Out of his fog of introspection he became aware again of the girl beside him. She was talking compulsively to the passenger in the window seat, apparently fighting takeoff anxieties. "... and they say the Right Bank has become so commercial, so brassy, I'd love to find a little hotel on the Left Bank, perhaps in the Sorbonne district. Don't you think that would be charming? And inexpensive, too. They say it's so colorful and interesting, the artists and students and all live there, on the Left Bank I mean, but then on second thought I don't know, I mean it might not be safe for..."

Bolan grinned, closed his eyes, and let it all go. He would take care of Paris when Paris presented itself. But only for a little while. A war at home awaited him, commanded him. Maybe he could work in a brief R&R in gay Paris before returning to the front.

The Executioner would soon discover, however, that the entire world was his front. There was to be no R&R for Mack Bolan in gay Paris.

Quick Tony Lavagni sat at a desk in the rear of a shop in Washington's ghetto, counting the day's bag from the most lucrative numbers operation south of Harlem. Wilson Brown, an immense black man and Lavagni's central controller, stood nonchalantly at Quick Tony's elbow, chewing on a dead cigar and watching the count with miss-nothing eyes. Brown was in his early thirties, and the mark of many personal wars, mostly lost ones, was ground into his dusky features; only the eyes showed an aliveness, a quick awareness and responsiveness, perhaps an intelligent wariness mixed with an acceptance of a black man's destiny. Lavagni was in his forties, not appreciably lighter in color than his controller, an emotional man of quick temper, violent tendencies, and a reputation with a knife. It was this latter consideration that had given him the label of "Quick Tony."