Vendetta in Venice

by Don Pendleton

  There was a sudden rush of damp, cold air as the doors of the rear were jerked open. An electric light flashed. Somebody grunted with satisfaction and shut the doors. Through slitted eyes, the Executioner received a momentary impression of his jailer — the upper half of a man silhouetted against a glare of light in which rain sloped down in silver lances. Then a flat iron bar was dropped across the doors, and the footsteps receded.

  Bolan waited for half a minute to make certain nobody else was coming, then he forced his cramped body into action. He rolled over onto his back, gathered his strength and launched himself upward so that his pinioned feet were pointing at the roof and his whole inverted body was supported on elbows, neck and shoulders. Then, forcing the elbows as far apart as he could, he rolled himself downward, drew his knees tightly up against his chin and maneuvered the hoop of his arms over his hips. All he had to do then was pass the bound hands over his feet.

  He had almost made it when the heels of his shoes fouled on his bound wrists. Panting and cursing under his breath, he struggled to draw his knees up still farther, to flatten his feet against his haunches. But it was only when he pushed his shoes off that he was able to slide his feet through and bring his hands in front of him.

  The first thing he did was reach up and tear away the strip of cloth holding the gag in place — and then, painfully, eject the gag itself. With his bound hands he explored his pockets, looking for a cigarette lighter. Bolan didn't often smoke, but the lighter had another purpose: concealed in the lower half was a small capsule of nerve gas that could knock out an opponent and leave him unconscious for a half hour.

  And, of course, the lighter would produce a flame.

  Bolan located it in the hip pocket of his pants, fished it out and sparked it into flame. The lighter wasn't self-extinguishing: once the wheel had been spun, the flame continued to burn inside a stormguard until it was blown out or the hinged top was lowered over it.

  Bolan set it on the truck floor, then, gritting his teeth, he lowered his wrists toward the flame... Two excruciating minutes later, the last charred strand of rope parted and he was able to give his tender flesh some much-needed relief. Quickly he untied the knots at his knees and ankles and freed his legs. Then, massaging his limbs to restore the circulation, he took the lighter and went over the interior of the truck to see if he could find anything that could help him break out.

  The vehicle wasn't very big — larger than a delivery van but by no means a long-hauler, probably a two- or three-tonner. Apart from a pile of old sacks, it seemed empty. But the storage space continued forward, over the roof of the cab, and here, lying in a corner with a coil of wire, a shrink-wrapped pack of four spark plugs and a twist of oily rags, he found a rusty hacksaw blade.

  Bolan scrambled down to the floor again and stole to the rear doors. The lighter flame showed him that although the panels were rusted, they were still a very close fit — too close for the hacksaw blade to slip through. Grunting with the effort, he leaned his weight against the outer door, hooking his fingernails at the same time around the edge of the other, painfully dragging it inward. The crack widened imperceptibly until he could slide the blade in.

  From there it was relatively easy to work the hacksaw upward until it lodged against the bottom of the flat iron bar securing the doors. Sweat beaded the Executioner's brow as he wrestled the slender steel finger up against the weight of the bar. But at last the bar was clear of its socket, and he tilted the blade away from him so that it slid off and clanked downward, leaving him free to shove open the doors.

  The man he glimpsed earlier stood immediately behind the truck. He was short, bulky, barrel-chested — a dark-complected man in blue coveralls, with hair plastered to his skull by the rain. He had a ferociously jutting jaw.

  Bolan recognized Conrad's murderer.

  The Executioner was poised on the truck's tailgate, waiting to leap. The killer watched him with glittering eyes, hefting an outsized wrench from hand to hand. Behind him the shrouded shapes of trucks and trailers in a parking lot blocked off the neon lights of an all-night cafe.

  The Executioner evaluated the situation in a flash. He was unarmed. He had no means of knowing how many confederates the guy might have, how many backup men could be moving in on them even now. It was no time for an in-depth investigation of who they were or why he had been kidnapped. That could wait until he had seen Tufik. Right now the operational priority was to get out.

