Blood Testament (22 page)

"Twenty minutes," Bolan told him, glancing at his watch. "We're on a deadline."

"Dammit, that's not long enough."

"You're wasting time."

He cradled the receiver, going out the same way he had come, descending swiftly, pushing off the trellis halfway down and sprinting back in the direction of the gate and his rental car. He had precisely eighteen minutes left when he slid in behind the wheel.

And Hal was right: it wasn't long enough. He didn't have a hope in hell of reaching Sleepy Hollow, tracking down the address and attempting any sort of rescue by a half-past one. It was a washout, doomed to failure from the outset — but if Bolan had no hope, he also had no viable alternative. But he had to
try,
and only when he saw the mortal evidence of failure lying at his feet would he be free to seek revenge.

Against the Gianelli family for openers. Against the honcho at Clandestine Ops who put the ball in play and caused so much unbridled havoc in the lives of decent folk. The bastard would be sorry he had started with Brognola, sorry he was ever born, before the Executioner was finished with him. He would plead for death, accept it as a blessing when it came.

Mack Bolan was surprised by the intensity of hate that welled up inside him. How long since he had braced himself to kill from righteous anger? Had it been Detroit? Miami? Pittsfield? Had it been so long since he allowed himself to feel? The question nagged at him taunting, and for an instant he wondered whether he had grown inured to suffering, immune to pain.

And in that instant, he immediately knew the answer. He had not forgotten how to feel. Pain had been a part of Bolan's war from the beginning, from the moment when he stood before a row of graves in Massachusetts, saying his farewells to home and family. He had survived the pain and learned to cope when lesser men might easily have sought escape through drunkenness or death. He had survived to turn that pain around and forge from it a weapon to destroy his enemies. With each new wound he suffered, each new loss, the soldier braced himself to wreak vengeance on the savages arrayed against him. In a world of dog-eat-dog, it was the swiftest, most ferocious hound who led the pack. It might already be too late to salvage anything from Sleepy Hollow. Bolan would not write Brognola's wife and children off, but neither would he count on miracles. If they were dead before he reached them, if the nightmare become reality, there still might be a chance for him to overtake the cleanup crew. From there, he had a date with Nicky Gianelli, and another with the honcho from Clandestine Ops.

There would be nothing he could say to Hal. The man from Justice had not asked for any promises, aware that they were impossible to keep. His sorrow would be boundless, and eradication of the animals responsible would not assuage his grief.

But it would help the Executioner.

His private pain was forged from equal parts of loss and anger now, with anger grappling for the upper hand. And it would help him to watch a bullet rip through Nicky Gianelli's face. To lock his fingers tight around the throat of Cameron Cartwright, squeezing out the breath of life until the man's tongue protruded and his eyes rolled blindly back into his head. It would be good to kill again.

Relax, Bolan told himself. The anger, he knew, could get him killed if he allowed it to control his actions. If he reached the safe house before the occupants departed, he would be outmanned, outgunned, and he would need his wits about him if he hoped to see another sunrise.

Relax, he told himself again.

Forget about the intervening miles and concentrate on distance covered, time remaining. Bolan knew the folly of defeatist thinking, realized the fatal error of giving up before the battle had been joined. If anger ruled his mind, he would be little better than a bullet fired at random, free to ricochet around the battlefield until it spent its force and fell to earth in vain. He needed something more along the order of a guided missile now, a death machine complete with built-in homing instinct that would let him find the necessary targets, root them out and burn them down with surgical precision. Forget about an old friend's family on the line, he counseled himself, and concentrate on picking off the savages. Make it count. And if the final sacrifice was necessary, take as many of the bastards with you as you could.

It was the only way to wage a war, and Bolan knew enough of living on the edge to realize that death was never far away. If this was all the time remaining to him here tonight, then he would use that time to best advantage, running up a score against the enemy before they took him down.

And he would teach them all a thing or two about the costs of everlasting war while he was at it. Offer them a lesson in the grim reality of suffering.

