Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  "Okay. So let's say you're still clean when you make Liege. But they're waiting for you at the site of the hit — even though the target had been switched. What does that suggest?"

  Bolan grinned crookedly. "They knew I was coming. But it still doesn't make sense. I mean, how could they have?"

  "Leave aside the how, Striker. Concentrate on the why. What else does it suggest to you?"

  "You tell me," Bolan said.

  "It was a setup," the Fed replied grimly. "If they were expecting you — and they were — then you must have been led to Liege deliberately, maneuvered there. There's no other explanation."

  "Led there for what?"

  "Because they needed you for those six hours. It's my opinion the entire Liege operation was mounted with that one aim — to get you where they could lay their hands on you once more."

  "Why, though?" The Executioner was frowning.

  "They needed to be in contact again. They had to be if they were to proceed with the Baraka thing. They had to know where you were so they could knock you out anytime they felt like it, as quick as they wanted, for the next stage of the training."

  "But I told you, in six hours they couldn't…"

  "You worked that out yourself," Brognola interrupted. "There wasn't time to take you anywhere, to work any drug routine. So this time it wasn't for any training stage."

  "What was it for?"

  "Like I say, I can only think of one reason. To make one hundred percent certain that they stayed in touch."

  "You mean…?"

  "I think they used the time they held you to plant some kind of bug on you. Something they could home in on as long as they knew roughly where you were, something that didn't require a twelve-man team on constant alert."

  "That could be," Bolan said slowly. "Let's check, huh?"

  "Don't worry," the Fed told him. "I already have electronics experts waiting downstairs."

  The experts were efficient and anonymous. Bolan unbuckled his shoulder rig and holster and stripped to the skin. First, they monitored his muscular frame with a radar-type scanner to check if the bug had been concealed in a body cavity or hidden in a hollowed-out-tooth.

  Negative.

  They used a radio-wave detector in case it was an all-plastic device; they had him talk, stop, talk again in case it was voice-operated. Nothing.

  After that they turned their high-tech attentions to his clothes — seams, buttons, clasps, zippers. They tried the metal tags at the end of his laces. But it was a tiny thread of dried glue that had escaped under pressure that led them to the heel of one combat boot.

  The device was between the inner sole and the non-skid heel. "Not very original," one of the experts said. And then, after he had examined the bug, he added, "It emits an ultrahigh-frequency signal that can be picked up over a radius of around three miles."

  "Okay," Brognola said when it was all over. "Mystery solved, and thank you, guys. Now we go see Greg Toledo and his tame pharmacist."

  The pharmacist was a full-hipped, breasty redhead with a diminutive waist and shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a white laboratory coat and glasses with huge circular frames, but neither of these accessories hid the fact that underneath she was all woman.

  Like Greg Toledo, she had freckles on her forehead and across each cheekbone. Apart from that there was little resemblance.

  "This is Beth McMann," the psychoanalyst announced in his high voice. "She's the best Langley has to offer. She's studied all the data you brought," he said to Bolan, "and she has news for you."

  "According to the formulae you supplied," Beth said, "the normal conceptual standards by which you live would be temporarily destroyed each time they drug you. Replacing them with different criteria would be no problem for experienced psychospecialists. I've checked the international lists, and Schloesser and Hansen, the doctors that you mention, are accepted experts with a long history of research in that direction."

  "And this reimprintation would stick? I mean they wouldn't have to start over each time they used the drugs?"

  "No. It would be cumulative."

  "Until?"

  "Until such time as the reimprintation was neutralized — under precisely the same medication — and the original standards replaced by a competent practitioner."

  "Meanwhile I go on knowing strictly nothing about this second self? But his implanted… immoral standards… don't affect my ordinary life? Unless I'm under the influence of the drugs, I go on thinking black is black and white is white?"

  "That is so. This is because of the memory block that occurs when they give you the drug we believe to be puromycil. Without that the reimprinted standards would spill over into your normal day-to-day existence."

  "Is there anything I could take that would remove the block so that I could be aware of both my selves at the same time?"

  Beth McMann shook her coppery head. "Not that I know of. And even if I did, you'd have to know how much had been used. And we don't. Plus the antidote would have to be taken at the same time or just before — and we don't know when that is because it's done when you're stoned out of your mind with these other drugs."

  "Right," Bolan said. "So what about these others? The psychoto — whatever they are? Have you come up with some way to combat them?"

  "We're on firmer ground there," the woman said, reciting a litany of complex-sounding pharmaceutical names that she told Bolan would be able to help him.

  "So if I stuffed myself with these before they got to me, the psychedelics wouldn't work anymore?"

  "It's not quite as simple as that. But if you did it at the right time, with very carefully calculated doses, it could reduce the bad effects. I can't swear they would be canceled out altogether."

  "Also," Toledo put in, "you'd have to know pretty accurately when you were going to be got to, as you put it, since the preventive action, as Beth says, is limited in time."

  "But I'd still know who I was and what I was doing?"

  "We think so. We hope so. But we couldn't promise."

  "What odds will you give that it'll work?"

