Bolan fodder was more like it, she told herself... and their opinions and idle speculation were worth less than nothing.

"Where's the woman?" Parelli snarled at the man with the shotgun. "I want to talk to her."

The guy jerked his head toward a small door in the wall opposite where he had lined up the children.

"We've got her tied up in the can."

"Get her out here."

"Right away, Mr. Parelli."

A moment later, one of the soldiers led Lana Garner from the small, smelly rest room.

Holding her right arm so tightly that she winced in pain, the hood led her over to where Denise Parelli and her son stood waiting.

Lana had been treated more roughly than the children, Denise could see at a glance. Her blouse was torn in several places, her right cheek bruised. A small trickle of dried blood encrusted the corner of her mouth.

She stared defiantly at the Parellis.

"I don't care what you do to me, I won't tell you a thing!" she blazed at them.

Denise smiled.

"My dear, what could you possibly know that would be of interest to us? There's only one reason you're still alive and it really has nothing to do with you."

Lana shook her head, more angry than afraid as she stared at the Parellis while the hood maintained his iron grip on her arm.

"You're crazy if you think holding me will stop Mack Bolan. He's going to find you and he's going to kill you!"

David slapped her brutally with an open hand across the mouth, spinning her around. The blow drove her to one knee. She would have fallen to the cement floor if the hardman had not yanked her back to her feet.

"You shut up about Bolan, bitch. That bastard's a dead man if he gets near this place. And there isn't much chance of that, is there? He doesn't have a clue where we are, now does he?"

She opened her mouth to shoot back a hot retort, then paused abruptly, grinning at him savagely.

"Oh, no you don't. You're not going to trick me like that! You just want to find out how much Bolan does know about you. You want to know if he's located this place. Well, you can just wait and find out, you slimebag!"

Denise stepped close to Lana until their faces were only inches apart. Denise lifted her gloved hand and softly stroked the fingertips along Lana's bruised cheek.

"You shouldn't call David names like that, dear," she said softly. "I am his mother, after all."

"I'm sorry." Lana closed her eyes. "I was wrong."

"That's more like it," Denise murmured sweetly.

Lana spit on the floor between Denise Parelli's feet. "I should have said that he's a son of a bitch!"

Denise sighed.

"My dear, my dear. I'm afraid you leave us no choice but to teach you some manners."

"The hard way," David chimed in.

His smile said he was savoring the experience. He nodded to a hood standing next to Lana.

The nearby soldier stepped up and slammed the butt of his shotgun into the small of Lana's back.

She cried out and fell to both knees, scraping them on the rough concrete when the man holding her released his grip.

Against the wall, the children saw this and began whimpering, a strange, eerie sound in the spacious warehouse, as if they knew that the brutalized young woman was the closest thing they had to a friend in this horrible nightmare.

David lifted his hand to the soldier who had struck Lana.

"No more." He looked down at the woman sprawled before him and licked his lips in anticipation. "Not yet, anyway. Business first."

He stepped over to Lana, reached down, cupped her chin in his hand. He jerked her head up so that she had to look at him.

"Don't touch me, slimebag," she snarled vehemently.

"When this is over," he told her with a reptilian smile, "we won't need you for anything. Except for maybe one thing... until you die. That oughta be lots of fun. For me, and for the boys."

Before she could respond, there was the rumble of a truck's engine outside and the loading dock door began to screech upward.

The big trailer rig had been backed up to the warehouse loading dock, its rear doors wide open.

The foreman walked in from the loading dock.

"We're ready to load, Mr. Parelli."

David lost interest in the woman sprawled before him. He looked at his mother and saw the barely perceptible nod. "Load 'em up and move 'em out." He looked back at Lana with a leer. "Then we fix you."

The fashionable neighborhood bordering Evanston was quiet. There were lights on in some of the big houses behind manicured lawns, but few cars moved along the broad, tree-lined boulevards.

Bolan parked Lana Garner's car a block away from Senator Mark Dutton's house, where he lived with his wife and teenage daughter.

Bolan had chosen one of the darkened houses when he parked the car. He loosened the bulb in the dome light and there was no flash of illumination when he slipped out of the vehicle, quietly closing the door and angling for the thick shadows underneath trees.

It took only a few moments for him to make his way through the backyard toward a high wooden fence that closed off the Dutton property from prying eyes.

Bolan paused, listening intently for a moment, hearing nothing from the other side of the fence.

A door slammed somewhere, but it was several houses away. A couple of dogs in the neighborhood were barking sporadically. He heard nothing else, nothing from the direction of the Dutton residence on the other side of the fence.

He reached up, grasped the top of the slats and vaulted over, his booted feet landing with a muffled thump in the backyard.

The rear of the Dutton house was dark. Wind rustled tall evergreens in the yard.

Bolan started toward the senator's residence, slipping the night vision goggles he wore into place.

The sound of the wind almost covered the rush of footsteps from behind.

He dropped to one side, the thought flashing through his mind that this guard was more competent than most. He heard the hiss of a knife blade through air, coming at him.

He spun and snaked his arm out, blocking the stab.

The sentry let out a grunt, pulled back and slashed again.

Bolan felt a line of fire race across his right forearm as he blocked this slash. His left dipped and the Gerber MK II combat knife sheathed mid-chest seemed to spring into his hand.

He pivoted as the blademan danced back again. Bolan snapped a kick to the guard's knee.

The man yelped in pain and staggered.

Bolan moved in, looped his bleeding right arm around the man's neck to stifle a cry. He drove the blade of his knife into the guard's back, expertly guiding it between the ribs, into the heart.

The sentry gave a mighty lurch in Bolan's grip, then went slack.

Bolan lowered the body to the cold ground. He wiped his knife clean on the dead man's jacket, sheathed the weapon and quickly frisked the corpse. He found a Colt .45 in shoulder leather and id claiming that Louie Caputo had been licensed to carry a concealed weapon in his capacity of security coordinator for Tri-State, Inc.

Bolan stood, confident that he had taken the life of nothing more than a Mafia street goon... posing as a private detective... put here by the family to bodyguard the senator.

Bolan's pocketknife had a back door of the senator's house open in less than ten seconds.

It took about three times as long to find the button of a burglar alarm and disarm it, then Bolan stood inside.

The house smelled of fragrant odors from a roaring log fire.

Bolan himself smelled of the brutal night.

Cold.

Sweat.

Tension.

He moved through the strange air of other people's lives, lives he could only guess at.

He spotted a staircase and moved toward it, careful not to nudge anything in his way, his NVD goggles guiding him.