Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  A birdlike, tweedy woman with spectacles emerged from an inner door and laid a buff folder on the desk. She sat down. "Can I help you?" she warbled, looking at the Executioner.

  He made some generalized inquiry about the availability of the books for the American market and added, "I was recommended to you by a friend from Corsica. In fact, I thought I saw him coming into this building a few minutes ago. Giacomo Lucchese."

  She shook her head. "Oh, no. You must be thinking of Monsieur Lozano. You just missed him. He was only here a moment."

  Bolan thanked her and was about to leave when the inner door opened and a tall, heavily built man with sandy hair and a ginger mustache came into the office. He was wearing a gray chalk-striped suit with a white shirt and a dark blue silk necktie. The woman turned to him. "Oh, Mr. Cobbold," she said as Bolan opened the exit door, "did you want these letters to be mailed tonight or will tomorrow morning be all right?"

  Bolan didn't wait to hear the reply. He left and hurried back to the street.

  Cobbold!

  That clinched it. He was the liaison and getaway man. The Corsican, Lozano, hadn't really left. He would have passed Bolan on the stairs if he had. Nor, Bolan had seen with a quick glance through the open door, was he in the inner office. He had gone on upstairs to check out his firing position on the roof.

  Or even, since the top of the building belonged to an accomplice, from one of the upper windows.

  So where would the Marksman operate?

  If he chose a position an equal distance from the Connaught Rooms but on the far side of the building, Bolan would have to find another way of eliminating both killers. But first he was determined to locate the Marksman.

  It was quite by chance that Bolan saw him in the rush-hour crowds flooding into the subway station soon after five-thirty. The tall, lean figure and that lined, cadaverous face were unmistakable, even though the man wore a London Telecommunications uniform and carried a metal telephone linesman's box.

  Disguised this way, he had probably been up on the rooftops all afternoon, making doubly sure he had the best of all possible vantage points. His gun could already be stashed someplace up among the chimney stacks.

  Angry that he had failed to spot the guy, Bolan tried his best to keep him in sight. Maybe it would be wise — if he could tail him to a quiet enough location — to take him out right now, this evening. That way he would have only one killer to deal with tomorrow.

  But keeping him in sight was beyond even the Executioner's powers that evening. The Marksman was swept down the moving stairway in a sudden crush of commuters, and although Bolan did his best to force a passage through the phalanx of men and women jamming the escalator, the tall spare figure had vanished by the time he hit the arched corridor below.

  The only reward for his pains was a tirade of abuse from the people he had pushed aside in his frantic efforts to keep the Marksman in sight. He didn't even know which of the two subway lines serving the station the guy had taken.

  Bolan walked the three blocks to his hotel with the problem of how to tackle the assassination plot still unsolved.

  * * *

  The morning of the twenty-ninth was sunny and warm, with high white clouds moving slowly across an azure sky. Between the clouds, jetliners descending to land at London's Heathrow Airport flashed silver in the clear, washed atmosphere.

  Soon after dawn Mack Bolan parked the panel truck on the far side of the conference center from the book publisher's office. He reckoned it was in that sector that he had the best chance of picking up the Marksman again.

  He remained in the truck all morning and all afternoon, but he saw no sign of Lozano or the Marksman.

  The killer from Corsica was probably still in Cobbold's duplex; there would have been no reason for him to leave once he had selected the best place to execute his plan.

  The nonappearance of the Marksman was more worrying. It was ironic that Bolan had fingered the quarry he didn't know and scored an absolute zero on the one he did. By five o'clock in the afternoon when the assassin was still conspicuous by his absence, Bolan concluded that he had to have a route onto the rooftops from one of the buildings in the next street.

  Bolan couldn't stake out two separate streets at the same time. Reluctantly he was forced to adopt a wild contingency plan he had dreamed up during the hours of darkness.

  At five-thirty Cobbold left his office and walked away in the direction of Drury Lane. He returned ten minutes later driving a small Opel sedan, which he parked across the street from Bolan's panel truck, facing Kingsway.

