Fatal Combat. Don Pendleton

said. “Seeing you with me was all it took for our man with the telephoto lens, or whoever hired him, to finger me as that agent.”

      “You’re talking about somebody inside the Department.”

      “I am,” Bolan said.

      “You don’t sound surprised.”

      “I’m not.” Bolan continued his grisly work, photographing all of the dead men. Then he walked to the bullet-riddled Charger and put his back to the car’s pocked flank. “Keep an eye out for me while I do this,” he said.

      Davis nodded. He watched nervously, looking this way and that, hand near his gun, as Bolan transmitted the photographs and a terse report of what had produced them. The Farm would collect the data and run the images through advanced facial recognition software, comparing the dead men to profiles in meta-databases across the globe. There was no law enforcement or government agency whose files Stony Man Farm could not access. At least, if there was, it was hard even for Bolan to imagine what those might be.

      No, if these men had criminal records, Barbara Price and her people would dig them up. Bolan had no doubt that most if not all of the shooters would have long rap sheets. Things would get really interesting, however, when Bolan had the chance to see just where these gunners’ backgrounds pointed.

      In the meantime, he would just have to keep shaking the tree, despite the target painted on his back. Davis, as his liaison, was no safer.

      “You think I’m a dirty cop?” Davis asked bluntly. The steel in the man’s tone was mildly surprising. Again Bolan raised his estimation of the younger man.

      Bolan looked at Davis. “If I thought that, I wouldn’t have asked you what I did.”

      Davis looked away. Bolan could see him thinking about it. Finally, the set of Davis’s shoulders relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Everyone knows it, and nobody wants to say it out loud. Everyone knows the walls have ears. Nobody wants to say who’s on the take and who isn’t.”

      Bolan nodded. He didn’t say so, but he liked that Davis was still idealistic enough to be offended when he thought his integrity was being challenged. There wasn’t enough of that in the world, as far as Bolan was concerned.

      “Is the CIA analyzing your pictures?” Davis ventured.

      “Not exactly,” Bolan said.

      “But somebody is,” Davis pressed. “You’re running identifications on the gunmen.”

      “Which reminds me,” Bolan said. “Make sure we get a full run-up on the guy they’re taking in.”

      “I’ll check back with the station and make sure. Unless someone suicides our boy in Holding.”

      Bolan looked at Davis sharply. The detective managed not to grin for only a moment.

      Bolan shook his head. “Let’s hope not.” Davis laughed.

      The pair surveyed the damage to the Dodge Charger, but it was clear the car was critically wounded. Bolan paused just long enough to grab the rental car agreement from the glove compartment and pocket it.

      “I don’t think you’re going to get your security deposit back,” Davis said mildly.

      “I almost never do,” Bolan said.

      Davis managed to beg, borrow, or steal an unmarked Crown Victoria from among the police personnel on the scene. He did not explain and Bolan did not ask. The silver-gray sedan was among three other vehicles parked along the increasingly crowded, chaotic street.

      Bolan climbed in as Davis brought up the car, transferring his war bag from the Dodge to the Ford. As he did so, Davis pointed past him to the cordon being set up. There were a pair of television vans and a crowd of reporters gathering, shouting questions at the officers keeping them at bay.

      “That’s going to be trouble, isn’t it?” Davis said.

      “Yeah,” Bolan told him. “Nothing we can do about that now. Let’s get started.” He looked through the list Davis had provided and read the first address aloud. “You know this place?”

      “There isn’t a cop in the city who doesn’t,” Davis said. “It’s not exactly one of our more affluent neighborhoods. A real hellhole, to be honest, Agent Cooper.”

      Bolan said nothing at first. He opened his war bag and removed several loaded 20-round magazines for the Beretta. Davis looked over, wide-eyed, as he caught a glimpse of the hardware and ordnance inside.

      “You don’t exactly travel light, do you, Agent Cooper?”

      “If I could carry more, I would,” Bolan said. He began replacing magazines in the pouches of his shoulder holster. “Welcome to the war, kid.”

      “Yeah,” Davis said. “Yeah.”

      3

      The squalid tenements on either side of the narrow street were crawling with people and sagging with furniture, garbage and other debris. A tangled maze of clotheslines linked facing buildings across the channel dividing them. As the unmarked Crown Victoria threaded its way around a series of abandoned, stripped vehicles, some of them bearing the scorch marks of past fires, children and adults scattered. Davis drove while Bolan watched from the passenger seat, his eyes scanning the rooftops and tracking the figures that ducked in and out of the shadows. The Executioner was no stranger to house-to-house close-quarters battle in urban environments. This neighborhood looked like yet another battleground awaiting the first shot to be fired.

      “I hate coming down here,” Davis said. “It’s like a war zone sometimes.”

      Bolan nodded. He checked the list Davis had given him. “According to this,” he said, “we want 1021, third floor, apartment C. A Ms. Kendall Brown. It looks like her son Mikyl was the first documented victim of these ritualized blade murders.”

      “Kendall Brown,” Davis repeated. “Got it.”

      It took them a while to find the right building, as most of the designations were either worn, missing completely, or covered by piles of junk or even cardboard signs. In a few cases, the numbers on the buildings had been spray-painted over or even switched. Bolan raised an eyebrow at one of the more obvious examples; the street signs at that intersection were also missing on one side.

      “Trying to hide,” Davis explained. “Could be a lot of things. Enemy gangs. Rival dealers. Creditors, tax collectors, any of countless state agencies, like Child Protective under the Department of Human Services. Most of the veteran agency folks know where they need to go, so these games don’t fool anybody. But I bet it’s hell trying to get a pizza delivered.”

      The dark humor in Davis’s comment, which seemed otherwise unlike what Bolan had seen of the man so far, bespoke bitter experience, perhaps as a uniformed cop on the streets. Bolan let it go. He had seen enough ghettos and poverty-stricken crime zones like this one the world over to know it for what it was. It didn’t matter if a place like this existed among the shantytowns of a third world banana republic, or in some of the worst overrun cesspools in Europe, or anywhere in the industrialized West. Poverty and desperation were feeding and breeding grounds for predators, who made those very problems worse, as they incestuously preyed on the communities that spawned them.

      Bolan’s jaw tightened. As many times as he saw this, it always moved something in him. There were innocents here, among the predators. They would be vulnerable to the creatures that hunted among them, terrorized them, bullied and brutalized and subjugated them. It turned the soldier’s stomach.

      Davis parked the car as close to the building as he could, wedging it between a derelict pickup truck—the rusted bed was full of trash—and a garbage bin overflowing with neglected refuse. The two men could hear children playing in the bin. When the detective leaned on the horn, the kids took the hint and climbed out, scampering off while shooting glares of mistrust and disappointment back at Bolan and Davis.

      “One