Vendetta in Venice

by Don Pendleton

  Brognola's jaw dropped. He paused with an oyster halfway to his mouth.

  "We believe we have the means of getting in touch with this network," Sujic continued, "of putting a man, a particular man, in contact with them... a task that has so far baffled every police agency in Europe, as you no doubt know."

  "I'm listening."

  "Let me offer you three facts. One, there was in my country a convicted robber and murderer who recently escaped from a prison near Prague. He made for the capital, where he hid with a large sum of money, wondering what to do — a natural client, don't you think, for this network? Two, this man was known to have gone to ground in the old city, where his loot was cached. He was also known to be seeking a way out of the country for obvious reasons. And the third point is that he is dead."

  He paused for effect. Brognola was staring at him with a puzzled expression.

  "We discovered his hideout," Sujic explained, "and as we moved in to flush him out, he broke cover and fled. He was knocked down by a military truck and killed instantly as he ran across a road. The important thing about this is that nobody outside the secret police, nobody, knows that he is dead. There were no witnesses to the accident and, as far as the underworld is concerned, he is still lying low in his hideaway."

  "I'm afraid I don't quite see?.."

  "You must remember," the colonel went on, brushing aside the interruption, "that our task is complicated by the fact that, officially, we have no underworld in my country. And there is one extra factor with which you should be made familiar. It is a visual one, so I shall content myself with showing you a photograph." He took a pigskin wallet from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, opened it and separated from a neat bundle of ID papers and plane tickets one postcard-size color print that he handed to the Fed.

  "That is Zoltan Cernic, the murderer who is no longer among us/' he said. "And who was, incidentally, a confederate of the bank robber Hradec, who has already been spirited away by this escape organization."

  Brognola looked at the portrait and gasped.

  It was a typical mug shot — staring eyes, defiant expression, prison number displayed across the chest. But apart from a higher forehead and the fact that the widow's-peak hair was a flaming red, the features could have been those of Mack Bolan.

  10

  Bolan was back at the hotel behind Sint Pietersstraat early the next morning. "Hendrik Vandervell" was already at work, covering a huge chart with hieroglyphics as he held a telephone receiver clamped to one ear. He waved the Executioner to a seat and went on talking.

  "... from that whorehouse in the Rembrandtsplein, did you say? And then out on the Arnhem parkway? Well, the devil be praised! But we have to have witnesses, mind, who saw her leave... Sure, you do that, but first see what the chambermaid has to say."

  He put down the phone and turned to Bolan with a crooked smile. "Hello, you," he said. "You wouldn't believe the trouble we have. There's this little fellow, a military attaché with one of the Latin countries, an' they want the lowdown on his private life. But, sure, the man's so active, movin' from girl to girl and from place to place so fast that my people can't tell if it's a miss he's after or a missile!"

  "I won't keep you long, but I have a favor to ask."

  "My pleasure, boy," Tufik replied, "so long as it has nothin' to do with that matter we discussed yesterday."

  "Not directly. It's a service I can't easily call up anyplace else in this town. I'd like to use your shortwave transmitter to call Brognola in Washington."

  "No sweat." The fat man waved a hand at the dials and tuners beyond the computer terminal. "And you can ask the dear lad how things are on my behalf, for I've had no word from himself for many a long month."

  "You don't have to be cagey with me," Bolan chided. "It can't be more than a couple of days since you were in touch with him."

  "What are you talkin' about?"

  "Hell, he must have been in contact to fix our meeting."

  "Our meetin'? I don't follow you at ail." The Irishman was staring.

  "You mean he didn't?.."

  Tufik shook his head.

  "You didn't make it to the Terminus barbershop specially to contact me? That means our meeting was no more than a coincidence. What the hell's going on?"

  And a few minutes later, when he'd contacted Brognola, he asked, "Why didn't you warn Tufik that I was on my way? I knew I had to meet someone once I had the railroad ticket, but..."

  "Ticket?" Brognola's voice interrupted. "What are you talking about, Striker?"

  "You mean you didn't..."

