Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  Crossing the gymnasium, he was aware that pangs of hunger were gnawing at his belly. He'd eaten and drunk nothing since his morning coffee in Neuchâtel. Thirst was more acute than hunger: the air-conditioned atmosphere of the redoubt had made his throat dry. Absently he walked across to a row of filing cabinets, opened the door of a steel cupboard at one end of the bank and took a bottle of mineral water from the miniature refrigerator inside. He drank.

  It wasn't until he was going through a pile of ledgers, medical treatment charts and notebooks covered with cryptic annotations that he found in the office desk that he paused to wonder how it was that he had known where to go for his drink. He shrugged. Another hunch — he was used to them paying off now.

  The charts listed treatment given to a score of "patients," many of them expressed in chemical formulae, some quoting the kind of drugs ordered by the researchers in the Neuchâtel lab. Amounts were expressed in micrograms and milliliters, together with dates and handwritten comments in the Results column on the right of each sheet. The comments were in a psychiatrist's shorthand that Bolan found hard to understand: "Resp var c moon… Percep chg antag + Sod Succ i v… Regress x 3… Synesth sens modal fus," The patients this time were identified by first names — Rizzo, Gerhard, Julie, Jean-Paul — and certain cross-references Bolan was able to make from memory showed that these were in fact the same people listed under the MAG heading in the Friedekinde clinic. MAG for Maginot.

  Patient was a euphemism: Bolan was reading a documented account of drug medication deliberately fed to known killers. The inclusion of Gerhard and Rizzo, the two guys he had wasted in the lobby, proved that.

  Baraka's chart was the longest of all, running to three sheets with dates stretching back more than six months. Bolan jotted down some of the formulae, drug names and abbreviations, since the treatment for the star assassin seemed more variable, more delicate and a hell of a lot more complicated than the others. Brognola would know someone who could deduce the kind of behavior such chemical indoctrination might produce. Maybe they could even get a lead on the big deal planned for this number one killer.

  For the moment, however, Bolan couldn't turn up any indications other than the medical records.

  He did find listed cross-references for several of the named terrorists, and also for the Marksman and an individual referred to simply as "the Corsican," neither of whom appeared to have received any medication, for their names weren't on the charts. Most of these references were followed either by "Morgue" or "VCR," sometimes by both.

  Hazarding a guess that the former implied newspaper clippings rather than the end product of the killers' work, Bolan searched the cabinets and found one drawer filled with files relating to every terrorist outrage, hijack, holdup and bombing during the past three years. The clippings had come from most European dailies and weeklies and the most influential papers stateside.

  Where the new organization had been involved, as in the English Channel car ferry disaster, the sabotage at Rome airport and the bombed rue de Rivoli store, neat names were printed on the outside of the folder: Cobbold, Graziano, Marksman, Gerhard.

  Some of the folders were also tagged "VCR."

  Bolan went down to the viewing room.

  In the projectionist's booth behind the six rows of padded club seats, he found a library of videocassettes and half a dozen cans of film. The cassettes were all noncommercial products, each marked on the spine with a name.

  The Executioner felt the hair on his nape rise, and a chill raced through him as he read those names.

  Alonzo, Codorneau, Jaecklin, Riordan, Van Leeuward…

  All prominent men.

  All recently murdered.

  Did this mean that the savages organizing the assassinations currently shaking Europe were callous enough to record the evidence on tape?

  It did.

  Bolan switched on the giant television screen and slotted in a cassette.

  The screen flickered, chased lines up, down, relapsed into color and then steadied on a tennis court surrounded by crowded tiers of seats fronting a palm-fringed backdrop of tower blocks and condos. Behind the modernistic steel and glass buildings, limestone cliffs stood against a hard blue sky.

  Monte Carlo?

  Check. With mounting horror, the Executioner watched the assassination of two prime ministers at the end of their match.

  He changed the cassette.

