Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  That prompted another thought: it was just as Boardman was about to explain the three Fs that the guns had opened up. If they had listened in on the conversation, or even the last part of it, that could imply that Friedekinde was the most important lead, the key to the whole thing.

  Bolan paid for the coffee and walked to the nearest phone booth.

  On the shelf beneath the directories someone had left a copy of Le Monde. Idly Bolan glanced at the headlines. None of the stories seemed familiar, nor were they follow-ups to anything familiar. Then he saw the date. The fourteenth.

  Boardman had been killed on the eleventh.

  Bolan was stunned. It had taken them not twenty-four but seventy-two hours to get him here! In between he had lost two whole days…

  There had to be some explanation, Bolan thought. Smuggling an unconscious man, plus weapons, across international frontiers could be tricky. A small boat across the Mediterranean perhaps, and then a car or truck or ambulance up past Lyon to Paris?

  The Executioner didn't think so. A group this organized would have executive jets or a chopper available.

  So what then?

  So that was just one more mystery to add to the long list. And what difference did an extra one make among so many?

  Bolan swiveled the name directory down on its pivot and opened the hard covers. There was nobody in Paris listed under the name Friedekinde. He flipped back a couple of pages. Nothing with the acronym FFF.

  He had no better luck with the street directory, and there was no point consulting the yellow pages, because subscribers were entered under professions and he had no idea what business Friedekinde was in.

  The guy was either unlisted or based in one of the other three hundred and eight major cities in the world.

  Bolan sighed. He closed the books and walked out into the street. He saw no sign of a tail, though he knew there would be one. They — whoever "they" were — had brought him to Paris for a purpose, even if he didn't know what that purpose was yet. So it stood to reason that he would be under continuous surveillance.

  So far he hadn't been able to spot anyone. But it could be the Vietnamese girl with the vacuum cleaner, the cafe waiter, the guy sweeping garbage along the sidewalk gutter near the phone booth, the telephone lineman with his feet dangling among the coaxial cables beneath the open manhole on the far side of the street.

  The streets were crowded, too. If it was a question of professionals — maybe two people on foot, a couple on bicycles and a pair of automobiles, switching every half hour — he knew he wouldn't have a hope in hell of flushing them out.

  Let them work for their dough. He'd take the subway up to the Place Blanche in Montmartre, a cab to La Villette, and then walk on down through Belleville toward Place de la Bastille. Graziano, he knew, was something of a playboy. He liked to hang around high-class women. He didn't mind spending money. So it wouldn't be too difficult to locate the kind of bars in those areas that such a man would frequent.

  If he could get his hands on the terrorist, maybe he could choke some intel about Friedekinde out of him.

  8

  It was the middle of the afternoon. Bolan had found the La Villette neighborhood counterproductive; until the second half of the nineteenth century, it had been part of what was called the Zone, a no-man's-land between the inner and outer ring of the old city defenses frequented by ragpickers, hoboes and the dispossessed. It wasn't much better now; it remained a bleak wasteland of railroad marshaling yards, abandoned factories, and dock basins linked by canals crossing vacant lots overgrown with weeds.

  The swarming, colorful ghetto of Belleville looked more promising. Bolan had no fixed plan of action. Graziano would doubtless be known to the precinct police, but he was unwilling to make his search that official — especially as he himself could still be on some Parisian wanted list for all he knew.

  In a network of narrow streets choked with market traders and children playing among battered automobiles parked along the curbs, he drifted from cafe to bar to club, sometimes asking a casual question, sometimes just keeping an open eye.

  It wasn't until the fifth or sixth that he struck pay dirt at an afternoon strip club. Dimly lit by pink-shaded lamps, there was a space at the far end of the bar where a succession of big-breasted blondes took off their clothes as they writhed and swayed to the hard rock screaming from speakers in the four corners of the room.

  Bolan sat near the bar. Only half a dozen tables were occupied, mainly by North Africans whose own customs or religion forbade them to watch such exhibitions at home. He ordered a beer and allowed a brunette with an enameled face and a red dress that looked as if it had been sprayed over her curves to join him.

  She ordered champagne, and he paid the usual clip joint price — from which, he knew, she would receive a small commission — for a glass of syrup and water. With the mustache and the stained face, it was conceivable that he could pass as a Libyan or Tunisian, quite possibly from the neighborhood. So he felt safe enough making conversation, asking questions, without being thought a police spy or the wrong kind of journalist.

  He called the barman over and ordered a second round.

  Bolan knew how these places worked. As a rule, the management reckoned each customer was good for three rounds. After that came the pitch… and then it was too late for questions.

  The pitch came in three sizes. The woman held out the promise of sexual delights in a love nest "just around the corner." She would take the cash in advance, agree to meet the John outside after she had changed out of her working clothes and then wouldn't show. Or she might be a genuine fast-throw hooker. In that case the ante would be upped and there would be cubicles upstairs. Or more likely, there would be a curtained alcove at the other end of the room where the girl and her customer could get together.

  In each case a quick turnover was vital. The guys who ran those places weren't paying the strippers so that a handful of rubberneck jerks could stay all afternoon over a single glass of beer.