  "I haven't made an attempt to contact you since you called me from the embassy in Paris."

  The Executioner whistled softly. If neither Brognola nor Tufik knew anything about that special delivery letter, then it had to mean he had deliberately been decoyed to the hotel. Which in turn meant that someone — the guy who tried to run him down in Paris? — had changed his mind and decided to eliminate him in Holland.

  Why?

  If they were going to shoot at him when he was on a balcony or knock him on the head and abduct him from a hotel room, why do it in The Hague? Why not Paris? Or anywhere else? After all, there were plenty of balconies and plenty of hotel rooms in Europe.

  There could only be one answer: because the person or persons who had to do the shooting and abducting must themselves be in The Hague. Having failed in Paris, they put one over on the Executioner, leading him to their next stop, so they could try again.

  Why would they have to be in The Hague?

  Bolan shot a glance at a newspaper on a table near the fat man, an early edition of that day's Het Parool.

  Yeah. Affirmative.

  Bannered across the front page, he read, slowly translating the Dutch: POLICE OUTWITTED IN DARING ESCAPE BID! And then in smaller type: Jailbreak Terrorist Traced to Maastricht — Then Trail Goes Cold.

  That figured. It was business as usual for the network, even when they did have accounts to settle with too-curious investigators.

  "...the best goddamn lead you're likely to get this side of Christmas," Brognola's voice was saying. "So, Striker, liaise with this guy in Switzerland, let him fill you in, then take it from there, okay?"

  "Got it," Bolan said, his mind automatically recording the details, though his thoughts were still right there in The Hague.

  As soon as the Fed signed off, the warrior turned to Tufik. "What's the strength of this, Mustapha?" He indicated the newspaper on the table.

  The fat man looked evasive. "I can tell you no more than what you read in the newspapers," he hedged.

  "Reading headlines is one thing, but translating six columns of Dutch is another."

  "Well..." Tufik cleared his throat. He began seeding reference cards back into a box file. "It seems there was this feller, a Palestinian, who belongs to some fundamentalist group. He made a break from the courtroom yesterday after sentence was passed. He'd drawn fifteen for his part in a supermarket bomb."

  "And then?"

  "They had cops cordon the neighborhood in no time at all. But the feller was already through. Someone recognized him in a truck stop near Maastricht sometime after midnight, an' that was the last seen of him." Tufik chuckled. "They say he got through the police lines doubled up inside the body of some old barrel organ contraption!"

  "A barrel organ?" Bolan echoed.

  There had been a barrel organ below his room when the sniper had fired at him yesterday morning. And again when he was knocked out after his visit to Tufik. Was it possible that this could be a coincidence?

  No way.

  Maybe that was the fashion in which he, too, was spirited away from the Terminus — concealed behind the decorated panels of that antiquated machine. He could also believe that the escaped terrorist had been traveling with the tough little guy with the jutting jaws. The evidence was accumulating, but as far as hard facts were concerned, had he really made much progress?

  Negative. There were still far too many ques
tions that needed answering. Specifically, how had the conspirators fixed it so that they were always up-to-date with his own movements?

  Sure, he'd had a lot of questions waiting for a reply ever since the operation had started; he had asked them in a lot of places. Many of the folks he'd quizzed had themselves demanded intel from others — and these in their turn had probably talked. But even so... If he didn't have complete confidence in Tufik's integrity, he might have thought the fat man himself was the source. However, until he could follow Brognola's lead, the only positive deduction he could make was that he had probably misjudged Gudrun, thinking her a party to his own snatch.

  "I owe your girl an apology," he told Tufik.

  "My girl?"

  "Gudrun. I figured she engineered my return to the Terminus, knowing there was someone waiting for me in my room. It seems I drew a blank."

  "Well, I don't know about that," Tufik said. "But Gudrun herself is away a couple of days. She has time owin' from last Easter, and she asked me could she take it now. She'll not be back until the day after tomorrow. Can I give her a message?"

