Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  "No nonsense. The boy was her brother, all right," Davis said soberly. "I guess she used his death as a reason — her instructions were to hook you and to talk you onto the team without letting you know who she really was."

  Bolan eased his position on the canvas seat. The bruises were beginning to hurt. "How did you get me out of that place?"

  "Standard antihijack activity and hostage release routine," the Mossad man told him. "Winched a couple of my men down to the roof. They didn't know they'd have several nut cases and a ward full of scared nurses to pacify, but it worked out okay. The rest of us jumped. We chuted into the grounds, rendezvoused at the stables and then took the place front and back. Son of a bitch in the butler's pantry pulled a knife on me and slashed my wrist." He lifted his wounded arm. "And some straw-haired psycho carved his initials on Shimon's skull with a .45. Luckily he was only creased. After that, broken windows and a brace of Slepoy stun grenades did the trick. You were out anyway, so you missed the party."

  "What did you do with the prisoners?" Bolan asked.

  "Got the hell out and left them there, once we had you. What else could we do? We were over Swiss territory without official clearance. By local standards that clinic's properly run. Nothing illegal goes on there, and it's not against the law to carry out psychiatric research. There's nothing to link the place with any terror campaign. All the links are buried in the Maginot bunker."

  "We couldn't get the place closed down? Provide evidence that would send Nasruddin, the doctors and the gorillas to jail?"

  "What evidence? You and I know what goes on. But there's no proof a court would accept. They may have employees with jail records, but right now they're officially clean." Davis paused. "But you, old buddy," he said, "are not! You made an illegal entry into their property, assaulted their butler and forced your way into the house. You held up the owner at gunpoint. Armed robbery with violence is the least they could throw at you. Same thing with us. Except we're breaking international law. An armed band crossing the frontier — that's practically an act of war! So far as the Swiss are concerned, if it ever came to trial, we would be the terrorists."

  "Guess you're right at that," Bolan said. "Working alone I forget that two guys with guns make a paramilitary organization and three's an army. If they're on the wrong side."

  The chopper flew on. In the distance, Bolan saw a wooded crest slide past through a gap in the low cloud. "Which way are we headed, Aaron?" he asked.

  "We have a safehouse with a helipad in Luxembourg," Davis said. "From there, we can fix you up with transport to Paris or wherever."

  "Could you drop me off someplace near Strasbourg?" the Executioner asked. "It's on your route, and I have to get there fast to tip somebody off. It's important… I mean life and death."

  "Tell me about it," Davis said.

  Bolan told him about Julie Marco.

  "I'll come with you," the Mossad man offered. "There's a small private field near Molsheim. I'll radio ahead and have our Strasbourg resident meet us with a fast car." He pushed himself upright and walked forward to the Plexiglas bubble enclosing the flight deck.

  * * *

  Julie's apartment was in the cathedral quarter of the old town. It was in a narrow cobblestoned street — a six-floor walk-up in a converted medieval house.

  Bolan rang the bell set in the doorpost and then knocked. There was no reply.

  Together they shouldered open the flimsy door.

  The apartment was surprisingly spacious, with goatskin rugs on a polished pine floor, big-screen television, stereo system and filled bookshelves among items of furniture that had obviously been picked up individually at secondhand stores but chosen and arranged with some taste. Three steps, with a wooden railing on each side, led to the sleeping alcove.

  The rope that had strangled Julie Marco had been passed over an exposed beam and tied to the frame of a heavy iron bed in back of the alcove. During her death struggles, the rope had jerked the bed a foot away from the wall, but her lifeless toes were still six inches off the floor. Deep scratches on her neck showed where she had vainly tried to claw the noose away from her throat.

  Aaron Davis had never seen an expression as forbidding as the one on Bolan's face; it masked the fury seething within him. "It's not your fault, Mack," the Israeli said, averting his gaze from the murdered girl's bulging eyes and protruding tongue. "You didn't know they were wise to her until a couple of hours ago, and this was done yesterday. I've seen it enough times to know. There's nothing you could have done."

