The blond laughed nervously and said, "I think it'll run okay. But you sure creamed that windshield. I wonder if my insurance pays off on acts of war?"

Bolan dug into his pocket, peeled four Harlem-fifties from a roll, and gave them to the blond boy.

"My insurance pays off on everything," he told him. "Will that cover it?"

The boy was surprised but he nodded his head and accepted the money. "What happened to your bus?" he asked in a greatly relaxed tone.

"It's caught on a downslope," Bolan told him. "We can push it out."

The dark youth was getting into the car. He ran his fingers along the top molding of the windshield, carefully examined the four ragged holes, and sighed loudly and announced to nobody in particular, "That's as close as I ever want to come."

The blond laughed again and said, "I guess he could have just as easily brought them in dead center."

Bolan said, "That's right," spun about and returned to the VW.

The sports car joined him there. Bolan ordered a sullen Rachel Silver into the driver's seat and gave her terse instructions regarding traction on slippery surfaces, then the three men got behind and pushed and heaved and grunted the laboring micro-bus onto flat surface. Then the blond grumbled something about the front wheels of his car being "knocked out-of-line and vibrating like hell" — so Bolan took it slow and easy and the two-car caravan crept cautiously along the treacherous streets until they came to an all-night automat.

They parked the vehicles on the next side street and trudged back to the automat, got coffee and pie and took it to a quiet corner where the three men talked of politics and racketeers and dishonest public servants, and of a young girl who talked too freely to possibly the wrong people. Rachel listened brooding and kept her silence. She very rarely looked at Bolan, and when she did it was with a tinge of ill-concealed disgust.

It was her turn, Bolan thought, and she was flinging something back into hisface now. It hurt a little, sure, but if what she'd seen out on that street was enough to turn her off, then Bolan had to be thankful for early favors. Rachel did not have Viking guts — she was not a Valentina nor a Theresa, and she demanded her own image of purity from her men. He fervently wished her luck, though doubting she would find much. Under the right conditions that beast would emerge, and a woman like Rachel would find it difficult to remain "in love" with the same guy for very long. A Jesus very rarely came along. And when he did, the Rachels of the world didn't stand a chance of latching onto him.

So Bolan inwardly felt sorry for the girl, and he saved a little of the pity for himself and for the loss of an impossible dream briefly held, and then he turned his full attention to the gory world of Executioner Mack Bolan.

He took the names and numbers of his two "advisors," jotted pertinent notes into his little poop book, and he knew that he was entering into a new phase of his war against the Mafia.

After an hour or so he steered Rachel back to the micro-bus and drove her back to the high-rise where the nutty dream had begun and where it was ending.

"Short romance," he told her as he pulled beneath the awning to let her out.

Her first words since the showdown on the street were, "I'm sorry. I had romanticized what you are."

"And what am I?" he asked quietly. "A killer," she replied.

He jerked his head forward in a curt nod. "That's me," he agreed. "And if those had been killers behind us — what then? What should I have been, Rachel?" She shivered and said, "I'm sorry, I…" He said, "Goodbye, Rachel. Thanks for my life." She whispered, "Goodbye, Mack Bolan," then she was out and gone and Bolan knew that something fine had departed his life.

Correction. Something fine had almost enteredhis life. Thank God it hadn't quite made it The Executioner had enough working against him — he did not need the additional complications of…

He threw the bus into gear and eased away from there.

A glance into the rear-view and it was gone already, lost in the great sticky gobs of winter's fruit, and back there — behind that swirling screen of white darkness — he saw in his mind's eye a thing of indescribable beauty crawling naked upon a table to escape the harsh world of men in a shadow world of gods.

"Come out, Rachel," he murmured aloud. "This is the only world you've got"

Bolan left his vehicle in a private garage near Central Park and walked a block to a nondescript but clean budget hotel where he had registered earlier. He reached past the snoozing night clerk, took his key and walked up to the third floor room, where he sat on the bed for a few minutes mulling over the information given him by his new acquaintances, Greg MacArthur and Steve Perugia.

They were post-grad students at Columbia who had decided that political battles were better waged at City Hall rather than on campus, and they had a rather loose-knit thing going which they called CIG — City Interaction Group. A fair-size troop of older students had been making the rounds of union halls, construction sites, docks and other workman's areas to "rap with the hardhats," and to attempt to find some common ground of understanding between the generations.

At first, apparently, there had been a moderate success. Then the kids had set up "rap halls" in various neighborhoods, with a program geared to "political education." This was not an ivory tower thing but a cold hard look at actual evidence of corruption, downright thievery, and flagrant abuses of political power. They were naming names and documenting facts, not merely shouting numbers and broad suspicions, and someone had obviously decided that they were becoming dangerous. They had been picketed, then threatened and muscled, and recently two of their halls had been bombed.

CIG did not regard this interference as a valid reaction by "hardhats," although this is how the counterattack was made to appear. They had good reason to believe, in fact, that certain elements of the organized crime structure of the city were responsible for their harassment. There were lurking suspicions that they had been infiltrated by the enemy. MacArthur and Perugia were "just sort of tossing around" the idea that perhaps The Executioner might wish to "take some action" — especially since it appeared that his "benefactress," Evie Clifford, "might be in very grave danger."

The nature or direct source of Evie's potential danger was never quite specified. Apparently Mac-Arthur and Perugia had only a vague fear that she had talked in front of the wrong people — "infiltrators" — or else they were trying to con Bolan into their fight. Either way, of course, Bolan had to assume the worst until he could definitely ascertain that the fears were groundless.

Also, the danger would not be confined to Evie. The other two girls were equally susceptible to a Mafia snatch. If the mob ever got the merest inkling that a path to the Executioner led through those girls, then their lives would not be worth…

Bolan firmly rejected the idea. The time was nearly three o'clock, his legs were getting wobbly, and the shoulder was aching like hell. It had been a long and tiring day, and Bolan was not much given to idle worrying. He could, of course, go back and camp in the girls' living room with a burp-gun under his arm — but his whole intent had been to carve himself out of their lives with all haste. // Evie had not already compromised their security, then Bolan would certainly be doing so by continuing to hang around them. No, he could not…

On an impulse he went into the hall to a pay phone at the head of the stairs and called the apartment. Paula responded to about the twelfth ring, in a voice thick with sleep.