Blowout

by Don Pendleton

  Chapter Nine

  A broad flight of steps in the center of a brick-and-sandstone facade led to the main entrance of the district courthouse. Inside there was a wide lobby with a marble floor. A staircase rose to the upper stories; the double doors to the courtroom were diagonally to the left.

  The paneled, windowless room was surprisingly small. From his high rostrum the judge looked across his desk at a single polished bench running around the well of the court. Behind and slightly above were four rows of high-backed seats. The dock and the witness stand were level with the rostrum, one on each side. And apart from tables for the defense and prosecution, that was all: no juries were called at preliminary hearings.

  It was ten-thirty on a damp morning, with the thaw well advanced and fog still veiling the trees around the Alster, when Mack Bolan was called to answer a charge of first-degree murder.

  Police witnesses stood about on the black-and-white checkerboard floor in the lobby, waiting to be called. It was anticipated that the proceedings would take only a few minutes. After formal identification, the state would outline its case, produce witnesses and ask for a committal. The accused was expected to plead not guilty and reserve his defense, since there could be no question, on a murder charge, of bail being fixed.

  In fact, the proceedings took even less time than predicted. The accused didn't plead at all. When he was asked the customary question, he opened his mouth… and was then seized by a paroxysm of coughing. He spluttered an apology to the judge, said he was unused to the northern climate and especially the fog, and then doubled up with another fit.

  During it, his right elbow jerked sharply backward, catching one of the wardens with him in the pit of the stomach. As the officer folded, Bolan lifted an uppercut from the floor to connect with the second warden's jaw. The guy staggered back against the wall and began to slide to the floor. But Bolan had already placed a hand on the wooden rail surrounding the dock and vaulted over it onto one of the lawyers' tables.

  Papers, briefs, pens, document cases scattered as he raced away and sprang to the floor in the tiny well of the court. Two strides took him to the gate in the slatted rail dividing the public benches from the officials, and then he was only five feet from the doors.

  The moment was well chosen. The court usher who would normally have been standing in front of the doors, barring the exit, had just opened one to call the first witness in from the lobby when the Executioner made his break. He was still off balance, half in and half out of the court, when the accused man reached him.

  Fischer was on his feet at the far side of the well, shouting. The judge was banging his gavel. There was confusion among the counsel and the newsmen in the public seats, and three cops had started in pursuit from the doorway leading to the cells.

  Bolan shoved the usher violently out into the lobby, skipped over him as he tripped and fell, and pulled the door shut behind him. It only held up the pursuers for an instant, but it gave the fugitive the time he needed. Sergeant Wertheim, witnesses, one or two lawyers and police on duty were standing on the black and white squares like pieces on a chessboard.

  While the opposition milled around in the lobby below, Bolan took the shallow stone steps three at a time and raced for the second floor. He was past the mezzanine by the time Wertheim and his men made the bottom of the first flight, and his long legs increased the lead up the next and across the hallway above. The pursuit was further hampered by a spectator from the court who had run out into the lobby, then appeared to trip over the lowest stair in his excitement and fall in front of the uniformed cops. Shooting a rapid glance over the balustrade as he ran, Bolan recognized the guy — a longtime CIA sleeper, unknown to Freddie Leonhardt', posted to Hamburg under deep cover as an importer of mechanical toys from Berlin.

  Had the boys from Langley been given covert orders to aid him if they could without blowing their own cover? Was the guy acting on his own initiative, one undercover man helping another, whatever their different objectives? Or was the stumble a coincidence?

  No time to wrestle the question now. There was a cleaner from a commercial firm supplying towels to the offices on the third floor; she was leaning over the balustrade, peering down the stairwell to see what all the noise was about when Bolan appeared by the cart she had abandoned. He swung it violently around and sent it hurtling down the stone steps toward his pursuers, shedding towels, pails, brooms and bottles of cleaning fluid as it went. The woman screamed, but Bolan was already on the fourth landing by the time they disengaged themselves and made the floor below.

