And he was gone, a shadow merging with the other shadows. She couldn't tell for certain, but it seemed that everyone had gotten clear, except for Gianelli's soldier. He was roasting in the middle of it now, and Raenelle felt her stomach turning over once again.
She had a message for the boss, and she would pass it on as soon as she was finished with the fire department, the police and whoever else might be attracted to the fire like moths. She could predict the don's reaction in advance, but she would tell him all the same. Raenelle Gireau had no intention of allowing Gianelli to escape without some notion of the terror that she felt inside.
A survivor at the best, or worst, of times, she realized that she might have the opportunity to rebuild something for herself. As for the boss, he would be needing every bit of luck available when Mr. Trouble finally met him face-to-face.
Raenelle would not have traded places with Gianelli, not for all the money in the world. He was already marked, except he didn't know it yet.
The Anacostia waterfront was dark as Bolan nosed his rental car northeast along the riverside. Due south, the sprawl of Bolling Air Force Base was brightly lit around the clock, prepared for any airborne menace to the capital. Across the water, Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard represented other branches of the service, each on constant standby for emergencies. The soldier had no business with them now. His target was a different sort of fortress, and the occupants conducted their primary business in the dark of night.
The Smithfield Export warehouse was designed for maximum security. No windows opened on the outside world, and giant loading bays had long been welded shut, mute testimony to the bankruptcy proceedings that had closed the warehouse three years earlier. Within the weeks immediately following its closure, Smithfield Export's one and only piece of real estate had undergone dramatic though invisible revisions. Stripped of merchandise, it had been labored over night and day by workmen whose continued silence was ensured by lavish overtime, the cavernous interior divided into smaller rooms, each soundproof, insulated from the rest. Whatever might transpire inside those cloistered rooms was strictly private. Members of the closed fraternity had paid for privacy, and it had been elaborately guaranteed.
The warehouse was a "lockbox," in the parlance of the street, a house of prostitution catering to savage needs that other brothels could not would not satisfy. The customers were guaranteed complete security, but it was not for their protection solely that the building had been turned into a fortress. There was "merchandise" to be protected, also, and the human cattle of the lockbox were no ordinary prostitutes, recruited by the profit motive. Forcibly obtained and forcibly restrained, the lockbox residents were chosen for the needs of "special" customers, the Johns and Janes who needed "something extra" in their sexual diet. Catering primarily to "chicken hawks" the pederasts who dote on brutalizing prepubescent children the lockbox also served a small but wealthy clientele of sadists, necrophiles and other aberrants. No fantasy was too bizarre, too grisly for the management to entertain, and in three years of constant service, they had never failed to satisfy.
The man ostensibly in charge was Girolamo Lucchese, a.k.a. Gerry Lucas, a soldier with the Gianelli family who had served several prison terms for rape and sodomy, molesting children, pandering, contributing to the delinquency of assorted minors. The recipient of pay beyond his lowly rank, Lucchese wore the label of a button man without complaint. He understood that it was insulation for the capo, something in the way of guaranteed security in case the lockbox should be penetrated. If and when that happened, Lucchese would be on his own, but through continued silence he could guarantee himself the best in legal talent, a continuation of his salary regardless of the outcome and a ready-made position in the Family upon release from jail. It was an offer he could scarcely have refused, since the alternative providing testimony for the prosecution would have meant his very painful death.
Lucchese was a man who valued pain. Infliction of it granted him the sort of sexual release that he had never found through normal channels, and he realized that pain was also educational, a useful tool for discipline. Receiving pain was something else entirely, though, and he knew that he could do a lot of time before he cracked and spilled the secrets of the Gianelli family. Hell, life would be a piece of cake compared to death the way that Gianelli's contract butchers dealt it out.
Mack Bolan knew Lucchese through his files at Justice, though the two of them had never met before tonight. Lucchese would have known Bolan by his reputation, but the Executioner would not be on his mind this evening. Having found a means of merging business with his pleasure, profiting from both, the mobster would be concentrating on his clients and their special needs. The Executioner was counting on it. The lockbox had no roving guards outside; Lucchese had decided that invisibility was preferable to an army on the street, and his exterior security was unobtrusive. Bolan's single pass was all it took to make the nondescript sedan, two passengers. The vehicle had been parked a half block down and faced the fortress warehouse, waiting for a danger signal that had not been used in three years.
The operation was protected at many levels. There were payoffs to be made at local levels, but Lucchese's customers themselves provided further insulation. Many of them crawled from under diplomatic rocks to seek their pleasures in the lockbox, representatives of European, Asian, African or Middle Eastern countries on duty in the nation's capital. Immune themselves to any charge of criminal behavior, they exerted a collective pull beyond their individual capacity, ensuring that authorities along the waterfront remained myopic, deaf and dumb.
The Executioner knew of the Lucchese-Gianelli alliance, and knew that it would never stand in court. If he had been a prosecutor or detective, Bolan would have busted Lucchese's operation anyway, preferring short-term gains to lasting victories. But as it was, he had a different goal in mind. The Executioner was not obliged to prove his case before a jury, satisfying all the rules of evidence, maneuvering among the countless technicalities that made the legal system work halfheartedly at best. His mission was retrieval of Brognola's wife and children, and his modus operandi was the Gianelli squeeze. His other scattered thrusts would have the capo fuming, anxious to retaliate.
Bolan parked his car in a narrow alleyway and shed his topcoat, taking time to double-check his weapons prior to going EVA. He was a shadow gliding through the darkness as he backtracked toward the plug car, moving close enough to make a positive ID of hardmen on the job before his silenced Beretta sent them to eternal sleep.
The lockbox stood before him, undefended. All he had to do was get inside and get back out again. Alive.
He used a compact grappling hook and nylon line to reach the roof, and said a silent prayer of thanks that soundproof insulation worked both ways. As he had expected, there was a skylight, plate glass painted black against the sun and any chance of outside scrutiny. Whoever did the painting, though, had done it from the outside, standing where the soldier stood, and Bolan had no difficulty flaking off a dime-size chip of paint to provide him with a peephole to the room beneath.
An unoccupied bedroom, Spartan in its furnishings. He marked the cot and mattress, straight-backed wooden chairs, a folding table. Access to the room was through a single door and it would be from that direction that the danger would come, if any came at all.
He eased around the skylight, found the location where he figured the latch would be inside, and spent a moment clearing paint away to verify its placement. Pockets of his skinsuit surrendered strapping tape, a slender glass cutter, and the soldier went to work, etching a circle the size of a softball, inserting cautious fingers, feeling all along the sill for an alarm that wasn't there. When he was satisfied, he turned the simple latch and eased back the skylight retrieving rope and grappling hook for his descent.