Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  There were canvas saddlebags on each side of the Honda's rear wheel. Bolan stripped off his sweater and stuffed it into one. From the other he took two objects encased in dull black plastic, one about the size of a cigar box, the other the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  He had run the scooter in close to the wall and had steadied it on the kickstand. His Beretta nestled snugly in the shoulder rig, the AutoMag holstered on his right hip. Now he clipped the two plastic boxes to his belt and hoisted himself warily up until he was standing on the little machine's saddle.

  Balanced precariously there, he flung a length of burlap he had found at an old campsite in the woods over the glass fragments cemented into the wall. Standing that far above the ground, with his height, he could just reach up and grip the coping with his fingertips.

  He drew himself up until his shoulders were level with the top of the wall. He paused and listened, fingers, wrists and biceps aching. There was no sound from the other side of the wall. In the distance he could hear music from a fairground on the outskirts of Neuchatel. A lake steamer gave a short blast on its siren.

  He continued to pull himself up until he could wedge one foot on the coping. In the next moment he dropped noiselessly to the grass on the far side of the wall.

  He unclipped the larger of the two plastic boxes and flipped a switch. This was one of the goodies supplied by Hal Brognola. Similar to a radar detector used by motorists, the box would bleep softly and a red light would glow any time it came within range of any kind of electronic sensor or magic-eye beam.

  Holding it in front of him, the Executioner glided silently between bushes, through a plantation of young trees and past a sunken garden to the pavilion that looked over the waterway.

  The detector remained mute. No dogs barked. No voice challenged him from the dark.

  From the rococo pavilion he could look straight down the length of the ornamental pond to the palazzo. Lights showed in two of the downstairs windows and between the slatted shutters covering several more on the upper floor. A slight breeze moved the lotus leaves and stirred the somber surface of the water.

  Bolan stole past the tropical shrubs and crouched below the terrace. There seemed to be no guards patrolling the outside of the building. After a while, he rose until his head was above the top of the terrace balustrade.

  Through one of the long, uncurtained windows he could see a book-lined study and a green-shaded, counterbalanced lamp pulled low over a desk littered with papers. An elderly man with gold-rimmed pincenez sat writing at the desk.

  Bolan moved to the second window. He saw what was clearly some kind of reception room — the honey glow of ancient wood, vases and figurines in glass-fronted cabinets, a group of leather armchairs. Two men stood by an eighteenth-century inlaid French buffet loaded with bottles and glasses. The older was florid, white-haired, about sixty years of age; the younger blue-chinned, his eyes hidden behind wraparound dark glasses.

  Hell, Bolan thought, they sure didn't put much value on security!

  One of the windows was slightly open. He could hear snatches of conversation as the white-haired man poured drinks.

  "It was Ruth Benedict who first noted the effect of psilocybin on the Pueblo Indians as long ago as 1934…"

  "But haven't we found here, Paul, that drug-associated behavior change in the patients…?"

  "…a case of controlling the extradrug variables…"

  "…an effect indistinguishable, as Abramson observed, from that obtained with microgamma doses of LSD. And talking of ethyl alcohols, do you prefer soda or just ice with your Scotch?"

  Shoptalk. Doctors having an exchange of views on the uses of chemotherapy in the treatment of nut cases. Normal enough — even though lysergic acid diethylamide and psilocybin were psychedelic drugs. Bolan had heard that they could be used on schizo patients in the more extreme cases. He was preparing to move away when a sentence from the younger man — Dr. Paul Hansen, he assumed — froze him in his tracks.

  "But in this case it's the thought block that counts. Baraka shows no evidence whatsoever of ability transformation."

  Baraka!

  Bolan concentrated all his senses, blanking off everything but hearing in an effort to hear the older man's reply. But the words were mumbled, and immediately afterward he moved toward the window, causing the Executioner to duck below the balustrade. "There's a breeze blowing up," he said. "At my age, you want to keep out of drafts."

  The window closed.

