Bolan raised the point that it was Brognola who was missing.
Sighing, one of the police chiefs, his eloquent hands spread wide, said, "Perhaps. But there is no actual proof that he has been abducted, is there?"
"He was here and now he isn't. He's not in his hotel or anywhere else I can find him. The man I'm after was here and now he isn't, either. What other interpretation can you put on those facts? In addition to the broken windshield and the blood on the deck."
"Perhaps your friend fell and cut himself? A quick check of the hospitals..."
"Already done," Bolan interrupted. "Zero."
"In that case, perhaps later. Because you must realize there are an enormous number of routine things to take care of in a city this size before..."
It was only after the Executioner called his friend, the commendatore in Turin, that he got some action. And even then it was dusk before anything positive came in.
Questions had been asked. The nearest a vehicle could get to the old city was the big Fiat garage at the inner end of the causeway, on the north side of the Grand Canal. From there one had to take a boat... and then walk. There was no record at the garage of any elderly vehicles coming or going at the relevant times — and no one had seen anyone sick, drunk or injured being helped or loaded into any specialized vehicle, such as an ambulance.
It was the same story at the railroad station. Until a redcap, apparently more observant, recalled the three hampers consigned to Mestre and realized that only one had gone on the specified train. The other two, empty, were still in the baggage check.
A replica gondola, floating free near the Scalzi Bridge, clinched it.
"It's clear as a bell," Bolan told Gudrun after the gondola was discovered. "He made it back to the narrow canal while I was still on the roof, surprised Brognola and then hid him in the curtained pavilion where his clients had been concealed. All he had to do then was pole the gondola on up to the Grand Canal, cross to the railroad station and somehow feed Brognola into that hamper. We'll find it was loaded into one of his derelicts at Mestre."
Bolan was right. They collected the Alfa Romeo roadster from the Fiat garage and drove back across the causeway to Mestre. Baggage handlers there remembered loading a heavy hamper arriving on the train from Venice onto an old flatbed truck, which had taken the A.4 pike for Udine and Trieste.
"He's on the way back to his own base," Gudrun told the warrior as they left the bright lights of the city behind them and headed eastward into the night.
"And that is?"
"Not too far from Udine. Twenty miles from the junkyard where you escaped from him."
Gudrun shifted down to pass a convoy of trucks. There was still plenty of boot left in the veteran speedster. She swung back into the inside lane as Bolan said, "Tell me about Baracco and what you think he aims to do."
"You have to know two things about him," Gudrun replied, "apart from the fact he's a monomaniac. One, he may be crazy but he's a very dangerous man. Two, he won't allow possible witnesses against him to stay alive."
"And where does that leave my friend?"
"Six feet under if you're not careful." Gudrun's voice was somber. "And quick with it. I know Bart, and I know the way his mind works. He's going to lean on your friend — and he can lean very heavily — until he's found out what he wants to know. After that I wouldn't rate Mr. Brognola's chances very high."
"What will he want to know?"
"Everything about the two of you. Who you work for, what evidence you have, who else you may have confided in. He'll want to know just how many people he has to eliminate before he's in the clear again. Once he knows those things he'll kill Brognola."
"He might not find out anything. Brognola's tough."
"He won't be tough enough to hold out against Bart. Not when the son of a bitch is mad, and he'll be as sore as hell. That's two operations you and your buddy screwed up, directly or indirectly — the only two he ever lost out on. His business depends on a one hundred percent success markup. I tell you there's nothing he won't do to get even."
"Okay," Bolan said. "Show me the place, and I'll go in and get Brognola out. You want to get even with him, don't you?"
"It's not that easy. You can't just go there. All the approaches are under surveillance. There are sensors and trip wires and things even I don't know about. Also the forest around there is very dense."
"So?"
"So I think it would be better if we stopped here and you rented a car. I think it would be better if we split up and approached separately. I think the smart way to play it would be for me to go ahead and get the lay of the land. After that I can come back to you and report, so we can work out a rescue plan together."
