Don Pendleton - Battle Cry

Not in his own bed.

Boyle reached the walk-in closet, crawled inside and only then stood up. For all he knew, a bullet might come punching through one of the walls and find him there, but he felt safer, anyway.

And he still had a wild card up his sleeve.

The neighbors didn’t know—or else, pretended not to—that he owned two houses on their precious tree-lined street. One that he lived and partied in, and one next door, immediately to the north, where shooters slept in shifts, ready to scramble in a heartbeat if their boss was threatened. Boyle had built a gate into the fence that separated his two properties, so troops could pass without alerting any watchers on the street.

Not that he gave a damn for stealth tonight, though, with some bastard shooting up his house. His neighbors would be calling up the police by now, he thought. Boyle only hoped that he could meet one of the bastards face-to-face, before the police rolled in.

And maybe get the hell away from there, as well.

But just in case, once Boyle had pulled his trousers on, he made another call. To his solicitor, this time. He figured that for what he charged per hour, the old prick could damn well haul his fat ass out of bed and meet Boyle at the lockup.

Just in case.

FOR SIX OR SEVEN seconds, there was chaos on the staircase. Bolan’s first shot clipped one shooter’s left biceps and staggered him, but both of Boyle’s men still had their guns in hand an instant later, unloading in rapid-fire. Bolan hunched down behind his human shield, felt the man taking some hits while other bullets sizzled past him, then returned fire with his autoloader set for 3-round bursts.

The wounded gunner took a round in the upper chest and sat down hard, then toppled forward, tumbling down the stairs in jerky somersaults. His partner tried retreating, nearly lost his balance with a misstep, throwing out one hand to catch himself. Before he could recover, Bolan’s Parabellum rounds sheared off the right side of his face and sprayed the wall behind him with gray matter.

Done.

Bolan charged up the stairs, taking three at a time, hoping he’d find the first-floor hallway clear between himself and Boyle. He needed time to squeeze the boss and get the information he required, before police came rolling in to spoil the probe.

And failing that…then, what?

No sirens, but he heard a crash downstairs as someone forced a door, then half-a-dozen voices, maybe more, were clamoring for Boyle, advancing toward the stairs. None of the new arrivals bothered to identify themselves as cops, and when he glanced over the railing, Bolan saw that they were reinforcements for the home team, closing in to help the man who signed their paychecks.

Say a dozen guns down there, at least, he figured. Where had they come from? He didn’t know and didn’t care. Only the fact of their existence mattered, and the weapons in their hands.

One of them fired a shotgun blast at Bolan, shattering the banister as he ducked back and out of sight. More bullets followed, peppering the walls and ceiling overhead. Retreating, he could see the door to Frankie Boyle’s bedroom, but Bolan knew the room could be a death trap. Boyle could pin him on the threshold, while his men came up behind and finished Bolan with a spray of lead.

Forget it.

Barging through the first door on his right, he found himself inside what he supposed had to be a guest room, with a queen-sized bed immediately to his left, an en suite to his right. Directly opposite the doorway where he stood, a sliding window faced the yard and street beyond across a narrow balcony.

Call it a drop of twenty feet, and then a run of twenty yards or so across the gently sloping lawn, wide open to Boyle’s shooters in the house and any who were quick enough to follow him. Bolan would still be four blocks from his car, and he wasn’t sure that he could risk running directly to it, with a pack of gunmen on his heels.

So, take it one step at a time.

Bolan kicked the bedroom door shut, latched it, then crossed to the window. He opened that and hesitated, waiting for the sound of angry voices to resume from the hallway. If they went straight for Boyle, he had a chance to make the drop unnoticed. If they started searching room by room…

The doorknob jiggled, and he stitched a double 3-round burst across the paneling, rewarded with a squeal of pain. A second later, he was on the balcony, one leg across the rail, as small-arms fire ripped through the guest room’s door and eastern wall. Artwork exploded, tumbling, and the furniture was taking hits as Bolan made his leap of faith.

He landed in a crouch and rolled once, bouncing to his feet as he came out of it. He sprinted for the sidewalk on a long diagonal, trying to gain ground in the general direction of his rental car while he had a chance. Hurdling a low fence meant to keep trespassers off the grass, he hit the sidewalk running, as a low-slung car roared up and swung in to the curb.

His piece was up and tracking toward the driver’s face and locked there, as the woman at the wheel asked him, “Care for a lift?”

Chapter 3

Washington, D.C., two days earlier

Parking was easier in Washington the farther you got from the White House. Not easy, but easier, as in, you only had to drive around the block four or five times for a space with marginal security.

Bolan motored north on Sixteenth Street, leaving the monuments and barricades behind, letting the flow of morning traffic carry him along. Most people who had jobs would be at work by this time. But Washington was not only the capital of paper shuffling, but also of people on the move: between office blocks, en route to courthouses and libraries; filing writs and motions; carrying messages that couldn’t be trusted to phones or encrypted e-mails.

The soldier avoided Washington—or Wonderland, as he had learned to think of it during his long and lonely war against the Mafia—whenever possible. He had no business there, per se, since he did not officially exist. His death in New York City was a matter of public record, literally carved in stone.

How often did a soldier get to visit his own grave?

Still, Hal Brognola worked in Washington, at the Justice Department’s headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. There were times he couldn’t get away to Stony Man Farm in Virginia for a face-to-face with Bolan, and on those occasions the Executioner used his knowledge of the teeming city’s streets to good advantage.

On this day, they were meeting at a new spot: the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, in the 1700 block of 16th Street, Northwest. Bolan wasn’t a member of the lodge, and he had never seen Brognola sporting a Masonic ring, but he assumed that the big Fed had chosen the location for a reason that would soon become apparent.

Meanwhile, Bolan had done his homework online. He knew that the Scottish Rite branch of Freemasonry had been founded in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1801. Its best-known promoter and primary architect of lodge ritual was Albert Pike, a Boston native who moved south and later wound up fighting as a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War. Some conspiracy theorists named Pike as a founder of the original Ku Klux Klan, but most historians dismissed that claim as false.

Beyond that, Bolan knew the lodge had thirty-three “degrees” of membership, with titles advancing from “master traveler” to “inspector general” at the pyramid’s apex. Much of the lodge’s dogma was cloaked in secrecy, but its public face included extensive work on behalf of dyslexic children and maintenance of two first-rate pediatric hospitals, in Dallas and Atlanta.

Bolan reached his destination—an imposing edifice known as the House of the Temple—and motored past in search of available parking. He found it two blocks farther north, pulled his ticket out of a machine and walked back in the warm sunshine.