At once each of his arms was seized in a viselike grip and he felt the muzzle of a gun jammed into the back of his neck.
Evidently the Soviet alarm system was less rudimentary than he had thought.
Bolan was hustled out of the room, down a flight of dimly lit stairs and into a book-lined area that looked like a study. A standard lamp by the curtained window threw a discreet light over a desk once again littered with newspaper cuttings. For the first time Bolan got a good look at his captors.
Both medium height, muscular, hard-eyed, with close-cropped hair and flat Slavic faces. One was dark and one sandy, but you didn't need the buttoned jackets and wide, cuffed pants to know where they came from. Peter Lorre and Moshe Dayan without the eye patch — Central Europe and Central Casting.
"Okay," Bolan said with a theatrical sigh. "You caught me before I had a chance to take anything. Just call the cops and let's get it over with, huh?"
"Do you take us for fools?" the man who looked like Dayan grated. "Do you really expect us to believe that you do not know where you are? To swallow the story that you are a common thief?" His voice was deep and almost accentless. Maybe a couple of steps up the KGB ladder from the chauffeur-bodyguard rank.
"I can't think of any other reason for coming in through the roof," the Executioner said.
"With a silenced 93-R, a transceiver and — let me see — yes! A customized stainless-steel AutoMag?" Peter Lorre, who had a higher, more sibilant voice, took the items from Bolan's hip and shoulder rig as he enumerated them. "This is spy equipment if ever I saw any. Who sent you? The dogs of national security, so-called? The FBI? The CIA?"
"You ought to know the CIA doesn't operate within the United States," Bolan said. "As for the others, are you crazy enough to imagine this place hasn't already been screened, swept, bugged and gone over at least a dozen times?"
"So we drop this pathetic burglar pretense?" sneered Moshe Dayan, still covering Bolan with a steady hand. The gun, he saw, was a Tokarev automatic. "In any case, there is no reason to: the house belongs to the commercial consulate; it is not as though…" The Russian stopped in midsentence.
"You mean it's not the embassy," Bolan finished for him, "where the wet-affairs boys work over suspects in the cellars and the dirtier subversion plots are hatched? Where it's really worthwhile listening in?"
"Impertinence and insults will do you no good," Peter Lorre said. "What are you doing here? Who sent you?"
"Find out."
"Oh, we will. It depends upon you how quickly — and how painlessly. But we will in the end."
"For you it may be the end," the man with gun said. "In any case, protests will be made at the highest level. This is Soviet territory. Such an unwarranted intrusion is inadmissible at all levels."
"Even the lowest, bottom-of-the-dunghill level like yours?" Bolan asked.
Peter Lorre drew back a meaty fist and hit him as hard as he could in the pit of the stomach. Bolan folded as the breath whooshed from his lungs. The other man kicked him in the crotch, pistol-whipping the side of his head savagely as he went down.
Bolan lay on the floor fighting off waves of nausea. Through a red mist of pain he heard Peter Lorre say, "What shall we do with him?"
"Call Sakol and wait for orders."
One of the goons went out into the hallway and shouted up the stairs, "Igor! We have caught a spy. Call Comrade Sakol."
"He is with the bankers. Orders are that he is on no account to be disturbed," the voice of the giant in the attic replied.
"Then we will follow the usual routine — inject him and then call the embassy to come and collect. You had better come down and lend a hand."
Heavy footsteps. Creaking stairs. Bolan opened an eye and saw the man in the vest lumber into the room. He was carrying a metal first-aid box.
Bolan was hauled roughly to his feet and held upright by the giant as Peter Lorre opened the box, took out a heavy-duty nondisposable hypodermic and sucked fluid into the barrel from a dark brown vial.
Breath was still creaking back into the warrior's lungs. His loins were on fire and he could feel warm blood trickling down his cheek. But he was not quite as punch-drunk as he made out.
The grip on his biceps tightened as Peter Lorre ripped open the sleeve of the blacksuit and pinched up a fold of flesh near the elbow. He brought the syringe closer with his other hand.
