Terror Ballot

by Don Pendleton

  At the top of the stairs he was confronted by two iron security doors, one to the left and one to the right. Shrugging, he took a pair of grenades from his war bag, popped the pins and dropped the bombs to the floor by the doors. Two quick leaps down the steps put him back on the first floor.

  The pressure wave from the explosions made his ears pop again. Overlapping thunderclaps reverberated through the abused structure. Bolan, M16 in hand, crept back up the stairs, avoiding new damage to the steps caused by his grenade assault. The doors were off their hinges and lying like ramps before the openings.

  Behind the doorway on the left, a single ES gunman stumbled around, holding his ear with one hand and shooting blindly from a revolver with the other. Bolan felt a round from his gun cleave the space in front of his nose. He snapped a single 5.56 mm round into the shooter’s forehead. A short scream escaped the man’s lips before his corpse hit the floor.

  Bolan almost didn’t hear the man who tackled him.

  The repeated explosions and gunfire had done little permanent damage to Bolan’s hearing over the years, but he was as susceptible to the temporary effects of gunfire as anyone else. The big ES man who collided with Bolan from behind was three hundred pounds easily—a bearded, shirtless mountain who wore camouflage pants tucked into heavy boots.

  Bolan hit the floor next to the corpse. The M16 was wrenched from his hands. He heard the quick-release clip on his sling give way, as it was meant to do. Using his hands for balance, he fired a powerful kick from the floor, catching the big man in the midsection. With a groan, the bearded goon dropped Bolan’s rifle. Undeterred, the ES man drew a KA-BAR knife from his belt and brought it plunging down at Bolan’s face.

  The soldier rolled away. The knife dug deeply into the floorboards next to him. His own knife was in his hand as he sat up, close to the enemy, and plunged his knife into the man’s kidney and ripped upward. Bolan’s opponent screamed in agony.

  Then it was over.

  The Executioner pushed his enemy off him, retrieved his rifle and stood. Entering the adjacent room, he discovered it dark. The windows were covered with blackout curtains. It was a bedroom, dominated by a queen-size bed. There was yet another door here, leading to what Bolan assumed was an additional bedroom. Given the dimensions of the house, it could not be particularly large.

  He paused, pressing himself against the wall. The soldier had no particular desire to absorb yet more bullets and splinters. “Whoever is in there,” he said, “come out. Do it now, or I’ll put a bullet in you and be on my way.”

  “I will not come out,” a voice said. “But please enter. I assure you I will make no hostile moves.”

  “Do you surrender?” Bolan asked.

  “I do not. But...neither will it matter. I am not a threat to you. Please come in.”

  Bolan reached down and very carefully grasped the knob.

  He threw the door open.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The bedroom was indeed small. The smell of cigar smoke was so thick that it made Bolan’s eyes water. The room was dark except for a single electric lamp on a corner of a writing desk. Seated at the desk was a large, heavyset man. He had turned away from the lamp and was cloaked in shadow, but as Bolan took a step farther into the room, the burning cherry of the man’s cigar blazed with new life. In the illumination of the cigar, the stubble-covered face it revealed was thick and ruddy. Bolan lowered the barrel of his weapon fractionally as the large man blew a smoke ring with obvious pleasure.

  “Gerard Levesque,” Bolan said. “The head of the ES.”

  Levesque smiled. He was heavier than in the photos provided in the electronic dossier from the Farm, but it was unquestionably him. On the writing desk before him was a Browning Hi Power pistol. The slide was locked back and the magazine had been removed. The weapon was no immediate threat and had obviously been prepared deliberately to appear that way.

  “I am Gerard Levesque,” he said. He spread his hands, careful not to reach for the pistol. Then he took another leisurely puff of his cigar. “These are Cuban. Some of the finest available. Would you like one? I have more.”

  “No, I don’t,” Bolan said. “You’re coming with me, Levesque. You’ve got a lot to answer for.”

  “So it is true,” Levesque stated. “You are an American. I received reports from some of my men in the field. Observers who saw you hit the bank and also one of our network’s safehouses. Men tasked with reporting to me the goings-on. Our suspicion, based on your methods, was that you might be a CIA troubleshooter.”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am.”

  Levesque laughed. He had a deep, throaty laugh, like a man without a care in the world. He was dressed in a tailored double-breasted suit, his silk tie at half-mast. The gold chain of what was probably an expensive pocket watch trailed from his lapel to the pocket of his jacket.

  He took another long drag from his cigar and blew a smoke ring that floated above his head. “These,” he said, gesturing with the cigar so that ashes fell on the floor at his feet. “These were going to kill me. I was told this by a doctor some years ago. I believed him. I stopped smoking them. Out of fear, American. I, a man who has lived without fear. I became afraid. I let my fear of death make me forget what it was to live.”

  “Time to go,” Bolan said. “I’m not interested in hearing philosophy from a murderer.”

  “I don’t think you understand. But neither do I begrudge you this, American. Please do not shoot me until I have finished explaining myself. And then...then I will shoot myself for you. It is fitting that I do it. It is a weakness to allow others to do these things for you. But I was afraid again for a moment. I allowed myself to be protected here. To be shielded from what I have done. But you cut through them as if they were nothing. You did what the French authorities have not been able to do. Or what they have been unwilling to do. I have never been certain.”

