Bolan twisted and the Beretta came back into his hand. The guy on the floor was sitting up, tracking his gun onto Bolan.

Bolan fired first, the Beretta sounding a soft murmur of death. A third eye appeared in the middle of the guy's forehead, and the guy lay down on his back again. A semiliquid mess of red and white and gray began to flow into the carpet beneath the back of his head.

The woman was slumped back in the chair. A dark stain was spreading on the khaki shirt between her small breasts. Her eyes were still open wide, as if imprinted in death with that final image of her own partner killing her to keep her from talking.

And in thirty seconds or less, that gunshot was going to bring a building full of people down on him. The numbers had just about run out. Bolan used the ones left to check out the rest of the apartment and came up empty.

From somewhere below on the fire stairs, Bolan heard excited voices and running footsteps. He went up instead. Between the fifth and sixth floors a man in a bathrobe grabbed his arm and said something in excited Italian. Bolan shook him off and continued on up.

The elevator was where he'd left it. The lobby was empty, although more agitated voices were audible from the open fire-stair door. Across the Via del Gladiatori Bolan stopped and lit a cigarette. The first police car was just pulling up.

The Italian cops had a pretty complete mug file of Red Brigades members. They would likely identify the two upstairs quickly, and after that the file would be closed. When someone did them the favor of killing off a couple of terrorists, the police were not about to waste a lot of time investigating.

The cigarette tasted stale, and Bolan ground it out. He had been close-damned close.

Now he was looking down a dead-end street that stopped in a brick wall.

8

Aaron Kurtzman punched a command into the computer terminal, and a line printer began chattering output at 80 characters per second. Kurtzman got up, absently brushing pipe ash from the front of his lab jacket, checked the first page, and smiled with satisfaction.

"It's all there," he said to the other two people in the Stony Man Farm War Room. "How Frederick Charon was going to juggle the inventory to replace the guidance-system prototype, how he was going to wash the money the Russians were supposed to pay him through Sir Philip Drummond, how he planned to peddle other items of interest." The Bear patted the terminal with his broad palm, as if it were a favorite pet. "Wonderful things, computers."

"What about the Frank Edwards angle, Aaron?" April Rose asked.

"Interesting and more involved than we figured at first. It turns out that when Frank Edwards was a legitimate CIA operative, he had professional contact with both Sir Philip and his Russian control, a guy named Tartikov, who was nominally a protocol officer at the Russian Embassy in London. Nothing unusual about that, actually. Our agents and the Soviets will collaborate once in a while, if it works to mutual advantage." Kurtzman fumbled his pipe out of his lab coat and began to stuff it with brown black tobacco. "Anyway, as it happened, Edwards found out, purely by chance, that Sir Philip was a mole. Don't forget, Edwards was an extremely competent agent and still is. Maybe Edwards was already thinking of selling out, but whatever, he kept the truth about Sir Philip under his hat. Then, when he went renegade, he used it to blackmail Sir Philip into siding with him."

"How did he use Sir Philip?"

"Primarily as an intelligence source. Having a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Defense in your pocket could be pretty handy for a guy like Edwards." Kurtzman patted absently at his pockets for matches, until April tossed a folder across the table to him. "Thanks. Okay, so Charon contacts the Russians. The Russians buy, and designate Sir Philip as the go-between. Then Sir Philip, recognizing a good deal when he sees one, tips off Edwards to Charon as a potential source of hi-tech gear-charging Edwards a hefty finder's fee, of course. Everyone is happy as larks."

"Did Edwards buy from Charon?"

Kurtzman nodded at the printout. "He put in one hell of an order — it's all right there, courtesy of the DonCo computer. Communications gear, sophisticated wiretaps and directional eavesdropping devices, computer hardware and software, weapons systems, cryptographics you name it. All of it state-of-the-art, all of it top secret, all of it restricted to military and official agency usage."

"But we were able to stop Charon before he shipped," April pointed out.

"Right," Kurtzman agreed. "But with the network Edwards has set up, he'll find someone to take Charon's place soon enough. The spokes are useful to us, but only as a way to find the hub. The way to kill this scheme once and for all is to stop Edwards."

"And that's where Mack comes in," April said.

"And Toby." The third person in the War Room lowered himself into the chair next to April, rubbed at the bridge of his nose with two fingers. Though it was early evening, local time, none of them had gotten much sleep of late, and all were weary.

He had been born Giuieppe Androsepitone, but to an international audience he was known as Tommy Anders, The Ethnician. He was one of the most popular stand-up comedians in the U.S. and Europe, deriving his humor from good-natured ribbing of people's ethnic prejudices and preconceptions.

He was also an undercover federal agent.

That was why he had been brought to the War Room.

Anders had been deceived, cruelly but necessarily.

For six months he had been made to believe that Toby Ranger, his partner all the way back to the days of Mack Bolan's War against the Mafia, had been cashiered for doubling.

"I'm not no ethnician," he said now — it was the signature line of his stand-up routine. "I knew the kid wasn't any kind of turncoat. Say, what kind of ethnic is Ranger, anyway? The kid probably had it fixed, just like everyone else. Probably it used to be Rangeropoulos, Rangarelli, something like that." It was a habit from childhood, one that had led to his cover profession; the wisecrack as a cover for nervousness and stress.

The only answer was from the line printer, spewing out the information that would damn Frederick Charon. After a while it stopped as well. None of them spoke after that. There was nothing to talk about. There was nothing to do at all.

Except wait.

Kurtzman had gone to his billet for tobacco, and April Rose had managed to doze off in her chair, so it was Tommy Anders who spotted the red light flashing on the phone that sat alone on a table in the comer of the War Room. He leaped from his chair and reached it before it was able to flash twice more. Two tape recorders in the wall rack automatically started rolling, their "record" lights shining.

"Go," Anders said.

There was a pause, and then a woman's voice tinged with surprise said, "Tommy?"

"Hell God," Anders exploded. "Are you all right, Toby?"

"Yes. Listen." Composure, lost momentarily, returned. "I don't know how much time I've got."

Kurtzman came in, reshuffling his pipe. When he saw Anders on that special phone, he froze, as if movement would break the precious connection.

April Rose had come awake and sat staring at Anders as well.

"Edwards and I are in Tripoli. Libya, not Lebanon." She rapped out an address. "It's coming down, the big push for his international "black" intel net. The Valais meet was just the prelim. This one is the real thing."

"How are you fixed?" Electronic scrambler hash filled her pause.

"I... I think I'm blown, Tommy. Edwards hasn't done anything yet, but I think he knows."

"Get out, Toby."

"Don't worry about me. There's still a few things to take care of."