"That was quick."

"When you going in?"

"Right now. Over and out."

Parking illegally, Gadgets stopped the rented car. Blancanales and Jefferson crossed the sidewalk and pushed through the doors. Gadgets pulled away. He continued to the far end of the block and parked, the engine running.

The lobby stank of mildew and stale tobacco. Blancanales saw the clerk sleeping with his head on the desk. Three haggard residents shared a gallon bottle of wine. They watched the two visitors pass. Blancanales kept his face turned away.

At the stairway, Blancanales paused an instant. He listened. Then he jerked the fire door open but did not step into the stairwell. He snapped a glance into a brightly lit landing. No one. They went up the stairs quickly, almost silently, their soft-soled shoes making no sound. But the old stairs creaked.

They paused again at the second-floor stairwell. Blancanales motioned Jefferson to continue up the stairs, whispered: "Make some noise…"

Jefferson's scuffs and footsteps broke the silence of the stairwell. Blancanales counted sixty and jerked the door open. Snapping his head out, then back, he saw no one in the corridor. He hissed for Jefferson to return.

In the corridor, they heard televisions and voices. A woman berated someone in Georgia-accented English. Jefferson glanced at a room number, then pointed to a door. The moldy carpeting silenced their steps.

Blancanales went flat against the wall as Jefferson knocked. "Senor Rivera...estoy aqui... Floyd. Floyd Jefferson. Recuerdeme usted? El nino delarco iris."

Silence for a moment, then laughter behind the door. It eased open. Senor Rivera called out, "Is there anyone with you?"

"Yes, I have a friend with me. His name is Rosario." Jefferson motioned for Blancanales to show himself.

"Bienviendo, amigos." Senor Rivera opened the door wide for his visitors.

As he entered, Blancanales glanced behind the door out of force of habit. A middle-aged Salvadoran woman — Senora Rivera — stood there with a butcher knife, raised to stab. He slowly lifted his left hand, palm open. Rivera tut-tutted his wife. "Todo es bueno ahora," he told her. He apologized to Blancanales and Jefferson as he shook hands. "One cannot be too careful in difficult times."

"And these are very difficult times," Blancanales agreed. "Senor Rivera, allow me to express my sorrow for the death of your son."

"Thank you for your compassion."

Blancanales keyed his hand-radio. "We're here. The family's okay. Wizard, how's the street look?"

"No Prescott yet."

Lyons's voice answered also. "He is one man I am watching for, no doubt about it."

"Relax. We might be here until morning. Over."

Senora Rivera motioned for them to sit. Only folding chairs and a mattress furnished the room. The three daughters watched the strangers from the mattress, a single blanket pulled around their shoulders. A portable television sat on the windowsill. A wooden packing crate served as both a table and a stand for an electric coil.

"Coffee?" the Senora offered.

"Gracias," Blancanales accepted. "It will be a long night."

"We are ready to go to San Francisco." Rivera gestured at the furnishings of the room and laughed. "We can pack in two minutes."

"Not tonight," Blancanales said. "Maybe tomorrow or the next day."

"But Michael Holt, Mr. Holt's son, said he would send Mr. Robert Prescott to take us to San Francisco. He said perhaps tonight. Certainly tomorrow."

Blancanales shook his head, no. Then he explained what must be done.

28

Only minutes after his arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, Robert Prescott parked in the garage of the Sheraton Hotel. As he locked the rented car, his eyes searched the shadows and unnatural fluorescent glare of the stark cavern of structural concrete and gleaming automobiles. He saw no one watching from the other vehicles. No one loitered near the elevators. He did see a panel van — like the vans favored by surveillance teams — but a concrete pillar blocked the view from its front windows. The back windows faced away from him.

As he headed for the elevators, the roar of a late-night flight drowned out the sound of his feet on the pavement. He tried to keep his eyes straight ahead, to watch around him for surveillance only with his peripheral vision, but his fear forced him to keep turning his head for surreptitious glances.

The operation had gone public. West Coast and national newscasts carried the stories and video images of the death squad Prescott had hired to kill "a leading black reporter and his heavily armed goon guards." Though the commentators lacked the imagination or paranoia to link the killings of Salvadorans and ex-con assassins in San Francisco with the freeway battle, the late-breaking and fragmentary reports of the ambush slayings of the "illegal Mexicans" in the mountains outside of San Jose would hit the headlines tomorrow.

Finally the commentators would connect the several incidents. The weapons used to kill the ex-cons and black nationalists would link the cases.

Though he had been careful, though he had handled the negotiations, the assignments and the payments without meetings, Prescott feared the relentless probing of an investigation of any sort. If the news media interviewed a hundred ex-cons, militants and extremists, one of them might remember the bright young lawyer who always offered legal advice and loaned money.

Years before, as an idealistic law student volunteering legal services to prisoners and paroled felons, he had gained entry to an underground society of dope dealers and murderers.

Later, after joining the congressman's circle of advisors, he learned the role of more sophisticated criminals in politics. The chic radicals of the jet set — San Francisco socialists, Manhattan Marxists, the corrupt elite of the capital — depended on heroin and cocaine and Quaaludes for euphoria and erotic novelty. Organized crime supplied the radical Left with the drugs. Soon, gang leaders appeared at fund-raisers, at first for the amusement of watching cocaine-dazed politicians attempt to explain international policy, later to sink their teeth into the elite who drafted the laws and appointed the prosecutors.

The gangsters had always contributed money to both conservatives and liberals, but they saw their future in the liberals. The people of the United States resisted the severe limitations of responsible fiscal policy. The liberals promised everything to everyone. Organized crime knew who would win the next election. Gang leaders became the Left's strongest supporters.

Prescott exploited his encounters with the gangsters. He offered them assassins unknown to the criminal hierarchies or federal investigators. Need a Mafia lawyer silenced before he testified to a grand jury in New York? Fly in a black ex-con to stage a parking-lot mugging and killing. Then fly the murderer on to Libya to live a life of luxury with the security of monthly payments from a numbered Swiss account. The felon did not know whom he killed. Unless he returned to the United States and searched library news files, the murderer would never know. But if he returned, he lost his payments and his luxuries. And his life.

As the administration increased the flow of North American wealth to the Salvadoran war, Prescott made contact with the Fascists sheltered in Miami. He offered them a twofold service: assassins and information. If necessary, North American felons and psychopaths would murder Salvadoran refugees. If necessary, they would murder others, people more conspicuous, people who were in the public eye and were hated by the public: the assassins would murder incurably recidivist child molesters, activist personalities, radical and criminal celebrities, anyone whose death would earn the killers the public's silent thanks, and thus help cover up the true origins of the crimes against the refugees.