Dead Man's Tale

by Don Pendleton

  He whipped off the offending footwear, carried the combat boots in his left hand and tried the door opposite the one he'd been listening at. The aluminum catch slid back. He was in a bedroom heavy with the odor of expensive perfume. The flash of his new penlight revealed a bathroom that connected with the room at the corner of the two corridors.

  He flitted through an atmosphere of colognes, steamy bath oils and scented soap, and opened another door. He was in an unlighted bedroom that smelled of cigar smoke. A thin slit of light shone from beneath the door; beyond it he heard the gravelly voice of Campos. "He must have it. He's booked on the Brussels flight tomorrow morning, with onward connections to New York and..."

  The voice ceased abruptly. "What is it?" someone else demanded.

  "Shit, would you look at that!" a third voice exclaimed. "There must be someone... Hey! Latta! For Chrissake...!"

  Footsteps thumped toward the room where Latta was holding court.

  They'd obviously seen the footmarks on the carpet. Bolan slid his feet back into the combat boots and advanced to the door. With luck he should be behind them now. He jerked open the door.

  Bright light seared his eyes. Blinking, he saw in a lightning glance that Campos had opened the door to Latta's conference room. Foxy-face and Schleyer were standing just outside, the intelligence boss with a revolver in his hand, and alerted by the opening door, they were already turned his way.

  He saw their mouths open in astonishment at the sight of his grimed and sodden figure, then he had triggered a single shot from the Beretta and hurled himself across at the passageway that led to the window overlooking the balcony.

  They were fast. Overcoming the element of surprise, two of them had already opened fire before he was around the corner, the heavy slugs passing too close to his head for comfort and gouging small fountains of plaster from the wall.

  Bolan fled down the corridor. He considered opening one of the cream doors, but discarded the idea because he might find himself in a broom closet or some other kind of no-exit situation, eventually opting to dive behind a heavy oak chest that stood beneath a window.

  Shots rang out, a multiple cannonade whose power and ferocity battered the eardrums and set crystal pendants jangling on a pint-sized chandelier halfway down the hall. The flesh-shredding slugs buried themselves in the antique oak, scarred the cream walls, cracked the window above the Executioner. One of the etchings fell out of its frame and dropped to the floor in a welter of fragmented glass.

  Ducked down behind the chest, Bolan took careful aim and shot out the central lamp illuminating the chandelier crystals. His end of the corridor was now cloaked in semidarkness while the gunmen at the intersection were exposed in silhouette each time they darted out from the connecting passage to try a shot.

  Bolan held his fire and heard Latta shouting. Campos dashed past the opening on his way to the kitchen. He'd be heading for the balcony, probably together with DaSilva at the other end of the apartment, to take the warrior from the rear.

  The beefy shape of Schleyer appeared, to hose a spray of leaden death the Executioner's way. He stayed a fraction of a second too long. Lying prone, Bolan fired around the corner of the chest and drilled the intel boss with a 3-shot burst from the Beretta. Schleyer spun away, then dropped on his back with a thump that shook the floor, red blood bubbling from the holes in his belly.

  The warrior took advantage of the consternation this caused. He leaped up onto the chest and, for the second time in less than a week, flung himself through a window to escape the murderous guns of the Mob. He landed in an explosion of broken glass, staggered, lurched upright and ran for the balcony balustrade.

  Bruno DaSilva was at the far end of the balcony, outlined against the streetlighting thrown up from below. The long tube of a silenced automatic sprouted from his right hand. Campos threw open the kitchen window and jumped out onto the tiles.

  Bolan whirled, choking out two single shots, one in each direction.

  The maneuver was too hasty to rate a score on each side, but both men dropped, Campos thrown sideways by the impact of a bullet in the right shoulder. DaSilva fired as he fell, and although Bolan's shot flew wide, the killer's aim was deflected. Simultaneously with the phut of the silenced pistol, Bolan felt a red-hot needle thread his thigh... then he was over the balustrade and into the painter's cradle, lowering feverishly away.

