Dead Man's Tale

by Don Pendleton

  6

  It was three minutes to ten, and the sun was high in a cloudless sky before conditions were right for the Executioner to act.

  He had walked a couple of miles along the foot of the embankment that carried the expressway when he saw the white "P" on a blue rectangle that signaled a rest area one thousand meters ahead. Then, after he'd made it up the bank to the parking lot to wait for a ride, everything went wrong.

  Nobody pulled off the road for two hours. The early-morning drivers were commuters with no time to spare; the truckers had too recently stopped for coffee, or were too eager to make the city before the rush hour traffic fouled up the streets.

  After that, a succession of cars, panel trucks and semis drew up, waited and pulled away again. But they stopped several at a time, or the cars had passengers, or the driver didn't get out. It did not work out the way Bolan wanted it.

  He lay concealed in the long grass, sweating. His jacket had been left behind on top of the wall that surrounded Latta's property, and at first, in the chill air of dawn, he had missed it. Now with the heat of the midmorning sun beating on his back, he wished he'd left his shirt as well. Ears numbed by the continuous roar of traffic on the expressway, he squinted his eyes against the glare and gazed over the twin ribbons of concrete at a landscape of small fields and trees misted with spring green.

  He'd never heard of Couette or Houdemelle, but he knew that Luxembourg city and Liege were about eighty miles apart. If he was between them he had to be near the forests of the Ardennes. And when alone in a foreign country, with no money, no ID, no weapons and no clothes except those he was wearing, what he needed was a city.

  A city from which he could somehow make a panic call home.

  Which was nearer, Luxembourg or Liege?

  Did it matter? The rest area was on the northbound lane of the expressway; he'd have to go that way when he was able to commandeer a vehicle, which was what he had to do next.

  But it wasn't going to be easy. There was nothing in the pockets of his pants, so it would have to be a car with the key in the ignition; it would have to be a car with a driver and no passengers; the driver would have to get out of the vehicle after it stopped and lastly, Bolan would have to wait until a vehicle that met all those conditions drew up when the lot was empty.

  An extra hazard: the car had to be powerful enough to make the city exit before the dispossessed driver could reach a phone and give the alarm.

  Bolan thought he'd finally gotten lucky when a Mercedes 190 carrying only the driver pulled in just after a whole string of trucks had left. But the young guy at the wheel never left the sedan. He ate a boxed lunch behind the wheel, smoked a leisurely cigarette without leaving his seat and then drove off.

  Another time, a middle-aged woman left a Volvo with the engine running while she scrambled around a stand of trees on the other side of the lot picking wildflowers. The warrior had actually been on his feet when two Dutch oil tankers lumbered up and parked just beyond the car.

  But at last it happened. The lot was empty, and a fat man driving a big Datsun arrived and stopped with a squeal of brakes. He got out, looked around, then plunged into the bushes fifty yards away from Bolan, unzipping his pants on the run. And the Executioner, rising like a phoenix from his grassy bed, sprinted across the pavement, jerked open the door and slid into the driver's seat.

  He twisted the ignition key, put the vehicle into first and swung the wheel hard over to head back toward the expressway.

  The warrior had a momentary impression in the rear-view mirror of a shouting figure waving his arms, and then he was away, stomping the pedal flat against the floor as the Datsun snarled down the concrete strip toward Liège.

  If the enraged owner relied on the roadside phones the Executioner would probably be okay. But if a highway patrolman happened to pass the lot, things might get tough. Flashing past the midmorning traffic on the heat-shimmered pavement, Bolan kept one eye warily on the mirror, on the lookout for a black-and-white sedan with a flashing blue light on the roof, a pair of dark-uniformed motorcycle cops, or the sound of a siren.

  It was, in fact, through the windshield that he received a shock. Slantwise across the hard shoulder, he saw the huge sign that said Péage 5000 m.

  Of course! Many of the European expressways were toll roads. There was a toll booth ahead, and he didn't have a cent on him...

