Soviet Specter

by Don Pendleton

  The hit man. At some point during the firefight, he had crossed through the office, seen the helpless man and shot him.

  The Executioner didn’t hesitate. Striding quickly to the desk, he began ripping the drawers open and dumping the contents. Out of the middle drawer fell a large green canvas-backed ledger book. The bottom drawer on the left was locked and, with no time or reason to look for a key, Bolan aimed the Beretta at the key hole, flipped the selector to semiauto and pulled the trigger. Inside he found what he’d been looking for. A small black address book.

  By now the sirens had reached the front of the gallery. They still wailed away outside, and the Executioner could hear excited voices already inside the building. Flashlight beams were streaming down the main hall toward him.

  Bolan pocketed both the ledger and address book and hurried to the door in the back wall. It opened easily, and he stepped through into a dark storage area and closed it quietly behind him. A second later, the voices reached the office.

  “Inspector Robins, you’d better get in here and look at this.”

  Feeling his way through the darkness, Bolan located another door, which had to lead out of the building. But the knob wouldn’t turn, and he felt along the frame until he came to the reason why. A double dead bolt lock secured the rear of the premises. It had to be opened with a key from inside, as well as out.

  The Beretta was still in his hand, and Bolan switched it to burst mode. A trio of near silent 9 mm rounds coughed from the gun but made loud clanging noises as they hit the steel lock and door.

  “What was that?” asked a voice in the office.

  “Our boys breaking down the back, I would imagine,” said the officer who had spoken earlier. “I’ll go let them in.”

  Bolan tried the door again. It had loosened but still held. It took another trio of rounds to spring it open.

  As it did, the door into the office opened.

  Bolan didn’t know whether it was Inspector Robins or the man who had called him from the hallway, but the officer who saw the Executioner froze in shock, giving Bolan time to slide through the door, sprint down the alley and disappear into the night.

  9

  Luiza Polyakova and Johnny Seven had already made it back to Le Meridien Piccadilly, found the first-aid supplies in Bolan’s luggage and dressed the shallow wound on the DEA agent’s upper leg when Bolan arrived. Seven lay on one of the beds wearing his new corduroy pants. Only a slight bulge was visible above the bandage.

  Polyakova was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. As the Executioner walked past he saw her lift a bottle of mouthwash to her lips. As gargling sounds issued forth into the bedroom, Bolan looked over at the DEA man curiously.

  “That’s the third time with the Listerine,” Seven whispered. “The son of a bitch kissed her. Can you believe that?”

  Bolan shook his head. Again his suspicion that there was some strange psychosexual thing going on in the brain of the hit man was confirmed. He didn’t know exactly what it was but he knew the man’s ultimate goal for Polyakova went far beyond a forced kiss.

  The television was on, and the program had been interrupted by the breaking news of the shoot-out at the Smith-Williams art gallery. “Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard are searching for a tall man—” the newscaster said. She then went on to give a moderately accurate description of the Executioner. Bolan knew it had to have come from the brief glimpse the SO19 officer had gotten of him when he’d come face to face with Bolan in the storeroom.

  The Russian came out of the bathroom and sat on the bed next to Seven. Her emerald eyes were as lovely as ever, but now they blazed with pure fury. Bolan pulled a chair away from the desk and dropped onto it backward, resting his crossed arms across the backrest. “We haven’t had a chance to talk,” he said, looking at the woman. “What did you do to make him jerk like he did when I came through the door?”

  Her purse was on the floor by the bed. She reached into it and pulled out the familiar nail file. “In the eye,” she said, jabbing the file into the air. “A trick my father taught me when I was very young and there was a rapist loose in Moscow.”

  The soldier looked at the small blade. She had wiped it off, but traces of blood could still be seen. He wondered if the man had lost the sight in that eye. Maybe. Maybe not. But in any case, he was still alive and that presented a problem.

  “You heard him speak,” the Executioner said. “He wasn’t Russian.”

  Polyakova shook her head. “Chechen,” she answered without hesitation.

