Sunscream (9 page)

The phone calls that Bolan made were urgent. Antonin would be back in a couple of days. He would expect to find the mafiosi ready to sign on the dotted line. With all their internal problems settled. Which meant that Jean-Paul would expect his highly-paid German hit man to have wrapped up his first four contracts.

The Executioner had no wish to massacre four innocent men, but to contrive the satisfactory “death” — or at least disappearance — of the columnist, the lawyer and the TV personality, with or without their cooperation, depending on how scared he could make them, would be difficult enough in two days.

The “murder” of Telder would be something else.

“There’s a convention of cops and criminologists and special services meeting in Avignon,” Jean-Paul had told Bolan. “It ends tomorrow. Your man Telder is one of the guys on the platform. I’d like you to take him out during the windup session.”

Bolan knew about the convention. The last call he’d made had been patched in to a secret number in the city. Ironically, the experts had been called together to discuss more effective measures against terrorism, skyjacking, juvenile delinquence and the increase in organized crime. “I want to make a point,” J-P said. “Go chase the Arabs, the Armenians, the Libyans and all the other bomb-happy crackshots, but leave us alone. Do that and we leave you alone: otherwise... well, see what happens.”

“You want this guy Telder wasted as an example of what we could do?” Bolan asked.

“Right.”

“But... in the conference hall itself? While they’re all there?”

The gang leader nodded.

“How many at the convention?”

“Around two hundred. Security’s tight, of course. But we can get you an official pass. And we have friends inside.”

“You’re kidding,” Bolan said. “This is a 561 Express that I use. Hell, the barrel’s two feet long! I can’t hobble in there with the gun stuffed down my pant leg, pretending I got too close to a bomb in Beirut!”

“So?”

“So I have to find some way of zapping the guy inside while I’m on the outside. If it has to be while he’s on the platform.”

“It does. That’s the way I want it. But I don’t see why you have to use the rifle. Why not go in close and use a handgun? We can get you in there, gun and all.”

“It’s getting out that has me worried,” Bolan said. “I don’t want to be lynched by a couple of hundred mad cop lovers. And that’s what would happen if I tried anything from that close.”

“I don’t see how it could be done from outside.”

“Let’s go see the place,” Bolan said. “If I’m the triggerman, I decide where; you just decide when. Okay?”

Jean-Paul shrugged. He glared at the hired gun. Goddamn nerve. “I’ll drive you there,” he said curtly.

They went in the white Mercedes convertible. Like a spoiled child refused a second ice-cream, J-P ventilated his ill temper via the car. They covered the sixty-odd miles of expressway between Marseilles and the Avignon turnoff in twenty-nine minutes, hitting an average of just over 120 mph. And that included two stops demanded by highway patrolmen who handed out speeding tickets. Bolan was amused.

The convention was being held in the lecture hall of a modern high school, which was closed for the summer vacation. The hall was a large free-standing rectangle with a serrated, asymmetrically pitch roof like a factory workshop. The shorter, near-vertical slope of each serration was glass, to capture the north light and minimize the glare of the sun.

Behind the hall were the school buildings; in front there was a parking lot — glittering now with ranks of expensive cars — and the main gates that opened off a traffic circle fed by five broad avenues.

Bolan was interested in a narrow side street that led off one of the avenues, north of the school and less than one hundred yards from the intersection. The street was fronted by tall nineteenth-century houses with gray slate roofs and iron balconies on each of the six floors. Each building was ranged around a central courtyard with an archway that led to the street. Between the archways, small shops shaded their display windows against the sun.

Bolan walked through to the cobblestone yard behind the third archway and looked up at the apartments stacked on each side. The facade opposite the arch had been modernized: wide picture windows, flower-strewn concrete terraces, a flat roof. “Who owns that part of the building?” he asked.

“Friends of mine, as it happens,” J-P said.

“And this side, backing onto the street?”

“Friends of friends.”

“Great. Is there anyone in either of those two blocks that you or your friends could lean on a little? Anyone you have a lever on? I don’t mean for muscle; just a helping hand for a few minutes.”

“Listen, Sondermann,” said J-P, “there isn’t anyone in this town, or my town, that I can’t get some kind of a lever on.”

“Better still.”

“What do you have in mind?” the gang boss asked curiously.

Bolan told him.

“You must be mad!” Jean-Paul said. “It must be at least three hundred yards.”

