Executioner 053 - The Invisible Assassins

by Pendleton, Don

  Bolan had caught the fleeting impression of a face: lips curled in a victorious sneer, eyes just slits of hatred. The driver was going to take them all out. No witnesses.

  The car bounced over the outstretched legs of Shinoda's corpse. Marten had turned and taken two last paces... but there was nowhere for him to run.

  The black monster slammed into the young agent and smeared him along twelve feet of cinder-block wall. Over the sound of the straining engine came the tortured shriek of scraping metal and screaming man. Then the car fishtailed back to the street again and accelerated away.

  Bolan had dragged himself to his gun, tried to aim, but there was not enough feeling in his arm to hold it steady. The shot was way off.

  A second car was approaching.

  Bolan shifted the Beretta to his left hand and awkwardly sat up as the Dodge skidded to a halt.

  "Oh, my God!" Hennessy yelled as he leaped out. Marten's broken body lay like a discarded rag doll at the foot of the wall. The backup man ran past Bolan to check on his buddy. But it was pointless; he could not even recognize the crushed mess as Jay Marten.

  Bolan climbed unsteadily to his feet. Nothing seemed broken, but he was sore.

  Sore as in bruised and aching.

  And sore as in angry.

  As in mad.

  Fighting mad!

  "How DOES THAT FEEL?" Her fingertips were cool and soft against his skin.

  In another place, in other circumstances, Bolan might have replied quite differently. This time he just gave a shrug.

  She was young. With her glossy auburn hair and green eyes, she was very attractive. And Dr. Vicky Stevens was also extremely efficient.

  "Does that hurt?" she asked, probing along the muscle.

  Bolan shook his head.

  "You've been very lucky, Colonel. Nothing seems to be broken. But we'll still have to wait for the X-ray results."

  No, lady, I've been careless, thought Bolan, and that too made him angry. Angry at himself.

  Blackmailers were not his usual line of business, and he did not like getting dropped into the middle of a local operation like that. But when some dirty little extortion scheme threatened to jeopardize the security of the entire United States, Brognola had no choice but to assign him to the case.

  Bolan was not making excuses for himself. Getting caught off guard by a speeding car on a badly-lighted street offended his own sense of professionalism.

  Professionalism was not merely a question of remuneration for one's services, it was a state of mind: dedication and detachment born out of hard experience. Men like Jay Marten did not live long enough to get that experience. But Bolan had paid his dues. He'd had plenty of experience. Bolan was the consummate professional.

  The slightly mocking smile in the emerald depths of Dr. Stevens's eyes did not help his mood.

  She wasn't laughing at him. The intense presence of Colonel Phoenix prevented that. She was just trying to practice her own form of professional detachment. It was the defensive mechanism of a woman that made her smile.

  He had quite a body. Phoenix certainly was not the usual kind of patient she attended here at the medical centre. The tall man sitting on the edge of the examination table was in superb shape, despite the evident fact that his body had taken some vicious punishment in its time. She could only guess at what terrible retribution he had dished out to his foes.

  For a few moments he had been lost in thoughts of his own, but now the colonel glanced up, and she awkwardly looked away. "Nurse MacLean will put a dressing over that scrape on your elbow."

  Her tone made it clear she would not tolerate an argument. In the hospital, doctors were the ranking officers, even if they were young and pretty.

  He watched her as she left the room. Her legs were pleasingly trim and the slight sway of her hips was not disguised by the shapeless white coat.

  Bolan was left alone to pursue a frustrating chain of unanswered questions. The coroner's team should be able to come up with the clinical cause of Shinoda's death—that was the "what happened"—hut it still would not explain the "how" of it.

  How was it possible for them to blow a guy away without leaving a mark?

  And just who were "they"?

  That's where Bolan started. He was brooding over the why of it when Nurse MacLean appeared, carrying a gauze dressing and instruments in a steel dish. She quickly cleaned his arm.

  If Shinoda was a blackmail victim, then surely they would not kill him off, reasoned Bolan. And in what way had this technological wizard laid himself open to blackmail in the first place?

