Blood Testament (20 page)

The tears were in his eyes now, blinding him.

"God damn it."

"Let's get Leo in the car."

Brognola took his wounded comrade's other arm around his shoulders, helped him back to the sedan. When he was safely stowed in back, Hal slid behind the wheel with Bolan riding shotgun on his right.

"You handle it," he said when they were rolling, and the taste of shame was bitter on his tongue. "I'm out."

"The hell you are. I've never seen you quit before."

"You've never seen me throw it all away before."

"So is this where you write them off?"

"You're acting like I have an option." They were rolling toward a stoplight and he punched on through the red, ignoring horns and screeching brakes on either side. "I fucked it up, or else we all did. Either way, it's done."

"You're wrong. There's still a chance, and if we blew it, then the play's not over till you make things right."

Brognola made a sour face. He knew that things would never be quite right again.

And Bolan would not let him rest.

"Where can I get in touch with Grymdyke?"

"Last I heard he had a place in Alexandria, not far from Langley."

He was startled to recall the address with crystal clarity, the sort of trivia a tortured mind can vomit up in times of desperation. Hal repeated it for Bolan, listened as the soldier played it back.

"That's him. Assuming that he hasn't moved."

Assuming that the front man he had wasted back at Arlington had not been working on his own.

Assuming any one of half a dozen different scenarios that might make chasing Milo Grymdyke a colossal waste of time.

But they had time now, he remembered. There was no more need for haste. They had already crossed the deadline, fumbled in the end zone, trashed the play beyond repair. It didn't matter if he had to follow Grymdyke to Afghanistan and back. Brognola had the kind of time that men alone possess, free time in such abundance that it gradually crushes them beneath its weight.

He could not make himself believe that there was any hope. It would accomplish nothing, holding on to phantoms while the living still required assistance. Leo's blood was soaking through the seat, and Hal could not ignore the sacrifice his friend had made in the attempt to win his wife and children back.

He concentrated on the next light, and the next one after that, intent on dropping Bolan at his car before proceeding on with Leo to emergency. There would be police and questions to be answered, once the doctors got a look at Leo's leg, but that was fine. Hal had the time for questions now and there might even be some answers waiting for him.

God knew there was nothing else ahead of him but empty nights and hollow days, beset with memories of faces he would never see and voices he would never hear again except in dreams.

In nightmares.

He could hear them now, and they were whispering embittered accusations, carping on his failure. They had every right and he did nothing to evade them, taking all of it inside and nurturing his shame.

He had a single reason left to live, and that lay in the hope that Bolan might allow some stragglers to survive. There was a chance that one or two of Hal's tormentors might escape the cleansing fire, and he would have a reason to continue living while
they
lived, committed to extermination of the animals who had already torn his world apart.

When they were finished he would have to find another motive for survival, or surrender to the darkness that surrounded him already. For now, it was enough to concentrate on traffic, on the winking lights and on his pain.

He had sufficient time for any tasks that still remained unfinished, and there would be pain enough, he knew, to see him through his days.

Cameron Cartwright set the telephone receiver in its cradle, swallowing an urge to rip it free and fling it through the nearest open window. Years of playing cloak-and-dagger had prepared him to control his own emotions, and no hint of strain showed through the passive poker face. For all the outward evidence he might have just received a bulletin about the next week's weather. An astute observer might have marked the concentration lines that formed between the salt-and-pepper eyebrows, indicating that the man from the CIA was lost in thought. But none would have surmised the sharp anxiety, the brooding anger that was building inside of him.

When Cartwright lost control — say, once a decade — he was careful to surround himself with solitude before the fact. It was incongruous, this preparation for a tantrum with meticulous attention to detail, but perfectionism was his trademark, and he could not let it go this late in life. Routine was part and parcel of his life, although clandestine warriors theoretically abhorred the semblance of a pattern in their daily lives. It had been years since Cartwright worked the field, and if he seemed to have gone soft with age, with his advancement up the ladder of the Agency's command, there was a frame of steel still hidden underneath the middle-aged upholstery.

He was adept at dealing with disaster, fielding crises that might break a lesser man, but there were limits even so. His shoulders might be broad, but he was growing tired of carrying the world upon them, bearing burdens that should rightfully have fallen onto others.

Nicky Gianelli was a constant thorn in Cartwright's side, the more so since he had conceived his master stratagem for dropping Bolan and Brognola with a single stroke. No matter that the two of them were strictly Nicky's problem, he had asked for help — demanded help — and there had been no graceful way for Cameron to disengage. As long as Gianelli had those files he would be in the driver's seat, and Cartwright's only hope was to survive the bumpy ride with life and limb intact.

