"Where's the package?"
Nino frowned.
"Long Island, last I heard." He rattled off an address. "That was five, six hours back."
A lifetime, sure.
"What kind of guard?"
Tattaglia spread his hands.
"That's all I have, except the rumble says Minelli's got it safe. Real safe."
"All right. Can you get clear?"
"I wish. Don Carlos picked me special for the delegation."
Bolan frowned. "Some reason?"
Nino thought about it, finally shook his head. "No sweat. He likes me."
Bolan hoped the guy was right, for everybody's sake.
"Okay," he said, "I've got to move. Whichever way it breaks, stay hard."
"Hard, hell. I'm petrified."
They shook hands again, and Bolan left him by the Chess and Checker House, and moved in the darkness toward another rendezvous.
And this time he was flying blind, on a collision course, perhaps, with fate. He knew, of course, precisely whom he should expect to see, but as for what might lay in store...
The Executioner discarded his uncertainty at once. He knew precisely what was waiting for him on Long Island. It would be hell on earth, the usual, and any minor variations added by his enemies would be confronted as they came.
He had been down that road before and knew exactly where it led.
The terminus was death, for some — or all — concerned, and once you bought your ticket there was no disembarking until the final destination.
As for Bolan, he had seen his ticket stamped and canceled long ago. And he was riding, as always, to the end of the line.
1
"Remember Dave Eritrea?"
The question haunted Bolan as he made his final preparations for the probe, double-checking gear and weapons that could save his life.
And he remembered, sure.
The name, the circumstances of their meeting in New York, were stamped indelibly on his memory.
Eritrea had been an up-and-comer in the Mafia, intent on seizing power in the wake of capo Augie Marineilo's fall, when he had crossed the Bolan path and come to sudden grief. The Executioner's command strike on Manhattan had upset Eritrea's plan... and very nearly trashed the "Black Ace" network, which comprised the Mafia commission's own gestapo in the process.
Nearly, but not completely.
As the coup de grace Mack Bolan had arranged for Dave Eritrea to be exposed as a stoolie, a role he had never played... until his shaken fellow mafiosi made it necessary. Already doomed, Eritrea had little choice but to accept the offer of a new identity, another life inside the federal witness program, as a trade-off for his vast knowledge of the Mob. His turning had been counted as a major coup in Washington, and Hal Brognola, manning things at Justice, had received the lion's share of credit for the victory.
But Brognola had known of Bolan's part, oh yes, and quietly, behind the scenes, spread the word.
Eritrea's conversion marked a turning point in Bolan's private war. The Mafia was reeling even before the capo made his move; when it was later caught between the Bolan hammer and Brognola's anvil, it appeared to be the beginning of the end for the brotherhood of evil. Bolan felt secure enough to listen when Brognola broached the subject of a wider war against a larger enemy, and after one last mile against the old familiar foe, the Executioner moved on to other battlefields.
But he had watched carefully for any signs of a resurgence in the Mafia, damn right, and more than once he had diverted from pursuit of terrorists to swat the capos down. Lately released from all official ties and sanctions, he had spent more time investigating what appeared to be a rejuvenated syndicate.
In Florida, where mafiosi had joined with Cuban-exile terrorists and agents of Havana's DGI, Castro's secret police.
In Hollywood, where drugs, sex and blackmail simmered in a rancid stew of politics and crime.
And in Las Vegas, where the old-line mobsters waged a brutal shooting war against invaders from the Yakuza.
It made good sense, of course, that these and other tracks would lead him eastward toward New York, but he had not expected anything like the Tattaglia bombshell dropped in Central Park.
He trusted Nino, knew from past experience that his intelligence was solid — even if delivered, as it sometimes was, with obvious reluctance. Nino was Brognola's man inside the Mob now, replacing Leo Turrin. Nino had been pressed into service with an indictment hanging over him for double murder. The alternative was to serve life without a chance of parole. Since Nino had turned informer, there had been nothing in his behavior to suggest duplicity on Nino's part.
He was a top lieutenant in Don Carlos Narozine's family of Baltimore, linked to every outfit on the eastern seaboard. His contacts had alerted him to "something big" in store when mafiosi from around the country gathered for their largest conclave in a decade, but the "something big" had taken Nino off his guard. So far, two people in the world outside the Mafia had been informed of the Eritrea scheme.