The next attempt to eliminate the Executioner came early the following morning. He had just crossed the Champs Elysees, two hundred yards below the Arc de Triomphe, when a flock of pigeons wheeling away from the plane trees suddenly changed direction and arrowed toward him. Bolan was thinking of toast and coffee. From the corner of his eye he sensed the rapid approach of something shadowy and unexpected as the birds momentarily veered his way. With an involuntary reflex he started back a pace.
The instinctive movement saved his life.
Before he had time to feel sheepish, the way people do when they have jumped away from a nonexistent danger, he was hurled to one side by a small car that had peeled off from the traffic roaring up the avenue, made a U-turn on two wheels and rocketed down the service road between the trees and the ritzy stores.
Bolan had been about to step into the service road. The pigeons had caused him to falter, checking his stride — and the vehicle that would otherwise have mowed him down struck him only a glancing blow as it raced past. Fortunately he was off balance and rode with the impact. But he was spun across the sidewalk before he dropped dazedly to the ground.
Passersby ran up as he sprawled there, panting for breath. Many hands helped him to his feet, shepherding him to a bench. A man rushed out of a restaurant with a glass of cognac, and an elderly lady kept telling anybody who would listen that the police must be called. In no time at all, Bolan was in the center of a crowd.
"It's a scandal the way some people drive!" someone said.
"No more than kids in their teens!" a woman exclaimed. "It shouldn't be allowed."
"Madame, I entirely agree," an old man cut in.
"Did you see? He shot down here like a racing driver after making a U-turn in the avenue — a thing expressly forbidden by law."
"He must have been doing sixty kilometers an hour."
"Why, only last week a friend of my uncle in Lille..."
"The foreigner didn't have a chance."
"Has anyone telephoned for an ambulance?"
"Is he hurt?"
Bolan struggled to his feet, brushing aside the offers of help as politely as he could. His head was spinning. He was bruised and shaken, but otherwise undamaged. "No, no," he said. "Thank you. I'm all right."
"Did you get the assassin's number?"
Bolan shook his head. Assassin was right. The number would tell him nothing; the car was probably stolen. What was certain was that the driver had intended to run him down and kill him.
Bolan smiled grimly as he limped to his hotel. That was just fine with him. For it proved that his investigations thus far, superficial though they were, had been embarrassing to someone, maybe even caused them to panic. Because you didn't try to commit murder in public, twice, unless you had something pretty damned important to hide. It followed, too — though he couldn't as yet see how — that he had to be getting warm, and that the organizers of the escape network were afraid he might get warmer.
The one negative point was that he was forced, for the moment, to react rather than act himself. Because while they obviously had a line on him, he had none on them. And until he did he was condemned to play a passive role.
What the hell. They would try again. He had to stay more alert than ever, every nerve, every sense at full combat pitch. Next time they made a move against him, he'd be ready. And when they did, he promised himself grimly, he'd make his move.
When he arrived at the hotel, the receptionist handed him a letter that had been delivered by special messenger. The envelope contained a railroad ticket and a seat reservation on the Trans-Europe Flyer that ran nonstop that evening between Paris and The Hague. Attached to it was a slip confirming a booking for a single room with bath at the Grand Hotel Terminus.
There was no message enclosed.
Bolan sighed. Brognola was acting cagey again. He had already suggested that the Executioner return to Holland and try yet again to pick up a lead on the two Dutch boatmen, this time without making his presence known to the police. Bolan had demurred. Now the Fed was insisting — in a way that implied he was no longer prepared to argue.
Bolan went back to the embassy and called Brognola's number in Washington. He was told the Fed was in conference and couldn't take a call.
Frowning, the warrior ran a mental check. He guessed Brognola must have some special reason for wanting him to be at that hotel tonight. Maybe he had instructed a contact, someone with a lead, to meet Bolan there. Maybe someone supplied with the number of his seat reservation was to contact him on the train.