  He flipped open the glove compartment and found a spark plug, a soiled handkerchief, a pile of crumpled candy bar wrappers... but not the handful of forgotten coins he'd hoped for.

  Bolan glanced at the instruments. The Datsun was hitting 100 mph. He had less than two minutes to come up with an answer to this immediate problem.

  Another sign flashed past and dwindled in the rearview mirror: Péage 3000 m.

  Bolan dived a hand into the deep pocket on his door. Zero. In the pocket on the passenger side? He reached across. Nothing but maps.

  Péage 1000 m. Half a mile ahead he could see modernistic flat roofs, the curving stalks of electric standards, the colored stop and go lights of the toll booth. He lifted the leather holder of the car's parking permit from the padded shelf above the dashboard. It was stamped in gold and bore the number of a garage in Brussels.

  And beneath it was a pink card marked off in squares — some with holes punched in them — that looked as if it could be a weekly or monthly pass for the expressway.

  Braking, the warrior sighed with relief. He'd noticed that the Datsun had Luxembourg license plates; clearly the owner was a regular traveler between the two cities. Bolan shifted to fourth, to third, to second and rolled down his window to hold out the card as the car slid to a halt opposite the uniformed attendant in the toll booth.

  The man took the card, swung around in the glass-fronted booth, struck a punch with the flat of his hand and returned the card without a glance at Bolan. He gestured the vehicle forward and pressed a switch to change the light in front of it from red to green.

  The Executioner was past the hazard, but he reckoned it was time to split fast: a guy in one of the other booths had been holding a phone to his ear and gesticulating excitedly. It was possible that the call could have already gone out for a stolen Datsun.

  The woods and fields gave way to the urban clutter that signaled the outskirts of a city. As the car was sucked into the vortex of traffic swirling toward the center, Bolan saw thin chimneys that belched flame at the sunny sky, vacant lots pockmarked with tin-roof shanties, junkyards piled high with car wrecks. Across the smoky horizon, the city was battlemented with the rectangular slabs of high-rise apartment blocks.

  The stream of traffic moved too fast — and the road system was too complex — for Bolan to pick a route. For a while he went with the main flow. Then he found himself in the wrong lane at a big police-controlled junction. And while most of the vehicles swung away unexpectedly to the left, he was obliged to go straight ahead into a maze of narrow streets that led to a riverside warehouse area. To have attempted to cut across the line would have invited attention from the police, which was the last thing he needed. What the hell. He drove on.

  Threading the Datsun between the barrows and stalls of a street market bright with fruit and vegetables, he searched for some sign that would lead him back to a main street or toward the city center. But all the streets seemed to be one-way — the wrong way. Like it or not, he was penetrating deeper and deeper into the dock area.

  Between the gaunt facades of the warehouses he saw cranes, the blue of the river, the spires of a cathedral on the far side. But there was no sign of a bridge.

  Eventually the warrior found himself in a street so choked with pedestrians and off-loading trucks that he had to stop. There were no sidewalks: smooth-worn cobbles joined one row of gray buildings to the other. The car was attracting attention, yet Bolan couldn't leave it in the middle of the street. With no curbs, there was no logical place to park, and the few side streets he'd noticed were already jammed with vehicles that blocked every
available space.

  At last, in desperation, he edged the sedan forward and turned into a courtyard beyond which was an official-looking building with a wide flight of steps and a flag hanging over the entrance. He stopped the car and climbed out.

  "Hey! You!" a voice called out. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  Bolan swung around. A booted cop in breeches and a leather jacket had been hitching a motorcycle on its stand. Now he was staring angrily at the warrior.

  Too late Bolan saw that a blue panel truck with an amber roof light was parked at the end of a line of police cars behind him. He'd driven into the front yard of a police station or a town hall.

  The cop was striding toward him, scowling. Bolan decided to avoid the confrontation.

  He ran back into the street, darted across and sped along behind a row of market stalls. Footsteps clattered on the cobbles behind him, voices were raised in protest, in question.