"No way." Bolan shook his head. "I couldn't allow you to do anything alone. Your ex-boyfriend is as mad as hell, so now he'll be doubly dangerous. You told me that yourself. Forget it."
"You don't understand," Gudrun said passionately. "This man has destroyed my image of myself. He's... well, you know what he's done to me. I do what I do because I want to, not just because of your friend. I have to do it for myself, to regain my self-respect. So it's not a case of whether or not you permit me to take part. I'm going on to his place anyway. All that has to be decided is whether you come with me or wait until I check back on the situation there."
"I'm still not happy."
"That's just too bad." The woman pulled the Alfa Romeo to the side of the road. Beyond a stretch of marshland, the square tower of Torcello's Church of Santa Fosca rose floodlit above the dark lagoon. "Look," she said, "I know the trails in this forest like the back of my hand. I know the crazy folly where he lives so well that I can move secretly and watch and listen where it would be impossible for two. I can avoid the trips and traps from memory where it would waste time pointing them out to you. Your friend is in great danger. Don't you think it will be quicker, safer in the long run, if I go ahead as I suggested? Then once I come back to you with the intel, we can decide the best way to attack."
"I still don't like it. You'll be in great danger yourself."
"Nobody will even see me," Gudrun promised. "Even if they did... Well, he knows this car, but he knows nothing of my connection with you, because I never showed my face in Venice. He'd simply think I'd come back to bawl him out over this Mafia bitch. Don't you see?"
Bolan sighed. "Well, okay," he said reluctantly, "but you don't have to come back to me. Remember the little baton radio my friend used in Venice? I have a couple here, tuned to the same frequency." He reached over into the back of the roadster and pulled out the airline bag. "Take one with you and keep in touch. Call me the moment you know the score and I'll come to you. You can show me a place on the map not too far away where I can wait."
She switched on the light below the dashboard, unfolded the map and traced a route with one finger. Then she leaned across him and opened the passenger door. "Paoluzzi in the village there will rent you a car. Don't expect me to call much before midnight."
Bolan unleathered the Beretta from his shoulder holster and held it out to her. "Take it," he offered. "I have the AutoMag, and you can't go in there defenseless."
She nodded and took the gun. The Alfa Romeo shot away with a crackle of exhaust. He watched the twin taillights dwindle and then vanish around a corner at the entrance to the village. He started to walk.
Behind him and to his right, the illuminated domes, towers and classical facades of the city lay like a honey-colored mirage above the black desert of the sea. Bolan remembered how the men of this same village had dismantled their houses, loaded the stones into barges and sailed across the lagoon to build Venice, a town that could be defended on all sides, when they tired of eternal raids by Visigoths and other barbarians from the mainland.
After fourteen hundred years of civilization, he reflected grimly — thinking of Baracco, of the Red Brigades, of the Middle East terrorists and of the Mob — the barbarians were still there.
The only vehicle Bolan could
rent from Paoluzzi's waterfront garage was almost as beat-up as one of the Corsican's — an aging Toyota Land Cruiser that looked as though it had been abandoned in the middle of the Paris-Dakar rally and only recovered after ten years of Sahara sandstorms. But the engine sounded relatively healthy and the tires were new. He filled the gas tank, handed over far too many dollars as a deposit and began to follow the route i Gudrun had indicated on the map.
He drove slowly. The total distance was less than ninety miles, and it was a long time until midnight. The Land Cruiser rumbled past the marshes flanking the Piave estuary, where rich industrialists from Treviso, Mestre and Portogruaro would be gathering at dawn for the duck shooting, crossed the river via the bridge at San Dona and headed for the Tagliamento at Latisana. The Executioner, too, would be shooting at first light, though the game — he fervently hoped — would be rarer and more important than the ducks downed in the mist over the marshes.
