There was an outside chance that Gianelli's family had no hand in the abduction, but it didn't matter in the long run. Nothing on this scale could happen in a capo's jurisdiction if he had not granted his approval. Gianelli was the key, regardless of his personal involvement in the plot. If he was innocent, so much the better; it would make him that much more inclined to cut his losses and reveal the guilty parties once he felt the heat of Bolan's wrath.

Whoever was behind the scam, they had been making use of Gianelli's Washington connections, and from all appearances the tentacles at Justice had been long enough to touch Brognola where he lived. It would be part of Bolan's mission to identify those tentacles, to search them out and sever them before their probing grip became a stranglehold.

If he was not too late.

The recent revelations of corruption in the FBI and NSA had shaken confidence in national security, but random spies imparting information to the Soviets were few and far between. The greater risk by far was the domestic threat of infiltration and subversion by the native cannibals who had so much to gain by undermining honest government: the lobbyists who lavished cash and gifts on pliant legislators; corporation presidents who kicked through with illegal contributions in the nick of time; the manicured mobsters standing ready with their payoffs and assorted favors in return for service rendered — venal politicians, outlaw businessmen, and gangsters fattening on both.

But it was not the soldier's mission to reform a nation, overhaul a system that had sheltered corruption from the start. His war was limited in scope, his moves restricted to the possible, and for the moment it would be enough if he could save three lives. Achieving that goal in itself might be the death of Bolan, but he meant to give it all he had.

He owed Brognola that. For all the times when Hal had risked his pension, his life, to offer aid and comfort in a lonely soldier's war against the odds. For offering an opportunity to make his war official, and for maintaining contact when the roof fell in. Beyond all that, the warrior felt a gut responsibility to strike against the cannibals wherever and whenever possible. It was his life, his reason for existence and the driving force behind his endless war.

He did not share Leo Turrin's fears about a meeting with the President. The Man would not have given Hal two days without some sense of what was happening behind the scenes. Brognola would have been in jail by now, his home and office under guard, if he had not convinced the Oval Office — at least to some small degree — that he was being framed. The President's support would soon evaporate if Hal could not produce substantial evidence.

In the meantime it was simply that the meeting struck Mack Bolan as a waste of time. He owed the President a certain debt of gratitude for setting him up in the Phoenix program, giving him the freedom to conduct his war worldwide. But any debt had long been paid in blood. He forced his mind away from April and the others, wondering precisely what the White House wanted from him. In the end, he finally decided that it would be best to wait and see.

No matter what was said or offered, Bolan's obligation of the moment was to Hal Brognola and his family. If he could not retrieve those gentle souls, his mission would be ultimately counted as a failure, and the measure of his vengeance would be nothing in comparison with Hal's traumatic loss.

If he could not secure the safety of Brognola's wife and children, scourge the animals who had abducted them, his presence in D.C. was nothing but a hollow mockery.

And he was wasting precious time.

But before he moved against the enemy, he had a date to keep.

Mack Bolan braced himself to meet The Man.

Susan Landry pushed her chair back from the computer keyboard, stretching as she double-checked the paragraph that she had just completed on the monitor. She caught a typo and deleted it, reentered the proper spelling of the word and thanked her lucky stars again that she had purchased the machine. With its many functions, the word processor had taken half the effort out of getting stories ready for the wire. The other half, of course, was still the digging — good old-fashioned legwork, phonework, or whatever — and she doubted whether any new technology would ever help reporters cover that end of their beat.

In fact, she loved the work involved in digging out a story. Though she would complain about it with the best — comparing blisters, insults, the occasional menacing letter — she thrived on the research, the intrigue involved in rooting out corruption, searching for the dirty laundry. It was something she excelled at, and the knowledge of her own ability provided confidence required for tackling the tough — and sometimes dangerous — assignments.

There might be nothing dangerous per se about her latest story, but it was important to her all the same. It had begun with scrawled, anonymous complaints, alleging criminal mistreatment of the residents at certain D.C. nursing homes. A string of interviews with residents, beneath the watchful eye of smiling nurses, had done nothing to substantiate the stories. But an off-the-record conversation — and a strictly off-the-record payment — with a member of the cleaning staff at one facility had cast a different light upon the scene. Provided with a suitable inducement, her informant had agreed to take a camera inside the rest home where he was employed. His photographic style would never rate a one-man show, but his subject matter spoke to Susan Landry's heart. Police were studying the photos now, together with a tape that her informant had secured while wired for sound, but she was not inclined to wait for the indictments. UPI was waiting for her lead and talking a potential series. The police would have to watch her dust.

The piece was small compared to other stories she had handled. Susan's coverage of the Cleveland underworld had flirted with a Pulitzer, and she had won acclaim for coverage of the Bolan trial in Texas. Still, the subject matter counted, meant more to her than the national exposure she was likely to receive. It mattered when her writing made a difference in the lives of people on the street, in boardrooms where the fear of media exposure made the fat cats think twice before proceeding on their merry way and trampling the little man. But Susan Landry didn't write for glory or for the recognition of a byline. Several of her hottest stories had been quietly suppressed, against her own best interests, and the Bolan trial had been a fluke.

Bolan...

She thought about the solitary warrior often, wishing there was some way she could tell his story to the world. A part of it had surfaced after Cleveland, rising from the ashes of her own irrevocably altered life, but she had so much more to say about the man. So much that she could never say in public.

He had saved her life on two occasions: once in Cleveland, and again in Washington, before the roof fell in on Bolan's supersecret operation with the government. Each time the guy had risked his own life to pull her out of jeopardy created by her innate curiosity. She would be dead now if it was not for the man in black, but there was nothing she could say or do to repay that debt.

In Cleveland he had saved her from the syndicate; in Washington, from strung-out members of a street gang on the payroll of some renegades at the CIA. The shock waves from his D.C. operation had produced some changes in the Company, but they had also left Mack Bolan once more on the outside, looking in. She wasn't privy to the fine points of his previous arrangement with the government, the price that he had doubtless paid through loss of freedom in return for coming in from the cold. But Susan knew that there had been a hefty price tag on his leaving. She had gleaned from fragments of unguarded conversation that a part of Bolan's heart, a portion of his soul, had been severed, left behind when he was banished from Stony Man.