On principle, he asked the receptionist to look up the times of planes. It turned out that by the time he had taken a cab out to the airport, checked in, waited for his flight, made it to Amsterdam, cleared customs and immigration, taken another cab from Schiphol into town and traveled by train or car the fifty-three kilometers to the capital, he would get there no quicker than he would by train. Maybe Brognola's assistant had checked out the planes and come to the same conclusion.
Bolan took the train.
Nobody approached him on the journey. He ate an excellent, if rather heavy dinner, read the Paris newspapers, listened to endless business conversations. In between he watched the gaunt outlines of the northern landscape whirl by through the lozenges of yellow light cast by the Pullman windows.
The Grand Hotel Terminus was a large nineteenth-century building across from the railroad station. Cheap souvenir stores, french fry stalls and car repair shops surrounded the building, but inside the revolving doors all was comfort and bourgeois respectability. The blast of overheated air that greeted Bolan carried with it the odors of food, cigars and aromatic coffee.
After he had checked in, Bolan sat in the lobby pretending to read a newspaper, a cup of coffee on a table beside him. The lobby was surrounded by a barbershop, a cigar store, restaurants and boutiques. Nobody came out of any of them or pushed through the revolving doors to contact him. At midnight he went up to his room.
The next morning after breakfast he opened the French windows and went out onto the small balcony that jutted from the hotel facade four floors above the street. Streetcar lines ran down the center of the road and groups of workers, who had arrived by train, waited on the pedestrian islands to board cars for the city center. It was cold on the balcony, but the sky overhead was at last free of cloud, and bars of pale autumn sunshine slashed the roofs and upper stories of the buildings around the station.
A barrel organ parked by the sidewalk serenaded the rush hour crowds with rollicking mechanical music. It was an enormous machine, painted all over with multicolored circus motifs and resting on four wheels. Two men worked the act, one turning the handle that moved the punched music sheets through the mechanism, the other cavorting from side to side with a battered hat held out for contributions.
Before the first tune was through, coins showered down from the hotel windows and bounced across the road from the city-bound workers. Bolan ducked back into his bedroom and grabbed some change. He leaned over the balcony rail and tossed it toward the waiting entertainers. As he bent forward, a rifle on the fifth floor of the building opposite cracked and a bullet smacked into the brickwork behind his head. Even as Bolan's mind registered the report, a second slug drilled the French window, starring the glass and sending fragments tinkling to the floor. The third shot was dead accurate. It whined across the balcony a foot above the rail, exactly where the Executioner had been leaning an instant before. But by this time he was flat on his face on the tiled floor, crawling backward into the room.
Once inside he raced to get his Beretta. He clipped on the folding carbine stock and whirled back to the window. But the figure of the marksman, dimly seen in silhouette against the sunlight reflected from a pane of glass, had vanished.
Bolan threw on clothes, ran for the elevator, sprinted through the hotel lobby and dashed across the street. The warning bell on a streetcar clanged angrily, and workers scattered as he hurtled over the pedestrian island. He jerked open
the front door of the building and found himself in a dark, narrow hallway. Uncarpeted stairs spiraled up into the dark. He began to climb.
He passed an attorney's office loud with the clacking of typewriters, a private apartment with a radio playing somewhere inside, another that seemed to be some kind of rehearsal studio: he could hear the tinny cadences of an upright piano and a woman's voice counting one-two-three.
The door to the fifth floor was open.
Bolan sidled through with the Beretta cocked in his right hand. He wasn't expecting to find anyone, but Vietnam had taught him that snipers who failed to score occasionally left something to cover their retreat.
He heard a soft thumping noise, then saw a spot of bright light swinging back and forth across the far wall. An open shutter, moved by a slight breeze, was reflecting the sunlight as it thudded repeatedly against the frame.
There was nobody in the place.
A dozen cigarette stubs trodden into the dusty floorboards showed that the killer had been waiting some time. A popular brand, the cigarettes told the Executioner nothing. Three spent shells glittered beneath the window. Smallbore, high-velocity rounds: standard NATO ammunition. He looked in vain for a meaningful clue.