  Bolan nodded. Whether he had one eye left or two, the Executioner didn’t get the feeling the Chechen was the sort who would give up. Eventually he and the hit man would meet again.

  Bolan pulled the address book and ledger out of his pockets. “I didn’t get the names I needed from Smith-Williams,” he said. “When I went back, he was dead.”

  “I noticed he wasn’t along for the ride,” Seven responded.

  Bolan held the books in his hand. “Our best shot now is to go through these and look for anything suspicious. I’ll take the ledger and mark all the paintings that have come into the gallery from Russia. Then I’ll look for sales going out on the same day or the day after. He may well have coded all this in some way, in which case I’ll have to get it to my people back home and have them go over it.”

  “Your people being the Department of Justice, of course,” Seven said with a straight face.

  Bolan couldn’t tell either of them who “his people” really were. But he saw no reason to lie to them at this point, either. “Partially,” he said. He flipped the address book across the bed so it landed in the DEA agent’s lap. “Go through that and see if you can find anything of interest.”

  Seven leaned forward and opened the book.

  Polyakova started to work on her nails, then looked at the file and recoiled slightly in disgust. “I believe I’ll get a new one,” she said, and dropped it in the trash next to the bed.

  Bolan turned around in the chair, placed the ledger on the desk, opened it and turned on the lamp.

  Fifteen minutes later, he had marked sixteen shipments of various artworks that had come in from Moscow within the past twelve months. He was no art expert but it seemed like an unusually large amount of business from any one city.

  Polyakova, who was an expert, agreed. She moved in to stand behind him and look over his shoulder. Bolan did his best to ignore the enticing scent of her perfume while she said, “Even for a gallery the size of the Smith-Williams, it is too much.”

  Bolan moved on to the section where the sales were recorded. Paintings and other works had gone out of the Smith-Williams gallery on the same day as all of the imports except one. But there had been a large sale the day after, he noted. The Executioner frowned at the tiny numbers in the boxes. Next to each sale there were letters that might or might not have been initials. The ledger was undoubtedly cross-referenced with other files containing invoices and other information about the buyers. Those files had probably been in the office. He’d had no time to look, and the opportunity was gone now—SO19 would have the gallery sealed off tight while they went about investigating the small war that had gone on inside.

  Bolan continued to study the ledger, picking up a pen and piece of scratch paper from the desktop. As he went back and forth from ledger to scratch pad recording dates and initials, a pattern gradually began to take shape. Ten of the sales on the same day as the shipments had gone to someone corresponding to the letters L and N. Were they the buyer’s initials? He looked up at Polyakova, who still stood behind him. “The letters L and N mean anything to you?” he asked.

  The beautiful Russian woman shook her head. She had been following what he was doing as he worked. “No,” she said. “And any dealer or collector who could afford such large purchases, I would know of them. They would be prominent in the art world.”

  A fervor began to grow slowly in the Executioner’s soul. He turned in the chair to face Johnny Seven. “Look und
er N,” he said. “And see if there’s a first name that starts with an L.”

  The DEA man flipped through the book, squinting at the page once he’d found it. “Bingo,” he said. “Three of them.”

  Bolan’s excitement wavered slightly. He had feared there would be none, but three created its own problems. He had to figure out which one, if any, was the “Ontomanov” of London. That would take time, and each second’s delay meant another second in which Gregor and the man in Moscow might figure out what he was actually up to. If that happened, Polyakova’s family was as good as dead.

  “Read them to me.”

  “Lawrence Niles,” Seven said. “Then—”

  Bolan wanted to take it one step at a time. “You have an address for Niles?”

  “Yeah. Kensington,” the DEA agent replied. “But before we go into all that, I think I can save us some time. The second name is Sir Lambert Neal. But the third one is Leonid Navrozoz.”

  The Executioner smiled. Three names but only one was Russian. It was the logical place to start. “You’re earning your keep, Johnny,” he said. “Where does Navrozoz live?”

  “No address,” the DEA agent answered. “But there’s a phone number.”