  The flip side of Paris's latest hit single was halfway through and the third blonde was revealing her breasts when the bartender brought the third round to the table and the pitch was launched.

  The brunette's mascaraed stick-on lashes were as stiff as iron railings. Bolan was surprised she had the strength to bat them as she cooed, "I always did like tall, macho types with blue eyes. I like a guy with muscle. And you got some powerful shoulders there. The thought of your hands makes shivers run down my spine." There was a pause before she continued. "Tell you what, darling, why don't we…?"

  Bolan was familiar enough with French to understand what she was saying. Besides, he thought wryly, the language she was speaking then was international in its intent.

  "As powerful as Graziano's?" Bolan asked, diving into the deep end.

  The girl's eyes opened unnaturally wide as if counterweights in back of her doll face had swung down.

  "Emilio?" she exclaimed. "Graziano? You're a friend of Emilio's! Baby, you shoulda told me. But you just missed him. He left with Clara half a minute before you blew in."

  "You know where he was headed?"

  "The Bluebird, I guess. Or maybe Las Vegas Nights. Clara has a thing about the hatcheck girl there." The brunette sniffed. "Look, seeing you're a buddy of Emilio's, I got a better idea. I know a joint just off the rue Morand, and my place is…"

  "Another time, maybe." Bolan pushed back his chair. He left a couple of bills on the table. "I've got business with Emilio. But thanks for your time."

  "Quickest way to the Vegas is out the back, past the bathroom and across the lot," she said. "It's the way Emilio always goes."

  Bolan nodded. "Sure," he said. "Thanks again."

  He threaded his way past the tables. The third blonde's buttocks were shaking and wobbling. Through the red draperies below the illuminated Toilettes sign, a short passage led to an open doorway, a yard with two evil-smelling toilets and a vacant lot.

  As soon as the curtain dropped behin
d Bolan, the brunette hurried back to the bar. "Toni," she said to the man behind the bar, "get me Max on the house phone. This is urgent."

  * * *

  The lot was big. It was, in fact, a demolition site, where a whole block had been flattened in a slum clearance scheme. But the reconstruction hadn't started yet.

  Wrecked car bodies stripped of everything movable, piles of used tires, bottles and cans in stacks of rotting household garbage, iron bedsteads and broken pots littered the rubble-strewn ground between brick-lined pits where wildflowers grew among the smashed drainage pipes.

  Old two-story houses backed onto two sides of the lot, and there was a high fence with wire gates ahead. Beyond this, Bolan could see soot-blackened warehouses and a couple of high-rise apartment blocks where the new concrete was already cracked and stained.

  It was presumably in that direction that Graziano and his companion had gone. Perhaps there was a pass door in the fence, or a portion of the wire gates that opened. Bolan hurried across, his shadow long in the rank grasses.

  In the center of the lot a section of paved roadway — the remains of a lane that had once been a cul-de-sac — ran alongside a pit filled with yellow water. Discarded trash cans lay on the far side of the pool.

  The first shot hit one of the containers with a noise like a ten-pound hammer battering a steel door. Bolan was flat on the pavement, rolling, with his arms above his head and the Beretta in both hands before the echo of the report registered in his ears.

  His tails — if they were still there — couldn't be gunning for him: they could have done that more easily in Algiers.

  So who was the attacker? If it wasn't one of the hardmen who had drugged and then dumped him, could it be a buddy of Graziano's alerted by his questions in the neighborhood? Graziano himself?

  If so, did it mean that his wild idea — that Graziano and the new terrorist organization weren't connected — might be true?

  Or was it no more than a coincidence? Some independent villain out for a tougher-than-usual mugging? A kid stoned out of his mind who'd do anything, kill anyone, to get the cash for a fix?

  Vital question: was the shooter after Bolan as Bolan, as an unwelcome, unidentified snooper who must be silenced; or just as a convenient mark? If it wasn't the last it had to be one of the other two, because nobody else could possibly know he was in Paris. He hadn't known himself until he'd woken up in the hotel that morning!

  The thoughts flashed through his head as he kept rolling, waiting for a second shot that would give him a clue, a direction, a hint where to aim.

  It came quickly enough, a heavy-caliber slug that gouged a furrow in the tarmac beside his head and scuffed dirt into his face. This was no hophead kid firing blind, but a pro who knew what he was doing.

  But the near miss enabled the Executioner to locate the ambusher's firing point — the skeleton of a miniature three-wheel delivery truck that had once been powered by a motorcycle engine. The tricar was lying on its side, and the gunman was crouched by the rusted floorboard.

  He whipped around to the far side as Bolan squeezed off a three-round burst that shook the steel plating and sent one ricochet screeching off the differential housing.

  Bolan came to his knees, firing a single shot to make the hidden marksman keep his head down, and then dashed toward the trash cans. Over the stamp of his own pounding feet he heard the distant thumping jangle of rock music from the strip club.

  The third shot — and a fourth immediately afterward — didn't come until he was almost level with the galvanized bins. He dived full length behind them, and then there was another pause.

  A gun with no more than a two-shot capacity, Bolan guessed. He figured it for some kind of express rifle, judging by the whipcrack report — something far crisper and less hollow-sounding than the reverberations of modern handguns. The pauses were bonuses, allowing him peril-free movement each time the guy reloaded.