  The tapes were expertly edited. Some of them incorporated shots from two different cameras. One — the murder of the French antiterrorist chief, Codorneau — had been shot from a boat.

  The backs of Bolan's hands were tingling. Trying to control his fury as the catalog of crimes ran on through tape after bloody tape, he found he was drumming nervously with his fingers on the arm of the seat.

  On the screen two bikers emptied their SMGs through the windows of a stalled Mercedes on a German street.

  Bolan clenched and unclenched his hands, forcing himself to concentrate on Nasruddin and the elusive, mysterious Baraka, who was being groomed in this very bunker for God knows what atrocity. Baraka, whose secret he was resolved at all costs to unveil, whose satanic plans he had sworn to thwart.

  Every hint, every rumor, every indication that could suggest a lead to the monster was a step in the right direction. And there were cassettes here, he had seen, labeled "B — Training."

  If B did stand for Baraka, he might at least — at last — see what the bastard looked like. He returned to the projection room, selected a cassette at random and slotted it in.

  The lighting wasn't brilliant, but he could see that the camera had been mounted high in a corner of the fortress's gymnasium. Perhaps they recorded from the video scanners he had noticed in every part of the redoubt.

  The two doctors Bolan had seen at the Friedekinde clinic were in semicloseup. "Let's see the result of the Doberman lesson," the older man said.

  A huge, bald gorilla with tombstone teeth walked into shot. The younger doctor, the one with wraparound shades — Dr. Paul Hansen, Bolan remembered — nodded and turned toward the thug. "All right, Mazarin," he said. "Take him."

  The camera panned as the giant leaped suddenly at a tall muscular man who had appeared in the frame, kicking his feet from under him and catching him as he fell to hurl him bodily down on the wrestling mat.

  The Executioner sat forward on the edge of his seat, craning to see the man whose back was still to the camera.

  Mazarin had jumped the terrorist-in-training, groping for nerve centers he could use to immobilize him.

  Baraka threw him off with a double heel-of-the-hand attack that slammed against Mazarin's temples, extricating himself and springing upright while the giant still sprawled. For the first time he faced the camera.

  Bolan suppressed a shout.

  He sat rooted to the seat, frozen with horror.

  The other tapes had made his flesh creep, but this was totally bizarre.

  Something had made him vaguely uneasy, something about the terrorist's carriage, his stance, the moment the camera picked him up. Now the unease crystallized into a spine-chilling certainty, for there could be no mistaking those ice-blue eyes, the face with its resolute mouth and determined chin. He saw it in the mirror each time he shaved.

  The image of the terrorist on the screen was the image of himself.

  He was Baraka.

  19

  Mack Bolan was thunderstruck. He found himself unable to accept what his eyes told him must be true.

  His first reaction was total disbelief.

  The man on the screen was a look-alike, a ringer, someone already schooled and trained — but trained to impersonate and discredit the Executioner. It was a plot to blacken his name and destroy his reputation as a fighter for justice.

  It had happened before. The KGB had meticulously groomed and trained a Bolan look-alike who had publicly murdered a popular European labor leader while the Executioner himself was in the country. That was one of the reasons he was still on
the hit list of so many of the world's intelligence services.

  Except that this time there was no ringer involved.

  The blank-eyed unarmed combat expert throwing Mazarin around on the screen was the real Mack Bolan. A dozen personal quirks and movements and reflexes underlined the truth. And as he dazedly ran the rest of the tapes, Bolan was forced to admit to himself that by some evil alchemy he was, unknown to himself, being programmed to act as a terrorist.

  The thought made his blood run cold.

  It was the most recent cassette that was the clincher. The tall sharpshooter gunning down images of the world's most prominent statesmen and diplomats in the shooting gallery wore on his right hand the cuts Bolan had suffered from flying glass during his flight from Nasruddin and the police in Paris.

  He looked at his own hand. The scabbed cuts were still there, and they checked.