  Bolan's eyes were chips of ice. "She was counting on me," he choked. "I failed her. But not one of the people responsible is going to live, I promise you. Not a single damned one."

  31

  "I want a last look at the Maginot dossiers," Mack Bolan told Hal Brognola. "There may be more intel there that could give us a line on their planning, not just on the Baraka hit."

  "Don't you risk another… well, another Baraka programming yourself?" Brognola asked. "They know you've penetrated the place at least once before, and they must have strong suspicions that it was you who wiped out those guards in the farmyard. Won't the place be double-guarded now?"

  "Could be. But if there are no cars, no bikes in the yard, it stands to reason the place is unoccupied inside at least for the moment. It's too far out in the sticks for people to arrive on foot, and no buses pass within miles."

  "And if the guards are outside, like last time?"

  "I'll ignore them. I tunneled my way out at the far end of an unused passageway before. No reason why I couldn't get back in the same way. And a stronger version of that magnetic lock pick should see me past the steel door."

  "Yeah, but…"

  "Look, Hal, the guards will never know I was there. It's unlikely they found my exit tunnel. Nobody goes along that passage beyond the steel door… and the two guys who did know how I escaped, well, they won't be talking."

  Brognola shrugged. "It's your psyche," he said.

  "Hal, in the summer of '86 a man called Alexandre de Marenches, a former chief of the French intelligence services, was questioned about terrorism in a TV interview. Do you know what he said? 'It's only just starting.' That night there was the bloodbath in the hijacked Pan Am Boeing in Karachi. Soon after Muslim extremists were responsible for the massacre at the Istanbul synagogue, and a bomb was found on the Paris subway. These bastards have to be stopped, Hal. And among them are two from the Middle East, one of them with a big religious following."

  Bolan stopped. Brognola knew that his friend wasn't usually a man of many words. But this time Bolan's determination was almost palpable in his fervid outburst. He was breathing heavily. "Any single thing we can find out about them," he said, "anything at all, will help to stop them."

  "Okay," Brognola said. "Okay, Striker. Don't think I'm not with you. But don't say I didn't warn you either."

  The big Fed was right; the Executioner underestimated the opposition.

  He was glancing at the biochemical lab reports and was less than twenty minutes into the office papers when he was surprised by a four-man team — two at the top of the spiral staircase, two blocking the exit to the walkway overlooking the computer room.

  He recognized the two-haired little killer from the clinic. The other three were unknown to him.

  The two Arabs by the door the walkway, one tall, one short, both with swarthy faces and hooked noses, seemed to be on some drug. They exchanged glances of complicity frequently and were having difficulty suppressing fits of giggles. Bolan didn't know it, but these two were the crazed terrorists who had carried out the supermarket slaughter near Brive-la-Gaillard on the road to Limoges.

  The man standing beside the tow-haired kid was tall also — a thin character with a crew cut and pale, expressionless eyes. Nobody could have recognized him because all the passengers and crew of the jetliner he had sent hurtling to its doom over the Alps were dead.

  Bolan, blacksuited, the 93-R and the AutoMag both firmly leathered
, noticed that none of them carried guns. But they were all armed with weighted lengths of rubber hose, and the crew-cut man held a small bamboo blowpipe. The warrior didn't need to be told what that would be used for.

  For an instant he considered making a run for it. He had beaten odds worse than four to one in his life as a fighter. But they had appeared too silently, and they were now too close to leave him room to maneuver.

  Those lead-filled hoses would paralyze his arms before he could draw. The soldier knew that even if he drew on all his unarmed combat expertise, he couldn't take them all. In any case, a single well-aimed puff from the blowpipe would signal the end of the contest.

  A savvy warrior doesn't waste energy when the situation is already hopeless. He conserves it for future use.

  Bolan knew they wouldn't kill or even injure him badly — they needed Baraka, the "stolen" half of Bolan, with all his faculties intact. They would simply make use of this unscheduled capture to take the program one step farther.

