Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

But from now on, no way.

  He raised the chin strap, removed the helmet and unlocked the chain from his wrist. Then he stripped off the uniform, belt and holster and stuffed them beneath the wooden platform. Wearing only his blacksuit, he turned the crank that raised the shutter blanking off the loading bay. It was well greased and moved silently. When the shutter was eighteen inches off the pavement, he let go of the crank and ducked beneath into the open air.

  He was in an alley that led from the loading bay to the street… and the alley ended at a wall that enclosed a yard in back of the building next to the Sporting Club. Bolan seized the briefcase, leaped for the top of the wall and hauled himself over.

  He dropped on the far side between a stack of empty crates and a row of trash cans. The air was pungent with the odor of overripe fruit, but it was more agreeable than the yard behind Las Vegas Nights. There was a restaurant in the block.

  He drew a bunch of skeleton keys from the pouch clipped to his belt, unlocked a door and went into the building. From here on in it was enemy territory.

  It was necessary to keep that in the forefront of his mind. The enemy… the enemy… the enemy. He had to be destroyed.

  On the inner side of the door there was a storeroom, with stairs that led down to a basement housing the laundry and a heating unit. Both were unoccupied.

  Bolan set down the document case, thumbed out six digits on the roller-type combination lock and opened the lid.

  Inside was his Beretta, the shoulder rig and a Japanese Arisaka Type 99 rifle that was split into three sections, together with his favorite Bausch & Lomb Balvar sniperscope.

  He shrugged into the harness, checked and holstered the Beretta and then started to assemble the rifle. He screwed the barrel into the breech mechanism, snapped the small of the butt onto the hinged portion of the stock and locked them together, then clipped the optical sight in place above the breech.

  The gun was equipped with a webbing sling, and the five-shot magazine was loaded with old-type .303 caliber rounds. The slugs in front of the brass cartridge cases were nickel-jacketed.

  Bolan slung the rifle across his back. He opened a door on the far side of the storeroom and edged cautiously into the lobby beyond.

  Marble floor; multiple glass doors opening onto the wide private parking lot in front of the Sporting Club and a view of the tropical gardens; an antique elevator with a paneled mahogany car and an open shaft fenced in with a close-mesh grille.

  The door of a glassed-in concierge's lodge by the entrance opened. An old man in a gray uniform came out. "Who are you?" he demanded. "What are you doing here? How did you get into that storeroom? You can't bring a gun…"

  The words were choked off by a yelp of pain. Bolan hit the old janitor with the edge of a stiffened palm behind the neck. He crumpled, but the warrior caught him before he fell and carried him back into the lodge.

  He found cleaning materials in a closet. He ripped cloth into strips, bound and gagged the old man, pulled a shutter down over the window and left the small office, locking the door behind him. He tossed the key through the accordion-type gate at the foot of the elevator shaft and pressed the button to call the car.

  After it rocked to a halt behind the gate, he shoved the grille aside, pushed through the double doors and fingered the top button on the control panel.

  The doors swung shut behind him, and the grille clanged across to close off the shaft. Bolan turned away from the doors.

  There were mirrors on all three of the car's paneled walls. It was then, as the elevator jerked into movement and whined upward, that the struggle inside Bolan's head began.

  He had to open the inspection hatch of the car. That was part of the plan. It was too high for him to reach on tiptoe. That had been allowed for. He unslung the rifle, reversed and jabbed the butt upward against the small trapdoor. The door sprang open and flipped over, leaving an opening wide enough for a man to climb through.

  Or rather four openings wide enough for four men.

  Lowering and reslinging the gun, the man in the elevator was aware of four identical black figures performing the same movements.

  But not thinking the same thoughts.

  It was the first time since he'd passed the door of the jewelry boutique that Mack Bolan the Executioner had invaded the implanted consciousness of Baraka the killer. But now, with the proliferation of image and the duality of personality, there came the added trauma of identity — which of those mentalities belonged to which image?

