Bolan spotted the pinpoint glow of a cigarette from a sedan parked at the opposite end of the block from the streetlamp.
Company men.
He backtracked away from the sedan, toward the dim streetlamp, and the man, or men, in the car did not see him. Or they did not care.
He rounded the corner building and moved past his parked rental car to the mouth of the alley running behind the shop.
The half moon was blanketed out by the low-hanging thunderheads, making the night blacker than usual in the confines of the alley.
The nightscorcher palmed the Beretta as he jogged down the alley to the rear of the address he wanted. He soundlessly negotiated a ten-foot wooden fence.
Bolan dropped to a crouch at the base of the fence and scanned the area behind the shop.
He saw the outline of a sentry against the lighted back window of the house.
Bolan came in at the man with a slashing chop that connected the butt of the Beretta with the base of the man's skull. The guy's knees buckled as he collapsed with a soft moan. Bolan caught him before he touched ground and dragged him off into deeper shadows away from the enclosed porch and back door of the shop. He left the sentry propped against the building.
The night warrior returned to the porch and the door, the top half of which was lighted window, unshaded.
Bolan moved in at a low crouch. He pressed himself against the door and risked a look inside from a corner of the window.
A conference between three men was in the process of breaking up at the far end of a corridor that ended at the front door of the house.
The men grouped around the door were swarthy, stocky.
Armenians.
Two of the men, wearing jackets, were checking their weapons.
Ismet Kemal and Mustafa Izmir toted short, compact Ingram Model 10 submachine guns, the 'room brooms' of urban terrorist action.
The two men holstered their weapons in specially designed slings under their jackets, then grimly shook hands with the third man who held the door open for them and saw them into the night in a wordless parting.
The Armenian closed the door after the men and turned to walk back further into the house. Bolan figured that he could only be the Washington contact for the Istanbul hit team.
The man half turned toward Bolan when the Executioner sent a kick at the back door that broke the wood panel inward.
The surprised Armenian reacted with a curse as he grabbed for holstered hardware. But he was too slow. One whispered chug from the Beretta punched out the swarthy guy's left eye and made him dead meat. The corpse was still tumbling to the floor when Bolan withdrew to the backyard. Not pausing in his steady jog, he squeezed another 9mm slug from the Beretta as he moved past the unconscious sentry. He would never regain consciousness.
Bolan scaled the wood fence again without slowing and was on the move the instant he landed in the alley.
He trotted to the alley entrance and made it behind the wheel of his rental car. The Ford in which he had seen the pinpoint glow of a cigarette was just gaining the intersection up the block at a moderate, almost lazy speed.
The vehicle, driven by either Kemal or Izmir, would be somewhere ahead.
Bolan gunned his own vehicle to life and punched on the headlights as soon as the Ford was out of sight.
Bolan's rental Mustang pulled onto the street a half block behind the unmarked CIA car.
It was a parade through the night streets of Washington. Company men in the Ford were following the Armenians, and Bolan was tracking the CIA agents.
The three cars connected with Rhode Island Avenue and tracked northeast out of the lower-income neighborhoods through the stretch of commercial zoning that began to give way to more sleepy suburbs just over the Maryland line.
Bolan played the moderate evening traffic with all the finesse at his command, keeping the Agency car in sight but staying far enough away not to arouse suspicion.
They had just passed the Mount Rainier turnoff when Bolan realized that the group had picked up another member: a custom-designed van was doing its best to hold back from Bolan's Mustang. But the highly polished chrome work of the flashy vehicle stood out like a beacon as it drove under the street-lamps.
A new twist in an already tangled night.
In Brentwood, the group led off Rhode Island Avenue into a quiet neighborhood of winding streets lined and shadowed by white oaks, with one— and two-story residences interspersed with some office buildings.
Bolan knew where they were heading.
When he saw the Ford with the CIA men glide to a stop at the curb, not more than one block from where the Interstate Loan Association had its offices, he knew there had been too much coincidence this night.
Mack Bolan's former Mafia war had brought him blitzing to this area when he targeted the Gus Riappi family and rained hellfire upon it.
At that time the Interstate Loan Association had been a money-laundry operation for the family that Bolan had somehow not had time to take out completely. Riappi still ran a weakened but functioning operation in the D.C. environs.
Mafia.
He would make time for dealing with this old enemy that appeared to be a link in the chain of events that occurred tonight.
He wheeled the Mustang off the track, cutting onto a side street that intersected the block where the CIA car had pulled over. When he was out of their range of vision, he coasted to the curb and killed the headlights and engine. He paused behind the steering wheel a moment more.
In his rearview mirror Bolan saw the customized van turn off the parade route and slide into deep shadows in the block behind him, facing in the opposite direction.
It occurred to Bolan that he had still not caught glimpse of the car carrying Izmir and Kemal since the trek began.
Now, the parade was over.
The players were in place.
The low ceiling of thunderheads rumbled ominously as if impatient for this action to begin.
Bolan strapped Big Thunder low on his right hip, unleathered his Beretta and went EVA into the night.
Into the killing ground.
When the Toyota he was tailing turned into a parking lot, CIA agent Bob Gridell steered his unmarked Ford Granada to the curb and doused the lights and engine.
The Toyota driven by Mustafa Izmir was out of sight somewhere on the blacktop on the far side of a low brick office building.
For a moment Gridell found himself wishing that he was across the river in suburban Arlington with his family.
Tonight was his second pull of duty after coming off a two-week vacation with Margie and the kids.
At forty-six, Gridell thought he was getting too old for this kind of work. Then he blocked those thoughts and checked the action of his pistol, a snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver.
He holstered the gun and reached for the under-dash mike of the car's two-way radio. He glanced sideways at his partner.
Robbins was also doing a last-minute check, his own piece a .45-caliber automatic.
'It's going down,' Gridell told the younger man. 'Our marks will hit that building on the corner, I'll lay you any odds.'