  The dates made perfect sense, too. The first cassette, recording the fight with Mazarin and the shooting duel with the Marksman, was dated the twelfth and thirteenth of the month. These were the two "lost" days between Bolan's visit to Boardman in Algiers and his awakening in the Paris hotel.

  On the last tape, where he was firing at the pop-up targets with famous faces, a newspaper was visible on the counter of the gallery, and the front page bannered the Van Leeuward killing. The date of this "treatment" coincided with the two missing days following his capture at the clinic. Hell, he must have been here in this same damned fortress, yesterday!

  No wonder he'd known subconsciously where to go when he'd needed a drink; no wonder Willi the doorman, Mazarin at the clinic and Friedekinde himself had in effect said " You again!" each time he showed. No wonder Nasruddin had drawled, "Ah, leave him be. The medics can fix him."

  The way it seemed they had somehow fixed him before. And fixed him good.

  But how? His discovery answered a few puzzling queries but raised a host of issues that were far more serious.

  Such as, what kind of devilish drug treatment could turn a man's mind around so that he became temporarily the opposite of his natural self, could turn a freedom fighter overnight into a terrorist assassin?

  And leave him, two days later, back in his normal guise, with no recollection at all of the terror phase?

  Such as, how the hell had they managed to lay their hands on him, again without his knowledge, in order to force that treatment on him?

  Okay, the last two sessions had been after he'd been blackjacked — but there were other one- or two-day gaps of which he had no memory at all. How had they gotten to him?

  What kind of chemical could erase from a man's memory the fact that he had been doped?

  If they could do those things and get away with it time after time, it didn't matter too much whether Bolan was wise to the plan or not: they could still use the same methods to take him next time.

  He'd figured they must be damned sure of themselves to leave him loose in the fortress, even if there were gunners to prevent him splitting, with all the evidence of their devilry lying around. Now he saw what Nasruddin meant — if they could take him any time they wanted, and if Bolan was unable in any way to relate mentally to Baraka, it didn't matter whether he knew or not. There was nothing he could do about it: the two would remain separate entities, with Bolan ignorant of Baraka's deadly aims.

  The Executioner was never a man given to fear.

  He was frightened now.

  He went back to the office and took out the Baraka medical charts again. If Hal Brognola's shrink was to have any chance of combating the treatment — and if Bolan was to act successfully against its results — the guy must have all the details, right down to the last microgram, not just a few liftouts at random to give the flavor of it.

  There was no photocopier in the place. Bolan found some blank paper and laboriously transcribed the whole works — formulae, drug names, dates, amounts, length of each session and marginal comments. It took him over an hour.

  While he was working with his hands and eyes, his mind was free to roam, racing over a recap on the past few days, evaluating the action he did remember.

  If his discovery posed agonizing problems, at least one question was answered by it.

  The thinking behind his Paris saga.

  They didn't kill him in Boardman's place for a very good reason: they wanted him, needed him alive.

  He had been brought to the French capital, he supposed, because the political asylum situation in France allowed them to staff the city with hired help that would have been arrested and probably deported elsewhere — hired help that Nasruddin used as a team with orders to keep tabs on him. They wanted to know where he was at any time, so that they could move in when they thought it necessary and take him for future treatments.

  Another reason for bringing him to Paris was so that he could be provoked into taking out Graziano, who had become expendable once he'd been unmasked at Tel Aviv. This, they knew, would hang a murder rap on Bolan and keep his head down so that they could more easily locate him. And the execution of Graziano the traitor could be used to keep the jihad activists in Teheran sweet.

  But completion of that particular puzzle raised two more minor questions to which he could find no answer right now.

  First, the attack in the vacant lot.

  How did that stack up against the fact that they needed him alive? Had it been, as he'd first thought, Graziano acting on his own to protect himself against Bolan, whom he knew was on his tail?

