Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  The girl looked uncomfortable. "I was supposed to stay behind and take care of closing up the place after everyone had left — everyone except the two waiting in the lobby for you, that is. But…"

  "Well?"

  "I was kind of tired. I figured I'd lie up a few minutes in the rest room. While I was… while I was there, I heard shooting. I came out and I saw you moving around. I followed you. That's all."

  Bolan studied her face, noted the tiny muscular twitch, the shadowed eyes. "You're hooked on something, aren't you?" he accused. "You were shooting up, weren't you? That's what you were doing in the rest room — shooting up."

  She blushed, nodding miserably.

  "And you came to offer help because you knew who I was and you thought maybe I could help you?" Bolan played the long shot.

  It paid off. She nodded again. "I want out," she said.

  "So get out. Walk away."

  "I can't kick the habit. I've no money of my own. Max keeps me supplied. It's a condition of the… It's the only way I can make out."

  "How did you get in? How come a kid like you can stomach working with people whose business is killing"

  She was crying now, the tears channeling through the makeup on her cheeks and diluting the mascara to blacken the dark circles under her eyes. She shook her head helplessly.

  Slowly at first and then in a flood, it all came out. Her name was Julie Marco.

  And, yes, Bolan had heard the story hundreds of times. In fact, it had touched him personally, where he lived, had become the reason for his everlasting war.

  "Julie," Bolan said when the girl had finished, "I can help you."

  Tears glistened on her cheeks again. "If only you would," she whispered.

  "I will," he promised. "You want out. That's half the battle won already. But I'm going to ask you to do something for me first. I want you to stay here a little longer, to keep me in touch with what goes on, with what I'm programmed to do. Because I'm going to break these guys into little pieces — and Baraka along with them! But I must have inside intel. Will you help me?"

  "Yes," she said, dabbing at her eyes with the back of one hand.

  "Okay," Bolan said. "Now, do you know anything that is planned for Baraka, any possible hit in the future?"

  She shook her head. "I've heard them say it's going to be the big one, but I don't know what it is. There's nothing in the files about it."

  "Right. I arrive here and get some kind of drug pumped into me that transforms me into Baraka. I have a list of the drugs they use. But how do they get me here? It seems they can knock me out somehow and transport me here without my knowledge of it. Do you know what method they use? There's nothing about it in the medical files."

  Again the blond head moved from side to side. "No idea. My work starts when I clock you in."

  "Lastly then, do you know anything of any other hits planned, any future hits that don't involve Baraka, but may have been assigned to other killers?"

  This time Julie nodded. "I have no details," she said, "but I heard Max talking to the Corsican about the… the elimination of a Spanish official."

  "That's right," Bolan mused. "I heard someone ask about 'the Spanish thing' while I was in the storeroom."

  "I think it's the minister for tourism, Alfonso Velasquez. It's supposed to be when he's on a goodwill visit to London. You know, to check out some compromise on Gibraltar or something that the Spaniards have been agitating for years. There's a bomb planned outside the Iberia airline office at the same time. It's supposed to scuttle the talks and lead to bad feeling."

  "Do you have the date?" Bolan asked.

  "No. It depends on the minister's schedule, and that hasn't been finalized. I think they said it was to be when he's addressing a meeting of the Anglo-Hispanic Friendship Society."

  "Julie, you've got to keep in touch," Bolan said urgently. "As soon as you learn that date, you've got to let me know."

  For a moment she looked scared. "As long as it's something you could have found out for yourself from the files, on some future visit," she said dubiously. "I could tip you off when to come again, when there will be written evidence. Because if a leak could be traced back to me that would be it. I'd be found OD'd in my room with enough circumstantial proof strewn around to convince a coroner it was suicide ten times over."

  "Just trust me," Bolan said. "I wouldn't drop you in it, kid."

  Julie smiled tremulously. "I have to lock up now. You could have run out immediately after the shooting. I never saw you, right? But I'll have to report… well, whatever I see on my way out."