  Panting, he glanced up the next flight of stairs and then along the corridors stretching left and right. Lower down, there had been people opening the doors of offices, curious to know what was going on; here, for the moment, the passageways were deserted. As feet clattered on the stairs, he came to a decision and ran swiftly to the corridor on his right. A few yards along, leading toward the rear of the building, there was another branching off to the left. At the far end of this was a door with a small notice announcing: WC — Privat. Bolan jerked the door open and slipped inside.

  Gently he eased the door shut and shot the bolt. Gasping for breath now, he leaned his back against the panels and listened. The chase swept up to the fifth floor, hesitated, then split into separate sections. Footsteps receded, thumped overhead, stomped back down the stairs.

  He heard Wertheim's voice: "Every door into every office, and the closets inside those offices!" Then Fischer, from farther away, shouted something unintelligible.

  He looked around his refuge. Apart from the toilet and a sink with a cold-water faucet, the room was empty. Below and to one side of the toilet tank, which bore the name of a Ruhr ironworks in relief, was a small window. It was about eighteen inches square, just wide enough for a lean man to squeeze through.

  Bolan peered through the grimy glass. The window looked out on an air shaft, fifty feet across and webbed with a complex of drainpipes emptying the guttering, sinks and bathrooms of the buildings surrounding it. He leaned his forehead against the glass, squinting sideways as he shielded the reflections with one hand. As he had hoped, a fat pipe ran down the wall close to the window, receiving the outflow from sink and toilet. It was only a few inches away. The odds were long, but it was the only possible escape and he had to take it.

  There was just one thing wrong with the idea. The window wouldn't open. It was designed to open inward, but clearly nobody had used it in years, and the last time it was painted the cracks had filled and seized up solid.

  Bolan heaved and tugged desperately at the small brass catch, cursing under his breath as the sweat ran down between his shoulder blades. Doors were opening and voices calling not far away. He couldn't even shift the lever operating the catch. Finally he snatched the hand towel from its bracket by the sink and smashed the glass with the wooden roller.

  Outside the door someone shouted as the windowpane shattered. Bolan wrapped the towel around his hands and started to push out the fragments of broken glass still sticking to the frame.

  Heavy footsteps pounded down the passageway. The handle of the door turned. The door rattled. Bolan stood on the toilet bowl, thrust one leg cautiously out through the window and sat astride the sill. Doubling up his body, he twisted the other foot out so that he was now draped over the sill with his head and shoulders inside and his legs outside.

  The rest room door shook to a sudden impact. Bolan fed more of his body out over the sill, leaning his weight on his forearms and elbows. He stretched a leg sideways, feeling with his foot for the junction where the outflow from the sink ran into the drainpipe.

  Wood splintered as somebody charged the door. Bolan found the junction with his toe, wedging the foot into the wide V and transferring some of his weight to it. Moving with care, he withdrew his head and shoulders from the window frame, feeling his jacket rip on fragments of glass still implanted in the wood.

  The door shivered under another assault. Bolan was still grasping the
windowsill with one hand, reaching now for a handhold with the other. His fingers touched the smooth, cold surface of the pipe and curved around it. He was spread-eagled on the face of the building with one leg dangling in space.

  Inside, the bolt was split away from the jamb and the door burst open with a crash. The Executioner quickly transferred all his weight to the foot jammed between the two pipes, let go of the sill and clasped the drainpipe with both hands. He was hunched there when the beefy uniformed cop thrust his head, one arm and shoulder out the window. "You come back here!" the policeman ordered.

  Bolan did not reply.

  The cop compressed his lips. The situation was ridiculous.

  He could just touch the escaped prisoner with his outstretched fingertips, but he couldn't grab him, much less support his weight with one hand if he did grab him. The most he could do would be to dislodge Bolan and send him hurtling to his death. He withdrew inside to ask for further instructions.

