Blood Testament (8 page)

But it was not the soldier's mission to reform a nation, overhaul a system that had sheltered corruption from the start. His war was limited in scope, his moves restricted to the possible, and for the moment it would be enough if he could save three lives. Achieving that goal in itself might be the death of Bolan, but he meant to give it all he had.

He owed Brognola that. For all the times when Hal had risked his pension, his life, to offer aid and comfort in a lonely soldier's war against the odds. For offering an opportunity to make his war official, and for maintaining contact when the roof fell in. Beyond all that, the warrior felt a gut responsibility to strike against the cannibals wherever and whenever possible. It was his life, his reason for existence and the driving force behind his endless war.

He did not share Leo Turrin's fears about a meeting with the President. The Man would not have given Hal two days without some sense of what was happening behind the scenes. Brognola would have been in jail by now, his home and office under guard, if he had not convinced the Oval Office — at least to some small degree — that he was being framed. The President's support would soon evaporate if Hal could not produce substantial evidence.

In the meantime it was simply that the meeting struck Mack Bolan as a waste of time. He owed the President a certain debt of gratitude for setting him up in the Phoenix program, giving him the freedom to conduct his war worldwide. But any debt had long been paid in blood. He forced his mind away from April and the others, wondering precisely what the White House wanted from him. In the end, he finally decided that it would be best to wait and see.

No matter what was said or offered, Bolan's obligation of the moment was to Hal Brognola and his family. If he could not retrieve those gentle souls, his mission would be ultimately counted as a failure, and the measure of his vengeance would be nothing in comparison with Hal's traumatic loss.

If he could not secure the safety of Brognola's wife and children, scourge the animals who had abducted them, his presence in D.C. was nothing but a hollow mockery.

And he was wasting precious time.

But before he moved against the enemy, he had a date to keep.

Mack Bolan braced himself to meet The Man.

Susan Landry pushed her chair back from the computer keyboard, stretching as she double-checked the paragraph that she had just completed on the monitor. She caught a typo and deleted it, reentered the proper spelling of the word and thanked her lucky stars again that she had purchased the machine. With its many functions, the word processor had taken half the effort out of getting stories ready for the wire. The other half, of course, was still the digging — good old-fashioned legwork, phonework, or whatever — and she doubted whether any new technology would ever help reporters cover that end of their beat.

In fact, she loved the work involved in digging out a story. Though she would complain about it with the best — comparing blisters, insults, the occasional menacing letter — she thrived on the research, the intrigue involved in rooting out corruption, searching for the dirty laundry. It was something she excelled at, and the knowledge of her own ability provided confidence required for tackling the tough — and sometimes dangerous — assignments.

There might be nothing dangerous per se about her latest story, but it was important to her all the same. It had begun with scrawled, anonymous complaints, alleging criminal mistreatment of the residents at certain D.C. nursing homes. A string of interviews with residents, beneath the watchful eye of smiling nurses, had done nothing to substantiate the stories. But an off-the-record conversation — and a strictly off-the-record payment — with a member of the cleaning staff at one facility had cast a different light upon the scene. Provided with a suitable inducement, her informant had agreed to take a camera inside the rest home where he was employed. His photographic style would never rate a one-man show, but his subject matter spoke to Susan Landry's heart. Police were studying the photos now, together with a tape that her informant had secured while wired for sound, but she was not inclined to wait for the indictments. UPI was waiting for her lead and talking a potential series. The police would have to watch her dust.

The piece was small compared to other stories she had handled. Susan's coverage of the Cleveland underworld had flirted with a Pulitzer, and she had won acclaim for coverage of the Bolan trial in Texas. Still, the subject matter counted, meant more to her than the national exposure she was likely to receive. It mattered when her writing made a difference in the lives of people on the street, in boardrooms where the fear of media exposure made the fat cats think twice before proceeding on their merry way and trampling the little man. But Susan Landry didn't write for glory or for the recognition of a byline. Several of her hottest stories had been quietly suppressed, against her own best interests, and the Bolan trial had been a fluke.

Bolan...

She thought about the solitary warrior often, wishing there was some way she could tell his story to the world. A part of it had surfaced after Cleveland, rising from the ashes of her own irrevocably altered life, but she had so much more to say about the man. So much that she could never say in public.

He had saved her life on two occasions: once in Cleveland, and again in Washington, before the roof fell in on Bolan's supersecret operation with the government. Each time the guy had risked his own life to pull her out of jeopardy created by her innate curiosity. She would be dead now if it was not for the man in black, but there was nothing she could say or do to repay that debt.

