Dead Easy

by Don Pendleton

  Then Bolan turned to Ruth. "We better get going. We have a train to catch."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "Do you ever ask yourself why you are doing this?" Ruth Elias demanded. "I mean the fighting, the crusading, the endless battle against the evil of our society?"

  "Somebody has to do it," Bolan said, "or it's no longer a society but chaos, anarchy. I don't like seeing honest people trampled upon. And I have some of the necessary skills to let the savages know that someone is prepared to oppose them, and violently, if need be."

  Bolan and Ruth were sitting behind glass walls in the rooftop bar of the Hotel Mandela, Gaborone. The Humber half-track had been abandoned at Dinokwa, where a prudent display of dollar bills had secured them a place on a train to the capital. Let the South Africans explain to the Botswana authorities how one of their armored vehicles, with the identification insignia clumsily painted out, happened to be parked fifty miles inside foreign territory.

  The hotel was one of the few buildings of more than two stories in the railroad station neighborhood. They had checked in there because it was close by, because they were exhausted and because stores across the street could replace the tattered rags they wore with acceptable clothes.

  Approaching the bar to order refills — the Mandela didn't have table service — Mack Bolan glanced through the plate glass to find half the city had disappeared. Reducing visibility to a few hundred yards, a slow drizzle was drifting down from the darkening sky.

  It was actually raining! In dusty Gaborone! At dusk! And the population wasn't ready for it.

  Black shoppers rushed an ancient bus with crates of live chickens roped to the roof, jamming the interior, riding the fenders, clinging to the rear bumpers. Between the hotel and two stained concrete apartment blocks squatters took shelter in a vacant lot. An old woman covered paper sacks containing her worldly possessions with a sheet of rusted tin. A cooking pot rested on top of a fire made from discarded lumber, hissing in the rain. People huddled together in doorways: a mother with her baby, an old man whose head and hands twitched ceaselessly, listless youths with wet cigarettes dangling from their lips.

  Perhaps it was some atavistic impulse, springing from the time spent with primitives in the desert, that led Bolan and Ruth in a sense to identify with those squatters, fellow outcasts and outlaws seeking warmth and shelter and human comfort in mutual protection against the elements. Human elements in Bolan's case.

  Or perhaps it was no more than a simple animal attraction that suddenly became irresistible.

  Whatever, the moment dinner was through, they went to bed. They had reserved two rooms; without a word being spoken, they went to one.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world, a relief after days of tension that had been almost explosive. And curiously, half naked in the desert, sleeping rough together, changing clothes in the Volvo — nowhere had he been genuinely aware of her as a woman. Ever since his first unashamedly sexual appraisal in Vanderlee's office in Johannesburg she had been no more than an ally, someone he had to protect but who would also protect him.

  But the instant the trappings of civilization were around — the cool drinks, the uniformed doorman, shiny cars in the parking lot — from that moment on there was a force drawing them together that was almost tangible.

  Bolan didn't try to resist it.

  Tomorrow they would part, she to report back to Jerusalem, he to check out a name and address in the southeastern United States.

  It was tough. But Bolan had long renounced the idea of a lasting relationship, renounced since the death of April Rose any hope of a permanent attachment.

  And yet…

  Well, tonight was tonight. And tonight was theirs.

  On the wide bed in the seventh-floor hotel room, he remained staring, long after Ruth had fallen asleep, at the reflections of passing automobile headlights as they pierced the blinds and swept across the ceiling.

  He shook his head, marveling still at the extraordinarily voluptuous quality of her body — so trim and contained in her blacksuit or in the neat shantung skirt and top she had bought as soon as they hit town — once she was naked in bed with him.

  She was one of the most passionate and demanding — and at the same time one of the most compliant and giving — women he had ever encountered.

  Somewhere in the night a clock struck the hour. Tires swished on the wet road below. Bolan did not bother to count the strokes.

  How often in his hazardous life did he have time to relax this way?