  The guy wouldn't have been caught with his fingers in the till; cash transactions did not figure in Shinoda's line of work. And fiddling with his expense account would hardly qualify Shinoda to have his arm twisted.

  What did that leave? He was single. Bolan recalled that Marten had said he'd been engaged for a while. Okay, assuming that Shinoda led an average love life, what did he have to conceal? What would he rather betray his country for than have revealed? In this permissive day and age it was difficult to imagine what a normal bachelor would find so crucially embarrassing. Had he been seen in some sex show or brothel overseas? Had he been snapped in bed with a couple of hookers? Was he bisexual?

  That wasn't enough.

  Rumors of a person's sexual preference, or especially prowess, were more likely to prove an intriguing enticement than a subject for blackmail.

  No, it did not add up.

  "Keep still while I tape this," Nurse MacLean demanded crisply. Her manner was every bit as commanding as the young doctor's.

  There was something else the young agent had said. "I read the transcript.. . . " Hell, a transcript did not show the inflection, mood, intention in a man's voice. Shinoda may indeed have been receiving instructions for a meeting, but on the other hand the caller might have repeated an order that in fact Shinoda had given them. Shinoda himself might have been dictating the time of the meet.

  "God, I hate having to make phone calls like that," grumbled the heavyset man who ambled into the room. He was Marten's boss, Jim Garfield; he was the one who had ordered Hennessy to bring the colonel in for a hospital checkup, a rare experience for a man usually served by the limitless resources of his own Stony Man Farm. Garfield held the door open for the nurse to leave, then turned back to Bolan. ''I've just spoken to Jay's wife...."

  Bolan could sympathize. He'd had to make more than a few calls like that, too. Death was no stranger to The Executioner; he was on intimate terms with it.

  "I told her... well, I just said it was an accident."

  Some accident.

  Garfield stood there for a moment forlornly looking his age. He stroked his hand across the spiky top of his crew cut, a hairstyle he had seen no reason to change since Eisenhower had been president. He had started in this line of work right after Korea.

  "So they patched you up?"

  "Yeah, I'm okay," nodded Bolan.

  "We found his car."

  "The Firebird?"

  "No, Shinoda's. A Jaguar XJ-S. It was half a mile away. On a supermarket lot."

  That bothered Bolan. And why was Shinoda at the agreed location nearly fifteen minutes late if he was following instructions for a payoff? The more likely explanation was that Shinoda had been going there to collect.

  Bolan was coming around to the conclusion that this codemaking genius was not the victim, but the blackmailer himself. "Do you have the original tape? I want to hear it."

  "Sure, Colonel, it's at the office," Garfield told him. "I'll take you over there. But first I want to see if anything's been found at Shinoda's apartment."

  "All right. Let's go."

  The two men had almost reached the Emergency reception area when they were intercepted by a balding physician with a slightly mystified expression.

  "Mr. Garfield!" The doctor signaled with the file folder he was carrying.

  "Ah, Dr. Benson, what have you found out?"

  "The detailed autopsy
hasn't been completed, but the initial inspection didn't reveal much. No immediately visible wounds." Dr. Benson took advantage of being in a Smoking Permitted area to light a cigarette, then flipped open the file and glanced at it. "These are the first reports from the lab. No evidence of toxins.. .. Hmm, that's interesting.. . "

  "What is it?" demanded Bolan.

  "Sodium thiosulfate. It was in the sample taken from under the fingernails."

  "So what's that mean?" asked Garfield.

  "It's fixer," said Bolan. "Sodium thiosulfate is a chemical used to fix photographic negatives."

  "That's right," Benson confirmed, puffing quickly at his cigarette. "He must have been an amateur photographer."

  Suddenly Bolan very much wanted to visit Shinoda's apartment.

  "We've still got to know what killed him," said Garfield. "What's your best guess?"

  Benson only hesitated for a moment. "He seems to have succumbed to a massive neurological spasm. But how was it induced? I have no idea."