  The sedan was outside a small, modern glass-fronted office block. The facade was topped by a parapet, behind which there seemed to be a flat roof bare of chimney stacks. There was, however, a two-foot serpentine conduit leading to the air-conditioning plant and — just visible from the street — the upper part of a square concrete structure above the elevator shaft. Was it from there that the killer would strike?

  It was impossible to be certain.

  Bolan started the truck, drove to the end of the street, made a U-turn around a traffic island and returned to park in the same place but now, like the Opel, facing Kingsway.

  He eased open the lock of the panel truck's rear door and left it resting on the latch. After that it was a matter of waiting.

  At seven-thirty half a dozen unarmed uniformed policemen were decanted from a dark blue minibus and took up position on either side of the entrance steps to the Connaught Rooms. This, Bolan knew, would be the normal detail to keep the roadway clear and move away onlookers when a minister of state was due.

  Soon afterward a procession of cars and taxis deposited men and women who were probably members of the Anglo-Hispanic Society's organizing committee. They were followed by a number of obviously Hispanic men, presumably stewards, bodyguards, possibly even bouncers from the embassy. And after that — at first in twos and threes, later in tens and twenties — the audience began to arrive by car, by taxi and on foot.

  Bolan saw cocktail dresses, white tuxedos, dark suits, a sprinkling of jeans, all of them presenting invitations at the top of the steps. For the hundredth time his eyes raked the rooftops opposite. No figure showed above the parapet; none was visible in any of Cobbold's windows.

  Five minutes before eight o'clock, a white-helmeted cop astride a BMW 1100 arrived, parked the bike on its kickstand and began talking into his radio. A crowd of spectators, sensing celebrities, had assembled on the sidewalk.

  Right on the hour, a Daimler limo with diplomatic plates, flying the Spanish flag, turned into Great Queen Street from Kingsway. It was preceded by two more cops on BMWs and followed by three black Jaguar sedans.

  The bikes wheeled aside, the limo drew up at the foot of the steps and the Jags stopped immediately behind.

  Embassy officials, wives and a couple of newspaper columnists piled out and moved toward the entrance. A man with a rosette in the buttonhole of his tailcoat ran down the steps to open the rear door of the Daimler.

  Bolan had started the panel truck's engine. He scanned the street in every direction.

  The Englishman, Cobbold, hurried around the corner from Kingsway, climbed into the Opel and sat behind the wheel.

  A louvered shutter opened on the top floor of the book publisher's building. Someone appeared in the window. Bolan was certain it would be Lozano. He was holding a long-barreled rifle with a sniperscope. Standing back a little inside the room, the Corsican raised the rifle to his shoulder and squinted through the sight.

  Bolan glanced upward toward the Kingsway end of the street. He saw a figure lurking behind the parapet of the office block. The gunman would fire through a space between two of the short stone columns forming the balustrade.

  The Executioner's plan relied on speed, surprise, sureness of touch and silence alternating with sound. Above all on speed.

  The man with the rosette was holding the limo door open, offering his hand to the Spanish minister.

  Bolan was holding t
he Beretta 93-R. He had lowered the front handgrip. The gun, equipped with specially machined springs to take subsonic cartridges, now had a folding carbine stock clipped to the butt and a suppressor screwed to the barrel. Bolan's two favorite handguns were supplied by Hal Brognola via the CIA's London resident at the Grosvenor Square embassy. And it was through that same channel the weapons would leave the U.K. again.

  The warrior raised the modified and silenced weapon to his shoulder, the fingers of his left hand curled around the handgrip, his thumb hooked through the extrawide trigger guard.

  His right forefinger caressed the trigger.

  Since the Corsican was standing back from his window and the Marksman was behind a balustrade, Lozano would be invisible to his accomplice. Bolan's plan was to take him out silently and then preempt the Marksman's action with a maneuver of his own — before the killer knew his teammate had been wasted.

