Dead Man's Tale

by Don Pendleton

  He nodded. "And they won't wait to ask questions, will they?"

  "Right. My car is out front. If we can make it to that before they catch on, there's a possibility I could bluff my way through the gates before the alarm's sounded."

  Bolan was unhooking his harness and holsters from the closet. "It's all right," she said, seeing him start to remove the Desert Eagle's magazine. "I know she changed them all for blanks, but I paid a visit to the armory when nobody was looking. They're both loaded with the real thing."

  "Good girl," Bolan said. "How do we get to your car?"

  She laid a finger to her lips and led him up a flight of stairs, through a double doorway and along a short passage. At the heavy double doors blocking off its farther end, she whispered, "There's a courtyard outside here, on the far side of the house to the burned-out stables. The car is just inside the gates."

  He eased back the catch and inched open one of the doors. Gradually the hairline of daylight widened until he could peer through into the open air. The car — it was the Fiat sedan he'd seen in the garage at Latta's house in Belgium — was there all right, hidden from the house by a clump of overgrown rhododendrons. Beyond it was the high wall of a vegetable garden, and then the driveway leading past the front of the castle to the stableyard and the woods.

  But between them and the sedan loomed the broad shoulders of a Maccione gunner. He was standing with his back to them, a mini-Uzi at the ready, staring through the gates toward the lake.

  Katrina sketched a brief pantomime with one hand, motioned Bolan back out of sight then jerked the door noisily open. "Brockmann!" she called. "Here!"

  The guard turned slowly around, his brutish face creasing into a frown. "What's the trouble?" he demanded suspiciously, approaching the door.

  "It's the prisoner below," Katrina said agitatedly. "He's... come and look, please. Quick!"

  The big guy snicked back the safety on his weapon, bent his head and strode through the doorway. Katrina was already at the top of the stair, beckoning.

  Bolan had cached himself in the deep shadows behind the open door. As soon as the guard passed through, he stole up behind the man, poised on one leg and slammed his other heel down as hard as he could on the gunner's right hand and the butt of the Uzi's pistol grip protruding from the palm.

  The SMG, knocked from his grasp by the impact, clattered on the floor as he whirled around with a snarl of rage.

  Before the hardguy could shout an alarm, Bolan had danced in close, his forearm held across his chest, his fingers extended in a cobra strike, his flat hand darting out, axing the guard's throat.

  The man staggered, grunting. He wasn't going to be able to cry for help for a while, but he was tough. The guy didn't fall. Choking, he rushed at the warrior with outstretched arms and seized him in a bear hug.

  Bolan tried every fighting trick he knew. He butted the guy's nose with his forehead; he hacked his shin; he brought up a sharp knee. But the hardguy was immovable; wheezing, purple in the face, he merely increased the pressure. Inexorably the arms tightened around Bolan like steel bands.

  The warrior's spine felt as though it were about to snap. His own arms, pinioned to his sides in that viselike embrace, were seized with cramps. It was when his senses were reeling that he resorted to the oldest trick of all. He went abruptly limp.

  With a growl of satisfaction, the guard relaxed his grip enough to let Bolan slide down within his grasp. When his elbows were free, the warrior's bunched fists hammered with piston precision into the hardman's unprotected belly and savaged his diaphragm. All at once the rest of the Executioner was free...

  The purple visage paled to a livid green, the remainder of his breath wheezed from tortured lungs, and the guard careened over against the wall and slid to the floor. At the same time Katrina slammed the side of his head with the butt of the subgun she'd picked up from the floor.

  "I better tie him up."

  She shook her head. "No time. They'll know you've got loose before he regains consciousness anyway. Come on. Every second counts."

  They ran back to the outer doors. Bolan checked that the coast was clear, then led her out.

  They were within five yards of the Fiat when footsteps crunched on the graveled driveway just outside the open gates. Bolan pulled the woman down, lightning fast, behind the rhododendrons. Crouching there between the leaves, they saw Latta and Alexandra sprinting toward the cellar doors.

