He took a midsize Ford and stowed his luggage in the trunk then retrieved the Beretta 93-R with its shoulder rigging, tucking it beneath his jacket as he slid behind the wheel. A roadside turnout halfway into Hyattsville provided Bolan with an opportunity to slip on the rigging, and he felt better as he nosed the Ford back into traffic. Whatever happened next, he was prepared to answer fire with fire. No longer feeling naked, vulnerable, Bolan focused upon his mission in D.C.

There had been no time for elaboration on the telephone, no inclination for Sticker to discuss his business on an open line. The urgency was obvious, and Bolan knew it was not in Leo's nature to exaggerate. The open conversation would be enough to ruin him if anyone was tapping in. By the very nature of the risk involved he had communicated desperation, and it wasn't Leo's style to overdramatize.

The Executioner recalled another time, in Pittsfield, when the undercover Fed had sounded equally upset. On that occasion, Turrin's wife had been abducted and held hostage by a group of renegades within the Marinello Family. The hostiles had him pegged for an informer and were planning to exert the kind of leverage that never failed. But they failed disastrously by omitting Bolan from their calculations. They had not prepared themselves for hell on earth, and in the end they were unable to stand hard before the flames.

Bolan knew Hal and Leo would brief him when they met. For now, his sole objective was to arrive at the contact point. Before he flew, a call from Kennedy had netted him the address of a townhouse in Georgetown, and he stopped again in Hyattsville to phone ahead, confirm that he was on the ground and homing in. The traffic worsened mile by mile, became a snarl as Bolan crossed the line from Maryland to D.C. proper. The final run to Georgetown was a short six miles, but it took the soldier forty minutes, hitting every red light on the way.