Pendleton, Don - Executioner 018 - Texas Storm.

by Pendleton, Don

  Bolan's reception of the invasion of privacy was a skilled mixture of irritation and willingness to cooperate. "My wife's still in bed," he growled. "What's going on?"

  The clerk was riffling a thin stack of registry cards.

  One of the deputies told the Executioner: "We've had reports of a dangerous fugitive in the county, sir. We're checking out all the public places. Sorry for the inconvenience but—you know how these things go—we have to look."

  Both officers had stepped across the threshold into the room. The clerk remained outside, nervously shuffling his cards.

  Bolan mentally shook his head over their "procedure." They were blocking the doorway, framed in it, with all the light behind them, sitting ducks for any "dangerous fugitive" who might wish to blast his way out of that corner.

  He snapped on the overhead lights and waved his arm in an invitational sweep of the premises. "Have at it," he said.

  The official eyes had gone magnetically to the appealingly staged "bed scene" but did not linger there more than a split second.

  One of the lawmen wandered through toward the bathroom, mumbling an eyes-averted apology to the lady in bed. The other was scrutinizing the motel card on which Bolan had registered his occupancy several days earlier.

  "Name, sir?" he murmured.

  Bolan replied, "Edwards. You want identification?" "No, sir. Is that your Porsche parked just outside?"

  "One-third mine, two-thirds the Cotton State Bank's."

  The deputy grinned. "Yes sir. Do you happen to remember the license number?"

  Bolan told him, then asked, "Didn't I put that on the card?"

  "Yessir, just checking. Uh, you didn't register your wife, Mr. Edwards."

  "Didn't I?" Bolan clucked his tongue. "Too long a bachelor, I guess. I keep forgetting."

  "Yessir." The deputy shot a quick glance toward the bed. Judith was glowering at her half-devoured Danish, pouting.

  The other officer returned from his hasty inspection of the steamy bathroom, snapped a sideways glance at Bolan, and went on outside.

  The spokesman for the law said, "Sorry to trouble you, Mr. Edwards. We appreciate the cooperation." He made a little half-salute toward the bed. "Mrs. Edwards." He paused in the open doorway for another glance at the bed. "Uh, it's state law, sir. Each adult occupant is supposed to be registered by name."

  Bolan smiled through the hardening shaving lather. "I'll stop by the office and fix it," he assured the young officer.

  The guy touched his hat again and stepped outside. Bolan closed the door and turned a smile toward the girl.

  She released a long sigh and said, "Wow. Easy as pie. Just the same I'll take my suspense in the movies, thanks."

  "It only seemed easy because it worked," Bolan corrected her. "A false breath, one wrong word, and the roof would have fallen in. You did great. But the suspense has hardly begun."

  Five minutes later he was fully dressed, the Beretta snug in her usual place of concealment beneath his left arm.

  The girl remained as Bolan had placed her, nude beneath the thin sheet, propped onto the pillow, the half-eaten Danish in her hand, watching him with mounting curiosity.

  "Yes, you're a mighty tough guy, Mack Bolan," she observed. "So sweet one minute and so—so deadly the next. I'll bet you're going out looking for blood, aren't you."

  He said, "Something like that."

  "What about me?" she asked in a little-girl voice.

  "That's your option," he replied. "You're in no shape to travel and you're certainly not dressed for it. I don't know how far a couple of towels would get you. From where I stand, though, you have three choices. You can pick up that phone and call the law, tell them what's happened, demand protection. Or you can try to contact your father, expose yourself to the people who are holding him, and end up right back in their hands. Either way, even if you call the cops, you'll probably wind up right back where I came in."

  "You said three choices," she murmured.

  "The third is probably the toughest, maybe even the most dangerous. The third choice is me, Judith. You can tell me all you know. Then you can stay right where you are until I've had a chance to clear a place for you out there in that no-man's-land. But there's no assurance that I'll ever get back. And it has to be your decision, not mine "

  She showed him a wan smile. "It's like I'm a quarterback. I have to call the play. No help from the bench."

  Bolan nodded. "Third down. And it's your option. You can pass, keep, or hand off."

  "Let's huddle and talk this over," she said solemnly.

  "No way. It's a two-minute drill, third-and-ten situation. The play has already been called and I'm up front, in the pit. It's a sweep to the strong side, quarterback option."

  "You're my right tackle," the girl murmured. He said, "I see you understand the game."

  "This is football country, Mack." She gave him a long, unblinking gaze, then sighed and added, "It's the one thing Daddy and I always had in common. Yes, I understand the damn game. But this isn't a game of football, is it."

  Bolan said, "Very much the same. Call it."

  She fluttered her eyelids and said, "You're going to pull and block for a strong-side sweep. I can follow my blocker or I can exercise my options."

  "That's about it."