Bolan ate at a canalside truck stop near Ceggia. In the yellow sodium light flooding the parking lot, he could see fishing boats, wicker fish traps and long skeins of net behind the semis and their trailers. By the canal gates, three sailing barges waited for the dawn wind that would run them down to Venice.
Five miles up the Tagliamento valley, Bolan stopped again, ran the Toyota into a disused gravel pit and snatched a couple hours of badly needed sleep. But the sky in the east was lightening, and it was after five o'clock before the transceiver lying beside him on the seat bleeped for the first time.
* * *
Hal Brognola blinked himself awake. It took some time for his mind to clear, and the blurred images revolving slowly in front of his eyes meant nothing to him at first.
Then, piece by piece, the jigsaw assembled itself: the empty gondola drifting backward until it bumped against the powerboat at the entrance to the canal; the sound of distant shots; the helicopters circling and then sinking down over the stairway where the Executioner had followed Baracco and his fugitives; the unexpected appearance of the Corsican himself on the Grand Canal quayside; his leap onto the cruiser with a blackjack in his hand, and then... nothing.
The Fed jerked fully awake. Baracco was standing in front of him, squat, powerful hands resting on his hips. "So," he grated, "the number two snooper is back in command of his senses. So much the better. Baracco will be able to find out the truth that much quicker. And then he will be free to deal with at least one of the interfering bastards who have dared to thwart his plans."
His lips curled back from his teeth, and his eyes flashed venomously as he spit out the last words. Brognola involuntarily flinched from the fury in his voice.
Or at least he tried to. Movement, however, was impossible. He was sitting in a stoutly built rustic chair, wrists wired to the arms, knees and ankles to the front legs. The wide baggage strap that passed over his chest and behind the chair back was so tightly buckled that he found it hard to breathe.
"I guess it's useless asking who you are, what you have to do with this Bolan, who the two of you work for, and why you are interfering in my life with your goddamn snooping?" Baracco asked in a quieter tone.
"Quite useless."
"As I thought. I can tell a professional when I see one. It would save me a lot of time — and you a lot of pain — if you were able to do the same. For I aim to get that information, and I don't give a damn how I do it. Also, I am pushed for time, so my methods will necessarily have to be... crude."
"You talk like a heavy in a World War II movie," Brognola said. "Supposing I was to come across with this intel. What happens to me then?"
"I shall kill you. You must pay the price of the knowledge you and your friend have gained by your spying. Both of you know too much for the safety of my organization."
"If I'm going to die anyway, why should I talk first?"
"To save yourself great suffering before you die."
"Well, you might have me, but you don't have my friend."
"His time will come. I shall have him soon."
"I doubt it," Brognola needled. "He's smarter than you."
"He wasn't all that smart in Prague," the Corsican sneered. "Come now, answer my questions."
"I have nothing to say."
"Very well. We shall see." Baracco sighed heavily and left.
Alone now, Brognola saw the room clearly for the first time. It was a strange place. There was one more chair — the twin of the one he was bound to — a rolltop desk littered with newspaper clippings, a huge refectory table...and that was all. Through a window above the bare, dusty boards of the floor, the Fed could see the wall of another wing of the building, turreted, spired and battlemented with hewn stone like a castle in a fairy tale.
Except that, unlike the fairy-tale mountains that humped themselves above flower-strewn fields in storybooks, the peaks, spurs and bluffs beyond this stronghold were composed of towering stacks of scrap iron.
Brognola switched his attention back indoors. His bonds had been tied by an expert. He couldn't reach them with his fingers or detect the least sign of resilience when he flexed his muscles against them. And there was nothing nearby that could be of any help. The remains of a delicatessen meal lay in waxed cartons on the big table, but there was nothing in sight that could be used as a tool.
Footsteps echoed in a flagstone passageway outside the door. The Corsican was coming back.