“Of course it has to be the right time, with the right light, but given the help I’m asking for, it’s a piece of cake.”

“But the angle... the deflection... you’d never make it.”

“I’ll earn my money,” Bolan said.

Maitre Delpeche was the difficult one. He could not accept the fact that someone wanted him dead.

Dassin, the columnist who cherished a secret passion for high-school girls, thought it was a joke. “What is this?” he said good-humoredly when Bolan showed him the Beretta.

“Look, Dassin,” Bolan snapped. “I’ve been hired to kill you. But for reasons of my own, I don’t want to do this one... but for other reasons, equally vital, it’s got to look as if the contract’s been filled.”

“No way!” the newspaperman chided.

Bolan pulled back the slide on the auto-loader.

“All I have to do is fire a single shot into your temple and put the gun into your hand before I push you out the window. There’ll be a suicide note, too. Something about underage kids and photos.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Dassin’s voice was suddenly shaky.

“Damn right,” Bolan growled.

“I’ll come with you,” Dassin said.

Bolan took a bleeper from his pocket, thumbed a button and spoke a single word. It was necessary to have witnesses who could support the theory of an abduction, so Bolan walked behind the columnist, a folded topcoat over one arm, as they walked out through the Provencal’s entrance lobby. There was no reason for Dassin to put on an act: he looked scared enough to convince anyone that the tall, dark stranger with the ice-chip eyes held a gun on him.

A block away, the two men got into a black Peugeot sedan with tinted windows. Bolan was dropped off a mile farther on. Dassin and the three other men in the car drove north to a safe house built into a ruined castle.

Bolan was waiting in the underground garage of Michel Lasalle’s plush apartment block. The TV broadcaster’s handsome face paled the moment he stepped out of his Alfa Romeo and saw the dim shape of the Executioner, half-hidden in the shadow cast by a concrete pillar at one side of his parking slot.

Bolan had no trouble persuading the young man to step into the nondescript van standing nearby with its engine idling. Lasalle’s hands were shaking as he sank into the passenger seat.

The takeover — in a black Citroen this time — was in a rest area on the Marseilles-Aix expressway. Lasalle would be kept isolated in a motel near Toulon until Bolan gave the word.

Fortunately for Bolan, Maitre Delpeche was working late in his office near the cathedral. But the Executioner’s luck ended there. Delpeche was a courtroom bully who gained most of his acquittals — especially in the defense of criminals — by intimidating witnesses. His work had given him an angle on the underworld.

“Who the
hell
do you think you are?” he stormed when Bolan, easing himself, gun in hand, through the half-open door, had said his piece. “What kind of hoax is this?”

“No hoax. There’s a contract...” Bolan began.

“Bullshit! There’s not a villain in the country who’d want
me
out of the way; there isn’t one who’d dare. If it wasn’t for me, most of the bastards would be in jail, anyway.”

Bolan folded down the Beretta’s front handgrip.

Delpeche was sitting in a swivel chair behind his desk. He swung left and right, shaking his head. “I don’t believe you have orders to kill anyone. This is some kind of amateur attempt at a shakedown, isn’t it?”

Bolan approached the desk. “I kill you... or we make it
look
as if I killed you. I get paid either way, as long as you stay out of sight until I leave town.”

“So kill me,” the lawyer said.

Bolan hesitated.

“No?” the lawyer said. “I thought not. And I’m going to call the police.” He reached for the telephone.

The Executioner frowned. The last thing he needed was a confrontation with the local law. And the cop or cops in question just might be on Jean-Paul’s payroll... and if he discovered that Bolan was trying to fake the hits he had been hired to make, the whole scheme — and Bolan’s cover with it — would be blown wide open.

Delpeche was dialing.

“Central Commissariat? Delpeche speaking. Look, I want to report an attempt...”

Bolan crashed the barrel of the Beretta down on the receiver rest, cutting off communication. Delpeche looked up, a cynical smile twisting his features. “Just as I thought...” he began.

Bolan’s left fist traveled only a short distance, but it had all his weight — and all his exasperation — behind it. The blow caught Delpeche on the side of the jaw and knocked him cold.

Bolan picked up the unconscious lawyer, slung him over his shoulders and carried him to the service elevator.

He met nothing in the way of true resistance as they descended to the basement parking lot. Nobody saw him dump Delpeche’s limp figure in the passenger seat of the lawyer’s Jaguar. But there was a barrier pole barring the exit at the foot of the ramp leading to the street. A uniformed guard in a glassed-in hut at one side of the pole was sharing a bottle of beer with the janitor.