  "But your assignment is fixed. Preordained. You go with or without me."

  "Right."

  Her eyes were brave but the voice just a bit trembly with the decision. "Okay. I'll keep."

  He twirled a chair around and straddled it, gazing at the girl across folded hands. "Welcome aboard.

  You've got about five minutes to tell me everything you know."

  The telling was painful, often choking, sometimes teary—and it took quite a bit more than five minutes.

  But when the Executioner stepped out of that motel room, he carried with him very clear directions to the front. He knew, within certain limits, the name of the Mafia game in Texas—and, no, it was not football. It was a game for keeps—for control, maybe, of the entire Western world.

  Cosa di tutti Cosi—the Thing of All the Things— the Cosa Nostra master plan for world domination— was taking firm root in Texas soil.

  And there were no options whatever for executioner Bolan.

  7: SIGNALS

  A couple of sheriff's deputies were still nosing around the motel. Bolan noted that the war wagon had drawn no more than passing interest, but he was not about to push his luck in that direction.

  He climbed into his hot wheels, the Porsche, and eased out of there.

  The roadblock across the interstate exit was still In place but having minimal effect on the flow of traffic. The troopers were spot-checking only, waving most cars on without even a full stop. The half-hearted effort told Bolan something about the state of alert in this particular area. The on-ramp was not being monitored at all.

  It was a huge state, after all, and severely under- policed.

  That could be both good and bad, depending upon the point of view. For Bolan, at this particular moment, it was good.

  He smiled grimly at his own reflection in the car mirror and pulled in beside a phone booth at a service station just off the interstate. The long-distance operator connected into a Massachusetts area code and rang the number which Bolan supplied.

  A familiar voice responded to the third ring. The operator announced, "Collect call from Mr. Al La Mancha. Will you accept charges?"

  "You got the wrong number," came the expected reply. "I don't know any La Mancha."

  The operator verified the number, apologized, disconnected, and asked Bolan,

  "Would you like to check that number, sir?"

  He replied, "Sure. I'll call you back."

  He wandered into the office of the service station, bought coffee from a coin-operated dispenser, small-talked the attendant, got a pocketful of change, and stepped back into the phone booth precisely five minutes after he'd left it.

  This time he direct-dialled, fed i
n his coins, and waited for the ring at another booth two thousand miles away.

  The same familiar voice was there, a bit breathless this time. "Yeah, damn it, hello."

  "La Mancha here."

  "I wasn't exactly expecting Alice in Wonderland," Leo Turrin told the Executioner.

  Turrin was a Massachusetts family under boss also an undercover federal cop and Mack Bolan's truest friend in the world.

  Bolan was chuckling. He said, "Leo, you're getting soft. Or else that two-block walk gets a little longer every time."

  "Yeah, you've hit it," Turrin replied sourly. "On both counts. I hope to God you're not calling from deep in the heart of Texas."

  "How'd you guess?"

  "Good Christ. It's true, then. Sarge, get the hell out of there!"

  "No way, Leo. This is happy hunting grounds. These guys are—"

  "I know, damn it, I know. Listen, Texas is so hot that I only started hearing the whispers a few weeks ago, myself. How the hell do you get onto that stuff? Brognola just turned his strike force into the problem ten days ago. All they're getting so far is odours."

  Harold Brognola was an on-again, off-again Bolan ally—also a rather highly placed official in the U.S. Department of Justice. His special project was organized crime, and this circumstance had placed him on collision courses with Bolan's pathways during several of the campaigns.

  Bolan said to Leo Turrin, "And all you're getting is whispers, eh?"

  "Yeh. That's about par. Except right now all of a sudden I'm hearing some loud screams. The Bolan Bunch has been activated, and I hear—"

  "Hold, hold. That's a new one. The Bolan Bunch?"

  "The new head-hunters. In your case, successors to the Taliferi. You should've been checking in with me. It's a new counterforce headed up by a guy named Lileo. They—"

  "Never heard of that one," Bolan interrupted.

  "One of the young Turks out of New Orleans," Turrin explained. "A real headman, I hear. Anyway, it's a nationwide outfit. Crews in all major cities. This Lileo calls the shots from his new headquarters in St. Louis. It's a network operation, Sarge—like a spider web. These crews are poised to converge on any point you touch. It's their only reason for living.

  And right now, buddy, they are converging on Texas."

  "It figures," Bolan commented. The humour had left his voice. It was grim, now—thoughtful. "Well, that's just one more factor. I'm not playing defence this time, Leo."

  "You might have to."

  Bolan was remembering his little speech to Judith Klingman about "a two-minute drill." He told his friend Turrin, "Just gives me less time for a score. I was playing on a couple more days' worth of numbers."

  "No. No way, Sarge. If you must hit, then damn it hit and git. And I mean quick. Don't give these boys a chance to set up for you."

