Vendetta in Venice

by Don Pendleton

"I believe Mynheer Tufik is expecting me."

  "Mynheer Tufik?" the woman repeated in a husky voice.

  "Mustapha Tufik."

  "He won't like you to use that name," she reproved. "Please remember to use his correct name when you see him."

  Bolan was amused. "And that is?"

  "Mynheer Hendrik Vandervell."

  "I'll try to remember. And speaking of names, what's yours?"

  "You may call me Gudrun. Now if you would please follow me..."

  Squeezing through the wall and a stack of planking, she reached out with one arm. Evidently there was a hidden switch, for a moment later Bolan heard the whine of hydraulics and a section of wall behind the oil drums rumbled aside. A vaulted passageway beyond the opening led back beneath the road. Gudrun went through and waited for him to follow. Two yards down the passage they broke a magic eye beam and the secret door swung shut behind them.

  The corridor was brightly lit, built of brick and floored with rubber tiles. Their footsteps made scarcely a sound — the wheelchair, Bolan reflected, would have been virtually noiseless. When they had gone a distance that he estimated would have taken them under the road and beyond the row of houses bordering it, the tunnel turned sharply and ended by a blank wall. The final section of tiling on the floor was outlined by a narrow crevice, as though it might be a trapdoor. The woman stepped on this rectangle and motioned the Executioner to follow her.

  As soon as he was standing beside her, she stretched out a hand and pressed one of the bricks set in the wall. Again there was a whine of machinery... and the section of floor on which they stood, together with the end wall and the ceiling above it, rose slowly on a hydraulic platform. They were on an open-sided elevator.

  The platform lifted about twenty feet and stopped. They were enclosed by brickwork on three sides — the fourth wall was formed by what looked like an ordinary door. Gudrun pushed it open, and they walked into a luxuriously furnished bedroom.

  Bolan calculated that they had to be on the first floor of a house in the block behind the half-door cottages — a house whose official entrance was doubtless on another street altogether. Tufik, he remembered, liked to cover his tracks.

  From the bedroom the elevator now looked like a large built-in closet that happened to be empty. As he watched, the "car" sank from sight, the ceiling became the floor and another ceiling lowered itself to replace the first one.

  Gudrun closed the door and led him through a screen of heavy draperies that masked an archway. In the huge room beyond, Bolan at once felt that sense of deja vu.

  Gray steel filing cabinets lined three of the walls. On a bench projecting from the fourth a computer terminal stood among speakers, transmitter chassis and spools of tape that had overflowed from an audio console sophisticated enough for a recording studio.

  A boardroom table big enough to seat twenty people occupied the center of the room, its polished top submerged in a tide of newspapers, magazines, press releases and information sheets sucked in piles twelve to fifteen inches high. There were heaps of periodicals, too, mixed in with floods of newspaper clippings and dozens of sheets of paper covered with scribbled notes, on the chairs, over the coffee tables and on every inch of horizontal space in the big room. A closed-circuit television was mounted high up in one corner.

  The place looked, in short, exactly like the headquarters Bolan had visited in Marseilles. Even the tape equipment, with its switches, dials and rheostats, its matched spools and twelve-channel mixer, was the same.

  Like a pale spider in a corner of its web, Tufik was waiting for them on the far side of the room. "Mr. Bolan! Mr. Bolan!" he enthused as they pushed past the curtain. "A pleasant surprise indeed to be seein' you! Come on in an' sit down this minute while I see about fixin' you some liquid refreshment."

  With all his old expertise, Tufik whisked the electric chariot in between tables, chairs and stacks of books to roll up to the Executioner with a pudgy hand outstretched.

  Bolan grasped the fat but unexpectedly sinewy fingers. "What have you been up to? And what are you doing in Holland? I thought the Mob had put you out of business."

  "It takes more than them rapscallion foreigners to keep a good man down," Tufik said, "even if he's condemned forever to sit in this contraption." He gestured dismissively at the wheelchair. "Girl, dear, perhaps you'd be good enough to furnish Mr. Bolan and meself with a small jar of the creature?"