He blamed Lee Farnsworth for the problem. It had been Farnsworth who recruited Gianelli's predecessors for the war against Fidel, who had continued the assassination efforts — in defiance of repeated White House orders — after the Bay of Pigs disaster. When spokesmen for the Mafia's
Commissione
had bitched about the federal drive against their brothers of the blood, it had been Farnsworth who conceived the series of scenarios that culminated on an autumn afternoon in Dallas. And before the smoke had cleared, it had been Farnsworth — with some help from Cartwright, granted — who had agitated for a special panel to investigate the murder of the President; a panel that would close the door on ugly rumors permanently, and prevent the furious attorney general from initiating an investigation of his own.

It would be thirty years before you knew it, but the Mob had never tired of dropping little reminders into Farnsworth's ear. When an aircraft was required to haul the fruit of countless poppies stateside, the CIA had volunteered to fly the covert "rescue missions," braving hostile fire and customs agents to supply a growing army of addicted zombies in the streets of Everytown. When Momo Giancana thought his mistress had been looking for a little action on the side, the Agency provided wire men to investigate the "boyfriend," finally absolving him and thereby, doubtless, lengthening the poor schmuck's life. When the IRS expressed a passing interest in foreign bank accounts, the cry of "national security" was sounded to repel investigators.

It had worked to everyone's advantage through the years. The Company, for its part, had been granted access to the eyes and ears of underworld associates from Brooklyn to Marseilles, Los Angeles to Bangkok and Taiwan. The eyes saw many things, those ears heard many whispers that might otherwise have been ignored. The godless enemy was only human, after all, and when he paid for pleasure in some foreign port of call, he spent his rubles with a good friend of the Agency.

When there were problems, when attrition claimed the principals — Roselli, Giancana, Lansky — there were always others standing by to take their place. As for directors of Clandestine Ops, a few had voiced their outrage at the Agency's peculiar bargain with the devil, but they changed their tune the moment something interesting surfaced in the cesspool. None had finally possessed the nerve — the guts — to terminate Lee Farnsworth's monster. None so far.

Cartwright thought he might decide to do that little job himself.

But it would be no little job, and Cartwright recognized the problems he would face if he attempted to disrupt the status quo. For openers, he was already ass-deep in the most horrendous foul-up since the Watergate fiasco. Worse, since this particular disaster had been foisted on him by outsiders, in defiance of his own expressed concerns. It had been Gianelli's baby from day one, and now that it was starting to unravel, Cartwright knew that he would be expected to be brilliant and save the day.

Except, he knew, it might already be too late.

The move against Brognola's family was a calculated risk, but he had finally agreed with Gianelli that a threat to innocents would be the quickest draw for Bolan. It had worked, and now that Bolan was in town, the question of disposal still remained unanswered while the precious moments ticked away.

The contract on DeVries had been another calculated risk, and it had backfired in their faces. Gianelli's face, to be precise, since it had been his show. The shooters had been his — all four of them, stretched out in cold drawers at the morgue beside DeVries — and there would doubtless be some questions for the capo when detectives got around to tracing those IDs. The gunners had been sanitized to some extent, but they were traceable — hell, anyone was traceable — assuming Justice chose to go the whole nine yards. And with a ranking staff investigator dead, the whole nine yards would only be for openers.

As if the fumble with DeVries had not been bad enough, there were another eight men dead at Arlington, and they were his men this time, dammit. Trained professionals, selected for their expertise in handling the damper side of covert operations. Every one of them had been a skilled assassin with kills on foreign — and domestic — soil to prove his worth. They should have taken Hal Brognola easily, exterminated Bolan almost as an afterthought... but something had gone horribly, irrevocably wrong.

The body count was bad enough, but the placement had been even worse. When morning papers hit the stands, their headlines would be shrieking crap like MASSACRE AT ARLINGTON and SLAUGHTER AT THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER'S TOMB. They should have staged the meeting in a junkyard, on the river, any fucking place but Arlington. He had been showing off, and it hadn't worked for shit.

From all appearances the guests of honor had escaped unharmed. If either one had suffered injuries no evidence remained behind. A homicide detective serving double duty as another pair of Cartwright's eyes reported evidence of blood around a gravestone where no body had been found, and they were checking on the local ER logs, but Cartwright would have bet his life that they were pissing in the wind. With eight men shot to hell they could be typing blood for months and leave a tubful unaccounted for. From personal experience he knew that wounded men could travel awesome distances before they finally died.

The worst of it was Hunter Smith. He would be traceable directly back to Grymdyke's office, and from there...

Goddamn it!

More loose ends that would need looking after tonight, before the mess got any worse. Grymdyke was tough enough, a veteran of the Nixon purges, but if he should smell indictments in the wind, he might decide to cut a deal and save himself from prosecution. Copping out was almost SOP in Washington, and Cartwright was continually disgusted by the way bureaucrats betrayed each other.

That didn't matter now. He had to keep his wits about him. They were already running desperately short of time, and Gianelli stood no closer to the prize — Mack Bolan's head — than he had been six months ago. They might have missed their only chance already, Cartwright knew. The way the bastard had been tearing up the town, the way he handled eight of Grymdyke's best, the man from CIA had little hope of trapping him in Washington. They had already played their strongest hand, and he had walked away.