He stood on the accelerator, felt the car grudgingly respond, its engine laboring. Another fifteen minutes, and he wondered if Brognola had the slightest chance of showing up before the roof fell in. For once, he almost hoped that Hal would be late.

The man should not be forced to watch his family die.

There would be ample opportunity for him to witness death before the sun rose over Washington again. This one time, though, if there was any mercy in the universe, the soldier hoped Brognola might be spared.

But it was not a night for mercy.

It was a night for blood.

"He's late!"

"Take it easy. We've got time."

"He should've called by now."

"I'll give him ten more minutes."

"Dammit, Blake, the man said half-past one."

"And I said give him ten, so just relax."

The quarreling voices were distinct enough that Helen had been able to identify the speakers. Blake would be the blond one, the leader of the team, and he was standing firm against his two accomplices — for the moment. Their contact — someone calling with instructions? orders? — had already overrun his deadline, and the two gorillas were becoming restive, anxious to be on about their business.

Helen knew only too well what that business was, and she kept the dark suspicion to herself. The only call their captors might anticipate would deal with their release... or execution. She cherished no illusions of eleventh-hour stays, no last reprieve. The call, when it was finally made, would seal their fates, and any small delay could only provide an inkling of hope.

Whatever came they were prepared to fight and die with something close to dignity. Her Catholic background had prepared her to believe in miracles, but Helen recognized the odds against success. They would be facing automatic weapons in the hands of trained professionals, their only armament consisting of a wooden staff, a shower rod-cum-javelin, and the internal hardware from a toilet tank. No point in calculating odds; the melancholy end result would only weaken her resolve, and at the moment Helen needed every ounce of strength that she possessed.

She was determined to resist, if not in hopes of breaking free, then merely for resistance as an end unto itself. She would not let herself or her children be methodically eliminated like a string of brainless sheep marched off to slaughter. If they could strike one blow, or kill one of their enemies, they would have left some mark behind, a sign of their humanity, their will to live. Surrender at the final instant was unthinkable, a crime against Hal's memory and their life together.

No sounds came from the other room, and Helen stood back from the door, her children's eyes upon her as she turned to face them. They were waiting, tense, expectant, and the tears in Eileen's eyes were tears of anger mixed with fear. Jeff's face had aged impossibly, and Helen cursed their captors for the theft of innocence from both her children.

Were they innocent? Was anybody innocent today? In a society conditioned to accept a toll of sixty murders each and every day, six violent rapes per hour, was there even such a thing as innocence? Could children weaned on television news and splatter movies ever grasp the concept of a life immune to fear? It did not matter in the end. They were
her
children. And as far as she was concerned, they would always be innocent.

For bringing fear and grief into their lives, she owed the gunners any pain that she would finally be able to inflict. For snuffing out their lives, she owed the bastards more — and knew that she would never have the strength, the opportunity, to pay her debt in full.

If Hal was with her now...

God, no.

If Hal was with her, then the bastards would have all of it, her family and life itself wrapped up in one large bundle, ready for disposal. While he lived, while he was able to pursue their captors and make them scurry for their lives, then justice was a living breathing possibility.

And Hal was still alive. She sensed it, knew instinctively that his survival was the reason for her captors' agitation, the delay in their receipt of final orders. A meeting had been set for Arlington at midnight; Helen knew that much from listening to one-sided conversations on the telephone. Whatever had transpired, her man had walked away from it intact. If he was dead the gunners would have heard the news by now. The three of them would have been dead by now.

Which meant they still had time.

The leader, Blake, had said ten minutes. Gino and the one called Carmine were reluctant, but they both had gone along... from fear, uncertainty, whatever.

It was incredible, this measuring of life in minutes, knowing that you would be dead by, say, 1:45. Unless Blake stalled his comrades one more time. Unless a call came through.

"Be ready," Helen told her children in a whisper. "We take the first one through the door."

"Right on." Jeff's knuckles whitened where he gripped the wooden closet rod, converted to a makeshift fighting staff.