  "I'll need some quick intelligence," Bolan said, and both men understood that it was an urgent request.

  The troubled sigh from Massachusetts told it like it was. "You're in a top security area, Mack."

  Bolan sighed and said, "Don't I know it. Leo—it's the Big Thing again, in spades. They're going for a Texas takeover."

  "Takeover of what?"

  "I just said it. Texas. The proverbial heart of it, at the least."

  The undercover fed sent a nervous, coughing chuckle across the two thousand miles of telephone line. "Hell. That's quite an order, isn't it? The whole damned state of Texas?"

  Bolan replied, "Just about. The politics, the economy, the whole bag."

  "Then they must have gotten a lot smarter than anything I've seen yet. Since Lansky, anyway.

  "This looks bigger than anything Lansky ever tried," Bolan told him. "It's a coalition—a gathering of brains, money, and muscle."

  "Cannibal operation?"

  "Yeah, but much more than that. International interests, even."

  "Sounds very romantic," Turrin growled.

  "Yeah, well, I lucked onto a small piece of it. I believe they're working several angles all at once. The piece I caught is oil."

  "Is what?"

  "Oil, the stuff that makes the world go 'round."

  "What the hell!" Turrin snorted. "They can't hope to take over anything that big! Why that's— that's . . ."

  "Yeah, ridiculous. That's exactly why it might work. I thought the same thing, at first. But you're liable to wake up some morning to find that you've got to play ball with the mob before you can gas your car or heat your home. Or open your factory or roll your trucks or whatever the hell you can think of that makes the world hum."

  "Aw hell, Sarge."

  "I know, Leo. It's hard to believe. But they are well into it. Already they've gobbled up, at least one small independent, the Klingman outfit, and—"

  "Hey! I've heard that one! Is that—what is that?"

  "Just the beginning I hope. I need you to tell me just how far the cancer has spread. Now listen and get it the first time around. I've got to get off centre and start my sweep. Three months ago the small corporation known as Klingman Petro was rolling high in profits and you couldn't have bought a share of the stock with your own blood. At this moment the company is in collapse. You can't give the stock away except to people in the know, and then that's about what you have to do—give it away. Klingman has been gobbled up whole body by a so-called conglomerate that's chartered in Delaware under the name International Bankers Holding Corporation. I believe it's a mob front operation. But it's more than that, too. A well-known sheik or sultan or whatever from the Mideast is an officer in IBH - one of the invisible ones. I think the—"

  "Hold it, Sarge. This is beginning to sound like something out of Arabian Nights. Do you know what the hell you're—?"

  "I said to get it the first time around, Leo. My numbers are getting short. Believe it or don't, but damn it listen and take off from there when I've finished."

  "Okay, okay," Turrin muttered.

  "My informant couldn't recall this Arab's name, but I'm assured it's well known to the state department. He's some sort of a maverick over there—never has played ball with the Arab unity idea, and apparently he has ideas of his own. But he's picked himself some damn tough partners. He'll probably find himself in the cannibal's pot before it's over. The Italian mob and the French mob have a piece of the action, too, if the names of the IBH directors mean anything There might also be some action coming in from the Bahamas, so you might check that direction of interest."

  "Mack, this is just too goddamned—okay, okay. Go on."

  "That's about it. Except for one final item. My contact tells me that the wells of Klingman Petro are pumping at maximum flow, despite official reports to the contrary. I'd sure like to know where that crude is going, whether it's being stored or refined—and, if it is being refined, where Klingman's refineries are all but shut down."

  "Sarge, I don't know how the hell I can—"

  "And I'd like to know what gives with their pipeline operation. Something damn peculiar is going on in that area. They're changing out pumping stations, rerouting feeders and trunk lines, all sorts of weird moves."

  The Pittsfield under boss howled, "Shit, I don't know anything about that stuff!"

  "Then it's time to broaden your mind. See what you can dig up for me, Leo."

  "Oh, sure, that's easy. I'll just waltz down to New York and crash in on Augie Marinello. I'm sure he'll spill the whole thing to me. In a pig's ass!"

  Bolan chuckled solemnly. "How is Augie? Last I saw or heard, he was being rushed away to the medics."

  "He's alive, just. They took his legs off."

  Bolan said, "I get no cheer from that An old man should be able to die in one piece, even an old man like that one."

  "There's, uh, quite a mystery about that, Sarge.

  They say you gave 'em a white flag to carry the old man off."

  "No mystery," Bolan clipped back. "It just seemed the thing to do. I did it."

  "Yeah. Well . . ."

  "Take care, Leo. Don't expose yourself
."

  "You're a hell of a guy to be handing out advice like that," Turrin replied. "Watch out for Lileo and the Bolan Bunch. It's a hard team."

  Bolan said, "Yeah. How're things in Pittsfield?"