  Crazy! Mack Bolan thought.

  Yeah, crazy. There was only one real body, only one Bolan, only one brain that was being artificially split. But the images multiplied. His vision blurred; now he saw eight. The floor of the car had begun to rotate. Panic seized him. He had to get out.

  That was part of Baraka's plan — getting out. Leaping up to grasp the edge of the inspection hatch, he dragged himself through the opening and up onto the roof. He closed the hatch. So far, so good. Now all he had to do was wait until the car stopped on the top floor.

  The car stopped at the sixth.

  A gate slid back, doors opened and shut, the gate closed. The car trembled as extra weight depressed the floor. The elevator began to sink.

  The man crouched behind the cables rising from the roof cursed. Someone on the sixth floor must have called it an instant before he'd stabbed the button; the mechanism was overriding his own command.

  On greased hawsers, the huge counterweight slid past him and up into the darkness. The car stopped at street level.

  He heard footsteps receding on the marble floor. A man's voice said, "That damned concierge is out again! How many times do I…?"

  Now once more he must open the hatch and drop down inside to redirect the elevator to the top story.

  As he raised the trap, the car shuddered into motion. For the second time he swore silently. Hunched there on the roof, he would be visible to anyone, on any floor, who happened to glance through the mesh surrounding the shaft as the elevator rose.

  This time it stopped on the eighth floor. And there was someone standing back from the gate, staring at the roof — a dark-skinned man with a mustache, wearing an elegant Savile Row suit. He was holding a yellow rosebud in one hand.

  The man on the roof of the car recognized him.

  Farid Gamal Mokhaddem, director of the Friedekinde Foundation, a cynical manipulator of his Muslim coreligionists, with enormous interests in oil and armaments. "What the hell are you doing here?" Bolan said.

  "You know what I am doing here, Baraka," Mokhaddem said. "My office suite is on this floor. You were here last week. How else do you imagine you got to know the geography of this block?"

  "What do you want?"

  "At the moment nothing." Mokhaddem wore an Old Etonian necktie, but his English was heavily overlaid with the gutturals of the Middle East. "Just checking that so far your plan works out." He opened gate and doors, leaning into the car to press a button. "You have two more floors to go. But don't forget — if you fail or try to cross us, we shall be waiting for you on the way down."

  As Bolan was carried out of sight, he saw that the Arab was threading the stem of the rose through his buttonhole.

  When the car reached the top of the shaft, he stepped onto a short, steel-runged ladder attached to the side of the shaft. Above this was a door, and on the other side of the door the roof of the building.

  Bolan stepped out into the sunshine.

  The roof was flat, asphalted, studded with television antennae, vents from the heating unit, occasional chimneys. Across treetops stirring in a warm breeze he could see the casino.

  He unbuckled his shoulder rig and left it, together with the Beretta, behind a trumpet-shaped ventilator from the mouth of which drifted a wisp of steam and the smell of cooking. Where he was going, the extra gun would be an encumbrance.

  His target was on the far side of the roof, where an air duct connected to the air-conditioning installation crossed the asphalt and then sna
ked up over the wall of the adjoining building, which was two stories higher.

  The duct was rectangular, made of sheet metal and riveted every few feet to brackets set in the roof. Near the housing from which it emerged, a fine-mesh steel grating that was thirty inches wide and eighteen high covered an opening in the side of the duct. The frame of this grille, too, was riveted to the metal; there was no way of removing it short of using a blowtorch.

  But the wires of the mesh, each one-eighth of an inch thick, were set at half-inch intervals around the frame.

  Bolan intended to get inside that duct. He produced a pair of wire cutters. To open the mesh grille, so that he could bend the whole thing inward, he would need to sever a hundred and thirty-two separate wire strands.

  He started to clip. It took a long time, and before he was halfway through, the muscles of his right hand were on fire.