  DaSilva's head and shoulders appeared over the rim of the rail. Bolan fired once, smashing a shower of chips out of the stonework below him. But he needed both hands to manipulate the rope that was hoisting the cradle down. The ground still seemed a long way below.

  DaSilva had ducked when the Executioner fired, but now he reappeared, pistol in hand. Farther along the balcony two more menacing shapes were visible. Latta, too, had to be outside the apartment by now. Bolan heard him shout, "Don't kill him, don't kill him! He might have found it. We have to know what it is!"

  But DaSilva had already aimed his gun. Bolan didn't know how many times the guy fired — he was deliberately swaying the cradle from side to side as he lowered it — but he heard Latta yell again, "No! We have to take him alive."

  The words were barely out of his mouth when a chance shot from the silenced gun struck one of the ropes supporting the cradle, shearing away most of the rope's strands.

  The wooden scaffold jerked; Bolan played out the counterweight line faster still. Swinging wildly, the cradle shuddered downward. Then the Executioner's weight, seesawing it from side to side, took its toll. The last few strands of the supporting rope parted, and one end of the cradle fell away. Bolan lost his hold on the line, slid down the slanting wooden floor of the scaffold and plummeted twenty feet to the ground.

  He landed sprawling on a heap of soft, wet, builder's sand. Glass from the burst window had slashed his forearms and bloodied his face; his palms were raw from the descent of the steel hawser; the flesh wound in his thigh was beginning to hurt like hell. But he was alive, on his feet... and running.

  Over the pelting rain he heard Latta's voice far above. "All right, you guys, let him go. We can pick him up any time we want."

  Bolan reckoned he might have something to say about that himself, however "well covered" — he remembered Katrina's words in the room upstairs — they figured they had him. But he filed the quote away for future analysis. Right now he had to get back to the hotel to dry off and clean up. He was already thirty minutes late for his date with Alexandra Tauber.

  By the time he made it to the dinner-dance restaurant where they had agreed to meet, the champagne bottle on the table in front of her was half empty.

  "You're limping!" she exclaimed, brushing aside his apologies. "Why did you have to put bandages on your face... and why are you wearing gloves?"

  "I cut myself shaving."

  "On your left temple?"

  "I use the long stroke method. As for the gloves, we were always told at school that a gentleman..."

  "And the limp?" She was giggling over her glass of champagne.

  "It's useful if they play a samba," Bolan dead-panned.

  21

  Bolan came out of Alexandra's bathroom wrapped in a white terry cloth robe. It was three o'clock in the morning and they had danced — or at least stood upright and held each other on the dance floor — until the nightclub closed. She sat on the wide bed in a seal-sleek, dark red negligee that glowed beneath the pale glory of her hair.

  "Shall I be your scarlet woman?" she asked, smiling. "Oh, but I forgot. You have to be dead after all that drama. You must want to sleep for at least twelve hours!"

  "Alex," Bolan replied, "of all the things you could suggest, sleep scores the lowest rating in my book right now." He dropped the robe.

  She eyed the lean, tanned, muscular hardness of his scarred body with approval. Fatigue and tension had etched furrows across his brow, but the contours of his rugged face were taut and alert. "Of all the things I could suggest," she said softly, "what would score the highest rating in your boo
k, Herr Bolan?"

  "I'll show you," the warrior said. He untied the belt of the negligée, slipped it from her shoulders and laid her down on the bed.

  Curvy but slender when she was dressed, Alexandra's body was surprisingly voluptuous naked. The breasts were soft but well-shaped, the hips broad and firm, the subtle curve of the belly a delight to sculpt with the hands.

  The Executioner felt the tiredness and tension lift from him and vanish as effortlessly as the bubbles from a glass of the champagne that was still in its frosted bucket on the night table.

  Making love, Alexandra was warm and pliant and demanding, though her adventurousness never exceeded the limits of his desire. There was something nevertheless — a technique a little too practiced, a response almost too spontaneous in its small cries of joy — that posed a question in back, way back, of his conscious mind. Whatever, it was on a tide of shared rapture that they finally drifted into sleep.

