LITMIR.BIZ

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of burglaries, car thefts, domestic beefs and nuisance calls distracting officers on any given shift.

      Say eight or nine incoming, then, within the next five minutes. As for times on-site, there would be stragglers. Some patrolling at a distance from the roadhouse, others eating fast food with their radios turned on, maybe a bathroom break or two.

      A little breathing room.

      But if his marks didn’t start losing soon…

      Bolan was ready, waiting, when Halsey charged into the middle of the fight and caught a haymaker dead center in his face. It might not be a nose breaker, but there was force enough behind the punch to send Halsey flying again. He hit the floor hard, no table to break his fall this time, and Bolan worried that the man he needed to impress might be unconscious.

      No. Halsey was shaking it off, rolling over and wiping a dark smear of blood from his nostrils with his sleeve. Face flushed with impact and anger, he lurched to his feet, wobbled into a fair fighting crouch and began to advance with fists clenched.

      Going back in for more.

      It was enough.

      Bolan slipped from his booth, feeling the rush of battle in his blood. He reached the battleground in four long, loping strides, grabbed Halsey’s adversary by one arm and spun him, scowling as he drove a fist into the biker’s face.

      2

      Washington, D.C.

      Four days earlier, Bolan had strolled through crowds of tourists on the National Mall, making his casual way toward the pale upraised finger of the Washington Monument. His destination lay adjacent to that obelisk, on 1.9 acres of land allotted by Congress in the 1980s, on Fifteenth Street, renamed Raoul Wallenberg Place.

      Bolan knew the name from history. Raoul Wallenberg had been a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest during the German occupation of 1944–45. He had issued protective passports to Hungarian Jews, saving tens of thousands from slaughter—and then, ironically, was jailed when Soviet troops “liberated” the country from Nazi rule. Dying under questionable circumstances at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1947, Wallenberg had been honored worldwide once his story was told.

      It was only fitting that his name now marked the street outside of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

      Bolan entered the museum, collected his free pass from a clerk in the Hall of Witness and proceeded to the first-floor elevator. Self-guided tours were timed, leaving Bolan five minutes to wait in the lobby, and start on the fourth floor, with visitors working their way back down to street level through various halls and exhibits.

      Bolan surveyed the first of four permanent exhibitions. This one depicted the Nazi assault on German Jews from 1933 until the 1939 invasion of Poland, including documents, photographs and other relics of the years that included the Reichstag fire and Kristallnacht riots. Lower floors, he knew, presented the rest of a grim history in chronological order: the “Final Solution” on Three, and the nightmare’s “Last Chapter” on Two. Altogether, the museum contained nearly thirteen thousand artifacts, eighty thousand photos, one thousand hours of archival film footage, nine thousand oral histories, and some forty-nine million documents charting the course of brutal genocide.

      Tragically, it hadn’t been the last.

      Man’s inhumanity to other humans was the world’s oldest story, played out in grim new headlines every day.

      Which kept the Executioner busy year-round.

      On this bright spring morning, he was killing time indoors, studying bleak reminders of how cruel humankind could be, while waiting for his oldest living friend. Their conversation, subject still unknown to Bolan, would inevitably launch him on another journey to the dark side, where he would find predators aplenty still alive and well, working around the clock to victimize the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.

      In short, business as usual.

      Scanning the photographs of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, studying their smug and ghoulish faces, Bolan wondered if someone like himself could have derailed that tragedy, if sent to solve the problem soon enough. Would half a dozen well-placed bullets have changed anything at all?

      Or was the tide of history inevitably tinged with blood?

      Bolan’s experience had taught him not to second-guess the vagaries of human nature. Every personality contained a blend of traits, defined as “good” or “bad” by different societies. Some cultures valued warlike attitudes, while others favored meekness and pacivity. Some cultivated stoicism and endurance in the face of suffering, while others honored conscientious suicide.

      But every nation, race and culture recognized that some people could only be restrained by force. If left at large, to exercise their will, the predators wreaked havoc.

      Sometimes, they wound up in charge.

      Bolan harbored no illusions about saving the world. He wasn’t a statesman, diplomat or philosopher. He couldn’t sway the masses with a glib turn of phrase and persuade them to trade in their weapons for schoolbooks or farm implements.

      Bolan was a soldier, had been since he’d snagged his high-school diploma en route to the Army recruiting depot, breezing through basic training and moving on to Special Forces training at Fort Benning. And there’d been no looking back from there, until his family at home met a fatal snag that pulled him out of uniform and forced him to pursue a different, more personal kind of war.

      That phase of Bolan’s life lay far behind him now. In terms of serving with official sanction, he’d been back on track since the creation of Stony Man Farm. In terms of serving fellow human beings, he had never stopped.

      Each blow he struck against the predators saved lives that otherwise would have been diverted into dark and deadly avenues. For the enduring benefit of strangers, Bolan walked those alleyways and jungle trails alone.

      They felt like home.

      As he moved slowly past the Holocaust exhibits, Bolan wondered how it had to feel to be persecuted for a trait you hadn’t chosen and could never change. An accident of birth, say, that determined pigmentation, hair texture, the shape of eyes or nose.

      Bolan knew all about the sense of being hunted, but he’d always brought it on himself, by standing in the way of people who would never stop harassing, robbing, killing others until they, themselves, were stopped dead in their tracks. He stopped them, and when their associates came looking for revenge, he buried them.

      How long could it go on?

      Bolan had no idea and didn’t let the question trouble him.

      Turning from blown-up photographs of Nazi signs and posters that he couldn’t read, but which he understood too well, Bolan saw Hal Brognola moving toward him, past a group of children following their teacher through the gallery. Small faces sad and humbled, learning more than they might care to know about their species.

      Bolan went to meet his friend.

      “NO PROBLEM PARKING?” Brognola asked, as he clutched Bolan’s hand, pumped twice and let it go.

      “The walk was nice,” Bolan replied.

      “Sorry you had to come in naked,” Brognola went on. “Security’s been tighter since the shooting.”

      “Sometimes the hardware weighs me down,” Bolan said.

      Back in June 2009, an octogenarian neo-Nazi ex-convict had carried a .22-caliber rifle into the museum, killed a security guard, then fell under fire while trying to shoot other guards. The gunner had survived and was sitting in jail while his case wound its way through the courts at glacial speed. Attorneys at Justice had a pool going, on whether a jury or Father Time would deal with the creep in the cage.

      Brognola, for his part, couldn’t care less. As long as the neo-Nazi was off the streets for good, it suited him.

      One down. And how many tens of thousands to go?

      God

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