In Cleveland he had saved her from the syndicate; in Washington, from strung-out members of a street gang on the payroll of some renegades at the CIA. The shock waves from his D.C. operation had produced some changes in the Company, but they had also left Mack Bolan once more on the outside, looking in. She wasn't privy to the fine points of his previous arrangement with the government, the price that he had doubtless paid through loss of freedom in return for coming in from the cold. But Susan knew that there had been a hefty price tag on his leaving. She had gleaned from fragments of unguarded conversation that a part of Bolan's heart, a portion of his soul, had been severed, left behind when he was banished from Stony Man.

No, scratch that. The soldier had not been expelled. From all accounts — and there were precious few available — the choice to leave had been his own. If Bolan was in exile now, the penalty was self-imposed, and Susan knew that he would live with it the way that he had lived with being hunted like an animal throughout his early war against the Mafia. From what she gathered off the wires, that war was still in progress, and the Mob was having no more luck at pinning Bolan down today than in the bad old days.

They had come close in Texas with their scheme to put the guy on trial for murder, pin him up in jail where he would be an easy mark for assassination or where he would doubtless find himself condemned to execution for his "crimes." It had been close, but even in a cage, the Man from Blood would never be an easy mark. The trial had been an education in itself, but sudden violence had disrupted the proceedings prior to the delivery of a verdict. Susan wondered what the decision might have been, but the presiding judge steadfastly fended off requests for interviews. If he had come to a decision in the Bolan case, he seemed determined that it would not surface in the headlines.

She thought about the last chaotic moments of the trial in Texas. Bolan had been marked for murder in the courtroom, with assassins salted through the spectators and others waiting on the street outside. But in the final moments he had not been alone. With cameras excluded from the courtroom, there had been no photographs of Bolan's comrade, and the sketchy "artists' renderings" reminded Susan Landry of a Saturday cartoon. She had observed the action from a ringside seat, had passed within ten feet of Bolan's young compatriot as he sat taking notes, a Press badge pinned to his lapel. She had not seen him since, might never cross his path again, but if she did...

And maybe Bolan wasn't out there on his own, alone against the overwhelming odds. Perhaps he had a friend — or two, or three — to stand beside him when the flames were licking at his ankles. But she was wrong again, and recognized the fact before the thought was fully formed. The soldier never lost sight of his goals. And if his goals were ultimately unattainable... well, he would persevere in any case. It was the very definition of a hero and, in Susan Landry's eyes, Mack Bolan fit the bill.

It wouldn't do for Susan to express herself in print — the wires and major magazines were known to frown on editorials romanticizing "common criminals" — but in her heart she knew that there was nothing common in Mack Bolan's private war. Someday, somehow, she might be able to describe the man as she had known him, make the reading public understand the driving force, the dream, behind his long crusade. Despite their relatively short acquaintance, Susan felt that she could see inside the warrior — one facet of the man, at any rate — and understand what made him tick. The truth was painful in its brutal simplicity.

He was
decent,
nothing more nor less. Too decent for the modern world, perhaps, and certainly too decent to permit the savages, the cannibals to go about their business unmolested. He attacked the enemy because he had to, and because he had the skills required to make it stick. When courts of law broke down and justice failed, when predatory animals were circling their prey, the Executioner stood ready to exterminate the vermin, to restore a measure of security, of sanity to daily life inside the urban jungle. Having seen him work, and having shifted from the opposition's viewpoint to the status of an unabashed admirer, Susan Landry knew that Bolan's contribution was important, even vital to the maintenance of civilized society.

Someday, somehow, the world would see Mack Bolan through her eyes. She only hoped that he would be around to share her vision, and to realize precisely what he meant to one reporter in D.C.

The telephone disturbed her private reverie, and Susan got it on the second ring. She recognized the voice at once, a junior officer at Justice who had given her some leads from time to time. The guy had trouble understanding why her gratitude had never been expressed in bed.

"How are you?" Friendly, but with distance that would let him know his place.

"We're jammed up to the rafters, but I thought you'd want to know about your friend."

Alarm bells chimed softly in the back of Susan's mind. "Which friend is that?"

"Brognola."

"What about him?"

"Hey, I guess you really haven't heard."

"What's going on?"

"Perhaps we could discuss it over dinner?"

"Sorry, I'm on deadline. Now, if you've got something for me..."

"Always."

