Bolan swept his light over the sedated animal. The devouring pinscher was long and lean, black as the blitzer himself. He would not kill an animal if he could help it, even a kill-trained one; it had no place in his war. Outside in the hallway, someone pounded on the anteroom door. Bolan flicked off the flash, froze in the darkness.

Silence, then more pounding.

The pounding stopped. The door eased open.

"He's not here." The relief in the man's voice was obvious. "Of course the mutt's not here. He's in the bossman's office where he belongs. Let's get moving."

"I say I heard him making strange noises."

"Listen, we got two minutes till we have to punch in at Station Four. I'll go easy on you, you're new. The dog is making strange noises because any noise it makes is strange. You ever seen it? If you have, you never wanna see it again. That is a mean pooch, Edgar. I leave him alone, he leaves me alone, we're both happy."

"I think there's something going on in there."

"I tell you what, Edgar." The older guy was losing his patience. "You have a need to let that hound chew you up into Gainesburger, you go right ahead. Me, I'm gonna punch in at Four."

There was a pause before Edgar said, "I'm going to check on him."

Inside Charon's office, Bolan slipped another tranquilizer dart into the Hurricane's breech, cocked the pistol, leveled it on the door. Footsteps shuffled across the carpet in the outer office. They stopped in front of the access-control panel.

Bolan's eyes etched the darkness as he waited for this non-notable to approach. But then the guard muttered, "Ah, the hell with it." Bolan gave him ten beats to get to the outer door and close it, then turned to Gadgets.

"Let's get down to business."

Mack Bolan lit a cigarette and shifted restlessly in the padded leather swivel chair.

April Rose, sitting across the conference table from him, caught his eye and flashed him a fast smile.

His ally during The Executioner's final Days of De-Creation with which the Mafia wars ended, the tall lush-bodied woman was now "housekeeper" at Stony Man Farm headquarters, overseeing every incredible aspect of the operation, providing logistics, back-up support, care to the few and mighty to Mack Bolan, Able Team, Phoenix Force, who deployed against the terrorist menace. This meeting in the War Room was a debriefing.

"The Hurricane worked like a charm," Gadgets Schwarz was saying. "Then, just before we get, I shot the Doberman with the stimulant, and he was already waking up when Mack and I got the hell out of there. From one tinkerer to another, Andrzej, nice work." "Andrzej" was Andrzej Konzaki, and he was no more a tinkerer than Gadgets. Officially on staff with the CIA, unofficially detached as consultant to Stony Man, Konzaki was one of the most skilled and innovative armorers in the world. As a marine in Vietnam. he'd won a Silver Star and lost both legs above the knees. But like Mack Bolan, Konzaki saw no profit in living in the past.

Now he had the torso of a weight-lifter, the hands and the imagination of an armorer master craftsman.

He was to be trusted as the expert in every small arm from pistol to heavy machine gun, as well as knife, small explosives, ever more lethally exotic devices.

"Gadgets," Bolan said, "you must brief Aaron on the set-up you rigged to Charon's computer. I want him ready to take over as backup."

Gadgets turned to the fifth person in the War Room, a big rumpled-looking guy hunched over the control board of a computer terminal console that was set up at one end of this operating heart of the Stony Man complex. "DonCo has an in-house mainframe computer. of course, addressable from any terminal in the place," Gadgets explained. "But on Charon's personal terminal, and probably on the terminals of his senior staff, there's a phone link. That allows him to "talk" to any other phone-linked computer to exchange data, place or accept orders, whatever over a regular phone line. You know the technology, Aaron, no point in rehashing the details. But the bottom line is that we're tapped into that phone line."

Bolan stubbed out his cigarette. "What kind of access does that give us?"

"Right now we can eavesdrop," Gadgets replied. "We can monitor and copy anything that is requested from the DonCo mainframe computer, or an computer with which it's linked, if the request comes from either Charon's terminal or his secretary's. Aaron, I've inserted the access protocol in your file."

The big man at the console nodded. His fingers danced over the keys. Lines of characters darted across the video display in front of him. He scanned them, typed again. This time, except for a couple of lines at the top, the screen was blank.

"No traffic," Aaron reported.

It was just after five, Sunday morning. The softprobe of DonCo had been completed only three hours earlier.

"So until someone uses one of those consoles, those taps don't do us any good," muttered Bolan.

"Not quite, Sarge," Gadgets said softly. "If we can figure out Charon's personal access protocol his users, his query codes and so on, we can duplicate them. From the computer's point of view, we'd be disguised as Charon."

"That's the nice thing about phone lines," Aaron nodded. "They work both ways."

"We already have one lead. That reference to "FRANCOFILE" you saw in the appointment book," said Gadgets. "It won't get us in by itself, but it's a point in the right direction."

"We'll get on it right away, Mack," Aaron declared. "But I can't predict time frame.

Aaron "the Bear" Kurtzman ruled over the Virginia headquarters' electronic library.

In addition to the Farm's own extensive data banks, Aaron could interface instantly with those of the National Security Council, the Justice Department, the CIA, DIA, the intelligence agencies of every major friendly nation. Kurtzman was not simply the operator of this expansive communication and information system; he seemed himself a grizzled, portly extension of it.

Gadgets and Kurtzman began to toss around ideas on how to decode Charon's computer domain.

April Rose joined them. Her advanced degrees in electronics and solid-state physics made her no stranger to the arcane mysteries of electronic computation.

In front of Mack on the polished surface of the War Room conference table, in an unmarked file folder, was a digest of the dossier of Frederick Charon. It occupied no more than three pages of sprocket-hole-edged computer paper. Bolan had no need to consult it. He knew the details on those pages well enough. And they told an old and familiar tale.

The salient points were simple: it was the American success story. To a point. Charon was the only son of Italian immigrant parents, his father a self-educated salesman and opera buff, his mother an elementary school teacher. They were dedicated, ambitious people, and they instilled ambition in their son. From Boston Latin High School, Charon went to MIT for his undergraduate work, then Stanford for graduate and post-doctoral programs. His first and only job as an employee was with the prestigious Rand Corporation think tank; when he was twenty-five he left that firm to form his own company, DonCo. In ten years he had built it into one of the most respected theoretical hi-tech firms in the country, and a repository for the country's most profound trust.

And then he chose to betray that trust.

Somewhere along the line, the ambition inculcated in Charon by his hard-working parents had been perverted-impulsion. A brilliant man, Charon was also brilliantly flawed. No matter whatever had achieved-intellectually, socially, financially — he had to have more of everything that fed his will.

Perhaps, Bolan mused, his downfall was preordained, as is the defeat of any man whose appetites forever exceed his reach.