  The blonde nodded and disappeared through a doorway between the filing cabinets and the computer terminal. The only other exit was at the far end of the same wall, by the tape decks. There was one window opposite the curtained archway, which was covered by a Venetian blind.

  The Executioner looked for a place to sit. Every available space appeared to be covered with the raw material of the fat man's trade, but eventually he removed a copy of Le Monde, a page torn from Krokodil and a month's issues of Der Spiegel from a stool and sat. His host, he saw, still used his own personal system of polychromatic annotation, ringing, underlining and commenting on items of special interest in various colors.

  "Why The Hague?" Bolan asked conversationally. "It seems so unlikely."

  "Don't you believe it, boy! You want to keep a finger on the pulse, there's no better place in Europe. Between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, not too far from Antwerp — there's three of the biggest ports on the continent for a start. And in my experience, if you want to know what goes on, like the nice girls, you ask a sailor. The boyos working the airlines are good for a taste of honey, too, but that's the same wherever you go. Here we have Schiphol. Brussels, with connections to France, Germany and all of Scandinavia. I'm teliin' you, there's never a corner like this that gets as much shippin', that's also near an international airfield. Except maybe Marseilles — an' that's a deal too near home to be comfortable, if you take my meanin."

  "Okay, okay." Bolan grinned, holding up a hand to stem the flow. "You convinced me... Hendrik."

  "Ah, now," the fat man said chidingly, "listen, you! There's no call to make a mockery just because a fellow takes the precaution to adopt, as you might say, a trifle of protective colorin', now is there?"

  "I guess not. So brief me on the setup."

  "It's satisfactory. It is that. From the street you see there..." he waved a hand at the Venetian blind "...the place is kind of a cheap hotel. With a bar. And though 'tis not a port itself, the town sees plenty of brave lads off the boats. From the canals too, so the bar is full..."

  "And bugged at every table?"

  "And bugged at every table," Tufik agreed with a sidelong glance at the multichannel tape recorder inputs. "There's a heap of useful stuff on those tapes you wouldn't believe, once they're sorted. Which is why our prices are kept low and the bar is kept crowded."

  "And the hotel?"

  "The hotel? Why, curiously enough the place seems to be booked solid all the time. There's never a room to be had if a body tries to check in."

  "You never appear in the hotel yourself?"

  "Never. I use the canal bank on Sint Pietersstraat. It's easier for the chair that way, for there are steps out front here. It's discreet. And it means I'm never connected with the place at all. The hotel itself has a fourth advantage, but."

  "I'm listening."

  Tufik chuckled throatily. "Apart from the casuals who give with their information, er, involuntarily, via the hidden mikes, there's plenty more who come here to deliver the goods they're paid for."

  "I can guess. Hotel porters and cabdrivers and..."

  "Quite, quite. There's no call to be precise. Well, these ladies and gentlemen have to get in to see me. Personally. And whereas an odd crowd like this might attract attention in another neighborhood, here it's no problem at all. There's always sailors droppin' by to check out the ould girls on Sint Pietersstraat — the hotel has a rear entrance there, too — and there's always a multitude patronizin' the bar. So, between them, who's goin' pay any mind to a few extra clients here an' there?"

  Gudrun came back into
the room carrying a tray. Pushing aside a heap of manuscripts on the big table, she set out glasses, coffee cups, saucers, a conical copper pan full of Turkish coffee and a bottle of Izarra — the fiery yellow Basque liqueur that was the only spirit Tufik had ever been known to drink.

  "I still have the sweet tooth, as you see," Tufik said while the woman poured. "Your continued good health, sir. And now let us talk business. What can I do for you this time?"

  Bolan's dark eyebrows rose. "I thought you might know already." He had reckoned that, since Brognola had arranged the meeting, he would also have briefed Tufik. But the big man merely shook his head.

  "No? Well, it's easy enough to lay on the line. It's information, of course, that I want. But you won't find it in your filing system, your newspaper stories or your data banks this time. You might get a lead from your microphones, if you have enough bad characters in your bar."

  "Yes, Mr. Bolan?"