  Well, he could make use of it, too.

  He'd asked Beth McMann to provide him with doses of the vitamins and drugs they hoped would neutralize or at least minimize the effects of the stuff Schloesser and Hansen pumped into him.

  They were contained in four separate gelatine capsules, two of them with double, extrahard layers that would dissolve slowly in the stomach and release the contents in measured amounts only after some hours.

  Rather than waste the seconds remaining in a useless display of courage, he would swallow these and see what happened. It would be a helpful trial run; the knowledge he gained could be vital when the time came for the big hit.

  The four hoods were moving in on him.

  They were only a few feet away. Bolan's right hand dived into a pouch clipped to his belt and then flew to his mouth.

  A blackjack thudded with savage force against his forearm, sending pain flaming to his shoulder. But the capsules were in his mouth. He swallowed as the tow-haired punk came in.

  "This is for my pleasure," the kid said. His right arm swung back and then forward. The lead-weighted rubber hose thwacked with terrible force across the lower part of Bolan's belly. As he doubled up with a grunt of agony, the return blow on the backhand caught him a second time on the hip.

  Bolan twisted as his legs buckled. And it was then that the tiny blowpipe dart stung the back of his neck.

  After that there was chaos.

  It wasn't a total blank as it had been each time they'd taken him before. But then Beth's antidotes weren't specifically designed to combat the knockout stuff. It was only when he was back at the Friedekinde clinic and the whirling darkness pricked out with occasional dazzling lights had faded that Bolan regained a blurred awareness of reality. But even then straight lines curved and curious waves of color washed between solid objects each time the doctors, sometimes dwarflike and sometimes giant, approached him with a drink or a syringe.

  He knew he was taken south in an ambulance. He knew that in a house high above the harbor he sat for a whole day in a chair talking and being talked to. There was a map and an architect's model of the principality.

  He knew that, but Baraka knew much more. Baraka was digesting information, evaluating it, making and rejecting decisions. And it was only from time to time that Bolan and Baraka connected, became a single entity.

  Certainly it must have been Baraka who asked to be taken for a walk around the port and the casino quarter. Parts of that filtered through to Bolan: sunlight warm on his farm, a group of nuns against tropical shrubbery, a boatman with a bright green face and torso rowing across the chocolate sea.

  Another time, in another life, there were stairs, flights and flights of stairs… and companions eager to stop him making too much noise.

  At some point Baraka made a decision. He made up… his mind? Or was it Mack Bolan's mind, only Bolan didn't know?

  Then, quite normally, there he was in the late-afternoon sunshine, talking to his friends Max Nasruddin and the Marksman.

  "That time in Paris," he said with a smile at the Marksman, "when I was trying to get across the vacant lot and you were firing at me, were you missing deliberately, or was I just lucky — or too difficult a target?"

  "Difficult!" The Marksman's saturnine, cadaverous face creased into an expression of disbelief. "What do you think? You think I could have missed, in that light, at that range, with that gun, if I'd really wanted to take you? Don't make me laugh. My job was to make you run… and convince that punk Graziano that I was really trying."

  "And convince me that Graziano was really trying so I'd get mad at him?"

  "That and the bikers. We never expected them to make it," Nasruddin said genially. He put an arm around Bolan/Baraka's shoulders. "Hell, those kids were expendable. The point was to get you to the Las Vegas."

  Later Bolan remembered the whole exchange — and recalled with incredulity his own bland acceptance of the parameters involved. But of the twenty-four hours between the conversation with the Marksman and Nasruddin and his awakening in a hotel room in Dijon, central France, he retained only the haziest, unreal recollection.

  * * *

  "What I can't understand," Aaron Davis said, "is why you don't just alert the President. Change the date and the venue. Call off the gala altogether. Or simply keep Bolan under lock and key until the presidential visit is over."