  To take time off from his personal crusade in order to make human contact with someone of the opposite sex? How frequently in the middle of a mission did the flux of events he controlled — or which controlled him — eddy to a halt so that for the moment there was nothing he could do, need do or even want to do? Because the affair that had begun with a train wreck in Italy had taken on its own momentum, and right now at this moment, there was nothing in the world he could do to alter it.

  Not often. But this was such an occasion.

  Until his plane took off tomorrow there was nothing on earth he could do to accelerate the operation. No phone call, no letter, no telex message could bring him information that would take the affair any further. Gaborone could provide no more intel on what he knew already.

  He had discovered that Ononu kidnapped the daughters of men who controlled the mines in his country so that he could bargain for a bigger share in the profits. Would the extra cash have been used to finance bigger and better drug distribution? Probably. And the increased profits from that would likely have been devoted to the organization of continued terrorist activity.

  Terrorist activity in aid of what? On whose behalf? To prove what?

  He would find this out when he got to Florida.

  He hoped.

  Because although both Ononu and his opium farm were now destroyed, Bolan was certain that there were ramifications to the conspiracy, that a wider organization existed and still worked, and that so far he had only uncovered a part of the whole.

  In the meantime… space to breathe, to make contact.

  And secret agent Ruth Elias to help him do it.

  The thought hardened once more into desire. He reached for her, pulling the warm smooth length of her toward him, cupping a breast in one hand.

  She was awake at once, her moist lips open, feeling for his mouth, her cool, practiced fingers wrapping around him, tightening, caressing. She slid beneath him, she sat astride, she knelt on the bed.

  Much later, standing mouth to mouth with him beneath the shower as the dawn filtered past the blinds, she whispered endearments against his lips.

  One of his hands was in the small of her back. He arched his hips forward, feeling the curve of her belly, as he let his fingers stray downward around perfectly formed buttocks, massaging, probing.

  Gasping, she pulled him out of the shower and into the bedroom.

  "Do you ever ask yourself why you are doing this?" the Executioner said.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  From Jacksonville, past St. Augustine and Flagler Beach, Mack Bolan's rented Thunderbird took the Highway 95 south at almost three times the legal limit. At Daytona Beach, he switched direction, heading crosscountry on Highway 4, to the outskirts of Tampa. After that it was north again on U.S.19, past Tarpon Springs, New Port Richey and Hudson, to the turn-off for Pretty Bay.

  Bolan had decided not to fly direct to Tampa for several reasons. One, he needed money. He had fulfilled his promise to Bozuffi, but he was not prepared to ask for more now that the tycoon's own particular problem was settled.

  There was, however, a fund specially set up from which he could draw whenever he needed. It had been organized by a White Russian refugee duchess, now dead, for whom Bolan had once smuggled a scientist out of the Soviet Union. There was a bank in Jacksonville through which he could make use of this fund.

  Secondly, he had contacts in Jacksonville, though not in Tampa.

  The third reas
on was probably the most important.

  Since the heat was on in South Africa, it had clearly been impossible for him to fly from Gaborone to Cape Town and make the connection stateside there. He had been obliged to take a Pan-African flight from Botswana to Brazzaville, a Sabena jet from Brazzaville to Dakar, in Senegal, and then a UTA jumbo to Paris. By the time the Air France AF001 night-departure Concorde deposited him at Kennedy — with fifteen minutes to spare before the connection to Jacksonville took off — several hours of air that was neither pressurized nor conditioned was the number-one priority on his list.

  Driving the T-bird was great. It blew away the jet lag and cleared his mind. He was almost sorry when he saw the sign that said Welcome to Pretty Bay.

  The place was new. But the land developers responsible for the glassed-in shopping mall between the unfinished condominium towers had not been able to eradicate entirely the original Gulf fishing community; their clapboard shacks, tarred and weathered, still stood on either side of the half-empty tourist marinas. There were big houses, too, on the outskirts of town, which lay between Bayport and Homosassa. Bolan's quarry lived in one of them.