  At 9 a.m. they passed by the Hotel Cravat so that Bolan could check out. It was still raining, though blue sky showed through eastward toward the German border. Alexandra was wearing a white vinyl raincoat, white leather boots and a silk scarf tucked in at the neck that matched the color of her domed orange umbrella. She had promised to accompany Bolan to the airport and then return the rented Buick to the Luxembourg branch of the agency.

  Bolan opened the sedan's trunk and tossed in his bag. "Careful," she warned, smiling. "If your precious piece of glass, or whatever it is, is in there..."

  "It's safe enough," Bolan replied, slamming the lid. "Let's go. The rain will bring out all the jocks who usually walk to work, and the streets'll be busy."

  The traffic was heavier than usual. He took the road that looped down beneath the huge rounded bastions of the fortifications to avoid the jam in the city center. They were crossing the bridge that spanned the Alzette River at the foot of the ravine when Alexandra said, "This little sneak thief you told me about yesterday — the match seller outside the post office — do you figure him for a member of the Maccione organization?"

  Bolan shook his head. "No way. He was just a two-bit chiseler who happened unknowingly to have picked up something other people wanted." He downshifted and urged the Buick past a bus and a semitrailer that were spraying muddy water up from the wet road.

  "But in that case," Alexandra protested, "why would he take your piece of glass or whatever it was from Zulowski's body? A pocketbook I can understand, a diary even, but a piece of... you never did get around to telling me just what it was that he used to make that hologram. What did you get from the bogus blind man yesterday?"

  "Just that," Bolan said vaguely. "A piece of glass." The BKA and its GSG-9 affiliate would receive courtesy copies of the Mafia report from Brognola as soon as it was deciphered, but he saw no reason to divulge the hologram details at that particular point.

  "You're making good time," the blonde observed. "You don't have to break the land speed record to get there!"

  "Sorry." Bolan glanced through the streaming windshield and up at the cliffs, with their vast network of caverns, towering above them. "It's just that it bothers me to be stuck behind all these big vehicles on such narrow roads."

  Something was wrong. He'd been aware of it ever since he awoke — something niggling, scrabbling for attention at the margin of his consciousness. Something someone had said? A piece of the puzzle, at any rate, that wasn't right, that didn't quite fit. But the harder he tried to drag it into the light, the more elusive it became.

  "Take the next left," Alexandra said.

  "Are you sure? There's a sign up ahead with the airplane logo and an arrow, telling us to bear right."

  "It's right for the airport, yes," the young woman said. "But we're not going to the airport. Take the left, then left again on Route 7 for Walferdange and Mersch."

  He turned to stare at her. "What's the idea..." he began. Then it hit him, and he cursed himself for not seeing it before.

  "What would score the highest rating in your book, Herr Bolan?" she'd asked him the night before.

  But she shouldn't have known him as Bolan!

  She had addressed him, correctly for a member of the BKA, as Belasko, when she introduced herself after his escape from the hit-and-run driver. He remembered her words: "Maybe I can convince you, Herr Belasko, of my bona fides..."

  Well, she had convinced him all right, even if the bona fides were questionable. He'd been played for a sucker, but good. It was no wonder the mafiosi considered him "well covered" — with an operative actually sharing a bed with him, they couldn't have him better covered.

  In the millisecond that all this flashed through his mind, it registered that she was holding a Browning-style automatic, probably a .38 caliber, in her right hand. And that it was pointing straight at his abdomen.

  Involuntarily he braked hard, and they were both thrown forward as the car behind slewed across the wet road and blared an angry horn. "Don't do that again," Alexandra grated. "You might get hurt." The barrel of the pistol hadn't wavered.

  "You made me break my sunglasses!" the Executioner reproached. He felt his chest where it had struck the steering wheel and drew a pair of smoked shades from his breast pocket. They had expensive tortoise-shell frames — and one of the lenses certainly was cracked.

  "Put them back," she snapped. "You won't need them where you're going. And don't put a hand anywhere near your pockets again. I do know how to use this. Now, keep driving and follow the directions I gave you."

  "So tell me, Alex, how does a beautiful young woman get hooked up with the Mob?"