  Bolan looked over his shoulder. That was a mistake. The air shaft, which was faced with glazed white tiles to reflect light into the lower windows, plummeted down sixty or seventy feet to an area at subbasement level. One careless move and he would end up with a broken back among the garbage cans.

  Below the window through which he had escaped was another, and under that yet another. The floor plan of each story was identical, with the toilets one above the other to facilitate drainage. But even if he could slide down the pipe and make it into another rest room, the police would be there waiting for him long before he had made the difficult transfer to the sill and forced open the window. If, on the other hand, he could climb upward…

  He tilted back his head and looked toward the room. There was one more washroom window and then, another eight or nine feet above, the guttering that ran around the shaft. The glazed tiles stopped at window height, leaving a wall of blackened brick.

  And between the two was a stringcourse — a narrow, projecting ledge that ran along the face of the building. Bolan drew a deep breath. Mercifully there were ribbed rubber soles on his shoes.

  Sergeant Wertheim's head and shoulders had replaced the cop's in the shattered window frame. "Don't be a fool," he called. "You'll kill yourself, man! Come on back in here and we'll give you a hand, but no smart tricks, eh?"

  The Executioner still made no reply. He was levering himself up the drainpipe like a slow-motion frog. "We'll have a dozen men on the roof before you make the gutter," Wertheim shouted, "and you'll have run the risk for nothing!"

  Bolan hardly heard him. He aimed to quit the pipe before he had gotten that far. If he could last that long. The air was moist, leaving a thin film of damp on the grimed surface of the pipe. Each time he tightened his grasp and dragged himself up a little higher, each time he gripped it with the soles of his shoes to maintain his position while he slid his hands farther up, the risk of slipping increased. The distance to the next junction in the pipe, below the fifth-floor window, wasn't much more than twice his own height — maybe a dozen separate maneuvers, flexing, stretching, gripping — but to the fugitive it seemed like a thousand feet.

  For a moment he rested, watching his own breath condense on the shiny tiles. For the first time, exposed at that height, he realized how cold it was. To look down was impossible. If he looked, up, the gray clouds sailing over the roof gave him the illusion that the building was toppling toward him and made him giddy. The muscles in his wrists, calves and biceps were already clamoring for relief, and although the drainpipe was solidly cast and nine inches in diameter he had the recurring impression that it was about to pull away from the wall and crash to the ground with him still clinging to it.

  Police now crowded the dormer windows above the guttering and crawled along the edge of the roof. Bolan gasped with relief as his fingers touched the pipe junction. Bathed in cold sweat, he pulled himself level with the window and rested for a moment with both feet in the V. There was a roaring in his ears: the voices shouting to him from above and below sounded immeasurably far away. Six more feet and his smarting eyes were staring at a row of bricks surmounting the tiles. Another agonizing sequence of pushes and pulls, then he was leaning against the pipe just below the gutter with one foot braced against the ledge.

  The stone projection was three inches wide, the corner of the air shaft six feet away. Keeping one hand curled around the drainpipe, Bolan edged a foot out along the bricks. "For God's sake!" someone shouted. "Don't do it, man! Don't!"

  Warily Bolan transferred his other foot to the ledge. He let go of the pipe and stood balanced on his toes, facing the wall with his arms spread. Gingerly, inch by inch, he moved away from the pipe.

  Mack Bolan was only able to balance on the strip of stone because he was lean and muscular. With his arms flung wide and every available square inch of his body pressed to the damp brickwork, he advanced one foot a few inches, cautiously shifted his weight, brought up the other foot, moved the first again, thrusting desperately upward and inward with his calf muscles all the time.

  His cheek lay against the wall and his eyes were fixed on the corner of the shaft. He knew that if he looked down he would fall, seeing the space that yawned between his heels. Even to turn his head and stare at the bricks would displace his weight enough to overbalance him. He felt as though the trembling of the blood in his veins was sufficient to shake him from his perch and hurl him into oblivion.

