Two ambulance attendants were bloody before they got the broken body off the Datsun and onto the stretcher.

"You were the first on the scene?" asked a plainclothesman whom Smith recognized as a detective from homicide.

"Right. I got here and waited. There were some people up on those balconies looking out, but they were just curious about the sirens, the activity."

"Any guess, Officer Smith?"

"Jumped or was pushed."

The detective grunted and marched off toward the hotel.

Detective Ormsby went directly to the sixth floor. The first five floors were too low a launching point to reach the Datsun.

Room 606 was vacant. The hotel manager met him there and they went to 706. A couple from California had occupied the room for three days. They had not noticed the disturbance.

On the next three floors they found nothing. A man in 1106 had tried to hide a small quantity of marijuana when Ormsby came to the door, but the detective told him to forget it and they moved on. A call came for Detective Sergeant Ormsby to go up to the fourteenth. He and the hotel manager went together. A uniformed cop showed them a woman's clothes and a purse. He had not opened it.

Sergeant Ormsby did, and found a picture of a black girl about the right age and height. He looked at the face, and was sure. The girl, Charlotte Albers, had fallen or been pushed from 1406. No one was in the room. A call showed it had been rented to John Smith.

"Hooker," the hotel manager said.

"Probably," Ormsby said.

Downstairs, he found out that "John Smith" was white, about forty and had arrived alone. There was nothing left in the room to suggest he had been there. They would dust for prints, just in case.

"Any next-of-kin card?" the manager asked.

"Yes. You want to make the call?"

The manager shook his head, retreating.

"Figures," Ormsby said. "We'll let our police psychologist do that. He's going to earn his money tonight."

Mack Bolan left the restaurant, drove to his hotel, and took the elevator directly from the underground garage to the lobby. No one would leave a message at the desk for him: no one knew he was there.

He went to the bank of phones, slid into a booth, spread ten quarters in front of him, then dialed a ten-digit number.

The operator asked him to deposit the toll, and he did. Then a phone in Denver rang three times.

There were three clicks as his call was mechanically forwarded to another number, which rang four times and he got a local dial tone.

The dial tone came from a third number in Denver. Bolan punched in a long-distance number for Del Mar, California, and a moment later someone answered the phone.

"Yes?"

"Sentinel here, Strongbase. This phone-number latch-up you developed — you're sure there's no way it can be traced?"

"Absolutely none, guy," the younger voice said.

"How are the installations going?" asked the Executioner.

"On schedule. Today we hooked up the second online computer. We should be fully operational soon. I have something you may be interested in. There's talk about a big gunrunning operation going down within the week. Either in Portland or San Francisco, with the betting leaning toward the Northwest. I have a batch of printouts from Law Enforcement Agencies' headquarters and a special briefing to all like from Justice. Maybe I should run it up there for you to check out."

"I want to know about it."

"I can get a 7 A.M. flight to Portland."

"I'll meet you at the airport. As a test, bring me ten loaded magazines for the 93-R in your checked luggage. You might as well stay a couple of days. Perhaps you can do some research for me up here."

"I'll be there."

"Remember, you'll be strictly backup."

"Suits me fine."

"See you tomorrow."

Mack Bolan awoke at 5:30 the next morning, donned tan slacks and a light-tan sport coat that covered the 93-R and went downstairs. At the newsstand he bought The Oregonian. On the front page was an old picture of him, as well as a sketch of him in his blacksuit with a submachine gun and combat harness. It was a good likeness.

He returned to his room and ordered breakfast.

Then he attached a thick black mustache to his upper lip with spirit gum, donned a pair of reflective sunglasses and a tan beret.

He completed the disguise as room service arrived.

The waiter noticed nothing unusual. Bolan consumed the toast, orange juice and coffee.

The morning paper featured a long story about Mack Bolan and described The Executioner as "a vigilante figure fighting the KGB and the Mafia, or a cold-blooded killer, was depending on your point of view". It even revealed that he had apparently been dead for a year, then had turned up not dead at all but working for the government.

The story detailed that he was wanted by the FBI and the CIA as well as half a dozen foreign intelligence agencies, including the KGB.

The story concluded: Portland Police refuse to discuss the possibility that the Executioner is in town, but the presence of marksman's medals at the triple killing yesterday and the second loan-operation blast seem to indicate that the Executioner is indeed here.

Organized Crime specialists say that both loan firms hit yesterday are known to be closely tied to the Portland Mafia.

Police say they have no warrants naming the Executioner. The FBI would not comment when asked if they have such warrants or if they are actively searching for the vigilante.

The mention of his name in me newspaper sent a chill down Mack Bolan's spine. Obviously it was his contact with Dunbar, the vice cop from Portland whom he'd known in Nam, that had instigated the report, and Bolan had no regrets that his message had gotten through loud and clear. But he knew that any newspaper report would be a distortion, inevitably a falsehood, just another source of future misconceptions.

The true story of Mack Bolan was too searing, too raw, too personal, for the pages of a newspaper. The truth of his own story continued to trouble Mack Bolan himself.

When April Rose was killed, he found himself shifting his entire psyche onto automatic pilot. And in that mode he undertook the Russian hit, the killing of a Soviet test pilot in Afghanistan after the enemy raid on Stony Man Farm in which April was shot dead. The killing of the young pilot was a decisive act for Bolan, because the man's father, Greb Strakhov, became the Executioner's sworn enemy.

The Strakhov war continued through many missions, and was still fiercely unresolved. But immediately following the tragedy at Stony Man — a complicated time for Mack Bolan — some of those missions were more harrowing, more bizarre, than others.

For a start, the Bolan invasion of Russia by way of Afghanistan necessitated the killing of a Canadian journalist, Robert Hutton, who had betrayed Bolan and who ended up as a halo of pink mist when the Executioner helped the guy drop from a helicopter onto the spinning rotors of another chopper below.

It was not a deed to endear him to the journalistic world, and indeed Bolan found himself strictly persona non grata in the America to which he returned following his covert, deadly blitz on Moscow.

U.S. politicians, agency chiefs, bureaucrats and law-enforcement officers all suddenly found an excuse to be down on Bolan.

The get-Bolan response was undoubtedly a reaction to their own fears of the big guy, a certain unease they experienced with the legend of the Executioner, a guilt over what Mack Bolan really represented.

So Bolan was very much on his own, and the difficulties mounted immediately. From the extreme and unsanctioned vengeance he wreaked in the sewer city called Washington to his twisting adventures in Kampuchea when representing the League of Families in search of American POW's lost in the blood-soaked world of the Khmer Rouge, Mack Bolan prevailed without ever knowing who his allies were-who would let him live or try to make him die.