Right?'
'Right.'
'Winding stairway up to the left, library to the right, ballroom straight ahead.'
'Yeh, but they don't ball there.'
'Kitchen, dining room, butler's pantry, security cell. Right?'
'Right. The cell is manned day and night. Electronically locked.'
'Any idea about the duty shifts in that cell?'
'I think three. I saw them changing at midnight.'
'Okay. Now. The guy in the cell. He monitors all three floors.'
'Right. The television cameras are all over the place. They might even have hidden ones in the bedrooms. I wouldn't put it past them.'
'Anything else about that first floor? Anything at all?'
Grimaldi pondered for a moment, then replied, 'That's all I can draw.'
'Okay, upstairs. Sir Edward's suite.'
'I never got in there.'
'Think of it from the outside.'
'Well… yeah, I told you… uh, come to think of it, he must take the whole damn corner there. Let's see, the doors are…'
'Think about it.'
'I'm thinking. The guard in the hall and one in the inner security room. Let's see… oh, all the inside guards are hard Mafia, I mean wops like me. Uh, I'll bet he has about three large rooms in that suite. I mean, not counting the security jazz.'
'Women?'
'I never saw one on the whole place.'
'Okay. Over to the west wing, now. Offices, conference rooms, a vault.'
'Yeah.'
'Second floor. Is this all the windows there are on the second floor west?'
'Hell I didn't build the damn place, I just spent an evening there.'
'If you think hard enough, Jack, you could tell me all about your mother's womb. Are you saying there are just two damn windows on that whole floor?'
'Well now wait, no — I've got the stairs in the wrong place. Look. Gimme the damn pencil. Here's the way…'
And so it went, toward the dawn.
The Caribbean Kill was definitely not over.
The big one was yet to come.
Chapter Fourteen
With the dawn
The Republic of Haiti is slightly larger than the state of Maryland and has a population estimated at close to five million people. Discovered by Columbus in 1492, it became a French colony in 1677, achieved independence from France in 1804, and has been a constituted republic since 1820. The ore-rich and agriculturally productive country has had a turbulent history, especially during the 20th century. Following a five year period of political tumult and violence, U.S. forces occupied Haiti in 1915 to restore order, this occupation lasting until the mid- 1930's.
A surface calm prevailed over this troubled land until 1950, and then five successive governments rose and fell until the election in 1957 of 'Papa Doc' Duvalier. That administration undertook a program of severe political repression and engineered a constitutional 'reform' in 1964 which established Papa Doc as President of Haiti for life. The Duvalier years were marked by official terrorism, internal strife and rebellion, and open hostility between Haiti and her island neighbor, the Dominican Republic.
Through all of this tense history, the plight of the ordinary Haitian citizen seems to have shown little improvement. Illiteracy in the republic is common, wretched poverty a way of life.
It was not difficult for Mack Bolan to understand why Haiti had been selected as the hub of the Caribbean Carousel. A government which showed no official respect for its people would certainly be amenable to the influences of an 'international invisible government' trafficking in the same brand of human exploitation and organized greed. They made a pair, Bolan decided — and he had to wonder how many other small and vulnerable countries around the world were being setup for invisible domination by the international cartel of crime.
The situation seemed a bit ironic. The giant 'world powers' had been locking horns and cold-warring for international influence for most of three decades. They'd rattled rockets at one another, maintained huge armies, raced into outer space, fought or backed brushfire wars, and tried to woo the world with dollars, rubles, and yens.
And quietly, through it all, the street-corner hoods of all the lands had been nickle-and-diming their way toward the formation of that brooding and overlying conglomeration which could certainly be called
A guy didn't have to grow up in a ghetto to develop a criminal mentality. The neighborhood punks could never have brought it off without the assistance of that other criminal type — the business-man without a conscience, the politico without a soul, the lawyer with nothing but contempt for human justice.
There were some strange bedfellows beneath that Fourth Power sheet. There were, it seemed, entire government administrations, corporations, international financiers, 'nice' people of every race and religion and political philosophy, hoods, punks, thugs, psychopaths — yeah, it was the little United Nations, all right. An entire fourth society brought together under one common banner: greed.
And they were eating the world.
Bolan was aware that his war was expanding. The battle fronts were extending in all directions at once, and into infinity.
What the hell could one man do in the face of all that?
Bolan knew that his was an extreme case of reaction. He could not expect others to follow his example, to abandon their own quests for happiness and fulfillment in exchange for unrelenting and unlimited warfare. But he could expect no less of himself.
He had been taught to kill. It was his trade, his profession. And he was good at it. He had the tools, the skills, and an awareness of the enemy. He could do no less than all-out war.
So what could one man do?
He could kill. He could cover himself with blood and offer up his own for the taking. He could stand up to the appetites of that voracious Fourth Power and shake his fist in their bloated faces. He could stay alive as long as possible while continuing the opposition. He could remind them that not every man had a price — that principle and dedication and audacity and guts were still alive in the human race.
He could remind them that there was a higher reason and purpose behind the forward spiral of human evolution, and that the universe would be kind to those who continued to reach beyond themselves toward the higher goals. He could tiog them every step of the way, and hold up a mirror to their gross distortions of the estate of mankind, and show them that they were,
And it was this overlying rationale that sent Mack Bolan into a foreign republic, with stealth and in darkness, to kill a man whom he had never heard of until a few hours earlier.
Jack Grimaldi's reasons were perhaps a bit more personally defined. He quit simply admired Mack Bolan, and he was thoroughly disgusted with the unadmirable course his own life had taken.
As they scuttled across the Haitian landfall in the helicopter, Grimaldi told Bolan, 'When my cousin came to me with this proposition, I figured what the hell. I had the Italian name, I may as well live in the image.'