  Bolan looked to Polyakova. “You’ve been a great actress so far,” he said. “Want to try it one more time?” When she nodded, he walked to the phone next to Seven on the bed. “Call this Leonid Navrozoz. Tell him it’s an emergency. You brought a load of paintings in from Moscow but there was trouble at the gallery tonight.” He hooked a thumb at the TV. “He should already know about that from the news. Tell this Navrozoz you’ve still got the paintings and the heroin but you’re scared and you want to get rid of them.”

  The woman frowned. “But won’t there be a regular man who brings the shipments into London?” she asked. “Like Rabashka did in New York?”

  “Say you were his girlfriend. He got killed at the gallery.”

  Luiza still looked worried. “But this Navrozoz,” she said. “If they are operating the same way here as they did with me in New York, he will have an emergency number to call. If he has called it already, or if he calls to check after I talk to him—”

  Bolan held up his hand to silence her. “It’s not a perfect plan, Luiza. It’s got some potential flaws in it but it’s all we’ve got. I’m counting on your native command of the Russian language, and the confusion at the gallery, to throw him off stride.” He shrugged. “And if it doesn’t work, we haven’t lost anything.”

  Polyakova nodded. “I will try it,” she said.

  Seven still had the address book open. He rolled onto his side, lifted the receiver, dialed the number, then handed the phone to Polyakova. A second later her eyebrows lowered and she held the phone up so the soldier could hear.

  A prerecorded voice was explaining that the number they’d just called was not a working number.

  The DEA man tried again with the same result.

  Bolan took the address book from him and stared at it. Something was wrong. According to the ledger, L.N. had purchased several paintings within the past week. Was the phone number in some kind of code? If so, he suspected it would be simple. Taking the receiver from Seven, he tapped the cutoff button, then called the front desk. “Can you tell me what area the prefix 765 corresponds to?” he asked the woman who answered.

  “One moment, sir,” she said. When she came back on the line, she said, “Is that in London, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, we have no such prefix in the London area.”

  The Executioner frowned. “How about 567?” he asked, reversing the order.

  It took only a second for the woman to reply, “Oh, yes, sir. That’s Hyde Park.”

  Bolan smiled as he hung up. He had a hunch, and his gut told him to play it. Handing the receiver to Polyakova again, he tapped the entire phone number in backward.

  The woman nodded as the line connected and began to ring. A moment later, Luiza Polyakova began speaking excitedly in Russian.

  Seven looked puzzled but Bolan followed the conversation. The Russian woman hung up a few minutes later. For Seven’s benefit, she said, “He’s coming here.”

  The DEA man laughed. “Well, you can’t beat curb service.” He looked at Bolan. “What do we do when he gets here?”

  “We get the name of whoever it is who actually brings the shipments in from Moscow.”

  “Then we go to Moscow?” Seven asked.

  “It looks that way,” the Executioner replied. He lifted the phone. He had one more call to make—to Stony Man Farm. Jack Grimaldi had taken the members of Stony Man’s Phoenix Force to Madrid but he could be back in London easily by the time they needed him. There was no longer any reason to get bogged down flying commercial airlines. And he would need a pilot unafraid to take chances. That was Grimaldi.

  As he dialed the number, Bolan looked at Polyakova and Seven. He saw no reason to remind them that when they had finished in Russia it would still not be over. There was still Gregor back in the U.S.

  Not to mention the Chechen hit man.

  “THIS IS TERRIBLE,” Leonid Navrozoz told Polyakova in Russian as soon as she opened the door. “Did you know that in addition to Stavislav, Raymond Smith-Williams is dead?”

  Polyakova led him past the closed bathroom door to the chairs around the small table in front of the bed. “Sit down,” she said.

  “I will sit,” Navrozoz replied, brushing the thick brown hair off his forehead. “But we must hurry. The police will soon know there is more involved here than art, and they will come looking for you and the paintings.” He paused a second, then said, “What did you say your name was? And you were Stavislav’s wife? Girlfriend?”