  Westwood Towers was surrounded by fifty acres of wooded valley with a quarter-mile frontage on the gulf. Most of the estates that ran down to the ocean were centered on pillared, colonial-style mansions. Westwood was different, it was sham Gothic. It reminded Bolan of a larger version of the Reinbecker place without the courtyard. The towers that gave it its name lay at the four corners of the huge house.

  It was not visible from the road; the entire landward margin of the property was bounded by a ten-foot-high wall. But Bolan rented a small outboard from one of the Pretty Bay marinas and went fishing. Five hundred yards offshore, with a pair of powerful binoculars, he was able to make a survey.

  What he saw was not encouraging.

  Manicured lawns sloped down to the waterside from the terrace in front of the house. A fifty-foot fly-bridge cruiser, flanked by two powerboats glittering with chrome, lay alongside the private pier. Among the trees on either side of the valley, a nine-hole golf course had been laid out, and formal gardens surrounded the Olympic-size pool.

  Bolan tightened the focus.

  He could see at least three — no, four — dog handlers prowling the outskirts with leashed Dobermans. At one side of the coach-house yard a husky dude stripped to the waist was polishing a cream-colored Mercedes. Beside it was a blue Maserati.

  And beside the dude — very close beside, hugging his bare, tanned skin — was a strapped shoulder rig holding a large-caliber handgun.

  That was not all. Among the trees Bolan saw some posts, rising no more than eighteen inches above ground level. To the Executioner's experienced eyes that could mean only one thing: TV monitors.

  If that was so, an intruder's progress could be precisely charted from somewhere within the house, night or day.

  Provided he made it far enough to be charted at all.

  Bolan suspected — he could not see clearly enough to be certain — that some of the posts were related to what looked like fixed-position shotguns wedged in tree forks. There would probably be trip wires, too, to set off guns or grenades.

  Welcome to Pretty Bay.

  For sure, anyone in the opium racket handing out orders to Reinbecker and Vanderlee was not going to be a lily-white boy; he would certainly be working on the wrong side of the law. But this was hard-pro gangland material, and Bolan had expected something more in the line of an up-market Reinbecker or perhaps a crooked senator.

  What the soldier wanted here, as he had in Baarmbeek, was intel. He had assumed it might be a simple break and enter, with a search of papers and perhaps a little pressure applied to start the conversation.

  Now he understood why there was no barbed wire or broken glass along the top of the wall surrounding the property.

  If he was dealing with heavies, his approach had to be very different… and from what he had seen it was going to be difficult even getting inside the perimeter of Westwood, let alone making it to specific rooms within the house.

  Bolan returned to town, turned in the boat, stashed the T-bird in an underground lot and checked in to an empty hotel.

  He went out again, found a public phone booth, fed in coins and dialed a secret number.

  A little inside information, he figured, would help in the case of Mr. Hugo Rostand, the proprietor of Westwood Towers.

  In the receiver he heard a woman's voice speak the single word, "Listening."

  Bolan repeated, twice, an identification code.

  After a pause, in which he knew his voice print was being matched electronically with a master in a memory system, the voice intoned, "Accepted," and quoted him another number.

  He thumbed more coins into the box and dialed again. The number — it was changed twice each day — was a sterile contact for Hal Brognola, director of the NSA's Sensitive Operations Group and sole link between the Stony Man organization and the Oval Office.

  From the covert operations section of the Justice Department, Brognola was still unofficially in touch with Bolan's one-time Stony Man comrades, the men of Able Team and Phoenix Force, who were still based on the Virginia Blue Ridge stronghold.

  Even less officially — clandestinely, in fact — Hal Brognola remained the sole link between Bolan the outlaw and Bolan the lone warrior. The big Fed was also the only connection between Bolan and the vast data banks storing the information gleaned over the years at Stony Man.

  It was through him that Bolan had been able to acquire in Jacksonville the assortment of arms and equipment now taped beneath various parts of the Thunderbird.

  And he had several times plundered the Stony Man computer memories to help the Executioner on his lonely path.