  The minister, together with two aides and the guy with the rosette, began to climb the steps. They were talking animatedly.

  Lozano's gun was raised. Bolan squeezed off two three-round bursts, the Beretta punching his shoulder lightly as the deadly 9 mm parabellums leaped noiselessly toward their target.

  There was a flash of light as the rifle spun from the Corsican's hands and pinwheeled down into the street. Bolan didn't wait to see the killer, his chest smashed open by the six-shot killstream, collapse over the windowsill and hang head downward with outflung arms. The Executioner had already dropped the Beretta and snatched up his AutoMag.

  Velasquez, a small, neat man with a pointed beard, was one-third of the way up the flight of steps. Bolan's plan was simple. Now that there was only one murderer to reckon with, he would fake an assassination attempt… and hope to hell it would provoke enough confusion to stop the Marksman from isolating his target.

  Crouched in the open rear of the panel truck, the Executioner blasted off six separate deafening rounds, aiming three of them just above the heads of the Spaniards on the steps, two more at the pillars flanking the entrance and one into the air.

  The effect was as electrifying as he could have wished.

  There were shouts and the panicked commotion of bodies moving in all directions as chips flew from the pillars and a ricochet screamed skyward. The uniformed cops whirled toward the panel truck, the bikers leaped for their machines, and guests flung themselves flat. Some began to run while others shot back inside the building.

  Bolan had to hand it to the embassy aides. They manhandled Alfonso Velasquez back down the steps, pushed him to the ground between the limo and the curb and covered him with their own bodies before the echo of Bolan's last shot died away.

  If the Marksman had fired during the confusion, he hadn't scored. That was Bolan's main concern. He was already in the driving seat, Big Thunder beside him, the Beretta on the floor in back. He pulled out of the parking space, floored the pedal and headed for Kingsway.

  Across the street, the Opel was already moving, slewing out into the center of the roadway.

  The door of the office building burst open, and the Marksman, carrying his twin-barrel rifle, pelted across the sidewalk and ran between a couple of parked cars to get to the Opel. He jerked open the passenger door and scrambled inside as Cobbold cut in front of the Executioner and sent the car, with gears screaming, hurtling toward the corner.

  Bolan saw a startled flash of recognition on the face of the Marksman as he registered the identity of the man driving the panel truck. Then both cars were on Kingsway, roaring south toward the bridge and the river.

  Behind them, the three white-helmeted police riders started their BMWs, slammed them off the stands and raced in pursuit.

  23

  Mack Bolan had been in many pursuits, sometimes as hunter, sometimes as the hunted, but this was the first time he had played both roles at once.

  Cobbold was a good driver, better than average, but not as good as the Executioner. The fact that he had the faster, more maneuverable vehicle just about made them even.

  At the lower end of Kingsway, he broadsided the Opel into the one-way circle around the Aldwych, corrected the slide just in time to avoid a bus, carved up three taxis returning home after the early theater trade and ran a red light to turn onto Waterloo Bridge.

  Bolan maintained his distance about fifty yards behind through experience and expertise, using the gears skillfully, twitching the wheel when he felt the rear end begin to drift. He had a two-hundred-yard lead on the police BMWs, but the bikes were gaining fast. Their ability to thread through a jam on busy roads would enable them to catch up within a few blocks… and on an open road they would be almost twice as fast as the Opel. As for the panel truck, the small European-built Ford was lively, but it was no speedster.

  So the cops would draw level almost at once.

  Bolan was certain they would have radioed headquarters to put out an APB: prowl cars would be heading in to cut them off from all over London.

  Once over the bridge, the Opel swung right and took the road past the Royal Festival Hall and along the South Bank. Still in convoy, they raced past London County Hall, the fire department center and the blackened stone towers of Lambeth Palace — with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament blurred in the dusk on the other side of the river.