Bolan stamped down suddenly, with all his force, on the giant's instep. The Russian cried out in pain, snatching his foot from the floor involuntarily and slackening his grasp on the Executioner's arms.
It was all Bolan needed. He jabbed an elbow viciously backward into the guy's solar plexus, reaching forward at the same time to seize the hand holding the hypodermic. He bent the man's arm upward with manic force, slamming the heel of his own hand against the syringe so that the needle plunged into the goon's temple beside the eye and the plunger went home.
He flung the Russian sideways just as Dayan fired the Tokarev, the body cannoning into the gunman and deflecting his aim. The slug drilled a hole between the giant's eyes. He fell with a crash that shook the house.
The remaining Russian was regaining his balance, the Tokarev swinging back in Bolan's direction, when the big guy's foot flashed out, straight-legged, and kicked it from his hand.
The heavy automatic spun away. Before it thumped to the floor the Russian's curse was killed in his throat by the edge of Bolan's hand, hard as a seasoned plank, slamming into his windpipe.
The cartilage was crushed, the blood vessels ruptured, muscles and nerves paralyzed by the blow. Dayan sank to his knees, choking on his own blood. Bolan picked up the Tokarev and made it easy for him.
After the flat, ringing report, the house seemed very silent. Bolan recovered his hardware and thumbed a switch on his transceiver.
"Ranger to Rider, are you receiving me loud and clear? Over."
He pressed the button marked Receive. Mettner's voice responded almost at once. "Rider to Ranger. Five on five. How's the weather in your part of the country? Over."
"Variable," Bolan said. "Bright intervals right now, but it could blow up a storm. I have a small survey to carry out, but I'll need transport at the door in, say, fifteen minutes. Over."
"Willco," said the newspaperman. "There's a gang of blank pages in my notebook, remember. Over and out."
"Well," Bolan said thirty minutes later, "you get your story, all right. I can wipe out the scum carrying out these deals, but I don't have the means to expose the plot as a whole. You do."
"I'm listening," Mettner said. They were parked beneath trees on MacArthur Drive, between Washington and Bethesda. Some way off to their left, the lights of a police patrol boat cast wavering reflections on the moving surface of the Potomac.
"I'll give you the story briefly, first," Bolan told him. "You can ask questions and fill in details later."
"Suits me," Mettner said. He fished a notebook from his pocket.
"I found the clincher during the fifteen minutes I was alone in that house," Bolan said. "Apart from more specific market intel, I dug out a whole sheaf of directives in Russian from Sakol's room. I have them here." He tapped his breast pocket. "You can take them with you. They prove the truth of my story."
"Okay," Mettner said. "Even radar beams couldn't bounce off a bug and listen in on us here. Go ahead."
"You're familiar with the cash-collecting stages of the scheme," Bolan said. "And you know the cash is used, ultimately, to finance terrorist activity. You know the aim of that activity is to destabilize Western society. But for what specific reason?"
"Promote anarchy, so that the Russians can step in and take over?" Mettner offered.
Bolan shook his head. "If such a project is on the cards at all," he said, "it's a very long-term one. This one is short-term. You have to remember two things: one, Russia desperately needs hard currency. For the installation of heavy industrial plants, to buy Western know-how and to purchase our grain surplus to make up the deficit in h
er own five-year agricultural plan. Two, Russia has an enormous gold surplus."
Mettner lit a cigarette and flicked the spent match out of the open window. "Go on," he said.
"Now, what will happen if terrorist activity — bombs and hijacks and machine gunning of innocent people — escalates so much that everyone panics and the stock market takes a plunge?"
Mettner nodded slowly. "I get it. As the shares slide, everybody will put their money into gold. So the shares slide still more."
"And the price of gold goes sky-high. Right. At which time our Soviet friends, in a brilliantly organized worldwide operation, slowly begin to unload their gold surplus on a seller's market — reaping so much hard cash you wouldn't believe. I've seen the estimates."
"But wouldn't that bring the price tumbling down? If they unloaded all that at the same time?" Mettner objected.
