the front page showed a fire-gutted automobile on a city street. Bolan leafed through it, feigning interest.
'He says you are not from Edwards,' the woman said suddenly. She took a step back from Bolan. He says if you are from Edwards, you not have to ask where he is.'
'We had a meet set up,' Bolan said patiently. 'Who do you think gave me this address? I got held up, and now I have to know where he's moved on to.'
The guy snapped out something, then drained the rest of the wine.
'He wants to know why you come the way you come, why you do not use the... what do you call it, the recognition code.'
'Look.' Bolan let anger color his voice. 'I don't have time to play your little revolutionary games. I want to know where the hell Edwards is, and I want to know now.'
The guy might not have understood, but he heard the tone. He slammed down his empty glass, hard enough to shatter it. Blood oozed from his palm, but he didn't seem to notice.
The guy was drunk, and that made him unpredictably dangerous. Bolan had to put him down, or the play would go right to hell. He took a step toward the guy.
The guy snarled something at Bolan, shifted his weight in the chair, and went for his gun.
Bolan threw the magazine in the guy's face.
The guy clawed at it, but by the time he'd gotten clear Bolan's own pistol was in his hand and leveled.
Bolan did not want to shoot, nor did he want to get shot.
'Tell him to take it out with two fingers,' Bolan said, not looking at the woman. 'Tell him to drop it, and nobody gets hurt.'
She never got it out.
The guy rolled out of the chair and came up on hands and knees, the pistol in his hand. He barked something, wine-red saliva spraying from his mouth, and drew a bead on Bolan.
The Beretta whispered, and a 9mm tumbler tore into the guy's right shoulder and tumbled him over on his side, the gun dropping from his nerveless fingers. He moaned once and lay still.
The woman's mouth formed a silent O, her eyes wild as a frightened doe's. Sure, she had just seen the difference between revolutionary theory and reality.
Reality was the red fluid leaking over the unconscious guy's dirty T-shirt.
The woman sunk into a chair, her eyes fixed on her partner's inert form. Bolan leaned over, grabbed her shoulders and shook her insistently.
He could not afford to lose her now.
'Where did they go? Where did Edwards and the woman go?'
The girl stared at him through her wide eyes and shook her head.
'Do you know where they went?'
She nodded like a child.
'Tell me,' Bolan said, his voice as even as he could make it.
'Yes.' But she did not go on.
Bolan shook her again, gently.
'Water,' the woman said. 'Please.'
He had just turned on the tap in the pantry when the gunshot exploded behind him.
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