  The analyst smiled. "My business is empiric. We observe, we deduce, we make decisions and we act on them. Beth is a scientist. For her, nothing is accepted until it's proven. But in neither case do we gamble, Mr. Bolan."

  Bolan looked at Brognola. "What do you think, Hal?"

  Brognola sighed. He looked out the window. The street was blocked again. A scatter of raindrops drummed against the glass. "It's for you to decide, Striker," he said. "It's your life at risk."

  "And hundreds, thousands of others more innocent than mine," Bolan said soberly. "The way I see it, there's only one way to do this. I have to play along, hide the fact that I uncovered part of the plot, allow myself to be programmed yet again — but shoot myself these precautionary drugs and hope to hell I stay sane enough to get wise to the terrorists' plan as a whole." He looked at the redhead and grinned. "Miss McMann, you better make me up a package of goodies that I can carry with me at all times — along with a little instruction book that tells me how much and when."

  The girl raised questioning eyebrows at Brognola and Toledo. "You heard what the man said," Brognola told her.

  Later he said to Bolan, "You're going out on a limb, you know, right to the end. Because there's one thing we haven't taken into account yet. If you're going to make it you're going to need inside intel. You're going to have to know in advance when you're scheduled for another treatment."

  "I know."

  "And, you must know this as well as I do, the Liege setup, the fact that they wanted you there and got you there, must mean one of two things — either that girl, your contact, is a plant, or else she's blown and they've been deliberately feeding her. It's got to be one or the other."

  "Yeah," Bolan said wearily. "I know that, too."

  "So?"

  "So I play along, the way I said. If she comes across with any more intel, I take it in — but with the knowledge that they're wise to
it and will be there ahead of me."

  "Wouldn't it be wiser to stay clear, to break contact?"

  "I promised to help the kid, Hal," Bolan said. "She needs help. I don't see her as a double, a plant. And if, as I believe, she's leveling with me, like you say, that means she's deliberately being fed disinformation… that they know is passed on to me. In which case, once they have no further use for her, she's in real trouble, and I have to do what I can."

  "Okay," Brognola said. "But we agreed that you need inside intel if you're going to make it. More than that, you need accurate inside intel. And whether this girl's on the level or not, that's one thing you certainly won't get through her. If they're onto her, it'll be what they want you to know and no more."

  "Sure. So I take what she has to offer," Bolan said, "but with it I take the proverbial pinch of salt. Whether I act on it is something else. That will depend on my evaluation of the truth when it comes my way."

  "And it will come your way exactly how?"

  "There's a certain shrink, one Friedekinde, that I have to see," the Executioner said, and there was steel in his voice.

  28

  The strength of the clinic owned by the Friedekinde Foundation was also its weakness.

  It was normal to have high gates and a wall topped by broken glass, as much to keep psychotic patients in as marauders out. But by renouncing trip wires, guard dogs, electronic sensors and any of the more sophisticated anti-intruder devices, Hansen, Schloesser and the son of the founder were in effect proclaiming that they had nothing to hide.

  They could afford to do this because the activities that they did have to hide took place safely out of sight in the Maginot biochemical laboratory.

  The disadvantage of course was that, although their work remained under wraps, the crooked medics were personally vulnerable when they were at Neuchatel.

  Their headquarters was easy enough to penetrate, and they themselves were in turn "accessible" to a determined intruder such as Mack Bolan.

  Especially if he was a loner and the clandestine entry was made at an unexpected time of day.

  Bolan chose to make his surprise return engagement in the middle of the morning.

  It was a wet morning, with the rain drifting down from the wooded, cloud-capped crests of the Jura and blowing across the lake in horizontal squalls. The sound of raindrops pattering among the branches and dripping from the leaves of trees surrounding the property was loud enough to drown the noise of footsteps treading cautiously over the sodden underbrush.

  Bolan selected a sector of wall that ran behind the stable block on the side away from the road. A stout branch projecting from the trunk of a Spanish chestnut fifteen feet above the ground offered him a secure enough perch to monitor the yard — and a launchpad from which he could leap over the wall.

  But first he was simply going to keep his eyes open and watch.

  From time to time, nurses in white uniforms passed the window at the end of the second-floor hallway. On the far side of the stable yard he saw Schloesser, followed by Hansen, emerge from the lab block. Hansen locked the door, and the two men hurried into the main building.

  When he had been there twenty minutes, Bolan saw the chauffeur, Klaus, his collar turned up against the rain, run from the rear door to the stables. Soon afterward the black Mercedes purred out into the open, wipers threshing busily.

  Klaus drove out through the arch and stopped the big sedan outside the villa's front porch. He gave a single discreet tap on the horn.

  Bolan shifted his position slightly so that he could squint through the arch and keep the steps in view. He saw the hulking gorilla, Mazarin, holding a striped golf umbrella above his head, appear on the steps. One by one, the hairless giant convoyed Schloesser, Hansen and two other men to the Mercedes, sheltered by the umbrella. Klaus was already holding the rear door open.

  The last man down was Max Nasruddin. He was preceded by a sulky-looking individual with bushy eyebrows whom Bolan recognized as the electronics tycoon Shell Pettifer, a U.S. senator who was also, Bolan recalled, one of the foundation's directors. Nasruddin and Hansen took the jump seats, and the older men sank back against the cushions. Klaus closed the door, climbed behind the wheel and drove the Mercedes away.

