With responsibility. And with direct and effective action. Yeah, effective it had been.

From the jungles of Panama and the high-mountain country of eastern Turkey, to the Algerian desert and beyond, the terrorist cadres had gotten a taste of something the Mafia had grown to know and hate.

It was called the Bolan Effect. And it worked.

Hal Brognola thanked God that it was working for their side. If all Bolan required in exchange was a free hand, he'd damn well have it.

"What do you remember about Frank Edwards?" Brognola said. Edwards had been a back-burner project of the Stony Team for some time, and Bolan was familiar with the broad outlines of the man's dossier.

"Ex-CIA," Bolan said. "Suspected of freelancing for various Arab radical factions in the Middle East. He's also been fingered as having worked in an advisory capacity for Amin in Uganda and Khaddafi in Libya, training and tradecraft, if I remember correctly."

"You do, Striker," Brognola confirmed. "Add to that gun-running, we believe he's been acting as the middleman in the illegal shipment of American armament ultimately destined for terrorist hands. But he's beyond our official reach, and even if he weren't, we couldn't put him on trial, because we'd have to make top-secret intelligence public in order to present the evidence against him."

"But we would like to see him take a fall."

"He's got to take a fall, Striker," Brognola said. "New intelligence has just come in on the guy, and if I read it right, he's got his finger in a far bigger pie than we ever suspected. Not only that, but it ties in with Charon. Edwards has to be interdicted, and now..."

Bolan ground out his cigarette butt on the concrete floor of the barren underground room. "Take it from the top, Hal."

"Right. We're telexing you Edwards's updated dossier and a data package, but here's the bare bones of it. Edwards's personal staff, the half dozen or so he employs for security, communications, liaison with his terrorist clients, and other "housekeeping" duties, are all Americans. They're either ex-Special Forces, or ex-Agency, like him."

Like him, for sure. Another nest of treasonous vipers, men in whose lexicon words like "loyalty" and "patriotism" had been replaced by "power-lust" and "self-interest." Yeah, Edwards needed to take a fall, and Bolan would be more than happy to give him the push.

"More than six months ago, we infiltrated one of our people into Edwards's organization. Because Edwards is a highly trained operative himself and still maintains a vast network of clandestine contacts within the international intelligence community, we had to make it look absolutely authentic. Only three people knew the truth: the agent, myself, and the commander in chief. That'll give you an idea how badly we want Edwards. Following orders, the agent sold some factual but outdated information to a KGB counter-intel operator, was caught, and was cashiered of course. As far as the agency knows — and her files support this — she was drummed out after a long and valued career because she turned rotten. Even her closest colleagues believe it. It had to be that way, because we believe it's possible that Edwards may even have a pipeline into the agency. It worked. Within a week the approach to Edwards was made, and within a month she was in."

Bolan had not missed the feminine pronoun. An idea started to take shape in his mind and he did not like the look of it.

"This was projected as a long-term operation, to be conducted with absolute minimum risk of error. For that reason, our agent has contacted us exactly twice in those six months. In the first instance, she informed us that Edwards was just as professional as we believed. He was treating her as what she was: a highly trained and proficient operative. No grab-ass bullshit or anything like that. She had been given a few assignments, nothing very sensitive-courier duty, surveillance, intelligence analysis, and so forth. Edwards was testing her out, and she was passing with flying colors. He was convinced that she was what she professed to be: a fellow professional and a fellow traitor."

"Hal," Bolan interrupted. "Who is she?"

"You know her, Striker. The name is Toby Ranger."

Bolan leaned back in the straight-backed wooden chair and let out breath. Yeah, he knew Toby Ranger.

In that other lifetime, when the Mafia menace took him the length and breadth of the country, fate had engineered the intersection of his path with that of Toby Ranger more than once. He had fought at the woman's side. He had saved her life.

And she had saved his.

So maybe "know" wasn't quite the right word. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the lives of Mack Bolan and Toby Ranger were bonded, in a way few men and women could ever hope to know.

"Striker, listen..." Hal began.

"You said Toby made two contacts," Bolan broke in, his voice betraying no emotion. "Brief me on the second."

"It's fresh, Striker — came in while you were airborne en route to Heathrow. Last week, Edwards held some kind of big meet at a chalet he owns in the Swiss Alps, in the canton of Valais. Nominally, Edwards now holds Swiss citizenship. Anyway, this chalet is apparently one of his permanent bases. He maintains a full-time security force there, multinational, recruited from the terrorists he serves as opposed to his handpicked inner-circle force that Toby became a part of. The chalet also has a communications facility. Probably Edwards has other bases like it, but he's never domiciled in one place for long.

As near as Toby could make out, something damned big was being hatched at this meet. Those people weren't terrorists, at least not what we usually think of as terrorists. Toby was pretty sure they were intelligence agents, representing nearly every freeworld nation. Some of them were "retired" like Edwards, but some of them were still active, we think.

Besides the agents, there were a few others offering "specialized services." One of them was Frederick Charon." Brognola's voice had gone harsh with tension and suppressed rage. "Do you have any guesses as to what this could mean, Striker?"

"An international underground intelligence network," Bolan said evenly. "A "black" CIA, run by men trained by the top legit agencies in the world, serving the needs of the terrorist network. With state-of-the-art technology provided by traitors like Charon."

"That's the way it shapes up," Brognola agreed. "And it has to be stopped."

So the mission wasn't over after all; in fact, it had hardly begun. The Charon penetration, the cutting of the Charon-Drummond-KGB chain, was only a foot in the door of a major infrastructure of deceit, treason, and terror. Somewhere in the bowels of that infrastructure sat Frank Edwards, renegade agent, death merchant.

And it was up to Mack Bolan to bring that temple of terror crashing down on him, burying him forever.

"Where is Edwards, Hal?"

"Striker, you're in no shape to take him on, not now. That bullet wound..."

"Where is he?"

Brognola's sigh cut through the static. "We don't know." Bolan waited. The idea in his mind was getting uglier. "Toby was only able to pass what I've told you. She was leaving the Valais chalet, but she wasn't sure for where." Another pause. "I'll level, Striker. She suspects her cover might be blown." The ugly idea was clear as a photograph now.

Frank Edwards operated in a grim dark world, and the realities of that world were overwhelmingly lethal.

Toby Ranger would remain among the living only until she had revealed everything she knew to Frank Edwards. And Edwards and his men would know every vicious method for encouraging her to talk.

The odds that Toby was alive were short. The odds that she was entire were almost nil.

"We're not even sure where the Valais chalet is located, Striker," Brognola said bleakly.