They made County Road, which bisected the course, plunging through the protective rail and onto it, the crew wagon's trunk bouncing up and down with the movements. Bolan followed, laying down a couple of rounds through the open windshield space.
He had started gaining on the limo again, when its driver took a different tack. He swerved off the main road, moving into the wealthy beachfront neighborhoods and their winding streets.
Bolan followed, still hoping for a clean shot, knowing he had to keep moving or die at the hands of those chasing him. It was like some surreal nightmare, everything happening swiftly around him, beyond his control. And in Bolan's line of work, control was everything.
Metrano's sedan turned down Worth Avenue, the most expensive three blocks of real estate in the world, the exclusive shops and restaurants of the superrich stretching out on either side in absurd counterpoint to the filth that was now filtering through it.
Metrano was nearly home. Other cars made the streets, large crowds of weekend pedestrians dodging the speeding vehicles. The cops were all converging, too, flashing lights and sirens turning the atmosphere to a grotesque carnival. Cars took to the wide sidewalks, trash cans flying through the bright afternoon, people diving into storefronts.
A white Cadillac blew a tire and blasted right through the large plate-glass window of Gucci's, the police car behind it swerving into a light post, knocking it into the middle of the street in a cascade of sparks.
Bolan took aim with the carbine, zeroing on the limo's right rear tire, but it swerved around a Mercedes, and he slammed on his brakes instead. This was insane. He dropped the rifle and veered off just as he saw Metrano's car pull up to the gates of his mansion, a squad of men armed with automatics running out to protect their boss.
He sped off quickly, hurrying to lose himself in the maze of residential streets. He'd have to get to safety quickly. The Lincoln was like a red flag, battered and pitted with bullet holes. He jammed the gas pedal and hurried toward the bridge at Southern Boulevard so he could get back to the mainland before the cops could seal it off.
Angrily, he turned to the corpse beside him. "What the hell is going on here?" he asked through clenched teeth.
3
It was twilight before Bolan pulled into the driveway of the ranch-style house he had rented on Riviera Beach. He got out quickly, moving to open the garage. The neighborhood was quiet and residential. Besides the rhythmic slapping of the surf behind the white frame house, the only sound he could hear was the distant echo of rock and roll music. He took note but didn't listen. The gentler arts were something long ago buried within the puzzle box of the Executioner's past, covered fast with the scar tissue of pain and responsibility.
Though he had friends and associates, good people, his fight was, had to be, a lonely one. For when the life you lead keeps you on the ragged territory between survival and death, you find yourself saying goodbye too often. And goodbye in Mack Bolan's world was a permanent thing. He thought of April Rose. She had shared his world, his love and his mission — and when a KGB bullet ended her life in the attack on Stony Man Farm, he was forced to say goodbye, not only to April, but to a good bit of himself.
The fight had continued, for the man known as the Executioner had a mission, but giving of himself emotionally to others was something he guarded himself against. The pain that could hurt him, could kill him, resided within himself. The death of April had almost done it to him. And now he protected himself as best he could, except with Johnny, his brother, who shared some of his lonely vigils.
The door rumbled open and he moved back to the car, driving into the cavern of the garage under the nearly iridescent blue of the rapidly darkening sky. He was tired, emotionally drained from a day of playing hide and seek with the Mob and the Florida police.
He left the headlights on until he got the garage door closed and locked, then he turned them off and moved around to the passenger side and opened the door. The woman's body slumped out into his arms. He probably should have gotten rid of her, but the riddle of her identity was more than he could walk away from. She had been at the church for reasons similar to his own, had died for those reasons, and Bolan had to know why.
He picked her up off the seat. She was surprisingly light, her jump suit still damp from the blood that had stopped flowing now. He moved to the door that led inside. The TV was blaring as he walked into the house. There was a dining table with two folding chairs, and two sleeping bags unrolled on the living room floor. There was no other furniture.
Bolan's brother, Johnny, jumped up from the floor in front of the television when he heard movement in the house. His look of happiness turned to near horror when he saw the grisly bundle Bolan held in his arms.
He ran up, staring into the dead woman's slack face. "Who is it?" he asked.
"You should keep that door locked," Bolan replied. He moved to the table, dropping his burden heavily upon it, fast-food bags and paper cups flying everywhere.
"Sorry, I…"
"Lock it now," Bolan growled, and bent to the woman who lay sprawled on the table, her dead eyes staring at the ceiling.
In the living room the television was showing pictures of the savaging of Worth Avenue. It was a national telecast. They were interviewing the chief of the Palm Beach Police.
"It looks like the work of that vigilante, the one they call the Executioner," the officer was saying. "The man he was after, Mr. Metrano, has been under state and federal investigation for quite some time, but so far there's really no evidence to connect him to organized crime."
"The guest list at the wedding would do if you people could read," Bolan said, nodding at the TV.
"What happened out there?" Johnny asked, moving around the other side of the table to look at the woman.
"… All available personnel, including the FBI, are involved in the search for this guy," the chief said. "As of this moment, we are engaged in the largest manhunt in Florida history. We'll have him before long."