  Here, beneath street lighting just switched on, the road was almost clear, and Cobbold pushed the Opel up to seventy-five miles per hour. Bolan's own vehicle began to whine in order to keep up.

  The Opel tore around the complex carousel beneath the railroad tracks at Nine Elms and continued heading west. It was on the long warehouse-bordered section between there and Battersea that the cops drew level and decided to make their play alone.

  Two rode up, one on either side of Bolan, and waved him curtly to stop. The third man accelerated and maneuvered his machine, exhaust howling, alongside the Opel.

  He gestured fiercely, stabbing a gloved finger toward the sidewalk.

  Casually the Marksman poked the barrels of his gun out the open window and fired at the bike's front wheel.

  Bolan saw the two puffs of smoke whipped away by the speeding car's slipstream. Hammered by the two deadly projectiles, the wheel whipped to one side, wrenching the handlebars from the rider's grasp.

  With the front wheel turned under, the BMW somersaulted, catapulting the cop across the roadway. He landed on his back, slid along the pavement and hit his head on a curb.

  Horror-struck at the fate of their teammate, the cops on either side of Bolan signaled him more angrily still to stop. Bolan kept on after the Opel, now traveling dangerously fast. He reached for the AutoMag, lifted it from the passenger seat and pointed it first at one rider and then the other. He had no intention of firing, but the cops didn't know that.

  They hesitated until he made a more imperious gesture with the big gun. They reduced speed, dropping behind the panel truck and remaining there, about fifty yards away. In the rearview mirror, Bolan could see the one who had looked the more scared steering with one hand while he talked into the mike of his radio.

  The bikers had evidently been ordered to stay put and tail them until there were patrol cars near enough to cut across and block the route in front and behind.

  The Executioner himself was following much the same plan — except that he had no prowl cars to help him. He hadn't yet decided what action to take if he did manage not only to keep on Cobbold's tail but draw level with the runaway Opel.

  The Marksman had recognized him for sure, so there were only two things he could do. First, eliminate the guy along with Cobbold, which they both deserved as murderers in theory and now, with the callous attack on the policeman, in fact.

  Or pretend that he was there in his Baraka role. The Marksman was jealous of Baraka's own firearms prowess; the Maginot tapes proved that. Maybe he could be fed the idea that Bolan had been sent by Max Nasruddin to see how the Marksman handled the Velasquez assassination. As a loner, proud of his lethal skills — and the reputation that went with them �
�� the Marksman would violently resent such interference. He would interpret it as questioning his competence.

  But the situation was developing too fast for Bolan to make a choice.

  He could hear the warble of a police siren, then a second, some way behind. Soon the cars, two low-slung Rover 800s with blue lamps flashing on their roofs, appeared in the rearview mirror, overtaking him rapidly.

  A moment later a third appeared from beneath a railroad bridge on the left and cut in between Bolan and the Opel.

  It was now virtually dark.

  With the solitary police car closing up to nudge his rear fender, Cobbold screeched the Opel around the traffic circle south of Battersea Park, cut back across the river and roared along the Chelsea embankment. Gnatlike, his headlamps now blazing, he zigzagged perilously in and out of a stream of trucks, buses and private cars heading west and north for the expressway that circled the city.

  The Rover followed, sometimes pulling right across the roadway in front of oncoming traffic as brakes smoked and drivers swore. Bolan and his pursuers began to drop behind.

  It was on the long stretch between Hammersmith and Chiswick — where there were two three-lane sectors of road separated by a central grass strip — that they decided to put the Executioner out of the race.

  There was a sudden lull in the westward flow. The bikes swung wide to let the Rovers through. They raced up on each side of the panel truck, intending to overtake and then squeeze together in a pincer movement, forcing him to stop. The BMWs stayed behind, ready to pounce and disarm him as soon as he halted.

  Bolan was familiar with the maneuver. He knew, too, that the police drivers, as they had been taught, would be watching the driver's silhouette, the front wheels, the brake lights for signs of an abrupt alteration in speed or direction.