  Quick.

  He would join battle as soon as he was armed, as soon as he knew the score, as soon as he had regained his own freedom of movement.

  As his adversary moved forward, Bolan acted.

  But instead of jumping he sank down onto his heels, pulled the cigarette lighter from his pocket and aimed it at the killer's face. Reflected light gleamed on the wrench as the guy raised it high. Bolan pressed a button in back of the lighter. A stream of gas jetted at the killer's nose and mouth from a tiny hole below the flintwheel. The killer's eyes widened in surprise and his mouth opened, but before the man could utter a sound he twisted around and fell to the ground.

  With a single bound, Bolan cleared the prone figure and sped off into the rain and into the night.

  When he was two hundred yards down the highway, he turned to look back. He couldn't see anyone else around the truck, and so far the alarm hadn't been raised.

  The blare of a jukebox jangled from behind the steamed-up windows of the café. Cars and trucks speeding past in each direction probed the dark, wet pavement with long fingers of light. Otherwise there was no sign of life.

  Bolan started to walk. A mile farther on, a glare of yellow light reflected back from the low clouds marked the position of a motel. When he got there, soaked through from the driving rain, he saw to his surprise that he knew the place. It was on a section of road in northern Belgium between Hasselt and the Dutch border city of Maastricht. He knew, too, that someplace in the vast parking lot he would be able to lay his hands on transportation.

  Mercifully his papers were still in his pocket, so he wouldn't have a problem crossing the frontier back into Holland — although it was too much to expect that he'd stumble on a car that carried its documents and insurance certificates in the glove compartment. So he'd have to junk the stolen car at Lommel, on the border, and walk through, picking up another at Bergeijksche, on the far side. Maybe he'd be more believable as a pedestrian anyway, considering the state of his sodden clothes. Taking these delays into consideration, Bolan reckoned he should make the journey to The Hague in a little over three hours.

  * * *

  The canalside was deserted when he coasted the car to a halt a little after four o'clock. Nobody saw him flit down the ramp and melt into the shadows of the archway; nobody heard the faint creak as the door opened. Finding the secret switch behind the stack of lumber was difficult because the fuel in the lighter was almost gone. But at last he was standing on the elevator, ascending to the closet in Tufik's bedroom.

  He turned the handle and strode in. The room was empty, but there was a gleam of light from behind the draperies. The fat man was busy marking up some papers, crouched in his wheelchair in the light from a single green-shaded lamp pulled down over a coffee table.

  "I'm a little late," Bolan called softly.

  Tufik glanced at his Rolex. "A little," he said. "But pay it no mind, sure, for I never sleep until six."

  "Where's Gudrun?"

  "She was here just before midnight for the late shift. She left at three-thirty. Said you stood her up: took her back to your hotel and walked out on her."

  "That might be true," Bolan said enigmatically. "I was taken for a ride. Whether or not it was because Gudrun suggested I get something from my room, I don't know. But since the people responsible will be those I'm asking you questions about, I'm more than ready to hear what you discovered."

  "Ah, sure, you're not in a hurry at-all. Sit you down, dear man, and join us in a spot of the creature."

  "I'm in a hur
ry to get your report."

  The fat man toyed with a bulky sealed envelope he had picked up from the tabletop. "Now who wants to be hasty? Relax, you, and wait'll I tell you somethin'."

  "Well?"

  Tufik sighed. He seemed ill at ease. Spinning the chair away from the light, he held the envelope out to the Executioner. Bolan took it, frowning, and slit open the flap with his thumb. The envelope was filled with money.

  "I don't understand."

  "Four thousand five hundred guilders," Tufik's voice said from behind. "You better count it to make sure it's correct."

  "That's what I paid..."

  "Of course it is." The fat man was wheeling around the room, straightening papers, making unnecessary adjustments to stacks of reference books. "Sure, it's simple enough," he said without looking at the warrior. "I can't help you. I can't undertake the work."

