Bolan looked at the girl. "Get in the car," he said.

Then, shifting the Uzi to his left hand, he un-leathered the Beretta and approached the wounded man.

The guy's hardware lay a few feet from his right hand. He didn't seem to be aware of it, but Bolan took no chances. He kicked the weapon aside, then knelt down next to the dude.

The guy was in intense pain and must have known he was dying. His lips were flecked with red. His hands were pressed against his abdomen but did nothing to stem the flow of life fluids that bubbled out between the fingers. His breathing was shallow, ragged, and forced. He seemed unaware that Bolan was beside him.

"Who are you?" Bolan asked calmly. "Who sent you after that woman?"

The guy's eyes opened into tight slits. He was a tough one, all right. A young guy who must have still thought that there was some honor among thieves. He spoke through teeth clenched against the pain, and Bolan could tell it was torture for him. But he spoke.

"Bastard...goddamn bastard...I'm not t-telling you shit....Bastard...."

Bolan sighed. "Have it your way," he said quietly.

He squeezed the Beretta's trigger.

Bolan hurried back to the car, climbed in beside the woman, gunned the engine, and got the hell out of there, continuing on into the park, away from the bodies and the two cars and the approaching sirens.

After passing two more turnoffs, Bolan pulled a left and took them back to MacArthur, catching MacArthur west toward Persimmon Tree Road, back the way they had come, toward that walled estate in Potomac, where Eshan Nazarour was temporarily residing.

He finally took time to give the lady beside him a long, sideways appraisal. She was hugging her door, watching him warily. He could see in the passing streetlights that the frightened lines of her face had softened some, but not entirely.

"Where are we going?" she asked quietly, nervously.

Bolan had the impression that she knew damn well, but he said, "Back home. Back where you started from."

"Do we... have to?"

"No. This is a free country. I can drop you off anywhere along here, if you'd like."

She mulled that over for a moment. Then she shook her head. There was something helpless about her that made Bolan want to reach out and touch her. To comfort her. But he did not.

"No, that's all right," she said finally, in a weak voice that was almost like a little girl's. "It wouldn't do any good. I'll go with you."

"Who were those men?"

"I — I don't know. I... don't know."

"Okay, we'll let that one go. Who are you? What's your name?"

He was pretty sure he knew the answer to that. He was remembering the first thing she'd said to him as he'd come in out of the darkness after killing all those men: "Did Eshan send you?"

"Don't you know?" she said, staring straight ahead through the windshield, not even looking at him. "My name is Carol Nazarour. I'm General Nazarour's wife."

"Who was that man you were meeting? The one they killed?"

"It doesn't matter," came the harsh reply. "None of it matters. None of it...."

That was, quite obviously, all she intended to say for the duration.

Bolan did not insist. There are times to push and times to lay off. For right now, the lady needed her space to recover from all that had happened, all that she had been through. Mack Bolan allowed her that space.

Complications, sure.

A corrupt Iranian general marked for assassination and his beautiful American wife who was up to her lovely blonde head in kidnapping and sudden death.

It promised to be one hell of a mission. And only he, because it was a hit team loose in American streets, was truly qualified to handle it.

Great.

Goddamn great.

Mack Bolan had mixed feelings about Washington, D.C., and its environs, which included Potomac, Maryland. The area had about it a sense of oneness with history that Bolan had experienced in few other places in the world. You could feel the spiritual presence of the great men who had walked this ground and done great things. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where Bolan had meditated on several occasions long after the city around him slept. Yeah. To experience Washington was to experience the essence of American pride and patriotism. But there was another side of Washington that Bolan cared for not at all.

A beautiful city, sure. If you ignored the sprawling black ghetto that surrounded the capital of this land of plenty. And that's exactly what most people did. Washington is not so much people as a state of mind. The city's only real industry is government, which employs nearly a half-million civilian and military personnel: about forty percent of the area's work force. And if it is a town of scenic parks and classical architecture and monuments to a great past, then it is also a city of lies and deceit and too many factions trying to buy too many pieces of democracy with a strictly what's-in-it-for-me philosophy. A city where the tax dollar finances wasteful bureaucratic nonsense, while the ghetto and the problems it represents only grow larger, and the only things that go up are the taxes and the bureaucrats' salaries.

Mack Bolan was not a cynic by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, he was a realist. He knew that many good men and women worked hard, long hours in the nation's capital to make this country a better place to live. But they stood little chance of succeedding in any large sense. They were outnumbered and outflanked by the bureaucrats and their red tape and the many interests they fronted. Somehow the country functioned, the democratic process worked, and sometimes decency and what was right did win out. But not nearly often enough.

Bolan stayed as far away as possible from the fat-cat lawyer legislators and what they were trying to do to a great nation. Col. Phoenix was a man of direct action surviving in a complicated world. He did his part away from sticky-fingered senators and silver-tongued diplomats. He cast his vote in every election, and he hoped that enough people who felt the way he did were doing likewise. In a democracy there is always hope. But he generally stayed away from Washington proper unless his work called him there.

It was calling now.

He sensed Carol Nazarour growing tense in the Corvette's bucket seat beside him as he steered off Persimmon Tree, onto the road that fronted the northern wall bordering General Nazarour's temporary home.

Nobody could have guessed what she had been through. Bolan realized that this was a strong woman sitting next to him. As strong as she was beautiful. Sure, he could see the strain she was under — the tightness around the eyes and mouth. But she was keeping a stiff upper lip, too, and he liked her for that.

There was no sign of the Datsun that the kidnappers had left behind. It had probably been driven off by one of the backup team.

Bolan braked to the shoulder and killed his lights at the spot where he had first seen the woman moving furtively along the wall only a scant twenty minutes earlier. He turned in his seat to study her.

"How did you get out from in there?" he asked, nodding toward the property. "It wasn't by the front gate. You looked like someone crashing out of prison."

"I was," the blonde replied softly. But she ignored his question.

"You didn't have to come back here with me," Bolan reminded her sharply.

The woman sighed. A defeated, beaten sound. "He would have found me," she said, looking out through the windshield at the wall. "I've tried running before. He's always found me and brought me back. Or had me brought back.'' She seemed to realize for the first time that Bolan had pulled the car over. "Why did you stop?" she asked, turning to eye him with a new curiosity.