  It was during this period that the two sets of drugs within him started warring for ascendancy. He had no idea if it had happened before when he'd been playing Baraka, but he began to hallucinate.

  The sky hardened into a glittering constellation of crystals; buildings wavered, soft as caramels, and started to melt; a sensation of extreme warmth washed over him as if he were deep within a coral sea. Through air as thick as molasses, his arms, hands, fingers continued their task.

  The last wire parted. Lying prone, he pushed with all his strength. The grille bent at the top, slanted inward and folded toward the top of the duct.

  With the .303 Arisaka slung across his back, he crawled through the hole into the ventilation conduit.

  Its rectangular section was the same size as the grille: thirty inches wide by eighteen high. This gave him width but not too much height, especially with the gun barrel between his shoulders — there was a hollow boom that seemed to him to echo forever each time the muzzle knocked against the top of the duct. When he had progressed ten painful yards, he rolled to one side and managed to withdraw his arm from the sling.

  After that, he held the weapon in his left hand, advancing slowly with his weight supported by both forearms and one drawn-up knee. The passage was too shallow for a proper elbow-and-knee crawl.

  He had a long way to go. Dimly lit every fifty feet by a grating similar to the one he had forced, the conduit stretched interminably ahead. The really difficult part, he knew, would come when he hit the slope, where the duct climbed up to and over the parapet of the neighboring building, angling across the Sporting Club roof to feed or — he was not sure which — extract air from the auditorium.

  For the moment it was a question of stifling the waves of nausea, of fighting to ignore the bands of livid color spiraling toward him and twisting underneath his eyelids when he forced his way grimly onward with his eyes squeezed shut.

  From time to time the phantasmagoric quality of his journey was emphasized by a far-off roar of machinery and a hot wind that roared past him, sucking in air through the gratings, blowing his hair across his eyes and drying the sweat-soaked material of his blacksuit where it clung to his back and thighs.

  He was tunneling his way out of a prison camp — the roof props ahead were breaking up and he would be buried alive. He was robbing a bank a mile beneath the ocean. He was huddling beneath the covers, plunging headfirst to the foot of the bed because he was scared of tigers and it was hours before he could get up and go to school.

  And all the time, incessantly in harmony with each forward shuffle, the refrain hammered on with the pumping of his heart — a great voice shouting, The enemy… kill the enemy… kill the enemy… kill…

  He could see the face of the enemy very clearly.

  It was in front of him all the years it took him to coax his body up the slope, free hand scrabbling, the weight dragging him back down the smooth slant of metal and only the ridged rubber soles of his combat boots, digging in, to stop him sliding back. It was only because the rifle, more than forty inches long, was considerably wider than the conduit that he was finally able, by wedging it slantwise across, to drag himself foot by foot up the last section of the grade.

  After that, apart from the risk of making a telltale noise, it was an easy ride until he reached the grating, above the proscenium arch, that looked out over the auditorium.

  That one had to be removed altogether — one hundred and ninety-two separate snaps of the cutters and the hand burning again.

  When it was done, he lifted the grille carefully out of the frame and set it down on the floor of the duct where it curved away around the auditorium. He climbed out through the opening.

  A catwalk ran along behind the proscenium arch. He stepped down onto it.

  Above his head rose the loft, that tall, hidden part of the theater where backdrops were stored until they had to be flown as decor for opera or ballet on the stage far below.

  At the far end of the narrow gangway, a tiny red pilot light glowed among the controls on the lighting technicians' gantry. They wouldn't be used tonight: the reception would be a lights-up occasion. Bolan nevertheless stole to the other extremity of the catwalk and made himself comfortable between the wall and a huge spotlight.

  Apart from a dim blue illumination filtering through from the wings on each side, both stage and auditorium were in darkness: the technicians, the maintenance men, and the security personnel wouldn't materialize until it was time for the festivities at the end of the afternoon.