"Her accent was French," Bolan said, patting the woman's pockets to see if they contained any clue to her identity. They were, not surprisingly, empty. "Why don't you crank up one of those machines and see if you can find us anything on the word Sabra."
"A girl's name?" Johnny asked.
Bolan shook his head, and ripped open the woman's jump suit, tearing it from her body. "An organization, I think. I'm sure she was at the church in a professional capacity."
Johnny moved to the portable computer hardware in the next room and turned on the phone modem that gave him fingers that spread over the whole world.
The woman was wearing only panties under the jump suit, her pale skin encrusted with dried blood. She had no identification of any kind, her only jewelry a fine silver chain on which hung a six-pointed star, a Jewish symbol.
Plan, Bolan thought. Where had he heard that word?
On television, the Cadillac was being winched out of the ocean where it had run off the bridge, with shots interspersed of the bodies being carried away from the wreck, white sheets covering them.
Bolan thought of Devil's Island, of the ingenious way prisoners had of concealing their valuables in small silver cylinders called plans. The woman was hiding something. He was sure of it now.
He quickly examined the body, finally moving to her mouth, forcing the already stiffening jaws open. Johnny walked back into the room, puzzlement showing on his face.
"What are you doing, Mack?" he asked.
Bolan looked up, his face hard. "She said something, sounded like plan. I think it's a French word," he said. "Maybe she can help us finish what she started. Get me a flashlight and some needle-nose pliers."
Johnny Bolan, only surviving member of Mack Bolan's family, got the tools and left them on the table, returning to his computer silently.
Bolan took the flashlight and played the beam inside the woman's mouth. Her teeth were stained red, forcing him to clean them off with a rag before continuing. When he did, he found a
tooth unlike the others, not quite matching in coloration, a little brighter. This had to be it.
Flashlight in one hand, the pliers in the other, Bolan began tugging at the discolored tooth. It came out easily.
"Got it!" Johnny called from the next room, and walked in just in time to see his brother holding a bloody tooth up to the light.
"Tell me," Bolan replied, and laid the tooth on the table.
Johnny sat on a folding chair, facing away from the body. "You know you really tore this city up," he said. "We have to get out of here."
"Soon," Bolan answered, picking up the tooth and wiping the blood off it. "Any civilians hurt?"
Johnny shook his head. "A concussion, a broken arm and a lot of fender benders. Eleven on the other side are dead, though."
Bolan grunted neither satisfaction nor regret, simple acknowledgment. "Sabra," he said again, and found the tooth had a hairline break around its circumference. He turned it against itself and it unscrewed.
"It's a cactus that grows all over Israel," Johnny said.
"Israel," Bolan repeated distractedly, pulling the tooth apart and finding a tiny spool of microfilm within.
"I was able to get into the State Department's computers and checked what they had for Israel." Johnny turned to stare as his brother dumped the microfilm onto the tabletop. "The info is pretty sketchy, just reports from Company people over there, but it seems that Sabra is the name of an Israeli paramilitary unit that operates independently of that government through the private funding of mostly American Jews. They're a strike force that conducts commando raids on PLO targets both inside and outside the country. The word is that they were the ones responsible for the raid in Tunisia that destroyed the PLO headquarters."
Bolan stood. "What could they want over here?" He took the pliers and picked up the film by the edge.
Johnny shrugged. "That's all I could find," he said.
Bolan handed him the pliers. "Think you could rig something up so we could get a look at this?"
"Give me five minutes."
While Johnny rummaged through his case Bolan used the time to make sure no trace of them remained in the house. They were going to have to get out quickly, preferably in another vehicle. They'd have to leave all the gear behind, but there was more where that came from.
This was a bad one, and Bolan was worried, not so much for himself, but for his brother. The woman had started it, but in his own haste to follow it up, he had used poor judgment. His dislike of Metrano had canceled out all common sense, and that bothered him. Rationality and a dogged sense of protectiveness toward civilians had been among his chief virtues. Today he had ignored both, and would possibly have to pay for it.
He moved through the house quickly, walking finally to the sliding glass door in back that looked out over the ocean. The water churned wildly, reflecting moonlight on its froth in silver diamonds. He thought he detected movement in the shadows for a second, but he convinced himself it wasn't anything. Still, he made sure that the doors were locked.
Things were ready in the living room. Johnny had hooked up a photographic enlarger and was shooting the image at maximum magnification onto the white wall. Even at that, the picture was small and blurry. Bolan walked right up to the wall and leaned in close to look. It was a letter.
Jamil:
Am sending this by messenger. Hope it finds you well. The deal for the artillery and ordnance is set on this end and is already in motion by conveyance previously discussed. We wish the ten million cash in American money. I am set to arrive in Lebanon on the sixteenth and will see to the money personally. Coming with me will be several associates ready to connect up with your people in drug disbursement. Will advise of carrier by another messenger. This operation marks the first union between our organizations. We guarantee the equipment and I am sending, as a gift, one of my experts in the use of C-4 who will help in planning the destruction of the Zionist landmarks previously discussed. All best from our family to yours.
Metrano
"Jamil?" Johnny said.
"Jamil Arman," Bolan said in a low voice, his fists clenched. "Second in command of the PLO."