Recognizing the car, he moved toward the lever that raised the barrier... and then, seeing Bolan at the wheel and the inert figure slumped beside him, he leaped for the doorway of the cabin, reaching for the revolver holstered at his waist.

Bolan was out of the car before the guy had time to draw his weapon. The Executioner fired two shots from the Beretta — deliberately high, above the heads of the two men, shattering the glass, wrecking an electric clock on the cabin wall.

“On the floor,” he snapped. “Both of you, if you want to stay alive. Facedown. Hands above your heads.”

The two men complied and Bolan plucked the guard’s gun from its holster and sent it skittering away beneath the parked cars. While the two men quaked on the floor, he yanked the lever operating the barrier and ran back to the Jaguar. The big rear tires laid rubber on the ramp as he took off.

The warrior was satisfied how everything had worked out so far. The interrupted call to the police, added to the assault on the guard and his friend, who would have seen the lawyer’s unconscious body in the car, would strengthen the abduction scenario. Bolan spoke into his transceiver.

Chamson and Telder’s undercover operatives took Delpeche ten miles outside the city limits. “Keep a close watch on this one,” Bolan advised. “He’s tricky. Doesn’t believe a thing he’s told. If he still doubts the story when you guys fill him in... well, I guess that’s just his bad luck!”

The Jaguar was abandoned near an unused gravel pit filled with stagnant water. Police frogmen would be dragging it for Delpeche’s body within twenty-four hours.

There was blood, Delpeche’s, on the Jaguar’s beige leather seats. The lawyer’s nose had been bleeding when Bolan put him in the car.

Beneath the seats, the investigators would find three more spent shells — Bolan had fired a burst into the air — that matched the two outside the cabin in the basement parking lot.

If that didn’t add up to a prima facie case of kidnapping and murder, Bolan reflected grimly, nothing would.

Bolan was wearing a white coverall when he approached the police line with Raoul, the stockier of Smiler’s henchmen.

Raoul was similarly dressed. He was carrying a canvas case and there was a short aluminum ladder supported on his left shoulder. Bolan’s hands were weighed down with two five-kilo cans of anticorrosion paint that had already been opened and partly used. Paintbrush handles projected from the knee pocket of his coverall.

The avenues were not lined with police the way they would have been if the convention had involved visiting diplomats or French senators. But three gray armored trucks, used to carry anti-riot squads, were parked off the traffic circle, and there were police details on each sidewalk of all five approach roads. Gendarmes with slung SMGs guarded the entrance to the school complex. More men patrolled inside.

Bolan and the mobster were stopped before they reached the side street. “Where are you going?” one of the cops asked.

“Number three,” Bolan said, jerking his head toward the street. “The guttering above the arch is rotted; the tenants complained that it leaks. So the landlord finally decided to have it fixed.”

“Your papers?”

They produced them — dog-eared folders that identified them as workmen employed by a local contractor; in Bolan’s case a residence permit, also, stating that he was an immigrant of German origin. Jean-Paul was good at that kind of detail.

“What’s in that case?” another cop demanded.

Raoul unzippered the canvas bag. Inside were more paint brushes, a can of thinner, cotton waste, a coil of rope, a plastic bottle of cheap red wine and two ham sandwiches wrapped in cellophane.

The first cop handed back the papers. “Go ahead,” he said.

Bolan glanced across at the armored vehicles. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Just routine. A stack of bigwigs meeting in the school over there.”

“Some people have all the luck,” Bolan said. “We never got police protection when
I
went to school!”

The cops laughed and waved them on.

They walked unhurriedly to the third house in the street. On the inner side of the arch they found a painter’s scaffold that had been suspended from booms projecting from the roofline above. They stepped into the wooden lift and Bolan checked the hook, shackle and swivel assemblies on the end of each hoisting cable. When he was satisfied he nodded and they began to haul on the ropes that ran over pulleys on the outer ends of the booms. The cradle jerked upward, accompanied by the squeak of the pulley wheels as they revolved.

Braking the cradle below the guttering, they began slapping the anticorrosion paint on a section that stretched from the arch to the corner of the yard.

It was almost midday. White continents of cumulus cloud moved slowly across the blue sky, hiding the sun from time to time. But right now it was hot as hell, and the steep roofs above shut them off from the breeze. Soon Bolan and his companion were dripping with sweat.