  "No. Thanks. I'll be long gone by then. In fact, I'm on my way as of now — unless you have any second thoughts about..." He jerked his thumb toward the newspaper.

  The fat man's jowls quivered as the great head shook in negation. "A rule's a rule, Mr. Bolan," he said regretfully. "Even among friends. 'Twouldn't be of much use, I doubt not, even if I could talk. A name, a description, a probability of whereabouts, which you'll like enough latch on to soon enough yourself. You already know they were askin' about you... and, the dear knows, you've had proof of that yourself. Still, though, there is one thing I'll tell you..."

  "Yeah?"

  Tufik grinned. "It's a pity of him, but remember this: it's not always the new ones that travel the best!"

  "It's not always the new ones?.." Bolan echoed with a puzzled frown.

  But the fat man in the wheelchair refused to elaborate his hint — if hint it was — and the Executioner left with one more riddle unsolved, leaving Tufik to reach into his pocket for a fistful of colored pens as he drew a stack of newspapers toward him.

  11

  "Liaise with the guy in Switzerland," Brognola had said. And "the best goddamn lead you're likely to get." Okay. But there were a few formalities to get through before the liaison could be effected, before the Executioner even knew what the lead was. Such as initial contact, transport, communications. And on these the Fed hadn't been as specific.

  "It's your game, Striker. Play it your way," he had said infuriatingiy. And when Bolan pressed for details, for some hint on the nature of this lead, Brognola had pointed out that the long-distance airwaves weren't secure.

  Bolan was left with an instruction to make his way to Switzerland, pausing at certain stated times to tune a radio to a particular frequency, waiting for a call from the contact, who wasn't yet sure of the exact time and place of the rendezvous. Once that was fixed, the warrior was to allow the contact to blaze the trail... until a given moment that the contact himself would choose. After that Bolan would know what to do.

  It all seemed unnecessarily complex to him. HE didn't even know the name of the contact — some spook from an Eastern Bloc country, Brognola had said — only a coded radio call sign by which he would identify himself.

  Bolan didn't have to be in Switzerland until the following day, but he figured it a good idea to make it as close as he could today in case the contact wanted an early rendezvous... or favored someplace way up in the mountains. So he left The Hague early, skirted Antwerp and Brussels and arrived in Namur on the Meuse in time to buy bread, cheese and beer before the stores closed for the lunch break. He ate not far from Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes, pulling the rented Mercedes off the road just before two o'clock in time for the first listen-in period.

  Since the guy calling him would be far out of range of any normal transceiver, Bolan was obliged to choose a secluded place where he could set up a miniature dish aerial and connect that to a classic receiver about the size of a small typewriter. Around the clearing he had selected, the undulating country fell away in a series of interlocked, wooded curves.

  Wind moaned in the pines overhead and stirred needles around the trunks of trees farther down the hill as he ate and drank. The sky, which had gotten more and more overcast since dawn, was now a sullen yellow canopy stretching from horizon to horizon. It looked as though it were going to snow.

  Bolan sat for thirty minutes with the engine running and the heater booster turned up, the radio tuned to the frequency he had been given. Other than an occasional surge of automatic Morse, the receiver remained silent.

  He drove on into Luxembourg. Snow had already fallen on the eastern slopes of the Ardennes. There was a thin coating between the trees, and from time to time, along the surface of the sinuous route near Esch-sur-Sure, powdery white trails snaked toward the car in the wind. Farther south in the Grand Duchy the fail had been heavier: snow lay thickly on branches and roofs, filling the furrows between iron-hard ridges of plowed land.

  The streets of the capital were still bone-dry, but it was unnaturally dark, and in the chasm that divided the city into two fairy-tale halves, light already gleamed in the dusk below the turreted cliffs. Bolan drove on toward the south.

