"You can die right now," Bolan rasped. He stood beside the desk and slipped the Beretta into his overcoat pocket. "We don't need you. Remember that."

There was, of course, the possibility that the approaching footsteps would go right on past the office, but Bolan's gut told him that wouldn't happen.

He stood to one side of the desk, Lana to the other.

Wallace remained motionless in his seat.

No one in the room expected what happened next.

The office door opened quickly, and a small object came flying into the room. Then the door slammed and the footfalls echoed in the hallway, running away from there.

The object hit the desk, bounced off and rolled into a corner with a clatter.

All three of the room's occupants recognized it right away.

Grenade!

Wallace leaped from behind the desk with surprising speed and lunged toward the door of the office.

Bolan reached across the desk with a long arm and snagged the collar of Lana's jacket. He dived to the floor behind the desk, taking her with him, shielding her body with his own.

The grenade exploded with a thunderous roar.

Bolan felt the shock of the blast as shrapnel thudded into the desk. Then he lifted his head, ears ringing and hurting, realizing that none of the deadly fragments had penetrated the bulky metal furniture. Lana moved around beneath him, coughing because of the plaster dust that now filled the air.

Bolan pulled himself to his feet, resting one hand on the desk, the front of which was now bent irreparably out of shape.

The fact that the desk was bolted to the floor had kept the explosion from throwing it over on top of Bolan and Lana.

Floyd Wallace had not been nearly as lucky. He had been sprawled against a wall and the exploding shrapnel had turned his body into a shapeless mass of bloody, quivering flesh, barely recognizable as having once been human. There was nothing left of his face, just blood, gristle and bone.

Voices began calling inquisitively in the first seconds of silence after the explosion, as the night-shrouded orphanage began waking up and responding.

Bolan heard retching.

Lana had pulled herself up enough to see the carnage in the room, and now she was back on hands and knees and had emptied her stomach into the debris that littered the floor.

He reached down, took her arm and hauled her to her feet, shaking her roughly, trying to break through her shock.

"Lana, come on! The Parelli family is cleaning house, and Wallace was on their list. We've got to get out of here."

Lana shook her head numbly, carefully averting her eyes from the corpse, then she seemed to come alert and realize something with a gasp. She broke away from him and ran toward the door.

"The children! We have to save the children!"

Hysteria and shock still gripped her, and Bolan hardly blamed her.

This sort of thing was his life.

Most men and women are not accustomed to rooms blowing up around them and to seeing bloodied remains of what a blink earlier had been a living, breathing person.

He started after her, reaching the hallway, when a bullet sang past his ear.

He spun, the Beretta in his hand. He spotted a man with a pistol at the other end of the hall. Bolan triggered off two quick shots.

Both hot 9 mm sizzlers zapped into the gunman's chest. The guy flopped backward against a wall.

Bolan was on his way again before the dead man hit the floor.

Lana was out of sight now.

The lobby, toward which she had been heading, was buzzing with people, including a few kids in their nightclothes, diving for cover at the sounds of gunfire.

He heard automatic weapons fire from outside. He wheeled and charged out through the door by which he and the woman had entered a few short minutes ago. He burst out into the night.

A few yards from him, someone writhed on the ground in agony.

Bolan ran to the figure, saw it was a man and knelt beside him, occasionally glancing around.

"Where are you hit?" Bolan asked sharply, trying to break through the other man's pain.

The guy wore a stethoscope and white smock: one of the institution's medical staff.

The wounded man looked up at Bolan, clearly surprised to see him. His eyes took in the blacksuit underneath the overcoat and the weapon held ready in Bolan's fist.

"Leave... leave the kids alone, damn you!" he gasped.

"I'm not going to hurt the kids," Bolan assured him firmly. "How bad are you hit?"

The medic was grasping his right leg. There was a spreading red stain on his smock.

"Nicked me in the leg and it hurts like hell," he grated. "I ran outside when I heard the explosion, trying to see what was going on. There was someone running away. He had some kind of machine gun." The guy reached up, grasping Bolan's arm. "Were you going after those guys?"

"That's right."

"Then don't waste time with me. I'll be all right."

The intern was obviously not hit bad and, from his concern about the kids, Bolan figured he... like Lana, like most of the personnel here and at Wallace's day-care centers... was innocent, a caring employee duped by Wallace.

The Executioner realized he had to find Lana. And he had to get out of here before the police arrived, which would not be long.

Those responsible for the carnage were only a moment ahead of him.

He clapped the man on the shoulder.

"Hang in there."

He set off at a run toward the front of the administration building, through the shadows between the wings, half expecting to trip over another body, but he encountered no resistance.

The pandemonium from the compound faded behind him.

He came around the corner of the building.

Most of the people in the lobby of the admin building had stayed there, except for one little blond-haired youngster in her pajamas. She was no more than five, a stuffed rabbit dangling from her dimpled little left hand.

Curious, the child had strayed away from the melee in the lobby and her absence had not yet been discovered by those inside.

She was staring off down the street. She turned intelligent eyes at the big man striding toward her.

"Are you with Miss Lana?" she chirped.

Bolan knelt to bring his face level with that of this small girl.

"Have you seen Miss Lana?"

The youngster nodded.

"She used to play with me whenever she came here to work," the girl informed Bolan in a perky voice. "She couldn't play with me tonight. They wouldn't let her."

Bolan heard his own sharp intake of breath.

"Where did they go?"

"They took her away. They were bad men." The child looked off down the street again longingly. "I wish she would come back. I like her. Are you a bad man, too?"

Bolan found his voice.

"Uh, no. Please don't be frightened." He gently took the child by the arm, guided her around and sent her off with a nudge in the direction of the lobby entrance. "You go inside now and don't come back out."

"Okay."

The little girl did as she was told.

Bolan hurried across the lawn toward the parked Camaro. He slid inside the car before anyone emerged from the lobby of the building.

The sounds of chaos echoed from back there and wisps of smoke and settling dust from the exploded grenade still wafted from the shattered window of Floyd Wallace's office.

He gunned Lana Garner's Camaro to life, knowing he had no chance in hell of catching up with whoever had snatched her. He knew the direction taken, thanks to the little girl, but he had no idea of the make of the car.

He knew only one thing with any certainty.

The Parelli family had Lana.

Bolan did not know who had ordered the hit on Floyd Wallace, whether it was David Parelli or his mother, but that did not really matter.

What mattered was that the family was doing its best to cover its trail now that they knew Bolan was after them.