  The street was blocked fifty yards farther when three men rolled barrels of beer down a ramp from the open door of a trailer. Bolan crossed the street and dashed into an arched cloister.

  At the far end of the cloister he found himself in a paved lobby full of elderly men in cassocks. Glass doors opened on steps that led up to a street bright with sunlight.

  Bolan ran past the clerics, burst out the doors and took the steps three at a time. A moment later he was hurrying through a press of students thronging a sidewalk café. Two more turns brought him to a wide main street leading uphill from a bridge over the River Meuse.

  A long convoy of dun-colored army trucks and halftracks loaded with soldiers in combat fatigues was lumbering up the grade. Waiting to cross the road, the warrior glanced over his shoulders. He seemed to have shaken off the pursuit.

  So what were the options?

  He could check the phone book, see if there was an American consul in Liège. He could make it to the embassy in Brussels. But even if they believed his story — and they might not without one hell of an inquest — he was unwilling to involve the country in a personal dilemma that revolved entirely around his status as an unofficial loner who wasn't even on a mission. And although there was a new, unstated, "arms-length" alliance between Bolan and officialdom, there were still plenty of people in the administration who would be happy to see the Executioner in tough shit, who would go out of their way to make sure Bolan stayed down... and out. Permanently.

  He'd have to get hold of Hal Brognola.

  Easier said than done.

  The answer came to him as he stepped into the road to pass behind the last truck in the convoy. He remembered speeding past a similar line of army vehicles on the expressway, and he'd been automatically checking out the components of the convoy as he waited: ten three-tonners, a dozen half-tracks, a command truck, two high, square ambulances with huge red crosses painted on their steel sides.

  Bolan's idea was a long shot, all right. But if it came off it could give him a shortcut to Brognola. There were no soldiers in the last truck. He swung himself up over the tailgate and dropped into the dark space under the canvas canopy. Forty minutes later he lifted the flap and peered out.

  The convoy had halted in a compound of a military encampment, and judging from the commands he heard, the crews had been marched off to the mess hall for chow.

  Bolan donned the camouflage fatigues he'd found among the stores in the truck and dropped to the ground.

  From what he'd been able to see as the vehicles lurched out of the city, the convoy had stopped about twenty miles southeast of Liege, somewhere near the town of St. Vith and the West German frontier. The camp was surrounded by the wooded hills of the Ardennes.

  He lifted a steel helmet covered in netting from the driver's cab and walked nonchalantly toward the head of the convoy.

  The command truck was outwardly like the ambulances, but a complex of radio antennas sprouted from its squat roof. And in the boxlike cab, he knew, would be a sophisticated and extremely powerful shortwave transmitter.

  Affecting a casual air, Bolan climbed into the cab. He stared out through the windshield at a detail busily erecting a khaki tent beside a row of huts two hundred yards away. Nobody was looking in his direction.

  Taking a deep calming breath, Bolan pressed the starter button. The warm engine growled to life, then, for the second time that day, he steered a stolen vehicle out of a parking lot toward the road.

  7

  "What the hell's going on?" Hal Brognola raged. "A man is grabbed on my own doorstep, witnesses are eliminated, we hear Zulowski's been murdered at the post office in Luxembourg and the pictures he sent are meaningless!" He breathed deeply. "And now State's after my butt because some half-assed American tourist in Belgium stole an army command car and used the radio to send a birthday message to his uncle!"

  "If you'd just take a look, sir, at the reports..." Frank O'Reilly gestured toward the folders on Brognola's desk.

  "The hell with the reports!" the Fed yelled. "What do I have to do to get people into action around here? And as for this tourist.."

  "No tourist," O'Reilly said gently. "Bolan."

  "In Belgium!"

  "That's right, Mr. Brognola."

  "How do you know? Why wasn't I told?" Brognola was red in the face.

  "You were at a conference in the Oval Office and you weren't able to be disturbed. And we know," the security chief said soothingly, "because the 'birthday message' was a coded request for help." He leaned over the Fed's shoulder and flipped open the top folder. "The transcript is right here. You'll see that he asks for clothes, weapons, ID, that kind of thing. Plus a trace on the Stony Man computer relating to a man called Latta."