“Shit,” Raoul complained, leaving his brush dipped in the paint can and massaging his right arm. “My goddamn shoulder is aching. Why the hell do we have to waste time horsing around in this elevator, anyway?”

“You know why,” Bolan said. “The cover has to be perfect.”

“I don’t see why we need two guys. You could handle the whole deal. I can’t help you press the goddamn trigger, after all.”

“Painters work with a mate,” Bolan said. “Anyway, that’s the way J-P wanted it. He figured I’d need a good backup man.”

In truth it was Bolan himself who had insisted that someone the gang boss trusted should come with him. Raoul’s report of what he had seen Bolan do was vital.

The mobster was not soothed by the implied compliment. He spit over the side of the cradle. “It beats me,” he grumbled. “I coulda been helpin’ Smiler work over that creep who owns the cafe in the Old Port. The asshole won’t come across with his insurance payment.

“You like that kind of work, don’t you?” Bolan asked, concealing his revulsion.

“Sure. I’d rather be in the contract line, though. Like with Smiler the other day...” An ugly smile cracked open the hood’s blue-jowled jaw. “I’ll never forget the look on Frankie Secondini’s face when we told him! We were on this train, see, and I had this length of steel...”

“Yeah,” Bolan said curtly. “I heard.”

At midday the sun disappeared behind a cloud and a factory whistle sounded in the distance. The convention was due to remain in session for another hour, breaking for lunch at one o’clock.

“Okay,” Bolan said. “We’re on our way.”

He drew on rubber gloves and fished plastic-wrapped packages from beneath the paint in each can. Inside one was a small but powerful pair of Zeiss binoculars which he handed to Raoul. The other contained a dayview Balvar X5 sniperscope, similar to the one Bolan had used in Corsica but without the Triphium IR light source. He placed this in his knee pocket and extended the ladder so that it linked the cradle with the roof.

Followed by Raoul, he climbed to the roof. They were wearing rubber-soled sneakers. Carefully, crouching just below the line of the roof, they circled the block above the courtyard until they came to the modernized sector opposite the archway. From here they looked over a row of lower buildings to the nearest avenue and the school beyond. The sidewalks were crowded now with office workers and clerks from the stores hurrying to lunch.

In the center of the flat roof a rectangular structure eight feet square and ten feet high housed the mechanism at the top of an elevator shaft. Between this and the roof parapet on the side away from the courtyard half a dozen zinc ventilator outlets from the air-conditioning plant projected. Bolan consulted his watch. “Three minutes,” he said.

Raoul sank gratefully with his back against the elevator housing. The sun was shining again, and the tarmac surface of the roof was softening in the heat.

Bolan stared over the buildings below them to the far side of the avenue, where the near-vertical slopes of the assembly-hall glinted in the bright light.

He looked at the sky. Another bank of clouds was drifting across from the west. Soon the sun would be hidden once more.

Two minutes later he walked to the ventilator nearest the elevator housing. Seizing the conical cap that shielded the opening at the top of the twelve-inch metal tube, he twisted left and right until the cone and its stays loosened.

He lifted off the cap, glanced again at his watch and held his hand out to Raoul. The hood handed him the coil of rope.

One end of it was spliced around an oval eyelet lined with lead. Using this as a sinker, Bolan fed the rope slowly into the ventilation shaft, playing it out until he felt it slacken in his hands and there was a definite tug from far below.

The janitor — one of the people on whom Jean-Paul could use a “lever” — had been instructed to wait at the foot of the shaft at precisely twelve-fifteen.

Bolan waited until he felt three tugs on the rope and then began hauling it up again. It was much heavier this time. Carefully and evenly he withdrew the rope until the object tied to it appeared at the top of the vent.

The Executioner held the Husqvarna 561 in his hands.

He untied the rope and left it coiled by the shaft, then took the scope from his pocket and fitted it to the gun. Crouching low now, he moved to the corner where the parapet ran into deep shadow cast by a multiple stack of chimneys above the next-door building.

Kneeling behind the parapet, he rested his elbows on the coping and raised the butt of the rifle to his shoulder.

The school was due south of them, and the sun was almost directly above the assembly hall’s serrated roof. The north-facing glass, four floors below Bolan’s vantage point, was in shadow, but the glare from the sky allowed him to see through.

