"Whatever you have to do here, let me do it," she said, in a voice just barely under control.

"Go back to the apartment," he commanded firmly. "Wait for my call. I'm going to need you, Toby. Both of us will."

"Both of who?" she asked, the control slipping and her voice breaking.

"The Canuck and I," he said, and kissed her quickly, and got out of there.

He walked straight into the official entrance, and she watched him disappear into that ominous interior.

Then she wheeled the car around and sped away from there, half-blinded by a sudden gush of tears.

"Damn you," she whispered. "Just damn you all the way back to me in one piece."

It was a prayer, couched in reverse English — and, it seemed at that moment, a terribly forlorn one.

13

Struck

A tall guy with an open watch book in hand was moving gracefully about the strike room, talking in earnest with members of the task force, studying the postings and making notes as the hard, detail work of police methodology continued along its grinding course.

The guy walked past John Holzer, locked eyes momentarily, smiled, and went on for a closer look at the contingency postings.

Holzer asked one of his people, "Who is that guy?"

"Hell, I don't know," the cop replied. "We got cops here from everywhere, places I never knew existed until this morning."

"I know him from somewhere."

"Ask him."

"I will."

But the guy had moved on. Holzer followed with his gaze and saw him walk into the federal area, shake hands with a strike force fed, then move into the stake-outs section.

Holzer ambled over and asked the fed, "Who is that guy?"

"Which guy?"

"You just shook his hand. He went into the tac room."

"Oh. That's Stryker. Spell it with a y."

"One of your people, eh."

"I think so."

"You think so."

"That's what I said," the fed replied, a bit testily.

"Well, what is that, a code name or something?" the lieutenant from Grosse Pointe persisted. "I mean, strike force? Stryker?"

"I don't know what you're getting at," the fed said, definitely testy now. "Go play games with someone else. I'm busy."

The guy was reading the morning paper. Holzer said, "Yeah, you look busy," and passed on to the tac room.

The tall guy was talking to a vice squad lieutenant, pointing out something on one of the big city grid maps that choked the walls of the place. The vice man was shaking his head and stabbing a finger into another area of the chart. They were having a pretty good argument when the tall guy gazed over the other man's head and directly into Holzer's eyes. Something sparked there, and he raised a hand and crooked a finger. It could not have been meant for anyone else; Holzer pursed his lips and stepped forward.

The tall guy said, "Let's see, it's John Holzer, isn't it? Grosse Pointe?"

Holzer nodded. "And you're — "

"Do you know Lieutenant Kelso here? DPD Vice."

The two lieutenants locked eyes and nodded. "We've met," Kelso said with evident irritation.

"Policeman's Ball, maybe," Holzer said sarcastically.

"You got vice up there, Holzer," Kelso growled. "You got half the goddamn mob up there."

"Three-fourths," Holzer replied amiably. He wished he could place the tall dude in his mind.

But the tall dude was placing something else in John Holzer's mind. "Kelso says the Eight Mile triangle between East Detroit and Harper Woods has been cleaned out, neutralized."

"You mean that area up there opposite the high school complex," Holzer said, glancing at the wall chart.

"Exactly," Kelso growled. "They got three high schools side by side there — they got Notre Dame, Regina, and Lutheran East."

"But they're in Harper Woods," the tall man said.

"So what? They were screaming like hell because of — and that's why I'm saying it's clean as a hound's tooth, the whole Detroit triangle from Kelley to Hayes and up to Eight Mile. We sweep that area once a week, and I'm telling you, it's clean."

"That's close to your area, Holzer," the tall dude said quietly. "Do you agree with that?"

"Not exactly," Holzer said.

"Aw, bull," the Vice lieutenant exploded. "You name one joint that we missed, just one!"

Holzer stretched to tap the chart. "How about Linda's Salon? She was operating full blast last time I passed there. Couple days ago."

Kelso was glaring at the grid map. "What's that again now?"

"Linda just happens to be Palooka Joe Venedetti's sister-in-law. You know what Palooka Joe deals in, Kelso?"

"Where is that? Show me where that is!"

The lieutenant from Grosse Pointe busied himself at the chart for a moment. He was aware that the tall guy had squeezed past his shoulder, but he did not miss the guy until he looked up from the brief task — and the guy was gone again.

Kelso had snatched up a plastic overlay sheet and was posting the stake-out board with the new intelligence. "Okay," he growled to Holzer. "It goes on, at least 'til I can check it out. You better — what's the matter, Holzer? You look like you just saw a ghost or something."

"Who is that guy, Kelso?"

"Who — the big guy? Thought you knew. Hell, he introduced you."

"Yeah, but who introduced him?" Holzer wondered in a choked voice. He went out of there without another word to the man from Vice and hurried into the strike room.

The fed with the newspaper glanced up, then went back to his reading. "Stryker come back through here?" Holzer demanded.

"You've got a complex, mister," the fed said, and that's all he said.

Holzer had something as he hurried on across the large room and through the babble of organized confusion, but it wasn't a complex. It was a shaking gut and the certain sinking conviction that he had finally "placed" the tall man in his mental mug file.

But, hell, surely it couldn't be. No guy would try that. No guy in his right mind would stroll right into the enemy's war room, peer over the shoulders of the general staff, and engage them in debates on strategy and tactics.

No guy — well, okay, maybe one guy would. Maybe he would, at that. Some guys just worked harder, and that's why they worked better.

All the same, John Holzer was going to feel like the chump of the century if it turned out to be — if he'd actually been standing there talking to — hell, puppy-dogging the guy all over the damn place … oh, God!

He found the make sheets and went through them one by one — front view, profile left, profile right... hell, it could be. Artist's conceptions weren't all that great, not all the time — a composite sketch depended a lot on the reliability of the witness's observational powers. But, yeah, it could be the guy!

He dropped the sheets and ran to the corridor, dying a little with each pace of the trip.

The guy called him by name — knew him! How'd he get that? The same way, maybe, that Holzer got "Stryker"? By just simply asking somebody?

What did the guy have, for God's sake, a photoelectric mind? Could he walk into a strike room like that, casually look it over, and walk away with the entire counterplan blazed across his brains?

If Holzer couldn't find the guy — if he couldn't nail him and make him produce proper identification — what then? What could he do? Run to the skipper and tell him to change the game? Just because a kid lieutenant from Grosse Pointe thought he'd entertained Mack Bolan unawares in watch headquarters?

Holzer ran to the main lobby and on through to the outside, spent thirty seconds or so in a visual search there, then reversed course and ran through to the vehicle area.

There was not a sign of the guy, not anywhere.