  3

  IT WAS A QUIET STREET, well tended and rich. The white tower of Westdale Heights, thirty-two stories of luxurious condominium apartments, rose amid its own private complex of tennis courts and swimming pools. A battery of lawn sprinklers insured that the grass was maintained as a lush carpet, which hidden floodlights now rendered an almost unnatural green.

  Shinoda's apartment was on the eighth floor.

  A uniformed cop stood guard in the corridor outside. Garfield showed his identification and vouched for Colonel Phoenix. The sentry jerked his head at the door: they could pass.

  Despite the lateness of the hour there was already quite a crowd at work inside when Garfield and Bolan arrived. Bolan had been detained at the medical center long enough for a diverse team of experts to swing into action.

  It seemed a lot of people were interested in the demise of Kenji Shinoda.

  The local homicide captain did not like it that yet another respected citizen had been cut down on an L.A. street. The NSA boys were curious because the victim was one of the nation's top cryptographers. Hennessy was there watching a fingerprint team dust down the door handles. And two dour-looking agents from another federal department were trying to find out if they, too, should be concerned.

  "As you can see, it hasn't exactly been ransacked," one of the detectives told Garfield, "but somebody's been in here all right."

  "Nothing much seems to have been touched," added Hennessy, coming across to give his boss the guided tour. "I guess whoever they were knew what they were after."

  Yeah, thought Bolan, but did they find it?

  "That desk over there has been searched. And the filing cabinet has been rifled," Hennessy pointed out, "and if you'll come through here. . . on the right . . . yes, in there. See, he'd converted the second bathroom into a darkroom."

  A police photographer took a final wide-angle shot of the trashed room and retreated to allow the two newcomers to inspect the place.

  None of the equipment had been smashed. The enlarger stood in place on the Formica homemade top, a small print dryer was in the corner, and three empty chemical trays sat on a rubber mat along the bottom of the bath.

  Scattered across the floor were strips of 35mm negative, each about a foot long, obviously dumped out by someone in search of a specific picture.

  "Your being-blackmail theory seems to have run out of gas," said Bolan.

  "It looks that way," Garfield concurred glumly. He had already received the report that nothing had been found on the body except a wallet and loose change: no wad of bills for a payoff. Garfield's hand once more brushed nervously across the graying bristle of his crew cut; he looked like a frustrated foot ball coach whose miscalculation had cost his team dearly.

  Bolan was not so easily defeated. Ever. He did not care if the other side was a few points ahead. Now it was time for him to roll up some yardage of his own. Bolan would get to the bottom of this mysterious killing; somebody was going to pay for trying to turn him into a hit-and-run statistic.

  Garfield was inspecting two eight-by-ten black-and-white prints. They were well-composed views of a Shinto shrine. "He must have taken them on his recent vacation in Japan."

  Bolan scooped up a couple more photos from beside the washbasin pedestal. They showed Shinoda in a white karate suit halfway through a practice kata. He looked a lot more lively and healthy than when Bolan had last seen him.

  "A regular Bruce Lee, wasn't he?" said Garfield. "He must have had a friend take these when he was working out at the Iron Fist Association."

  Bolan gave the security agent an inquiring look.

  "It was in his wallet. A membership card," explained Garfield. "He belonged to a karate and kung Fu club here in town."

  Even more puzzling. If Shinoda was trained in the martial arts, why had he been taken by surprise so easily?

  Garfield bent down and began to scoop up the cut strips of negatives. There were about three dozen of them. A policeman standing in the doorway looked resentful that Garfield had interfered with potential evidence.

  "We'll send them on down to you," growled Garfield.

  The cop knew better than to argue. One of his partners appeared. "The guy who runs the all-night convenience store on the corner said Shinoda dropped in about eleven-thirty."

  "What time did you get here?" Bolan asked the cop. "About one-thirty. Along with Mr. Hennessy, we were the first to arrive."

  "See if there's anyone around who saw a black Firebird parked in this area between midnight and one-thirty," Bolan told him.