  The Executioner would have given a lot to know whether they were on their way to the Maginot complex. If they were, it meant that Pettifer was mixed up with the terrorist conspiracy. That would certainly be a lead worth following up. Did it mean that he was at last on the track of Nasruddin's superiors?

  Maybe. There was nothing he could do about it now. In any case, it was more important first to approach Friedekinde while the clinic's top man was on his own.

  Mazarin had folded the umbrella, shaken it free of raindrops and gone back indoors. If the information gleaned on Bolan's previous recon still held good, it was possible that he was the only hardman left between the warrior and his target.

  Bolan broke twigs from his branch and stripped off leaves. Slowly he began rocking the bared limb up and down until the wood creaked with his efforts and the rain stung his face.

  When he figured he had worked up enough amplitude, he loosened his hold at the zenith of an upswing and allowed himself to be catapulted over the top of the wall.

  He landed like a cat near some bushes.

  It seemed to the Executioner that he had made a hell of a lot of noise. As well, he'd twisted his ankle slightly, bruised one arm and found that the sleeve of his blacksuit was ripped. But no inquiring faces were pressed against the clinic windows; no servant appeared around the corner of the building to ask what was going on.

  He picked himself up, ran lightly across the wet cobblestones of the yard and flattened himself against the wall of the house below the hallway window. Carefully he edged toward the arch.

  And through it.

  On the terrace above the pond, he crouched and moved along below the line of casements, risking a rapid glance over the sill at the corner of each.

  Friedekinde was seated at the desk in the study.

  He was writing in some kind of a ledger, glancing from time to time at a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard between the two phones on the desk. As Bolan watched, he lifted the red handset, tapped a single button on the keyboard and spoke.

  Making up the clinic's "official" books, the Executioner guessed, and now he was querying something with a staffer, probably one of the nurses upstairs. The single numeral proved that it wasn't an outside call.

  Crouched again below the window with the rain drumming on his back, Bolan thought about the three possible means of entry — the rear entrance through the kitchens; the outhouse roof and the stack pipe that led to the window of Mazarin's room; the main doors beneath the porch.

  He rejected the first. Workers in the kitchen area would probably be innocent locals, preparing food for the staff and the few genuine patients, and he was reluctant to cause them harm.

  He also tossed out his second option. Although his twisted ankle hadn't swollen, it had begun to hurt him slightly now, and the thought of putting his weight on it each time he swarmed farther up a slippery pipe wasn't appealing.

  So it had to be the front door, like a respectable guest.

  He crossed the rest of the terrace until he made the porch. He pressed the bell set in the brickwork beside the outer doors.

  Footsteps. The door opened.

  "Yeah? What is it?" Mazarin asked in a rasping, surly voice.

  Using the fingers of his right hand, Bolan jabbed with savage force into the big gorilla's solar plexus before the hardman's eyes had stopped widening at the unexpected sight of the Executioner.

  Mazarin uttered a choked gurgle as the muscles of his diaphragm, paralyzed by the force of the blow, ejected the air from his lungs and refused to draw in more.

  He folded forward — to meet Bolan's pistoning knee beneath his chin. Bolan's left uppercut, carrying all his weight, snapped the hood's head back before he fell. The edge of a flattened hand,
seasoned as teak, chopped the top of his spine to help him on his way.

  Bolan tried to catch him before he hit the ground, but Mazarin was already as slack as a side of beef, and the two of them cannoned into a plaster column supporting a potted palm.

  Bolan grabbed for the pot, stumbled and ended up seated with the heavy pot clasped to his chest. The column fell sideways and shattered on the black-and-white marble floor.

  Originally Bolan had meant to drag the hood's unconscious body into the inner hallway, perhaps tie him up and stow him in a cupboard while he surprised Friedekinde in his den. But he figured he would have no time for that now. Mazarin had fallen heavily, Bolan himself had made some noise saving the pot, and the pillar had broken into pieces, it seemed to him, as loudly as a train wreck. Could be someone would come out to check.

  He thumbed back one of the fallen giant's eyelids. Mazarin was going to be out for some time. He decided to gamble on the hope that no other visitors would ring the doorbell, so he left the guy closed in between the two sets of doors. With luck, he wouldn't be missed — and he wouldn't wake up — in the time Bolan needed.

  If he was found among the broken fragments of the pillar, the finder might believe he had fallen, knocking himself out with the pot full of earth as he went down.

  Until Mazarin was able to tell them differently.

  So okay… it had to be fast.

  Bolan maneuvered the pot onto its side, spilled some earth and moved it nearer the gorilla's head. He closed the outer doors, then slipped through the inner and shut them, too. The big warrior found himself at the foot of a curving staircase beside a table strewn with letters that he knew was outside the door to Friedekinde's study.

  If he found the hallway familiar — as he had found Mazarin's room upstairs disturbingly familiar on his first clandestine visit — that was because he had been brought here and taken care of when he was suffering from amnesia six months ago.