"Ten million buys a lot of guns."
"And a lot of lives. The sixteenth is three days from now."
"What are we going to do?"
Bolan turned toward the dining area, taking a quick look at the dead Sabra agent. "We're going to get Metrano," he said, "wherever he is "
4
The man sitting in the black Jaguar watched intensely as a small white Siamese cat crept along the rooftops. It moved along a path it had used for years, leaping from roof to fence to tree and back to roof again, patrolling its territory without ever jumping to the ground. If it saw the Jaguar parked in front of the white frame house that came somewhere toward the middle of its circuit, it didn't let on. More important, it didn't change its routine.
The man in the car smiled when he saw the cat approaching him. He reached under his dark leather bucket seat and pulled out a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. He peeled away the protective covering to reveal a Manurhin MR 73 Long Range with a 9-inch barrel, a formidable .357 Magnum he had brought to the United States in his diplomat's attaché case — personal property of his country's embassy and exempt from customs inspection. The three-inch custom-made silencer was wrapped up with the revolver, and he screwed it in with delicious slowness.
The cat leaped from the roof next to the white frame onto a palm branch, clinging tightly as the branch swayed up and down with its weight. Then the animal raced quickly along the branch and onto another, finally leaping onto the rain gutter of the white frame's roof, and up the eaves to the peak.
The man in the Jag turned on the key so he could operate the power windows. He was Palestinian, and his dark face was framed by a shock of jet-black hair and mustache. Though he had spent many years in the United States, taking advantage of its educational and cultural opportunities, he cherished an intense hatred for Americans. He hated them for what they represented. Though he came from a family made rich by oil, he hated the casual, easygoing life-style that most Americans enjoyed. Life was a war that America hadn't tasted as yet, and the man found in that a profound reason for hating Americans.
He watched the cat climb to the rooftop and walk casually along it, a tiny silhouette moving across a moonlit backdrop. He pushed the button and the window powered up, stopping two-thirds closed.
Whether America knew it or not, World War III had already begun, and the man was one of the advance terrorist troops. It was a war fought not on the usual battlefields, but on the television screens of the world, and the chief weapons in the arsenal were fear and misdirected humanity. Not with a bang would the land of liberty fall — but with a frightened whimper.
The man took out his handkerchief and draped it over the top edge of the half-closed window. Then he laid the barrel of the MR 73 on the handkerchief, leaning close to look down the micrometer rear sight.
He chuckled when he got the animal in the sights. He pulled back the hammer, his finger gently caressing the trigger.
His car phone trilled, but he ignored it and continued tracking the cat. Just before it reached the far end of the roof, he squeezed off a shot, the gun bucking in his hand, its sound a muted hiss, like the closing of elevator doors.
The Magnum dum-dum took off the animal's head cleanly, its spasming body clutching frantically at the roof for several seconds before going slack and rolling down the incline to drop heavily onto the front lawn. The man nodded in satisfaction and reached for the phone. He had just taught some weak American family a lesson in impermanence.
"Yes?"
"Are our people there yet, Abba?"
"No. If they don't come soon, I shall handle this myself."
"Don't be hasty. There's already been enough trouble for one…"
The man hung up the phone, then disconnected the ringer so he couldn't be annoyed by a callback. All Americans were weak, even the Mafia. He had been the on
ly one able to stay with the stranger who pulled the Sabra agent out of the church. The man was probably the one who killed the courier with the letter to Jamil, also. This one had to be taken care of quickly. He was dangerous, not soft like the others.
The black-haired man heard the sound of engines and looked in his rearview mirror to see several cars moving slowly down the street with their headlights off. They coasted up in front of the house, one Cadillac pulling in front of the driveway to block it.
Abba got out of the Jag, slipped on his silk sport jacket over the black turtleneck sweater he wore. He still held the Magnum in his hand.
Men began filing quietly out of the cars, several of them carrying shotguns. Tommy Metrano's son, Joey, was among them, walking toward Abba as soon as he saw him.
Abba hated Joey Metrano. He was soft and fleshy like all Americans. He cared nothing for the revolutionary struggle and was interested only in what he could acquire for himself.
"Which house?" Joey asked, nearly a whisper.
Abba pointed to the white frame.
"Is he alone?"
Abba shrugged. "What does it matter?"
Joey Metrano's eyes narrowed. He was taller than the Palestinian, probably outweighed him by eighty pounds, but he was scared of him anyway, scared of the meanness that seemed to well up in a never-ending pool behind the man's eyes. Third-generation Mafia, he felt a lot more comfortable in the boardrooms of the Family's legitimate enterprises than he ever would out on a hit.
"We've got to handle this one quietly," Joey said. "There's been enough bad publicity already today to hurt us for years."
Abba smiled wide, his teeth shining brightly in the moonlight. "Bad publicity!" He snorted derisively. Joey tried to hush him. "We simply go up and take the house. Kill the bastards and burn the son of a bitch to the ground."
"No!" Joey rasped. "We're handling this one my way. We'll figure how to take him quietly, then get rid of the body where it won't be found."
Death Has a Name Page 2