  Gunfire sounded outside. Bolan hit the floor. Several rounds penetrated the walls of the windowless room. The shots were coming from the street. Bolan looked up and was astonished to see Levesque calmly sitting at his desk, smoking his cigar, as if a firefight had not just flared to life scant yards from him.

  “Stay here,” Bolan ordered. “If you stick your head out of this doorway, I will blow it off.”

  “I am not going anywhere,” said the French terror leader. “I have nowhere to go.”

  Bolan crawled on his belly out the door of the bedroom, holding the assault rifle in front of him. Navigating the stairs took some work, but once on the ground floor, he made it past the wrecked car and to the gap in the side of the house. There he was able to pick out the shooters from their vantage on the street. It was a second car—another Mercedes, in fact—with shooters located behind the engine block and, ridiculously, behind the midsection of the vehicle. One of the gunmen was wielding an FN FAL rifle with a bipod and had braced the rifle on the roof of the Mercedes.

  The ES were supposed to be well trained, but within every group of trained men, there were bound to be a few “fliers,” a few men who, under the adrenal stress of a real altercation, did foolish things.

  In battle, they would die for that stupidity.

  Bolan used a portion of the wrecked wall to brace his weapon. The gunmen had not seen him; they were shooting at random in the same location on the upper floor. Bolan did some quick math in his head. Their trajectory had them pumping bullets into more or less the spot he had been standing, in the small, windowless room where Levesque was waiting.

  And what was that all about, exactly? Rarely did his enemies simply grab a chair and wait for him. There was no trap that Bolan could detect, unless these gunners now attacking the house, obviously shooting for whomever had breached the structure with a car, were someone’s idea of a clever deadfall. Bolan doubted that.

  Aiming through the red dot sight
of his assault rifle, he briefly considered punching a 40 mm grenade through the car, but there were too many other residences nearby. He could not be certain of the damage that would be done by shrapnel from the vehicle. Instead, he calmly sighted over the roof of the newcomers’ car and waited for the gunman there to stick his head up.

  When he saw the man’s eyes, Bolan fired.

  The bullet dug a hole through the center of the gunman’s forehead. The corpse’s skull bounced off the roof of the car before the deadweight of the rest of the body pulled it back behind cover. It was several more moments before the second shooter noticed that his comrade had fallen.

  “Wait for it,” Bolan said quietly to no one.

  Bullets began to rattle against the ravaged wall of the house, raising splinters near his head and shoulders. These weren’t important. The gunman had rightly divined the angle of Bolan’s shot but had no real clue exactly where the soldier was located. The panic fire that resulted was the action of a desperate man.

  All Bolan had to do was wait. His opening came soon enough. The shooter paused to duck behind the car and reload. A less-experienced man might use this opportunity to break cover and go after the car, lining up a shot on the gunner, but Bolan was concerned about Levesque waiting upstairs. He was not about to give the French terrorist leader a target, letting him fire a clean shot between Bolan’s shoulder blades.

  The soldier aimed lower, for the pavement ahead of the car’s bumper. Then he began firing single shots from the M16, walking the rounds in, bouncing them off the pavement. The ricochets began peppering the front bumper and grille of the car.

  A headlight exploded. The gunman screamed in defiance and raised his weapon, a Kalashnikov assault rifle. As the terrorist shot wildly at the front of the house, Bolan finished his arc, walking the spray of bullets right into the man’s thighs. The gunner toppled, howling in pain. His head was just visible beyond the front bumper.

  Bolan put a bullet through it.

  The realization that he was being played stopped him from leaving the wreckage of the house to check the body. Instead, he retraced his steps, hurrying back upstairs, expecting to find that Levesque had let himself out by some alternative route. He would be forced to pursue the terrorist leader and reacquire him—

  Except Levesque had not escaped. He was sitting precisely where Bolan had left him, finishing his expensive Cuban cigar.

  “I take it,” Levesque stated, “that you’ve just killed more of my men.”

  “I have. Wasn’t that your plan?”

  Levesque shook his head. “Again you do not understand. I did not call them. They responded to the attack, nothing more. The local residences are under our nominal control. My men have visited every household previously and given them a telephone number to call.”

  “You forced them to play informer?” Bolan asked.

  “No,” Levesque replied. “We put them under our protection. The trade was simple. Call us, not the police, should anything occur in this neighborhood. A few bribes, a few threats. The combination works well. You make them fear you, then you salve their consciences with money. Natural greed does the rest. They can hardly complain too loudly once they are, as you Americans say it, ‘on the take.’”

  “And that’s why there are no cops here?”

  “We bribed the local authorities,” Levesque said. “As an added measure. There is much corruption here. But you knew that.”

  “I want answers, Levesque. It’s time to go.”

  “As I said,” the terrorist leader stated, removing another cigar from inside his coat, “I will die here. I am tired, American. It is my time. But I will make a full explanation to you before I do. Will that suffice?”

  “You don’t want to know the different ways I can lean on you to make you do what I say.”