"I'm ready." Armed with metal slats extracted from the toilet tank, Eileen looked very soft and frail, a princess dressed in blue jeans and a checkered flannel shirt.

"All right."

The shower rod was cool and slick in Helen's hands, its tip already bent and flattened into something like a clumsy spear point. She would not be winning any prizes for originality or manual dexterity, but it would have to do. If she could reach soft flesh, perhaps a vital spot...

It was enough to fight. The killing, if she got that far, would be a bonus. No, a miracle.

And while her background had prepared her to believe in miracles, tonight Helen Brognola knew that she was on her own.

"They're still inside?"

Brognola's voice was strained, almost inaudible, and he was winded from the final sprint that had delivered him to Bolan's side. They looked away, his eyes returning to the lighted windows of the safe house.

"Could be they're waiting for a call."

"From Grymdyke?"

Bolan shrugged. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

"If they're alive..."

"Not now."

Brognola got the message and nodded solemnly. "How do we play it?"

"You stake out the front. I'll take the rear approach."

"All right." He had begun to move when Hal reached out to place a warm hand on his shoulder. "Hey... and thanks, you know?"

He knew, damn right, and he could read the questions, the accumulated pain engraved across Brognola's face. He knew precisely what the Fed was going through, and with that knowledge came the certainty that there was nothing he could do to make it any easier.

If Hal's wife and children were still alive, against all odds, they had a chance. If someone in the crew had gotten antsy and snuffed them in the safe house in defiance of established rules, then there was still the matter of exacting vengeance. Either way it all boiled down to chance and opportunity, the factors that no soldier on the firing line could possibly control.

The drive from Alexandria had taken twenty-seven minutes, and he had been on the scene another three before Brognola showed. He would have moved without the Fed, but there were angles of attack to be computed, odds against survival to be weighed and finally discarded. Anyone who blundered blind and ignorant into an established hardset was asking to be killed, and while the Executioner had long abandoned any lasting fear of death, he did not plan to throw his life away on futile gestures, either.

If he could not readily identify the enemy or count the hostile guns inside, at least he could attempt to chart the layout of the safe house: doors and windows, rooms accessible from the exterior, the likely fields of fire inside and out.

If he could not protect the hostages, he could try at least to minimize their risks. Provided they were still alive, of course. Provided that the gunners were not primed to wipe them out at the first sign of interference. If the hostages were covered or if the safe house had been wired to self-destruct, then they were beaten going in.

Which did not abrogate the Executioner's responsibility.

No way.

He had a job to do, for his closest friend and his family... and for himself. The savages inside that safe house needed to be taught that there was no place safe on earth for animals who violated families. They needed a reminder that the abstract justice they had learned about in school was still alive and well, if not precisely obvious in day-to-day existence on the streets. There was a price to pay for every crime, a consequence for every violation of the laws men had erected to preserve a civilized society. And if the courts had fallen on hard times, if judges and DAs appeared unable to enforce those laws across the board, the job might fall to others.

To an Executioner.

He slid through the darkness like a living shadow, circling the house, keeping to the trees and hedges, using up a precious minute on his circuit of the killing ground. The house was small, a single-story number with apparent bedroom windows boarded over in the rear. The hostages would be sequestered there, but Bolan dared not go for them directly. He would have to take the gunners first, eliminate the threat before he turned to scan the house for survivors. When the savages were taken care of, when their lesson had been learned, there would be time for toting up the gains and losses.

He found a door that opened on the little combination kitchen-dining room and risked a glance through windows that had not been washed in years. There was no sign of life inside the darkened room, but he caught a hint of shadowed movement through a doorway leading to the living room beyond. If they were concentrated there, he had an opportunity to take them unaware and nail them down before they could react against the hostages.

He worked a thin stiletto along the door jamb, raised the screen door's latch and held his breath against the possibility of rusty, squeaking hinges. When the door swung back without a sound, he used one knee to hold it open, concentrating on the dead bolt that secured the kitchen door in place. It took a moment, but his pick eventually overcame the tumblers and he eased the door ajar, prepared for any challenge from the darkness, any sound that might betray an enemy within.