  "There's a highly organized escape network operating in Europe. For a price it takes people across frontiers, out of reach of the law. All the police forces know it exists, but none know a thing about it. I want to know who runs this organization, how it works and how to contact it if necessary." The Executioner sat back in his chair, drained his cup and set it down carefully in the saucer.

  Mustapha Tufik hadn't moved. He sat bulkily in his chair, staring straight ahead and humming a tuneless little air through his teeth. Gudrun, who had been curled up on the floor at his feet, rose to refill cups and glasses.

  Eventually the fat man reacted. He spun the chair around and wheeled swiftly to the far end of the table, where he began ferreting about beneath an untidy pile of gossip columns torn from the previous week's Sunday newspapers. "I'm always losin' that damnable phone!" he muttered. "I know the instrument's on this very table... Ah!" He gave a cry of triumph and flourished an ivory-colored handset. His free hand dived back into the pile, and Bolan heard the sound of a number being punched out.

  It was followed by a conversation in rapid Dutch, which he was unable to follow. Then Tufik said in English, "And you can tell the advocate that the articles he wants can be obtained in an ordinary pharmacy in Spain. In boxes of ten. That's the only country they still make them now. But warn him they're much stronger than the ones they used to sell in England: I think there's a whole cc in each." He chuckled. "Tell him too that the info won't cost him a penny. This time it's on the house!"

  Tufik replaced the receiver. He spun the chair to face the Executioner. "It's not an easy thing you're askin'," he said slowly. "But if you care to come back around midnight, I think I might have something for you. In the meantime..."

  "Don't tell me. In the meantime there's the question of money." Bolan reached for his wallet. "Your sources had better be good," the warrior said as he counted an extravagantly large number of bills into the fat palm.

  "Always trust an old friend," Tufik said, stuffing the money into his inner pocket. "If you'd like to leave by the hotel, it might attract less attention in the long run. Gudrun will show you the way. She's going out anyway."

  "Until midnight. How do I get back in?"

  "The way you came. There'll be plenty of boyos about on Sint Pietersstraat after dark. Just make sure none of them see you actually go through the archway, is all."

  "Will do. See you." Bolan followed Gudrun into a short passageway and then past two steel doors. Between them, a tall man with long sideburns and a dark mustache sat at a table cleaning a Walther PPK automatic. Recognizing the bodyguard Tufik had in Marseilles, Bolan nodded a greeting as he passed. The tall man looked up and inclined his head gravely.

  Beyond the second steel door was a tiny office. And outside it was the lobby of a typical commercial hotel, the kind of place favored by traveling salesmen, with out-of-date theater posters on the brown-painted walls, dispirited artificial flowers and faded notices covered in food stains. Through a door at one side they could hear the brawling hubbub of the bar.

  Gudrun took Bolan's arm when they reached the street. "I like dark men for a change," she said. "It's not many clients he sees personally, you know. What do you do?"

  The warrior smiled. "Let's say, if Mynheer Vandervell sells information, then I collect the same commodity — preferably without paying for it."

  "You are a detective?"

  "No, just an information gatherer. There's one item you could supply yourself, Gudrun."

  "Sure." The woman pressed the taut curves of her body against him as they walked. "If I can. What do you want to know?"

  "I want to know what time you have to be back."

  "Back with Hendrik? Not until midnight. I'm off duty as of now."

  Bolan looked down into her flushed face. There was a mischievous twinkle in the green eyes, a mocking tilt to her mouth. Her whole expression was a challenge. "That's too much of a coincidence to be passed up," he said. "Are clients permitted to date the personnel?"

  "I see no objection if the personnel is not on duty."

  "Great." He glanced again at the eager face, the blond halo. Was he misreading the expression in those eyes? What did it matter? He had nothing else to do until midnight; he couldn't advance the operation any farther until he had the material Tufik could supply. Who was going to beef if he passed a few hours in pleasant company? "Where do you want to go?" he asked.

  "Let's go to Scheveningen. It's only two miles. We can walk by the sea, and I'd like to try the food at the Bali. I'm crazy for Indonesian."

  "It's a deal. We'll grab a cab right away."