His face was grim as he headed back to the hotel. The hoods seemed to know his movements better than he did himself. Three times already he had escaped by chance. He reckoned that was his ration of good luck on this particular mission.
From now on every move would have to be covered front, back and both sides. And from now on, there was a new dimension to the operation: the hunt had become personal.
7
Bolan realized suddenly why Brognola had sent him to The Hague. He was passing the barbershop on his way to the elevators when a rich and fruity voice boomed out from the archway leading to the scented salon with its chairs and mirrors.
The Executioner stopped in midstride, staring through the arch. It couldn't be true — the last time he'd heard that voice he'd been in the slums of Marseilles... and then he hadn't believed it.
But there was no mistake about it. The third draped figure before the mirrors, sitting lower than the others, was that of an enormous man in a wheelchair. Weighing close to three hundred pounds, he sat with the great swell of his belly thrusting out the barber's sheet like a tent, the massive folds of flesh encasing his skull, almost burying unexpectedly humorous, twinkling blue eyes.
It was Mustapha Tufik, the world's leading intel broker.
Bolan stood watching the dexterous, almost balletic, movements of the barber as he guided a straight razor unerringly among the convexities of the big man's chin.
Tufik had been born to an Irish mother and a Moroccan father. After an early encounter with gangsters that had crippled him for life, he had left North Africa and set up an information service in Marseilles that was unequaled in the world. Police forces, embassy staff, military attaches, detectives, lawyers, newspapermen, crooks and secret agents from many countries had gone to him to buy the lowdown on anything from the private life of a foreign minister to the affairs of the heart of married movie stars.
For Tufik sold information. Just that. Any piece of inside knowledge required could be bought from him — for a price. He took no sides, asked no questions, played no favorites. There was only one stipulation: he refused to sell intel about one client to another.
His unrivaled sources had been built up over many years; his encyclopedic knowledge derived in part from an exhaustive cross-referencing of gossip items culled from press reports all over the world, in part from the bugging of selective meeting places, in part from plain eavesdropping. It was said that a fair proportion of the vast sums he received for his services was redeployed among the army of doormen, porters, chambermaids, reception clerks, flight attendants and cabdrivers who supplied much of his raw material.
He had enjoyed the reputation of being the most informed gossipmonger on earth — until Bolan had unwittingly involved him in a Mafia plot to smuggle stolen uranium isotopes to a secret nuclear reactor in the Sahara. In reprisal for the help he had given the Executioner, his Marseilles headquarters had been bombed out of existence. Tufik had narrowly escaped with his life.
Was it possible that he had set up shop in Holland?
As the barber drew a towel across the huge face to remove the last traces of shaving soap, the man in the next chair rose and left. Bolan slipped into the vacant seat.
"Yes, sir?" A young man with glossy black hair shook out a pink linen sheet and spread it over Bolan. The man looking after Tufik was preparing hot towels.
"Just a trim," Bolan said.
The barber fished a comb and scissors from his breast pocket.
"It pays to keep your hair well trimmed," Bolan said. "My favorite uncle always advised it."
"Just so, sir." The young man began to comb and snip. There was no discernible reaction from the next chair. Tufik was a mountain of sheeted pink surmounted by a cone of white towels through which steam rose gently into the air.
"My Uncle Brognola," he added a little more loudly.
A tremor manifested itself among the vaporous towels. A fold of the damp cloth subsided, and an eye was revealed. The eye opened and stared at the Executioner. It closed again. Bolan settled in his chair and closed his eyes. "Not too much off the back."
A few minutes later he heard a bustle of activity as the fat man was divested of his robes and towels, helped on with his jacket and flicked with a clothes brush. There was a crackle of folding money and the chink of coins changing hands.
"Thank you, mynheer," the barber's voice intoned unctuously. "It is more than kind. Until next week, then?"