He stood inside the kitchen with the silver Lawgleg in his hand, the smell of dust and ancient Pinesol in his nostrils. It was time for thunder, and he left the sleek Beretta in its armpit sheath as backup to the heavy .44 AutoMag in his fist. The soldier had already milked surprise for all that it was worth; when he emerged to face the enemy, he wanted them to hear his thunder, smell the gun smoke that accompanied cleansing flames.

And it was down to seconds now, a span of heartbeats, waiting for Brognola to complete his move and find a suitable position in the front. He heard the doomsday numbers falling in his head and knew that soon he would be forced to move, regardless of Brognola's readiness. Before the gunners panicked and decided to proceed without a call. Before one of them started getting hungry and emerged to fix himself a snack.

Before it was too late for all concerned.

Outside, Brognola pressed himself against the wall surrounded by the thorny hedges that had sheltered his approach. Thick drapes were drawn across the picture window to his left, preventing any glimpses inside the safe house or learning anything of Helen and the kids. They must be still inside, he guessed; the cleanup crew would not be here unless they still had work to do.

But were the hostages alive?

It violated every regulation in the nonexistent book for gunners to eliminate their marks inside a safe house. Still, things happened in the field that could not be anticipated in an office. Not in Langley, not in Washington, not even in the White House. Circumstances altered cases, and he knew the gunners must be itchy now, aware that they were running overtime. They would be anxious to evacuate the premises, and carrying a body would be easier than shepherding a hostage any day.

The man from Justice made his mind a blank, deliberately expunging visions of his wife and children stretched out on the floor inside, already zippered into body bags or wrapped in plastic shower curtains for the ride to an incinerator or construction site where they would simply disappear. The Company was good at working disappearances, although its paid magicians usually practiced out of country. So there was all the more incentive to see the job behind them before somebody dropped a wrench into the works. If they were taken in the midst of pulling down domestic violence, if the slightest hint should find its way to the Senate oversight committees, all concerned were in the soup. They didn't need that kind of heat at Langley, and Clandestine Ops would move the earth to keep it quiet.

Brognola's mission, failing to secure Helen and the children, would be simply to ensure that all involved — survivors, anyway — were treated to a dose of grand publicity. He thought of Susan Landry, other contacts he had cultivated in the media, in Congress, and he knew that he could pull it off.

Unless he bought the farm right now.

Survival was the first priority, at least until he was convinced that he had come too late for his family. If he came too late to save them, then survival paled beside the grim priority of personal revenge.

But he could not be sure until he was inside. Until he saw them for himself.

For now his target was the door, ten feet away. It was secured with double locks and opened on the living room — or so he had surmised without an opportunity to case the floor plans. The gunners would be concentrated there, and he would stand a sixty-forty chance of being riddled on the threshold if he moved too soon. It all came down to Bolan now, and while he waited, Hal prepared himself to do or die.

The Bulldog .44 had been reloaded after Arlington, and now its weight was reassuring in his fist, a tangible extension of his rage. The snubby .38 was in his other hand, a lighter weapon, every bit as deadly with its load of Glaser Safety Slugs. He would be forced to kick the door — the Glasers wouldn't penetrate — but with the anger and frustration churning in his stomach, Hal was certain that it wouldn't be a problem.

Getting in was easy. Getting out alive was something else again.

The animals inside were not the authors of his pain. They were performing under orders like attack dogs on the leash, and he would not be satisfied until he found their trainer, looked the bastard squarely in the eye and pushed a bullet through his guts. A Glaser, if he still had any left when he was finished here. If not... well, he would have to improvise.

Fifteen seconds later he had worked his way along the wall until he reached the porch, ignoring thorns that snagged his trench coat, plowing bloody furrows on his hands and wrists. The pain was nothing. His mind was on the mission... and what lay beyond.