  "My car is here," she told him, stopping by a parked convertible with the top down. It was a low-slung roadster with red bodywork, steeply raked black fenders and a detachable windshield. Tarnished chrome lettering slanted across the radiator honeycomb spelled out the name Alfa Romeo. Bolan placed it as a model that dated back to the mid-thirties.

  As Bolan slid down into a worn leather bucket seat, Gudrun asked, "Where are you staying? There's no heater in this, and there will be a wind on the coast. It gets cold after dark, too. Don't you have an overcoat?"

  "In my hotel, the Terminus. It's only a couple of blocks away. If you don't mind making the detour, I'll stop off and get a windbreaker from my room."

  He left the woman, looking remarkably voluptuous despite her slender build, at the wheel of the battered old roadster while he hurried into an elevator and went up to his room.

  Opening the closet door, he thought at first the wind-breaker was missing. Then he realized it had slipped off the wire coat hanger and was lying in a crumpled heap on the closet floor. With an exclamation of annoyance, he leaned in to pick it up.

  The nylon filled with wet sand made no noise as it swung down to meet his nape. The floor cracked open into an abyss of darkness, and the Executioner fell through.

  8

  There was a roaring sound in Mack Bolan's ears. The world heaved in waves of blackness. Someplace far down in his skull a team of workmen with pneumatic drills were trying to blast their way out.

  The warrior raised his hands to his throbbing forehead ... and touched nothing. He experienced a moment of irrational panic.

  Then, as consciousness gradually returned, the head came with it, and he realized he hadn't reached for it at all: he couldn't have because his hands were tightly bound behind his back.

  Bound? Yeah, his feet, too. Something hard and unpleasantly dry to the taste was jamming his mouth open and was secured there with a strip of cloth. His jaws, wedged apart by the gag, ached as painfully as his head.

  After a while his memory fully returned, though the blackness and the roaring continued. It took him some time to figure out that he was shut up in the back of a truck: an old, dilapidated truck, judging by the hard springs, the racket of the engine and exhaust, and the booming of the side panels.

  He strained his eyes in the darkness. There wasn't a vestige of light anywhere — no cracks between doors suddenly illuminated by the headlights of a passing car, no refleclions from streetlights or road si
gns. It must, he reckoned, be very late at night.

  And if the surface was anything to go by, they were on a very minor road.

  Bolan tested his bonds. His wrists were tied tightly together, but not crossed. His ankles were bound and so were his knees, but they had left his elbows free. He'd probably be able to get his hands around in front of him.

  They lurched along the rough track for what seemed to be hours. At last the truck turned sharply, hurling Bolan across the metal floor like a sack of coal, then they were traveling on a smooth surface.

  He heard the sucking whine of heavy-duty tires, the regular concussions of air as they thudded past cars and trailers going in the opposite direction. From time to time, as some late traveler came up behind them and waited for an opportunity to pass, cracks outlined the rear doors, limned in bright light.

  Bolan occupied his mind by running over the sequence of events since Hal Brognola had involved him in this operation.

  After all the legwork, the shootings, the fire, the three narrow escapes and the baffling lack of intel that confronted him at every turn, what had he come up with in the way of pay dirt?

  The fact that there was an escape organization.

  But he had known that before he'd started.

  Worse still was the fact that the shadowy characters who masterminded the organization had not only kept up with him all the way: half the time they had been way ahead of him.

  Why?

  And why was it that the previous moves had all been attempts to eliminate him outright whereas this time he had merely been knocked unconscious and abducted?

  Interrogation? Find out how much he did know and who was behind him? That figured.

  Lastly, as far as his present situation was concerned, had he fallen into a honey trap? Was Gudrun part of the scheme, a decoy who had set him up? Or was she no more than an innocent coincidence?

  He would have to leave that one on hold, along with the other questions awaiting an answer from Mustapha Tufik.

  The noise of the truck's tires changed to an oily hiss. He heard the drumming of rain on the roof. Soon afterward they bumped off the road, and the vehicle groaned to a halt. The rumble of the engine died away, and the pattering of the rain grew louder. A door slammed, and Bolan was aware of footsteps squelching on wet ground. He faked unconsciousness, his breath snoring past the gag.