  Bolan visualized the lobby and then asked, "Tell me, is there any way into this place besides the tunnel by the fig tree?"

  "Yes, of course," she said. "The storeroom hatch."

  Bolan slapped his open palm against his forehead, mentally cursing himself for not having thought of it. Of course they had to have some way of getting all that heavy electronic equipment in, and the other stuff installed below. None of it could possibly have been maneuvered down through the trapdoor in the cellar and along that narrow tunnel. "In the ceiling of the storeroom?" he suggested.

  "That's right. Two steel plates that open upward hydraulically, with an electric crane above."

  "I never thought to look up." Once more he conjured up the layout above and below ground, mentally estimating distances. "I suppose the hatch is hidden above in one of the farm buildings?"

  "Behind the skeleton of a tractor in the old barn," she confirmed.

  When she was through and they had made their way out past the gruesome evidence in the lobby, she showed him the button, concealed on the top surface of an ancient oak beam, that operated the hatch.

  They emerged into a night brilliant with stars. A warm wind blowing off the Rhine stirred the tops of the trees surrounding the farm.

  "Where do you live, Julie?" Bolan asked.

  "Strasbourg," she replied.

  "But that's quite a way, isn't it? How do you get there?"

  "Thirty-four miles. I walk to Saales and catch a bus. That's only three miles. Max says it's good for my health. He won't let me hitch a ride with the others. He says the exercise counteracts the bad effects of my habit."

  "Well, you're getting a ride tonight. There's a bike here, and I don't think the owner's going to need it anymore."

  20

  Hal Brognola's expert had been brought to Paris all the way from Washington. "Nutty as a fruitcake, the whole diplomatic community," he told Bolan. "I never stop working."

  A psychoanalyst by profession, he was also an expert on drugs and was often called in for consultation by the Federal Narcotics Bureau.

  His name was Greg Toledo. He was short and wore oversize glasses, and his bald scalp was covered in freckles. Bolan guessed he was around forty years old.

  They met in the embassy interview room overlooking the Avenue Gabriel.

  "Interesting," Toledo said in a high-pitched voice when he had been briefed on the Bolan-Baraka substitution. He smoothed the fringe of hair that remained on his head and fingered a wispy mustache. For the third time he scanned the charts the Executioner had brought from the old Maginot fort. "All these drugs, you see," he said to Brognola, "are psychotomimetics."

  "Say again?" Bolan said.

  "Psy-choto-mi-met-ics. They are agents that mimic certain abnormal mental conditions. Their combination, as outlined here in this case history, is fascinating. Now what do we find?" He ticked off each entry on a finger. "Psilocybin — that's the famous Mexican mushroom — telepathine, soma, TMA, microgamma doses of LSD-25, all administered in minutely varying quantities at carefully calculated intervals. Amazing."

  "Those are all hallucinogens, aren't they?" Bolan inquired.

  "Each of them," the analyst said, nodding, "is capable under certain conditions, in certain amounts with certain subjects, of producing paravisual phenomena. Of making them hallucinate, if you prefer.

  "What makes this case particularly absorbing is the plan
ned interaction of the agents, each imperceptibly modifying, stimulating or acting as a catalyst on the action of the other. There are, you will know, great differences in degree. The synthetic LSD, for example, is ten times stronger than psilocybin and a hundred times more potent than mescaline, the original psychedelic. The one thing they have in common, all of them, is not so much these so-called visionary effects as the fact that they ruthlessly strip away the fences we surround ourselves with. They penetrate the masks we hide behind when we face the world. And we suddenly see ourselves as we really are. Psychologically it can be frightening, even terrifying. It is this that gives people what they call a bad trip. Because they can't retreat from that reality until the effect of the drug wears off."

  "Okay," Bolan said. "So how can they turn me into a terrorist?"

  "This — it's only my guess, mind — would have something to do with the phenomenon known as imprinting."

  "Which is?"