  Bolan decided to offer himself as a decoy, tempting the gunner to let loose two more, which would give the Executioner the chance, now that he knew the score, to seek proper cover in the lull that would come immediately after.

  Bolan shuffled down to one end of the row, raised an arm above the level of the trash cans and fired a shot at the tricar.

  For an instant he showed himself beyond the end of the row, as if in readiness to run for a pile of broken bricks topped with motor tires, a piece of cover ten yards nearer the wire gates and safety. And immediately the rifle cracked out once, twice. A slug pierced a lid above one of the empty, deformed bins with a noise like a shot from a Bofors antiaircraft cannon. It was no more than an inch from the Executioner's momentarily visible shoulder.

  Its companion was a hunch shot prompted by Bolan's own misleading maneuver. It was aimed at the space he was expected to fill when he made his run, to nail him as he left the cover of the bins and dashed for the tires.

  The high-velocity round glanced off the corrugated side of the container at waist height and caromed skyward with a high-pitched whine.

  Bolan was on his feet and moving, all right… but he was springing away in the opposite direction, hurling himself toward a burned-out panel truck that was much farther away toward the middle of the lot, but which would give him much better all-round protection in case the sniper also moved.

  He made it. The gamble on the killer's need to reload after two shots paid off, but only just.

  A hole appeared in the roof panel above his head, and another round took away the heel of his shoe and sent him sprawling as he threw himself through the gap where the rear doors of the truck had been.

  Panting, Bolan dragged himself toward the front end of the wreck. The farther away he was from the rear, the wider his angle of view on the tricar… and the more chance he had of enfilading the guy behind it.

  The bulkhead separating the cab from the engine compartment was missing, along with the motor itself and the gearbox and pedal controls, so it was possible to crawl through beneath the scuttle to the scorched and oily space that had once housed the cylinder block.

  Better still, the hood that covered the engine had also been removed.

  Bolan had a choice of vantage points. Crouched, he could peer over the axle and brake drum out through the wheel arch, or he could rise suddenly up over the louvered edge of the hood long enough to risk a shot. The rifleman would be expecting him now to do just that — but through the glassless cab window or around the pillar of the empty windshield.

  The extra few feet would once again give Bolan the advantage of surprise. He would have time to choke out another three-round burst and drop back out of sight in the moment it took his adversary to adjust the target site he had in mind and switch his aim.

  From beneath the wheel arch he could see part of the gunman, but only two shoes and trouser legs as far as the knees. The guy was lying behind the floorboard. It was difficult: there was no percentage wasting lead in an attempt to score on a pair of limbs when the best he could do was wing the bastard. Let the sniper take the initiative one more time, Bolan thought, and then waste him once he showed.

  The gunman took the initiative all right, but he also took his time.

  Bolan mastered his impatience. Years of guerrilla combat experience had taught him that a savvy warrior doesn't move before he's ready, mentally as well as physically.

  Clouds passed across the sun now. A wind rustled the wild grasses patterning the vacant lot. In the distance the pulse of hard rock music was momentarily drowned by an angry chorus of horns as drivers less patient than the Executioner expressed their frustration at some holdup caused by a delivery truck in a narrow street.

  At last the feet behind the tricar moved.

  The guy was about to kneel. Bolan saw the barrel — no, two barrels! — of a rifle appear through a hole in the floorboard where the shock absorber for the single front wheel had once been fixed.

  He backed off a few inches from the wheel arch.

  It was too difficult a shot angled
upward around the brake drum. He would have to fire over the top of the hood. And in any case it was at the Beretta's maximum range.

  One of the rifle barrels jetted flame. The single round tempted a reply, but Bolan knew the killing slug would come soon after. The panel truck's bodywork quaked under the impact.

  Bolan waited in his turn. What kind of a greenhorn did the man take him for? The rifle would be trained on the cab window, first pressure probably applied already, anticipating his appearance.

  Bolan knew he had to do it before the guy's concentration on that window lapsed, before he started to ask questions, to ponder other possibilities.

  Suddenly Bolan sprang up into view, as near the charred radiator grille as he could get, and blasted a three-in-one at the tricar. Then he dropped as quickly as he had risen.

  He could have taken his time. With no chance of hitting the sniper himself, he had aimed at the twin barrels, hoping to damage the weapon, to scare some unexpected reaction from the man behind them.

  He scored.

  The barrels jerked upward under the stunning shock of the 9 mm parabellums. Involuntarily a finger tightened on the trigger. The gun fired; the second shot went into orbit.

  Bolan heard a cry of pain as the damaged gun was wrenched savagely from its owner's grasp.

  Mack Bolan remained immobile. There were no more shots. Were they going to keep up this act until nightfall, or until a third person walked across the lot and one or the other could make it to safer terrain?

  The sun reemerged, flooding the lot with golden light. A thin bright shaft flashed suddenly above the floorboard of the capsized three-wheeler.

  The gun barrels canted upward? Bolan screwed up his eyes against the glare. No, it was something slimmer, something that moved. He saw a hand.