  "Don't worry about it." She shrugged. "We're both professionals. There has to be a winner and a loser, and although you played well, this time you lost. Period. Maybe it would have helped if I had showed you this before we started. It arrived at the hotel for you last night. The reception clerk gave it to me to pass on to you." She took a blue-and-white Western Union envelope from the pocket of her raincoat and eased out the contents with her left hand, unfolding it so that he could glance at the teletyped strips stuck on the cable form.

  YOUR TRACE REVEALS NO ALEXANDRA TAUBER LISTED BKA PERSONNEL STOP GSG-9 ANTITERRORIST SPECIALISTS CONFIRM NO FEMALES RECRUITED SECOND UNIT STOP HB.

  He drove for several miles in silence. They were heading north, roughly retracing in reverse the route Zulowski must have taken when the Mob were after him. They were approaching the small town of Walferdange when he said conversationally, "What's to prevent me from stopping the car in the main street here? Are you prepared to shoot me down in front of witnesses?"

  "Use your mirror," she said. "The black Mercedes behind is Mr. Latta's. And before we make the village, a Lancia will pull out ahead of you from a rest area. Bruno DaSilva will be driving. As a foreigner with no papers, do you think..."

  "What do you mean, no papers?" One hand flew automatically to his breast pocket.

  "Keep your hands on the wheel!" Alexandra's voice was suddenly hard. "The wallet in which you keep your ID is stuffed with newspaper. And in case you were thinking of trying anything when we stop, the ammunition in both your guns has been replaced with blanks. I was busy while you slept."

  Bolan compressed his lips and said nothing. The rain had stopped, and sunshine was raising steam from the drying pavement as it curved between meadows of silvery green. A quarter of a mile ahead, the familiar Lancia convertible, now with its top raised, nosed out into the road from beneath a row of poplars and took up its station ahead of the Buick.

  "As a foreigner with no papers, as I was saying, do you think any country policeman would believe you against the word of two carloads of Europeans, some of whom are local residents?"

  "You tell me."

  "Don't think, between us, that we couldn't dream up some convincing explanation... whatever story you told."

  "Suppose, for starters, that you come across with a convincing explanation of where we're going. And why."

  "Don't play dumb, Bolan. You know as well as I do. We're on our
way to another of Maccione's properties. When we get there, you will tell us what it is that you took from this pickpocket and, if you have it with you, we'll destroy it. If not, we'll go get it, and then destroy it."

  "And if I don't tell you?"

  Alexandra laughed. She sounded genuinely amused. The coldness had gone from her voice. "Oh, but you will. Believe me, there are ways and means at Grindeldange. Some of Vito's friends are very inventive."

  "Grindeldange?"

  "It's a castle Maccione is restoring near Wiltz, overlooking the artificial lake at Esch-sur-Sure. It's very picturesque."

  "How nice!" Bolan said.

  "You could feed a little more gas to the engine now. We still have almost twenty miles to cover."

  Bolan's mind raced, wondering if he'd have an opportunity to overpower the woman before they reached their destination.

  * * *

  There are thirty-two castles listed in the brochure issued by Luxembourg's National Tourist Office — not a bad score for a country no more than five-sixths the size of the state of Rhode Island.

  Most of them are located in the center of the Grand Duchy, north of the capital. Farther north, in the forested Ardennes region, there are curiously enough only four: Clervaux, Schuttbourg, Wiltz and Grindeldange.

  The Mafia boss's most recent acquisition was a nineteenth-century Gothic monstrosity, with pointed-arch windows and a battlemented central tower. It had been built as a summer retreat by the owner of Europe's most famous travelling circus, and many carnie favorites of the period had been incorporated for the amusement of his guests — among them a maze, a hall of mirrors and a "tunnel of love" waterway channeled through the foundations from a stream that ran through the property.

  The place had been uninhabited for years when Maccione's lawyers bought it. Much of the roof above the six hundred foot frontage had collapsed and fallen in; half of the fifty-two bedrooms lacked floorboards; windows were without glass and the stables had been gutted in a fire started by refugee squatters from Eastern Europe in the late forties.