It was three o'clock and only ten hours into the California battle when the warwagon crept to the curb outside the production studio on upper Geary Street. Bolan was wearing slacks and a shirt open at the neck, crepe soled shoes, a conservative blazer, and the Beretta Belle snugged within easy access.
He parked in a loading zone directly in front of the studio and gave Mary Ching a curt nod of the head. 'Try it,' he said.
She exited and went to the studio entrance, then returned quickly to the vehicle. Her eyes were large and worried as she reported, 'Closed, locked. Shouldn't be. They're usually working right into the early evening.'
He asked, 'Could they have finished, wrapped it up?'
Worriedly, she replied, 'Hardly. Just started yesterday.'
He said, 'Okay. Here's what you do. Sit right here. Don't budge for anything and don't let anybody move you away. If you hear gunfire, though, beat it quick. Go exactly one block north on Van Ness and wait for me there, even if you have to double park. Time it, and if I'm not there within two minutes, then you split. Every hour on the hour after that, cruise past the corner of Powell and Geary. You have that?'
'I have it,' she assured him.
Bolan left her then and proceeded directly to the studio entrance.
The door was mostly glass, not designed for extraordinary security precautions, with an ordinary mechanical lock, the type that is built into the inner hardware. It silently came apart under the first probe of his handy little tool, and he let himself in.
There was a reception area with a low wrought-iron railing to one side, a freight counter on the other. Behind the railing was a desk and a couple of cheap couches; swung off farther into the reception area were two private offices, an unfamiliar Italian name lettered upon each one.
There were no signs of life in that forward area.
Set into the far wall was a rugged looking door of solid construction, no visible hardware. Stenciled across it in thick white letters was the admonition:
STUDIO
ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY
Bolan found the secret to the door at the reception desk, via a push-button which was hung to the underside. He pressed it. The door hummed a brief note and cracked open.
He went through without pause and into the darkened interior of the studio. It was a bit larger than he'd expected, long but rather narrow in the approaches with — probably — dressing rooms and offices to either side. At the far rear everything opened up again and it was a single large warehouse-like sound stage with overhead lofts and scattered with photographic and sound equipment.
Bolan noted three small 'sets' — one had a thin layer of sand spread along the cardboard backdrop of what might pass as an ocean if something of more optical interest were placed in front of it — like, say, a beautiful nude young body. The other two sets were mockups of, respectively, a bedroom and a living room. Both were rather grim scenes; Bolan would not have liked to live there.
The only lights in present operation were a pair of white spots on the bedroom set.
A cluster of guys were standing across the front of the set and blocking most of the view into the bedroom. It wasn't so blocked, though, that Bolan couldn't catch a glimpse of a couple of scared looking lads seated cross- legged on the bed. They wore white terry-cloth robes which probably would have bottomed out around their thighs if they'd been standing, and that's all they were wearing.
The guys were mostly in shadow, but Bolan could see that they were not dressed for either bedroom or studio work. There were six of them, and the suits they were wearing were not silk, but they may as well have been. These were Chinese boys, and they looked as ornery as anything Franco Laurentis could have fielded.
A seventh guy was up on the set, standing beside the bed, posturing angrily and addressing the girls in quietly furious tones. He was an Occidental, and he wore a silk suit too.
The coalition, yeah.
Bolan moved quietly onto the beach set, found the lights, swiveled them about to his best advantage, and ignited them.
Everybody in and around the bedroom set came rapidly alive. The six Chinese boys were less demonstrative than any, but even they came around in a fanlike confrontation, plainly warlike, arms suddenly stiff and ready for anything.
The guy at the bed whirled about and did a quick little two-step off the platform like a bedroom phantom caught in the act. The girls grabbed each other, hid their heads and simply clung together.
All others were looking directly into Bolan's lights, so he could have appeared to them as no more than a vague shadow somewhere in the background.
The voice was not vague, however; it was harsh, and laden with ice as it commanded, 'Cool it!'
'Who's there?' silksuit snarled.
'Death, if that's what you want, Clyde,' Bolan promised.
Two of the China boys twitched. Bolan drilled them cleanly, with two sighing little phu-uts that were grouped so close as to sound like one, and then there were four.
The survivors stood rigid, frozen, not even interested in the condition of their fallen brethren, and the white torpedo took a tentative step forward, both hands stretched forward in a placating gesture.
'Hey wait, wait!' he urged, in a voice quivering with sudden respect.
'You wait,' Bolan countered. 'Send those girls out here, and don't be cute about it.'
'You uh, that's all you want, eh?'
'Right now, yeah,' Bolan assured him.
'Shit, guy, they're not worth it.'
'They are to me,' insisted the death voice. 'Send them.'
The guy sent them. Panda and Cynthey scampered panting and sobbing into the waiting darkness behind the spots. In the momentary close-up, Bolan had received an instant understanding of what they'd been put through. Those cute faces were now welted and puffy, bloated from a combination of blows and tears, and terribly, terribly unhappy. A dried trickle of blood remained at the corner of Cynthie's mouth.
As they hurried past, he quietly instructed them, 'The van, right outside. Mary's waiting.'
He gave them until the door up there opened and closed, then he told the coalition of five, 'Now you guys draw straws to see who'll be the first man out behind me. Or else lean together for awhile and live to remember.'
He withdrew in a quiet backpedal, and apparently the coalition had decided to lean together. There was no pursuit. The warwagon was fired up and Mary Ching was riding the clutch in a slow crawl when he casually opened the door and slid in beside her.
'Go,' he said.
The two kids were huddled together on the rear deck, alternately crying and laughing in mutual hysteria, and Mary had taken the corner and proceeded several blocks up Van Ness before Bolan could edge an intelligent word into it.
'Tell me a safe place to drop you,' he demanded.
'Sausalito,' Cynthey replied without hesitation.
'You sure?'
She bobbed her head in an emphatic reply. 'Our friends will take care of us. I just dare those goons to...'
'Sure you wouldn't rather have police protection?'
Both girls shuddered at that suggestion, and Bolan dropped it.
He turned a sigh to Mary Ching. 'You know the place?'
'I know,' she said, and she made it sound almost like Bolan saying it.
He scowled, freshened the Belle, and the porno girls plus two headed for the Golden Gate.
The story did not need to be told, but they wanted to tell it, so Bolan let them. It was nothing new, the usual routine, an incautious word dropped in a dangerous place, a visiting delegation of hard-eyed and equally quick-fisted inquisitors. They'd closed the place down and sent everybody home... everybody but the two female 'stars' — and two hours of mind-blowing hell had ensued.
They'd wanted to know everything the girls knew — which they got very quickly — and a lot of things the