  Sounds around him became exceptionally important, invested with terrible significance: the slither of his soles along the stone, the rasp of his jacket against brickwork, a scrape of boots above as some policeman followed his progress out of sight above the guttering, the hoarse, quick gasps of his breath. Loud enough to drown the world, these sounds became his lonely universe. Somewhere over the rooftops a clock chimed a quarter of an hour. Only fifteen minutes had passed since he had climbed the steps to the dock!

  There was another drainpipe in the corner. Without it Bolan would have been lost. He clung to the smooth, cold, tubular casting for all he was worth.

  The adjoining wall was part of a building two stories higher than the courthouse. Police following Bolan along the roof were therefore faced with a blank cliff of stonework; they would have to return to street level, run to the alley that led to the entrance of the next-door building and try to cut him off there, once they had checked exactly where he was aiming to get in.

  It was the other building that had prompted him to make his near-suicidal trip. Plus the gamble that he could beat them to it. For the stringcourse continued around the corner, and above it on the next leg of his odyssey were windows. The nearest was less than three feet away.

  Biting his lip, Bolan took a hand away from the drainpipe, and set out on the last few perilous feet, which somehow were the worst of all. Icy sweat ran into his eyes. A breeze sprang up from somewhere and plucked at his clothes. He was more than ever conscious of the chasm below him, of the hairline separating his life from his death. His calf and thigh muscles were on fire.

  But at last the purgatorial journey was over. He stood in front of the window. It was open a crack at the bottom and there was nobody in the room beyond. Bolan thrust up the frame. As he lowered his outspread arms to grasp the sill, a fragment of the stone ledge crumbled under his weight and broke away.

  Bolan fell.

  His legs dropped into the void. His flailing arms struck the sill with an impact that ripped the remaining breath from his body, but miraculously one of his arms hooked over the sill and held.

  For a dizzy moment he hung suspended over the air shaft with all his weight tearing at that arm. Then he managed to reach up with the other hand and find a purchase, lessening the strain.

  Only on the fourth attempt was he able to will his muscles to haul him back up to a position where he could collapse over the sill and tumble into the room.

  It was a small storeroom, not much larger than a broom closet, packed with cartons of cleaning materials and drums of detergent. Behind the door hung a dark blu
e lightweight raincoat — something a park keeper or a janitor might wear — together with a uniform cap with a shiny black peak.

  Bolan put them on and opened the door. Shuddering slightly from the intolerable tension of those last few minutes of ferocious concentration, he was aware that he dare not let up for an instant; even from here he could make out the distant shouts of the pursuers, shouts that would grow louder with every second that passed.

  The door opened onto a hallway. On the far side of the hallway were the doors of three elevators.

  The whole operation was simple once it was under way. Bolan pressed the call buttons of all three cars. One arrived almost at once. The others whined upward from street level. Before they made half the distance he was riding down to the subbasement.

  He heard the advance guard of the police squad clatter into the entrance and deploy up and down the stairs as he hurried out into the area at the bottom of the air shaft. Walking quickly to the building's fire exit, opposite the courthouse, he ran up the back stairs to the street. Five minutes later he was sitting on a bar stool in a tavern off the Alter Steinweg.

  The place was empty. "Sir?" the bartender inquired. "What'll it be?"

  "Beer," Bolan said hoarsely.

  Chapter Ten

  Bolan left the tavern and walked north, away from St. Pauli and the docks, away from the courthouse and city hall, but away also from the busy roads encircling the Alster. Mercifully, although his pockets had been emptied, there were a few bills sewn into the lining of his jacket that the friskers had missed. First priority for that cash had been the beer; the next was a change of clothing. After that it was a secret visit to the rented BMW, and back into the pursuit business with Ferucco Lattuada and Arvell Asticot at the top of the list. Add Hansie Schiller at number three.

  Near the botanical gardens, Bolan found himself in the center of a crowd milling around half a dozen barrows loaded with fruit and flowers. Behind was a crowded parking lot surrounded on three sides by the tall, bleak facades of a hospital. He realized it must be the morning visiting hours.