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 i

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, Sonderma

“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.