  "I just don't get it," the man was saying irritably. "I told her when I agreed she should take the first shift. The current was to be switched on, hard, after the first five minutes, and left that way for some considerable time on that initial session."

  "Yes," Alexandra replied, "and it's five minutes or more since we heard even a groan. At one time I even thought I heard whispering!"

  The double doors opened and closed behind them.

  Katrina Holman was on her feet. Her face was white. "Damn," she muttered. "They must have been listening to the tape, live, all the time! We have about ten seconds before they see the guard and raise the alarm. Let's go!"

  They were still several feet from the sedan when Campos, Foxy-face and DaSilva, accompanied by the meaty bulk of Maccione, walked into the area between the gates. The Mafia boss spotted them. "What the hell...?" he roared.

  Foxy-face and the cold-eyed killer whipped out handguns almost before the words were out of his mouth. But Bolan and Katrina were already running away from the gates.

  "Get them!" the chief mobster shouted. "But keep the guy alive!"

  Shots cracked out behind the Executioner and his rescuer as the double doors burst open and Latta and Alexandra ran into the yard. For an instant the shooting stopped and there was a confused exchange between the two groups. By the time Maccione's rasping voice had restored order and issued commands, the fugitives had turned the corner of the building.

  They were faced with a wildness of weed-grown ground enclosed on two sides by the blackened walls of the gutted stables, the restored rear wing straight ahead of them, and the ruined facade of the castle's rear elevation on their right. "Which way?" Bolan panted. "The new wing?"

  "No. Every corner's covered by video cameras. We'll have to make the old part and hope for the best."

  An arched doorway, half hidden behind a screen of neglected wisteria, stood ten yards away. The timbers of the door itself, bone-white with age and fissured through lack of use, were slightly ajar. "In here," Katrina said urgently. "The restorers haven't touched this part of the castle. Nobody's been in here for years."

  "But won't they know..."

  "Not at first. There are other doors. We'll find a way out on the other side."

  Bolan reckoned she'd earned his trust after her performance with the guard, especially in view of what Latta and Alexandra had said. He nodded briefly and strode to the door, shouldering the weathered wood. Running footsteps were fast approaching the corner of the building behind them.

  The door squealed open only a few more inches before it jammed on the stone flags of a passageway inside. He pushed Katrina through the gap and squeezed in after her.

  She was already running for a staircase thick with dust. Outside, he heard Maccione's voice. "DaSilva, try the hole in the stable wall. We'll check out the doors in this wing."

  At the top of the stairs was a small empty room. Katrina pushed open a door, and they found themselves in a long gallery, lit by sunbeams slanting down through ocular windows high in the castle's front facade. Beneath the windows were dozens of glass-fronted showcases, filled with exotic tropical moths. Many had fallen from their transfixing pins and the bottoms of the cases were thick with shriveled thoraxes and dead wings. Stuffed birds were behind them, their bright plumage faded. Angry voices echoed now at the foot of the stairway behind the fugitives, and they heard the jammed door roughly forced open.

  Katrina pushed past a curtained arch at the far end of the gallery and they ran through another unfurnished room. Bare shelves yawned on every wall; o
nly a stack of nibbled books rose in the center of the floor, its dark crannies alive with nests of mice.

  Stags' heads mounted on wooden shields, along with moth-eaten fox masks and the front half of a wild boar, its back white with dust, looked down from the walls of the upper hallway they passed through next. Twin staircases curved down to the castle's original main entrance below.

  But voices echoed from one of the rooms off the lobby and behind them — probably from the gallery — came the hoarse hunting cry of Maccione. "This way! They've been through here. I can see footmarks in the dust!"

  "We'll have to go up," Katrina whispered. "This way!"

  "Yeah, but..."

  "Don't worry. The place is enormous. There are half a dozen more staircases that lead down."

  They dashed to the far side of the hallway, but not fast enough...

  "Hey, look! Up on the second!" One of the hoods, crossing the lobby, had seen them. The chase was on.

  Bolan ran into the hallway above, passed a stone chimneypiece over which generations of spiders had woven their webs into a shawl of lace... and stopped dead.