  "The system we build up from birth, like all living creatures, to relate ourselves to the world around us. We learn that the first large moving object we see — our mother — means comfort and security. We learn how to distinguish that moving object from others. We learn that a flame means heat means pain. We learn that water makes you wet and reflecting surfaces shoot you back an image of yourself. Later we learn that the image is false, the opposite of ourselves. And later still we begin to build our sense of values, the moral code by which we live."

  Toledo shuffled the medical charts and patted the edges straight with his fingertips. "The psychedelic drugs," he said, "are believed to suspend these imprinted patterns, to erase them temporarily. It has also been suggested that during the period of suspension a subject may be reimprinted with a different pattern. A different set of values. I believe this is what is happening in your case."

  "You mean it alters the sense of right and wrong?" Bolan asked.

  Toledo sighed. "Those terms are relative to the persons using them. They're subjective, arbitrary, nonscientific values decided upon by each individual or group of individuals themselves. I may label as right an action you choose to label wrong. But, in effect, yes, you could say that."

  "He gets around to it eventually," Bolan remarked.

  Brognola winked. "You said that on one of the tapes the doctors mention the fact that digital expertise — acquired skills if you like — was unimpaired?" he asked the Executioner.

  "That's right," Bolan said.

  "Well, that accounts for it, Striker!" The Fed sounded pleased with himself. "You're the perfect choice for the job, a natural for programming as an undercover killer of the innocent."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Your previous history has shown you to be precisely the opposite," Brognola said. "That's your imprinting. But your muscular and autonomous nervous systems are clued in to the type of work required of a terrorist just the same. You're an excellent penetration agent. All your skills have conditioned you for the kind of existence a terrorist leads. You're just on the other side of the fence, that's all."

  "Too right." Unexpectedly the shrink lapsed into the vernacular. "All the enemy has to do is, in effect, alter the target in your sights."

  "And this can go on happening each time they pump the stuff into me in the right amounts?"

  "Basically, yes. It's a little like posthypnotic suggestion."

  "Okay. I'll buy that. But I guess I had to be available for your hypnotist to make the original suggestion, right? I mean like the first time they got to me."

  Toledo nodded.

  Bolan was about to say something more, but suddenly he paused, thinking. Then he turned to Brognola. "Remember when I took that blow on the skull in northern Italy, Hal? I was taken to a hospital somewhere nearby, wasn't I?"

  "Sure. They lifted you across the border into Switzerland. It was the nearest place with the right kind of care. But it wasn't a hospital, it was a clinic."

  "You remember the name?"

  "Sure I do. It was called the Friedekinde Foundation."

  Bolan was incredulous. He realized now why parts of the clinic had seemed so familiar to him, why Friedekinde had talked of his coming back: he had been there before. He turned to the analyst. "Granted that I was an amnesiac the first time they got to me," he said, "and that I'd been knocked out immediately before the last two sessions, can you think of any way they could have gotten to me, any way they could have taken me without my knowing, the times I was programmed in between?"

  "I can think of dozens," Toledo said cheerfully. "The tiny pellet in the back of the calf, fired from an umbrella gun the way the KGB did in London with that Bulgarian defector who broadcast anticommunist stuff over the radio. Toxic material in your food or drink. A miniature thorn in your shoe. What the press call a sleep dart. You'd have forgotten the tiny mosquito sting before you hit the ground"

  "And I'm open to that kind of attack?"

  "Unless you stay closeted in one room with a guard outside. And even then they could get to you through your food. There are so many choices." The analyst shook his head. "You can get alkaloids so poisonous that a small amount smeared on the inside of a sleeve will put you out as soon as it touches the hairs on the back of your hand."

  "That's nice to know," Bolan said. "But how come I've no recollection of the knockouts or the treatment after? I'm not an amnesiac anymore."

  "That's another question altogether. I'd be guessing again here, but I can only think of one way it might be done."

  "It was done," Bolan said.