  Bolan cursed. He couldn't hear anything else. But at least it proved he wasn't on a wild-goose chase: there was a connection between the foundation and the terrorists.

  If the clinic's director was the guy writing in the study, that still left one question unanswered. If, on the other hand, the florid white-haired character pouring drinks was Friedekinde, the answer was affirmative: he too was heavily into the plot.

  Bolan decided to pay a visit to the laboratories.

  There should be records there, some kind of book-work, filing cards even, on the patients — a case history, perhaps, on Baraka, if they were experimenting on the mysterious master killer.

  If so, there was a possibility that he could find a lead to the man's movements.

  And through him, maybe, to the shadowy elements behind the conspiracy. For Bolan was already convinced that the clinic was no more than an intermediate stage in the plot. The total lack of security precautions argued that.

  It was a good time, anyway, for a clandestine check on the labs. It was a fair guess that they would be devoid of people after working hours, whereas there would be an unknown number of nursing staff, servants and possibly patients in the house. He could hear someone whistling and the scrape of a bucket around the corner of the building now.

  He cat-footed around the opposite wing and crossed the stable yard. A black Mercedes sedan, a Citroen ambulance and a couple of lightweight pickups were parked on the cobblestones.

  At the far end of the yard there was a high wall with a wooden door inset. The door wasn't locked. He went through and found himself in a vegetable garden, the scents of herbs aromatic on the night wind.

  The garden was bounded on one side by the rear of the laboratory block. There was a door there, too. This one was locked.

  Bolan unclipped the second, smaller plastic box from his belt. This small, sophisticated device was magnetized. It clamped firmly to anything that had metal buried within two inches of the surface. A lock for instance. On the outside there was a dial calibrated with figures.

  Once the box was fixed firmly over the keyhole, the Executioner manipulated the dial this way and that until he heard the tumblers fall. He opened the door and walked into the lab.

  A pencil flashlight showed him a row of windows above a tiled workbench complete with sinks, fume cupboards, Bunsen burners and microscales in glass cases furnished with deionization equipment. He pulled Venetian blinds down over each window and risked sweeping the beam around the room.

  He saw shelves of chemicals in jars and the usual laboratory equipment. Insulated wires and lengths of rubber tubing linked the copper condensation coils and glass components of some complex experiment set up in front of a locked poison cupboard at the far end of the lab. At one side of the cupboard, a glass door led to an office.

  There were filing cabinets in there, along with ledgers on shelves and printed forms filled in by hand and clipped to sheaves of computer printouts. Bolan sat down at the table and started to read.

  He set aside copy invoices from pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment suppliers' order forms, a daybook recording the clinic's financial income and expenses and salary slips for doctors, nurses and household employees. Thick notebooks logging the results of experiments carried out by researchers were of little use to him since they were almost entirely expressed in chemical formulae, which he couldn't understand.

  He saw from the foundation's letterhead that the board of directors included Sir George Caversham; Admiral Herve Dutrand-Che
ville; Farid Gamal Mokhaddem; Senator Shell Pettifer; Sayed Mahdi al-Jaafari; and Montessori Giotto.

  Caversham, he knew, was a big wheel in the London stock market, a useful figurehead for companies wishing to float shares. The admiral was a retired defense adviser to the French navy, Giotto the industrial relations chief to Italy's largest manufacturer of automobiles. Mahdi al-Jaafari was gossip column material, a playboy educated at Oxford who kept a close watch nevertheless on his immense holdings in oil. The others didn't ring any bells for Bolan.

  No hint of anything shady there, he thought. He found a box file in a drawer of the desk in which case histories were summarized. But the patients were identified only by code letters. The treatment, expressed in medical shorthand, could have been instructions for the manufacture of a fission bomb, for all Bolan knew.

  Patients were subdivided under the headings NEU and MAG. Did the first of these imply Neuchatel, that is, inpatients at the clinic? If so, there were only five of them — three men and two women, all suffering from paranoid delusions of one kind or another, if he read the abbreviations correctly.