  By the time he was due to operate the radio again, he was in the center of the vast industrial complex between Metz and Saarbücken. It was like a scene from some medievalist's idea of hell. Rows of gaunt iron chimneys belched flame into the livid sky. From factory to grimy factory, huge metal pipes, twelve feet in diameter, writhed across the blasted landscape like the entrails of a galactic robot in a strip cartoon, bridging roads and marshaling yards, swerving around waste tips, linking furnaces and smelting plants and mines. Even with the Mercedes windows sealed shut, the Executioner could smell fumes from the sulfurous, polluted air trapped beneath the fiery clouds.

  Small wonder, he thought, that the workless, condemned to a useless existence in this dead land, so often turned to crime. And the more the little guys turned to crime as the only way to buy a ticket out of hell, the more the predators, the big wheels it was Bolan's vocation to destroy, grew fat on the evil they moved in to organize.

  Bolan shook his head. The problem was insoluble. He would continue the fight until there was no breath left in his body. Others would take up where he left off. But however much of the web of evil they tore down, however much of the rottenness behind it they exposed, however frequently the ulcers that festered on the body of society were destroyed, it seemed that they would always be replaced.

  It was time to stop. He didn't know quite what to do. The road was narrow and full of traffic. The sidewalks, below high corrugated metal and chain-link fencing, were crowded with workers returning home. The few parking lots he saw were too busy. Finally he approached a stretch of dusty grass bounded by a hedge white with some airborne waste. It was too public a place to set up the radio, but at least he could get the car off the road. He steered up over the sidewalk and stopped the Mercedes beside the hedge.

  Waiting until the press of walkers and cyclists thinned, he took the equipment from the trunk and looked around. A redbrick building on the far side of the road was surrounded by transformers and generator housings and gantries bristling with insulators. He could see a parking lot in front of it, bordered by tubs full of dispirited flowers. Beyond the hedge, stunted trees punctuated the rusty topography of an automobile junkyard.

  He could see — beyond the stacks of crumpled fenders, the concertinaed witnesses to death and destruction and moments of fatal inattention — a wooden hut by the yard's entrance gate. It should be quiet enough in there, in the dark, for his purpose... as long as he could make it past the man on the gate.

  Or was there, maybe, another way? A rear entrance?

  Strolling by casually, he found that there was. Fifty yards farther along the highway, a lane cut up between the junkyard and the high brick wall of a foundry. And fifty
more yards up the lane, Bolan saw tire tracks in the mud between a gap in the hedge. Glancing swiftly behind him to check that he was unobserved, he slipped through.

  A few minutes later, cans hooped over his head, he was sitting comfortably enough on the running board of a wrecked 1930s taxicab, his aerial erected on its battered hood. He was completely hidden — from the road, from the lane and from the shack at the entrance — by the towering stacks of scrap metal.

  The bigger piles consisted of metal shells from which everything of use or value had been stripped: engines, wheels, instruments, springs, transmissions, seats and even the trim from the doors. But a variety of more specific scrap was heaped between these stacks. Bolan saw a mound of radiator cores, another of bolt-on wheels, a third of bench seats, mildewed and worn, with springs and stuffing leaking from the ripped surface. Beyond these, rose a mountain of cylinder blocks from which the pistons and valves had been removed.

  "Hammer calling Striker. Hammer calling Striker." A clipped voice with an unidentifiable accent rose above the hiss of static in the Executioner's phones. "Do you read me, Striker? Do you read me? Please acknowledge and stand by for time and place."

  Bolan flipped the Send button and transmitted the coded acknowledgment Brognola had given him.

  "Hotel Lucerne, Geneva," the voice said, "Midday."

  And that was all. The static faded. Bolan heard the equivalent of a telephone line going dead.

  He had questions, but although he tried for ten minutes to raise a reply, his unknown correspondent remained obstinately silent. This, the Executioner thought, was carrying security to a farcical degree. It showed, nevertheless, that the contact he was to meet was highly professional.

  The guy hadn't even specified the day. He knew Bolan would have been briefed on that already and was counting on him to know. In the same way no mention had been made of recognition techniques: Brognola's contact was relying on him to play it by ear. A man who expected that kind of efficiency from others, the warrior reckoned, had to be pretty damned efficient himself. Maybe the lead would turn out to be a positive one after all.