Angry now. "I don't have time for this. If you have nothing more to say..."

"Okay, okay." A note of petulance, the little boy rejected once again. "Brognola's busted."

"What?"

He sounded satisfied with her reaction. "Well, they haven't reeled him in, but it's inevitable. We've got evidence that puts him in the middle of a major orgcrime leak."

"What kind of evidence?"

"That's need-to-know right now, but take my word for it, he's history. They've got him on administrative leave right now."

Her mind was racing, trying to make sense of the ridiculous. Brognola leaking classified material about the syndicate? Perhaps receiving payoffs? It was ludicrous, yet if Justice was anticipating an indictment...

"Listen, I appreciate the tip. I owe you one."

"Say, that's more like it. We could..."

Susan cradled the receiver, cutting off his pitch and letting him romance the dial tone while she tried to grasp the full significance of what he had revealed. It was bizarre enough for Hal to be suspected of disloyalty, but for the brass to formally relieve him, something more than scuttlebutt must be involved. It would be Susan's job to trace that something else, to run it down and find out what was happening before her competition caught the scent and started nipping at Brognola's heels. With any luck she might find some way to assist him in exposing what was clearly a mistake, or worse.

Except there might be no mistake, she realized. The allegations might be true, and God knew stranger things had happened in the past twelve months, with G-men, military officers, their families, all dealing secrets to the Soviets. She knew that
anything
was possible, and yet...

Not Hal.

The lady knew it with a certainty that was rooted in her soul. The only problem now was proving what she knew, unearthing evidence that would support her instincts, her beliefs.

And Susan would begin her search, as always, at the source.

"I don't like this."

It was as close as he would come to arguing with Bolan once the big guy's mind was set, but Leo Turrin had to air his apprehension as he pushed the station wagon north along Wisconsin Avenue in the direction of Bethesda, Chevy Chase and points north.

"Don't worry."

Bolan's voice betrayed distraction, and Turrin couldn't blame him. He was cruising toward a sit-down with the man who had once pardoned him, and then invoked the hit-on-sight directive that prevailed since Bolan's exit from the Phoenix Program. Anything could happen, and despite his faith in Bolan's judgment, Leo did not share his confidence in secondhand "official" guarantees. They might be walking into one hell of a setup, and in spite of his misgivings — no, because of them — he had insisted on providing Bolan with some backup for the meet. He wasn't sure what would happen if they should be met by someone other than the President — by marshals armed with riot guns and M-16s, for instance — but the veteran lawman would not let his friend go down without a fight.

In some ways, it reminded Turrin of the old days, walking into danger situations with the man in black beside him, risking everything on some fantastic run against the odds. They had survived, incredibly, to fight again. But it was different now. If there was trouble this time, Leo's enemy would be the very government that he had served since he enlisted with the First Marine Battalion and shipped out to Vietnam. And if it came to killing, Leo knew that Bolan would not fire a shot at any lawman who acted under orders. He would be a sitting target for the firing squad.

And if that happened, Turrin didn't know how he would react. The marshals wouldn't recognize him, wouldn't know that he was on the payroll, and his own reaction might become superfluous if they were shooting first and asking questions later. Leo knew he might be driving toward his death, but he could no more turn his back on Bolan now than he could voluntarily stop breathing. They were in this thing together, both of them for Hal.

A nagging apprehension had already taken root in the back of Leo's mind, subverting his determination with the message that their mission was a bust, that Brognola's family had no chance whatsoever of surviving their encounter with the Mob. They might be dead already, and most certainly they would not be released to Hal, potential witnesses at large who might exonerate Brognola, turn the spotlight back upon the syndicate. It would be lunacy to let them go, and while the leaders of the syndicate were always savage, sometimes less than brilliant, they were far from being idiots. The man who released Brognola's family, with everything to lose and nothing positive to gain, would have to be a fool.

If Bolan bought it in the coming hour, at his meeting with the President, Hal's family was doomed. It would require a special touch to bring them out of this alive, and Bolan had that touch, in spades. The little Fed had seen him shake the very walls of Castle Mafia, not once but time and time again. His reputation was enough to rattle certain ranking mafiosi, and the ones who weren't afraid of him had never seen the guy in action.

It would be Turrin's job to see that Bolan was not betrayed before he left the starting gate. And if his sit-down with the Man turned out to be a gun-down with a troop of marshals in attendance, well, then Sticker would be forced to offer some diversion while the Executioner withdrew, intact. It was that simple. Sure.