Sunscream

11

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.