  Bolan leaned the Arisaka against the wall and squatted with his arms wrapped around his knees. Somewhere in the blackness of the grid above him, a piece of scenery creaked on its ropes. All he had to do now was wait.

  * * *

  Hal Brognola was angry. "What the hell do you mean, you lost touch with him?" he raged. "When you replaced that bug in his gun, you positioned another, didn't you, under the screw on the other side?"

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Brognola," the electronics expert replied. "On a different frequency, like you said. With a three-mile pickup."

  "And Bolan knew nothing about it?"

  The man shook his head. "No way, sir."

  Brognola ran his hands through his hair. It was his job to cover every angle: outside of his loyalty to the Executioner there was his loyalty to his country and the man chosen to direct it. It had been a hell of a thing anyway, the President and his advisers allowing this thing to go through. And now one of the Fed's lines of communication appeared to be blocked.

  He stared at the twenty-six monitors that had been put at his disposal in the Monaco secret police HQ. "You're certain it was him the camera picked up on the Quai Albert Premier this afternoon, near the jetty where the President will land?"

  "No doubt about it, sir," the expert confirmed. "He was disguised as a member of the palace guard, but there was the height, and the eyes… and anyway the bug gave us a fix."

  "And then?"

  "The trackers monitoring the bug had him pass the beach and continue up the hill — where he was picked up again by the camera above the Avenue d'Ostende underpass, and once more at the Beaux Arts-Princesse Alice intersection. He was carrying a black document case chained to his wrist."

  "And your bugmen then tracked him across the Beaumarchais Square to the post office, right?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "But now you're telling me he never came out of there?"

  "He's appeared on no screen since. I'll swear to that, Mr. Brognola. And the bug is still transmitting — but from a fixed location. We lost movement on it twenty minutes after he went into the building. The operatives monitoring the frequency — they're parked on the far side of the square — report a steady bleep that neither swells nor fades. No more than one hundred yards from where they are."

  Brognola frowned. "And that block's pretty close to the back of the Sporting Club. He must still be in there someplace."

  He stared at the street scenes on the monitors. There was a festive air in the streets. Traffic was still heavy. A crowd had gathered around the barriers railing off the awning above the presidential landing stage
.

  "I'd give a lot to know what's in that damned document case," Brognola said savagely. "How do you read this no-movement bleep from the bug?"

  "There was a lot of movement within a small area, sir, just after he went in, but our guys had been told to hold off if there was any risk of them being seen. After that, the bug was static. The way I read it, sir, he dumped the Beretta and the harness and went on without it."

  "What would he do that for? He's never without that gun," Brognola growled. "The sharpshooters are all ready to take up their posts inside the auditorium?"

  "Two hours before the festivities start, sir."

  "Okay." Brognola sighed. "You better alert the local authorities. Check with the police captain and tell him we'll have to go in there, track down that bug and keep a watching brief."

  * * *

  For Mack Bolan there was no longer any time, any place, not even any identity: there was only flow — the dancing kaleidoscopes of color that buoyed him up above the glowing coils and endless vibrating circles in his mind.

  Wading through the tide, he tried desperately to reach the shore. But the flow slowed, solidifying, turning to jelly that clung to his arms and legs. Fernlike arabesques of brightness proliferated behind his eyes. The designs were as neat and geometric as the wiring patterns on a computer.

  A computer? Now his mind was diamond-sharp, crystal clear. The mind was a computer, billions of neurons programmed only to make a limited number of connections. The drugs — he knew very well that drugs were affecting him, helping him to see more clearly — were consciousness-expanding. They opened his computer mind to newer, more varied and exciting programs.

  The world around him was infinitely more complex than he had imagined. The jelly before his eyes separated and, to prove the point, the spotlight, the catwalk, the auditorium, the whole universe cracked apart into vivid globules that carried him away to the brilliance beyond the frozen waves. He was at one with the atoms that were the essential constituent of matter; he was an electron, an electric charge, the nucleus at the center of it all.