Not quite.

He hadn't walked away with any hostages, and while he was intent on rescuing Brognola's family, the bastard had an Achilles' heel. It just might be possible to stake the wife and kiddies out, trick Bolan into coming for the bait... and his death. He would be skittish after Arlington — he might be making tracks already — but he had the reputation of a gung-ho soldier unaccustomed to retreat. Brognola's family had drawn him here, and they would hold him here until he set them free... or died in the attempt.

It would be tricky, but...

Suppose he muffed it, fumbled one more time? Reluctant to accept the notion of defeat, he had presided over or participated in enough snafus to realize that true survivors always made contingency arrangements in advance. Before you ever fired a shot in battle, you examined ways of cutting losses, covering your ass in case of failure. If Cartwright planned to walk away from this one free and clear, without a target painted on his back and handcuffs on his wrists, he would be wise to leave his options open, cover all the bases going in.

Brognola's wife and kids would have to die, that much was obvious from the beginning. Whether they survived the night would logically depend upon their usefulness, as balanced out by any risks that their survival might entail. Alive they were the kind of witnesses that juries loved, and they could send his pickup crew away for life. Once that had been accomplished, Cartwright lost his hold upon subordinates who would be looking for an easy ride. Alive, Brognola's family was a lethal time bomb waiting to explode, and it was only logical that they should be defused as soon as possible.

He briefly weighed the options of permitting them to live for, say, six hours, giving Bolan one more opportunity to risk himself on their behalf. All things considered, though, the man from the CIA did not believe that live bait would be necessary to his plan. As long as Bolan
thought
they were alive, he would feel honor bound to make the futile, ultimately fatal, gesture. Logic cast its overwhelming vote for death, and Cartwright seconded the motion with a scowl.

The order should have gone through Grymdyke, but his second-in-command was now a problem in his own right. If the Bureau hadn't tumbled to him yet, his hours were numbered all the same, and while he lived he was a threat to everyone around him. Typhoid Grymdyke, bet your ass. Except that his disease was many times more lethal than a virus of the flesh. Exposure. Public condemnation. Loss of power in official circles. Death was infinitely preferable to embarrassment in the clandestine service — most especially if the death was someone else's.

Someone, say, like Grymdyke's.

Cameron Cartwright harbored nothing in the way of animosity against his second-in-command. Eliminating Grymdyke was a way of making up for damage that the man himself had caused through negligence. If he should disappear without a trace, the Justice probe would languish at his doorstep, starved for information that would never be forthcoming from above.

The odd man out was Nicky Gianelli, and the very thought of him made Cartwright clench his fists in anger. Twenty-seven years of honorable service — more or less — was hanging in the balance for him now, because of Gianelli's wild vendetta. While the capo possessed the crucial files containing Cartwright's name, the evidence against him, he would never be entirely free.

While Gianelli lived...

Of course there were a thousand ways to take him out, but it must be accomplished with discretion. Nothing that would smack of CIA involvement, certainly. Perhaps a word to other, rival mafiosi, urging them to carve a slice of Washington from Nicky's pie. It would be simple, once the reigning capo was removed.

That left the files, and Cartwright knew that he could never trust a rival mafioso to deliver them intact. A bargain might be made, but once another capo took the throne, once he deciphered the importance of the files, then Cartwright would be right back at square one. He might waste weeks or months and millions of illicit dollars, winding up with someone who was worse than Gianelli.

A replacement would never be the problem. Any time a ruling capo went to jail or bit the bullet, there were half a dozen heirs apparent standing by to take his place. The key was simply dumping Gianelli, and recovering the files that would be always close at hand. It was the kind of job the CIA was made for, and there were professionals on staff to handle every phase of the procedure, from assassinating Gianelli to location and removal of the documents. No sweat, provided Cartwright picked the team himself, avoiding stumble bums like those who left their carcasses at Arlington.

Eliminating Gianelli had its risks, of course. If Cartwright should blow it, if the greasy bastard tumbled to his plan and then survived, there would be hell to pay. It was unlikely that a contract would be let upon a ranking officer of the CIA, but nothing was impossible. More probably, selective information would be circulated to the media — the goddamned
Post,
the frigging networks — and before you knew it there would be another round of hearings, blue-nosed senators forgetting where their campaign contributions came from, looking for a little mileage at the Agency's expense.

It had been bad enough when Hoover's files had surfaced some years back; at least the old man had been dead and gone before they started dumping on him. But Hoover's antics at their worst would look like Halloween amusements next to Dallas and Los Angeles. Before the snoops had finished with him, Cartwright would be lucky if they let him bite the bullet — and he knew that no such mercy would occur to the inquisitors.

He could almost hear Lee Farnsworth's voice, a dusty whisper in his memory.
The moral of the story is: don't miss!
When he was ready for the move on Gianelli he would have to make it stick the first time out. There would not be a second chance, and Cartwright could not tolerate the obvious alternatives to victory.