  But what could MAG stand for?

  The larger number of patients under this heading were clearly nonresident, for the dated treatments — the coded entries varied a lot — took place at odd intervals, and the length of each was unrelated to the others.

  Without a key to the identities masked by the code letters, it was pointless to continue. Bolan searched everywhere, but he could find no key, no deciphering notebook, no master card in the box file.

  Pondering his next move, he flipped idly through the pharmaceutical invoices. Among the expected analgesics, local anesthetics, disinfectants and tranquilizers, there was what seemed to him an abnormally large number of orders for very different substances: bufotenin, lysergic acid diethylamide, sodium amytal, TMA, adrenolutin — all of them, Bolan knew, in the category classed generally as hallucinogens.

  He shrugged. It was a research clinic, after all. Hadn't he read someplace that such psychedelic drugs had successfully been used stateside in the treatment of alcoholics, as well as psychotics and schizos?

  One thing was for sure: none of this stuff bore the slightest relation to arms, explosives or terrorism in general. It would be a waste of time delving any farther here. If proof existed of Friedekinde's connection with the plot, it would have to be sought elsewhere.

  The palazzo?

  Bolan glanced at his watch. It wasn't far off midnight; he had spent more time than he realized in the laboratory. The flashlight beam was beginning to fade.

  But even if the principals were still working or talking, surely the domestic servants, the patients and the medical staff would be asleep by now?

  In a house that size there would be room for maneuvering.

  He raised the Venetian blinds, slipped out of the lab and relocked the door. Back in the stable yard, he checked out the palazzo's rear facade. There were no lights showing from the kitchen quarters, and none through the shuttered upstairs windows.

  A quick circuit of the building showed him that all three of the doctors he had seen were now drinking in the reception room. The conversation was animated; it looked as if it might be a long session.

  Bolan stole back to the side of the house that was opposite the stable yard. The upper floor offered no problems to a penetration specialist trained in the expertise of secret entry. There were trash cans behind a fence, there was an outhouse roof, a stack pipe, a broad windowsill. It took him ten minutes to make the sill, open the shutters, lift away the circle of glass he had cut with a small diamond tool and reach in to ease back the catch. He pushed open the casement and climbed inside.

  After a moment of silence, he swept the pencil flashlight beam around the room. For some obscure reason it looked vaguely familiar. A narrow bed, a desk, a door to a bathroom.

  There was a half-full bottle of Scotch on the desk, an overflowing ashtray and a folded newspaper on a night table. To his surprise, instead of the sterile clinical odors he expected, the place smelled of stale cigar smoke and sweat.

  Something was wrong.

  It wasn't just that he had made a miscalculation: he had hoped the window would have been at one end of an upper hallway, not in the wall of what seemed like some servant's room.

  No, the alarm buzzer in back of his mind was vibrating; it was something much more positive than that. His subconscious fighter's sense had noted something out of place and was signaling him to watch out.

  He stood very still, listening.

  Then he swept the weakening flashlight beam slowly back over the bed, the newspaper, the ashtray, the bottle, the desk…

  The bottle!

  The surface of the amber liquor was swaying inperceptibly from side to side.

  Somebody had put that bottle down, plunked it hastily down, only seconds before, when they had heard him at the window.

  He continued the even sweep of the pale pencil of light around the room, as though he had noticed nothing. But now he was noticing everything, especially the heavy draperies covering an alcove that was presumably used as a closet for hanging clothes.

  And the tips of oversize brown shoes just visible beneath them.

  So the penetration specialist trained in the expertise of secret entry hadn't been so smart after all!

  Bolan flicked his flashlight off, unleathered the AutoMag and launched himself into the dark where the draperies had been. He aimed a kick just below a slight bulge he remembered in the invisible material.

  His foot thudded into something yielding. He heard a gasp of pain, and something heavy dropped to the floor.

