dismounted from his vehicle and they held a council of war beside Bolan's roadrunner while they pulled concealing coveralls over their combat outfits.
'Sammy's bread is in the bread truck,' Blancanales reported, grinning. 'It counts out to exactly a hundred and five thousand. What do I do with it?'
'Keep it for the warchest,' Bolan replied. 'That's one of your problems for this operation. Anything Gadgets and I need, we'll come to you. You make all the buys. Less chancey that way.'
Blancanales nodded. 'Okay. How'd it go in Lucasi's palace?'
'Damn near disastrous,' Bolan said. 'The little man walked in while I was sounding his bedroom. You guys did a neat job outside, thanks. Probably saved the day.'
'Did you get the bedroom bug planted?' Schwarz wondered.
'Yeah.' The man from blood smiled. 'In the headboard of his bed, while his wife slept. He's married to a kid ... but oh, what a kid!'
Blancanales snickered. 'Maybe we could sell the tapes to an underground movie outfit.'
Schwarz, all business, wanted to know, 'Where'd you put the relay stations?'
'Window ledges, outside,' Bolan reported. 'All aligned at one-five-zero magnetic, per your instructions.'
'Then we should have him snookered,' Schwarz said. The gadgets-genius glanced at his watch and jotted a note in his surveillance log. 'I'll have to cruise by and drain those storage banks in four hours. That's maximum storage, sorry.'
Bolan had to grin. It was typical of Gadgets Schwarz to be 'sorry' that he could not improve upon perfection. The little devices which he'd designed and built for this job were just about the ultimate in electronics surveillance, to Bolan's mind.
The pickup unit, consisting of a mike and a miniature radio transmitter, was about the size of a lady's wristwatch. The life in the tiny power cell was sufficient to provide 72 hours of continuous operation.
The 'relay station,' somewhat bulkier but still small enough for easy concealment, received and recorded the continuous broadcast from the pickup unit.
Upon command, the transmitter in the relay station would 'unreel' the entire recording disc in about sixty seconds. That command would come from Schwarz's mobile console in the warwagon; he could cruise casually past the house once each four hours and 'collect' the intelligence stored in the relay station ... four hours of electronic surveillance compressed into a sixty-second transmission keyed from the warwagon.
The re-recording, appropriately slowed and automatically performed within the master console, screened out all the silent zones or 'lapses' in the four-hour recording, preserving only the 'audibles' for fast monitoring in the re-play. And Gadgets was 'sorry' about that. They had followed Sammy Simonetti from the airport and used the courier's unhappy arrival at the Lucasi household as a diversion for their own penetration.
While Lucasi and his palace guard focused on the implications of Simonetti's busted play, Able Team slipped quietly in and wired the whole joint for sound.
'You've got four relays plus the phone tap,' Bolan reminded Schwarz. 'Can you collect them all on one pass?'
'No,' Schwarz told him. 'I could probably squeeze in two per pass but I'd rather not. A hundred yards is about the maximum reliable range for those relays. That gives me a hundred coming and a hundred going away, strict line-of-sight. I read that as one collection per pass, unless I just pull up and park.'
'Pull up and park, then,' Bolan suggested. 'Change a tire, fiddle with your engine — anything that will cover. But I don't like five times past that house in the same vehicle.'
'Okay, I'll park and drain,' Schwarz agreed.
'Pol, you stay on Lucasi. Keep a log on his every move outside that house.'
'You'll have it,' Blancanales quietly replied.
'Did you get those zoom lenses for the camera?'
The Politician nodded his head in reply. 'I could probably get a flea from a block away.'
'Great. Try to get a picture of every one entering that house, plus every one he meets away from the house. Unless you're really tied into something fantastic, we meet back here in exactly four hours.'
'What do I do in the meantime?' Gadgets wondered. 'So far I've got a five minute job.'
'Run over and drain the phone tap at Howlin' Marian's,' Bolan instructed him. 'If you pick up something useful there, don't save it. Beep me on Able Channel.'
'Okay. Where will you be?'
'I think I'll be at the Mission Bay marina.'
'Who do we know there?' Politican asked.
Bolan smiled. 'I hear that Tony Danger keeps a deep-water boat berthed there.'
'I guess I never heard of Tony Danger,' the Politician murmured.
'One of Lucasi's lieutenants,' Bolan explained. 'Narcotics, mainly.'
'That's the guy,' Schwarz commented, 'was supposed to get the hundred grand.'
'That's him,' Bolan confirmed. 'I believe he was setting up for a buy. Heroin or cocaine, probably. They usually time the black money shipments for a fast in and out. And I saw Tony Danger at Lucasi's awhile ago, pacing around and wringing his hands over the loss of that shipment. He was wearing a yachting cap.'
Blancanales chuckled. 'That was Tony Danger, eh?'
'That was him.'
'He turned green when I laid that autopistol on him.'
'When he's got it all together he can be pretty mean,' Bolan warned. 'He was one of DiGeorge's favorite triggermen.'
Schwarz was wearing a faint frown. He asked, 'How does all this tie into the colonel?'
'Maybe not at all,' Bolan replied. 'I'm just hoping to stir the pot a bit. No telling what might float up off the bottom.'
Blancanales suggested, 'Maybe some very straight big daddy with a dirty backside.'
Bolan nodded. 'That's what I'm hoping for. A hell of a lot of mob money is moving into the legit pipelines in this town. That's what put Winco in business ... black money. But it didn't move directly from Lucasi to Winters. There's a middleman somewhere, a guy with plenty of clout. If we're going to find Howlin' Marian's lost soul, then we've first got to find the Big Middle.'
'Okay, I guess that makes sense,' Schwarz said.
'The same guy is providing the umbrella for Lucasi and his hoods,' Blancanales added.
'Probably,' Bolan said. 'It takes a certain kind of environment to support a Mafia entrenchment. If you find that entrenchment, then you know the environment is there also. So well try to knock some holes in the entrenchment. Maybe well get a glimpse of the environment as it rushes in to plug the holes.'
'This is different than the L.A. operation,' Schwarz decided.
'Quite a bit,' Bolan agreed. 'L.A. is a big roaring city, liberal, free-wheeling. That's enough natural environment right there to cover routine mob operations. This is a different sort of environment. Much smaller. Conservative, strong civic spirit, a proud town. Somebody in a position of power and trust within that establishment has to be dirty if the mob is operating here on the scale I suspect.'
'Or maybe a bunch of somebodies,' Blancanales growled.
'Maybe. Whoever or how many, we have to shake them up, get them churning, worrying. We already have a possible.' Bolan stared for a moment at Schwarz. 'After you've collected the Winters' intelligence, if you have time, find out what you can about a local wheel named Maxwell Thornton.'
'Pretty big guy?' Blancanales inquired. Bolan replied, 'Yeah, pretty big. Let's examine our problem here for a minute. We know the mob people in this area. We know pretty well where their interests lie and the type of routine operations they're running. We could blitz them ... just lay all over them ... and we could do that very well, I think. But that wouldn't put us any closer to the deeper enemy, and that is the one we really want this time. The Big Middle ... that's our target. First, though, we have to find them.'
'And you think this guy Thornton may be one of this Big Middle?'
'As I said, he's a possible. Lucasi dropped the name on me. Maybe just as a stall, but sometimes a lot of truth seeps out of a deathbed stall. We have to check it out ... but very carefully. We don't want to get these guys to running ... just shaking a little.'
