach, via one of those monitors, and had overridden the door’s electronic interlocks to let him enter.

  “Am I glad to see you,” was her greeting to the chief.

  “Came a’running,” he grunted, “soon as I got your hit. What’s happening?”

  The girl removed a cassette from the audio console and handed it over. “It’s all on there. He’s wired for sound and the reception is excellent—really surprising quality, considering the limited power of that microtransmitter. Your technicians will have no trouble analyzing the data. You can even recognize very subtle voice characteristics. That’s just the first hour. I have a new tape in, and the reception is holding beautifully.”

  Brognola frowned as he said, “You didn’t rush me over here for a routine progress report. What’s wrong?”

  The girl removed her he
adset and stared at it for a moment, then replied, “Well … it didn’t start that way, but apparently he saw an opportunity for a soft penetration. For the past hour he has been playing to the hilt his masquerade as Frankie Lambretta.”

  Brognola groaned and said, “God I hate those. It’s constant jeopardy, it’s—every movement of the eyes and hands, every inflection of the voice is crucial. One false move and those cutthroats will be all over him. We wouldn’t get in there in time to find a piece of his skin. What—”

  The girl’s eyes were sparkling as she interrupted that worried speech. “Let me tell you, he’s a master. He is Frankie Lambretta, and he’s got them all jumping through hoops.” Those eyes clouded as she added, “But I’m afraid he’s in for some real trouble. That’s why I hit the panic button. I believe you could head it off at the pass.”

  What is it?”

  Someone telephoned from Fort Lauderdale. It was a scrambler line. He took the call—posing, I guess, as Thomas Santelli. The microrelay picked it up fine, but you know how those lines sometimes behave. The voice quality is terrible. But I believe he was speaking to Carlo Papriello.”

  Brognola nervously lit a cigar while he thought that one over. Then he told the girl, “Well, yes, that could be damned big trouble. What’s the gist of the conversation?”

  She tossed that lovely head and said, “I couldn’t be sure. Maybe your technicians can refine it some. But it sounded like Papriello was warning Santelli that Mack Bolan and Frankie Lambretta are one and the same.”

  Brognola struck the bulkhead with an open palm and exclaimed, “Damn!”

  “But, of course, Striker took the call. So the cat is not out of the bag yet.”

  “Where was Santelli during all this?”

  “Santelli is dead.”

  “Well, gee, thanks for telling me. What were you saving it for? Easter?”

  The girl ignored the gibe. “It’s all on the tape, you’ll have a blow by blow account. By the way … who the hell is Toby?”

  Brognola flinched. “What about Toby?”