Don Pendleton: Save the Children

"Where is he, Mrs. Parelli?"

"You think I'd turn my son over to the Executioner?" she retorted. "Then you're crazier than everyone says you are."

Randy Owens was nowhere near as levelheaded.

"Denise!" he cried. His eyes were oval saucers of fear, focused unblinkingly on the silenced snout of the Beretta. "Tell him the truth! We don't know where David is," he blurted to Bolan. "He called a little while ago."

Denise Parelli swiveled her open appraisal of Bolan into cold contempt at the man standing beside her.

"Shut up, Randy."

Owens continued blurting to Bolan.

"It was you, then, wasn't it, at that health club! David told his mother he was going underground for a few days. He wouldn't say where, that's what she told me." He threw a nod to the woman. "She..."

Denise Parelli shifted her weight slightly and brought up her right knee hard into Randy's crotch.

Randy Owens emitted a startled wheezing gasp and doubled over, knees closed in, hands gripping himself in pain where the woman had kneed him. Slowly he collapsed to the floor at their feet, dry heaving into the carpet.

The woman shifted her look of contempt from the man back to Bolan.

"I don't know where David is. If I did, you could torture me and I would not tell you."

She glared defiantly at the man with the Beretta. "So what will you do now, Executioner? Kill me?"

Bolan lowered the Beretta until the nuzzle pointed at the floor. He had not vanquished the rage coursing through him after what he had glimpsed on the VCR in David Parelli's bedroom, but he had no idea how much this feisty woman knew about Bolan's intel on her son. And he did not have it in him to kill this woman tonight.

He glanced around the bedroom and focused on a walk-in closet on the other side of the bed. "In there." He motioned with the Beretta.

The woman glared down at the moaning, semiconscious Randy.

"What about him?"

Bolan felt the butt of the Beretta burn in his grip.

"I heard you say he makes TV commercials. I don't suppose he dabbles with kid porn on the side?"

The woman blinked at that.

"Don't make me sicker than I already am standing here looking at you," she snarled angrily. "I keep a young man. I'm not a pervert and I wouldn't sleep with someone who was."

Bolan removed his finger from the trigger of the 93-R.

"You just saved this punk's life," he told Denise Parelli. "In the closet, both of you."

"I'm not going in any damn closet," she said viciously, "especially not with that rat!"

"Oh, yes, you are," Bolan corrected her quietly and he clipped her on the chin with the butt of the pistol.

Mrs. Parelli's eyes rolled back in her head, her knees buckled and she started to collapse.

He stepped forward quickly and caught her in his left arm, then carried her unconscious figure over to the closet.

He deposited her gently on the floor of the closet, then returned and dragged the still moaning Randy by the jacket collar, dumping him alongside Mrs. Parelli.

Randy whined every step of the way, drunk with the pain of his kneed genitalia.

Bolan leaned over and clipped Owens with the butt of the Beretta.

The porno star stopped whining and started snoring.

Bolan locked the door of the closet and left the room. He retraced his way quietly down the winding staircase, through the kitchen and back out into the night. Once outside, he took the route of his approach across the grounds, through the miniforest of firs.

He encountered no more men in his withdrawal.

At the base of the wall he repeated the climbing rope exercise.

The two sentries at the front gate paid him no more attention than they had on his way in.

Before returning to his waiting Vette a quarter mile away, he paused only an additional moment to check on something he had been curious about, and the answer provided no answer at all, just another question in a night of violence and intangibles.

The sedan with the policeman and bumper sticker was gone.

Fifteen minutes later he stood at an outdoor telephone kiosk adjacent to a shopping mall, closed at this hour, speaking with Aaron Kurtzman.

Not long before, the Executioner had been offered amnesty by the U.S. government. For a brief time Bolan had worked in the system...

strictly off the record...

heading the nation's covert anti-terrorist force, from a top-secret command center called Stony Man Farm, in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

During that period, Bolan's energies had become focused on the real force behind international terrorism, the KGB, until that terrible day when the special woman in his life, the brilliant, beautiful April Rose, had died in the assault on the Farm.

Embittered, tormented by this loss, Bolan had again broken the shackles of establishment authority, resuming his one-man war against evil wherever he found it. He realized that the evil of the Mafia, of child-molesting scum like Parelli, was no different from that of nations like Iran or the Soviet Union, who sought to wreak havoc upon civilized people around the world with their barbaric deeds.

He rethought just what it was he was trying to do with his life, with his skills and sacrifices, and he realized you could not give evil a name.

It wasn't the Mafia.

It wasn't the KGB.

It wasn't the loony who starts blowing people away when his brain snaps.

Evil was all of them.

He understood evil to be that dark side of the collective human psyche, the self-destructive impulse inherent in the species, manifesting itself as the homicidal maniac, the Mafia, the slave state trying to devour the whole world map.

For Bolan to direct his attention at any one of those manifestations to the exclusion of the others was to undervalue both what he fought to accomplish and the memory of his allies who had fallen along the way. Those friendly ghosts had made the ultimate sacrifice because they had believed in what he was doing and had wanted to help.

The Executioner now took on the bad guys wherever he found them. That was how it broke down in simple language. He financed himself from his war chest, money he confiscated from those whose evil machinations he dismantled.

Support also came via connections from his government days. But those friends could not go public and say so. Powerful allies in the Justice Department and at Stony Man Farm...

even at the White House...

channeled intelligence data and, at times, actual covert support to the lone warrior who was accomplishing with his "crazy" one-man wars what the U.S. government in all its might and wisdom knew it should be doing but could not for whatever reason.

Such an ally was "Bear" Kurtzman, the irascible Stony Man Farm computer wizard, wheelchair bound since sustaining a serious wound in the same assault on the Farm that had taken April's life.

Kurtzman continued to oversee the intel network that fed into the still operational Stony Man Farm, from which the two Bolan-formed units, Able Team and Phoenix Force, continued to operate against terrorism at home and abroad.

Bolan briefed Kurtzman on the events of the past two hours, since the Executioner's arrival in Chicago.

"You're helping both teams smoke you out, big guy."

Kurtzman's response was concerned and melancholy. "You know that, don't you?"

Bolan watched his breath against the glass side of the phone booth turn to ice.

"I'm used to living under a death sentence, Bear. I can't let this one go, no way. I wanted Parelli when I hit this town. After seeing what I saw on that VCR of his, now I want his whole damn crew. And I'm going to get them."

"I believe that," grunted Kurtzman. "Wish I had something new on whatever the hell it is Parelli's trying to swing, but you know Washington. We're picking up the bits and pieces as fast as they drop. Trouble is, there's big bucks behind this one and I don't just mean Mob money. Some lobbyists and more than a few government contractors are in the puzzle, too."