  Continuing his advance, the Executioner ripped aside the curtains and swept his free hand over an electric light switch he had seen by the door. The room blazed into dazzling brightness.

  He was tall, bald, and massively built, and he needed a shave. He would always need a shave. He stood in jeans and a vest with his mouth open and his hands clasped to the lower part of his belly, fighting for breath.

  "You again!" he choked as air wheezed back into his lungs.

  As far as Bolan knew, he had never set eyes on the guy before. But this was no time for asking questions. He booted a fallen revolver under the bed, reversed the AutoMag in his hand and danced back out of range as the giant lumbered out of the alcove after him. Once he let those gorilla arms wrap around him he would be finished.

  He ducked underneath a roundhouse left, launched his own hard fist in a second attack on the big man's belly and then took a right cross on the shoulder that sent him spinning across the room to sprawl back over the bed.

  Winded or not, the giant was quick on his feet. Still grunting with pain, he hurled himself at the Executioner with clawing hands. Bolan lay on the bed, drew back his knees and straightened his legs as the huge body hit his feet.

  The guy staggered away far enough for Bolan to spring upright. A colossal fist slammed against his cheekbone with a force that seemed to split his skull apart. And now the hamlike hand straightened out, the plank-hard edge forward in a karate stance.

  But by this time the butt of the heavy stainless-steel AutoMag was swinging in a short arc toward the bald head. It clipped the man behind the ear before he could attack again. He dropped facedown on the floor with a thump that shook the room.

  Bolan leaped astride his back and slugged him again. Harder this time. The giant had been struggling to rise. Now he dropped and lay still.

  Bolan sprang catlike to his feet. Any kind of struggle in a house makes a disproportionate amount of noise, especially on an upper floor, especially a no-holds-barred fight between two big men. The fabric of the building acts as an acoustic amplifier, the floorboards as a resonator. And a deadfall by a hulk as heavy as the Executioner's opponent must have woken everyone in the entire house — and tipped off the doctors downstairs that this was no simple case of an inmate blowing his or her crazy top and being forcibly restrained by muscular nurses.

  Jerking open the door
, he ran out into a long passageway dimly lit by low-power light bulbs enclosed in wire cages in the ceiling.

  He had had more than his share of hunches already on this mission, but there was another to be followed now.

  With that curious and mysterious déjà vu feeling that everybody has at one time or another, he knew as he dashed down the corridor that he must turn right at the T-junction, that the main stairway lay to the left. There would be an unmarked door at the end of the passage that led to a service staircase that must connect with the kitchens.

  Angry voices sounded from the foot of the main stairway. A door opened somewhere behind him. He flashed past doors with glass inspection panels behind which he glimpsed patients in white hospital beds. An image was imprinted on his mind of one woman sitting up open-mouthed and screaming.

  He opened the unmarked door. True enough, concrete stairs led downward.

  At the foot of the stairs he ran across an empty kitchen bright with stainless-steel sinks, white enameled deep-freeze units and copper pans hooked along one wall. The door to the stable yard was locked, but the key was on the inside. He twisted it, reholstered the AutoMag, opened the door and hurried out into the night.

  The yard seemed twice as wide as it had before.

  Bolan took in the alternatives with a single searing glance.

  The car? The pickups? The ambulance?

  No ignition keys. No materials — and no time — to hot-wire them. The iron entrance gates barred the only way out, and they were probably electrically controlled. In any case a phone call could alert the gatekeeper and have him waiting, maybe with a gun.

  Down past the ornamental pond and the pavilion, with a desperate leap for the wall and the Honda on the other side?

  No way. He had seen floodlights installed in the tropical shrubs on either side of the water when he'd come in. One flick of a switch, that way, and he'd be center stage, with all illumination systems go.

  Behind the stables, then, and hightail it for the wall where it ran through the woods?

  Right.

  He sprinted past the vehicles and turned the corner of the block. Another wall, an archway that led to an orchard.