  Uh-uh. The second wave of attackers, the biker kids, had been supplied by Nasruddin. And he, like the Marksman himself, was part of the main conspiracy.

  Were the attacks intended to fail? Were they a ruse to sting him into action, to steer him toward Las Vegas Nights, where he was set up to eliminate Graziano before witnesses, with a planned police raid due?

  Was the whole routine a trick to get him on the run?

  No way of knowing.

  Then there were some other events that didn't make sense. Fawzi Harari had told him the two missing days between Algiers and the Paris hotel had been taken up with a sea voyage to Marseille followed by an overnight truck ride to the capital. She claimed she had tailed them all the way.

  But they must have transported him in a private plane, because the tapes proved that those two days had been spent right here in the redoubt — the last but one training session.

  Why had the girl lied?

  He had no time for evaluating honesty, though. For the moment Bolan was more worried about the immediate future. Because although he had uncovered the truth of Baraka's identity, he was no nearer the identity of the big wheels behind the plot, the guys who pulled the strings for Nasruddin and the others.

  He shook his head. It remained one hell of a problem.

  "Can I help you?" a female voice said suddenly behind him.

  The woman standing in the doorway was blond and slender. Her features were chiseled, and her eyes were as blue as the Executioner's own. But apart from the attractiveness, Bolan thought there was an unhealthy pallor to her skin. She had a generous, curvaceous figure, but looked sick and wasted. Her shoulder-length hair was lusterless. Beneath the makeup, the skin of her face had lost its elasticity, and there were lines of tiredness around her mouth as well as dark circles under her eyes.

  She was wearing a white lab jacket over black stretch pants and a blue shirt. Bolan recognized her as the girl who had been working the switchboard in the lobby when he'd come in.

  "Help me?" he repeated. "You probably could. How did you get here?"

  "Tell me," she said, ignoring the question.

  Bolan studied her. A little neurotic maybe? You'd have to be to work in a dump like this, even if you didn't know what went on. But harmless? She was leaning against the doorpost, thumbs outside, fingers inside the pockets of the jacket. There was no sign of a weapon.

  Could he trust her enough to ask the vital question?

  He decided yes. And he would play it straight.

  "You
know who I am," he said. "But I just found out who else I am. There's something the first me wants very much to find out about the second. Maybe you could help me?"

  "What's the question?"

  The question was crucial. Ever since he'd seen that first tape and had survived the shock it had produced, he had been shoving it to the back of his mind, unwilling to face the implications — and the consequences — of the wrong answer.

  He drew a deep breath and asked the question.

  "Has my second self…has Baraka…been sent on any missions yet? Has he been… used… to eliminate anyone, plant a bomb, sabotage a train or plane?"

  "You mean has he been personally responsible for any deaths?" she asked with a wry twist of the mouth. "The answer is no, not yet."

  "You're certain?"

  "Certain as can be. I do the filing here. I prepare the dossiers and organize the videocassettes. No operation has been activated in Baraka's name. He's still in the training sector."

  Bolan heaved a sigh of relief. The specter haunting him ever since his discovery, the fear that he might already — even if unknowingly — have been guilty of killing the innocent, had been dispelled.

  "The big wheels," he said. "Do you know who they are?"

  "The big wheels?"

  "The guys in the boardroom, the bastards who give the orders."

  "I don't think…"

  "I know Nasruddin seems to be the man in charge of operations. And the two doctors take care of the experiments. But somebody has to give them their orders. There must be men above them. Men who dreamed up this whole sick operation, who had the money to modify this old Maginot fort. Do you know who they are?"

  She shook her head. "No one speaks of them. Max brought four guys down a few days ago, very cagey characters, didn't want to be recognized."

  "But you did recognize some of them?"

  "No. I don't know who they were. One looked like an Arab. Another had a rose in his lapel. They all looked classy."

  "I'll bet," Bolan said. "How come you're still here anyway? Why did you ask if you could help?"