And then the familiar, fruity tones: "Ah, think nothin' of it, Gustav, think nothin' of it. When you have it, you might as well spread it around, boy. For there's none as will give a man a sight of it when he's without it at-all. Next Friday it is, then. And now I'll be on my way. There's them as is waitin' to see me by the canalside on Sint Pietersstraat an* I don't like to miss an appointment."
There was a squeak of rubber tires, and the self-propelled wheelchair was gone.
Bolan didn't open his eyes. There was no need to. Tufik appeared to be a garrulous person, a heedless and friendly man born with the gift of the gab. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. He was a shrewd operator who planned every move: every single word in his conversation was there because he wanted it to be there, for a purpose. He had mentioned the name of a street in Bolan's hearing. That was as good as an engraved invitation.
A few minutes later the warrior was talking to the hall porter. "Sint Pietersstraat," the man repeated, scratching one side of his mustache. "Yes, of course. Here on the street plan of the city. Square D7 on the grid, see. A small street running by this canal. You'll find it off the Duikersteg, second or third after the lights."
It was only four blocks from the hotel.
The canal was narrow, its surface completely covered by leaves. There seemed to be no current and no traffic. On the far side the high walls of factories and a warehouse cut off the view. The street itself was bordered by small houses in poor repair — meaner and less imposing than the tall waterfront properties in Amsterdam — and there was a towing path below it, approached every hundred yards by a cobbled ramp.
Bolan noted with amusement that to make the Duikersteg he had to walk the length of Onkelweg — the Uncle's Way.
Once in the Sint Pietersstraat he hurried along looking for some sign of Tufik. The autumn sunshine was still bright, but there was a keen wind blowing and the shadowed side of the road was cold. Some of the two-story houses had Dutch doors at the entrance, and slatterns with painted smiles leaned over several. One flabby creature, wearing a skimpy bikini, called out something to Bolan in a dialect too broad for him to understand, and a burst of laughter echoed down the street.
How typical of Tufik, Bolan thought, to live in or near a red-light district! But where was he?
And then suddenly he saw him. The whe
elchair was below him on the path, parked at the water's edge. The fat man, bulging massively over the chair's frail structure, appeared to be gazing along a line of stunted trees whose fallen leaves had choked the canal. Bolan quickened his pace and went down the nearest ramp.
Although his back was to the Executioner, Tufik somehow sensed his approach. Before he reached the foot of the ramp, Bolan saw the wheelchair spin through 180 degrees, so that it was facing away from the canal, and roll toward the wall separating the path from the road. Then, to his astonishment, Tufik was apparently swallowed up by the brick façade...
Slowing his walk to a casual saunter, Bolan reached the bank. He glanced across the water and then swung back toward the street. Immediately he saw how the wheelchair had vanished.
Recessed deeply in the brickwork, a series of low arches ran below the surface of the road. Behind them, he guessed, were shallow cellars, perhaps used once for storing the boatmen's equipment. Most of the arches were boarded up or bricked in, but the wooden door set in one gaped open.
The wheelchair must have disappeared through there.
Bolan patrolled a few more yards of canal bank, turned and began strolling back toward the ramp. After a little while, he veered in the direction of the wall.
He saw that the brickwork cut off the view of the houses on the far side of the street, and his movements would be invisible from the upper stories. He walked through the doorway.
Inside, beneath the dark vaulted ceiling, Bolan saw rolls of chicken wire, an iron barrow, oil drums and a stack of lumber. When he'd advanced a couple of paces into the gloom, the door slammed shut and he was in total darkness. Before he had time to be surprised electric lights blazed on, and he found himself face-to-face with a blond woman whose hair stood out like a halo.
"Mr. Mack Bolan, I believe?"
She had a fresh complexion, wore a jade-green sweater that matched her eyes, tall brown boots and a very short skirt. The Executioner estimated she was in her midtwenties.
Vendetta in Venice Page 5