Brognola knew the man they called the Executioner better than anyone else. They weren't exactly friends, but then Mack Bolan probably didn't have any friends. Hell, the man didn't even have a family except for his younger brother, Johnny. Friends were a luxury for a man in Bolan's line of work. His years in Vietnam and his subsequent intelligence work had created a network of sources, allies, snitches and comrades. But not friends. Brognola knew he was the closest thing to a friend Bolan would ever have.

At times it bothered him that he never socialized with Mack. But Brognola knew that the Executioner could not afford to let down his guard at any time.

Too many people wanted his ass. Badly.

Brognola sat down and propped his feet up on the oak desk in front of him. He reached forward and put the cigar down in the massive glass ashtray before returning the chair to an upright position. He started poring over the sheaves of papers in a dozen file folders stacked in one corner of the desk.

Each one bore a small brightly colored label on its raised tab, and each was stamped SECRET in the no-bullshit kind of lettering preferred by guys who were deadly serious about their line of work. Without exception, the colored label bore the name of an American nuclear installation. The folders were on loan from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and only one other person knew they were in Brognola's hands. That man had refused to part with the papers at first. He relented only when Brognola had sworn to return the documents within forty-eight hours. Uncopied. And unaltered.

And Brognola didn't blame the guy, once he got a look at the files. Not a bit. More megatonnage was sitting right there in those folders than had been dropped on Hiroshima. And Nagasaki. The intel was that explosive.

Critical, actually. And right now Brognola could barely contain his anxiety, waiting for Bolan to report back on a related piece of intelligence the Fed had received that morning. Each folder laid out, in painful detail, recent nuclear accidents. What was clear, and what the files proved beyond reasonable doubt, was that the "events," as they were tidily called by the NRC, were no accidents. None of them. This morning's information concerned an incident that had not yet happened, and if Bolan got there in time, would never happen.