"Not the way they have it planned. Not in a graduated market assault in London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bonn and Zurich. Orchestrated with a new series of vicious terrorist atrocities, to keep up the demand any time the price does show signs of flagging."
"Very neat," Mettner said. "And you have written proof of all this?"
"I have the directions for the unloading operation. In Russian, from Moscow, right here. Obviously that's why Sakol has been seconded from the KGB: to tie up the loose ends and watch over Wall Street.
"I have the Rostand file that Sakol was supposed to collect. It shows clearly that they were relating downward market movements with past and present terrorist activity. The rest you have in your head. And don't forget this is not a case for a judge and jury; you only need enough proof to make the story stand up. Once the plot's blown wide open, whether or not there is enough proof to satisfy a court of law, the whole deal is dead."
"You're right," the newspaperman said. "What a story!"
"It's yours if you'll delay breaking it until I've checked out one more thing. There's a single piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite fit and I'd like to straighten it out before we go for broke."
"Sold," Mettner said. "I'm kind of surprised, though, that this guy Sakol's the front man, working openly through their trade delegation. I'm surprised they even let him in the country. I thought he was thrown out persona non grata years ago."
"For organizing illegals and blackmailing guys in sensitive positions to spy for the Soviets?"
"For organizing one particular illegal. Sakol was the contact man in the Varzi affair. He was Varzi's case officer."
"Varzi? The Varzi case?" Bolan frowned.
"Sure. I'm surprised you don't remember. It was soon after we went into Vietnam. It was a big scandal at the time, but I guess maybe it was eclipsed by the war news."
"I had other things on my mind," the Executioner said grimly. "Tell me about it."
"Varzi was a big wheel in the Mob. Sicilian, of course. A very smart operator who worked with families based in Vegas, the Coast and southern Texas. On his own, he was into prostitution, gambling, numbers, fixed horseraces and drugs imported through Galveston."
"I know the scenario," Bolan said.
"Yeah. Familiar story. But this one has the payoff you already guessed. Varzi was a longtime sleeper, recruited by the Reds back in the late twenties. They activated him during the Nam crisis. He used his Mob connections to instigate trouble in unions working on Defense Department contracts, to spread unrest in the Army, and most of all to stir up antiwar feeling among students. Half the campus protest movements that sapped the war effort originated with Varzi."
"Nice guy," Bolan commented. His mind was racing.
"They don't come any nicer. They got him in the end the way they got Lucky Luciano — nailed him on an illegal entry rap, plus tax evasion and white slavery charges. He was deported… oh, I guess it must have been in the late sixties."
"Somehow I don't think he retired," Bolan said. And then, "What was Varzi's first name?"
Mettner flicked his cigarette out the window. "Something not too far from Luciano, oddly enough. Luigi? Lucio? No — Lucino. Yeah, that's it, Lucino Varzi."
Bolan released his breath in a long sigh. It all figured. Just that one piece of the puzzle to fit in now. But apart from that it was green all the way.
Lucino Varzi was the fourth director of the Montemines Corporation; he had a seat on the board but he held very little stock. He was not on the board of Negrimin International.
Lucino Varzi's seventeen-year-old daughter, Palomar, was the only one of the five girls held hostage by Anya Ononu who was neither tortured nor raped.
Why? Because the whole kidnap deal in her case was a setup, a cover to distract attention from the fact that her father was actually in cahoots with the dictator, probably masterminded the whole show.
Through Ononu, Varzi planned to get his hands on all the stock of both companies.
But — this was Bolan's missing piece of the puzzle — what exactly did this have to do with the unloading of Russia's gold surplus? Were Sakol and Varzi still connected? And why, above all, were Vanderlee's big-time industrialists concerned with a scheme that, if it succeeded, would ruin them?
He turned toward Mettner. "One more thing," he said. "Varzi's still a millionaire, he still plays the world markets. Would you know where he's based since he was thrown out of the U.S.?"
"Sure," Mettner said. "He has a place on the island of Ischia."
