"Damn right I'm going to call," Copa replied anxiously. He produced a ring of keys and fitted one into a large drawer of the desk, opened the drawer, and lifted out a "funny phone" which he set delicately down on the desk.

Mazzarelli growled, "You want me to go out and-?"

"No, not yet. Let's confirm this hot ass first."

The Boss of Nashville donned reading glasses and consulted a small notebook which he withdrew from the base of the telephone. Then he lifted the phone and punched up a long combination on the relay diffuser. Thirty 'seconds later he had his roundabout connection into New York -via Atlanta, Dallas, Denver and Boston.

The greeting had the metallic resonance which he had come to associate with the scrambler lines. "Head shed."

"Area Three here," he responded. "I need a flaying card confirmation."

"Hold it."

Another instrument clicked into the line almost instantly and a different voice announced, "Field Bureau."

"Yeah. Area Three, here. This is Highroller. I want a make on a black card."

"What's the number, sir?"

"Who am I talking to?"

"This is Auditor, sir."

"Okay. This is in Spades. It's zero two, dash, zero two, dash, one one one."

"That's a Full House, sir. I can't give you that. I'll have to pass you higher."

"Do it, then, dammit, and snap it up. I got the man waiting."

"One moment, please."

Copa covered the transmitter with his fingers and asked his head cock, "What's a Full House?"

"You mean..?" Mazzarelli's gaze flicked toward the door. "Beats me. Sounds like a high hand, though."

"Right." Copa fidgeted and shook the telephone angrily, muttering, "Goddamn bureaucratic bullshit. I never saw such-you better take the man to the garden, Gordy. But watch him. Treat him with respect, but watch him. It may take awhile to check this out."

Mazzarelli nodded his understanding and went quickly out to greet the visitor.

Copa waited and fumed at the silent telephone, staring at the "calling card" until his eyes glazed with the effort. At this particular time, an Ace of Spades was bad enough. A Full House sounded even more ominous-and he wanted none of it whatever it meant.

Mazzarelli was right, though. The commissione's Aces had fallen onto hard times. They had been all but repudiated by the surviving council of bosses, following the unbelievable fiasco in New York which had crumbled the Marinello empire. Now these hot asses were under tight leashes from their head shed and it was being told around that many of them dared not venture away from the New York area. A lot of wiseguys around the world were holding hot bags of hate for the former untouchables. Several of them had been hit in recent weeks, or so the stories went.

Like Mazzarelli, Nick Copa had no particular reason to dislike the Aces. The guys had done a hell of a job during a damn tough period. They'd kept the families from slaughtering one another, and they'd brought a stability to an organization which by its very nature was patently unstable. Copa gave them all due credit for that. And he had no reason to hate them.

He also, however, had no particular reason not to hit them-if any got in his way.

And that went for Full Houses, too.

It was a strange world, this world of Mafia. As the most secret societies, it was held together by a rather rigid social structure and governed quiet ritual. Custom and tradition were therefore important elements and tended to ext long beyond practical usage. It was this understanding of Mafia mind in which Bolan was investing his own strange game. He knew that the Aces had become an endangered species thanks chiefly to his own destructive penetration of their ranks. They had constituted an elite force-a secret society within the secret society-with virtually unlimited power and authority in the internal affairs of the Mafia nation They had been, in effect, a sort of Gestapo. And it was a tailor made setup for a guy like Mack Bolan.

He had been walking quietly among them since the third campaign of his war against the Mafia, taking on their camouflage when the "need versus risk" factor seemed to be in balance. It was not, however, a masquerade which a guy would contemplate for extended periods, or for capricious purposes. His enemies were not fools, even though he frequently made them appear as such. Bolan had survived this far in his war not by contempt for his enemy, but by careful respect for their intelligence and cunning. Each penetration was always on the heartbeat, with Bolan's survival in their midst directly dependent upon every word being spoken to the finest nuance, each gesture carried to perfection, every movement of face and eyes geared to the dictates of the changing moment.

It was not a fun thing, not even under the best of circumstances.

Add to that the present reality that Bolan's recent command strike on New York had severely undermined the authority of the Gestapo force. In the immediate wake of that strike it had seemed highly improbable that the supe rhard force would survive at all. But it was a strange world and the Aces had survived, although in greatly modified form. They were no longer autonomous. They could not interfere in any intra family dispute and their function in the no man's land between families was purely as fact-finders and arbitrators.

Theoretically they were still at the disposal for hard duties-of that council of boss known as La Commissione. So they were, in theory, still an enforcement arm of that council. But the council itself was presently in disarray, due to the instability of the Mafia world itself. It had not formally met since the New York fiasco, and La Commissione was in fact nothing more now than an executive staff functioning almost entirely as an administrative service. They maintained communications, and coordinated various operations between the underworld groups.

All of this left the Aces as neither fish nor fowl in that predatory jungle constituting the Mafia world. A few had been hit-as the logical settlement (in this world) of old grievances. Others had simply drifted away and vanished, retiring, perhaps, to obscure fates. Those that remained in service did so at their constant peril-at least until a new stability could be established.

So Bolan was well aware of the various hazards involved in this attempt to softly penetrate the Copa camp. But he was banking on that strange quality of Mafia mind which finds it’s sustenance in tradition, custom, and ritual. And he knew that success could be measured only from one heartbeat to the next.

He was not here for fun and games.

Mazzarelli was a bear of a man, half a head shorter than Bolan but commanding 300 pounds or more of tightly packed brawn-shoulders a yard wide, neck and head appearing as one unit with hardly any variation in circumference. The face was something else, though. Except for the bristly crewcut hair, it recalled memories of the long-dead comedian

Lou Costello-radiating that same air of tragic-comic innocence and vulnerability. But Bolan knew better. This guy was as dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake. All the time.

"Call me Omega," Bolan told him. He did not offer his hand.

"Okay, call me Gordy," said the Bear. The name fit no better than the face. The smile was pure mama mia and could have been entirely disarming had Bolan not known what lurked behind the smile. "How're things in the Big Apple?"

"Tense," Bolan replied.

"I'll bet, yeah. I haven't been there in a long time. I hate that damn town."

"That's okay," said Bolan-Omega. "I hate Chicago."

Those "innocent" eyes buckled a bit. "You like Nashville?"

"Better than Chicago, yeah."