Bolan's good right hand shot out to grab the guy's tie, and he catapulted him out of there in an arcing swing from the throat just as another group charged to the top of the stairway from the helicopter area. The guy was dancing around just outside the elevator, trying to keep his footing against the wild eviction fling. Guns thundered from the stairway and the Mafioso'sdancing took on a freakish quality as he stopped the hot missiles meant for Bolan. The elevator doors, closing, also intercepted a grouping of sizzling metal. Then the car was in motion and Bolan was alone with his empty revolver and a steadily building pain in his shoulder. The pistol slipped away from numbed fingers and his lifeblood followed closely, dropping into bright scarlet spots on the floor. He wadded a handkerchief and jammed it roughly inside his shirt, holding it tightly and grinding his teeth against the new onslaught of harsh sensation.

The firefight on the roof had seemed to last an eternity. Actually, hardly more than a minute had elapsed since he dropped from the belly of that chopper. Men died in a fingersnap; time seemed to stand still at moments like that. It was not standing still now. Bolan's shoulder wound was bleeding furiously, and he could literally feelthe life energies seeping away from him. He had not escaped, he knew — only delayed the end a while longer.

The elevator was an automatic express between the roof and the thirty-eighth floor. He left it at that level and took another car to the sixteenth floor, then doubled back to the twentieth. There he carefully cleaned up some wet splotches of spilled blood and went looking for the stairway, taking care not to leave a telltale trail of crimson.

The arm was beginning to stiffen, his coatsleeve was soaked, and the bleeding was showing no signs of letting up. The grazed hip was stinging like hell but had bled very little and was obviously not going to give him much trouble. Not that he needed any more. Those guys on the roof would not be giving up all that easy. At that moment, Bolan knew, they were swarming the building in a determined effort to keep himsealed in there. And, of course, in a minute or two there would be cops to contend with. There would always be cops, as dependable as heat in hell.

The shoulder was not hurting much now. That was a bad sign. Also his legs were getting rubbery and his eyes were becoming unreliable. The truth bore in on his dizzied consciousness — he would not find that stairway, and it would not do him much good if he should. He was losing consciousness. He stumbled, and threw his good hand out to steady himself against the wall. Instead he fell against the frosted glass of a door and his hand came to rest on the doorknob. Artful letters on the door told him that Paula's Fashionslay just inside.

Bolan pushed on inside just as his legs gave way altogether and the floor of the office floated up to receive him. A feminine voice squealed something in an alarmed falsetto, and impossibly long and shapely legs ran over to stand beside him. Then a pretty face was hovering above his and a disembodied voice gasped, "Oh wow! I know who you…"

Bolan had lost his dark glasses somewhere back there in the fracas. Sure, everyone knew who he was. That face of his had been plastered across newspapers, national magazines, and television screens so often that it had become almost as familiar to the American public as John Wayne's or Paul Newman's.

His voice sounded to him as though it were coming from someone else as he feebly commanded, "Call the cops and leave!" Death crews left no witnesses, and suddenly the most important thing in his spinning mind was to warn this girl of her danger. "Quick, get out before…" The words became entangled in his tongue and he lost them.

Another pair of legs floated in from somewhere. The same voice he'd heard before was declaring, "It's that guy, that Executioner."

"Some executioner," said another, less excited, female. "It looks as though he tried once too often."

With his final erg of conscious energy, Bolan whispered, "Don't get caught here with me. Run, now— splitl"

Then the most incredibly beautiful face he had ever seen was hanging there just above his, inspecting him with a concerned smile, and he took that image with him into the beckoning whirlpool of utter blackness. Perhaps, he thought, he would not die with a snarl, after all. If he was dying, then it was with a quiet sigh of deepest regret.

Chapter Two

Bodies

Bolan dreamed of lush Elysian Fields and of cavorting with beautiful naked nymphs with impossibly long legs, and of skinny-dipping in sparkling pools where the nymphs grew Mafia heads beneath their arms. The dream seemed uninterrupted and endless, and when he finally opened his eyes he could not be sure that he had been or was not still dreaming.

He lay beneath a sheet on a luxuriously large bed in a beautifully decorated room, and he was naked beneath that sheet. His shoulder was bandaged and the arm was taped to his side. Lying beside him above the sheet and propped onto multiple pillows was a lovely young thing in the briefest of bikini panties and a peekaboo shortie-top of purplish gauze; her face was angled away from him and all but buried in the pages of a book — but yeah, they were the same long legs that had stood over his bleeding body so many dreams ago.

At the far side of the room upon a table at an open window was something equally as interesting. He thought at first that it was a life-size statue or mannikin — maybe a female Buddha. Whatever it was, it was stony-naked and seated in a somewhat awiwardpose, facing the open window, legs folded and drawn up under it, ivory skin gleamingly reflecting the sun's rays, head slightly bent, absolutely unmoving, absolutely stark staring beautiful.

Bolan was gazing at the still figure and trying to get a better focus when another girl entered the room and came directly to the foot of the bed to stare at him in unblinking appraisal. She was clad in a long gown with a bulky shorter overgarment, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, dark hair styled in a soft contour of the very lovely head, sensitive lips, eyes beautifully delineated and tending to brood a bit. Bolan returned her level gaze and presently she broke the silence. "Welcome back to the world of light and beauty."

He said, "Is that what world this is?"

She solemnly nodded her head but whatever she had at the tip of her tongue was lost as the girl beside Bolan came out of her book and twisted toward him with a stifled little gurgle of excitement. "You're back!" she squealed.

Bolan recognized the voice. It was one of the last things he'd heard before he died, or passed out, or whatever. He shifted his reluctant focus toward her and weakly asked, "Where've I been?"

"Out of it," she told him. "Absolutely out of it for nearly twenty-four hours."

The tall girl at the foot of the bed said, "I'll fix you something light to eat," and went back the way she'd come, silent as a wraith.

"That's Paula Lindley," the girl at his side informed him. "She went almost all the way through nurse's training. You can thank herfor fixing you up."

"I'll do that," Bolan murmured. His eyes had a new focus and his mind was lethargically cataloging the shareholder of his bed. She was a moppet, no more than nineteen or twenty, with luminously inquisitive eyes, gleaming golden hair looping down to softly rounded shoulders in two heavy braids, and the cutey-pie face of a rapturously expectant romantic.

"We knew we didn't dare get a doctor for you," the cutey-pie was telling him in that very alive voice of bursting excitement. "We know who you are, you see." She giggled.

"But you don't know who we are, do you. I'm Evie Clifford." She pointed to the girl in the lotus position at the window.