  "Why the hell not?"

  Tufik was embarrassed. "Now that I've had a chance to look into it, I, uh, I find the people running this escape lark, the fellows you asked me about, are already clients of mine. So I'm sorry, but I can't tell you anything. 'Twould be contrary to me own rules."

  "You couldn't break those rules? In this case?"

  "Now you know better than that, Mr. Bolan. Sure, that's me cardinal principle: there's only one kind of intel you cannot buy — the lowdown on another client. You wouldn't be after wantin' me to go against that?"

  "I guess not. But..."

  "But since the client protection business can work both ways," Tufik continued, "I can put you wise to one thing before you take your money and go."

  "Anything would help." Bolan strove to mask his exasperation.

  "The boyo you're askin' me about, he asked me a question I couldn't answer, too." There was a pause, and then he said, looking straight at the Executioner, "He wanted me to find out everything I could about you..."

  9

  The small man with the gray crew cut and the clipped mustache paid off his cabbie on Eleventh Street, SE, a block away from Philadelphia Row on Washington's old Capitol Hill. He looked sharply once in each direction, crossed the road and began walking toward the river. An erect man with a firm, springy step, he strode along in his belted raincoat and his pepper-and-salt tweeds as though he would be more at home in a uniform.

  Ten minutes later, at the far end of a street of redbrick town houses, he went into a corner grocery store. In back of the store, behind serve-yourself shelves of canned soups and dry goods, there were two phone booths. In the right-hand booth, half hidden by a rack of newspapers and magazines, he lifted the receiver from a dial phone. Reading the figures carefully from a line scrawled on the back of a business card, he dialed a nine-digit code. A sliding door at one side of the booth slid open. Without a backward glance, the military man stepped through into the passageway beyond.

  The passage served much the same purpose as the one that ran beneath the cathouses in Sint Pietersstraat in The Hague: it led secretly to a house in an adjoining street. But there the resemblance ended.

  At the far end of this tunnel was the hallway of a suburban villa, all white-painted bay windows, scrolled ironwork and bay trees in tubs on the stoop. It was a safehouse used by Hal Brognola when he wanted to make discreet contact with agents whose presence would have been questioned if they had appeared at his office at Justice.

  The man with the gray crew cut wasn't however, a secret agent. He had, in fact, never been to old Capitol Hill or Washington before.

  Or, for that matter, the United States of America.

  He was just very well briefed.

  But there was nevertheless an established routine for Brognola's shadowy contacts the first time they used the secret entrance. And the man hadn't followed it.

  The elderly man behind the grocery store counter pressed a button beside the cash desk, which had been installed for just this eventuality. If it had been labeled, the label would have read Provisional Alert.

  The middle-aged blonde behind the reception desk in the villa hallway had already seen the stranger coming on the closed-circuit video monitor above the front door. Even without the winking orange indicator light activated by the man in the grocery, the defenses of the place would have been ready for the intruder.

  Steel doors now blocked the rear entrance, the door to the garage and the way back into the grocery store telephone booth. The second-floor corridor that led to Brognola's office was similarly cut off. The power supply to the elevator and the grille between the garage and the street was shut off. And similar orange lights would be winking in every room in the house while the provisional alert lasted.

  But the crew cut man wasn't there to cause trouble. He walked quietly across to the desk, clicked his heels and said in clipped, formal English, "Good morning. I should like to speak with Mr. Hal Brognola, if you please."

  The blonde was trained to deal with unexpected situations, but this one threw her. People didn't usually walk calmly through the secret entrance and expect to see the boss. "I, uh, I'm afraid it's not...that is, it's usual to make an appointment," she said.

  "I have not the time to waste on formalities, protocol, red tape."

  "Yes, but I'm afraid... Can I have your name, please?" The woman clutched hurriedly at a straw of routine.

  "I am Colonel Imre Ferenc Sujic, of a branch of the Czechoslovak military intelligence with which you would not, I imagine, be familiar." He proffered an engraved business card.

