Save the Children

18

The fashionable neighborhood bordering Evanston was quiet. There were lights on in some of the big houses behind manicured lawns, but few cars moved along the broad, tree-lined boulevards.

Bolan parked Lana Garner's car a block away from Senator Mark Dutton's house, where he lived with his wife and teenage daughter.

Bolan had chosen one of the darkened houses when he parked the car. He loosened the bulb in the dome light and there was no flash of illumination when he slipped out of the vehicle, quietly closing the door and angling for the thick shadows underneath trees.

It took only a few moments for him to make his way through the backyard toward a high wooden fence that closed off the Dutton property from prying eyes.

Bolan paused, listening intently for a moment, hearing nothing from the other side of the fence.

A door slammed somewhere, but it was several houses away. A couple of dogs in the neighborhood were barking sporadically. He heard nothing else, nothing from the direction of the Dutton residence on the other side of the fence.

He reached up, grasped the top of the slats and vaulted over, his booted feet landing with a muffled thump in the backyard.

The rear of the Dutton house was dark. Wind rustled tall evergreens in the yard.

Bolan started toward the senator's residence, slipping the night vision goggles he wore into place.

The sound of the wind almost covered the rush of footsteps from behind.

He dropped to one side, the thought flashing through his mind that this guard was more competent than most. He heard the hiss of a knife blade through air, coming at him.

He spun and snaked his arm out, blocking the stab.

The sentry let out a grunt, pulled back and slashed again.

Bolan felt a line of fire race across his right forearm as he blocked this slash. His left dipped and the Gerber MK II combat knife sheathed mid-chest seemed to spring into his hand.

He pivoted as the blademan danced back again. Bolan snapped a kick to the guard's knee.

The man yelped in pain and staggered.

Bolan moved in, looped his bleeding right arm around the man's neck to stifle a cry. He drove the blade of his knife into the guard's back, expertly guiding it between the ribs, into the heart.

The sentry gave a mighty lurch in Bolan's grip, then went slack.

Bolan lowered the body to the cold ground. He wiped his knife clean on the dead man's jacket, sheathed the weapon and quickly frisked the corpse. He found a Colt .45 in shoulder leather and id claiming that Louie Caputo had been licensed to carry a concealed weapon in his capacity of security coordinator for Tri-State, Inc.

Bolan stood, confident that he had taken the life of nothing more than a Mafia street goon... posing as a private detective... put here by the family to bodyguard the senator.

Bolan's pocketknife had a back door of the senator's house open in less than ten seconds.

It took about three times as long to find the button of a burglar alarm and disarm it, then Bolan stood inside.

The house smelled of fragrant odors from a roaring log fire.

Bolan himself smelled of the brutal night.

Cold.

Sweat.

Tension.

He moved through the strange air of other people's lives, lives he could only guess at.

He spotted a staircase and moved toward it, careful not to nudge anything in his way, his NVD goggles guiding him.

At first he didn't notice the light, only saw it peripherally as he moved past, then it registered: a thin line of light beneath a tall door leading to the basement.

His gloved hand turned the knob slowly.

A steep staircase descended into shadow.

He took the steps one at a time, breathing slowly.

The basement was well furnished. At the end nearest him was a bar that could easily accommodate twenty or thirty people.

He heard sounds from behind a half-open door between the bar and where he stood. He moved toward it, negotiating a pool table, sliding the night vision goggles up, knowing he had found the senator alone down here in his study while Mrs. Dutton and their teenage daughter slept somewhere upstairs.

Good, thought Bolan.

He eased up to that half-open door to look inside.

The senator was seated in an overstuffed armchair, nursing a drink, his back to Bolan. The politician's attention was riveted to a TV screen that was playing a videotape from the VCR atop the set.

Bolan detected a faint, wheezing sound, and it took him a second to realize what it was.

The senator was breathing heavily, thinking he was alone, entranced by what was on the screen.

Bolan saw it, too.

The image of young girls, no older than eight or ten, looking frightened, terrified by someone off camera. The children were parading naked before the camera as if they were in a beauty contest...

Bolan had to restrain himself from emptying Big Thunder into the man's head. Disgust, rage and bile rose in the soldier's throat, but he kept his hands empty.

The senator was so transfixed by the images on celluloid that he was not aware of the Bolan presence until he touched the Off button of the unit's remote control device, making the young girls disappear to a pinprick of light, then nothing.

The senator saw Bolan and half jumped out of his chair, almost knocking over the drink on a small table next to his chair. Bolan came around to stand before him, clamping a big hand over Dutton's face and pushing him roughly backward into the chair.

Dutton's eyes bulged fearfully as Bolan brought his hand away from the other man's mouth.

"Sound an alarm and I'll kill you right now."

The senator looked as if he didn't need to be told twice. He stared up at Bolan, face white and shaking, his hands gripping the arms of the chair.

