Sunscream

“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.

12

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 thi

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 whenIwent to school!”

The cops laughed and waved them on.

They walked unhurriedly to the third house in the street. On the i

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.”