Don Pendleton - Blood Testament

"Exposure?"

Bolan nodded.

"I'd be looking for it somewhere down the road. Right now we need to figure out what made them punch his ticket."

Susan Landry raised a cautious hand, reminding Leo of a little girl in school, except that she was anything but little, anything but childish in her figure and her face. She was all woman, and she had a subtle way of never letting any man forget it for an instant.

"He might have been exceeding his authority."

Bolan frowned. "It's possible," he granted. "He was pushing it. He might have stepped on someone's schedule."

Susan was ahead of him.

"They might have wanted all the so-called evidence preserved for court appearances. If someone found out that DeVries was leaking it ahead of time..."

"They would have tried to plug the leak."

"Which means..."

"That they were out for all concerned, not just DeVries."

The recognition hit her like a fist above the heart, and Leo watched her slump back on the sofa, going pale. The brush with sudden death had strung out her nerves already, but the acceptance of the fact that she had been a target of the gunners would be something else again. There was a world of difference between coincidental intervention in another's tragedy and having someone sentence you to death.

"You'd better keep out of sight until this all blows over," Bolan told her gently. "If the Family was planning on a double funeral, they'll be looking for you now."

"Where does it end?"

"With Gianelli," Bolan told her, "or whoever else is running down the frame on Hal. It ends when we've recovered everyone and everything that's missing."

"All right."

The lady seemed resolved to living under siege, but Leo thought he could still see signs of strain around her mouth, her eyes. And she had reason, certainly. If Gianelli had his hunters looking for her on the streets, she had a perfect right to worry. It was a threat that might have put some stony soldiers on the verge of tears, but she was holding like a champ, at least externally. And in the business she had chosen, it was the exteriors that counted. You could dazzle them with footwork, and if they didn't see you sweat, they might — just might — be duped into a serious miscalculation when they tried to take you out.

The no-sweat factor had been Turrin's own salvation on a number of occasions, but he couldn't bring himself to handle grim nostalgia at the moment. Here and now was bad enough, and if he wanted here and now to hang around a while, it needed all of his attention.

Careless soldiers rarely lived to rake their pensions in, and Turrin had survived the hell of Southeast Asia, years of burrowing within the Mob, by taking care of details, trusting in his instincts and responding when they flashed a warning signal to his brain. Right now he knew that they were all in danger — not just Hal, his family, or the woman from the media. The net was closing fast, and if they couldn't find a loophole, couldn't cut themselves a new way out, they would be snared. Irrevocably. Irretrievably.

They would be dead unless they found a handle on the situation soon. Perhaps, if Bolan and Brognola were successful at their midnight meeting with the enemy...

A flicker on the edge of vision brought his head around, and Leo found Brognola standing in the doorway to the den. The guy had aged a decade since his family disappeared, but he was looking even older now, his shoulders slumped, dark rings beneath his melancholy eyes. A silent moment passed while everyone regarded him with curiosity, and when he spoke at last they had to strain to catch his words.

"Too late," he said, and for a moment Leo thought that he was going to drop it there. "Somebody rigged a charge to Nino's car this afternoon, between the time he reached his office and the time he started home for dinner. They tell me there was goop enough to take out half a city block. He's gone."

The cab ride back from Hal Brognola's to the condo parking lot where she had parked her Honda gave Susan Landry time to think. About her life, her work and the possibility of her own violent death by the hand of some Mob hitman. She was no stranger to the rough assignments: street crime, underworld investigations, brushfire wars. But in the past she had drawn solace from her status as a paid professional observer. She had been outside the action for the most part, looking in. On the occasions where it had been necessary for the Executioner to save her bacon, she had stumbled into situations where her life was jeopardized. In Cleveland. In the Farnsworth business. And, she had believed at first, in her encounter with DeVries.

The knowledge that she might have been deliberately selected as a target, that another man or group of men had casually decreed her death, was chilling. Susan wondered how professional combatants lived with that forbidding knowledge day to day — and in a sudden flash of understanding it became clear to her. Mack Bolan had been living with a contract on his head since he had first thrown down a gauntlet for the Mafia at Pittsfield, in the first days of his private war. He had been living in the cross-hairs ever since.

It was the dedication of the man that gave her pause, and Susan wondered how she would perform now that she had been declared a moving target. Her immediate reaction was an overwhelming urge to run and hide. But she could not exist in darkness, could not ply her trade without some access to the streets.

And she had promised Bolan she would help. That was the worst of it. She was committed for the grim duration of his Washington campaign, and there was every likelihood that they would all be killed before the sun came up on Monday morning. It would be a miracle if they survived the weekend and despite her Catholic background, it had been some time since Susan Landry put her faith in miracles.

She owed the soldier her assistance in the search for Hal Brognola's wife and family. She knew that he had compromised himself, risked much to have the others take her in, accept her in their council. She was not their equal — she did not delude herself on that score for an instant — but there might be things that she could do. Her contacts with the CIA, for instance. And some leads at Justice that were temporarily closed to Hal.

It was the hint of Company involvement that disturbed her most. They had discussed it briefly, after Hal had poured a drink and downed it straight, when they were finished grieving for Nino Tattaglia, a man she had never known outside of glossy photographs. From the expressions on their faces Susan gathered that there had been more than business between them, but she had not dared to ask. It had been Bolan who first broached the subject of the CIA's involvement — or its possible involvement — in abducting Hal Brognola's family. The smaller man, who had been simply introduced to her as Leo, had his reservations, opting to believe that Nicky Gianelli had sufficient troops and wherewithal to snatch three people on his own, without assistance from the federal government. It took Brognola to command Turrin's attention with his mention of "reliable reports" that some of Farnsworth's cronies might be working with the syndicate toward some end that was not as yet entirely clear.

Ignoring the sporadic stabs at conversation from her cabbie, Susan concentrated on her private thoughts, replaying portions of the conversation from Brognola's den. "So, what's the hook up with the Company?"

"They've been hooked up for over twenty years."

"You're reaching. All that stuff about Fidel..."

"So, now it's not Fidel. Now it's Baby Doc, or the Sandinistas, or it's just some of the good old boys who need some reassurance that their tracks are covered."

"All of this for old times' sake?"