  From his vantage spot beneath the bed, Bolan watched the conversation take place. He had tugged the bedspread and sheets down almost to the floor, and now peered out from under them. Polyakova had done a great job on the phone, convincing Navrozoz that they were in a tremendously confusing emergency in which the paintings—and particularly the heroin stashed inside them—would be confiscated by police in the next few hours if something wasn’t done. She had even manipulated him into letting it slip that the man who accompanied the shipments from Moscow was named Stavislav.

  Bolan had hidden beneath the bed, with Seven in the bathroom, and ordered Polyakova to continue her act, learning as much more as she could the easy way before they appeared on the scene.

  “He was my fiancé,” she said, improvising. “And now he is dead.” She fell forward, face in hands, and sobbed softly.

  Navrozoz appeared to be a man who knew when to show sympathy even if his face didn’t reflect any real feeling of it. “I am sorry,” he said. “And I feel your pain. Where did you say the paintings are at the moment?”

  The woman looked up from her hands, diverting him from the subject. “I will take you there in a moment,” she said. “But first you must tell me who it was who attacked the gallery.”

  Navrozoz sat back in his chair and slapped his chest. “How would I know?” he asked.

  “He came posing as a friend,” Polyakova stated. “And I even spoke to him briefly before he began to shoot everyone.” Now, she leaned forward, reached out and touched Navrozoz on the forearm. The Russian looked half-hypnotized by her intense magnetism as she said, “He was a big scary-looking man. He wore a long black trench coat and spoke Russian. But with an accent.”

  From beneath the bed, Bolan saw Navrozoz stiffen. “What kind of accent?” he asked anxiously.

  “Chechen.”

  Navrozoz’s face turned so white it was hard to distinguish it from the bed sheets in front of the Executioner’s face. “Akhmatov,” he breathed almost too low for Bolan to hear. “Movlid Akhmatov.” He lifted his right hand and crossed himself. “The man is the devil himself,” he said. “They even say he is a cannibal. They say he tortures women, then kills them and—” The man stopped talking, as if it upset him too much to go on.

  There was other infor
mation the Executioner needed from Navrozoz, if the man had it. Stavislav’s last name. The identities of Gregor and the head man in Moscow, and anything else he knew about the three men. But he saw no way Polyakova could wheedle these things out of Navrozoz without giving herself away, and that meant there was no reason to carry on the ruse any longer.

  The Beretta had been in his hand all along, and now Bolan rolled from under the bed and up to his feet, pressing the sound suppressor against the side of Navrozoz’s head. The man practically jumped out of his chair, then turned to face the Executioner.

  Bolan rested the suppressor on the bridge of his nose. “Don’t move,” he ordered. Quickly he shook the man down, finding a Vektor CP-1, two extra magazines, and a short braided leather blackjack. Seven had come in from the bathroom by then, and the Executioner handed the weapons to the DEA man.

  “What is going on?” Navrozoz managed to squeak out of a throat that had all but closed off.

  “You’re going to take us to Stavislav,” the Executioner said. “What’s his last name?”

  Both courage and loyalty come in varying degrees, even among criminals. Some have a lot, others have none. Leonid Navrozoz fell into the latter category. “Nemets,” he said without hesitation. “Stavislav Nemets.”

  “Where was last time you talked to him?” Bolan demanded, grinding the sound-suppressor a little harder into the Russian’s forehead.

  “Moscow,” Navrozoz replied. “He was due in with a shipment tomorrow morning, which is why this incident confused me.” He looked at Polyakova for a moment, then said, “I had supposed that since he had brought this woman with him, for some reason he had come to London a day early. Before the paintings arrived.”

  “There’s a shipment due tomorrow?” Bolan asked.

  The Russian nodded, then looked at his watch. “In only a few hours now.”

  The Executioner stepped back but kept the Beretta on the man. Moscow to London wasn’t a short trip, but it wasn’t a long one, either. “Watch him for me, Johnny,” he told the DEA man, then walked to the phone. Five minutes later, Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman had hacked into the computers at all the cargo airports in Moscow and learned that no flights had left for London since the shooting at the gallery had occurred. Nemets, the paintings and the heroin had to have left before it happened.