His three companions lounged in straight-backed chairs and watched the count with hungry eyes, unspeaking. They were dressed like sideshow hucksters: velvet coats and wide-brimmed hats, pegged trousers tapered at the ankles over pointy patent-leather shoes. Draped in chains of gold, the black trio fairly sparkled in the light from naked ceiling fixtures, their fingers glittering with diamonds in a tribute to conspicuous consumption. On the streets they would be viewed with awe as masters of the brute survival game, the men to watch and emulate, but they had come to see their master here, and they kept silent as the mafioso struggled to laboriously count his tribute.

Bolan crouched to take advantage of the partly open window, bracing his Beretta in a double-handed grip and sighting down the slide. Four targets, but he meant for one of them to live and carry word of his encounter with the Executioner. It mattered little to him which one of the runners should survive. But Bolan had already taken stock of who should die.

The hood behind the desk was his immediate concern, the holstered .38 most easily accessible of all the weapons in the room. His runners would be armed, but they would have to fumble under jackets, their reactions hampered by the Executioner's advantage of surprise. And Bolan had another reason for selecting their superior as first to die: it would be doubly galling for a thug like Gianelli to receive the news of his impoverishment from a subordinate outside the Family.

The Executioner's finger tightened on the trigger. The Beretta sneezed, and he was tracking on in search of other targets, wasting no time on assessment of the shot. Round one impacted on the mafioso's upper lip and punched on through, the fleshy face imploding like a rotten gourd, a spout of blood erupting from the wound.

The runners recoiled, scrambling from their chairs and digging under velvet coats for hardware. One of them had spotted Bolan in the window, pointing dumbly, struggling to voice a warning. Round two exploded in his face and pitched him backward, long legs flailing as his wide-brimmed hat took flight.

The second runner had a weapon in his hand, but no time left to use it. Bolan shot him twice, in the chest and throat, before the guy could bring his gun to bear. He saw the life wink out behind dull eyes, the lanky carcass folding in upon itself, and he was tracking onto number three before the second runner's legs gave way.

The final target had already opted for retreat, no longer trying for his side arm as he pounded toward the door. A parabellum round behind the knee was all it took to break his stride, but the momentum sent him into crushing impact with the door. The guy rebounded, leaving bloody traces of himself behind as he collapsed onto the threadbare carpet.

Before he could recover, Bolan entered through the window, crossed the office to unlatch the door and peer outside. A murky stairwell granted access to the billiard parlor below, and he could hear the voices of the regulars, their laughter floating up the stairs. No sign of any scouts attempting to investigate the noise upstairs, no indication that the troops had heard a thing.

He closed the door again, relieved the sole survivor of his .38 and backtracked toward the desk. Between the leaking mafioso's feet he found an empty satchel and began to fill it with the greenbacks from the desktop. He was nearly finished when the wounded runner groaned, a signal that the guy was wrestling his way to consciousness.

The soldier knelt beside him, waiting for his eyes to focus on the face of death. The runner's eyes crossed as the Beretta's muzzle came to rest upon his nose.

"I'm back," the warrior told the trembling thug. "Somebody has the merchandise I want. Somebody should deliver while they can."

"Hey, man, I swear to God..."

"Shut up and listen!" Bolan punctuated the command with his 93-R, tapping it against the guy's forehead. "Your job is to spread the word. You start with Gianelli, and you tell it straight. Somebody should deliver while they have a chance."

"I got it, man, I swear." The beads of sweat were standing up like marbles on his forehead now. "I'll tell 'im."

Bolan left as he had entered, scrambling down the fire escape until he reached the bottom landing, swinging out across the rail and dangling a moment prior to letting go. He stowed the satchel in the rented car's trunk and locked it down, secure as it could be while he was on the warpath.

There was something like a quarter-million dollars in the satchel, no big thing to Gianelli, but still substantial when considered on its own. The capo could afford it, Bolan knew; what he could not afford would be the loss of face, the sheer indignity of being ripped off. The insult would be worse than any loss of income, any loss of life. And Gianelli would receive his message, the Executioner was sure of it.

The would-be boss of Wonderland would read him loud and clear.

Francesco Scopitone had not answered to his given name in twenty years. His friends, acquaintances, police detectives and the like all knew him more familiarly as Frankie Scopes. And sometimes when he wasn't listening, the more courageous or foolhardy called him Frankie Scars.

The nickname was a natural, but its careless use could lead to fatal accidents. No matter that the history of Frankie Scopes's disfigurement was common knowledge. He preferred to act as if the scars did not exist, and his associates who planned on staying alive had grasped the wisdom of incurring temporary blindness in his presence.

Frankie Scars had been a handsome boy in childhood and on through adolescence, but like countless other boys his age, he had been drawn to the fraternity of street gangs, petty crime that sometimes escalated into brutal warfare. On the evening of his eighteenth birthday, Frankie's clique, the Gladiators, had collided with the Saracens — a rival gang — in mortal combat. Three boys died before police arrived, and Frankie had been slashed across the face, bone deep from ear to ear, emerging with a grisly, twisted smile that wrapped halfway around his skull.

The county doctors had advised him to consider plastic surgery, but Frankie's family had been poor. With seven mouths to feed and frequent bouts of unemployment, Frankie's father had ruled out expensive medical procedures. By the time he was old enough and rich enough to make arrangements on his own, it had become a point of honor to retain the scars and challenge any living soul to mention his disfigurement. Within the syndicate and on the streets, his brute ferocity was legendary. Homicide detectives in New York and Washington suspected Frankie Scars of intimate involvement in at least a dozen homicides, but witnesses were an endangered species, and the mutilated thug had never come to trial.

In recent years his business was narcotics. Murder was a necessary adjunct to the business or, some said, a sweet fringe benefit that Frankie Scars enjoyed. Unauthorized competitors could normally expect a single warning, often painful and humiliating; if they failed to take the hint they were assassinated publicly or else they simply disappeared.

Lately, Frankie was considering a war against the Colombians. Conveniently amnesiac concerning his own roots, he hated foreigners with an evangelistic zeal more common to the 1920s than the mid-1980s. Frankie loathed the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, Arabs, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. He especially despised Colombians because they held a stranglehold of sorts on premium cocaine, and they refused to quake in fear at his approach. The nervy bastards seemed to thrive on violence, dealing out sadistic punishment to traitors and informers, littering the streets with bodies in a style that Frankie Scars was forced to view with grudging admiration.