  "Very well. But first I have to give you a crash course on the functions of the human brain."

  Bolan sighed. "Shoot."

  "You have ten billion neurons or brain cells in your head, Mr. Bolan. Any one of them, at any time, can be interacting with some twenty-five thousand others. This means that the number of possible associations mentally is staggering. Each of those neurons transmits a tiny electric current and contains, among other things, twenty million molecules of ribonucleic acid, RNA for short."

  "Yeah." Bolan nodded. "I heard a guy at the fort talk about RNA chains."

  "The RNA manufactures protein molecules, and these are related to the function we call memory. Are you with me?"

  "At a distance."

  "Good. This electrochemical network, inconceivable in its complexity, is the anatomical structure of consciousness. Now, it has been found that certain chemicals stimulate the production of RNA. Secondly, it has been proved with laboratory animals that increased RNA — and thus increased protein in the brain — enables animals to remember better, learn faster. They get smarter. Then the back room boys decided to try the reverse process. They injected rats and mice with a chemical that interferes with the production of RNA."

  "And they got dumb animals?"

  "Exactly."

  "What was the chemical?"

  "I think they call it puromycil."

  "Could it be used on humans?"

  "If it was, I'd think the effect would be just what you describe — total memory loss of recent events, with long-term recall unaffected."

  "And when the drug wore off…" this was Brognola "…the subject would be back to normal, but the memory loss would remain?"

  "Correct."

  "Yeah, but just a minute. You say the animals get dumb. So what about this digital skill routine? You said — and the videotapes proved it — that Striker's military expertise would be unaltered."

  "You don't understand," Toledo said patiently. "Certainly they remained unaltered — when he was under the influence of the other drugs. But presumably the puromycil would only be injected when the, uh, training was through and the skills weren't required anymore."

  "But they'd be back in there again next time around when they laid hands on me for another session?" Bolan said.

  "Yes."

  "And this… this reimprinting would remain kind of dormant until the next psychedelic treatment?"

  "I guess so."

  "Okay," Bolan said. "All that
makes sense, in a screwy kind of way. I find it spooky, but at least I'm not going crazy."

  "Not with the tiny controlled doses they're giving you at the moment."

  "Now one more thing," the Executioner said. "Suppose I find out, as me, that Baraka is being programmed to pull off something real bad. And suppose I know beforehand when he's going to be knocked out and then given the treatment and briefed to do it. And suppose, finally, that I want to pretend to go through with it but in fact louse up the deal…"

  Toledo looked interested. "I'm supposing," he said.

  "Right. Is there anything I could take before they got to me, you know, some kind of antidote? Are you familiar with anything, any drug or chemical that would stop these hallucinogens having their usual effect on me?"

  The analyst smoothed out the mustache with a forefinger. "Again, this is not really my area," he said slowly. "But I believe there are certain other drugs — some of them quite common — that can block, inhibit or even cancel out for a short time the psychotomimetics. But I'd have to check with a couple of colleagues in that line."

  "Do that," Brognola said.

  "As soon as I get back. I'll contact you when I have the necessary information."

  "Make it fast," the Executioner said.

  21

  The phone rang in the bedroom of a back-street hotel in Strasbourg. Mack Bolan swung his legs off the bed and reached for the receiver. It was Julie Marco.

  "The Spanish thing has been finalized," she told him. "The Connaught Rooms between Kingsway and Drury Lane in London. The Corsican and the Marksman have been briefed to make the hit, each from a different location. The Iberia bomb will be placed by Olga Kurtz, the woman who did the Amsterdam station and acted as a decoy in the Jaecklin killing in Kronberg. Her MO doesn't change. She uses a baby carriage, with the stuff concealed beneath a blanket."

  "You wouldn't happen to know the snipers' MO on this particular occasion?" Bolan asked. "Like the firing points they'll use?"

  "No. Only the date. The twenty-ninth, around eight in the evening. It's left to them how they work it out. But there'll be a camera there someplace, recording it."