  The cop looked at his watch with a frown. Was he supposed to go knocking on people's doors at this hour? He departed with a shrug.

  As Bolan and Garfield returned to the lounge, the detective there came to speak to them. "This might sound crazy, because nobody passed us on the way up and there was a squad car outside, but I have the feeling we might have disturbed whoever was in here."

  "Oh?" Garfield looked at him with interest. "What makes you think that?"

  "The guy who just left said the top two drawers of the desk weren't touched. The intruder might not have finished the job he set out to do."

  Bolan crossed to the long window in four strides even before the other man had finished his sentence. The latch was open on the sliding glass door. Bolan pulled it back and, drawing his weapon, stepped out onto the balcony.

  It was nothing more than a concrete slab four feet wide by about twenty feet long, hemmed in by a metal grille guardrail. A puddle of water had collected under the back of the air-conditioning unit. The balcony was deserted.

  Bolan looked over the edge. The sheer white wall dropped smoothly to the flower garden eight floors below. An evenly matched row of similar balconies Milled out from each of the lower apartments. No utility pipes to mar the surface. No fancy brickwork. No handy ledges.

  Garfield came out and peered over at the floodlit grounds. He stepped back quickly; evidently he did not have a head for heights. "Nah, you'd have to be a human fly to get down there."

  Bolan was not ruling that out. He looked pensive as he stepped back into the main room.

  "Colonel Phoenix?" A uniformed cop had entered the apartment. Garfield shook his head at the mis-identification and tipped his thumb toward Bolan. The patrolman turned to address him. "A call has just been patched through to say a Mr. Hal Brognola and your colleagues are on their way. They're flying in right now."

  Bolan nodded. He could use some backup. Garfield's comment about a "human fly" still echoed in his mind.

  "As soon as it's light I want you to have that wall out there examined," he said to the ranking agent. "And the one running alongside Alvarez Street. Inch by inch if necessary. See if you can find any unexplained marks. Anything at all."

  "Okay." Garfield managed a weary shrug. It would be dawn soon enough. "Let's get back to my office. I could use a coffee. We can wait for your people there. Oh, yeah, and you wanted to hear that tape."

  BOLAN SAT SLIGHTLY HUNCHED FORWA
RD, head cocked toward the speaker. It was the tenth time he had listened to it.

  He hit the Stop button.

  You could read it either way, he decided. Shinoda might have been repeating prior instructions or on the other hand he might have been issuing an order; his clipped tone was inscrutable. It was understandable that an overeager young agent like Marten, ambitious for a big-league bust, could have jumped to the conclusion that Shinoda was having his arm twisted, especially if he had only read a transcript of the two-sentence conversation. Still, it was a terrible price that young agent had had to pay. Somebody should have told the kid: it only takes one mistake. But Bolan would avenge him, that much was certain.

  Finally conceding that there was nothing more he could get from the recording, Bolan stalked out down the corridor. It was quiet. Hennessy had signed out for the night. Garfield had gone for an early breakfast.

  The door to Garfield's office was open. The duplicate keys to Shinoda's apartment were lying on the desk, alongside the half dozen prints they had found.

  The couch along the far wall looked inviting, but there was no point in sacking out; Brognola and the others would be here shortly. And, Bolan hoped, they would bring some answers with them.

  Steve Corbett was working in the cluttered laboratory at the end of the corridor. Bolan wondered what luck the technician had had; maybe those strips of negative would reveal something.

  Corbett ran the all-purpose lab attached to Garfield's small secret service department. A tight budget would not allow anything more elaborate. Serious forensic investigation or detailed technical work were farmed out to the appropriate authorities, but Corbett and his assistant Larry Fisk could handle the more routine matters.

  Garfield had called Corbett in early to work on the negs. He, in turn, determined he should not be the only one to suffer, and he had called Fisk in, too. Bolan found Corbett whistling as he peered through the microscope.

  The technician looked up, still slightly sleepy-eyed but smiling. "Just about finished! I was matching the last of these cuts precisely."