"Wh-what do you want?"

"You've got some taste in movies, Senator. Where did you get that tape?"

Too quickly, Dutton said, "I rented it."

"Right. Most video places have tapes like that."

"A friend gave it to me."

"What's his name?"

"I don't remember."

Bolan flared with anger. He backhanded Dutton across the mouth hard enough to draw blood, pop out two of the senator's pearly capped front teeth and rock the chair, but because Bolan loomed over him, Dutton remained seated.

He had no choice.

"I should've known I wouldn't get a straight answer out of a politician the first time out," Bolan seethed. "Let's try it again, Senator. The big question. Where are the children?"

"Don't... know what you're talking... about," Dutton answered stubbornly, wiping away the blood of his split lip with his sleeve. "What kids?"

"I know all the rest of it now," Bolan told him. "I know about Wallace. He supplied the Parellis with the children. And I know the Parellis are shipping out a cargo of those children tonight. I'd be curious to know, Senator, how it feels to have your soul so dead that you can allow yourself to deal in human lives and the young like that, you goddamn monster, but right now I don't have the time. I want to know where that shipment is leaving from. You're going to tell me."

Dutton shook his head, his blood continuing to leak out onto his expensive shirtfront.

"Nothing... nothing I can tell you..."

Bolan shook his head.

"You're being loyal to the wrong people, Senator. Wallace knew about it and he's dead. So is Randy Owens."

"Wallace... dead?"

"They supplied you with some of those children from time to time, didn't they, Senator? That was part of their hold on you."

Dutton looked into Bolan's eyes and seemed to see mirrored there what Bolan saw. The senator sank deeper into the chair, exhaled a heavy sigh.

"I am a monster," he nodded wearily. "You... can't know what it's like." He seemed to begin deflating before Bolan's eyes. "The girls... I never hurt them... didn't want to hurt anybody... I'm like two men... I love my wife, my daughter, dearly... I'm sick, Bolan... that's what the Parellis are really blackmailing me with... They're less than human ... and God help me, so am I..."

"Where do they have the shipment?" Bolan asked in a soft voice.

Dutton looked up at Bolan with tears in his eyes.

"Trucking company... Skokie..." He rattled off a street address. "David Parelli owns the place."

"What time are they scheduled to leave?"

"Supposed to be... midnight."

Bolan glanced at his watch.

11:20.

Forty minutes to midnight.

"Bolan... wh-what are you going to do?" Dutton asked in a halting whisper.

"I'm here to collect your tab, Senator."

The soldier watched as the politician's hand began to move slowly toward a drawer in the small end table.

Good, thought Bolan, he's going for hardware. It'll make the fight even fairer. Because the rage that coursed through the warrior made him realize that he would have felt no remorse at choking the senator to death with bare hands right where he sat. The man was too dirty to let him live.

But no, let the scum try to save his life.

Dutton's hand was almost out of the drawer now, and Bolan saw the unmistakable shape of a small handgun.

Far enough.

The sleek Beretta filled Bolan's fist and a single discreet chug echoed in the basement's silence as a 9 mm stinger pinned the politician against the armchair.

Bolan turned to the VCR that sat on top of the TV set.

He ejected the child porn tape from the machine, then turned around to Dutton's lifeless body and dropped the foul video on the dead man's chest.

He left the room, noiselessly retracing his way out of the house, briefly recalling that he had wondered, after his first visit with Dutton at that fund-raising dinner earlier tonight, if he was not going soft when he had let the senator off the hook. But then, Bolan realized now, he had been in the process of putting the picture puzzle together.

No, the Executioner was not going soft.

He took as much satisfaction as ever in eliminating lice like Senator Mark Dutton.

He felt sorry for the senator's wife and daughter having to find the body in the morning. They were victims of the rottenness of Dutton's soul. But so were the children Bolan had to rescue before David Parelli and his mother sent them off to whatever unspeakable fate awaited this shipment of helpless human cargo. These were the victims whose welfare drove Bolan. The children.

And the puzzle of a cop named Griff, a man tormented by inner devils, who figured into this somehow.

And, of course, the woman.

Lana.

Where was she?

Griff's and Lana's whereabouts were the only puzzles left on this night of sudden death.

Bolan returned to the Camaro and gunned it away from the curb, U-turning to head west, toward the next suburb over, Skokie, and the address Dutton had given him.

It was time for the children to be saved and the Parellis to pay for their sins, past and present.

And time had almost run out for those kids being shipped from that Skokie trucking company at midnight.

Bolan wondered about a cop who could be friend or foe.

A kidnapped woman, in danger.

Missing children.

The time bomb that had been ticking beneath Chicago was about to explode with awesome fury.

Retribution time, yeah.

The Executioner only hoped he would be in time.