He carried a small piece of machinery in a cast-iron housing, two lengths of high-tension cable, a six-inch cranked handle and a half-dozen bulldog clips. "A magneto," he said proudly, laying the housing on the table with a heavy thump. "Twenty-four-volt Bosch from an old sandtipper out there. The Foreign Legion in North Africa used to say there was nothing like them for persuading folks to volunteer information! And it's nice that we can provide one, as it were, from stock. I always knew there were many uses for a wrecking yard."
He laid the rest of the equipment down by the magneto and walked to Brognola's chair. "Now, friend, we will see how sweetly Baracco can make you sing." He reached forward and seized the American's shirt, ripping it open from neck to waist in a single savage gesture.
* * *
Brognola was unconscious, slumped forward against the retaining strap with his head hanging, when the clatter of the helicopter's rotors broke the silence in the big room. Leaving the cables still clipped in position on the unconscious man's seared flesh, Baracco ran out to a stairway that spiraled to the ground inside a Gothic turret.
His retreat looked even more surreal from outside. It had originally been built as a hunting lodge for a Milan tycoon furious over the loss of the Massif de Mercantour hunting grounds when that part of Italy was ceded to France after a plebiscite in the 1870s. Gudmn had called it a folly, and that was what it was: a Gothic extravagance, the battlements and ramparts pretentiously concealing what was in fact a relatively small house. It had always looked curiously unreal in its forest hollow, but surrounded by a turbulent sea of scrap iron, as it now was, the place became at once a creation of the wildest fantasy.
Over a groundswell of bedsteads, iron railings, cooking utensils, disused ovens and lengths of railroad track, great crests of heavier wreckage swept toward the building in a rusted and remorseless tide — a flood that culminated in a tidal wave of smashed car bodies, dented boilers and the skeletons of traction engines that had once, in their day, hauled entire circuses around the country.
Dwarfed by this metal deluge, Baracco stood waiting.
The chopper sank down from the sky over the mountains that rose near the Austrian border, skimmed the surf of green treetops that washed against the foothills and lowered itself neatly to the ground in an open space between one of the mounds of scrap and the outer wall of the folly.
If he had been conscious, Brognola would have recognized it as the twin-rotor machine that had provided one of the diversions during the assault on Murano that same morning. But there were no decoy mafiosi with shotguns in the cabin now. The hatch slid back and a single figure dropped to the
ground. Brown boots laced to the knee strode purposefully across to the porch where Baracco was waiting. The curves of a supple body moved enticingly beneath a formfitting leather flying suit. Then the flight helmet was removed to reveal the face of Mariella, the blonde from the tavern in Prague.
Baracco kissed her and took her to the room where Brognola was being held prisoner. She glanced cursorily at the inert figure, then wrinkled her nose at the odor of seared flesh. "Has he come up with anything yet?"
"Nothing we hadn't guessed already," the Corsican growled. "He's tougher than he looks."
"You mean he's said nothing at all?" Mariella demanded.
"Oh, he's talked all right. They al! talk when the current is flowing. Pain and Pentothol make a persuasive mixture." Baracco waved a hand at a hypodermic syringe lying on the table. "So we know for sure he works for some American security service. We know where his office is, and we know he has the President's ear. Big deal. But we don't know any more about this Bolan — what's his angle, how far he has got, what he aims to do. What I do know is that I'm going to kill the son of a bitch. Give me another half hour with this creep and I'll find out..." He picked up an electric soldering iron from the table and rammed it viciously into a wall socket.
"My people know about Bolan," the woman said. "I've been checking. You can leave him to them. There's already a contract out. He's caused the Families quite enough trouble already. As far as this man here is concerned, you don't have time to take it any farther. You'll have to get rid of him, fast. My principals want action. We have clients waiting to be moved in three different European countries already."
"All right, sweetie, all right." Baracco was at once contrite. "Why the hell should I waste my time and yours trying to discover why a do-gooder should want to pass himself off as a murderer anyway?" He pulled the smoking soldering iron from the wall.
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