  "You don't understand, Aaron." Hal Brognola had decided — as he often did in moments of extreme stress — to quit smoking. He was sucking noisily at an unlit cigar. "Bolan is imprinted… he's programmed to kill the President…and the exact mechanics of the hit are left to him. That's why they need a guy with his skills. If he didn't make it this time, he'd try again, as soon as the plotters briefed him — or his pseudoself that they call Baraka — with details of another time, another place.

  "Naturally we have to warn the President," the Fed continued. "Whether or not he goes through with his own program as scheduled is up to him. But like I say, even if this particular hit is averted, even if we jailed Striker for the duration, the guy would still be at risk."

  "Which guy?"

  "Both of them." With a grimace of distaste, Brognola laid the soggy cigar down in an empty ashtray. They were in a private suite overlooking the ocean in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. "What you have here is a situation in which one of the world's most talented infiltration specialists is in a position where, unknown to himself, he can be used as a tool by a group of the world's most unscrupulous men."

  He reached automatically for a fresh cigar, but checked his hand just in time. He said, "Anytime in the future that they can slug him or get close enough to dope his drink or shoot a sleep dart into his neck — and, hell, we can't keep him under wraps forever — they can use his military know-how any evil way they want. That's what I mean — he'd remain at risk as a potential assassin. So would the President."

  "Until?"

  "Until this goddamn imprintation has been neutralized."

  The Mossad man nodded. "And so?"

  "So before he's safe — before anyone's safe — this whole setup has to be smashed. Bolan's exposed most of the ringleaders, but we still have no name for the top man."

  "What do you know about him?"

  "That he's apparently American, and the others call him Al," Brognola said disgustedly.

  "That's all?"

  "That's all. If there's anything else, nobody told me. In any case, exposing the bastards isn't having proof. We don't have anything hard against a single one of them, except possibly Nasruddin, and that's only Bolan's word against his. So, if The Man agrees, we figured the best thing is to let Striker keep on playing along, to hide the fact that he's wise to the target, to allow himself to be shot full of dope once more… but to take the pharmaceutical precautions worked out by Toledo and Beth McMann, and hope to hell he comes out on top."

  Aaron Davis shook his head. "Good luck!" he said.

  At that moment, unknown to Brognola and Davis, the Executioner w
as less than two hundred yards away from them, talking to Nasruddin and the Marksman.

  * * *

  "It was a kaleidoscope, a nightmare fantasy," Bolan told Brognola. "It was like a time-exposed still of Sunset Boulevard at night, but with all those long streaks of automobile headlights and rear lights weaving like snakes among the red, blue and green neon."

  They were back in Paris. The Fed figured that if they were seen together in Monte Carlo — even if Bolan as himself were to go there — it could be a tip-off that he had tumbled to the hit for which Baraka had been programmed.

  "But there's one thing I don't get, Hal," Bolan said. "I left that Dijon hotel at three o'clock in the morning. I took an all-night coach to Paris. Like one of our Greyhounds. I was the only passenger until the coach stopped at Chaumont, and then only a priest got on, with an old peasant couple on their way to the Paris fruit market. No car and no bike followed that coach, and I'd stake my reputation nobody saw me drop off at the terminus. It was still dark and the place was deserted. I took a cab to a small hotel in the northwest. That wasn't followed either. And yet look…"

  He moved to the window of the embassy interview room and drew a net curtain one inch aside. Brognola looked over his shoulder. A tow-haired youth with a jutting brow was leaning against the wall beside a drugstore across the street, pretending to read a newspaper. "One of them?" the Fed asked.

  Bolan nodded. "And there's a Peugeot parked ninety yards away on this side, with another one behind the wheel. A lanky guy with a crew cut. How the hell could they know I was here?"

  "The priest?"

  "He got out at Troyes. Okay, they knew about the Dijon hotel because they dumped me there. But even if they watched it all night, they couldn't have tailed that coach to Paris, and then followed me to my hotel, without my noticing. Hell, I was on the lookout for tails. I swear nobody followed me."