Bolan waited until the fringe of the approaching cloud bank passed across the sun.

At once, through the scope’s magnifying lens, he was able to see through and into the hall.

He saw a quarter of a circle of tiered seats crammed with people around and above a high platform at the far end of the huge room. On the platform, eight men and a woman sat behind a long table, each with a microphone positioned nearby.

Three places away from the chairman sat Telder. He was busy scribbling on a pad in front of him. Some refraction in the roof glass was making it hard to define his outline. Bolan moved along the balustrade until he could sight the platform through a different panel in the roof.

The image was sharp and clear now. He took a 3-round clip from his breast pocket and handed it to Raoul. The mobster fed three 150-grain slugs into it and passed it back to Bolan.

The Executioner shifted his position slightly, until he was comfortable and totally relaxed. He maneuvered the Husqvarna until the Bausch and Lomb scope located the platform... the table... the nine experts... Telder.

The cross hairs centered experimentally on the Interpol man’s chest.

The cloud thinned, became translucent. The sun rode out through thin veils of white into a clear blue sky.

The image blurred and vanished. At once it was uncomfortably hot again. Even in the shadowed corner of the flat roof, Bolan sensed the heat beating through his coverall. Sweat ran into his eyes from beneath his hair, crawled along his spine and trickled down his sides. His palms were sticky and his fingertips moist.

Bolan smothered a curse. He rubbed his sleeve across his brow; he wiped the palm of his trigger hand on the coverall pants. He stole a covert glance at his watch. Telder was due to address the convention; he was the last speaker before lunch.

The glass of the eyepiece was filmed with moisture. It was in any case impossible to see through the assembly-hall roof until the glare from the sun diminished.

Bolan looked yet again at the sky. Another mass of cumulus was moving toward the sun, but it would be several minutes before the glare was gone.

Raoul was squinting through his binoculars. “Last thing I saw, your mark was on his feet and talkin’,” he said.

Bolan reached into the grip for a clean cotton cloth and wiped the eyepiece. He mopped his brow, keeping the sweat away from his eyes. He dried his hands for the second time.

Abruptly the heat was withdrawn as the tower of cumulus leaned forward and covered the sun. Bolan clicked the Husqvarna magazine in place and took up his position afresh.

Through the glass now he could see Telder on his feet behind the table, his notes in his hand. The first shot was to break the roof glass; that was essential — to alert the audience that something was happening, to convince Raoul, and to make a clear passage for the second and third.

He squeezed the trigger.

The thunderous report... the shock of the recoil... an impression through the magnifying lens of pandemonium: glass fragments in a frozen cascade, open mouths, men and women starting to their feet, staring upward, the chairman half-risen from his chair. Telder had halted in midphrase, his arms spread wide, an arrested gesture.

Bolan flipped the Husqvarna’s bolt. The cross hairs lowered, shifted sideways, centered on Telder’s chest. While he remained immobile, perhaps petrified with astonishment, Bolan held his breath, took up the first pressure, squeezed again.

The second coughing explosion. A click of the bolt, the glint of a cartridge case, slam the last round in and at once —
now!
— fire for the third time.

They both saw it — Raoul via the Zeiss prisms, Bolan through the Balvar scope. Telder fell to the back of the platform, his chair flung aside, a scarlet patch already blooming horribly across the front of his pale jacket. He hit the wall and slid to the floor.

Raoul was giggling. Bolan scooped up the three ejected shell cases and tossed them onto the roofs below. Seconds later he was lashing the rope around the rifle, complete this time with sniperscope and empty magazine, using the leather strap to tie on the binoculars. He lowered the gun into the shaft and began playing out the rope.

When three sharp tugs told him that the janitor had safely received the rifle, he let go the remainder of the coil and allowed it to snake down the tube.

While Raoul, still grinning with obscene glee, grabbed the canvas case, Bolan replaced the ventilator cone. By the time the police began any house-to-house search for the assassin, the Husqvarna would be back in its rack in the gun shop from which Jean-Paul had taken it.

In the distance, police whistles shrilled. Soon afterward, Bolan heard the crescendo warble of approaching patrol cars and the siren of an ambulance racing to the assembly hall. He hurried back toward the roof and the ladder.

By the time armored-truck details appeared in the courtyard below, Bolan and the mobster were sitting in the painter’s cradle, eating their sandwiches and sharing the wine from the plastic bottle.