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The waterfront at Ischia resembles a slice of downtown Naples carved out of the gulf and deposited into the Mediterranean a dozen miles offshore.
Bolan and Jason Mettner checked in to the Hotel Punta Molino at Ischia Porto — an Italianate building set among pines above the flat-roofed jumble of fishermen's houses that tumbled down between stone stairways to the balconied facades overlooking the quays.
The Varzi property was at the other end of the island. They rented a scooter with a pillion to make a preliminary recon. Beyond the villages clustered on the vine-covered slopes of Mount Epomeo, they came to Ischia Ponte, where a castello — a complex of fortress, cathedral, prison and baroque churches — crowned a massive highland connected to the island by a fifteenth-century bridge.
The ex-Mafia sleeper's retreat was even more isolated — a medieval fortress on an islet half-hidden behind a wall of rock that rose from the cliff top. A tunnel pierced the outcrop, and beyond this a narrow footbridge spanned a chasm separating two sheer one hundred-foot cliffs rising straight from the sea.
The bridge was the only way of reaching the fortress. There was no landing stage and no visible way down the rock faces between the ancient walls and the waves frothing among the jagged boulders below. Varzi's automobiles, and those of his visitors, were housed in a walled compound on the landward side of the tunnel.
"And there'll be guys with guns behind those walls," Bolan said. They had already seen, focusing field glasses from a vantage point a quarter of a mile away along the cliff top, that there were two armed guards at the far end of the bridge.
"Below the ramparts, too, all around the rock," Mettner said, handing the glasses back to the Executioner.
Bolan refocused. The journalist was right. A path circled the islet below the huge stone walls supporting the central redoubt, and here and there small dugouts had been quarried from the rock. Most of them housed one or two men, tanned, muscular guys in swim trunks. They could have been guests at the castle sunbathing, but in several cases the bright midday light struck reflections from the breech or barrel of a gun leaning against the dugout wall.
"Okay," Bolan said. "Direct approach across the bridge is out. Likewise any attempt to land from a boat. The cliffs can be scaled — but I wouldn't rate my chances high with those goons on the watch."
"How are you going to get in?"
"Underwater," the warrior said. "Let's go back to town before the stores close for siesta."
Past groves of lemon trees and a volcanic lake, the scooter carried them back down through the pinewoods
to Ischia Porto. It was after they had bought scuba equipment that Bolan spotted Piotr Sakol.
The Russian was paying off a cab outside the Gennaro Restaurant — a slim, hard-bitten man with dark wiry hair who could have been north German or even Welsh rather than Slav.
"The vultures are gathering," Bolan said. "I reckon things are about to happen. They'll know the Russian unloading directives are in enemy hands. My guess is that they'll put the whole deal forward now, try to get it off the ground before anyone makes use of that information."
"You better work out a way of getting in there quickly, then," Mettner urged. "Because Ivan's gonna be given the big hand, if what you say is right. They'll have that red carpet rolled clear across the bridge and through the tunnel when he shows."
"Okay," Bolan said. "While he's getting the VIP treatment, I'll be going up the back stairs."
Shortly before dusk, Mettner tilted down the forty-horsepower Evinrude engine, so that the shaft and propellor were submerged, and punched the rented boat out from among the yachts and power cruisers moored along the waterfront.
On half throttle they cleared the harbor and chugged westward toward the castello and Varzi's place beyond. Bolan was already wearing a wetsuit, with oxygen tank strapped to his back. His two guns, spare ammunition clips, the transceiver and a couple of stun grenades were zippered into waterproof pouches clipped to his belt.
Approaching the islet several hundred yards offshore, he slipped flippers on his feet and sloshed seawater around the inside of his mask so that the glass eyepiece would not fog up. The intense, startling blue of the ocean had already faded through a leaden hue to inky black. Above the western horizon a tiny sliver of moon lay beneath the evening star in the darkening sky. It would be night in a few minutes.
Bolan coiled rope around his waist, picked up a harpoon gun and slid backward into the water on the side of the boat away from the islet. Mettner was instructed to await a call on the transceiver.
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