  Back on home ground, the receptionist became crisp and efficient once more. "One moment. Colonel," she said. "If you would kindly take a seat, I'll call somebody who can deal with your case."

  "I am not a case. I wish to see Brognola."

  "Yes, Colonel. If you would just take a seat, sir..."

  A minute later Frank O'Reilly, the fifty-year-old ex-FBI man responsible for internal security, was explaining in some detail why it was impossible for casual passersby, however eminent, to see Brognola, especially if they had illegally entered by a secret route. The blonde watched the exchange — O'Reilly with his pugnacious jaw, eyes watchful behind the rimless glasses, the Czech standing stiff and correct, talking with the minimum of gesture, his attitude inflexible. She'd put her money on the foreigner, she thought privately; there was an assurance about him that wouldn't admit even the possibility of defeat.

  It said much for Sujic's authority that she proved right. Within ten minutes O'Reilly was all smiles, personally ushering the visitor into Brognola's office.

  "I know you by reputation, Colonel Sujic," Brognola said, glancing at the card. "But why didn't you telephone to make an appointment? I must apologize for the embarrassment you must have suffered, but you appreciate we have to take certain precautions."

  "Understood. I did not telephone because you might have been officially 'out' and I have little time to spare. Also, I was interested to make my way into your... fortress... by unorthodox means because it was an instructive exercise and it afforded me the opportunity to test the efficiency of our own intelligence services, who had supplied the necessary information."

  "I hope you found the experience rewarding," the Fed said dryly.

  "Amply, thank you. A few of the interior details were absent. I did not know about the steel doors, for example. But the briefing on the approach and the entrance itself was admirable. I found my way to the correct store and into the reception area with no difficulty at all."

  "Great. I guess, just the same, that this wasn't your only reason for visiting Washington?"

  "By no means." Colonel Sujic cleared his throat. "What I have to say is very strictly off the record. I would prefer it to be said in informal surroundings. I should be honored, therefore, if you would allow me to offer you luncheon. I am told there are suitable places on the waterfront in Georgetown." He coughed. "I am further briefed that the Chincoteague oysters and clams from Chesapeake Bay should be sampled at all costs."

  Brognola laughed aloud. "You're on."

  Thirty minutes later, sitti
ng beneath a striped awning between a clapboard fisherman's cottage and a redbrick town house with delicate wrought-iron railings bordering the front steps, Sujic came to the point. "Our trade, as I think you will agree," he said, "is an endless chess game, an elaborate ritual of denial and counterdenial, of claim and rejection, that makes nonsense of truth as we know it. It is a convention, absurd perhaps to an extreme, but one that is imposed on us by our masters and one we must follow."

  Brognola nodded. Each time he spoke, he realized that he was mimicking the colonel's speech patterns.

  "If an espionage agent defects from country A to country B," Sujic said, "probably because he has a girl there or the money is better, country A will at once deny that he has defected, deny that he was a spy — and claim that, if he was a spy, then they knew nothing about him. Country B will in turn deny that it offered the man money and try to make out that he came because he was convinced of the Tightness of that country's way of life over his own."

  Brognola gazed through a screen of yellowing chestnut leaves at the brightly colored boats bobbing on the water. He nodded again.

  "Within the framework of these nonreal conventions," the Czech continued, "any attempt at genuine cooperation is impossible. But when we come to the question of malefactors, lawbreakers, crooks as you call them — as distinct from ideological agents, that is — then quite another set of conditions exist, wouldn't you agree?"

  "I guess so."

  "It is only in the case of vulgar felons, since they cannot in any way advance the cause of our respective dialectics, that we can afford to cooperate. Am I right?"

  Brognola sighed. "I can't deny it."

  "Very well. I am here to cooperate. Or, rather, to make a suggestion, which you are free to accept or reject as you wish. It concerns an escape organization that operates clandestinely throughout Europe and which it would be to everybody's advantage to destroy. I assume you have heard of it?"