  Beneath the sagging rafters of a lofty room, dozens, hundreds, battalions of tall, muscular, dark men, each holding a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle pistol, stared unbelievingly back at him.

  He stood at the entrance to the Hall of Mirrors.

  "Wait," Katrina whispered behind him. "There's only one way out the other end, I think I can find it. But it might..."

  "Okay," he cut in. "You take it. I'll use this to hold them off."

  Arched alcoves, each with its mirror, some with two installed in a V pointing inward or outward, covered the entire wall space of the huge gallery. And there were many others, singly, in pairs or in trios, each set in an arch identical to those framing the alcoves, slanting across the floor at various angles.

  The effect was hallucinatory. Bolan saw images of himself full face, from the rear, in profile, advancing and receding beneath a multitude of arches each time he moved — an infinity of Executioners in diminishing perspectives as far as the eye could be fooled.

  So cunningly were the reflecting surfaces arranged that sometimes, apparently face to face with himself, he found the image moving left when he moved right. At other times he was brought up short by a sheet of plain glass in a space between mirrors. He was halted by one of these when he heard a call off to one side. "All right, Bolan. Drop the gun or you're a dead man!"

  He swung around. Fifty more Bolans swung with him. Bruno DaSilva was beneath the entrance arch, his Smith & Wesson Model 59 pointing directly at... what?

  Mack Bolan, the flesh and blood one, was actually at that moment out of his direct line of vision. He raised his arm. Fifty Desert Eagles menaced the Mafia killer; fifty more pointed away from him, left, right. But which was the reality; which was the illusion?

  "Don't say I didn't warn you," DaSilva grated. He pressed the trigger. The whip-crack of the shot was deafening in the great hall, reverberations batting from frame to frame of the juxtaposed mirrors. One of the Bolans vanished in an eruption of shattered glass. Huge shards separated and dropped to the floor, leaving an empty arch... and through it, framed three yards beyond, another Executioner staring away to the right.

  DaSilva cursed. He advanced a couple of paces, the autoloader's muzzle questing like a snake's head from side to side. The warrior's image moved again. One, ten feet to DaSilva's right, was aiming straight for the killer's chest. He swung around and fired again, twice.

  The 9 mm slugs starred a sheet of mirror into a thousand pieces. Beyond it was another, reflecting yet more Bolans. They were smiling.

  DaSilva panicked. He began firing blind, at every facing image that he could see. His own image, wild-eyed, wreathed in cordite fumes, was now repeated in some of the mirrors. The crashing of broken glass played a jangling obbligato to the gunshot cannonade.

  Bolan vanished.

  DaSilva halted, panting. He stared anxiously around him. No Bolan, but no crumpled figure on the floor, either. No wounded warrior trying to writhe out of reach.

  One shot remained in the S&W's magazine. A single fragment of glass separated itself from a savaged frame and tinkled to the floor. After that there was silence.

  There was one spot, one single square of varnished wood in the center of the gallery, that wasn't reflected in any of the hundred mirrors in the hall. Bolan stood there, guided by Katrina, who had explored the secrets of the castle before.

  Nothing moved. Motes of golden dust remained suspended in the sunbeams that slanted through windows high up under the roof. From the farther reaches of the vast building a chorus of voices shouted questions. Nearer, somewhere on the same floor, Maccione bellowed orders.

  DaSilva cracked. He strode three paces forward, his feet crunching on broken glass. "Bolan!" he yelled, his voice rising to a note of near-hysteria. "You son of a bitch! Where the fuck are you? Come out and fight!"

  Fifteen feet to his left, five arched frames formed a quarter of a circle. Mack Bolan stepped suddenly into the center of each. "You have your chance," he said quietly.

  Snarling, the killer hesitated for one hundredth of a second, chose the central image as the target for his last shot, fired.