  "The first question I can answer off the top of my head," the gruff, lugubrious voice affirmed when Bolan had made his requests. Bolan visualized the unlit cigar that must inevitably be wedged in Brognola's mouth. "I thought you would have known, but maybe the change was made when you were in foreign parts."

  "The change?"

  "Yeah, the change of name. Very discreet. Official. To go with the reformed image of the retired gentleman."

  "I don't get it."

  "Hugo Rostand hasn't been with us too long. Before, he was more familiarly known as Ugo Rostano."

  "Rostano! But wasn't he an enforcer for one of the Detroit families?"

  "That's right. He's Mob right down to the ground. Then suddenly he got too big, knew too much and… well, he figured it best to cop out."

  "You said he retired?"

  "Into the laundry business. He washes syndicate money through connections in Switzerland, South Africa, Italy, you name it. Any Mafia don can use his services, and it's understood all the families stay away as long as he keeps his nose clean."

  "He still packs a useful-looking team around home."

  "A chauffeur and seven gorillas, according to the latest intel."

  "No women?"

  "None that we know of," Brognola replied. "No female domestics either."

  "Don't send in the fire department too quickly if flames are seen in the neighborhood," Bolan said grimly.

  "Just keep it low profile, Striker," Brognola said. "I should have the rest of the stuff you want within twenty-four hours. Call me this time tomorrow, right?" He hung up.

  Mack Bolan's brow was furrowed, the granite-hard features pensive as he walked back to his hotel. The wind was freshening and there were whitecaps out beyond the marinas. Beneath the glass roofs of the mall sudden currents of air shook the leaves of the potted palms and tumbled debris along the pavement.

  So he was back in the frontline against the old enemy, the Mafia! He should have known they would have a finger in the pie.

  The knowledge brought with it a two-way change in his thinking. First, it meant that the job was going to be much tougher, much hairier than he'd expected; second, it meant he could drop the kid-glove approach. If he was dealing with the soul
less carrion of the crime syndicates, he could go in with guns blazing.

  First, though, he had to figure out a way of getting in.

  * * *

  Hugo Rostand, a.k.a. Ugo Rostano, sat with his bodyguard, Frank Nardi, beneath a striped umbrella beside the pool at Westwood Towers. Beyond a hibiscus hedge, the Gulf stretched past millionaires' weekend love nests to the cardboard cutouts of Pretty Bay's seafront hotels three miles to the south.

  Rostand was wearing sunglasses. A brown-and-white-striped bathrobe was wrapped around his meaty body, and his pale legs and feet were bare.

  "It was the damnedest thing," he said, "this Swiss creep already tells me the dollar stands at 7.938 against the French franc, and it's gonna go on climbin' for at least three days. I tell him okay, weigh in when it makes eight, but hold it until then. So what happens? The bastard central banks lower their interest rates and the fucker drops overnight to 7.16!"

  Nardi was wearing a purple, violet and mauve Hawaiian shirt over his yellow swim trunks. His arms and legs were tanned the color of mahogany. "We got enough trouble with our own money without some son of a bitch screwing up on the clients'," he observed. "If that wind freshens any more, they're gonna find it hard bringing in the consignment." He reached across an ornate steel, copper and glass poolside table on wheels, and splashed whiskey from a decanter into a tumbler. He drank.

  "I call this schmuck," Rostand said, "and I tell him, 'listen, asshole, I want my friends' money cleaned — not ripped to shreds in the machine! »

  The bodyguard was watching two hummingbirds flitting around a patch of poinsettia. "So?" he said indifferently.

  "So next week you fly to Zurich, Frank, and we get us a new Swiss accountant."

  "Whatever you say, boss." Nardi lifted a Smith & Wesson .357 Combat Magnum from the table, sighted it and fired. The flat crack of the report was lost in the rumble of surf from the shore. One of the hummingbirds flew away. On the shaved grass at the edge of the flower bed, a tangle of blood and bright feathers palpitated. Nardi grinned and laid the automatic back on the table.