  "Where does he want this stuff? Belgium?"

  "In the diplomatic bag to Brussels, yes, sir."

  "You're telling me the kidnappers took him all the way to Europe?"

  "That's the way it looks."

  "And he escaped and wants to hit back at this guy Latta?"

  "You know Bolan much better than me," O'Reilly said tactfully.

  Brognola sighed. "Don't I ever! He didn't say why he was snatched?"

  "No, I, uh, don't believe he knows. Maybe he wants to find out."

  "That figures. Is that trace in hand?"

  O'Reilly nodded. "I called Kurtzman at Stony Man as soon as the signal was decoded."

  "The tackle, too?"

  "Requisitioned from... reliable suppliers."

  Brognola was satisfied. He knew better than to ask who those suppliers were. Official requests for the kind of gear and documents Bolan wanted would keep the wires red-hot if the Pentagon, or Langley, knew who the stuff was for. But there were always shortcuts, and Frank would know them. Brognola himself knew that his name — maybe even what looked like his signature — and the full authority of the Justice Department would be invoked to get the Executioner's goodies accepted as diplomatic bag material. But he didn't say anything about that, either.

  Among professionals, some things were better left unsaid.

  He changed the subject. "These damned photographic plates that Zulowski sent — any progress there?"

  O'Reilly shrugged. "There's an image, something recorded in the emulsion. But like you said, it's meaningless. Whatever way the darkroom boys handle it, they come up with the same scene. It could be a shot of electrons bombarding a neutron, a supernova exploding fifty million years ago, or just the interference on a TV screen. You tell me."

  "Don't give me that crap, Frank," Brognola growled. "You know as well as I do that Zulowski photographed the pages of a list. Names and addresses, thumbnail biogs, connections. In some way these pictures have been, well, coded visually. What we have to do is find the key."

  "He was killed outside the post office," O'Reilly said. "Maybe he was on his way to send us that key. Maybe he had sent it. The Company's Brussels resident went down. There was nothing on the body."

  "Well, there wouldn't be, would there? If he didn't mail whatever it was, the killers would have tak
en it off him."

  "Zulowski was shot from a rooftop across the street," O'Reilly objected, "just like the woman witness at the police station here. There wasn't time for the killer to get anywhere near the body."

  "Well, if he'd mailed it, we should have had it by now," the Fed replied irritably. "And we don't. But it has to be located. This operation is too sensitive and important to start over."

  O'Reilly scratched his head. "Yeah, but..."

  The phone rang.

  Brognola grabbed the handset. The call lasted two minutes, and during it he uttered only three monosyllables. He replaced the receiver, turning to O'Reilly.

  "That was the result of your trace. Fraser Latta. He's a laundryman for the international Mob. Converts their loot into legitimate business channels through connections in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas, you name it. Legally clean as far as the FBI, the IRS and the other countries are concerned. But he's neck-deep in crime all the same. It's just that there's no proof. Big operator, too. Manhattan penthouse, ranch in Apple Valley, apartments in Paris, London and Bonn, a villa in Palermo, Sicily." Brognola paused for effect. "And a country estate near the Luxembourg border, in Belgium."

  O'Reilly whistled. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

  "I'd say it was crystal clear," Brognola nodded. "Zulowski acquires a list of names that would blow a big-time Mafia operation wide open. He's wasted in Luxembourg before he can let us in on the method he used to transmit the evidence. Then Bolan is kidnapped and taken to Europe, to a place not a hundred miles from Luxembourg. By a guy who's a big wheel in the Mob's commercial activities. How do you read that, Frank?"

  "The Bolan grab and the Zulowski mission are connected?" the security chief offered.

  "Bingo. And?"

  O'Reilly plucked at his lower lip. "It bothers me that they could track Bolan, but I'd say they figured he was on a mission. The same mission as Zulowski. And they snatched him because they hoped he could tell them something... something they couldn't get out of Zulowski himself."