  Model 59 and Desert Eagle erupted at the same time, speaking each with a deadly but slightly different voice. Before the double thunderclap was lost among the rafters, the central Bolan flew apart in myriad jagged slivers and collapsed like a smashed jigsaw puzzle to the floor. DaSilva took the Desert Eagle's bullet between the fourth and fifth rib on the right-hand side, spinning sideways with white splinters of bone puncturing the gory hole smashed in his chest. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  Bolan, the real Bolan, stepped out of the right-hand frame — from which the glass had already been blasted some time before — with the smoking Magnum in his hand.

  Maccione and his followers were near now, still shouting.

  "This way, quick!" Katrina whispered from behind him. "There's a ladder up to the attic floor, and from there we can reach one of the turrets with a stairway that goes all the way down to the Tunnel of Love."

  They ran from the gallery, leaving a hundred killers dead on a field of bloodstained glass.

  23

  There were five interconnected rooms in the attic. Bolan and Katrina Holman scrambled up the ladder into the third. It was, like most of those in this deserted part of the castle, empty. Skylights spattered with pigeon droppings filtered in enough light to show dusty floorboards, many of them eaten away by dry rot.

  The fourth room was something else. Clearly it had been used as a junkroom by some previous owner, perhaps even the ringmaster who built the place, because it was stacked so high with ancient rejects that only a narrow twisting alley between piles of broken furniture, disused bedding and cracked tableware allowed a free passage to the far end. Bolan could see why the most recent inhabitants hadn't bothered to take it with them when they left.

  Smashed musical instruments strewed a groundswell of crates and boxes stuffed with papers, framed daguerreotypes, suitcases green with mildew and chairs with the stuffing eaten by rats. At one end of the stack, a huge pipe organ without a keyboard buttressed a pile of Victorian toys; at the other, the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung over a three-legged rocking horse and the shell of a broken drum.

  Dramatically the organ groaned out a wheezing chord.

  Bolan stopped dead and pulled the woman down to a crouching position. He held his breath, eyes straining in the gloom. Something small — wood? metal? — shifted imperceptibly up ahead. Motes swirled in the sunbeam sloping through a skylight high above the organ.

  Someone was there in the stack, someone who had leaned inadvertently on one of the organ pedals, someone moving enough to displace one of the relics and create an updraft of air.

  Bolan laid a finger to his lips and motioned Katrina to stay where she was. Bent double, he stole back toward the entrance to the twisting alley, turning at right angles a
round an upended kitchen table so that he was able to get a fresh slant on the farther reaches of the junk room. The maneuver paid off.

  Because there was movement, no doubt about it. Between the bamboo legs of a garden chair stacked on top of a steamer trunk... a flick, a disturbance in the static organization of all that detritus piled beneath the rafters. A movement at the limit of his field of vision.

  Very slowly, he turned his head. He was certain this time: bobbing up and down behind a chest of drawers, the top of a man's head. A head covered in short red hair.

  Foxy-face.

  He was moving around on the far side of the stack, hoping to take them unawares from the rear.

  Bolan placed a foot on a crate of moldering books and raised himself higher. The wood gave way under his weight with a splintering crash. As he pitched backward, the hardguy's head and shoulders jerked up into view above the chest of drawers, a malevolent expression on his pinched features.

  Both men fired at once, the roar of Bolan's Desert Eagle drowning the sharper crack of the mafioso's Walther PPK. Neither scored — Bolan because he was off balance, Foxy-face because he'd been taken by surprise. The head of a china doll shattered behind the Executioner; his own shot flew high, plowing into the paneling below the skylight.

  But the exchange had pinpointed the fugitives' position for the killers searching the rest of the castle. Bolan heard scrambling feet from all sides, boots pounding on stairways, the yells of Maccione and his confederates.

  He releathered the .44 and whipped out the Beretta. There were seven shots left in the bigger gun and he had no spare clips; at close quarters the 9 mm autoloader's extra firepower could be conclusive. "Run for the turret!" he called to Katrina. "I'll join you there."

  Splinters of wood cracked away from the tabletop as Foxy-face, aiming for the sound of Bolan's voice, triggered a round his way. The warrior dared everything once more on the unexpected approach. He righted the table and leaped onto the top so that he could look down on the gunner's hiding place.