  “I have no doubt of that,” Levesque said. “But please allow me to share with you the story that is...me.”

  Bolan had no response for that. Finally he gestured with the barrel of his rifle. “Go on.”

  “What do the authorities know about me?”

  “You’re fully aware of what your file must say,” Bolan told him. “Formerly with the Basques, among many other terror groups. You’ll kill anyone for money, support any cause if the price is right. Your men have a reputation for being ruthless. I kept that in mind when dealing with your little hostage drama at the bank.”

  “I had hoped to preserve the hostages’ lives just long enough to have them killed for news cameras,” Levesque said. “A vulgar display, but the trade of terrorism is built on them.”

  “Trade?” Bolan asked. “That’s what you consider it?”

  “You protest, but I do not hear it in your voice. You know as well as I do that violence produces money. Focused violence. All men pay for what they desire. Some purchase women. Some purchase drugs. Some purchase and use weapons. Some pay the men to use those weapons. Political power generates the desire for anonymity, for plausible deniability. That is the service provided by a man like myself.”

  “You’re a mercenary and a murderer,” Bolan said. He glanced at the military chronograph wristwatch he wore. If Levesque was stalling for time, his specific purpose was unclear.

  “Please, have a cigar,” Levesque repeated. When Bolan shook his head, the terrorist leader set about lighting the second cigar for himself. He used a wooden match from a box of matches on the writing desk. “It is unthinkable to consume a second one so soon after the first,” he said. “But I do not have much time.”

  “Spill it, Levesque,” Bolan said. “Or I’ll kill you myself and be on my way.”

  “Very well. Leslie Deparmond is my employer.”

  “Deparmond.”

  “Yes. I have been working with him for some time. It was Deparmond who sought me out, told me of his plans to purge France of foreign interests. Years ago he was but an ambitious man with nothing but a plan and a great deal of money. As his political career accelerated, so did our activities.

  “With the financing provided by Deparmond, I built Les Étrangers Suppriment. I recruited and trained the men. I armed them. I tested them. I made sure that when the time came they would be an effective fighting force. And as I expanded, I delegated these duties to my second-in-command. Our hierarchy has grown. Our organization is truly a power.”

  “Your men are better than average,” Bolan admitted. “But that doesn’t make them good.”

  “No,” Levesque said. “Clearly not. You have been to them as the scythe is to the wheat. Are all Central Intelligence agents so formidable?”

  “I’m not with the CIA.”

  “I will not insult you by calling you a liar.”

  “Enough,” Bolan said. “Why are you telling me all this? Why give up now? A last-ditch attempt to save your life?” Even as he said it, Bolan knew it didn’t wash. If Levesque were simply turning informant to stop Bolan from killing him, he would have tried to escape while the soldier was occupied with the backup forces outside.

  “For some time,” Levesque stated, “I have been debating my course of action. I have lived much in my time on earth. It has been a shorter life than I pictured for myself. But an eventful one.”

  Bolan took a step closer. He drew his Desert Eagle and pointed it at Levesque. “Five,” Bolan said. “Four.”

  “Please, bear with me, American. What is your name? I would like to know.”

  “You can call me Cooper.”

  “Agent Cooper, did you know I was born not far from here? Well, ‘far’ is a relative thing. But I was born a short distance outside Paris. My father was a common laborer. I never knew my mother. She left when I was a baby. My father never spoke of it. I would ask, and when I was old enough to demand, he began beating me when I persisted.

  “But late one night, after the factory had closed and he had been
sent home with the miserable sum that was his final pay allotment, he got drunk. He had spent all afternoon in a tavern, working up the courage to come home and tell me that we would be forced to leave our home. And when he did, he cursed my mother’s name. He called her a whore who abandoned us while I was but a squalling infant, and suddenly I understood.

  “I was a burden to him, you see. A nothing. Deadweight. He resented my being left behind almost more than he resented being left. Many was the night he came home to fix me with a stare that I now realize was his hatred of the inconvenience I represented. But there was something else there.

  “Beneath the hatred was an overwrought sense of duty, which he used like a weapon. Duty shackled him to me, and he wished me to know it. And so when I asked about my traitorous mother, he beat me for it, before and after...with the exception of that single bitter night. It was worse that night.”

  “Three,” Bolan said.

  “Staring into the barrel of your gun,” Levesque went on, “I find that even one more day suddenly seems precious to me. And that is also a weakness. Just as I wished to hide myself away behind locked doors, with my men to protect me, hoping that whatever assassin the Americans had sent would not find his way to me or get through them...I realized that the only way to defeat weakness is to confront it.”

  Bolan stopped counting. “Forward, toward the danger.”

  “Yes,” Levesque said. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. I hate the weakness in myself, Agent Cooper. I hate that it has reduced me to this. But I am telling you now. Deparmond engineered everything that has happened to this point in order to ensure political victory.”

  “Why tell me this now?” Bolan asked. “What possible benefit could there be to you to admit it?”

  “Perhaps I think you’re going to torture me for information,” Levesque replied. “Perhaps I have a weak constitution, and I hope to spare myself the pain I know a man of your worldly abilities can cause me.”