A shout from the direction of the dining room, and one of Gianelli's soldiers staggered through the drifting purple smoke, one hand still raking at his eyes, the other wrapped around an Army-issue .45. He was the token gesture toward security, superfluous until tonight and generally ignored. But he had Mr. Trouble's full attention now.

Before she had a chance to shout a warning, Raenelle saw the stranger pivot on his heel, the automatic in his fist already rising. At a range of twenty yards, he triggered off two shots in rapid fire, and Gianelli's soldier took them both directly in the face. Raenelle could feel her dinner coming up as blood and bone exploded from his cheeks, the impact lifting him completely off his feet and slamming him against the kitchen doorjamb.

The stranger stood beside her, waited while she finished retching. Then he drew her upright, pulling her in the direction of the nearest exit. As she followed him, Raenelle could hear the hungry crackle of the flames behind her, felt the glowing heat against her back. When they were clear and standing side by side on the lawn, he placed one hand beneath her chin and raised her eyes to meet his own.

"You're out of business," he repeated. "Permanently. Spread the word to Gianelli. Someone has a package that belongs to me. The heat stays on until I get it back."

Somehow, impossibly, she found her voice. "Who are you?"

"Gianelli knows. You see he gets the message."

"Yes."

And he was gone, a shadow merging with the other shadows. She couldn't tell for certain, but it seemed that everyone had gotten clear, except for Gianelli's soldier. He was roasting in the middle of it now, and Raenelle felt her stomach turning over once again.

She had a message for the boss, and she would pass it on as soon as she was finished with the fire department, the police and whoever else might be attracted to the fire like moths. She could predict the don's reaction in advance, but she would tell him all the same. Raenelle Gireau had no intention of allowing Gianelli to escape without some notion of the terror that she felt inside.

A survivor at the best, or worst, of times, she realized that she might have the opportunity to rebuild something for herself. As for the boss, he would be needing every bit of luck available when Mr. Trouble finally met him face-to-face.

Raenelle would not have traded places with Gianelli, not for all the money in the world. He was already marked, except he didn't know it yet.

The Anacostia waterfront was dark as Bolan nosed his rental car northeast along the riverside. Due south, the sprawl of Bolling Air Force Base was brightly lit around the clock, prepared for any airborne menace to the capital. Across the water, Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard represented other branches of the service, each on constant standby for emergencies. The soldier had no business with them now. His target was a different sort of fortress, and the occupants conducted their primary business in the dark of night.

The Smithfield Export warehouse was designed for maximum security. No windows opened on the outside world, and giant loading bays had long been welded shut, mute testimony to the bankruptcy proceedings that had closed the warehouse three years earlier. Within the weeks immediately following its closure, Smithfield Export's one and only piece of real estate had undergone dramatic — though invisible — revisions. Stripped of merchandise, it had been labored over night and day by workmen whose continued silence was ensured by lavish overtime, the cavernous interior divided into smaller rooms, each soundproof, insulated from the rest. Whatever might transpire inside those cloistered rooms was strictly private. Members of the closed fraternity had paid for privacy, and it had been elaborately guaranteed.

The warehouse was a "lockbox," in the parlance of the street, a house of prostitution catering to savage needs that other brothels could not — would not — satisfy. The customers were guaranteed complete security, but it was not for their protection solely that the building had been turned into a fortress. There was "merchandise" to be protected, also, and the human cattle of the lockbox were no ordinary prostitutes, recruited by the profit motive. Forcibly obtained and forcibly restrained, the lockbox residents were chosen for the needs of "special" customers, the Johns — and Janes — who needed "something extra" in their sexual diet. Catering primarily to "chicken hawks" — the pederasts who dote on brutalizing prepubescent children — the lockbox also served a small but wealthy clientele of sadists, necrophiles and other aberrants. No fantasy was too bizarre, too grisly for the management to entertain, and in three years of constant service, they had never failed to satisfy.

The man ostensibly in charge was Girolamo Lucchese, a.k.a. Gerry Lucas, a soldier with the Gianelli family who had served several prison terms — for rape and sodomy, molesting children, pandering, contributing to the delinquency of assorted minors. The recipient of pay beyond his lowly rank, Lucchese wore the label of a button man without complaint. He understood that it was insulation for the capo, something in the way of guaranteed security in case the lockbox should be penetrated. If and when that happened, Lucchese would be on his own, but through continued silence he could guarantee himself the best in legal talent, a continuation of his salary regardless of the outcome and a ready-made position in the Family upon release from jail. It was an offer he could scarcely have refused, since the alternative — providing testimony for the prosecution — would have meant his very painful death.

Lucchese was a man who valued pain. Infliction of it granted him the sort of sexual release that he had never found through normal channels, and he realized that pain was also educational, a useful tool for discipline. Receiving pain was something else entirely, though, and he knew that he could do a lot of time before he cracked and spilled the secrets of the Gianelli family. Hell, life would be a piece of cake compared to death the way that Gianelli's contract butchers dealt it out.

Mack Bolan knew Lucchese through his files at Justice, though the two of them had never met before tonight. Lucchese would have known Bolan by his reputation, but the Executioner would not be on his mind this evening. Having found a means of merging business with his pleasure, profiting from both, the mobster would be concentrating on his clients and their special needs. The Executioner was counting on it. The lockbox had no roving guards outside; Lucchese had decided that invisibility was preferable to an army on the street, and his exterior security was unobtrusive. Bolan's single pass was all it took to make the nondescript sedan, two passengers. The vehicle had been parked a half block down and faced the fortress warehouse, waiting for a danger signal that had not been used in three years.

The operation was protected at many levels. There were payoffs to be made at local levels, but Lucchese's customers themselves provided further insulation. Many of them crawled from under diplomatic rocks to seek their pleasures in the lockbox, representatives of European, Asian, African or Middle Eastern countries on duty in the nation's capital. Immune themselves to any charge of criminal behavior, they exerted a collective pull beyond their individual capacity, ensuring that authorities along the waterfront remained myopic, deaf and dumb.

The Executioner knew of the Lucchese-Gianelli alliance, and knew that it would never stand in court. If he had been a prosecutor or detective, Bolan would have busted Lucchese's operation anyway, preferring short-term gains to lasting victories. But as it was, he had a different goal in mind. The Executioner was not obliged to prove his case before a jury, satisfying all the rules of evidence, maneuvering among the countless technicalities that made the legal system work halfheartedly at best. His mission was retrieval of Brognola's wife and children, and his modus operandi was the Gianelli squeeze. His other scattered thrusts would have the capo fuming, anxious to retaliate.